My Tasteful Year?

I'm being bowled over by taste this year. Well, not bowled over -- my knees are buckling a bit. Anyway, can't really put my finger on why, but all I want to listen to so far this year is that Spoon album, Gil Scott-Heron, and the new Massive Attack record. Oh, and occasionally Peter effing Gabriel.

Not sure what's going on; may just be a slow start to the year (none of these albums have a crack at my Top Ten). On the other end of the TASTE spectrum, the only stuff that piques my interest on the new R&B comp from Tapemasters is no-chaser Super Cheeze, like "Blame It"- and Dream-derivative (mostly for the "ooh-ooh-ooh" hook -- "we in the club like ooh!" hmmm) "In the Club Like" by RL (who?) and Black Dada's race-Flo-Rida-to-the-bottom (<--pun! Hahaha BOTTOM!) "Round Round" ("she makes that booty go..."). Both unknowns to me, both will either be non-starters or #1 on Billboard for twelve weeks, as is now customary. (BTW, I'm guessing that's "Dada" like daddy not Dali? Also, I think I'm going to pronounce RL like "Karl.")

Quite enjoying the "Get Ya Money Up" remix with Nicki Minaj who has been on 100% fire for...what, about two years now? BIG BALL DADDY NO ELPHANTIASUS.

I like that Lloyd ("Get a Room") is slowly turning into a cartoon character. And I don't mean in the way that R. Kelly is a caricature of himself, I mean like a Tex Avery character. Rolling tongue on the floor, eyes popping out. Promising development; I need to give him a little reevaluation. He's the only good thing about "BedRock" -- though conceptually I like Gudda Gudda trying to do the worst rap verse ever. I have high (low) hopes for him!

I talked about my two taste(ful) extremes with Scott Woods -- teenpop is a good barometer for this sorta thing; I have separate compartments of my brain for straight bubblegum (A*Teens) and what is, essentially, fairly tasteful stuff (much of the confessional oeuvre). And now I think after crystallizing in one genre it's starting to spread out to new pastures. Teenpop itself [of the bubblegum variety, anyway] seems a bit dried up -- or it may be that its little niche heated up just enough to bleed into main-er streams, so that I'm picking the teenpop and confessional etc. bits out of other musics without finding an obvious source. Perhaps it has something to do with TRL going off the air, I dunno.

Nicheification goes both ways -- as much as it seems that "we" are retreating to our corners, what may once have been corners are also bleeding into the center, so it's simultaneously harder to find the center and track the niche. I love it -- you know what strands you're looking for and read them out of a giant knot. But I think that it's possible that song-listening and track-keeping has become somewhat exhausting, and I'm falling back on some pretty boring stuff as my standards for long-play listening.

Hey, speaking of song-listening, EVERYONE SHOULD BE PARTICIPATING IN THE POP WORLD CUP. Don't have much to say yet, been following along fairly passively thus far, but it's great fun as always.

Remembrance of Zings Past

Looking over all of my unedited Singles Jukebox blurbs for last year and I realize that with a little effort I could be the third-rate Yogi Berra of music criticism! I'm a sucker for a good (read: awful) one-liner and/or super-convoluted metaphor, tho.

On Phoenix: "They have a bright future behind them."

On Kelly Clarkson: "On her last album she cast herself as Jesus Christ on the cross; this is a huge step down...er, figuratively speaking."

On Jeremih: "I think I need a new music box -- when I wind this one up it just plays a retarded The-Dream knock-off." [After a year of radio saturation to make me think I was wrong on this one, I realize now that I was right the first time. Whew!]

On Demi Lovato: "The song's underlying sweetness remains unmoved amid the chug, like a sapling surviving a brief hurricane in the middle of a shopping mall."

On Dirty Projectors "Stillness Is the Move": "A third of this song is a pleasant surprise."

On Eminem's "3AM": "This is really bad even by 'free movie made exclusively for the Comcast OnDemand FEAR channel' standards. For those of you not familiar with Comcast's OnDemand FEAR channel, those standards are low, even by low-standards standards."

On YYY's "Heads Will Roll": "Megalomaniacal crossover appeal."

