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The decade in tunes

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I’m not interested in the argument over whether this new year’s marks the end of the decade-with-no-name. Since we celebrated the end of the millennium 10 years ago, I think we’re stuck. And you can bet that when 2019 rolls over to 2020 we’ll do the same.

My list, for your pleasure, is the decade in music — my personal bests. It will be no surprise to longtime readers here. This is the stuff that stuck with me through the years, that kept my body moving, my mind working and my heart opening. I’ve made most of these entries in pairs (or more) — because I can.

RUNNERS-UP:

  • Beck: The Information (2006)
  • The Decemberists: The Crane Wife (2006)
  • The Gaslight Anthem: The 59 Sound (2008)
  • Richard Thompson: 1000 Years of Popular Music (2003)
  • Wrens: The Meadowlands (2003)
  • XTC: Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2) (2000)

TOP TEN (IN ELEVEN):

(11) Garage Band and Rock Band: Apple’s software put remarkably high quality basement-taping music-making tools onto every Mac. Rock Band may be a toy, but it’s irresistible, and it schools young minds and bodies in the notion that music is to be made as well as consumed.

(10) Pernice Brothers: The World Won’t End (2001); Discover a Lovelier You (2005) — Definitely the sleeper in this bunch for me. When I first heard Joe Pernice’s work in 1998’s Overcome by Happiness I was impressed but a bit bored. Over time I came to appreciate, then crave, the combination of lush pop arrangements and astringent lyrics.

(9) They Might Be Giants: No (2002); Here Come the ABCs (2005)– For me this decade was all about raising a pair of twin boys. TMBG’s forays into children’s music were that process’s soundtrack — and frequent tonic. “No” offered my three-year-olds an early introduction to absurdism, and its charming animations proved an endless diversion. (“Robot Parade” introduced them to the term “cyborg” — and gave them a chance to misremember it as “borg-cy,” which we will never forget.) And even though, by the time “ABCs” came along, the alphabet had long been mastered, the music (and great accompanying videos) won over kids and grownups alike.

(8) The Long Winters: When I Pretend to Fall (2003); Putting the Days to Bed (2006) — Sharp tuneful alt-rock with an edge and a brain. My only complaint about singer/songwriter John Roderick? Low productivity!

(7) The Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat — The Friedbergers, brother and sister, moved from the more forthright songwriting of their early tracks to the increasing obscurity of their more recent work. But along the way they created this masterpiece of baroque verbiage and extravagant music.

(6) Tobin Sprout: Lost Planets and Phantom Voices (2003) — Deep autumnal soundscapes and pop paintings from a maestro of gentle melody. The former Guided by Voices songwriter, far less profligate with his talent than that group’s leader, Robert Pollard, hasn’t put out an album since; he seems to be concentrating on painting these days. Too bad!

(5) Green Day: American Idiot (2004); and The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine (2006)– Two punk operas about Bush-era America. Green Day’s megahit album drafted Who-style song suites and hook-laden power-trio riffs in the service of a narrative about disaffected no-future youth; the Thermals channeled a Buzzcocks sound for their grim portrait of a young couple trying to escape a fundamentalist/fascist America.

(4) Mekons: Natural (2007) — These veterans kept producing challenging, creative work through the decade. Each album, from Journey to the Edge of the Night (2000) to OOOH (2002) to Natural, improved on its predecessor. Natural is the band’s version of pastoral — a contemplative, acoustic-heavy set of laments for the end of nature.

(3) Frank Black/Black Francis: Dog in the Sand (2001); Bluefinger (2007) — FB/BF has been as prolific with his songs as he is fickle with his stage name. These albums were his peaks of the decade. Dog in the Sand ranged from fierce Stones-style rockers to the almost unbearably beautiful “St. Francis Dam Disaster.” Bluefinger used the story of Dutch glam-rocker Hermann Brood as the spine for a memorable set of Black classics.

(2) The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema (2005), Challengers (2007) — I do not know how A.C. Newman and his cohorts do it, but each album adds to my respect for their genius. When I read somewhere in an interview that Newman is a big fan of Eno’s “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” it all made sense.

(1) The Mountain Goats: Tallahassee (2003), We Shall All Be Healed (2004), The Sunset Tree (2005) — Don’t think I’d have made it through these years without John Darnielle’s music. Thank you. Happy new year!

SEO mills: That’s not fast food, it’s bot fodder

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Yesterday TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington denounced the rise of SEO-mill-driven content — the sort of business Associated Content and Demand Media are in, and AOL is going into — as “the rise of fast food content.”

