TheBig3KilledMyRainDog

I’m done with music. I’m sick of everyone’s private little band, I hate the hipster games of “have you heard of…” I can’t take LP’s or EP’s or the ED that comes with a thousand bands who are too drunk to **** or make decent music.

To hang around with the people I do, Patrick Wolf was the second coming. He had everything an indie kid could want, highly effeminate posturing with homoerotic overtones, circus colors and a catalogue that sounded like the Beach Boy’s Smile if Brian Wilson had been dragged through the 1984 post-punk revolution. Not only this but for whatever reason, he was the Elliot Smith every Elliot Smith fan wanted since Elliot Smith. (who I can’t stand by the way)

I’m sick of every second album being as thought through as take out Chinese. The curse of the second album used to be that bands had toured with 12 songs for so long they had forgotten how to write, or that they were one-hit wonder trying to cash in on a niche market to override their lack of talent. Now these bands hit a rough patch and they throw the apathy into overdrive. You can’t affect enough for the photo shoot. By the way the only photo shoots that don’t make people look like absolute douche bags are photos taken when people aren’t expecting photos. When you’re going over how something should sound or where the lyrics get all garbled up. You usually see them on the inner jacket of live albums. They should be everywhere. Your web site, magazine covers…everything. Posed photographs are an atrocity. The “lets all jump together” move of the pop-punk band made baby jesus cry.

I love what myspace has done for music, I think LastFM is the best thing to happen in the last 25 years in music and I’m still not sure how they’ve managed to avoid a law suit. That aside, the corporate shove is obnoxious, not because its corporate but because they delivered on their promise.
Take this story for example: Every rag and its sister web section have a page dedicated to what people leaving shows have to say about it. Not more than three years ago I read a comment from a 12 year old girl leaving a Black Eyed Peas show. She said “Some of these younger kids, they don’t know a lot of the Peas older stuff, and I think that’s just because their young. Their just new fans.” Its ok to laugh, talking about the Black Eyed Peas early works like they were any more credible than whatever constitutes their later works is a travesty. The machine that makes the saccharine treats rarely changes formula, just shape. More concise: The gummy bear doesn’t taste any different than the gummy worm. But the issue today is that that once 12 now 15 year old girl is saying the same snobby pseudo-high-minded hog wash about a band we’ve never heard of from some Garage-juke act born 16 miles outside of Duluth. You’ve never heard of them, and who’s to know if her heads up her ass or that she’s full of ****? She may be spot on, and now I have to crate dive and dig through the annals of the internet just to find out their a Melt Banana knock off that got stones one weekend and bought the back catalogue of The Fall and the Psychedelic Furs.

What we’ve done by commercializing a culture is give the once guarded jargon of credible music to the unrefined and irresponsible. People who can no longer articulate why they like something, or analyze music from across perspectives and time periods now have free range and freer access to gallivant as if they not only can, but have and had it published to boot. The new revolution is old friends. The new music investment is financially conscious. I shall forth conduct musical purchases exactly one year after its released. Not its leak, not its pre-production web downloads, its release. Not only will my investments be less rocky and furiously more sound but I will be perennially cool in that I will only always own the older stuff. Granted, one year in the Indieverse is length for enough bad news about an artists forthcoming album to make people cling to the last one. So when you get wind of Ryan Adams’s Rap album on the horizon, I’ll be experiencing Heartbreak for the first time, when Beck pulls a Bjork and records an album using only his voice, I’ll be knee deep in Midnight Vultures (great album by the way, don’t listen to any reviews on that one). And when you’re pissed because the new Dandy Warhols has left you down again, I’ll likely be listening to something else completely but I’ll still be smug in my giant vault of money.

Happy Diving,
Big3

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“The night falls gracefully for those who have a love to call their own. But alas, for those to whom love has turned a blind eye – love, it falls like a guillotine”

“No more waiting for fate to befall me, no. I have my dreamboat, and together we will find our destiny, choose our ladder to the sky” - Markus Pierson

JayJamJah

^Awesome

Molecules

terrific and true. The UK's leading music/multimedia stores now have little information tabs marking the 'historically significant' classics - so something like Unknown Pleasures is summed up on a tourist information board of sorts.

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Eff em
free post-punk for the people

Crowe

Bravo! What inspired this?

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My silly experimental band:

www.myspace.com/boyfromthestarsmusic

TheBig3KilledMyRainDog

Oh jesus man I wish I knew. I think i'm a good writer, but I have zero control over it. When I try to write something its either complete **** or its a highly intensive labor.

The rest comes like lightning and I just have to write then or its gone. Thankfully I have acess to Microsoft Word for 10+ hours a day.

I'm really happy you guys all like it. Hopefully I can keep up the quality.