Hey, here's an interesting one -- review of Daisy Dares You seems to be turning out pretty accurately so far! Ahem:

"Sorta dreamy, sorta dark three-chord power-pop is likeable enough but super gimmicky and ultimately forgettable, which means that Daisy, whoever she is, will probably start tearin' up the British charts and be hailed in the UK music press as the savior of a new generation of women rockers any time now. Y'all are weird."

And thus it was:

Daisy Dares You is the stage name used by Daisy Coburn, a 16 year old pop artist from Essex. She has not yet released an album, but she is already garnering much media attention, and she has been profiled by The Times, the BBC and The Guardian as a young artist to watch for 2010

On Rihanna's "Russian Roulette": "What hath Heath Ledger wrought?"

2010

PLACEHOLDER -- I haven't listened to a 2010 album yet! But I can at least sort out my classification system.

2010: The Year Everyone Ate More Fruit

Hardcore (Bananas)
Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
Massive Attack - Heligoland
Pantha du Prince - Black Noise
Sade - Soldier of Love
Spoon - Transference
Yelawolf - Trunk Muzik

Mediumcore (Ananas)
Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back
Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM
jj - no3
The Knux - Fuck You EP
Lady Antebeelum - Need You Now
Lali Puna - Our Inventions
Lindstrom & Christabelle - Real Life Is No Cool
Lloyd - The Young Goldie EP [2009]
Owen Pallett - Heartland
Jay Sean - All or Nothing [2009]
Young Money - We Are Young Money

Softcore (Nahs)
Katharine McPhee - Unbroken
OK Go - Of the Blue Colour of the Sky
Yeasayer - Odd Blood

Technically not a fruit (Disqualified)

Applecore (Offal)

Un-cored
Goldfrapp - Head First
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Rob Swift - The Architect
Vampire Weekend - Contra

COR, OVERLOOKED IN 2009
Dam-Funk - Toeachizown

Seeds

More Updates

I'm still working on the commenting situation -- Disqus is still in place for comments and I'm working with them to re-thread all of my old posts. I'll keep y'all posted, but again: all comments have been preserved, they just aren't in the proper threads.

Meanwhile, I've decided to get rid of the superfluous "extra blog" for yearly lists and will instead continue to update yearly lists on the main site -- each relevant post (from 2005-present) is on the side bar under "Ongoing Yearly Lists."

I'm working on a big (final?) teenpop project for what will basically be my only decade commentary -- more details as events warrant.

I do think I'll cull my Best Albums That No One Else Has Mentioned and post that some time in the new year. Also forthcoming is a hugely insanely massive post on 2004.

They're not dead, they're just hiding

One of the lovely side effects of rushing into changing my commenting system to THE DEVIL Echo/JS-Kit is that it appears that I've lost all past comments.

I haven't actually lost the comments -- they're all archived at my new DISQUS commenting system, but for some reason when exporting the comments from JS-Kit/Haloscan, everything went into ONE folder (the "Bedbugs Comments" folder) so that comments don't appear in their respective threads.

I'm considering ways of remedying this (if anyone has dealt with this problem in the past let me know!) the least drastic being figuring out a way to get an XML file that Disqus recognizes as having individual thread information for each comment, the most drastic being uploading BY HAND every single effing comment that's ever been made on the blog. Which I'll do if I need to but it's an absolute last resort.

In the meantime, I have the old Blogger format -- with terrible JS-Kit commenting system -- intact (that will still provide access to every old Haloscan thread in its proper blog post). I can switch back and forth between the two at any time and I imagine fixing the problem will likely require me to do this. So please bear with me for all remaining technical difficulties.

For now, I'm keeping the Disqus system -- Disqus still isn't as easy as Haloscan was, but it's a huge improvement over the super-clunky JS-Kit, so for now you'll be able to comment through Disqus but you will NOT see any old comments. I'll keep you posted.

EDIT: EUREKA! I was finally able to find the old Haloscan (not JS-Kit) XML files after all. Hurrah! However, not all comments have been re-aligned with their threads for some reason, so I'll likely be troubleshooting for a while longer.

EDIT 2: My EUREKA was premature (of course, of course), but I'm still working on it. Any help would be super-appreciated.

Technical Difficulties

Haloscan has finally decided to destroy the world sell itself out to the Echo commenting platform. As far as I can tell, I have successfully migrated all comments over to the new platform, but the system ALSO required a Blogger layout update, hence the semi-wonky appearance. I'm working on tweaking it back to where it used to be.

