infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

I’ve put off blogging this while changing hosts, but it’s time to clear out some open tabs. Wow, The New York Times Magazine has a long profile about doom-rockers Sunn o)). If you’re unfamilar with the band, Sunn o)) plays a deep droning metal that Jaeger once mistaked for mp3s played at the wrong bitrate. They’ve been written up in national publications before, but I’m surprised to see the somewhat stodgy Magazine devote that much space to a fairly obscure art-metal band.

I’m not much of a metal fan, but Sunn o)) is exactly my cup of tea. I enjoy their dark, rumbling songs that take the core of metal and distill it to its essence. The NYTimes story acknowledges that many Sunn o)) fans are not metal fans, but come to the band through indie rock and experimental music. The author John Wray describes the audience at a recent Knitting Factory show thusly:

On closer inspection, you would have noticed that surprisingly few people in the room had the look of genuine metal heads; big hair was in notably short supply, and the ratio of button-downs to heavy metal T-shirts was approximately one to one.

While he acknowledges the disparity between Sunn o)) fans and stereotypical metal fans, I wonder if he elides issues of cultural capital between the audiences. Indie rock fans might place Sunn in the context of drone bands like Spacement 3 or noise artists like Merzbow, while metal fans might get pure visceral enjoyment out of low-frequency tones. Sunn o)) is certainly a connoisseur’s music, but you don’t need to be a connoisseur to enjoy it. Wray complicates the indie-snob/metalhead dichotomy by outlining the history of doom metal, noting how there are issues of connoisseurship within the doom metal community. I’m a little too scattered to really articulate what I’m thinking, but I think what makes Sunn o)) worthy of note in the Magazine is the fact that the band takes a low-brow music (metal) and makes it interesting to art audiences. And Sunn o)) is awesome.

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Slate.com has a rather weird story that attempts to make claims about Hillary Clinton’s psychological makeup through textual analysis of a list of favorite songs she gave to The New York Post. The list, which includes The Beatle’s “Hey Jude” and U2’s “Beautiful Day,” the articles argues “suggests premeditation, if not actual poll-testing.” In contrast, the author Jacob Weisberg says George Bush’s iPod, which includes cuts from John Fogerty and George Jones, represents authenic musical taste, rather than any kind of red-state pandering.

The article takes an interesting methodological step, plugging Senator Clinton’s tracks into the music recommendation system Pandora.com in order to identify the salient characteristics of her ear. The article concludes the senator “likes ‘basic rock song structures,’ ‘repetitive melodic phrasing,’ and ‘extensive vamping.’” I’d have to say that Pandora is a pretty useless tool for understanding someone’s musical taste. I recently kept notes on what Pandora had to say about a few of my favorite artists:

• Neu! “Negativland”
  electric rock instrumentation, electronica influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, mixed acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and extensive vamping

• Dälek “Distorted Prose”
  east coast rap roots, hard rock influences, clean lyrics, use of modal harmonies and acoustic drum samples

• Ultramagnetic MCs “Nervous”
  east coast rap roots, electronica influencess, a deep voice, a poetic rap delivery, and clean lyrics.

• Caribou “Hammerhead”
  electronica influences, folk influences, a subtle use of voal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation and acoustic sonority

• (Smog) “When You Walk”
  vocal-centric aesthetic, a clear focus on recording studio production, extensive vamping, major key tonallity

Perhaps my taste in music is more diffuse than Mrs. Clinton’s or I lack the hermeneutic skills of Mr. Weisberg, but I can’t really conclude anything from Pandora’s results, except that it might be a good way to meet your word count.

I do wonder if textual analysis of rock may be a new tool of the right. A recent NRO feature listed the top 50 conservative rock songs. While they find a nice nugget here and there, most of the songs are taken out of context. Are we really to believe that U2 or The Sex Pistols shared the politics of The National Review at any time or on any issue? It seems doubtful.

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I was reading this account of Tulsa’s used record stores in the 1970s and came across a passage that I thought would be interesting to non-Tulsans:

It was run by a nice older couple who looked like the last thing they should have been doing was bootlegging music next to an elementary school. While they sold new and used 8-tracks, cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes, their bread and butter were these jukeboxes that had 8-track recording heads built in (these were not hot-wired garage collages; though I never saw these machines anywhere else, they were beautifully manufactured.) The trick was simple; you go in, find a bunch of hit songs you wanted, then put in your coins and buy a tape that was just the right length and you had your own customized 8-track tape version of a K-Tel album. I had a girlfriend who was hooked on these stupid tapes.

