Obviously the norms and folkways of the dudes in hats and sandals who attend things like the Jammys are the proverbial fish/Phish in a barrel—the Burning Man that records fatalities annually when it falls on oblivious hippies, the propensity of the movement’s heroes to be rolly-polly dudes who do things like play the mouth-trumpet and seem like they’d be really good dads—so let’s stick to just one cultural practice. Not sure what they call that dance guys do, where you hop up and down but also swing your fists and play an imaginary flute, kind of like the one the Grateful Dead bears are known for? Let’s call it the Kokopelli.
Anyway the thing I saw that was more amazing than “blue turtle seduction” or Chevy Chase playing “A Natural Woman,” lounge-piano version, was this dude who would go get beer and then come back and then go the bathroom and come back, etc., who could climb the WaMu@MSG stairs in full, uninterrupted Kokopelli, without tripping. When Leslie West played “Mississippi Queen” this individual did accidentally punch me in the face in an obvious rush of adrenaline, but his Kokopelli remained flawless.
Consonances: didn’t get the Doug E. Fresh/Chali 2na presence on the bill until I saw Matisyahu battle some guitar player with his mouth. Call the presence of the Jay-Z/Mary J tour in the same building as the Jammys a metaphor for beatboxing, which is apparently some sort of East meets West between dudes who wear their Yankee caps with the brims totally straight and those who bend them nearly in half. Matisyahu on Phish: “It was the first time in my life I’d experienced music so deep.”
As for me, it was the first time I experienced music played by a guy doing slap bass on an acoustic guitar that had no hole in it.
What else could possibly represent the Tribeca Film Festival’s odd combination of real estate speculation, downtown nostalgia, self-mythology, and liquid assets better than a Warhol-checking film from the one-time maker of Blank Generation, shot out of the casement window of his Manhattan apartment? Amos Poe, standing before a clutch of vaguely affluent Tuesday-nighters in the converted lobby of the Gershwin Hotel, wears star-freckled pajama pants as he introduces his “no budget, no wave” version of Rear Window: Empire II, after Warhol’s eight-hour original. Poe’s film—a year’s worth of footage compressed into three hours, with all the day and night and snow, spring, and rain the interval entailed—simulates a wandering but comfortably ensconced Flatiron eye, shot out of some seriously sizeable windows, often past a varied and pleasingly fresh array of flowers that share the sill with his camera.
If Warhol’s unblinking Empire was stubbornly about the minutes you passed watching it, or the minutes you watched passing it, Empire II evokes the feeling really good real estate gives you: being completely impervious to time. Poe’s idyll is unmolested by the pedestrians he occasionally deigns to film, the cars that zip by them, the clocks that turn in a nearby tower. Clouds race by, their shadows with them, but the view remains eternal.
Preempting what for the ages will supposedly be “a richly layered soundtrack of songs and city noises” are, tonight, Thurston Moore, Matt Hayner, and Tom Surgal, improvising accompaniment directly in front of, and a little bit below, Poe’s film. They seem to be present mostly to alleviate boredom, which they do: Moore’s cunning abstractions match perfectly with the hexagonal lights of cars that cross the screen, the band’s improv keeping time with Amos’s cut-for-cut-for-cut eye on the motion outside. Surgal, facing forward, isn’t even watching the film. As it speeds by behind the trio, they appear to be working in slow motion, another ironic reduction in scale—if the Empire State building can play prop, why not three grizzled no-wavers?
Empire II plays on Friday, May 2 @ Pace University and Saturday, May 3 @ Village East Cinema.
Steven Shearer, Activity Cell with Warlock Bass Guitar, 1997
Double Album: Daniel Guzmán + Steven Shearer
New Museum
April 24
What a drag, being forced to behold the basic, untransubstantiated stuff of semi-music-related pop-culture—Leif Garrett pinups, Sonic Youth cassette tapes, Kiss makeup, Stooges logos—in places that could do better, like the New Museum. The general reverse Warholing of that which has been already Warholed, the bland regard for totems that already swim in self-regard; the idea that mass culture rock n roll can stand in for your identity in a way that transcends the manner in which it stands in for my identity: isn’t this the exact illusion we burn off when we become adults and realize that when we were sixteen, we were not in fact alone, were not in fact on some other planet? That we were in it together? That our concert T-shirts had twins?
Beyond the general is-what-it-is—Guzmán’s Kiss figurines reconceived as Day of the Dead dolls (Kiss My Ass), Shearer’s portraits of longhairs (Longhairs)—Double Album’s sure to elicit shrugs from those who own TVs and listen to music. The general agony comes when you realize that at least half the show is one irretrievably mixed metaphor, from the title on down. Ultimate mashup prize goes to Guzmán’s Burn, which flips a Deep Purple album title into two stacks of last week's Village Voice and a couple of semi-figurative plaster busts—bam, Twin Towers. As for Shearer, he lays a Warlock bass guitar down inside a child’s windowed play space—bam, Reverse Panopticon. But why not commit to a real shocker? Why not just dress the Warlock in an undershirt and no pants and videotape it making love to Amy Poehler, who’s on the cover of this week’s Voice? Instead of filming it inside a children’s play set, why not shoot it inside the office of New Museum chief curator Richard Flood, while he plays the Warlock to the tune of “New York Groove”? Why not just go ahead and make it a three-way with a nine-foot tall Cousin It figure made entirely out of fake gold rapper chains?
Things I Learned from Watching Shine a Light
Union Square
April 17
Blame it on the debates last night, the spectacle one more time of a supposed elder talking sternly down to anyone in earshot who happens to be younger, the upshot as always I was there, as if being present then were somehow proxy for being fit to be present anywhere, in any position, ten or twenty or forty years later. Thus Shine a Light’s Keith Richards can blithely intone, as if bestowing upon his audience some timeworn piece of wisdom, “It’s good to see you all. It’s good to see anybody,” with an absolute surety as to the equal anonymity of anyone not named Mick, Charlie, or Ronnie, and his audience will crack up—because, of all things, they basically agree.
No surprise the Rolling Stones, circa 2008, turn out to be the kind of band—as we find out, a few thousand feet up in first class—that splits the list of potential songs for the night’s set into the categories of “Well Known” and “Medium Known.” Boiling self-regard scalds tepid modesty, and so we get Bill Clinton introducing the band by noting his birthday present is “opening” for the Rolling Stones. Aced out entirely in proceedings is the film’s ostensible maker, Marty Scorcese, who has at last apparently found four men whose schtick is more entrenched than his own. He can’t get a set list, which is hilarious, because who, at this point, doesn’t know exactly what the band is going to play?
All credit to Buddy Guy, who comes onstage in front of the two Clintons in the audience to vow he’ll get high tomorrow, just as sure as his name, and none to Keith Richards, who apparently mistakes him for a guy who’s short on guitars, and so gives him one at the end with the preposterous benediction: “It’s yours.” “I don’t think onstage,” says Keith, offstage, “I feel.”
Scorcese, meanwhile, realizes what he’s up against too late, and settles for his own version of two hours of greatest hits: arrhythmic cutting, cameras that swoop, fun at the mixer when the camera gets close in on a Keith (but somehow, never Ronnie) solo, a Goodfellas nod at the end, when he walks the camera backstage and then outside, past, yup, a couple more Marty Scorceses and, for a finale, transforming a CGI moon over Manhattan into a Rolling Stones tongue. “I did a thousand things over there,” he says to no one in particular, “And nothing that I needed to do.”
“It means much more to me than the ringing of the registers that we did the right thing in here."—John Varvatos, mtv.com
“NYC should not be a town just for the wealthy – but who can afford these clothes? Mr. Varvatos caters to a wealthy, male-dominated major-label mainstream rock world that has no claim on the CB’s legacy whatsoever.”—Rebecca Moore, “Varvatos Protest – my comments” (photocopy/bluviolin.com)
Varvatos Protest, my comments:
As a rule, I suspect stores that try to fend off protestors by entreating them to “come see our employees”—the one rocker guy with golden headband, the other guy with the snakeskin NYHC Converse, the not-Kim Gordon-looking woman who told me to stop taking pictures because “we have all these crazy rules”—i.e., there’s still a band playing every night at CB’s, except they’re actually retail clerks, and they “play” by selling clothes. I thought about playing a leather jacket but then I realized spring is almost here.
