You and What Army

I'VE NEVER HEARD "ROCKAWAY BEACH"

    The other day, I went to the 2009 Acousticue, the latest edition of an annual event the underground music promoter Todd P has been doing for several years now.  Basically, a couple of hundred Williamsburg hipsters (and me) go to some waterfront location and watch a couple of dozen Williamsburg hipster bands play completely acoustically – no amplification whatsoever.  (The milieu being what it is, some of them technically violate the terms and play electronic keyboards, but I suppose battery-driven is these kids' idea of acoustic.)
    This scene is a few generations or so directly descended from the original punk rockers, the ones who revolutionized music by declaring that anybody could do it, that you could play anywhere, that rock music didn't have to have Champagne wishes and caviar dreams.
    So it was fitting that this year's Acousticue was held on Rockaway Beach, the place that the Thomas Edisons of punk rock, the Ramones, first celebrated in glorious song 32 summers ago. I pointed out this wonderful confluence to a youthful friend at the Acousticue, and all I got was a blank stare.  She didn't know the song.  Outwardly, I maintained a placid demeanor.  But inside, I was thinking, "You don't know 'Rockaway Beach'?  How can anyone not know 'Rockaway Beach'?"
    OK, maybe this person was a freak.  So I mentioned it again to another friend of roughly the same age.  Same reaction, a shrug.  "It's about here?"
    With great trepidation, I tried once more.  No dice.  They hadn't heard the song called "Rockaway Beach" either.
    Now, I know what you're thinking:  "Michael, you're old!"  But c'mon, we're talking about one of the most iconic songs in punk rock.  Granted, it outsold "Rockaway Beach" by several orders of magnitude, but it would be like someone my age saying they'd never heard "Don't Be Cruel."
      So why didn't these kids, with their virtually unlimited free access to every note ever recorded, know about "Rockaway Beach"?  Some theories:

• After fifty years of the stuff, there's just too much accumulated rock music to assimilate at this point.

• There's just so much music available now that it's possible to live completely within a large but stylistically confined collection of music.
• The Ramones have become superfluous as a gateway band; punk has become commonplace, easy to grasp, so you don't need their bubblegum pop and '60s girl group echoes to ease you into what many people once considered an abrasive, difficult sound.
• The Ramones' aesthetic isn't relevant anymore: they were playing simple songs really fast and distorted as a reaction to the pomposity of prog and arena rock, and that's just not necessary right now.
• As my colleague Ryan Schreiber reminded me when I asked him about this, there's a high premium on discovering new things first in underground music culture now, so hipsters don't spend much time looking back.
• As stated above, the Ramones were retro in many respects.  Even their appearance alluded to Cold War-era hoodlum culture.  The most modern and visionary thing about them was that their music was fast and distorted, and that once-revolutionary idea ran its course perhaps 25 years ago.  Hipsters embrace the more forward-looking bands from the period directly after the Ramones' heyday — Eno-era Talking Heads, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees.  I bet those kids knew "Once in a Lifetime" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
• The groups now influenced by the Ramones are commercial bands, or they play on the Warped tour, both of which are anathema to the folks at Todd P shows.  So even if they did hear "Rockaway Beach," they'd shut it out because it sounds like A Simple Plan.

     Those are all plausible explanations.  And yet… It's "ROCKAWAY BEACH," PEOPLE!!!

DAVID BYRNE VS. JON PARELES: I DECIDE

    "It seemed to be one of those reviews that comes from some psychological issues the writer has," David Byrne said of NY Times music critic Jon Pareles' take on Byrne's new show, "Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno."  It was a rare flash of anger from such a reserved, considered man.  I deeply respect both Byrne and Pareles, so I was especially curious to check out Byrne's show at the Prospect Park bandshell the other night and see what the rhubarb was all about.

