Dumb Assumptions

Well it took something that moderately pissed me off to remember that I had a blog.

I have a VOICE. This is supposedly empowering but I'm not sure.

What pissed me off was this Pitchfork review of The Dismemberment Plan's new LP Uncanney Valley. I'll just tell you straight up I pretty much love this band, grew up listening to them in DC, so obviously I'm biased but so is everybody so that shouldn't matter too much as long as I'm aware of it. Consider me aware.

That the review pans the album with a 4.5 score doesn't really bother me so much, because I generally think music criticism is a waste of time. There's certainly good critical music writing out there, but there's also a whole glut of it that stinks of people thinking and assuming too much, and also trying so very hard to sound like they know something you don't.

What bothers me is something I keep seeing in a lot of music & writing criticism: Why do lots of folks seem to assume that a writer or a lyricist is always writing from their own point of view? I really don't get this. Writers love playing a role, creating characters, acting out, whatever. Why is it assumed these are all the actual thoughts of the writer him/herself and not the writer acting out a role?

Paul Thompson hated Travis Morrison's lyrics on the new 'Plan album. Fine, fair enough. I happen to like them for all their weirdness, but who really cares. I hate pickles and olives and I bet Thompson doesn't really care. But why is he assuming Morrison is singing about himself the whole time? Here's part of his review:

All over Uncanney Valley, Morrison—once one of indie rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists—cracks wise, veers off erratically, shoehorns in dated slang or beside-the-point chanting. "Well, look who it is—been a little while since you been up in my 'biz," he sputters as "Waiting" whirrs to a start, coming off like a "cool dad" in a lousy sitcom. "I am not an inhibited man—try to keep it in my pants when I can," he admits on lowlight "White Collar White Trash", before rattling off a far-too-long list of places he's been "doin' it in."

I think his use of the superlative "one of rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists" is a pretty dumb thing to say (to my calculations there's roughly 400 million incisive indie rock lyricists). It's one of those things you can just say and don't have to defend because it's impossible to prove or refute. But whatever to that, too. (P.S. "whirrs" up there with the two Rs is really British usage and somehow I don't think he's British...sorry, can't help myself).

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that I'm sure Morrison isn't singing about himself. You'd have to ask him and if I know anything about writers, I'm pretty sure he won't tell you. But to just assume he's only singing about himself is lazy and surface level.

That's kind of my biggest problem with these real quick reviews that lots of sites like to post. An album gets listened to a few times, maybe, and then you write about it and try to put it in galactic context with superlatives of "Best New" Whatever. Maybe I'm an old fart but that just seems laughably myopic.

Everybody just calm down. Enjoy stuff, or don't. It doesn't matter. Not everything has to be the absolute best or worst. Shh...Shh...It's all gonna be OK.

Internet Argument About the Internet & Music

Original blog post by NPR intern:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2012/06/16/154863819/i-never-owned-any-music-to-begin-with

Interesting emotional backlash that kind of misses her point but still is interesting, from David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker: http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Lowery's response has a distinct "letter you write but don't send" vibe. My biggest beef is how he throws in an anecdote in a very odd attempt to relate Mark Linkous' and Vic Chesnutt's suicides with people illegally downloading their music. I understand how he was close to these people and is probably still completely shocked, but I work in a mental health facility and from my experience peoples' reasons for committing suicide are plentiful and almost always go wayyyyy deeper than things a lot of us can even comprehend. Bringing this up in a music blog is, at best, bold, and at worst, shameful. Lowery tries to comfort our poor NPR intern, but comes off fairly condescending: "I present these two stories not because I'm pointing fingers or want to shame you. I just want to illustrate that 'small' personal decisions have very real consequences." Pointing fingers is precisely what he's doing! If only at a semi-conscious level.

But tone aside, these are things I wonder about: Where does this notion of artists deserving to get paid really come from? Why does Lowery seem to jump directly to the idea that because people download music without paying for it, it means that the music must have no value for them? His overarching point--that downloading music online without paying for it is unethical--is too simplistic. People have and always will find the easiest way to get something they want. I guarantee that if music had been as widely and freely available in 1970 as it is today, the majority of people would have done the exact same thing "young people" are doing now. It doesn't make it right or wrong, it just has nothing to do with it being a different generational mindset. (Before the Internet, I dubbed songs onto cassette off the radio and nobody ever told me I was stealing anything. Maybe I was, but it was probably about the same shitty sound quality as the 128K mp3s most people are "stealing." There's kind of a larger point here: making people pay roughly the same price for what is, aurally-speaking, a worse product--I'm talking mp3 vs CD/vinyl here--you could probably make the argument that that's stealing...).

