Last year, William Bowers compiled this playlist. A year later, any further additions?

This holiday's abstract mandate can be sorta barren for us patriotically-challenged atheist vegetarians who maintain cosmic equidistance from our bloodkin. The term for it is even weird: "Thanksgiving" is a syntactical cousin, reckon, of Wall Street's "profit-sharing," decorators' "wall-hanging," or The Riches' Eddie Izzard's "ass-having." It's the holiday least commodified by the entertainment industry, possibly because it's so pre-owned by food concerns? It was even the final calendar-refuge from slasher films until Eli Roth's fake Grindhouse trailer.

So I...made a playlist. Please feel free to contribute to its comprehensiveness via the comments section. Yup, I am aware that I omitted relevant jams by Dido, George Winston, Kelis, Brad Paisley, and Sum 41. I'm also yet to hear that popular Williams S. Burroughs thing. And I know that Big Black released a Thanksgiving EP, but I've always avoided them out of a certainty that nothing music could be good enough to earn the cover art of Songs About Fucking. And let me warn you: even though it was on the 1984 Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack, the awkwardly of-its-moment Danny Elfman song is somehow much easier to swallow if you used to be engaged to a girl who looks like Eric Stoltz in 1989's The Fly 2. -- William Bowers

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Provincializm #17: I’m Not There, Too, Either, Again

by William Bowers

Three other Voice typists have done pieces related to the new Todd Haynes prism about a certain awesome Jewish male performer whose most ebullient song about marriage is tellingly entitled “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” But the freelancin’ mustn’t stop until it’s a half-dozen articles deep, in order to better homage the film’s six-Dylan homage! And as a tribute to the film’s spirit of disjoint, my column won’t bother with coherence! It’ll be a bunch of unsubstantiated ideas! But please, consider its structure “complicated,” like that of banana pudding when tossed into unicycle spokes.

[Popping pills and donning Wayfarers]: Cuz nobody thinks in ordered paragraphs, maaan, except popes and po-leece! Linearity’s for squares. You can’t, like, contain the planet’s moodswings with a calendar any more than you can airbrush away an IED. Thesis Christ on a clipboard—

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Be thankful for William Bowers.

Provincializm #16: Thank-Rock

by William Bowers

This holiday’s abstract mandate can be sorta barren for us patriotically-challenged atheist vegetarians who maintain cosmic equidistance from our bloodkin. The term for it is even weird: “Thanksgiving” is a syntactical cousin, reckon, of Wall Street’s “profit-sharing,” decorators’ “wall-hanging,” or The Riches’ Eddie Izzard’s “ass-having.” It’s the holiday least commodified by the entertainment industry, possibly because it’s so pre-owned by food concerns? It was even the final calendar-refuge from slasher films until Eli Roth’s fake Grindhouse trailer.

So I…made a playlist. Please feel free to contribute to its comprehensiveness via the comments section. Yup, I am aware that I omitted relevant jams by Dido, George Winston, Kelis, Brad Paisley, and Sum 41. I’m also yet to hear that popular Williams S. Burroughs thing. And I know that Big Black released a Thanksgiving EP, but I’ve always avoided them out of a certainty that nothing music could be good enough to earn the cover art of Songs About Fucking. And let me warn you: even though it was on the 1984 Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack, the awkwardly of-its-moment Danny Elfman song is somehow much easier to swallow if you used to be engaged to a girl who looks like Eric Stoltz in 1989’s The Fly 2.

Robert Pollard-“Thank You”
Tom Waits- “November”
Something by the Mount Eerie-ish band (often covered by Mount Eerie) called Thanksgiving
Something by the psych underdogs Family
Something pissy from the punk boxset No Thanks
Something by the Grateful Dead
Sparks- “Thank God It’s Not Christmas”

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This week's obligatory William Bowers bio comes straight outta The Oxford American: "Mr. Bowers has two words for writing: limited success; two words for the meaning of life: expensive pretending, and two words for himself; aimless contrarian. He is currently at work on his first novel and a collection of short stories about the omnipotence of fast food. He does features, interviews, and reviews for Pitchforkmedia.com, Magnet, and is also a music reviewer for The Oxford American. He has fiction forthcoming in Open City." Sure, whatever they said.

