Brazilian records from the 60s



















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Happy Mondays, Bummed, 1988



"Happy Mondays are a difficult band to work with." -Nathan McGough, manager

Bummed is a great album. Are Happy Mondays a great band? Probably not, but on this record everything seems to line up perfectly- the band, the scene, the label, the drugs, and the guy who just played shakers. Most importantly, Martin Hannett's super dense, reverb-drenched production is disorienting in the most joyful way. It's not often the words "hellish" and "colorful" can both be used to describe the same music, but that seems to be what they were going for.

Here is a cute little TV documentary on the making of the album, which manages to capture McGough asking an apprehensive Tony Wilson for more money to invest in the record. (Of course, the band really just wanted more drugs.)


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drawings by Cat Stevens














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triumph of the artifice.



There's nothing truly committed about a Brian Ferry or a David Bowie.
-Lester Bangs

I guess it makes sense for two of my favorite rock musicians to be criticized on the grounds of being uncommitted. But when it comes to music, who needs commitment? Part of the whole point of the glam/punk scene's pointlessness was being an effective antidote to the ultra-sincere, ultra-committed school of bands like...well, The Band. Bangs asserts that Ferry "doesn't care about rock and roll at all," but maybe it would be more accurate to say he didn't revere the genre as a religion. He cared about rock enough to deconstruct it, to remake and remodel it.




Sometimes it's better to be fake. During his Ziggy period, Bowie sometimes wore a fake anchor tattoo under his left eye. A big part of his influence was the impermanence of his aesthetics, the constant openness to change and stylistic evolution. A tattoo may show classic, rock-ish commitment, but it limits you to carrying that expression for eternity. Better to slap it on for a while, then wash it off when you find a new persona to explore. Freedom, and then inspiration, comes from not having to worry about the permanence or sincerity of something. As Ferry says, "There isn't much time to stop and think, 'what am I doing this for?'"



Thuggage gets the Lester Bangs treatment as well. We've had 'serious' rappers get offended by our shows or songs, and they feel it's their responsibility (as true believers) to knock us for being fake or uncommitted. "They've never ridden low." There's a lot of honor in hip-hop, a lot of pride and exclusivity, so for a group to come along that is knowledgeable and unconcerned with authenticity is like a magician exposing the secrets of their craft. But the magic of artifice is the ability to try on different masks and stay fresh while sincere, committed acts settle into redundancy (50 Cent, the Eagles, etc.)

Of course, the joke was on Bangs. Not only are Bowie and Ferry still playing sold-out shows, but the influence of their 70s work is immeasurable, and there's a whole slew of bands today that seem (ironically) very committed to carrying their legacy. Looks like the artifice payed off.
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birds with tits.



I heart Russian animation. The artist/animator Ivan Maximov has been making surreal little movies since the late 80s, and still uploads newer films and computer experiments to his Youtube page.
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Casino Royale, 1967





























































































Casino Royale is not a very good film, but the 60s were a time when even a bad movie could be entertaining just to look at. If something came out today that looked like this, I wouldn't give a shit what it was about.
lea.

correct me if I'm wrong...

I don't update this thing regularly anymore, although I do update my Myspace blog with "weekly inspiration" posts which are similar to what I was doing here, so if you are still interested in what I am interested in, check those out. In the meantime a few people have asked me to update this thing, so today I'll talk about pitch correction.

What is pitch correction? Wikipedia says it is "the process of correcting the intonation of an audio signal without affecting other aspects of its sound." That does a good job of explaining the specifics, although the article later makes sure to point out "It is now popularly used as a robotic effect in some styles of hip-hop music." For many, that line alone would pass as a definition. The article also mentions the origin of the effect in popular conscience; namely, Cher. I find this funny, because back when Cher released her comeback single "Believe," with it's goofy use of a pitch correction software called auto-tune, nobody thought it was cool. It seemed everyone saw it as just more evidence that Cher had lost her touch. Relying on a production technique to hit those notes? Pretty sad. But jump ahead to today and according to the state of hip hop, the world's barometer of everything trendy/gratuitous, pitch correction is the coolest effect to hit the music scene since Elvis's slap-back echo.



Of course, many in tune with hip hop will associate the effect with one man: T-Pain. In short, T-Pain gained popularity as the guy who 'sings' the heavily pitch-corrected hooks and choruses on a whole slew of terrible rap songs. Why he has a career is still a mystery; when vocals are corrected to this level, virtually anyone could attempt to sing the words and produce the same sound. But it's his obnoxious persona and idiotic appearance that have rounded out his villain, and his presence on virtually every bonehead single that is released by a major rap artist has made him an expected trademark in an already embarrassing genre which is apparently perpetuated by the question "how dumb can we make our chorus?" (But that's another issue.)

T-Pain comes off as a failure because he is so sincere in his gimmick that his output is barely more than an ad for the product he is using. However, the auto-tune/pitch correction effect can have virtue when used within context, as an option but not a trademark. The song "Maquina de Ritmo (Rhythm Box)" on Glberto Gil's new album begins as an acoustic samba but gradually transforms into electronic bossa nova, with Gil's vocals sounding corrected and streamlined by the end of the track. Of course, by this point in the song (and at this point in his career), Gil has already proven that he can sing quite well without electronic application, something T-Pain still hasn't bothered with. Momus has been using auto-tune almost frequently on his past few albums, not so much to correct his pitch as to accentuate his electronic compositions. In the song "Nervous Heartbeat," the effect still allows a few warbles and cracks that give the robotic vocal a fragile grace.