I like the turn of phrase “garage collages,” although I do think “garage bricolage” would roll off the tongue better. More interesting, however, is the memory of commercially produced jukeboxes with embedded tape recorders. Granted, these devices were made before the DMCA or even the Sony Betamax case, but I wonder how what non-infringing uses they could possibly have. The account doesn’t say whether or not this business was in operation before or after the 1976 copyright act - I wonder if there were provisions in the act that addressed these jukeboxes, or, since the 1976 codified Fair Use, these jukeboxes were an effort to take advantage of a perceived loophole in copyright law. (Maybe since the jukebox plays the music aloud in a public place, the user is arguably making a fair-use copy of a personal experience.) It’s not clear, either, if these jukeboxes were manufactured in the United States — maybe they were graymarket Canadian jukeboxes brought to my hometown.

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I’m stuck in an AppleCare phone support queue. (The power adapter for my iBook is running very hot.) The automated system told me the wait would be twelve minutes or less. The wait doesn’t bother me as much as the hold music. Perhaps Apple thinks Dave Matthews and Counting Crows is inoffensive as possible, but, personal tastes aside, it just sounds like high-pitched muck on a crackly cell-phone. I understand why they need music on the line - it lets the customer know the line is still live. What I don’t understand, however, is why they need to play really bad music. Moreover, these artists don’t really seem to tie in with Apple’s public image as a hip, arty company. I wonder if they could just use a series of inoffensive electronic pulses to remind customers they’re still connected without offending their sensibilities. Or if they didn’t want to hire a sound designer, they could use the music of a project like Loscil, which might not even be recognized as music by many listeners.

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Newsweek has a pretty interesting story about the corporate parentage of Alternative Distribution Alliance, a distributor of indie records. Despite its grassroots-sounding name, the ADA is anything but alternative. It’s owned by Warner Music Group, a subsidiary of the basement operation Time-Warner.

I’ve been aware of corporate distribution of indie-label music for a while, but either I’m not reading the right material or not that much has been written about the distribution end of indie rock.¹ The US arm of Rough Trade, a major indie distributor in the 1980s, collapsed in 1991, pushing many record labels in dire financial straits. I tried to find an online source about this bit of history, but I could only find bits and pieces in interviews. After it went bankrupt, Rough Trade didn’t pay their bills and records were trapped in distribution limbo. Maintaining contacts with retail outlets, managing inventory, and moving units has to be a huge challenge for small, independent operations, so it’s not surprising there are many stories about indie distributors failing. Neal Pollack has said that all of the copies of his hilarious record Never Mind the Pollacks are locked up in a warehouse in Lawrence, Kansas because his distributor went under. It really is a pity that indie bands and labels can’t do business without working with the media giants.

Of course, the Newsweek story isn’t written from an indie purist point of view. Instead, it describes the business opportunity for the media giants in indie rock. Unlike the grunge explosion of 1991, where labels signed and promoted bands like Nirvana, Warners is making money by providing an essential part of the supply chain. Moreover, like corporate distrubution of independent film, it serves as a way to mitigate risk. The conglomerates don’t need to fund the recording of a record, and the label is largely responsible for promoting the band. They just move the physical records out to stores and take their cut.

The story suggests that the distribution biz is also a way for the giants to capitalize on niche markets. While the audience for the Twee Afrodrone genre might be small, thanks to computerized supply chain management and industry consolidation, the companies can now make money by selling many units of different items. I was surprised the story did not mention Chris Anderson’s notion of the “Long Tail,” where small audiences aggregate into the vast majority of texts (and, often, units sold.) The Long Tail is often heralded as an opportunity for greater diversity in media, but, as ADA’s success shows, it is also an opportunity for conglomerates to make more money doing business as usual.

1: The current issue of Maximumrocknroll has a great collection of interviews with owners of indie punk labels discussing the political and cultural implications of big business’ incursion into hardcore and indie rock.

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Nigel pointed to a live performance of my favorite Kevin Ayers song, which inspired me to experiment with posting a YouTube video on the ol’ infobong.