Dylan, Dalton & Neil: About to bohem-orrhage
photo by Fred W. McDarrah

Provincializm #15: Infomercializm

by William Bowers

Facts: Fred Neil entertained himself by watching squirrels try to access nuts that he’d taped to a window. Karen Dalton cooked and ate rabbits from a Colorado university’s psych lab. Percy Mayfield wrote depressive R&B about such subjects as water calling him to drown; one track’s titled “Life Is Suicide.” The Red Crayola considered Zappa and the Velvet Underground “Vichy-puppet right-wingers.” R.E.M.’s first producer was the house bassist at an optimistic North Carolina jazz club that even Thelonious Monk couldn’t pack. Jimmie Rodgers spoke yodelese even at home with his wife. Teddy Grace’s real name: Stella Hurt. Jesse Winchester was in a frat with Bill Bennett. Van Dyke Parks scored Polar Bears: Arctic Terror. Parchman Farm had an inmate band for 36 years, and Junior Kimbrough’s son played in it. Italy and Germany “worship American rockabilly.” The Roches are, like, Emily Dickinson triplets and fill me with penislessness-envy. This year’s Oxford American Music Issue is as enriching as the very best of its eight prior editions.

Unseemly disclosure: I’ve a piece in the issue, and I’ve had a turbo-felicitous relationship with the OA as a contributor since 2001. But don’t let my conflicted interests taint your impression of a volume containing: A) a piece about how Katrina may have nudged Barry Cowsill to not only kill himself but to have crafted his own memorial plaque, B) a fine reading of the Daniel Johnston cosmos, C) a survey of Pitchforkery re: Annuals, D) as many validating references to Dylan as to racist cops, E) roosters as a design element, and F) a 26-song disc so exquisitely sequenced and indie-rock-free that you might wish more blogs (and music junkies, reckon) back-looked.

I could lose vast McNuggets of the rest of my life overconsidering or quibbling with the articles, and have already blown two weeks attempting not to. When feeling particularly withersome on certain metabolic afternoons, I’d even posit that a compilation as strong as this year’s OA CD straight-up embarrasses even superb prose about those songs. (I’ve even pathetically deepened the disc’s role as a yardstick of personal fraudulence by telling three people who were curious about what I was listening to that it was “oh, a mix that I threw together.” You know, just something awesome I whipped up via the ol’ Winamp library. Larked it. Phhhbbbbt.) Lots of folks can crit-snipe a band that’s just-okay or bloated. But writing about Great Music, in its shadow, whew--Like, the part of me anticipating laundromat-day would gladly take some money to do one of those 33 1/3 tomes centered on a “classic” album, but the part of me skeptical about the whole endeavor of music-typing would fret that the check should be made out to Mosquito Von Coattails.

So yeah, I can’t find a way to parse this disc’s Various Artistry without admitting critical impotence, promoting intellectual dishonesty, or sounding like a rhetorical wind-tunnel. The music’s …“simply”…immediate, and its …”goodness”…speaks for itself. I’m supposed to know the value/purpose of cultural studies and entertainmenty criticism and all, but: so much music-writing accomplishes what, exactly, aside from maybe a kind of contextualization that lets us feel as if we can better access or attain or understand its power/genius/essence, etc? Even ambiguities that surface in the time-capsule articles evoke the poet Karl Shapiro’s line about how people who “know” “history” only know “the history of trying to know.” But wait, why am I processing my enjoyment of this CD as problematic? Because I’m an aspirant gabber, and this disc commands listenership, i.e. shutting up? Or because any “copy” that I could muster about the selections by Iris DeMent, Dan Hicks, or Zakary Thaks would be the result of a sagacious pose, camouflaging how pleasantly manipulated I am by them? For example, here’s my dumb/honest reaction to the anti-Sirenic, support-system ultimatum “Hammond Song”: I can’t believe I haven’t always loved this.

It's the man of this week's dour hour, Mr. William S. Bowers.

Silkworm, Spoon & Guided By Voices: Indie Rock High School Class Of '96

Provincializm #14: The Worm Turns

by William S. Bowers

Tim Midgett announced the release of the debut album by he and Andy Cohen’s new band Bottomless Pit via Silkworm’s website on October 10, 2007, five days before the trial began for the person who hit and killed Silkworm drummer Michael Dahlquist with her car over two years ago. (She was found guilty of three counts of reckless homicide with mental illness on October 26, and will wait a month to be sentenced.) Almost every aspect of this first post-Silkworm project seems to address Dahlquist’s death, from the matter-defying morbidity of the band name to the haunted architecture captured in the packaging. The title, Hammer Of The Gods, frames fate as percussive, and is of course also the name of the infamous book about Led Zeppelin, the most heralded band to break up because of the irreplaceability of their deceased drummer.

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Leave it to William Bowers to follow a column about Black Kids with two about Silver Jews. Go sit on Grampa Polydenim's lap at Puritan Blister.