That said, I noticed some items that I imagined would be there were missing:
One cape made out of the voluminous skin of Joey Ramone.
Hand-crafted thongs lovingly constructed out of tiles from the old CBGB bathroom floor.
An animatronic Robert Christgau punching an animatronic James Chance in the face.
A t-shirt silkscreened with a picture of John Varvatos’s face, except instead of ink the face is made out of Hilly Kristal’s ashes.
A big statue of the Statue of Liberty, but wearing eyeliner.
One more sign of how yawningly distant Baghdad is from New York—the sight of Vice idiots Suroosh Alvi and and Eddy Moretti strapping on flak jackets outside their Baghdad hotel, spooked like guys who just happened to take a wrong turn on their way to work out on N. 10th St. Into the frame rush the security team, a band of shooters that starts at two and swells to 12 as the local Iraqis realize their wards have literally no conception of the danger they’re dealing with. “Journalists…it’s not safe for them,” one guard finally breaks down and explains. “Or for the guys that protect them.”
This to say nothing of the predicament that the subjects of last night’s doc, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, find themselves in. First-and-so-far-last-ever Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda—“the Black Scorpion,” named for the most deadly of all scorpions—can’t really headbang (looks like Jewish prayer), can’t really wear Slipknot t-shirts (looks American), can’t grow their hair long (ditto), can’t play a show pre-Saddam without including “Youth of Iraq” (the “Freebird”-type request/demand made by Saddam’s Culture and Media Ministry, in which Arassicauda take the bait and rhyme “Hussein” with “insane”). After Saddam, the four guys can’t really go outside at all, and then their practice space gets rocketed.
Enter Vice, who take a Gideon Yago tip and decide to sponsor a show in post-occupation Baghdad. Alvi and Moretti do the gonzo thing—lots of chest-hair, aviator lenses, and giggling—until they finally make it into the country and realize this time, they might really die. Friendship with the four Arassicaudans ensues. The Americans miss the first concert go-round, in a not-quite-Green Zone hotel where the power keeps failing, but finally zig-zag in from the airport intact. They smoke cigarettes on their hotel roof, watch the helicopters fly by, and meet in secret with band ringleader Firas al-Lateef, who plays bass and is the group’s philosopher—“It’s just a crazy mission, dude” he apologetically tells Moretti and Alvi, when they ask about their prospects.
A reunion in Damascus ensues, where the band can’t work and its members live in the unheated basement of a Syrian project. The neighbors complain about the noise, so practice is out, but the band gets in one show and, on Vice’s dime, a recording session. Afterwards they all hit the hotel minibar and Marwan, the drummer, is so happy he promises the camera: “I’m gonna tell my kids about this, if I ever have one of those fuckers.” (Firas, who has one already, makes no such promise.) Then they see Vice footage of their time back in Iraq and two of them start crying. All credit to Moretti and Alvi, who’ve filmed enough faux fucked-up stuff to not flinch when they stumble onto the real thing.
News from the Q+A afterwards is that Arassicauda are now in Turkey (tickets courtesy of Vice donation drive), after being denied entry to the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, and the UK. Alvi and Moretti remain in touch, and both sat in on the band’s most recent (read: third) round of interviews with Homeland Security. Slipknot’s manager is interested, as are much of the rest of the metal community, but they’ve got to get here first.
Two kids in 40-degree weather, neither wearing jackets. The Studio B bouncers are playing that game where they see how long it takes for the first fifteen-year-old girl to pass out. Perfect time for a game of telephone: Fernando Eats Bagels While Playing the Banjo, some girl whispers in my ear. At that very moment, by that very magic, the line starts moving. The ripsters are saved.
***
Two kids, enormous necks hidden by the new neck-scarves invented by the keyboardist from Vampire Weekend, have a conversation.
Two kids, bald, jacked, dance wildly. Sweat flies off their heads. They don’t clap—they howl. Howling, the taller one says to the shorter one: “When are these guys going to play a good song?”
***
I head for the door. Some girl comes up, whispers in my ear. “Hypothesis: Even a nerd can become buff. Materials and Methods: Weights, running, push-ups, pull-ups. Repeat as needed. Results: Six-pack, muscled pecs.”
Speak Up!: A Benefit Concert for Peace in Iraq and Justice at Home
St. Ann’s Warehouse
Tuesday, March 18
Hats off to the famed American pop star Moby, whose Iraq War as Venus Flytrap, or “shark’s mouth,” was the most tortured of literally hundreds of tortured analogies tossed from press-conference folding tables and a St Ann’s stage during Speak Up!: A Benefit Concert for Peace in Iraq and Justice at Home. Prize to Antony Hegarty for overall incoherence—“4,000 brave American countrymen dead… I’m just an artist, not a politician…let’s make a pile of dead bodies so we feel better”—and to Damien Rice, for a nifty parable involving giving a small child millions of dollars to squander, a metaphor for waste and profligacy that I assumed would touch down somewhere near the Iraq War budget, and which instead landed a few hundred miles away: “We get a million sperm delivered to our testicles every day.”
Someday, Antony predicted last night, each and every one us will have to account for our actions. The putative Allies we once were will land on American soil with questions as to our whereabouts during the first five years of Iraq war, and “like the Germans in World War II,” we will have to look the rest of the world in the eye and answer. It will be at this moment that I offer up my seventy-five dollars in campaign contributions to Barack Obama and, after some fumbling through the ol’ wallet, my comped ticket stub to Speak Up!, featuring Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Antony, David Byrne, Norah Jones, Moby, Rice, and the Scissor Sisters, plus Bill T. Jones, Richard Belzer, and half of DUMBO’s more affluent supporters of great causes throughout the planet.
I expect zero mercy.
Oh, but line ahead of me will be long: Judith Miller (“tarred and feathered,” according to Moby); George W. Bush (“Hermann Göring,” quoth Belzer); Alito, Roberts, Gonzalez, and Ashcroft; not to mention every other stooge—McCain, Clinton, and Obama not excepted—who fiddled while Basra burned. With luck, the woman whose Bob Marley ring-tone interrupted Lou Reed mid-sentence during the press conference beforehand will be let off with a warning. As for the DJ duo MEN, who chose “Paper Planes” to soundtrack a slideshow of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders photographs of injured soldiers out in the lobby: good luck ladies.
For those whose go-to caricature of an over-rich, sanctimonious, loft-dwelling liberal involves Starbucks, NPR, and homosexuality, let me instead propose an alternative. Imagine, for a change, your chosen Birkenstock-clad, latte-sipping nemesis on a cavernous stage, a guitar slung round his or her neck. With eyes squeezed tight, fingers even now reaching out across the instrument’s many frets, he or she takes a deep breath, and with a mighty downstroke, summons forth the “Star Spangled Banner,” Hendrix version.
What? Not enough? Add, as the first notes swell, a disturbance in the curtain: here come famous liberals Moby, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Antony Hegarty! At St. Ann’s, this tableau comes to life posthaste, first thing, Reed taking liberties with the lyrics, all four stars wailing into their mics as if soon, perhaps by the very hand of Hendrix himself, a cleansing fire might sweep across the stage and change the world forever. Instead, up next: Norah Jones.
According to the furious woman next to me, this is the exact moment I stopped paying attention, but let me share some of my notes, to round this thing out. Jones covering Randy Newman; Air America’s Laura Flanders name-checking George Orwell and Thomas Paine; David Byrne!; Laurie Anderson doing her George S. W. Trow–homage “Only an Expert”; global warming; WMDs; Al Gore; torture; illegal invasion; “Maybe If I Fall”; habeas corpus; deportations; Belzer telling a heckler, “I work alone, pal”; Blonde Redhead; Scissor Sisters, who appear to have an Aladdin genie refugee behind the bongos, and who eventually cover “I Love a Man in Uniform”; Moby, in particular Moby doing “Honey,” the live-scatting of which I leave to you to imagine at home; Damien Rice; and Belzer again, this time threatening to shoot a dog.
