7/21/08 - Feed The Animals

A while back, I wrote a bit on mashups and Girl Talk, and with the recent release of Feed The Animals, Gillis's Night Ripper follow-up, the subject seems worth revisiting. Like a pair of CCR albums that I've been listening to recently (Green River and Willy and the Poorboys), the second album seems like a continuation of the first, as though the artist in question simply took a break after writing an album's worth of songs, got up, got a up of coffee, sat back down, and knocked out another one of similar mood, style, and overall quality. It's successive albums like this (or strings of them) when bands can come to seem like superstar athletes, locking into the realm of the unconscious and sinking shot after shot or hitting homer after homer, making it look identical and uniform. What's amazing is that for an athlete this comes in the span of minutes and hours, while for a band it often comes in spans of months and years.

It can be toxic to artistic development, especially when self-consciousness creeps in and they're no longer knocking it out of the park without even thinking. God forbid it happen at the beginning of the artistic career - then you've got the sad spectacle of chasing after ghosts for an entire articstic lifetime. It seems to me that bands that stumble first or often along the way can then more easily revist the peaks later in their career. So I feel reassured to know that Girl Talk put out two terrible glitch-pop DJ mixes before detonating Night Ripper all over my face.

Quick list of bands that hit multi-album strings of similar quality & style:

The Strokes (Is This It & Room On Fire)
CCR (Green River & Willy and the Poorboys)
Randy Newman (Sail Away & Good Old Boys)
Ben Folds Five (s/t & Whatever & Ever Amen)
Pixies (Surfer Rosa & Doolittle)
Arcade Fire (Funeral & Neon Bible)
etc.



vs.

Bands that show marked & ragged development

The White Stripes (s/t to De Stijl to White Blood Cells)
Nirvana (Bleach to Nevermind)
Radiohead (Pablo Honey to The Bends)
The Hold Steady (Separation Sunday to Boys and Girls in America)
The Clash (Give 'Em Enough Rope to London Calling)
etc.



So Night Ripper is the Leap, but Feed The Animals maintains the spot on the plateau, and creates the beautiful illusion that Gillis could keep putting out 46 minute masterpieces like this until he dies or doesn't feel like doing it anymore. A perilous position to be in, for sure, because where's the escape hatch? But in the meantime it doubles the Night Ripper-quality output for everyone to enjoy.

Previously, I lauded Gillis for ignoring obscurity, which is the guiding principle for many DJs - the recontextualizing of the obscure. Listening to Feed The Animals, what's striking is the almost scientific way that Gillis isolates the hooks of the songs that he features. Every sample comes form a hit (and usually a massive, U.S. or worldwide hit), and for a song to hit like that it has to have at least one (and often several) monster, undeniable hooks. Usually that comes in the chorus, but as Gillis shows in his two monster pop albums, not as often as you might think. He shows an uncanny knack choosing the best or catchiest 10 seconds of each song he samples, and forms his weave out of those 10 second moments threaded together from beginning to end.

So, for example, he shows that most of Eminem's "Shake That Ass" pales next to the opening verse, and that the pop rush of Nirvana's "Lithium" really does come from those descending "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" - which cleverly calls out that Pixies/Nirvana loud-soft-loud move as the pop hook that it is, not the abrasive attack that it seems to position itself as. It's like the way William Goldman claims his Princess Bride is the good parts version, without the unnecessary boring parts - Feed the Animals is all good parts. That can make it somewhat exhausting, like catching a case of contact ADD. But it's the same thing that makes the album/mix/song/set such a rush in the first place.

6/2/08 - When to go see live music - part 1

I saw a lot of live music in college and the year following. I've seen a lot less of it in the last couple of years, but the corresponding quality has gone way up. I was having this conversation with a friend the other day, about what kinds of bands I like to see live, and I figured I would set down my personal ground rules/guidelines.