    The show features music from the Eno-produced Talking Heads albums More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978), Fear of Music (1979) and Remain in Light (1980) – truly classic, revelatory records crammed with great songs about much more than just edifices and comestibles — as well as the pioneering Byrne/Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). Last year, the two men reunited for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, a comparatively conventional album that was nonetheless tuneful and touching.
    Really quickly, I started to see what Pareles was talking about. Although Byrne saw fit to travel with three dancers and three back-up singers, he neglected to hire a lead guitarist, and that formidable burden proved too much weight for his musical shoulders.  When it came time for a guitar solo, all Byrne could manage was some rudimentary squalling, a far cry from Adrian Belew's mind-warping work on Remain in Light.  Even worse, when Byrne took a lead, it meant his rhythm guitar playing was gone, handicapping whatever polyrhythmic levitation the able but short-handed band had achieved. The arrangements simply needed more musicians, especially Remain in Light standouts like "The Great Curve," "Born Under Punches" and "Crosseyed and Painless." In their original recorded versions and as performed by Talking Heads' expanded 1981 line-up, those numbers are sonic and rhythmic phenomena even more than they're songs in the traditional sense.  It seemed as if Byrne's vanity got the better of him, that, as the title suggests, he made just a little much of those compositions as "Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno."
    Especially considering this was music so solidly rooted in funk and African musics, the whole show felt very uptight, everything strictly scripted, giving it the soulless feeling that Paul Simon has down to a tee. That monochromatic sensation found a visual analogue in the fact that the band and dancers were head to toe in blinding white.  The only wild card came in the form of guest percussionist Steve Scales, who is not on the tour and presumably was sitting in just for this show.  Scales was the delightfully effervescent de facto co-star of Stop Making Sense and he not only stuck out because he was wearing street clothes, but because he broke the mold, singing along and striding to the edge of the stage to enthusiastically hype the crowd into clapping along.  Even Byrne couldn't suppress a smile.

    But the coup de grâce was the trio of onstage dancers.  They did the most banal sort of "modern dance," busting generic Broadway moves you might see in A Chorus Line.  Seriously, they were on the verge of "jazz hands."  It could not have been further from the worldliness and innovation that marks this trailblazing music.  And imagine it going on throughout the show.  It was distracting and unseemly, precisely the sort of mediocre culture we go to David Byrne to seek refuge from.

    Sometimes the dancers would leap-frog not just over each other, but even over Byrne; during the encores, everyone came out in tutus, even Byrne.  It was just undignified, and not in a refreshingly silly or even irreverent way.  Earlier in the show, when Byrne and the dancers slid and twirled on office chairs during "Life Is Long,"  some leather-lunged wag in the audience hollered out, "WAY TO WORK THAT CHAIR, BUDDY!" which kind of said it all.

   That said, it was a beautiful summer evening, the crowd was enthusiastic, the song selection was excellent, the band was tight.  It was a good time — if you didn't think about it too much.  But that's not the way this music originally succeeded.  In fact, the more you thought about it, the better it got.  So I'm with Pareles.  But maybe I have psychological issues too.

Photos from the always estimable Brooklyn Vegan by Chris La Putt.

CORPORATE PEP TALK

    I was trading some e-mails with my friend Jon about what a drag it is to work in an office, and how one of the biggest drags is putting up with corporate jargon.  Here's his reply.  I think it's pretty much the final word on the subject, although I welcome more buzzwords from my faithful readers.

    I think the take-away here, Michael, in terms of broad strokes of course, is that if you're really thinking outside the box, and you can deliver on the promise of a best-of-breed disruptive product in your market segment, you're gonna get buy-in and the rest of the moving parts are going to align themselves organically.  Um K?  So if we just "step back"  and break this down into right-size silos, I think what we're REALLY looking at here is a SUPER opportunity for you to take lessons learned, pivot quickly, and spearhead your own mission statement. And then — and this is key — deliver on it, bro'.  

    In other words, you've got the bases loaded here, and the whole team is counting on you to bring this one into the end zone. Um K?

    I know this is a lot to grok all at once. And I'm sure you're a little overwhelmed. So if you have questions, wanna drill down on any of this, or maybe peel the onion a little more, I'll make some free cycles available to you going forward.  Ping me anytime, buddy.  But, for now, it's probably more empowering for you if I stay in the shadows/out of the weeds and just give you some time to digest all of this and regurgitate it in your own voice.

    Let's make this happen, champ.  Go get 'em!

THE WONDERFUL AND FRIGHTENING WORLD OF KENNETH ANGER

    Not much to say here except that this is one of my favorite films.  Well, that and the fact that it might well feature Mick Jagger's greatest musical creation, and this is coming from a lifelong Stones fan.