I left during Hegarty: Back in February, he said, he’d started to cry in the voting booth, the tears brought on “by the weight of the future.” Heavy indeed.
Iraq Veterans Against the War here; NYC United for Peace and Justice here.
Be Your Own Pet’s new record is called Get Awkward, but they could’ve called it Get Giddy, Go Faster, Can I Borrow Your ID, or Don’t Mess With Nashville, Tennessee. “We’re getting old,” jokes Jemina Pearl, her band having just taken a year off, a year that in teenage time is more like three or four. “Come up here and mess with me.” And how rare is this, someone does.
Like any other band BYOP probably sing about dancing more than they actually go dancing, fighting more than they actually fight, but when Jemina Pearl hits somebody, they go back a few feet at least. Her right has whatever six-foot-something, 200-pound drunk comedian who got onstage to amuse himself or his friends staggering a couple steps, visibly calculating whether he can get away with hitting a girl in front of a few hundred people, what are the chances of him walking out the Mercury Lounge with his dignity intact, etc. He ends up reaching for her; he’s on the ground, and Jonas Stein and Nathan Vasquez are retuning the guitars they detuned laying this guy out on floor. I’ve seen worse fights but maybe none so one-sided.
So maybe call it Get Knocked Out. On Get Awkward, BYOP go looking for somebody to kill, somebody to stab, somebody’s brains they can eat; they go to graveyard parties, food fights, stay up all night. If debut Be Your Own Pet was about riding bikes, having fuuuuuun, adventuring, vacationing, Get Awkward’s the revenge record. In order: Pearl feels like she’s living in a black hole, cheats on her boyfriend cause somebody else makes her stomach hurt more, goes to juvie for stabbing an ex-best-friend, gets out, pops pills, gets in a food fight, confronts the beast within, resolves to just quit sleeping and start living. Stein and Vasquez nod to girl-groups, new-wavers, mock-operatic suites but mostly just play faster; Pearl, confident at 16, stays on her sideways drawl even longer at 20, drawing out the threats, upping the contempt.
At the Mercury Lounge, they were clearly off their game, rusty, out of it a bit after time off. “Sorry about all this tuning shit,” said Stein towards the end, the band’s tommy gun spray slowed to bursts. Yelled an audience member: “That’s what happens when you fuck someone up with your guitar!”
Posted by Zach Baron at 3:30 PM, February 14, 2008
No Context
“From Beyond”
GBE@Passerby
Wednesday, February 13
On YouTube there is a vast and growing sub-category of videos that dwell on the total destruction of the earth by mankind, videos that start with a tranquil shot of the earth from outer space. The segue to apocalypse is handled differently by different auteurs, but the elements of the deck remain pretty constant: Mushroom cloud; man walking on the moon; one missile colliding with another missile in midair; mushroom cloud; reprise. These clips unfurl with uniformly grim soundtracks, and the number-one soundtrack pick for “war its such a brutal planet”- and “fuck planet earth”-type montages that abound in the 18-or-older backrooms of the Broadcast Yourself empire turns out to be, over and over again, Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void.” The reasons for this choice are self-evident. Sabbath's proto-environmentalist, nuclear-winter anxiety dream imagines the population of planet Earth riding rockets to safety and the sun, a scenario that seems will soon come to pass and is also comparatively easy to animate. Other takes on “Into the Void” have included doom metal and ecoterrorism, but Sabbath's never really been touched in terms of out and out depressive clarity, and at this point they probably never will be.
Forwards, “Into the Void” sounds a bit like a factory collapsing, the metallic clank of the bassline grating off the most merciless Iommi-downstrokes in a catalogue consists of nothing but. Backwards, it turns out, “Into the Void” sounds. . . uplifting. I refer here to “From Beyond,” the Lucas and Jason Ajemian art piece/conservatory gag in which “Into the Void” is transcribed backwards and arranged for classical orchestra. “From Beyond” is an Boston Pops concept that in execution—say, at GBE@Passerby, where it was performed three times in a row last night—might be the best performance I’ve seen this year.
“From Beyond” has a bit of corollary in themusic-not-music American Idol slums of rock simulacra—someone might suggest that’s why it’s proving to be such effective gallery fodder—but it’s also an undeniably exciting piece of music, jagged and squawky but with a straight line running right through it. Predictably, the performance has already been gobbled up by the more experimental wing of the museum world: it debuted at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and will have its reprise this summer in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Of two brothers, Lucas Ajemian, who handles the yzzO vocals, is the artworld connect. Jason, who did the arranging, is a wild-eyed music-school graduate in a trapper hat and a suit two sizes too big, and he conducts standing on a paint bucket.
The orchestra ran small at Passerby, at about thirteen pieces, thirteen conservatory types cribbing off sheet music and grimacing at the fast parts. The audience grimaced too. Swing, that quality that separates us from the animals, is mercilessly stamped-out going the right way through "Into the Void" but returns when the piece is played backwards. Figures, if you think about how all the movement in a Sabbath song, when turned around, inverts from down to up.
"He's a conservatory master," whispered a friend, admiring Ajemian as he rode the bucket. But afterwards, Jason told a different story: "This is the first thing I've conducted in my life."
Posted by Zach Baron at 11:16 AM, February 7, 2008
No Context
Exodus + Goatwhore
BB King Blues Club and Grill
February 4
About the still mystifying phenomenon of metal shows at New York’s BB King Blues Club and Grill: Is it that King is so old, so pre-rock-n-roll that there is absolutely no difference in his mind between hosting a weekly Beatles Brunch featuring Strawberry Fields and a death metal band from Thibodaux, Louisiana called Goatwhore? Or are we looking at a Southern Hospitality type situation, wherein King plays the proverbial Mashantucket Pequot to some old white wizard of Oz with a dream by the name of Foxwoods? Because one wonders what might cross King’s mind were he to see Exodus perform in his own Times Square establishment.
Exodus are the band Kirk Hammett left in 1983 in order to join Metallica, and they’ve since had the exact sort of luck their origin story might suggest. As the rearguard member of the so-called thrash metal “Big Four,” Exodus had the privilege of carrying water not just for Metallica but for Slayer and Megadeth as well. Faddish popularity, Nirvana, and the Judgement Night soundtrack helped torpedo their genre’s lasting chances right around the day they signed a major label deal. They were left behind in a subculture of their own devising: 1989’s Fabulous Disaster contained the tune “Toxic Waltz,” on which then brand-new replacement vocalist Steve Souza heralded the “violent fun” of the mosh-pit, thus giving birth to a thousand terrifying guys like Exodus’ own current singer, Rob Dukes. “Back in ’89,” says Dukes from the stage on Monday night, “I was doing a lot of fucking drugs and alcohol, and I was a…FABULOUS...DISASTER!” He was also in high school at the time.
Dukes’ contribution to The Atrocity Exhibition, the otherwise not-too-bad record the band released last year, was “Children of a Worthless God,” god there being Allah. “For those extremist motherfuckers who fly planes into buildings,” warned Dukes on Monday: “I’ve got nothing but death for them.” This because they’re all children of a worthless god, a point he reprised by asking us to “fuck the Middle East.” Later the sentiment returned as “fuck New England” in tribute to Giants fans in the crowd.
Goatwhore were the openers, and to my left some dude had mashed-up the two bands, sporting corpse-paint a la Goatwhore’s armor, an Exodus T-shirt, and combat boots, the common thread being, I guess, that both bands encourage you to think about killing somebody. “How many of you douchebags downloaded Atrocity Exhibition for free?” asked Dukes, finally speaking my language. As the cheers went up, he held up his middle finger: “I knew it you motherfuckers.”