Berman gone wild: the collarbone years

Provincializm #13: Hero, Worship (Part Two)

by William Bowers

Capsule summary of last week’s episode: Michael Tully made a documentary about The Silver Jews’ trip to Israel. Its chronicle of Silver honcho David Berman’s sincerity and religiosity might be traumatizing for some of his fan-children unhealthily committed to aping their projections/internalizations of Berman’s previous ever-buzzed, linguistic-trickster persona.

“When I was younger I was a cobra: In every case I wanted to be cool.
Now that I’m older and subspace is colder, I just want to say something true.”
—from the Silver Jews’ “The Frontier Index”

Okay Mr. Berman, but what are your slavish fans supposed to do as we age, especially if we lack the luxury of having been born into a faith we can take semi-seriously? Plus many of us have been educated and acculturated to find “truth” problematic. An apparent immunity to what my fellow South Carolinians considered satisfyingly “meaningful” enabled my absurd substitution of a fervor for 90s lo-fi recordings onto the altar where some other folks positioned spirituality or money or both or whatever in the first place. And Mr. Berman, many of your slavish fans, like you, are unblossoming into grownup-ness. We lately agree with you that cool detachment is a prophylactic against the immediacy of being an earthling. Our thrift-drag became our skin, too: we see what is totally out-of-place and yet kinda fitting about your wearing a trucker hat and a Western shirt to read and weep at Jerusalem’s Western Wall in Michael Tully’s film. (Take it from Grampa Polydenim, any nubile and impressionable column-skimmers out there, adulthood happens like this: For a deceptively extended interval you’re young and brilliant, young and drunk, young and sexy, young and high, and then—SHABAM—one afternoon you wake from a nap looking like Paul Westerberg.) In Wendy Fonarow’s attempt at indie-rock-anthropology Empire Of Dirt, she calls reaching the thirties a music-slut’s “sell by” date. Criminy. I’m at risk of ending up like that terrifying Onion headline: “Family Unsure What To Do With Dead Hipster's Possessions.” Please, God in whom I do not believe, permittest not a Tokyo Police Club promo to be playing when my heart attacks.

All self-absorption aside: Good for David Berman. The film captures an artist who has beat his addictions, and who found a complementary life (and creative) partner. Fans will relish his band-origin stories, his explanation of his strategies for dealing with the press, and his lofty opining about religio-states. Non-fans can even enjoy the film’s bits touching on messianic delusion, women’s need to cover their tainted flesh at officially magical—I mean sacred—places, and the hassle of bargaining with local merchants. Most powerful is getting to watch Berman’s protective cynicism erode, as he curses his reluctance to feel in the 90s and is flooded by his audiences’ positivity. When he seems blown away by their being some of the “nicest people,” he rebaptizes that word—“nice” ceases to be descriptive styrofoam and is beautiful again, its benevolence radiant and legitimate. As Berman dives from the stage to hug crowdmembers, the viewer can’t resist imagining that he’s thanking them for saving this version of his life.

Yet: watching someone with such a sharp mind talk so hippie-ly about receiving universal answers can be hard, especially if the viewer doubts that a near-suicide would rejigger their own theology-lobe. But religion was a major presence in Berman’s work all along: every album contains (retroactively portentous) references to Jewishness and Judeo-Christian mythology. Even his book of poetry begins with angels, hypothetically restages Christ’s deathplace, and ends with a Lord/God/Bible trifecta. Jesus is so prominent in Berman’s lyrics that I figured the songwriter to be due for a 1970’s-Dylan-style fundie trip. Ah well: I remember a review of Pavement in, like, Spin, which claimed that “Fight This Generation” was proof of how (original Silver Jew) Stephen Malkmus had gazed into the abyss so much that it was gazing back into him. Maybe Berman’s early work jokily looked too long at the light, and that’s why he now claims to have seen “God’s shadow on this world.” Hey, here’s a pitch: For the sequel 2 Silver 2 Jew: Return To Irony’s Bosom, Tully could catch Berman eating a Goliathburger at Orlando’s Jews-for-Jesus attraction The Holy Land Experience.

Silver Jew has screened in Austin, Sarasota, Nashville, Boston, Glasgow, and London. It plays in Detroit November 3, and in Leeds on November 9 and 13. A DVD release is forthcoming via Drag City after the new Joos LP drops in February 2008.

Leave it to William Bowers to follow a column about Black Kids with one about a Silver Jew. WSB can be racially profiled at Puritan Blister.