Invocation Of My Demon Brother

THE WORST OF CNN.COM HEADLINES

    I just love to hate CNN.com. They're the major, "respected" news source that always features the story about the philandering football player or the murdered blonde even when a third world nation does a surprise nuclear test or a US senator is indicted on bribery charges. Their coverage is so stupid and pandering, it's a disgrace.
    And every once in a while I remember to note down some of the most idiotic headlines from CNN.com's absurdly titled "Top Stories" section.

X-Men illustrator dies in Superman pajamas (November 28, 2006)

Woman allegedly set boyfriend's groin on fire (December 4, 2006)
For some reason, this preceded a spate of headlines with the word "groin" in the title. I wish I'd recorded more of them, but the following is a good example.

Baseball shot directly into man's groin (December 10, 2007)

Mountain lion attacks rare (January 28, 2007)
How very interesting.

Falcon charged with animal abuse (February 19, 2007)
Isn't that what falcons do?

Two clowns shot dead during performance (February 21, 2007)

Thongs, fishnets called harmful to young girls (February 23, 2007)

Wife yells on 911 tape after husband shot lover (March 28, 2007)
Jeez, couldn't she just talk in a normal voice?

Virginia Tech wounded confront deep scars (April 29, 2007)
Easily the most unfortunate headline I've found to date.

Man bites dog to rescue puppy (July 4, 2007)
A little inside journalism humor, gotta hand it to them on this one.

Dancing penguin beats up 007 (December 3, 2006)

Ticker: Chelsea Clinton to say aloha to Hawaii (February 14, 2008)
Of course, "aloha" means both hello and goodbye. Which was it? Idiots.

Toilet-trained chimp on the loose in California (July 1, 2008)
Oh no, it's going to shit in your bathroom!

THE PARTY IS NOT QUITE OVER

The scene: the Animal Collective show at Terminal 5 the other night.

The speaker: a WASPy 30-ish guy in a nice suit, talking to his friends.

    "Then I thought, why don't I charge the hedge fund for the car ride up here?  So that's what I did."

LYRICS, SCHMYRICS!

    One day, when I was in college, a friend offhandedly complained about a lyric in David Bowie's "Fashion." I was stunned – he was actually parsing the lyrics as if they were sentences.  It had never occurred to me to do that.  I was well into my 20s before I tried to piece together Dylan's lyrics in a sequential way; I always just liked the way his words sounded atop the shambling stacks of guitars, keyboards and drums. I still hear lyrics vertically.
    Possibly because I'm so easily intoxicated by the potent cocktail of rhythm, harmony, melody and timbre, I don't tend to hear lyrics in a sequential, narrative way; that part of my brain just shuts down like a kitten seized by the scruff of the neck. I hear words or phrases continuously coinciding and colliding with whatever musical-sonic event is happening at the moment, and the more evocative those collisions, the better the lyrics.  (Michael Stipe, Stephen Malkmus and Kurt Cobain have all done it very well.)
    So I don't care about witty, revealing lines or good stories — I simply don't hear them. It's one reason I've never been able to get into Leonard Cohen and so much of what I call "grown-up music" — music that downplays rhythm and melody in favor of a lot of meaningful words.  Maybe "grown-up music" tends not to be as densely musical as most other popular music in order to reduce the intoxicating effect I referred to above, but for me, anyway, it doesn't work. I just hear volumes of words and nothing synergizing with them.
    And I always thought I was kind of a freak on this score, perhaps a mild sort of aphasiac, until last night, when I watched 30 Century Man, the intriguing 2008 documentary about celebrated pop enigma Scott Walker, just out on DVD.
    Buried deep in the DVD extras were out-takes from the filmmaker's interview with Brian Eno.  "Fortunately, I have the talent of filtering out lyrics — I just don't hear them," says the great man.  "For me, lyrics in most songs are a way of just getting the voice to do something.  I like voices."  My sentiments exactly.  Lyrics are just to get the singer psyched to sing.
    In fact, listening to the lyrics as narrative is antithetical to the complete experience of music.  It's like reading the newspaper while a Coltrane record is playing.  It takes you out of the music.
    Funny thing is, I loved Scott Walker's 2006 album The Drift, even though it is absolutely word-intensive and virtually devoid of the things that most excite me: hooks, riffs, beats. Walker's voice is riveting all by itself and that helps. But his lyrics are as sensational, in the true sense of the word, as any great riff or cracking-good guitar solo.  And, as Eno points out, their effect is just as ineffable.
    "In Scott's songs," Eno goes on to say, "lyrics actually draw you further and further into the music.  They're so rich and full of ambiguity that they actually withstand listening to again and again — like music does.  They don't spell it out for you, so you haven't solved the problem in the first two listens....  It's not to do with telling someone something, it's making something happen to someone.  Which is what you do with music as well.  Nobody ever says, 'I wonder what the music means' — you either feel it or you don't.  I think the same should be true of lyrics — you shouldn't have to think that you somehow flip into a different part of your brain when you listen to lyrics."
    Does anybody else hear music this way?