The Teenagers’ “Streets of Paris” is like an illiterate version of Pulp’s “Common People,” where all the class details are compressed into a couple lines about Nike caps and the chorus comes in under 30 seconds. “The streets of Paris,” they sing. “Man, it’s crazy.” They wrote a song called “Starlett Johansson,” a seventh-whiskey pickup attempt in which our narrator manages to get turned on by the fact that Johansson “whispers in horses’ ears.” That will do it for your band in the MySpace era, but to guarantee the eventual XL contract, they dug up “Homecoming,” a sub-Strokes ballad about fucking a girl who’s “a cheerleader,” “a virgin,” and “really tan.” The chorus is a charming Grease-style interplay in which one dude says “I fucked my American cunt” and then a blank-sounding girl agrees: “I loved my English romance.”
Actually, the band’s French, although they live in the UK. Though they say “cunt" on their record they also say, “You know we’re gonna make it!” on “Make it Happen” and “We’re teenagers, we don’t care!” on “Streets of Paris.” Not exactly the type of reserved, masculine sentiment that might allow you to crush tourists on holiday. Imagine, I guess, something like the Modern Lovers starring in University Sluts Of St. Petersburg 2.
Which, come to think of it, might not have been so different from the University Sluts of the Upper West Side tableau unfolding down the block last night at Vampire Weekend’s sold-out Bowery Ballroom victory lap. Since I’m not convinced that a band has ever formed without some expectation of eventual ejaculation, the Teenagers’ appeal to the “teenage girls of Europe and New York,” as they had it from the Mercury Lounge stage last night, didn’t seem particularly reprehensible. And although I don’t think they’re smart enough to be sending up much of anything, the fact that this so-called trio has, in addition to the three main guys, a female drummer and a female rhythm guitarist who plays half the riffs makes for a decent joke at their own expense.
They’re not teenagers, by the way. Bassist Michael Szpiner is 26. The three had adult jobs before doing a band. But they are a naifish act, in that they write their songs about the exact things that take place in their everyday lives. On “Love No,” a girlfriend tells one of them to stop spending so much time in front of his computer. He tells her he doesn’t love her anymore—making them the most debauched emo band of all time. It’s all girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, and girls they want for their next girlfriend. That your average teenager might merely allude to last night where the Teenagers will describe in detail what happened can be chalked up to the trio being a decade older and from the continent.
“You’re cooler than we are,” said their singer, Quentin Delafon, at one point. Their bassist, Dorian Dumont, got nervous and attempted to end the set a song early. As it turns out, their songs are good to the exact extent that Delafon can awkwardly dance to them. They’re giddy without meaning to be. “Feeling Better,” which rhymes “teenagers” and “feeling better” and talks about wanting to make the world a better place, is probably a sincere song, but that only occurred to me later. I was walking into the Bowery Ballroom Vampire Weekend circus and saw Dumont and Szpiner walking out. We passed each other on the stairs. When I got to the top, VW's Ezra Koenig had just finished asking, “Do you want to fuck?”
Posted by Camille Dodero at 1:30 PM, January 10, 2008
No Context
by Zach Baron
Sia
Apple Store SoHo
January 9th, 4pm
Sia
Virgin Megastore Union Square
January 9th, 7pm
If you are a recording artist in 2008, there will inevitably come a day where you will have to sit down with whoever is manufacturing your new record and decide how to convince people to buy it. You’ve invested time and they’ve invested money; neither of you wants to return to the coffee shop from which you came. But, as a matter of fact, maybe someone will say, maybe you do want to go back to the coffee shop. Starbucks is now as big a music retailer as they come. Your bassist may chime in, at this point, and note that there are still a few scrappy music shops holding on—maybe he’s even been a clerk in one or two of them—and they, too, still retain a bit of muscle. Like, say, the Virgin Megastore. At this point the obvious will dawn—most people buy their music, if they do so at all, from iTunes—and someone will write Apple Store on the back of a napkin, and this is how you will find yourself on a gigantic rainbow-colored bus, driving through lower Manhattan on a targeted search for your consumer.
Nothing against Sia here, the Australian-via-the-UK journeyman singer who's already taken her lumps riding every doomed trend from the last decade of pop music: late nineties acid jazz; early oughts white girl R&B; lusty adult contempo; trip-hop about eight years too late. And, most recently, one-hit fame the new industry way: a big television moment on the soundtrack to the finale of Six Feet Under. If this is your career, and a man in a suit comes to you and tells you to get on the rainbow bus, you get on the rainbow bus.
Her promotional slate in service of Some People Have Real Problems—out this past Tuesday—yesterday included Starbucks at noon (Astor Place), the Apple Store at 4pm (SoHo), and a finale on a Virgin Megastore stage at 7pm (Union Square). Not having anything at stake, myself, I caught the latter two—although I did glimpse the bus in Astor Place on my way in to work. In each case, she and her band performed mere feet from the merchandise. After each performance, she sat for an autograph line. In Union Square, I saw a couple of fans with their faces painted in a decent replication of her new album cover, waiting anxiously in line. The Megastore took the opportunity to rip through her album once more on the overhead speakers, what with the sympathetic audience and all.
Let’s be reasonable. Sia’s jazz-honk voice, which is actually so powerful it survived three shows and what her doctor apparently diagnosed between the latter two as the flu, would overpower anything but a soundtrack. At the Apple Store, where her band was denied their drum set, her voice shot out like water from a firehouse wielded by a 12-year-old girl, spraying an unsuspecting consumer tableau worse than their drummer ever could have. With such a formless talent, no wonder she’s been at the mercy of every lousy trend in demand of a female vocal. I do not know if she writes her own songs, but it would be hard to tell if she did. Two, in particular – “Little Black Sandals,” an extended metaphor about leaving a man you know you should leave even when your heart is trying to stop you, and “Academia,” which sports the couplet “You're a difficult equation with a knack for heart evasion/Will you listen to my proof or will you add another page on?”—have the distinct ring of something banged out by an anonymous songwriter on the plane ride over to the studio. But again, for all I know, they’re hers.
I’m not sure if you’re meant, as a fan, to go to one or all three. Certainly songs got recycled. And she reprised the trick of asking an audience member in the front row his name, and then dedicating a song to him—once in SoHo, twice in Union Square. But let’s not make too much of this, on a jaunt that was so nakedly about massaging an audience. Fact is, what would you do? It finally occurred, while waiting their second (actually, third) round out, that they were waiting it out too.
Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:15 AM, December 10, 2007
A Study of RRIICCEE at Eyedrum in Atlanta, Georgia by getzsch
No Context by Zach Baron
RRIICCEE
Green Room
December 7
The definition of irrational public behavior is probably something along the exact lines of attending a Friday night musical performance at the Green Room on Bleecker Street and expecting to see the band’s guitarist get a blowjob onstage, but people usually think of Vincent Gallo as being the irrational one. Similarly, you could call the fact that he spent most of his band’s set on his knees an apt reversal, but it’s not like he’s the first rock musician to adopt the pose.
Anyway I remember liking Gallo’s last record for Warp, Recordings of Music for Film, and I also remember liking Hole, and so the potential for eight inches was probably only the third or fourth reason I went to see RRIICCEE, Gallo’s new band with Hole’s Eric Erlandson.
Still, Gallo being a narcissistic guy is the gist of the evening. There were a couple of merch guys selling “one of a kind found articles” (i.e. lost-and-found street garments) “hand silkscreened by RRIICCEE” for 50 dollars—shades of Vincent Gallo's $3,000 Childhood Hopalong Cassidy Bedspread, available online accompanied by a letter of authenticity, or more infamously, the $50,000-$1,000,000 personal services offered to any “naturally born” female. As far as the actual noise goes, RRIICCEE’s music trends somewhere between a trebly Slint with no real basslines and an inferior drummer and a less lush MONO or Explosions in the Sky, punctured by a set-closing Gallo falsetto. This mattered to the genuine spectacle insofar as there wasn’t much spectacle to be had, so at some point listening was inevitable.
