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Brian Dear on Laurie Anderson

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In my years as a working theater critic, one of the things I occasionally did to amuse myself, in those desperate hours between an 11 p.m. curtain and a 2 a.m. deadline, was to write my review in the style of the artist whose work I was covering: a kind of critical Stockholm Syndrome, you might say. For instance, I recall, in one fit of near-insanity, writing a bunch of paragraphs of a review of a John Cage festival, then printing them out, cutting them up with scissors, and scattering them on the floor. The random reordering worked nicely, as it turned out. But I took the increasing frequency with which this impulse arose as a sign that it was time for me to move on to something else.

I still enjoy reading a nice turn in this vein, though. Here’s one: Brian Dear’s review of a Laurie Anderson show, told in that performance artist’s detached-chant voice.

Critical credo

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I’ve been enjoying reading music critic Alex Ross’s blog over at “The Rest is Noise” for some time now. This thoughtful comment on the role of the critic caught my eye — it pretty well sums up what I aspired to in the many years I devoted to writing about theater and movies:

“As a critic, I’m obliged to describe musical reality precisely as I hear it; I can’t sway in the breeze of intermission chatter. All the same, I want to write a review that will be of use even to a listener who had an entirely different experience. This entails writing with a certain humble awareness that my experience is not universal, that my account will never be carved in granite. Criticism is at its best where confidence meets generosity. It’s a tricky business: the slide into fake omniscience is deliciously quick. But I’m working on it.”

Bonfire of the C-90s

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Over the years I have accumulated a large collection of cassette tapes. Typically, I’d own LPs (later, CDs) but I’d transfer them to cassette to listen to them in the car. You could fit two LPs on one C-90, so it was efficient, and everyone knows that music and driving go together like, say, cinnamon and sugar. (Convenience of this sort is, of course, on the wane as the world of “digital rights management” tries to lock down everything it can.)

This was my mode for many years; I still remember debating whether it was worth dubbing my multi-LP set of Laurie Anderson’s “United States” to listen to during the cross-country drive in 1986 as I moved my life from Boston to San Francisco. I knew I’d made the right choice somewhere on I-80 on the long, slow climb up from the plains on the Nebraska/Wyoming border. Anderson’s voice intoned its futuristic alienations and fragile hopes as I hung suspended between two coasts and two lives, and the wind began roaring down from the mountains, buffeting my old car back toward the past. (I also listened to a lot of Buddy Holly — alienation only gets you so far.)

I’ll keep those tapes, and a handful of others. But I’ve got hundreds more that just duplicate music I have in other, better formats. So what does one do with several hundred old cassette tapes? They were once reasonably high quality blanks; it seems criminal to toss them in landfill. I’d welcome any ideas.

Long Winters tale

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My musical find of the last few months, and an album whose melancholy vitality has helped me through the post-election letdown: The Long Winters‘ “When I Pretend to Fall.”

I can’t even remember how I got pointed in this band’s direction. The music at first sounds like fairly typical alt/indie fare (the album opener, “Blue Diamonds,” reminiscent of Spoon), but a couple of listens and John Roderick’s songs start to burrow into your psyche. It’s all good, but there are three gems: “Cinnamon,” whose warm luster — that’s REM’s Pete Buck on mandolin — swaddles the singer’s grief (“I clung to the stretcher, I drew them a heart”); “It’ll Be a Breeze,” a simple acoustic love song that cuts to the core, like a Dashboard Confessional ditty that’s been through something harrowing; and “New Girl,” a rollicking 1-5-4 rocker with mischievous lyrics (“Twice you burned your life’s work / Once to start a new life / And once just to start a fire”) and a bridge of escalating taunts.

Go ahead, there’s free MP3s here, though sadly not of any of those songs.

If all that weren’t enough, check out the cover’s 1970s typography and gnarly rainbow-as-Gordian-knot graphic.

Random links

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This fast-cut edit of Republican convention rhetoric strips the Bush campaign down to its essence.