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“The night falls gracefully for those who have a love to call their own. But alas, for those to whom love has turned a blind eye – love, it falls like a guillotine”

“No more waiting for fate to befall me, no. I have my dreamboat, and together we will find our destiny, choose our ladder to the sky” - Markus Pierson

TheBig3KilledMyRainDog

I don't remember when I heard Lauryn Hill had made her infamous racist statement "I'd rather let my kids starve than have white people listen to my music." I do know that I've wished she'd have been hit by a bus since then. And I had never felt more empathetically vindicated than when Eminem turned his focus on those same vicious words and rapped "Bought Lauryn Hill's tape so her kids could starve."

So you can imagine my godless chagrin when last month Sasha Frere-Jones insinuated in The New Yorker that indie-rock had lost its soul and had become far too "white" forgetting its origins. The article was interesting, certainly I'd never heard that the "call response" origin of the blues and country might have come just as much from african-american chruch services as it came from illiterate congregations of Scotsmen. But the wealth of knowledge aside (one should expect that from The New Yorker) the problem was that not only are we going to start prescribing race to music, and therefore attributes to race (as if all african-americans made music that swung, and white people always made music that did not) but we're also condemning that as something that needs to change.

People are entitled to their opinions, the more opinions we have the better, and I'm certainly an advocate for racial diversity, but to conclude that there was no soul in Indie rock (a genre I happen to enjoy quite a bit, although not the Arcade Fire) and therefore it suffered because of it is preposterous bordering on absurd. The golden rule with art is to make the art that you want, phonies are easily spotted and make good music by accident and happenstance only. And I can't imagine another art form where we not only prescribe art to racial identity but where we deem them soulless if they don't use say, Mexican-inspired brush strokes, or Aztec pottery methods. It sounds foolish but this is what Frere-Jones is suggesting.

And if that were my only problem I may be more lenient. Pushing for diversity isn't a bad thing, and its good to keep those thoughts at the forefront of society. But while the Stones and the Doors caught the blues quite well. While Bob Marley took folk music to new and dynamic heights, its easy to loose sight of the utter train wrecks that occur when we try and "add soul" to a soulless body. I had the great displeasure of watching, on two-separate tours, Limp Bizkit remember to add soul to their white music and while I'll leave my opinion of that one out due to time constraints, when I walked by the merchandise booth and saw their name plastered on a trendy one-strap book bag, well that about sums up what I think of not only Limp Bizkit
but adding soul forcefully to something that doesn't naturally have it. Its commercial, it looks stupid and everyone can see it for what it truly is -- a corporate shill forced together and thrown out like a fish net to grab in as much money as it possibly could.

And I know i'm not alone on this one. The other massive offender that comes to mind, Michael McDonald, or maybe Michael Bolton, saw their own forced money-grab face the ire of a weary and vengeful youth culture. In the film, The 40 year-old virgin, the following dialogue occurs between two of the films characters as a Michael McDonald DVD plays int eh background:

David: I gotta tell you something. I'm really excited about it. Uh, for the first time, today, I woke up, I came to the store, and I - I feel confident to say to you that if you don't take this Michael McDonald DVD - that you've been playing for two years straight - off, I'm going to kill everyone in the store and put a bullet in my brain!

Paula: David, what do you suggest we play?

David: I don't care. Anything! I would rather - I would rather watch "Beautician And The Beast". I would rather listen to Fran Drescher for eight hours than have to listen to Michael McDonald. Nothin' against him, but if I hear "Yah Mo B There" one more time, "Yah Mo" burn this place to the ground.

Paula: You're such a smartass. Get back on the floor!

To this same effect years earlier, the film Office Space had a similar agenda to get across:

Samir: No one in this country can ever pronounce my name right. It's not that hard: Samir Na-gheen-an-a-jar. Nagheenanajar.

Michael Bolton: Yeah, well at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.

Samir: You know there's nothing wrong with that name.

Michael Bolton: There was nothing wrong with it... until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.

Samir: Hmm... well why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?

Michael Bolton: No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

And while I don't think its fair to say that their the worst, their certainly high-profile, on-the-radar offenders, one highly effective and capable of carrying Pat Boone's torch for watering down, and dragging the soul out of the very thing which they intended to put it into to. And I can't fault Frere-Jones's point, I'd like a lot more groove oriented things to come from the artful mind's of the indie rock world too. But suggesting that if they opt not to sell their soul (or lack their of) or make something other than they want to make that their are forgetting their forefathers and giving up something vital is nothing short of appalling.

"I gat soul but I'm not a soldier"- The Killers

__________________
“The night falls gracefully for those who have a love to call their own. But alas, for those to whom love has turned a blind eye – love, it falls like a guillotine”

“No more waiting for fate to befall me, no. I have my dreamboat, and together we will find our destiny, choose our ladder to the sky” - Markus Pierson

TheBig3KilledMyRainDog

"I haven’t really been listening to music lately so much as I have the backing harmonies that accompany different music’s, and I think it’s a craft that I’d never appreciated as much as I do now, or should have ever.