But what you didn’t end up hearing at the Green Room was more suggestive: the visible dissonance of forcing a veteran arena man like Erlandson to play minimal art-rock instead of big melodic chords, or Gallo’s repeated pleas to an already dazed Rebecca Casabian on keyboards to play “Slower!” She resembled any number of put upon and be-lipsticked Mark E. Smith keyboardists, and like Mark E., Gallo has burned through any number of musical collaborators prior to RRIICCEE: Sean Lennon, Jean Michel Basquiat, Lucas Haas, etc. Which is no surprise for someone who’s been trying to talk himself into suspecting or outright hating Jews, gays, African-Americans, and liberals for the last decade or longer. Quoted in this paper’s Brown Bunnyreview was this paradigmatic Gallo comment on collaboration: “The question is not how did I do it all myself: It's, How did I put up with the incompetence of the people I had to work with?” (Also contained within this same review is the world’s best summary of the Brown Bunny’s plot using the fewest words, e.g. “The film finds Gallo driving alone for 100 minutes, then forcing a torturous blowjob on Chloë Sevigny.”)
So Gallo gives good quotes, although I didn’t ask him for any. His shows are more about self-presentation and Rene Ricard-esque unpredictability in action than how well he plays the guitar, and though I thought his band was alright I don’t think many people would listen if not for celebrity diorama that RRIICCEE cuts onstage. Once it became clear nothing beyond effects pedals would be twisted, the bathroom trips got frequent, and rather than ducking when moving past the stage on their way there, people tended to slow down and gawk, as if they were at an aquarium and the band behind glass. It’s tempting to further the metaphor and note that the downtown New York of which Gallo is an undisputed graduate is like this too now, but for all I know Sonic Youth played the same underwhelming set in ’81.
Posted by Camille Dodero at 10:34 AM, December 3, 2007
No Context
by Zach Baron
The Mountain Goats
NYU Kimmel Center
November 29, 2007
Like so many of the homer fans John Darnielle now makes fun of from stages all across the United States, I’ll cop to an almost pathological aversion to anything made post-4AD, and to an equally Pavlovian fanboy response towards everything pre-. Darnielle knows this phenomenon, among other reasons because he’s as obsessive about records as the next guy chasing Taboo VI ‘cross eBay. Before one song last night, the 4:01-clocking “Tallahassee,” from Tallahassee, the record that marks the dividing line, he joked: “4:01! In the old days that was like 7 songs…”
Anyway this gets embarrassing, as far as public behavior goes. Me, mid-show, post-2002 composition: furious; disgustedly staring at the ground. Me, mid-show, pre-2002 composition: ecstatic; hopping. Generally I am the least stalker-like fan a band will ever obtain but there is the notable exception of the Mountain Goats, about which I develop theories.
One such theory, regarding audience affection, from an earlier draft of this very piece: “…Granted, this particular concert took place at NYU, but I’ve always fretted about the adoration Darnielle’s received in the 4AD era, which in regards to its character is less frantic and pushy and more messianic, which has always led me to worry about the effect being hailed as god might have on a man whose ideal rock show is the one put on by Heart on their Dreamboat Annie tour, etc etc…”
Look, who could argue that he doesn’t deserve it—even deserves the pair of girls who were right in front of me last night, wearing peasant blouses, flared jeans, and open mouths, who professed adoration for Peter Hughes—“I like this guy, whoever he is!” Characters who may well have been torn to pieces by a Mountain Goats crowd, circa ’97.
Again, call my knee-jerk what it is, which is involuntary. In the year that I discovered file-sharing and downloaded 40 different live Mountain Goats bootlegs, occupying my laptop’s tiny hard drive to the detriment of Word documents, pornography, other music, and emails more than three days old, the live-set refrain I inflicted on myself at the rough repeated frequency suggested by home hypnotism tapes was: “As you all know, I don’t write songs about myself.”
Famously this changed. Tallahassee, Darnielle’s trial run for 4AD, was a record about the Mountain Goats’ long-running, long-suffering Alpha couple, vodka-swilling and living near the Florida-Alabama border in decaying house with no children and no future; We Shall All Be Healed and Come, Come to the Sunset Tree and Get Lonely instead introduced a new character, one who’d never once graced any of the 500-odd songs the Mountain Goats had already written, whose name was John Darnielle.
Previously, avoiding the personal had always seemed a way of subtracting the confessional and bathetic stuff from the singer-songwriter paradigm. Writing about other people freed Darnielle up to act out, to identify, and for us to act out, and identify, and there you had it, the two-way street that gave birth to guys like myself who would later basically spit at the floor when Darnielle took a bigger piece of the action for himself.
‘Nuff said though; the new one, due next year, is called Heretic Pride, which is probably all the summary re: Darnielle’s POV necessary. The song “Heretic Pride,” which he previewed last night, is a banger – “old-school jams” is how he described the new record; fanboys take note – and hearing it was only one of many moments that exposed the whole split in the band’s catalogue for what it is—notional not actual.
Funny thing was, NYU was more Mountain Goats double-major fantasy-nerd than it was indie-citizen, slick-orchestrated Mountain Goats. Off tour, Darnielle and Hughes were in town for a one-shot, off-brand show: under-rehearsed, request-ready, off-the-cuff. Darnielle broke strings (“Old days, I used to break a string ever three songs”), did interpolations (from “Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”: “…and the top three contenders, after weeks of debate, were Satan’s Fingers, and the HOLD STEADY, and the Hospital Bombers…”), and played ancient songs: “Love Cuts the Strings,” “Orange Ball of Hate, “Alpha Incipiens,” etc.
But it was “Dance Music,” from the ostensibly loathsome Sunset Tree, that got me worst, as the two coeds just in front of me began to first suggestively bang hips before in fact banging hips and then banging asses and then full-on grinding, I kid you not. They went to the floor. They came back up. Everyone shouted “I DON’T WANT TO DIE ALONE” and for a second we were all the same fan.
Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:36 AM, November 9, 2007
No Context by Zach Baron
Mount Eerie
Lutheran Church of the Messiah
Thursday November 8th
“I would like to fulfill the pregnant night—whatever that means,” goes Mount Eerie fan favorite and last night’s show closer, “Where?” As a riff on the performer himself, “Where?” is pretty advanced, a semantic stagger between “Mount Eerie,” the band that’s a front for one Phil Elverum, and “Mount Erie,” the mountain for which his band and his hometown in Anacortes, Washington are named:
"Where is Mount Eerie and how do I get there
And how long is the walk and what should I bring?"
Mount Eerie is nowhere.
Mount Eerie is playing tonight.
“Where is the concert and will it be all ages?
What time are doors?
And how much does it cost?”
The concert is nowhere.
There is only one sky.
Also referenced here is Elverum’s 2003 swapping out of his Microphones alias for that of Mount Eerie, which even at the time was described as make-believe: “In 2002 I went on an endless tour and stopped for the winter in northern Norway and died. The next spring I returned and pretended I was a different person and a different ‘band’ and ‘artist’ and ‘singer’ and everything.”
As it happens, the concert was in Greenpoint, it was all ages, and I’m pretty sure it cost 8 dollars.
Features of the earth mentioned in lyric: valleys, mountain wind, the sea, night air, white air, lonely, lonely night, dawn, a satiated bear, the world, racing clouds, ocean squalls, storms.
Features of the earth projected at the back of the stage: the moon over a dock in a lake, ferns on a rocky slope, a foundry, mist hanging over mountains and trees, trees blowing in wind and snow, craggy peaks covered in clouds. Bonus rim-shot: footage of the band SunnO))).
The projections were among other things a product tie-in, for Elverum’s new Mount Eerie Pts. 6 & 7—a double-sided ten-inch with two great songs on it, 132 pages of colorful photographs (preview here), and a book-style dust jacket. On it, Elverum mostly forgoes the plangent strumming for which he is loved in favor of piano-progressions, palm-muted shredding, dive-bomb pick slides, background operatic choruses, organ-sustains, and rattling percussion. And here is another contradiction attendant to the many that come attached to Mount Eerie: though the eighteen-year-old kids who pack his shows beg and beg for his older, man-and-a-guitar odes to nature, he hasn’t recorded a song fitting that particular bill since his Microphones days. Newer songs allude to that sound without conforming to it—too much noise, too many quirks, too abrupt, no choruses, etc.