This gave me a good laugh, since, of course, most journalists have long (and mostly wrongly) viewed Arrington’s own output, and that of all blog-driven enterprises, as “fast food journalism.” Arrington, rightly, I think, sees himself more as a “mom-and-pop” operation producting “hand-crafted content,” and he’s bemoaning “the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.”

Trouble is, Arrington’s metaphor is off. The articles produced by the SEO-driven content mills aren’t like fast food at all. Fast food works because it tastes good, even if it’s bad for us: it satisfies our junk cravings for sugar and salt and fat. We eat it, and we want more. The online-content equivalent to junk food might be a gossip blog, or photos of Oscar Night dresses, or whatever other material you read compulsively, knowing that you’re not really expanding your mind.

The stuff that Demand Media and Associated Content produce isn’t “junk-food content” because it’s not designed for human appetites at all: it’s targeted at the Googlebot. It’s content created about certain topics that are known to produce a Google-ad payoff; the articles are then doctored up to maximize exposure in the search engine. individually they don’t make much money, but all they have to do is make a little more per page than they cost. Multiply that by some number with many zeros on the end and you’ve got a business.

These businesses aren’t preying on our addictive behaviors; they’re exploiting differentials and weaknesses in Google’s advertising-and-search ecosystem. As Farhad Manjoo pointed out recently in Slate, the actual articles produced by these enterprises tend to be of appallingly poor quality. McDonald’s food may not be good for you, but it’s consistent and, plainly, appealing to multitudes. But few sane readers would willingly choose to consume an SEO mill’s take on a topic over something that was written for human consumption.

That’s why I think Arrington’s off-base. The SEO arbitrageurs may make money manipulating the search-engine bots, but they can’t “force feed” their output to real people. Doc Searls’ idealism on this point is more persuasive than Arrington’s lament.

Public Enemy and the Washington Post: The correction as folk art and viral meme

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A week ago the Washington Post ran the following correction:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

You don’t need to be much of a hiphop expert (I’m certainly not) to know that the Public Enemy song in question, “911 Is a Joke,” predates the attacks of 9/11/2001 (it was released in 1990) and has nothing to do with them.

The Post’s error made it look ignorant and silly — like having to say, for example, “An article incorrectly reported that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is a Central European folk tune. The song is actually by Queen.” But it was the straight-faced solemnity of the correction’s wording, juxtaposed with the amusement so many readers felt as they clicked on its URL, that transformed this little footnote into something bigger.

Within a couple of days, the Post’s correction had gone viral (a post from Leor Galil at TrueSlant traces the path of dissemination). It inspired an outpouring of mocking imitations on Twitter, all marked with the hashtag #washingtonpostcorrections. Here is a sample of some of the feigned cluelessness I chortled at last weekend:

MoreAndAgain: Having a baby by 50 Cent will not actually make you a millionaire

BlackCanseco CORRECTION: Despite the song, it not only rains in Southern California, it apparently snows, too.

jsmooth995 George Clinton has assured us his roof remains intact, and he takes fire safety quite seriously

phontigallo: 2Pac’s “I Get A Round” was not about the life of a bartender.

I’m not sure whether the realms of newsroom practice and pop culture have ever collided so absurdly. (Although I do recall that, once upon a time, as legend has it, New York Times style required the paper’s music critics to refer to “Mr. Loaf,” for Meat Loaf, and “Mr. Vicious,” for Sid. The former, according to the Times, is apocryphal, but the latter seems to be real.)

There was another kind of collision here: between the informal populist free-for-all online and the stiff back of old-fashioned newsroom impersonality. It would have been a lot harder for the Twitterers to make fun of the Post if, instead of having that starchy correction to parody, they’d instead read a low-key blog post by the reporter (and/or editor) responsible for the goof, saying something along the lines of “Wow, we really messed that one up — here’s how it happened. We’re really sorry.”

But no; the newsroom must wear its tie. And so instead of dialogue we have silence on one side and ridicule on the other. #washingtonpostcorrections ended up as a sort of game of the dozens in which only one of the parties played along; the other didn’t even seem to realize the game was on.

UPDATE: Craig Silverman writes about this story at Columbia Journalism Review, tracing the hashtag’s origin back to Twitter user @phontigallo — Phonte (Phonte Coleman), a member of the Grammy-nominated hip hop group Little Brother.