1. Communal Experience



If it's the kind of music that everybody sings along with at the height of the party when it hits the jukebox at the bar, go see it. It was this rationale that led me to the Def Leppard/Bryan Adams show at Coney Island, which is probably in the top 10 moments of my life. As a card-carrying musical elitist for the bulk of my high school listening life and a devotee of the small rock club show since my initiation by way of a thundering Less Than Jake show at Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, I had kind of missed out on the big arena show. As is true in most things, my brother David was a step ahead of me despite being years younger. He had the good sense to go see AC/DC rock Walnut Creek Ampitheatre, and had nothing but raves. As my musical tastes expanded throughout college, I reached the position where I was ready to get rocked, unapologetically, with lighters 'n' all, with what seemed like half of Brooklyn. Bryan Adams opened with a solid set of cheesy overly earnest rock, making sure to hit the high notes of his catalog (prompted a hilarous overheard gripe in the men's bathroom from a guy wearing a Ratt shirt, who was REALLY PISSED that the Lep had stooped to playing with someone as non-rocking as Bryan Adams). Our rock receptors warmed up by "Summer of 69", we were ready for the Leppard to rock us.

They did. Oh how they did. It was like being engulfed in a gigantic wall of pleasure. Every single note in the Def Leppard catalog is calibrated expertly to hit the caveman (or cavewoman) part of the brain that grunts: mmm. good. more. To hear this notes with thousands of other people at top volume while aided by copious amounts of Bud Light - well, let's just say I've never felt prouder to be an American. Yes, Def Leppard are British, but this was summer at Coney Island, damn it. I was ready to go fly a fighter jet right then and there. One of the guys I went to the show with had brought small packets of brown sugar, and during "Pour Some Sugar On Me" ripped them open and threw the sugar like wedding confetti over the dancing throngs in our section. I could have shed a tear for the beauty of the moment. And then he proceeded to start making out with a girl who looked like she was about 17, and the moment became about 3 times as wonderful.

So - if it's going to be a massive communal experience, it's an almost guaranteed good time. Don't be fooled and think this category applies to the yearly flash-in-the-pans that show up and everyone is into because they're new and it's the thing to be into - those shows are usually pretty terrible. The ones that I'm talking about are ones where the back catalog forms half of any given classic rock radio playlist (or the equivalent to whatever genre).

Some bands that fall into this category for me: AC/DC, Van Halen, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Violent Femmes, Weezer (even though they now release terrible music, although that can pretty much apply to every band in this category)

2. Live Energy.



If a band's music doesn't lend itself to high-energy performance, I don't go. This was a rule I put in place for myself after I saw a Spoon show. I like Spoon. They're a good band, with good songs for the most part. They're very tight. But they play low-impact indie "rock". They're not going to blow the doors down, nor are they interested in doing so. They're interested in exploring wiry guitar pop songs pared down to their base elements. All very interesting when I'm walking around the city with my headphones on. Boring and unremarkable in person. I had the same experience with Ryan Adams. I love a lot of Ryan Adams's stuff, but when I saw his solo show, I realized that I was just watching Acoustic Guitar Guy - a very talented version, but still. When he set up an electic guitar and played a solo version of "Like A Virgin", my resolve hardened. No more of this. So I try to see bands that have the prospect of a live show propelling high-energy songs even higher. These shows are even better in small clubs, when the energy packs down tight.

Bands that this rule applies to: White Stripes, The Hold Steady, Local H, The Hives.

These rules will not serve you wrong. "Hmm, should I see the Shins live?" you ask. The correct answer: "Heck no. I will go home, make myself some hot tea, fluff my loofah, run the bath, and turn on the shins to waft through the bathroom door as I relax."

"What about Stone Temple Pilots? They're doing a reunion tour, that seems kind of lame." Correct answer: "Where do I sign? They want money which means they'll play all the good songs off of 'Purple' at volume 20 and Scott Weiland will writhe like a crazy person and I will hold up a big 'Food and Gas Available' sign above my head during 'Interstate Love Song'."

Rules and examples. What more could a person ask for?

5/12/08 - Mashups, Delights

The first time I heard a mashup was the Freelance Hellraiser "A Stroke of Genie-us" - I highly doubt this was the first one, but it certainly seemed to be the first to penetrate mass cultural consciousness.

Now I would consider this innovation one of my favorite in modern pop music; both for the sublime immediate pleasures of hearing a new song created from familiar elements, and also for its signifying of the collapse of the importance of genre.

Like so many things, credit for this should go to the Internet, and specifically the brief flowering of Napster and the spate of P2P file sharing. For the first time, cross-genre exploration was possible with no cost/repercussion. While terrible for the music industry as a whole, ironically this development has been fantastic for the collapsing of artificial genre fences. Chuck Klosterman has a hilarious account of these fences in "Fargo Rock City", as he expertly delineates the bands that were "acceptable" to the North Dakota metal fans that he hung out with. I spent a lot of high school listening to a lot of California punk bands, where the "Sellout" designation got a lot of play; what this meant musically was that every single band sounded like the Ramones with better production values. I can't even count the amount of times someone was asked what kind of music they liked in middle school and responded "everything but rap and country", as though entire genres could be written off.