It started with Waits, as it always does with me. He’s never one for backing vocal harmonies but he knows his brass and on many Blood Money tracks, it’s absolutely spot on. I’ll save you the indulgence of gushing about a musician I’d try to pontificate on at every passing chance but when it came to harmonies on this recording, I feel as if he gave them a special role, or importance. He’d always had harmonies, but these were less about the music and much more about the emotion. Music serves as a sister guide to most story lines, Aristotle insisted on it for god’s sake, but supporting harmonies are usually doing just that. Supporting a melody line that works with the story line but acts as a sort of a tag along and rarely if ever, anything more.

But on Blood Money the brass section works as elements of setting and plot. In Starving in the Belly of a Whale, the trumpets are a roaring ocean that slams against the sides of a ship charging through open storm waters manned by a lunatic captain screaming at his crew “tell me who gives a good god damn, you’ll never get alive, don’t be greedy, don’t be needy, a man must test his mettle in the crooked old world.”

And that world is this water logged old ship as it sorts its way through the North Atlantic while the furious trumpeters bury it in squeaks and bends.

I’d listened to Blood Money for days, reveling in the trumpets and the saxophones that sounded like they’d been pulled form time, running around the streets of New York on some coke-fueled romp in the 1980’s. They were wild and the notes were frayed and they complimented everything on the album better than anything else. Those god damned trumpets.

Then it spilled over. I was looking for that subtle and pained sound anywhere I could. At the end of Jolie Holland’s “Old Fashioned Morphine” I’d found a dark and sinister waltz in the antebellum south that had never been touched before. The floors were old and rotting and they squeaked as the guests danced over them while some Colonel Sanders type person rocked in his chair to the music while drinking his whiskey. It’s a good two minutes or so at the end of the song where words can’t get in the way and I’ve probably listened to that 2 minute instrumental three times as often as I have the first part of the song.

But the brass gave way to vocal harmonies. I was going to work when I’d realized that, on top of being a great song, the backing vocals in “No one knows” by Queens of the Stone Age might be as brilliant as the rift that punched through the stubborn wall of modern rock radio and its resistance to anything it hasn’t let in prior. Their notes, that might be the band, or Josh Homme multi-tracked but either way its one note gong down in sequences of three, like a stop light, filled with a enough pain to let you know he’s hurt but that he’s pretending he doesn’t want you to notice. And in that same vein, John Frusante (sp?) does a similar but not quite as brilliant a job on the Chili Peppers track “Can’t Stop” from “By the Way.”

And when I’d found these harmonies sitting back their patiently waiting for anyone to notice all the hard work and beauty in them, and subsequently all their worth, it was as if I’d discovered a whole new song. With regard to Can’t Stop there was a time between the songs novel appeal and this discovery that I hated the song. 1200 listens a day on rock radio tends to put one off. Once I’d found these harmonies however it was a breath of fresh air. Or more accurately found something else to breath. It wasn’t air any more it was something else. It was a whole new song. I didn’t listen to the foreground any longer it was all these harmonies and the bass, and what was going on behind the scenes that meant something. If it were a performance of the stage it would be like running up afterward and asking for autographs from the stage crew. And with that last line I may have staged a movement in while sweaty black-clad stage hands moved en mass to their local guitar center for want of some overdue adulation, but such is life.

This is one of those things, the attention to detail that, as we get older and move from our teenage predilection to any given genre up to the appreciation of well crafter music and structure that separates the masters of their craft from the would-be bar band cover acts of 5 years down the road. I don’t know MBer’s, just some food for thought. Hang in there."

__________________
“The night falls gracefully for those who have a love to call their own. But alas, for those to whom love has turned a blind eye – love, it falls like a guillotine”

“No more waiting for fate to befall me, no. I have my dreamboat, and together we will find our destiny, choose our ladder to the sky” - Markus Pierson

TheBig3KilledMyRainDog

Sometimes I begin to think there’s nothing else out there, and I have to switch genres. While I love the Stripes and TVotRadio, I find there to be only a handful of bands in any one sound that work for me, and I go through them like Eating Poetry and then I’m spent. I still enjoy the music, but I need some…rush? I guess? I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, but like some idiot frat boy who things there’s some added value in taking someone else virginity, I need it. There’s the rush of the new, and I end up switching genres.

One of the greatest finds I’ve had in my short life is anything close to folk. And it doesn’t have to be acoustic but it usually is. I’ve found that when you can’t run your instrument through 150 pieces of electronics, they have to take on more responsibility, more character. In doing so, I believe I’ve found a real art to music. Lyrics tend to give a story a plot, when instruments know their role, they give it the setting. And in some cases with regard to harmonies (see an earlier post) they give the narrative direction. (read: 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person).