John Darnielle, the amazing singer-songwriter mastermind of the Mountain Goats, also runs a Web site of writing on popular music called Last Plane to Jakarta. He recently switched to using blog software on his site, so there’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to. I have.

Flickr, the superb photo-sharing web application I wrote about last month, is now selling “pro” accounts for people who expect to upload a lot of photos. (“Preview pricing” is about $40/year, discounted for now from the planned full price of $60.) I’ve signed up for two years. Great design and good service online are worth paying for.

Link-o-rama

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For the past several weeks I’ve accumulated a set of links that I wanted to present and comment on. Each could warrant a full blog entry. But since the chaos of my life and schedule means that instead I’ve just been sitting on them, I’m just going to post them in a big underannotated lump. Better than not posting them at all, and probably what I should have done in the first place, one by one. If you’re an avid follower of blogs you’ll probably have seen many of these already.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s amazing compendium of “Lord of the Rings” parodies provided me with a nearly inexhaustible supply of merriment.

The long view: Greg Costikyan, with whom I don’t always agree but whose thoughts I will always read avidly, points out that the U.S. will not always be the “sole superpower” — providing a good, self-interested reason for us to pay a little more attention to international law:

  We have a window of opportunity, now before our relative but precipitous decline, to establish clear and pervasive international norms of behavior, to persuade the emerging powers that it makes good sense, and is in their benefit, to behave like good global citizens. And to do that, we desperately need the good will and cooperation of our allies in Europe and Asia. As the “predominant world power,” it may sometimes seem like we can dispense with this, in the face of more immediate threats. But that’s foolish from a more long-term perspective.

Danny O’Brien posts on the elusive and increasingly central issue of just how much fame and celebrity will satisfy us in an era when the middle ground — famous for 15 minutes, famous for 15 (or 150) people — keeps expanding. (This is the aspect of blogging that professional journalists, used to measuring readership by commercial standards, typically miss.)

  There was a time, I think, in the industries where fame is important, that you had was famous, and not. You had big stars, and you had a thin line of people who had work, and you had failures, or people who felt like failures. But now the drop-off on that curve seems to be less precipitous. It feels, stuck here, so close to the machinery of the Net, that there’s a growing middle-class of fame – a whole world of people who aren’t really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they’re fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious).

Danah Boyd pinpoints many of the problems with the current wave of social software in her talk on “Autistic social software” from Supernova. Good reading for anyone who thinks that “social software” started with Friendster — but valuable as well for those of us who already know the longer history here:

  I’m often told that social networks are the future of the sociable Internet. Guess what? They were the cornerstone of the Internet, always. What is different is that we’ve tried to mechanically organize them, to formalize them. Doing so did not make social networks suddenly appear; formalization meant that they became less serious, more game-like. All other Internet social networks are embedded into another set of practices, not seeking an application to validate their existence.

Creative Commons is doing important work in helping keep open a space for creative reuse of content in an era of hegemonic copyrightism. The organization recently moved in to share the office space for Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, where I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my book. Regular readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. So it tickled me to read recently on the Creative Commons blog that the Goats’ John Darnielle has okayed the hosting of a free archive of live shows at the Internet Archive. Darnielle has a low-tech preference for old-fashioned tape trading over the online approach — but the main thing is, he wants people to hear his music, and once they do, many will, as I have, become voracious purchasers of actual Mountain Goats CDs. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, the Mountain Goats — how can you go wrong?

Hugh MacLeod, whose trademark art is drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, has posted an ever-evolving list of thoughts and ideas on creativity that’s great reading. For instance:

  The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.

And, finally, a quote from Norman Mailer, via Jay Rosen’s commentary on Mailer’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention — an old one, but, for me, in the “paste this one on your monitor” class:

  “Journalism is chores. Journalism is bondage unless you can see yourself as a private eye inquiring into the mysteries of a new phenomenon.”

Stop, hey, what’s that sound?