So, when it comes to the mashup, of of the thrilling things that it does is to decouple the actual music from the dogma of classification (classification perpetrated in these cases by the bands themselves making choices about their styles which often fit within prescribed modes). So, in a mashup of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with "Bootylicious", a whole set of normally segregated musical energies are gloriously combined (segregated being a loaded term, but apropos, in terms of the grunge/R&B demographic split in terms of artist and to a lesser extent audience)

To wit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'s musical ambitions - tension/release, alienation expressed through ear-splitting volume, attack, pained aggression married to inviting melody.

"Bootylicious"'s musical ambitions - tension/tightness (in the James Brown sense), sex, ecstatic release of the dancefloor, metronomic rise and fall of energy.

The brilliance in the mashup is located the shared part of the Venn diagram (tension/release, tightness of performance) and then grafting the aspects onto each song that they are simply not concerned with in their original incarnations. "Teen Spirit" is unconcerned with sex, or the dance floor. "Bootylicious" is not concerned with aggression or attack. The brilliance of the matchup is that it grafts these elements together, making the shared track richer for it. The combination produces a dance floor stomper with all the whiplash dynamics of the Nirvana original, amping up the drive and kick. Similarly, it gives the shiver of sex appeal to a dour, sexless grunge song; just add glamour and a song as titanic as "Teen Spirit"gets slinkier, more complex, more fun.



I probably listened to Girl Talk's "Night Ripper" album more than any other last year, and it's an album that's stayed with me in a visceral way - namely, I continue to hear hits sampled on that album every time I'm near a radio. The thing that I find most impressive about "Night Ripper" is that, unlike other sample-based artists, Greg Gillis ignores the obscure entirely. The entire mix is built solely off of hits, megahits, hits that are even now floating along in the pop-cultural cloud. Sure, I can respect the Dust Brothers and the Avalanches for their impeccable ears and deep crate-digging and locating of the most perfect obscure sample for the moment, but there's something incredibly and almost dangerously intoxicating about "Night Ripper's" compression of top 40 into one long Frankenstein dance party. Where, I ask, can I get more of this, and the answer is that rocket has lifted off - the explosion is all there is.

For more mashup goodness: www.bootieusa.com

4/21/08 Grunge Influences - Whither Nirvana?

For all the oceans of mythologizing ink devoted to Nirvana and their influence, a little distance – Nevermind is 17 years old now – pegs their influence as stranger and more far-reaching than the standard “musical touchstone” type influence. They were both more influential and less than they were perceived at the time.

The dominant critical meme in the immediate post-grunge climate was that Nirvana’s success had, in one fell swoop, wiped the kind high-style, low-content ‘80s metal off of the map, along with prefab pop and glossy synth/dance music. Supposedly, the watershed moment was Nevermind supplanting Thriller at the top of the charts; the Moment that marked the changing of the musical zeitgeist.

Well, sort of. Prefab pop laid dormant for a while as grunge music suffered from the usual cycles of diminishing returns (A-Listers like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots giving way to B-Listers like Dishwalla, Collective Soul, and Live and then to C-Listers like Matchbox 20 and Third Eye Blind), but came roaring back with a vengeance when Jive records unleashed the Backstreet Boys, NSync, and Britney on the world.

Plus, oh yeah, hip hop simply blew rock out of the popular reckoning. Not a lot of critics saw that coming. You want influential? Try Biggie. Way more of an impact on the last 15 years of popular music than Kurt Cobain, and his lyrics are a lot better written. Doesn’t scream as well, though. All the disposable top of the charts lowest-common denominator stuff that Nirvana was supposed to sweep away in some kind of musical tidal wave? Say hello to Sisqo. Have you heard? He likes thongs.

Nonetheless, even if in retrospect the radio heyday of grunge looks like the last dying light of the supernova that is/was rock’s stranglehold on popular music (which doesn’t mean that rock itself is over and done – just that it is now another in a series of viable genres, with another genre holding chart primacy over it), the question of Nirvana’s actual musical influence is an interesting one.