The Book Of Job, starring David Berman

Provincializm: Hero, Worship (Part One)

by William Bowers

Indulge me a quick hegira to Fanboyistan: I’m among the multitude of blokes who imagine themselves to have undergone an abstract discipleship involving Silver Jews frontman David Berman. We mail-order-chased him everywhere, beyond his discography’s slippery singles, compilation tracks and EPs: collecting his work for The Minus Times, stockpiling his band’s posters, shelving Robert Bingham publications that referenced/influenced him, deconstructing the significance of our drool on his book of poetry, “explaining” the band name to passersby curious about our tee-shirts’ ironic Zionism, etc. I once mistook a forwarded compliment from Berman regarding something that I’d typed more seriously than multiple marriage vows.

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WILLIAM BOWERZ IS IN UR SOUND OF THE CITY
TYPING UR PROCRAZTINATION

I can has (genre) miscenenation?

Provincializm: Siblings Gonna Work It Out

by William Bowers

Friday morning last, Pitchfork (for which, let’s be honest, I’ve typed almost six years) deemed Black Kids’ four Myspace downloads “Best New Music.” By that night—after the band opened for Stockholm’s Lo-Fi-Fnk in its homescene at downtown Jacksonville, Florida’s TSI—the ideological provenance of that name had been roundly second-guessed, with the consensus being: “Black Kids” is an ingenious provocation. “Do you think it’s offensive?,” a Caucasian scene-staple asked an African-American scene-staple with whom he’d played in various bands, including one that Boss Pitchfork dubbed among 2005’s worst. “I’m not your mouthpiece for all black consciousness,” the interviewee responded, almost echoing verbatim Wanda Sykes’ answer to an impertinent Larry David on the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode about bow-tied Muslims. After whitey chummily quasi-apologized and reiterated his question, the black kid answered as an individual: “I don’t think the name is offensive. I think it’s trite.” This paragraph will abstain from taking the savvy quintet’s bait re: moniker-as-thoughtfood. (Instead, cut-n-paste your favorite declarative quote from Norman Mailer’s The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster here.)

See: TSI, the show’s venue, is like a Branch Davidian compound for northeastern Florida’s indie-demo, who are, to generalize, a gaggle of great-looking, fun-loving, unbrilliant drinkers who tend to hypercelebrate as fashion’s apex their aesthetic resistance to the bejorted Jax massive beyond the club—ahem, discotheque—walls. TSI, like America, reckon, can be a blast if you block out the combative undercurrent: a cretinous bartender might go out of his way to force the limits of his imagination onto you, an acquaintance might flip you off if you earnestly thank him for an Afropop recommendation (just in case you were being sarcastic), trial-ballooning a new look might be interpreted as threateningly distinctive, etc. Music is sort-of discussed all night, with an enthusiasm reserved for prognostication that rivals a sports gambling addict’s single-mindedness. Old hang-ups need not intrude: the closest thing to a rockist authenticity debate that one will hear at TSI involves fretting over whether or not Vice magazine is getting away from its roots. Black Kids Reggie Youngblood and Kevin Snow DJ there often, and the club’s entrance tunnel is adorned with posters of their faces, personality-flyers whose Leni-Riefenstahl-versus-glamtard design principles overtout nights spent spinning “Take On Me,” “Boy With The Arab Strap,” and “Wolf Like Me” (twice). Cultists awesomely fill the venue to support traveling acts (the aforementioned Lo-Fi-Fnk, Dandi Wind covering Men Without Hats, and so on), seemingly based only on TSI’s booking them as a qualitative vouchsafe; the equally ascendant Glass Candy played to a single-digit crowd likely because they took stage elsewhere in Jax.

Cultivated in that climate of overt NYC-mimicry and transcendent ‘tude: Black Kids. They’ve made good—internationally!—on the Warholian a-hole/microcosmic fame-whoredom of their own local iconography, as if a long season of cockiness could somehow will its raison d’etre into…being. Live, on the night of Pitchfork’s concurrence with NME, the huge, liberating slightness of the EP’s tracks convinced even showgoers who began the proceedings by asking, “What about Black Kids is singular, though, or, like, exceptional?” Some hooplehead familiar with Deadwood taunted the band’s UK-label flirtations by hollering, “Limey cocksuckers!” at them. Reggie Youngblood’s defensively self-conscious inflection and profane banter made a girl bark, “Wait, I feel heckled by this band!”