I feel obligated to point out that acoustic songs that did not start that way generally don’t fit the bill. The guy in the bus station playing DMB or Tom Petty songs doesn’t really get it. He’s trying to get pussy, (he’s likely that frat guy). I’ll go so far as to say there needs to be a band in order to have characters, otherwise the story that’s told is more of a monologue.

And artists that play folk tend to know their instruments better than most, in ways that may not be considered “knowing.” For example, I’ve seen a low-fame local guy bang on his guitar and loop it so he’d have a drum. He knows the sounds the instrument makes even if those sounds are not intended by play style. I remember once reading an interview with Kirk Hammett and he said theres some note on MOP he couldn’t figure out for the longest time and it was because he’d pulled the string off of the fret board. Now I love Kirk, but that’s because in 1986, he likely never played anything like he does now. (he has solo work you’d be surprised by.)

Going back to the impromptu drum beat mentioned in the last paragraph, don’t mistake a loop for the technology I ranted about early. He was using it to create more characters, and a simple loop doesn’t make anyone a chord strummer or a Tom Morello (all due respect). I can almost hear the arugments

that “everyone can bang on a guitar, we all know wtf that sounds like,” and I agree. That’s not exactly the height of the idea I’m rallying behind, its more of a simple example.

I think what I’m really getting at here is that musicians are enamored by sound, and to them they all have a place and they all can have a role. I watched the concert film of Neil Young’s “Prairie Wind” where they had a guy sweep a mat in beat with a broom because they didn’t have/want/need a weeroe (I don’t know how to spell it but its that percussive sounding rake sound that appears in songs like “Up on the Roof,” we had one in elementary school which is maybe the only reason I know what its called.)


But that’s my point. A broom? No, instrument. And it was on stage with everything else and had just as much clout, and more importantly, just as much reason to be there. Songs are living beings, and good artists just know what it takes to show the less artfully inclined what a song really is and can be.

If it came out the way I intended Cpt. Caveman’s post about Accordions from his Ambivilance thread made it atop this page and maybe you’re wondering why. I remember watching some misbegotten abortion on VH1 awhile back where celebrities were basically drafting middle school musicians to make their band. (don’t ask me what it was, I have no idea) and Flava Flav, being of the Captains picked a girl playing accordion because no one else wanted her. In a world of folk you bet your ass she’d have been #2.

I’ve not been around the world yet and to be honest I’m not in possession of a burning passion to do so, but I’ve seen some things and between you and I, the accordion is a monster. I’ve seen a street performer use it here in the city to sing tarantellas’, I’ve seen the lead singer of the Prodigals shred like Eddie Van Halen on a button accordion he played when they opened for the Dropkick Murphy’s, and recently I heard it back Springsteen on his live magic album on “4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy).” I’m not that big a fan so his piano/accordion player’s name escapes me (he recently died of cancer, R.I.P.) but that man knows how music can be the color, and the detail; the scenery, and the air in the lungs of a song. To steal a line from Alec Baldwin in Glen Gary, Glen Ross (and paraphrase the **** out of it):

The music’s out there Gents, you pick it up its yours, you don’t I gat no sympathy for you.”

Fair point. To which I say the height of music is out there guys. Don’t wallow in your genre’s too long. Folk knows know boundries and bleeds into itself all the time. You can take your classical and your ambient, but to me when a mans flesh knows how to manipulate a nylon strong to synergize with others doing the same…well its just proof to me that theres life after death.

__________________
“The night falls gracefully for those who have a love to call their own. But alas, for those to whom love has turned a blind eye – love, it falls like a guillotine”

“No more waiting for fate to befall me, no. I have my dreamboat, and together we will find our destiny, choose our ladder to the sky” - Markus Pierson

Molecules

A very absorbing read, and I'm with you (most) of the way. I don't know if the 'what is folk?' thread was what got you thinking but 'folk' is too often thought of as a just a genre. And the definition seems to be expanding all the time... in the UK, underground urban music has subsumed the inner-city youth for well over a decade - entirely digitized, yes, but when these kids were using Music 2000 on their Playstations to express themselves... there are echoes of the grassroots cultural element there. It's using what you have to hand, most people can't afford an acoustic instrument these days, they're expensive! (And forget about building them)

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Eff em
free post-punk for the people

shiseido_red

This most recent post was a great read. I agree with you, and I love what you said about knowing their instruments and having more responsibility and character. I saw went to a gig a few weeks ago where one of the acts was just a guy, his acoustic guitar, and a stomp-box. It was one of the most entertaining and captivating performances I have seen for a while simply because of the way he used his instruments and the way he poured his heart into them, simple as they may be. Great post.

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