One immediately curious thing about Nirvana’s success is that so few bands sound like actual musical descendants of the band. And, rest assured, this is not because their sound is so unique and out there and impossible to replicate. Sure, a lot of bands had success with the quietLOUDquiet formula (Better Than Ezra – "Good", Radiohead – "Creep", Stone Temple Pilots – "Big Empty", etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.), but it can be argued (and often is) that Nirvana just took that from the Pixies. “Gouge Away” and “Gigantic” are the obvious touchstones, both for the melodic nature of the bass lines and because they carry a lot less of the Santiago guitar madness that sonically distinguishes the Pixies from Nirvana – I challenge anyone to find surf rock influences anywhere in the Nirvana discography, whereas it’s all over the place for the Pixies).

Nirvana’s sonic template is the musical template of “the personal is political” – raw, extreme pain communicated in universal terms, alternatingly bludgeoning and off-putting (“Milk It”, “Stay Away”) or bruised and inviting in the manner of bird with a broken wing (“Lithium”, “All Apologies”). Foregrounded always is Cobain’s pain; sometimes specified, often not, and, by virtue of his gift for melodic phrasing and genuinely powerful vocal abilities, inviting rather than alienating. Even at its most abrasive, Nirvana’s music has a warm, tactile quality lacking in the dentists-drill vibrations found in the Pixies most abrasive concotions.

This empathy-inviting pain is communicated in simple, catchy melodies wedded to simple, punk-inspired piledriving instrumental sections, often pared down to 4 chords or so. Basically, the extreme end of power pop is the result (and why that term has been appropriated for the limp stylings of Todd Rundgren types is a mystery for another day) – tuneful melodies girded by titanic, galvanizing, and simple chord progressions/melodic bass work. On top of that, layer the sarcastic sense of humor behind lines like “It’s ok to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings” and to title a song “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”. And scream a lot, especially at the climax of the song (see Daltrey, Roger – "Won’t Get Fooled Again")

Nobody followed this template. Instead, everybody tried to copy Pearl Jam, whose music was also labeled grunge, but whose musical template was way, way different: mushy, complex interlocking guitar parts, chunky Neil Young-style chord progressions, a lot of acoustic/electric interplay. Longer songs, with more complex instrumental parts. Vocally, the incomparable Eddie Vedder, who I have come around on but once believed to be the worst vocalist in the entire universe. Like I said, I’ve come around, but Eddie influenced way more rock vocalists than Kurt did, namely in the following ways: heartfelt singing, without the sneer. Lyrics that reach for the mystical. Deep mumbling, with a whole lot of vowels. A distinct lack of irony. And, weirdly, ballads that are much, much more tuneful than the rockers (just compare the melodies of something like “Better Man” to something like “Why Go?” it’s not even a contest).

So, while Nirvana got all of the copy; admittedly, most probably because of the suicide, Pearl Jam had the influence. Nobody banged out albums of tuneful, sarcastic, 4 chord sledgehammer expressions of anger. Or, I should say, no one did that reached the top of the charts. Everybody released songs that sounded like Pearl Jam (Staind – "It’s Been Awhile", Seven Mary Three – whatever that song is, even Hootie and the Blowfish sounded like watered down Pearl Jam half the time – listen to "Let Her Cry" and tell me that couldn’t be a PJ song. The bands that achieved success in the post-grunge, pre-Backstreet radio days did so with songs that sound like Pearl Jam rips. It wasn’t until “Get Free” from the Vines came out that I realized it, because that was the first song I heard on the radio that sounded like a Nirvana rip-off.

The only band that sounded like they were actually influenced by Nirvana to me was Local H, a band that I hold dear to this very day. Only where Kurt’s pain was inviting, Scott Lucas’s was alienating in a way that Kurt just never could pull off, mostly because of that whole wounded baby bird thing.

Lucas, the songwriter/guitarist/semi-bassist/driving force behind the band, has a regular-guy practicality in lyrics and persona that lend the aggresive drive of Local H's music a bitter bite that Nirvana often deployed. Listening to the open, ringing phrasing of a song like PJ's "Daughter" or "Evenflow", what's notable is the claustrophic economy of the song. Where Eddie Vedder often writes in generalities, painting a feeling with images that's not always clear, and where Cobain often just strings together phrases for maximum frisson/impact, Lucas keeps his lyrics sharply trained on the objects of his wrath; which run the gamut from 1)himself to 2)other people.