OMFG, preview of the non-EP tracks: But first don’t forget to check out the bassist’s journalism or what they did before the lady annex alley-ooped their sound into the Pipettes-versus-dawn-of-Steve-Bays-fronted-Hot-Hot-Heat-osphere. “I Wanna Be Your Limousine” features a guitar solo that serendipitously quotes the vox of a certain Klaxons hit and ends with the Wicked Witch Of The West guardsmen chant. “Magnificent Seven” eerily rubs early Electric Six up against The Dead Milkmen’s “Lucky.” Don’t you know that “Look At Me When I Rock With You” and the also-imperative “Listen To Your Body Tonight” rise above their dumbish come-ons via the mysterious tension created by the enigma of whether or not their hetero call-n-responses involve lead vocalist Reggie Youngblood’s sister and Black Kids keyboardist/ovarist, Ali. If so, wow: they totally one-upped the White Stripes’ winky incest-play, like an Oedipus and Electra tag-team getting rid of their parents so they can attend exclusively to each other. “Body” even (Southernly) taps into the soft-porn contradictions of a church car wash by swearing “on the Bible” that a hot hookup will be worth investiture.

Some dude in the crowd on the night of October 5 can’t help himself. He yells, “8.4,” the Pitchfork Decimal System’s estimation of the virtual debut’s quality. Then another “8.4!” follows, and another. Reggie Youngblood sez: “8.4?” and then, motioning to his white drummer, insists: “Kevin’s dick is 11 inches!” So. Before boogie-ing in anticipation of Black Kids’ kickass hooks, and thinking “Good for them,” one remembers the original, rejected name of Turbonegro, another controversially-entitled band: Nazipenis.

Black Kids play an official CMJ showcase at the Annex Oct 18 and Oct 19 at the R Bar, New York for a Brooklyn Vegan/CMJ party.

It's a very special day at SOTC and it has nothing do with the fact that Ian MacKaye has just been pronounced alive. Rather, today marks Provincializm #10, the first double-digit installment of a regular column written by one of the best living typers to use the word "booger" in a sentence, Mr. William S. Bowers. Given you the obligatory bio before, but all you really need to know is that WSB has not written a book about Nirvana.

So far in this particular LCD screensystem, WSB has told us about a girl named after a maxi-pad, briefly lampooned another weekly SOTC columnist, and fixed you up with some Swedish chick named Linda Sundblad. Read all of William S. Bowers's previous SOTC columns here. Slip him the tongue at Puritan Blister.

Flesh-as-puzzle, via VC: connect the boobies, butts, and weiners

Provincializm: Ye Olde Songwriter Does (Not Do) It Again

by William Bowers

Particularly neglected in my lifelong failure to achieve omnilistenership, for no good reason: contemporary male guitar-based singer-songwriters who perform using their actual names. I'd have missed out on the work of Mssrs. Oldham, Molina, Mangum, Beam, Darnielle, and Houck--etc, etc--if they hadn't elected to (initially, at least) bill themselves under bandish monikers even when operating alone. I never much liked Elliott Smith, and am indefensibly uninterested in hearing Damien Rice, Ryan Adams, Jose Gonzalez, et al. I "respect" the recordings of David Dondero, David Karsten Daniels, and Micah P. Hinson, but never reach for them when facing my CD wall after a heinous day. When using iTunes, I pointlessly/fitfully change the "Artist" blank for solo tracks by Malkmus, Pollard, and Callahan back to the names of their previous respective projects. I can't finger this aversion's seed: Maybe my psyche got scarred by a Jim Croce television ad that used to loop during my favorite cartoons? I do know, however, the lone exception to my accidental embargo: Vic Chesnutt.

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This is Provincializm #9, a weekly SOTC column in which William Bowers writes about whatever the hell he wants. Dude lives in Florida, writes for Pitchfork, Paste, Magnet, and his work's been in a da Capo anthology. We like. When he's not here, he's here at Puritan Blister.

Understated ain't hood

Provincializm

I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Somebody Who Hates Me)

by William Bowers

Maybe it was another aural hallucination, but I could totally swear that this week as I was fossil-fueling along, hoping to get my imagination shepherded through commuter purgatory by NPR’s slumming, nonprofit culture-porn, I heard a segment (which I can’t find referenced in any online archive) about how a type of songbird—sparrows, maybe—are more attracted to partners singing new (or new versions of old) songs, encouraging strongly the idea that birdsong isn’t instinctual but fucking acculturated, and novelty-centric to boot. Possible scientific confirmation that new music has cosmic reproductive significance, or is a biological imperative, totally derailed a crotchety invective I was halfway finished typing, a righteous and overlong tut-tut to those slavish bloggers (and their slavish visitors) who privilege contemporaneity over quality or historical context. Sigh—pathetic fallacy and reverse anthropomorphism notwithstanding, I felt forced to reach into a folder of my external hard drive entitled “Dusty Grails of the 80s” to counter the hegemony of overcelebrated newness/nowness with a fine example of its unsung ancestry. Case in point: 1983’s Second Empire Justice, by Blitz (UK, not Brazil).

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