In the meantime, I'm using this thread to make sure that the Recent Comments feature is still alive and well, as it's an invaluable resource. I'll also be repopulating the links in my sidebar, which needed a refresh anyway.

EDIT: I'm officially not the world's biggest Echo fan -- the commenting is a bit cumbersome and not HTML-friendly. But it was the only way to preserve Haloscan comments without disabling Haloscan from the site completely. The only real difference in the archived comments is that all links to websites etc. are gone.

To comment, for some reason you need to click through twice, once for the individual post and again to comment. BOO. Let me know if you have any problems without being an Echo member, but comments should still be open to everyone without moderation.

2003: Cooler Kids

2003 was the year I met Emily and the year I started undergraduate college. It was also technically the year in which I wrote my first piece of music criticism, some kinda reaction to various 2003 year-end lists (hence the "technically" qualifier). What I remember most about it was about how good I felt, how confident I was. It was, for the most part, my first application of totally trivial knowledge to actual social interaction, and if I was faking it no one else seemed to notice. There were plenty of people who could indulge my tastes and share theirs with me (black metal, Mike Patton, Gogol Bordello, jam bands, the Boredoms, Dan the Automator...) and I just kind of soaked it in. At this point I'd developed my pattern of "checking my stories"; it was the difference between studying for a history test and reading the newspaper every day. I could keep abreast of what was going on in music contemporaneously while listening to it, argue with people about albums that had come out later than thirty years ago, make sweeping pronouncements on...y'know, the impact of Radiohead or something.

Freshman year of college seems now like it was a one-off opportunity to dabble in new identities, new ideas, new ill-conceived bits of mischief and mayhem. The world didn't open up so much as become a comfortable little low-stakes bubble, in which just about everything was permissible but nothing was that big of a deal, either -- for someone coming out of advanced high school classes that were routinely not only difficult but out of my academic comfort zones, classes themselves were a breeze going on a joke -- I was a film student, for one thing, and had bypassed most of my core requirements in advanced high school classes. So for a year, school was more of a summer camp -- and frankly intellectually/emotionally I hadn't progressed all that far from my junior year when I got the bug to delve into music more seriously.

When I think of 2003, I think of huddling -- cramped rooms with too many people in them in which nothing was really happening for hours at a time. So a lot of music happened this way. I remember a friend who knew "Work It" by Missy Elliott so well that he could record himself singing the backwards part, then reverse it on his computer so we'd hear his voice unnaturally saying "put my thang down flip it and reverse it." I remember thrashing around to a particular section of the Boredoms' "Cheeba." I remember conversations about Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life and seeing bad and/or competent student bands (usually in cramped rooms with too many people in them). I remember forming a band with my friend Sean, keyboard guitar and bongos, and covering Ween's "Push th' Little Daisies." I wrote two songs this year -- one of them was called "Maybe It's Love" and sounded not unlike the Dr. Mario music, which we broke into at the bridge, the other was a Hot Hot Heat-ish number called "70 Virgins" which was sort of a mock emo song. "It would take 70 virgins, 70 virgins, to fly me where you are / Girl it's true / It would take 70 virgins to fly me home to you." Haw, haw.

I met Emily that summer through a mutual friend in Maryland while Emily was visiting from New Jersey. My friend and I hatched up a scheme to visit her in New Jersey -- this was the Beck and Radiohead concert that was scheduled at Giants stadium and was temporarily canceled due to an endangered species of birds nesting on the field. This worked out perfectly -- though I would have liked to see the bands there, my interest was Emily, not Beck, so when the event was canceled we decided not to purchase the new tickets with a smaller line-up. That was the first to a bunch of trips to New Jersey that summer -- Emily and I hit it off and talked all the time, I sent her pompous declarations of love and the first mix CD I'd ever made, which looked like this:

1. Blur - Girls & Boys [2003, IIRC, is the year that I re-watched High Fidelity and realized that I knew just about every single music reference. By comparison, when I watched it the year it came out, I knew none. I considered this to be a major accomplishment at the time.]

2. Hot Hot Heat - No Not Now [Hot Hot Heat is a good lightning rod band separating the dorks-at-heart from the cool-at-heart in this period of time in the indie world, and I fall pretty squarely into the dork camp, though I never liked much of what they did after this album. Which is super dorky.]