New York has always seemed like fraught territory for Mount Eerie. A guy who loves nature this much, well, Brooklyn may be an awful place. The projected video at which Elverum gazed constantly, even though it was behind him, was a long time coming: a crutch, a way to get his mind right in order to sing odes to a dark that doesn’t even really exist within our city limits.
Before him his wife, the artist and illustrator Geneviève Castrée, who performs as Woelv, had bragged that her voice could “do the things little Simba can do in the French version of the Lion King,,” and both played in bare feet. Both incorporated heavy, off-beat breathing into their vocals; both often swallowed their words even as they emerged; both had arch, formal thank-yous for their adoring crowd: “Thank you for listening to me play these songs.” Neither, one guesses, is particularly fragile in a real life, offstage sense. And as irritating as the affect can sometimes be, to grownups anyway, it’s part of their project. How much of the traditional onstage pose can they strip away? What’s the least vocal and guitar combination that still results in a song?
As for “Where?,” Elverum wanted the crowd to sing along, but with time running out, he skipped actually sharing the lyrics with the audience, and went for telepathy instead: “Log on to my brain. I’m completely open. No password or anything. When you pull down the AirPort thing, it’s 'Mount Eerie Concert555.'”
Posted by Camille Dodero at 5:28 PM, November 1, 2007
No Context
by Zach Baron
Tony Conrad
Window Enactment
Greene Naftali Gallery
Tuesday, October 30th
It is at times very easy and at times very hard to reconcile Tony Conrad, the 21-year-old composition student from Concord, New Hampshire with Tony Conrad, the 67-year-old professor at the University at Buffalo. The first: early violin minimalist, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music along with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela; video- and film-art pioneer, beginning with The Flicker, in 1966; Heinrich Biber obsessive; Harvard graduate, A.B. Mathematics, 1962. The second: a cultural institution, longtime teacher, writer, and mentor to any number of students, the kind of guy who lends legitimacy to museums and concerts and record labels, just by showing up. They are in many respects remarkably similar men: fixated on repetition, even boredom; quirky, outsider types who are respected for their undeniable accomplishments even as they’re quietly shunted off to the edge; vigorously intellectual, but also pranksters, funny guys.
But if Tony Conrad, the 21-year-old, had an audience that even he mostly assumed resided in the future—his work, he once said, “was a total displacement of the composer's role, from progenitor of the sound to groundskeeper at its gravesite”—that future has now arrived, has become the past even. And with his primary musical legacy (hundreds of recordings made with the Dream Syndicate, since held captive by his former friend, LaMonte Young) tantalizingly out of reach, much of his reputation resides only in the memory of whoever might care to recall it. Sometimes it seems as if Conrad could just disappear—as he knows and has observed, “History is like music—completely in the present.”
No surprise then that what you heard in conversation before the premiere of Window Enactment, a piece commissioned for and performed as part of PERFORMA 07, the New York-based visual art performance biennial, was mostly “oh, why are you here?” You could have asked Alan Licht this question, or Cory Arcangel, or Matt Cerletty, or that guy with the long braided beard and hat from the No Neck Blues Band; Conrad’s constituencies are so far-flung—former Buffalo students, video-art geeks, arch composers, etc—that they don’t generally remember that one another even exist.
And add then to these Conrad’s performance-art sideline, which takes the conceptual rigor that underlies the pleasures of pieces like Four Violins or The Flicker, and foregrounds it, makes it into the thorny conceptual problem that older Conrad concepts like “active listening” in fact allowed you to dodge, since the pieces themselves were so enticing. Window Enactment is just the sort of formalist experiment Conrad has often written about, but to my knowledge, rarely tried.
Window Enactment: in the corner of the Greene Naftali gallery in Chelsea, a corner is walled off with white-painted construction. Rum-swilling patrons are signaled to attention by the lights going out, then fan out around the notional wall in which a window is inset. A door in the assemblage briefly opens and closes; behind it, red and white lights start flickering, and eventually silhouettes come into view. Over the next hour and a half seen and unseen violins play; what sounds like the “Godzilla” theme thumps at half-speed; and five often-nude actors (two women, three men, Conrad among them) act out domestic scenes such as talking on a cellphone, making a bed, simulating sex, trying on clothes, dining at a table, reading a book, and looking pensively out of the window. The audience, meanwhile, struggles just to peer in: the window is small, and much of the action takes place way behind it, in the rear corner of a room into which we can only barely see.
First frustration sets in, then resignation, then boredom, all three by design. Undoubtedly, Conrad’s sending up voyeurism—the scrambling around the room for a view through the window, the eventual domestic tedium of what the nude people are doing within, etc. There’s also an homage here to Edward Hopper’s 1932 painting “Room in New York.” A longtime favorite of Conrad’s, he once described it like so: “Here there is the window frame we are peering through, the stark whites and yellows spotlighting the figures that draw our attention in, while letting us forget that our eye has been caught in the position of a peeping tom: the torsion of the figures away from each other implies their imagined relationship to the voyeur. Only this much, and already we are inside the story, lost in the confusion of the picture.” This would be a fair depiction of Window Enactment as well, though it doesn’t get at the sheer stultifying repetition and boredom that eventually takes over outside the borders of the frame.
Boredom’s a technique too, of course. A devotee of the trance theory of the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, who believed that the path to a direct relationship with the subconscious was to trick or puzzle a person’s active, conscious modes of attention, Conrad also shares his belief in the techniques that yield such a state: boredom, distraction, confusion, and interruption. (About boredom, Conrad wrote: “Boredom is, as [formalist media works] demonstrate, in fact productive of a renewed orientation toward those fundamental (ideological?) actuators, expectation and the value of passing time.” Which is to say, I think, out of tedium comes revelation, or a different kind of communication anyway.) Which is all very boring, in the context of a Tuesday night in New York.
Conrad tells a story about how one of his heroes, the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen, once came to see the Theater of Eternal Music play. “At that time we were frequently using a large gong that Robert Morris had made for La Monte,” recalls Conrad. “Immediately there was a great change in Stockhausen's music—which had been stalled in its serialist tracks. He started using ‘improvisation,’ and even wrote a piece for gong. What a dweeb.” Such was the power and camouflage of Conrad’s early projects that one taste could lead the great Stockhausen to the lowly gong. There are many ways to distract a man, not all of them dull.
Posted by Camille Dodero at 4:53 PM, October 25, 2007
No Context by Zach Baron
Control
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Through November 1st, Film Forum
Two weeks before beginning work on Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis-biopic Control, the cast and crew visited a New Order show, seeking inspiration, or guidance, or approval from the three-out-of-four men whose early lives they’d soon represent onscreen. Most awkward, by his own account, was the presence of Sam Riley, who was to play Ian Curtis—the one member of the silver-screen band who lacked a real-life counterpart, since the occasion for the film was, at least in part, Curtis’ May 18th, 1980 suicide. “They didn’t offer all that much advice,” recalled Riley at last night’s Film Forum screening. “Bernard Sumner sort of patted me on the back and said, ‘Have fun.’”
As it happens, this is by all accounts the way Sumner talked to Ian Curtis when he was alive, too—the four members of Joy Division were known to be reticent, with each other and famously with the press. In one scene in the film, Curtis has just had an epileptic seizure, one in an increasingly disturbing series of them, while onstage; he’s just told his wife, with whom he has recently had a child and who he married at the age of 19, that he no longer loves her; and in the crowd, watching as he collapses at the back of the stage, is Annik Honoré, the girlfriend he can’t give up. The band’s manager, Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) lays Curtis out on a couch backstage and says, by way of comforting him: “Could be worse. . . You could be the lead singer in the Fall.”
Coincidentally, Sam Riley did play the lead singer of the Fall, Mark E. Smith, in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, the Factory Records film which many assumed would be the last word on Joy Division and Ian Curtis onscreen, and in which Anton Corbijn’s elegiac 1988 video for “Atmosphere” plays as a final, gut-punch memorial. Corbijn, a photographer who took some of the more iconic photographs of the band in the last year of their existence, had yet to direct a film before Control, but no one doubted that, with his proven understanding of the band’s mute aesthetic and seeming ability to appreciate a distant band from a distance, he was perhaps the perfect man for the job.