I could frankly do without the sax solo, but I’m accustomed to the version on June 1, 1974, which, if I remember correctly, has viola instead of sax.

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In the past year or so, I’ve all but quit reading newspapers on- and off-line. Nearly all of my online reading comes from blogs or relates to my research. While I watch Keith Olbermann for a little variety in my media diet, I’ll clearly see articles on a relatively bounded range of topics. Because of this, my drawers were really showing in a meeting with my chair this morning. We were talking about copyright and digital music, and I wondered out loud what had happened with Apple Computer’s agreement with Apple Records that it would not go into the music business. She told me, “That trial is starting right now. It’s been in the news.” Wow, I’m surprised I missed it, considering all of the technology blogs I read.

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AJ of PaperCuts fame has a new blog, and his first post is on a subject I felt inclined to write about a few days ago. He calls for a moratorium on what he calls “wistful, mournful cover versions” of songs. His examples of the trend include Frente’s cover of “Bizare Love Triangle” and Tori Amos’ version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I’m not sure this really constitutes a trend, since many of his examples come from the 1990’s.

I can sympathize, however. Over the weekend I watched Thumbsucker on DVD, and at one putatively tender moment the soundtrack swelled with a jarringly bad cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen.” The performance was too close to the original to make it new, so I wondered if the producers couldn’t afford the rights to the Big Star recording. Perhaps it was intended to have a distanciation effect in a moment of teen eros, but I had to stop the movie, pull out my copy of #1 Record and listen to the original a few times before starting the movie again. I first thought, “This is one of those songs that should never be covered” but then realized that a band like Galaxie 500 could have brought something new to the song.

Similarly, I recently watched a “Veronica Mars” episode from the first season where Veronica works to solve a mystery at a utopian hippie community. In one scene, a character sings “Oh Sweet Nuthin’” by the campfire. I was a little confused. It seemed like the producers were trying to evoke some notion of sixities-ness, but The Velvet Underground were about as un-hippie as it gets. They were all about black leather and IV drugs, not peace and love. It’s clear that the creators of the show like to mess around with intertextuality, so perhaps that accounts for the disparity between music and plot. Still, TV and movie producers need to be cagey about using covers for emotional effect - it seems as likely to alienate the audience than to draw them in.

AJ’s post informed me that Cat Power performed the cover of “Hangin’ on the Telephone” used in those Cingular commercials. The music certainly got my attention - Marshall’s voice is familiar enough that I wondered who was singing. I think I object more to a prominent indie rock figure appearing in a mobile phone commercial than the cover. She’s made a career out of “wistful, mournful cover versions,” so his moratorium would eliminate some of her best recordings. It’s probably better to admit that songs are often covered by lesser talents than the original artists, and leave it at that.

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Since it’s spring break, I’ve finally gotten around to messing around with Pandora, which is a music recommendation system that doesn’t work in Safari¹. It reminds me a bit of the old Firefly project way back when², but it actually plays tracks after you tell it a band you like. It makes some weird choices, though. I told it I liked the Krautrock band Neu!, and, after playing what it thought was a representative Neu! song, it segued into a Fleetwood Mac track. It wasn’t as awful as the Fleetwood Mac I know from classic rock radio, but its selections seem to be slanted toward corporate rock and the generally bad. (When I told it I liked !!!, it played Peter Gabriel’s “Steam.”) I suspect that licensing issues prevent the operation from playing too much indie rock, especially music from smaller labels. For example, it didn’t even recognize the band name Faust. Still, it seems like a useful tool for when I need anything to distract me from the environment around me.

1.I really should dump the native Apple apps and go back to Firefox and Thunderbird full time.³

2.I remember using HOMR in my dorm room via a SLIP connection freshman year.

3.Are these footnotes completely stupid? In the time I spend marking them up, I could probably figure out how to integrate my brain’s little tangents with words instead of anchor tags.

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Nigel has done a wonderful job of curating old music videos he’s found on YouTube. In particular I enjoy seeing the 13th Floor Elevators performing “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” It’s pretty amazing to see Roky Erikson so young and sane looking. I do wonder what program this clip was taken from. One problem with a video service like YouTube allowing people to upload bootleg video is that a lot of the context (metadata?) is missing, but I imagine it would be nearly impossible to share these videos legitimately, so I won’t cry, cry, cry “96 Tears.”

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