3. Esquivel - Mucha Muchacha [I didn't want to use the obvious one, the Big Lebowski song, since it wouldn't really prove that I knew Esquivel, which for some reason felt like an achievement.]

4. TMBG - Birdhouse in Your Soul [They Might Be Giants is one of the few bands that I knew before I "knew" them, largely through Tiny Toons but also because this was one of those random albums that you might just own and be obsessed with even if you had nothing to do with music otherwise. If I'd actually owned the album I may have been a TMBG fanatic, joined a fan board c. 2000, and then none of you would be reading this right now!]

5. Talking Heads - Who Is It? [Ohhhhh baby it's you.]

6. Beta Band - Dry the Rain [Did I mention High Fidelity? Emily and I still listen to Three EPs all the time, actually, though never anything after that.]

7. Pere Ubu - Day at the Beach On the Surface [This was a gamble at the time, but Emily loved this song more than most of the ones on here, which meant a lot at the time as I recall.]

8. Modest Mouse - Heart Cooks Brain [Emily's favorite Modest Mouse song -- she knew them much better than I did at this point.]

9. Self - Dead Man [DAMN I loved this album. Still do -- the "toy album," Gizmodgery. This used to be a song that I held in my head as a mixtape secret weapon, to be deployed with extreme prejudice in the event of a mix lag. I planned out way more mixtapes than I made, of course -- with a few exceptions I've never made a mix for anyone but Emily]

10. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea [This is the first sign of a legit taste change; this song grates on me in a way it didn't in 2003, but I heard it for the first time on that first drive up to New Jersey and it had sentimental value. I do think this is one of the better stand-alone tracks from this album.]

11. Incubus - Summer Love Song (Anti-Gravity) [This was a backfire -- I thought Emily might like the early Incubus stuff more than I did (relisten to it, though, it's pretty good!) but she actually liked it less. Via this mix, I've grown to love this song, but I think Emily always skips it.]

12. The Clash - Train in Vain [This was the last song I stuck on here -- I still hadn't quite figured out the balance between how a song sounds and what the song's "about" as far as a mix is concerned -- I don't care so much about content these days and mix almost purely sonically, but in 2003 I agonized about whether or not I would send the wrong messages with a song with lines like "you didn't stand by me / no not at all / you didn't stand by me / no way." Anyone else get paranoid about lyrical content on a mix being taken the wrong way?]

13. White Stripes - Little Room [Emily wanted "Fell in Love with a Girl" and got this, which was merely a transition track. I think I thought "Fell in Love with a Girl" was too "obvious" or something, but I quickly learned that what I thought was not the be-all and end-all of considerations when it came to thinking about someone who is not actually me.]

14. Dismemberment Plan - Girl O' Clock [Hyuck-hyuck, date rape song as "I miss you babe" track! This should give you a sense of some of the more unpleasant side effects of my sense of humor at this period. Great song though, and it's not as obviously "about date rape" as I seemed to think it was at the time. People can talk shit about Brent D.'s Kid A review all they want but if he hadn't written about Emergency and I the way he did I probably wouldn't have bought it. Funnily enough at college I had a friend from the D.C. area who actually went to, like, shows and loved D-Plan because he'd seen them live so many times, which made car trips from upstate NY to Maryland with him infinitely easier to deal with.]

15. Weezer - Across the Sea [Seriously, why didn't I agonize about the lyrics to THESE songs? If I'd written this song and then had to live with a bunch of fans (like me) who wanted more of this sorta honesty even when I was like 30 I'd start writing some really stupid shit to get them off my back, too.]

16. Elvis Costello - Alison [Didn't realize it at the time, but Emily not liking this song very much was a good sign, too. What a smug bastid. But hey, I thought it was the cleverest thang ever, so what does that say about me?]

17. Radiohead - Just [Emily's favorite Radiohead song. See, she's got some taste, that Emily. Radiohead is effing impossible to put on a mix, btw, they suck all the air out of the room almost without fail. And I love Radiohead. I saw them perform in Maryland on their Hail to the Thief tour and called Emily when they unexpectedly played this as an encore.]

18. Super Furry Animals - Demons [Another pain in the ass band to put on mixes, though I used "Juxtapozed with U" and "Golden Retriever" on subsequent mixes. This one just felt nice after the Radiohead track, sort of a cool-down before my traditional "penultimate/'final'/post-script" sequence that I usually use on these mixes.]