And, in fact, Control is eerily (mundanely, even) faithful to the Joy Division mythology. There are the books on the shelves of Curtis’ childhood bedroom – J.G. Ballard and Ginsburg – and the records on his stereo: Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop. There are the constant references by every interviewer, fan, and TV personality to the Buzzcocks; the foundational Sex Pistols concert; the change in name from Warsaw to Joy Division. There is the inexplicable “You all forgot Rudolf Hess!” boast by Curtis, pulled right off of the legendary Short Circuit Manchester punk EP, and there is the night that Curtis died: the fight with his wife Deborah, the half-empty bottle, Herzog’s Stroszek on the TV, Iggy Pop’s The Idiot on the record player, and at last the noose in the kitchen.
Riley looks like Curtis, moves like Curtis; the four actors ultimately talked Corbijn into allowing them to perform the Joy Division songs in the film themselves, and it’s almost incomprehensible how well they do, especially considering the fact that none of them – excepting Riley’s short-lived 10,000 Things – were musicians before filming. James Pearson, who plays Bernard Sumner, “had never played guitar before,” said Riley after the screening. “Now he knows nine songs. He’s not much fun at a party.”
Riley is clearly aware of what they are up against in making Control—“I know a lot of these films about bands are a bit iffy,” he said, and about Curtis he noted: “He’s a private hero to many people.” Corbijn’s challenge, in making the movie, would be paradoxically to represent this fact while remaining faithful to its fundamental tenet/tenant: that Joy Division was a band enjoyed best from a distance, from a remove, without emotion—the way, not coincidentally, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner and Deborah Curtis still speak about the band today. Even when Curtis was alive, he was adamant about not being psychologized. Understanding was beside the point; as Tony Wilson, the owner of Factory Records and a primary mythmaker behind the band, once said, “If it is a choice between the truth and the legend, take the legend every time.” Curtis’ daughter Natalie has recently quoted this exact line with approval, and she notes that her mother (on whose memoir of the marriage, Touching from a Distance, Corbijn’s film is based) feels the same way.
Honoring this wish would be a tall order for any filmmaker, even one as apparently talented as Corbijn—every shot in the film, with its bleak monochrome palate, perfectly understated costume design and almost fetishistic attention to the real-life exterior of the house in which Deborah and Curtis lived, honors the band. In Control, there’s no triumphalism, no unearned inspiration, hardly any transparent emotion at all.
Ultimately though, if only near the end of the film, Corbijn’s desire to possess Curtis, rather merely observe him, begins to infiltrate. Where Corbijn is content, for most of the movie, to render Curtis as the inarticulate and uncomfortable soul he himself described in song after song and abortive interview after abortive interview, the Curtis represented by Wilson and Hook and Deborah Curtis, eventually we go beyond the barriers Curtis so naturally set up in life—into the empty bedrooms and doctor’s offices and hotel rooms and even, via voiceover, into his thoughts themselves. What was remarkable about Joy Division—and what is remarkable about three-quarters of Control—was the way in which everything anyone needed to know about the band, and about Ian Curtis, was available in a handful of songs. No one ever needed to imagine what happened behind closed doors. We already knew.
Posted by Camille Dodero at 11:07 AM, October 17, 2007
Suppose I owe you some kind of introduction to CMJ. Something that mentions energy drinks, badge futility, and essential picks? CMJ is a "marathon," after all, every bloghard's own charitable Walk for Musical Hunger—collective insomniac "suffering" in the name of better-working elbo.ws—and in which every participant gets their sponsors, declares their intentions to whoever will listen click, drinks a lake's worth of liquid, whines a lot in the process, makes an essentially positive experience into a negative one because "art" consumption should repeat the Burger Kingian have-it-your-way mantra of customer satisfaction, etc.?
Sure. Right. There'll be plenty of that.
In the meantime, as far as I understand it, there are plenty valid criticisms of this CMJ arrangement, but I'll leave that to someone who's actually done this before, one Mr. Zach Baron.
credit: M. Wartella
Context from the No Context Guy: Give The People What They Want
No official panel on this subject, obviously, but I heard a bunch of people speak about it yesterday and last night:
A CMJ badge is priced at $295 for a college student, $495 for New Yorkers and everybody else not in school. At five days, some quick math will tell you that for a regular, non-college student to get anything approximating their money's worth, they'd have to attend 50 shows at $10 a pop or 20 shows at $25. Not 50 bands--50 shows. Doesn't take a genius to see the economics here are way out of whack.
Now, add the fact that a badge gets you into, at best, 75% of what you're actually trying to see. It won't get you into last night's Sub Pop showcase; probably won't get you into today's Kill Rock Stars showcase; they were more or less laughing at folks who showed up at the Knife with only a badge in hand; and so on. In other words, virtually all of the big-ticket shows this week are at least partially closed to badges.
Who's getting in? Mostly, venues act like it's any other week and force people who came halfway across the country to attend CMJ to pay full ticket price--badge, press, or otherwise. Strip away the fancy Marathon title and you're looking at just another price-gouging week in New York -- five shows or so at $20 or $25 bucks per, a $100 dollars or so out for the week and twice that on drinks plus cabs, etc. Triple that if you're trying to see more than one thing a night.
So do the math: who exactly is CMJ for? Not for the casual fans who buy badges because of the embarrassment of riches CMJ claims to bring to the city--those are the kids getting turned away for the shows they bought that badge for in the first place. My college radio station, up in Boston, stopped sending representatives years ago when it became clear that CMJ could give a fuck about college radio DJs, charging them $300 bucks to travel way out of the way only to be denied access to half the events.
Press might be a better answer, except plenty of writers get turned away like everybody else at doors all across the city. If you're not on the list, which negates the badge anyway (no matter what affiliation it's got on it), you're not getting in either.
Bands could conceivably be the winners here, with the hype ramping up attendance and guaranteeing tons of press coverage, but unless they're seeing a percentage of the badge sales, which rumor says they're not, most bands are taking a pay cut to play shows that have more cross-town competition and less attentive audiences than usual.
Try the venues then, which get to open up their bars at three in the afternoon to big crowds and are apparently allowed to stop admitting badges whenever they feel like it--over and over, you see venues turn away badges and demand people pay full price or go home. Or look to the sponsors (of whom the Voice is one), who get banners and flyers and advertising all over the city. Also in the mix are PR firms and the bigger blogs, both of whom act as middle men for all kinds of transactions going down throughout the week, thus profiting via more attention than normal and, presumably, by taking in more cash as well.
Hey- this is speculation. The paths of economics and access underlying this whole week are so well obscured behind the visible spectrum of badges, crowds outside of shows, free daytime showcases, late night super-secret afterparties, etc, that who knows who's benefiting. But one thing's clear: those who just showed up, as fans, to see bands play, are not coming out ahead. Neither are the bands who play the showcases and shows around town, as far as I can tell. Ask yourself who's left?
Posted by Camille Dodero at 10:10 AM, October 11, 2007
No Context by Zach Baron
Spank Rock and Benny Blanco are…Bangers & Cash was reportedly the result of a chance meeting between the Philadelphia-based sex rapper Spank Rock and a young former Disco D intern named Benny Blanco. Blanco had on hand a collection of beats he’d based off, almost entirely, samples jacked from the controversial early ‘90s Supreme Court case rappers 2 Live Crew, and as a means of getting them out into the light of day, offered them to his newly successful friend. Spank bit, and Bangers & Cash were born: four unusually crass songs (five, if you count the one they didn’t give away for free over the four week publicity bonanza run-up to the EP’s release) about pearl necklaces, fellatio, and sex involving brown paper bags.
No doubt also influencing the genesis of Bangers & Cash was the world-beating year that was 2006 for Spank Rock, nee Naeem Juwan, in which he went from a down-and-out Baltimore-to-Philly transplant to a globe-trotting, pussy-destroying titan in less than six months due to the strength of his debut, Yoyoyoyoyo. The sex raps that played as wink-and-nod wish fulfillment in the mouth of an aspiring indie-rap star landed him fame and more; more, presumably, in the form of willing girls who could appreciate the irony and also the confidence displayed, so that eventually, Spank Rock became less like an outré fantasy project and more like day-to-day life. By the time Blanco got to him, one could guess, Spank had more than just an EP’s worth of sexual adventures to relate.