REMAKE/RECYCLE: HOW TO VANQUISH THE AQUAPOD?

    Having just noticed a guy blithely dropping some paper napkins into a sidewalk recycling container clearly marked "Bottles and Cans," I'm struck once again by how clueless most people seem to be about recycling and what goes into the products they buy.  Even the people in my building, who tend to be affluent and well educated, still put milk cartons in the paper-recycling bin, or plastic bags in the bottle-and-can bin.
      These simple distinctions apparently elude most people, even relatively enlightened, progressive people.  It seems that most folks are just too ignorant, lazy or, to be generous, busy to try to understand the nature of what they consume, and they simply choose to ignore its consequences.
    So what to do?  On the back end, it looks like we'll have to develop sorting technology so people won't have to make the apparently unfathomable distinction between, for instance, corrugated cardboard and office paper.  They'll just throw everything into the same bin and some machine will decide where to send it — i.e., toss 'em all and let God sort 'em out.
    But what about on the front end?  It's not possible to decrease the supply of wasteful products like Poland Spring's egregious Aquapod bottles, so how to decrease the demand for such things?  People find them convenient and resolutely resist pondering the effects of buying them.  No matter how bad the environment gets, I guarantee that people will continue in their ways, because their actions seem so far abstracted from their consequences.  Then there's the selfish SUV-style attitude that they're going to waste all they want, let other people conserve; or that there are so many people out there that one person's actions won't make a difference anyway.  And besides, in America, if you can't buy what you want then the terrorists have won.
    I firmly believe that you can't legislate morality, so — assuming there will be no sea-change in American attitudes toward consumption even in the midst of economic disaster — how can we get people to change their ways?  To borrow a line from the acting world, what's their motivation?

STUPID, IGNORANT AND HOMOPHOBIC LIKE A FOXX

     Rep. Virginia Foxx (R, North Carolina) claimed the other day, on the House floor, that Matthew Shepard's death was a "hoax," not a homophobic murder but something that happened in the course of a robbery.  Of course, it was actually a homophobic murder, and a brutal and grisly one at that.  A lot of people complained, so yesterday, Foxx issued an apology.  Well, not really.  Let's parse her statement.

It has come to my attention that some people have been led to believe that I think the terrible crimes that led to Matthew Shepard’s death in 1998 were a hoax.

    "Led to believe" implies that somehow people were swindled by unnamed and nefarious outside forces.  But the person who said Shepard's murder was a "hoax" was none other than Rep. Foxx.  No one was "led to believe" anything — she said it outright.  Also, the use of "some people" is pretty sleazy; the phrase implies that not everyone who heard her say it came to the same conclusion.  But virtually anyone with a half-decent grasp of the English language would understand that Rep. Foxx was clearly claiming it was a "hoax."

 "The term 'hoax' was a poor choice of words used in the discussion of the hate crimes bill."

    This is deliberately slippery language designed to imply that she simply chose the wrong word.  Hey, anybody can do that, right?  Hogwash.  She said "hoax" and she meant it, as proven by the context of the statement.

 "Mr. Shepard’s death was nothing less than a tragedy, and those responsible for his death certainly deserved the punishment they received."

    Again, very sneaky.  Foxx pointedly doesn't acknowledge that it was a hate crime, just a "tragedy."  And by stating that the murderers "deserved the punishment they received," she is really saying that existing legislation is sufficient for this type of crime, and that hate crime legislation is therefore unnecessary.

 "I am especially sorry if his grieving family was offended by my statement."