19. Beatles - Got to Get You Into My Life [Emily's favorite band by...what's more than a country mile? A continent mile? Beatles are in the very fabric of her childhood -- from lullabyes ("Golden Slumbers") to the father/daughter dance at our wedding ("In My Life") -- and frankly putting the Beatles on a mix is a daunting prospect when most of their songs have such a historical weight to them. I didn't know the early Beatles at this time, having bought into the "Rubber Soul --> Abbey Road = real Beatles" myth that gets bandied about so often.]

20. R.E.M. - Nightswimming [Ha, this probably wouldn't stand a [cold thing]'s chance in [hot place] of hitting a mix outside of 2003. It is pretty, though it's probably the track on here that I've had the closest thing to a 180 on since then.]

21. Shelley Duval - He Needs Me (Jon Brion remix) [Punch-Drunk Love was a pretty big deal for me and my friends in 2003, the movie that allowed Adam Sandler fans who'd gone more pretentious since childhood/teenagehood to "understand the subtle genius" of his manchild persona or something. But this song is really sweet and the remix is better than the mixes you'll find from the original soundtrack anyway.]

So hey, I was on top of the world, man, new girlfriend, new friends, new confidence, though in hindsight I think I was actually more juvenile in my first year of college than in my last two years of high school. (Points to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for nailing this transition PERFECTLY, albeit not 100% intentionally, in its fourth season.) Emily encouraged me to write a blog, which led to my first attempts at organizing my thoughts in words. The only thing that technically makes the time cut-off for this year was something I wrote on, like, Dec. 30th on the year in music. It included sentences like this:

"the teenyboppers’ post-Backstreet Boys output is kind of like that Britney/Madonna kiss—awesome in theory, vaguely disappointing when you really see it."

I still feel this way about Justin Timberlake, actually! I was crazy underrating the Britney album, which of course I'd never listened to.

"In the world of hip-hop, which seems to be the only hope for even remotely original music in a popular format in the immediate future, the industry is content to let a few ingenious talents (Missy Elliot, the Neptunes, Outkast) define any kind of sonic change in mainstream rap."

The first part of this sentence is probably true, though I didn't know enough about hip-hop to speak to the second part. 'Course, I was defining "sonic change" as "whatever Outkast and Missy Elliott happen to be doing," so perhaps this observation was more a self-fulfilling prophecy than accurate assessment.

"singles have unquestionably dominated the American musical consciousness with a force they haven’t had since...well, before any of us were alive, to be sure."

Who's "we," white man? Anyway, I was just parroting received wisdom here -- wasn't the "artist of the year" in some major magazine poll (Time?) "your hard drive"?

"Indie rock is wiggling and giggling but not really giving us anything to throw in Evanescence’s ugly face."

Dear past me who had only heard like ONE Evanescence song, Evanescence is awesome. Signed, smarter future me who has heard at least three Evanescence songs. (I should probably listen to that album at some point, what with the Hodges/Clarkson connection.)

Anyway, this could quickly devolve into an exercise in masochism, so I'll stop there. My early music writing is extremely defensive, and I'm overcompensating for not bothering to do the work of listening to stuff before making pronouncements about it. I was, to be blunt, a hack, but you have to start somewhere. Think of it like a sculpture -- you can't start perfecting the nose, gotta deal with those big chunks first. So hacking it, as a transitional tool, can often be a useful way to get where you're going.

I have more thoughts on this early stage of music writing in my interview with Scott Woods over at rockcritics.com if you have an hour or so to spare to hear me ramble on about things.

Just to take a step back here, I think that in 2009 I'm probably a little too willing to be harsh on me in 2003, as he's the guy I've most tried to get away from in recent history (just as in 2003 the 13-to-14-year-old me was probably the guy I was trying to get away from). Until recently, my life has often about being comfortable with who I am now by knocking down who I was yesterday, and I think that the period between 2006 and now is the first time that I haven't had an often overly negative second-guessing of what I was doing c. 2 years prior. This might be a sign of adulthood, the extension of time between which you're willing to undergo a personality overhaul -- all I know is that I feel almost exactly as comfortable reading things I wrote three years ago as I do reading things I wrote recently, which I can't say for my writing career before that point. I think this is a sign of growing up, or something.