"One more thing/before we go/stepped over everyone I know" goes the climax to "Fritz's Corner", a 3 line cocktail of triumph, rage, alienation, and guilt wedded to a supercharged pick scrape into that familiar 4 chord bludgeon. Sure, Nirvana did it first. But who else even attempted it?

4/14/08 Preaching the Gospel of Max Martin

Like others whose radio lives during high school/middle school were dominated by grunge and then the post-grunge smorgasbord (OMC - How Bizarre, because, well, why the hell not), the teen-pop boom that achieved absolute and sustained domination until Napster and file sharing sent the music industry cratering into rubble was an awesome and terrifying force to behold, definitely, but a distant one, like an exploding supernova way off in the universe. I was busy listening to Radiohead and waiting for Weezer to reunite, and pretty much cherry-picked what I thought was the best of the teen pop boom off of the rest of America's computers (O glorious Napster, I lament thee). I didn't have to endure the onslaught directly; I'm sure there are people just slightly younger than me for whom NSYNC was their NKOTB directly, as in, inescapably dominant and perhaps transcendently irritating, but me I observed from afar.

Imagine my delight, then, when the cream of the teen pop crop of singles turned out to be such a series of blissful peaks. I became (and remain) convinced that the finest singles of the early 2000s teen pop boom stand their ground with some of the finest teen pop singles of any era. Sure, Phil Spector's a sonic saint (though hardly a real life one), but I'd hold "Baby One More Time" up against half of his peak Ronettes output. The sonic trappings are different, sure, but both are defiantly maximalist for their respective eras, rearing back and slugging with the desparate haymaker force that comes from a true reaching for the stars on the backs of kids whose every moment is an epic writ large in their own minds. A parasitical enterprise, perhaps, but a devastatingly effective one.

With a little more research, then, I was awed by the fact that just as Spector's fingerprints are all over the '60s girl-group crime scene, one man had an equal impact on the best of the 2000s version - a certain Max Martin (given name: Karl Sandberg). The genius Swede absolutely owned the peak of machine-tooled 00s teen pop, and his empire didn't just stop there. Just read over the list of songs that the man wrote or co-wrote, and marvel at the magma-temperature hot streak:

Backstreet Boys: As Long as You Love Me
Backstreet Boys: Everybody (Backstreet's Back)
Backstreet Boys: I Want It That Way
Britney Spears: "...Baby One More Time"
Britney Spears: "Crazy"
Britney Spears: "Oops I Did It Again"
Bon Jovi: "It's My Life"
Kelly Clarkson: "Since U Been Gone"



That's pop domination in 8 easy steps. My favorite part of the list is final song, a song so good that I remember an article in Spin or Entertainment Weekly or some such talking about how almost every musical notable couldn't stop talking about how good it was (I remember specifically Dave Grohl being really into it), and they are absolutely right. That song kicks ass. All of them do. I don't mean in an ironic fashion, I mean these are all great pop songs. But "Since U Been Gone" is something else entirely, and to me it really sums up the genius of Martin (and his co-writer, Dr. Luke). As they tell it, they were trying to write a Strokes song. They were frustrated that all of the Strokes songs never made the big rock move, or the big pop move, or whatever you want to call it. With a nod to Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it; it's the "Whoa-OOOH!" part of "Livin' on a Prayer", for easy reference. So they set out to write a Strokes song with a big rock move, and that was that. They did (hint: it's the beginning of the chorus, as it should be).

And what it really shows is that this guy is on another songwriting level from all of the bands that get venerated by the rock critics, and on another level from those that produce the tasteless pop that fades away after the sugar buzz wears off, because I would never argue that all pop music is great. Sometimes, obviously, it is spectacularly awful. But Martin basically said, OK all you Strokes/Vines/Datsuns/Yeah Yeah Yeahs/insert "rock is back" band here, I see what you're trying to do here, now let me DO MY THANG! And he wrote an anthemic stunner that everyone can agree is a)catchy as hell and b)a great rock song. And, more than that, it can be be karoaked to within an inch of its life, because of the cocktail of drive and energy that he melded to the usual big shiny hook. Plus it directly steals the bridge to "Maps", which is kind of shameful, but also kind of awesome. And in so doing he wrote a better song than the Strokes ever did, while performing the valuable service of reminding anyone with ears that the best songs, and the best bands, and the best songwriters, have at one time another just closed their eyes and tried to knock it out of the whole damn ballpark.