    This is the crowning glory of the "apology."  She's not sorry that she said something that was blatantly ignorant and homophobic, she's just sorry that anyone took it that way.  This is the way government officials apologize these days – blame the victim.

 "The larger context of my remarks is important. I was referring to a 2004 ABC News 20/20 report on Mr. Shepard’s death. ABC’s 20/20 report questioned the motivation of those responsible for Mr. Shepard’s death. Referencing this media account may have been a mistake, but it was a mistake based on what I believed were reliable accounts.”

    So she's taking speculation by the news media – the one she no doubt regularly accuses of left-wing bias – and takes it as fact to be repeated on the floor of the House of Representatives and read into the public record… in front of Matthew Shepard's mother.  This is especially egregious considering there was in fact a murder trial for this case done under sworn testimony which explicitly confirmed that Shepard was murdered because he was gay.  Thus Foxx admits that she ignored a very basic principle of our society: that legal verdicts, not speculation, are accepted as the official truth of a given case.  "Believing" something is a reliable account is weak, especially if you're an elected representative who is expected to know and trust the findings of the courts, especially when debating national legislation.

    Virginia Foxx is an embarrassment to our nation and to democracy. She should resign in shame, immediately.

 

 

SXSW: AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF ANARCHY

    Sadly, very few people witnessed the spectacular grand finale of SXSW 2009 — Trail of Dead's explosion at the Spin party.  The party began badly, but (by definition, I suppose) that was only the beginning.  Spin had handed out invites but they required an RSVP — which very few people bothered to do since just about everybody got their invites the evening of the party.
     Unfortunately, the Copper Tank club clearly had zero experience with events of this scale and simply could not think outside the box, so they turned away just about everyone — even Spin employees who flashed their business cards.  It was a bad scene and lot of people just left and called it a night.

    I finally got in when the nice publicist for the event gave me a VIP pass, although the hulking redneck goon with the cowboy hat at the VIP entrance still didn't believe I had obtained the pass legitimately.  The band, he claimed, was — horrors! — giving their VIP passes to their girlfriends.  In somewhat less than cordial terms, I informed him that I was not one of the band's girlfriends.  It was about to get ugly when the publicist noticed the argument and stepped in.  So more bad vibes.

    Superdrag played, and I don't know why — are they still popular?  If so, why?  Then at 3:30 it was time for Austin's own Trail of Dead, who played to a club that was half-empty at best.  Those guys are notorious bad boys and while their trail may not be littered with dead, there are certainly many trashed stages and much general mayhem and depraved behavior along the way. They played well and I was impressed that they'd cleaned up their act — but after a few songs, two very drunk young women from the audience staggered up on stage and sat down next to the keyboard player; nobody made a move to eject them.  It was a relatively small thing, but it distinctly felt like cracks had just formed in a dike.  "Shit is about to happen," I blurted out to my friend Melissa.  And without a word, she walked right out of the club.

    Soon, people were throwing full cups of beer at the stage, and the band was just grinning and throwing them back.  I noticed the roadies were quickly closing cases and moving gear away from the stage, as if a hurricane was coming.  Then the music accelerated suddenly and one of the guitarists started pushing the drum set around.  Soon, he'd lofted a cymbal stand and was tomahawking the drums.  Then he took out at least one monitor.  Then someone in the band threw a bass drum against the back wall of the stage, all beneath a constant hail of beer.

    Sure enough, shit was happening.

    The management didn't seem to mind any of this — until someone in the VIP area threw a large seat cushion onto the stage.  That did it.  The burly club manager bum-rushed the cushion-hurler out the back door, then came rhino-rampaging, red-faced, toward the sound and light boards, bellowing, "SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!"   So the PA goes off and the stage goes totally dark.  The band wasn't fazed at all — clearly, they'd been through this sort of thing many times before, and left the stage, laughing.

    I split after that.  There might have been more fireworks but it was 4:30 AM and after four nights of this sort of thing, I was just too wiped to hang around for more theatrics.  I walked back to my hotel, grooving on Austin's wonderful twittering birds, and found a Spin editor standing in front of the hotel, waiting for a cab to the airport for an early flight back to New York.  Beaming and still jazzed, I raved to him about all the chaos and destruction — "What a great way to end my SXSW!"
     "Oh great," he deadpanned. "I'm glad we could provide that experience for you."