Soo...unethical? I'll get a tiny bit nerdy: ethics are the study of morals, so take the Latinate moralis, which kind of roughly meant the "proper behavior of a person in society." Lowery argues that technology and its big corporate backers are trying to change our morals. But this is kind of a strange argument, because our morals should be constantly evolving. If we were operating under the same morals as 100 years ago, women wouldn't be able to vote, among many other terrifying things that were just "normal." The recording industry has only been a powerful phenomenon for the past 50 (maybes it's more like 100, I really have no idea--either way not all that long in the grand scheme) years...maybe our morals are slowly starting to line up with the vague idea that artists probably shouldn't be millionaires, and anyway the value of art is really, really hard to quantify. Though it's very tricky because somebody is making tons of money off these folks (he talks about the venture capitalists who front cash for places like Pirate Bay, who then rake in billions in advertising revenue, which is all definitely dirty), and that's where I can certainly understand Lowery's frustration. He makes an eye opening point about how lots of us pay for the iPhone, the MacBook, the high-speed connection, yet don't cough up much money for the artists themselves, and that's a swift punch of truth in the stomach.

But--blame the consumer and call it "stealing"? I don't get it. Words like "steal" or "theft" or anything else like thievery I find very misleading, because the etymology of the words imply someone taking another person's property and calling it their own. In probably 999 out of 1,000 cases a person illegally downloading an album from the Internet is not turning around and telling their friends, "Hey, listen to this album I just recorded!"

Trust me, as a traveling musician struggling to make ends meet, it would be fantastic to get paid even a decent salary for all the work I've put in. But that isn't really why I got in the game anyway. Either way, blaming the consumer has got to be about the least effective thing anyone can do. There is that maxim, after all, that the consumer is always right; and I'd add an "even when they're wrong" to the end of that. It's up to the artists to continue to innovate and creative something so powerful and meaningful that people feel they can barely survive without it.

What we really need is a massive innovation, some kind of new format that has a wilder audio fidelity than we can even dream of. It feels like right now the music world is overwhelmed with people trying to get noticed (which makes Lowery's claim that "the number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000" seem incredibly odd. How do you define "professional" in a situation where nobody's making any money anyway?! When something like 2,000 bands play SXSW every year I think we can all agree that on one hand that's pretty amazing, and on the other we've got a fucking mess on our hands.). So, my only absolute solution is to try to make myself stand out in any creative way I can, and/or enjoy the hell out of it no matter what.

The artists who embrace this idea rather than complain about how things are deteriorating are succeeding like never before. Father John Misty packaged his new album with a ton of short stories he's been writing; Radiohead has recorded live in-studio video versions of their last two albums to go along with the records; Amanda fucking Palmer is a millionaire!! (??); the list goes wayyyyyyyyyy on (yes, I know Radiohead's an odd example since they were backed very strongly by "the corporate machine," but they are a fantastic example of a band continually innovating, whether you dig them or not).

If you subtract just ONE thing from this equation--$$$--it is the absolute best time to be an artist, and will probably get even better. Besides, when have the majority of artists ever made much money? So, in my open letter to David Lowery I think my point is: Grow up and be thankful you've had the opportunity to creatively contribute to society.   

Video game music favorites

This will have to be an ongoing thing; there's just TOO MUCH. Potential obvious point: it's really cool to me how earlier game music almost completely created the atmosphere that art directors of future installments used as a framework as graphics improved. I think people who say that current game music isn't as good are a little blinded by nostalgia, because there is some phenomenal fully orchestrated stuff coming out now. Back in the day there just wasn't as much to latch onto visually, so it makes sense that everybody gravitated toward the music as the main way to emotionally latch onto a game character. With the soundtrack playing along, your imagination fleshed things out. Now, like I find myself saying over and over, you just have to pay a little more attention with so much getting thrown at you visually. It's just different, but still beautiful and exciting to me at least.

METROID (NES) - Title Screen


SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS (PS2) - The Sunlit Earth


LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME (N64) - Ganon Final Battle


SHADOW OF THE COLUSSUS (PS2) - Creeping Shadow [kind of want to post the entire soundtrack to this game, but you can go find it]


CHRONO TRIGGER (SNES) - Corridors of Time


Man, there are so many more that are just as crucial! I'll be back.

Autolux - "Supertoys"

Hello, Autolux. [insert Audrey Tautou-as-Amélie grin] Nice to have you back, we've been waiting.

DOWNLOAD "SUPERTOYS" MP3

Transit, Transit is out August 3 on TBD Records in the continent called North America, ATP will distribute to the rest of the world...that means YOU Antarctica.

Tracklist:

01 “Transit Transit”
02 “Census”
03 “Highchair”
04 “Supertoys”
05 “Spots”
06 “The Bouncing Wall”
07 “Audience No. 2″
08 “Kissproof”
09 “Headless Sky”
10 “The Science Of Imaginary Solutions”

"Supertoys" was known to us previously as "Let it be Broken":




Audience No. 2 was released for free back in 2008, just surf the Internet, which is a series of tubes, and you'll find it, promise.