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People are just beginning, it seems, to wake up to the fact that most digital music today doesn’t sound as good as it could. That’s because the most popular compression formats — including both the lingua franca MP3 standard and the standard Apple uses for its ITunes store — are “lossy”: To make the file size smaller, they trade off some loss of information (and therefore sound quality).

This latest round in the discussion seems to have kicked off with a Randall Stross column in the Sunday New York Times, but it dates back at least as far as Andrew Leonard’s early, groundbreaking coverage of the MP3 phenomenon in Salon. Stross points out that Apple’s choice of a good but still “lossy” compression standard for its music store means that — surprise! — you’re really not getting CD quality audio when you pay for your $9.99 album.

Continuing the thread, Tim Bray writes: “I used to think that if you were listening to music on headphones on a bus or train or plane or in a crowd, the MP3 lossage really didn’t matter much. But recently I’ve been listening to the Shure 3C phones, and it’s obvious that we really shouldn’t be ignoring these compression issues; in particular since lossless compression is available right here, right now.”

Well, yes. We have the technology! The problem here is not technical, it’s political, legal, financial.

The odd thing to me is that Stross’s column — which appeared in the Business section, after all — failed to mention the obvious: that the record labels are selling lossy versions of songs online because they still distrust the new medium, even when it is being used legally and when people are paying for their product. They’re more interested in propping up their sagging CD business than in quickly exploiting a new marketplace. So after years of dithering they figure, OK, we’ll sell our wares on the Net — but let’s only provide crippled versions. The crippling applies not only to Apple’s DRM schemes (lord knows whether you’ll still have access to that music, 10 years and three computers from now) but to the 128 kbps bit rate of the songs you buy. It was one thing to accept that tradeoff in 1998 when MP3s were underground, hard disks were smaller and most of the world was on dialup connections. Today, it makes no sense.

I don’t doubt that the DRM and bit-rate compromises were part of the horsetrading Steve Jobs had to engage in to get the record labels in the door in the first place. But it doesn’t make me want to sink my cash into purchases on iTunes. (At EMusic, by contrast — which I still subscribe to despite my hissy fit when they stopped offering unlimited downloads — I pay for music and receive it uncrippled by DRM and in a higher quality, though still not perfect, format.)

The prevalence of cruddy 128 kbps music in the online marketplace demonstrates that the music industry still doesn’t believe in online distribution: It still doesn’t trust us, even when we’re paying for the music.

The real issue for the recording industry has never been loss of profits due to piracy, because no one has ever proven that there is a direct connection between piracy and declining CD sales (in fact, quite the contrary). What the industry fears is loss of control. Individual consumers — like Andrew, who wrote a column about this last week — want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It’s what we’ve always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today.

There are audiophiles out there, of course, who turn up their noses at “CD quality” — which is itself “lossy” compared with higher-quality audio formats. But meanwhile, the vast majority of music lovers who are reasonably content with their CDs aren’t getting their money’s worth when they buy online.

So remember: when you rip your own CDs to MP3, use at least a 160 kbps rate, or higher if you’ve got a big disk, or a “Variable Bit Rate” if your ripper supports that. The added file size is negligible given how cheap storage is today, but your ears will thank you. And the next time you think of buying music from an online store, tell them you won’t settle for anything less.

Get more Goats

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If you were reading this blog earlier this year you may recall my recently kindled enthusiasm for the music of The Mountain Goats. This enthusiasm has not waned as I have explored the back catalog of this “band” of (mostly) one. It has, if anything, waxed.

As I wrote about my delight in this discovery I uncovered the existence of kindred spirits here at Salon, including our jack-of-all-trades editorial operations director Max Garrone, who swears by “The Coroner’s Gambit,” and our Renaissance-man IT support manager, Jim Fisher.

Perhaps you’ve read some of Jim’s in-depth reporting for Salon on technology and the environment, or some of his great poems that we’ve published. (I’m not the only one who thinks highly of his work; he has recently won a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.)