Finally, almost certainly adding to the appeal of the project for both men was the chance to push things forward a bit in their not-so-nascent genres: for Blanco, the revival of the Miami bass production style, and for Spank Rock, club-rap or gallery-rap or party-rap or whatever one chooses to call rap music when it’s made for a primarily non-rap audience. Nowhere was it more obvious how much they were trying to get away with than in the artwork appended to their various singles.
The Bangers & Cash debut single (above) dropped with a picture of Benny and Spank lying in the sand side-by-side, pounding fists as two thick, greased up women straddled their prone bodies; in the obviously fake background, Miami palm trees and blue skies stretched off into the distance. Over the next three weeks, this image was followed by one of two bikini-clad women, over whose heads were imposed those of two snarling panthers, demolishing a city, Godzilla-style, while shooting lasers from their panther eyes; a thong-clad panda bear on all fours, looking back over its shoulder at the camera; and (below) a snake giving a naked woman cunnilingus.
The records also included the following lyrics: “She gotta have it cinematic like Netflix / HD-documented pearl drop necklace”; “B-o-o-t-a-y, you ain’t got no alibi / You ugly, bitch fuck me”; “From the club to the bed / Brown bag on your head / In, out, lift, split / Cough, spit, eat dick,” and so on. These would be unremarkable on practically any given major label rap record, but for Spank Rock they were a significant leap forward from even Yoyoyoyoyo, which itself had hooks such as “tap that ass, tap that ass, tap that ass…”
Some of the off-color can be explained by where Spank Rock’s been for the last year and half, which by his own admission has been a different club practically every night. Some lyrics are satirical – say, “Hoochies wanna get on the guestlist / Eat a small dinner so you fit in your dresses,” from “Loose,” – satire derived, perhaps, from an intimate knowledge of just who’s trying to storm the VIP. And I don’t believe, exactly, that Juwan’s ever thrown a brown bag over a girl’s head – or at least, not in the order described above.
Spank, by his own admission, prefers to fuck to Janet Jackson, an empowered woman if there ever was one, and Amanda Blank, who’s also in Bangers & Cash and who raps on “Loose,” offers up a triumvirate of female positive mood music in the same Myspace short: Bjork, Mazzy Star, and Duran Duran. They then go on to posit Bangers & Cash as music made in the same spirit—call it inspirational.
Maybe. For Blanco, things are probably the simplest. To revive an ass-shaking production style he’s enthralled with – and, it should be said, really talented at – he needs ass shaking to be a thing people do again. For Spank, and the other B&C rappers – Santogold, Black Betty, and Blank – there are personas to look after, fantasies to be lived out and mock-fulfilled, and the fame that inevitable attends controversy, should there be any. But even Spank Rock’s number-one sex-soundtrack pick R. Kelly knows to get a girl home you’ve got to flatter her first (and during if you want to enjoy it, and usually after as well, if you ever want to do it again). Whatever Bangers & Cash is, it’s no turn on.
Posted by Camille Dodero at 2:13 PM, October 4, 2007
photos by Rebecca Smeyne
No Context by Zach Baron
End of Summer Jam
Tompkins Square Park
September 30th
At Tompkins Square Park, a friend yelled “Bring back the old school flavor!” in the direction of A.R.E. Weapons, and erstwhile ‘80s rap A&R Dante Ross—a man whose old-school flavor extends to having been caricatured as a duck in the artwork to Three Feet High and Rising—turned around instead. Old school, on certain NYC blocks, can have a lot of definitions. But A.R.E. Weapons were old school, as far as Sunday went—their ’99-to-now run represented more years put in than the rest of the bill combined.
The bill: Mod Rockets, Sahra Motalebi, Sh-Sh-Shark Attack, The Virgins, A.R.E. Weapons, and the L.E.S. All-Stars, the last of which who were described to me as “dudes who hang out at Max Fish.” Arrived late, and thus caught only the last two, but got the idea: sociology before sound—i.e., downtown—and geography—i.e., New York—before genre. Extremely young kids with skateboards and RICH GIRLS t-shirts, retail mafia, Ryan McGinley, no alcohol. This was better than it sounds, not least because the temperature was a cool 73.4 °F and everyone there was in a great mood.
“This one’s about caring about stuff,” said A.R.E. Weapons. Does this band even still have their bad rep? All that menace, live, is clearly as much self-directed as it is antagonistic. Something is at stake: they’re going to get the best of their fear and their squalling synth blasts and granular thrash guitar or it’s all going to get the best of them.
On Sunday, they played godfather to the masses—perhaps it’s an antagonistic thing when they leave New York, or open for the Pet Shop boys or whatever, but when they’re in their own neighborhood, they seem like they’re on the same side as their audience, who deal with the same kind of social terror they do on a daily basis. Surely there are worse sins than dramatizing the lives of those who battle it out below 14th Street?
Everyone was in it together; I even got pitched on the idea, via text message. “The turnout should be tremendous,” said the Q, via the show’s organizer, Off-Bowery guy A-Ron, “all community, all bands been friends for years even before they had bands, which is real cool.”
Since only a fraction of this interview with the Magik Markers appears in my short feature on them this week, I thought I’d post the whole transcript here. Boss, their new record on Ecstatic Peace, is queasy and claustrophobic and unsettling; it’s also one of the year’s best. Both drummer Pete Nolan and singer-guitarist Elisa Ambrogio are hyper-articulate when it comes to explaining their own work; all choppiness and indirectness can be explained by the fact that the interview was conducted over a couple weeks in late August and early September, via email, since Pete tends to “get pretty blank over the phone,” and Elisa was traveling. With three of us going back and forth, things went more sideways than linear—which hopefully will explain the meandering. . .
Your sound has changed—that'll be the big news here, why you guys went towards "songs" and away from the anti-composition, more free-form stuff you do live. On top of that I might wonder whether the ideas have shifted—I'm thinking specifically here of the last time the Voice did a feature involving Magik Markers, which was in 2005, and Elisa was pretty adamant about not being interested in modern music of the Rolling Stone variety, let alone, say, the "unfucked pale girls yammering about the gender binary" from liberal arts colleges who even now may have illegally downloaded "Empty Bottles" and are listening to it approvingly in their dorm rooms. New sound, new sociology? New goals for the band? Lets start there, if this makes sense as a question, and go forward. . .
Pete Nolan: I don't think anyone who's been following our output over the last year would consider BOSS to be a radical change in approach. We've been honing these tunes over a period of time. Several versions of some of these songs have appeared spread out over our various self-released CDs. On BOSS the tunes have just come into full focus. We were given the opportunity to spend time in the studio to apply our theories of effective sound formulation in time to the arrangements that we've couched the skeletal framework of our tunes in. I think the result is a full bodied and vivid dreamlike experience. To me the experience of listening to this record from start to finish is no less disorienting than one of our live performances, only more insidiously so. Anyone who's been picking up the bread crumbs will find that at its heart this is truly a Magik Markers record. As appealing and accessible as the songs seem immediately, on repeated and more attentive listening I think this record raises more questions than answers, and in the end leaves you with feelings of doubt and uncertainty.
Elisa Ambrogio: I mean, it was basically, with the Markers writing songs: let’s let a couple of defectives reinvent the wheel and see if we can make the car go on four squares. It can go, but it takes a lot more power and destroys more.
There was always something disgusting and too personal about melody before. Something creepy about it. In some ways I cannot explain the sea change in the Markers, other than that it was gradual and baffling. Believe me, I am as surprised as the next fellow that we wrote songs. It is weird. The influence Leah Quimby [–MM’s former bassist] exerted within the band should not be underestimated. She did not enjoy recording, it was a very uncomfortable process for her and it felt wrong in the context of the Magik Markers’ intent as Leah saw it. Something about our live shows was and is an attempt to shift the perception of a performance. A rock and roll c