Anyway, I learned that last year Jim had written an in-depth critical essay on the music and lyrics of the Mountain Goats and John Darnielle. For various reasons the essay never got published in Salon. It is perhaps of more interest to those already hooked on this work than those not yet familiar with it. But the piece deserves a home on the Web, so I’ve published it in this blogspace, here.

Jim’s piece was written months ago, at the time of the Mountain Goats’ release of “Tallahassee.” Earlier this year saw the release of “We Shall All Be Healed.” I’m not sure Jim agrees with me on this, but I think that album fulfills the prediction at the end of his essay of an “all-studio masterpiece” from this artist, much of whose previous work was recorded direct-to-boombox.

Forever Young

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Tonight I heard parts of Terry Gross’s interview with Neil Young. I’ve been listening to Young’s music since I was young myself. As an 11-year-old, in 1970, I’d bop around my room to those endless jams on “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.” As a 14-year-old I would cut phys. ed class and hang around outside the gym singing the lyrics to beloved obscurities like “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” I finally heard Young play live in the late ’70s on the “Rust Never Sleeps” tour. But in all those years I’d never before heard an interview with him.

The show is a shambling, illuminating ramble through the mind of this amazing musician, who belongs right up there with Dylan and Reed as a sort of deathless chthonic spirit of popular music. Here is the exchange with which it begins:

  GROSS: You’ve said that you like to destroy what you’ve created and then move on. Would you talk about why?

YOUNG: Did I say that?

GROSS: Yeah.

YOUNG: When did I say that? I probably did. I certainly can’t say I didn’t.

GROSS: Maybe you’ve destroyed that statement and that statement isn’t true anymore.

YOUNG: I’m working, all the wheels are turning a million miles an hour, I’m trying to come up with a quick answer here. I really think that, you know, you’ve got to move on, whether you tear it down, whatever you built, whether you tear it down — it’s just, you know, I don’t want to destroy what I’ve done, but I want to destroy the feeling that I’m going to do it again. I don’t want people to think that just because I did this, that I’m going to do that, that I’m going to do it again, that they can say now I’m this, and that’s what I should do, and that’s where I fit. I hate fitting.

Misfitting becomes him well enough.

Get your Goats

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It’s been a long time since I posted on music. Last year I spent much of my limited listening time close to home, with old familiars like Frank Black, Tobin Sprout and Guided By Voices.

I’m finally out and about again exploring some new bands. My find of the moment is the Mountain Goats — a “group” that seems largely the work of one guy and his pals, though the current album, “We Shall All Be Healed,” features a band on many tracks. John Darnielle sings in an adenoidal clip — as if you took the voices of either of the Johns from They Might Be Giants and stre-e-e-tched it high and wide. The full-band tracks take tried-and-true Velvet Underground riffs and layer sharp, angry poetry over them, half spiritual yearning and half cold-water-in-the-face reality. The solo acoustic tracks push that poetry at you without the rhythm section’s consolation, in simple threadbare grace. (One song, “Mole,” begins, “I came to see you up there in intensive care — they had handcuffed you to your bed,” with the narrator repeating the chorus: “I am a mole, sticking his head above the surface of the earth.”) Sacred and mundane get thrown together even in the song titles, like “Palmcorder Yajna,” which weds its obscure name to an almost unbearably catchy tune.

Now I need to go explore the rest of the Mountain Goats catalogue, which, from what I’ve read, seems to feature a lot of solo-acoustic recordings made on a whirring boombox in a bathroom. If they’re half as good as “We Shall All Be Healed,” I’ll be happy.

Bonus find: If you loved the Feelies as I did, you’ll be glad to know that you can now get specially custom burned CDs of Feelies spin-off band Yung Wu’s solo full-length effort, “Shore Leave,” here. Different vocalist, same great guitars — and cool covers of Brian Eno obscurity “Big Day” (that bouncy song about Peru from his collaboration with Phil Manzanera) and Neil Young classic “Powderfinger.”

UPDATE: “Palmcorder Yajna” appears to be available as a free download on Amazon. Beware — it’s one of those songs that plants itself in your brain and stays there.