One of the best uses of pitch correction I've heard is Pop Levi's song "Mai's Space," a catchy diddy in which any natural human voice just wouldn't sound appropriate. The song is so exact, the melody so precise and synthetic, that Levi's corrected vocals - or is it a vocoder? - fit snugly between a synth and drum machine. Sadly, whatever technology Levi is using, he knows that people's attentions are more focused on those using it poorly: his tags for the YouTube video of "Mai's Space" include Flo Rida and T-Pain.

post something new!

Someone gave the above request recently, so here is something actually rather old, but probably new to you; Alan Watts A Conversation With Myself from 1971.



I haven't been posting recently because I'm not really in a comfortable position to observe and analyze things. Portland is difficult. Transportation is inconvenient, work is scarce, the job I have managed to catch is frustrating, and I have only just figured out a living situation. I can't write about what I see now, because my perception is skewed; all I see are dead ends and cold, wet streets. I'm bogged down by the albatross of uncertainty and the crown of doubt.

If and when things pick up, maybe I will start posting again. In the meantime, admire Watts's orange shirt and think about wiggly nature.
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beauty and irony.

Well, happy Stadium Mud Buggies Day everyone. I haven't been updating much lately, I know, but I always post on Feb 14, and thought I'd share some valentine-flavored sights and sounds with you. First is Cocorosie's lovely rendition of Kevin Lyttle's "Turn Me On". You really can't fully appreciate this performance until you listen to the original song in all its mediocrity. And have I mentioned that Bianca Casady is one of my favorite figures in pop music?



Unfortunately you will never see this, or any Cocorosie video, on MTV. There is a good chance, however, that if you turn the channel on right now you will see my next clip:



Not only is Melina's video hilarious - aping the retro look of videos by Shalamar and Earth Wind & Fire - but Snoop Dogg's song is just plain dope. "Sensual Seduction" (actually titled "Sexual Eruption") is catchy in a way that isn't obnoxious or overly stupid, which is more than I can say for most hip-hop singles in recent memory (*cough*Soulja Boy *cough*). For an overly-horny forefather of modern rap, Snoop Dogg has done well for himself, managing to rise above the current trends of the genre by reaching back to the oldest of the old-school and coming up with something that sounds, ironically, fresh.
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city world.



Here is my little basement den in (south)East Portland. I moved up here a couple weeks ago. It's nice with its neon green trim, but it gets awful cold in this weather.





It's fun to go downtown and look at the big buildings. Some are new, some are old, some are gothic, some are modern, and some, like this Michael Graves creation, are just silly in a Batman-ish way:




Joel reflects beneath a strategically placed "Suicide Hotline" sign on the Hawthorne Bridge.


Emerson Valentine Lyon, aka Rickety, self-proclaimed leader of hip-hop and my bandmate in Thuggage. Oh, and check out his song Rude, my favorite single of 2007.


Comedian Aaron Ross as talk-show host Ed Foreman...

...and as bathroom-lesbian-couple eavesdropper, along with fellow comedian Bobby Mickey and former president Abraham Lincoln.

More to come.

REMODELING.

As you can see, I've updated my template. I did this for a few reasons: 1) Blogger's new templates are more open to customization, 2) the built-in comments feature is more reliable than the old comment button I added myself, and 3) my archives are once again available for viewing (when I switched over to Blogger Beta a while back, all the archive links disappeared from my old template). Now you can go all the way back to my very first post, and then observe how I gradually become more and more cynical as the years progress. Thanks, Blogger!

glam echoes: just to recap...

Kylie Minogue, 2 Hearts, 2007


Goldfrapp, Ooh La La, 2005

T. Rex, Hot Love, 1972

...A woman acting like a woman acting like a man acting like a woman.

Funny how the boys these days aren't too keen on reviving glam. The girls do an alright job, I guess, but it's not as outrageous; part of the fun of seeing Bowie all dolled up is that there was a man under all that makeup. Nope, nowadays rock music is dominated by a bunch of pseudo-masculine guys who take themselves too seriously and worship at the altar of metal. Maybe someone should remind them that the metal god they kneel before started out wearing spandex and listening to Slade and T. Rex.
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woman shall inherit the earth.

I just read this interesting/troubling little article: Are Boys An Endangered Species?

The focus of the article is on a couple populations of indigeonous peoples, whose diets of local chemically contaminated foods are resulting in less boys being born. The disturbing angle is that this may be a forecast for a global problem, as hinted in the last line: In the United States, more boys are being born than girls, but the gap between the two has declined in the last 30 years.

From an evolutionary standpoint, an even balance between boys and girls is not necessarily required to sustain population. As long as some boys continue to be born, and we rely on Dr. Strangelove's mating ratio of 10 females to each male, we should be alright. ...More than alright, if you're one of the lucky endangered males.



Perhaps this is the beginning of the end. Maybe that's how humanity will go out; men will slowly die off until we are left with a woman-dominated earth (a world with terrible television, a world of global emotional paranoia, where wars are all passive aggressive and casualties are all from a knife in the back), whose inhabitants will no doubt attempt to create artificial insemination machines to completely replace the role of man in reproduction. But the irony will be that, since all the asian men have gone extinct, there will be no one to repair these machines when they break down, and eventually the women will go the way of the men. And what will be left? That's right; cockroaches and Keith Richards.


They live!
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e-disHarmony.

I remember a TV ad telling me that eHarmony.com uses a comprehensive database system to provide the most exact, reliable, successful method of matching up people with potential "soul mates," and that viewing these matches is completely free. Well, today I was bored, so I thought I might just see what kind of "soul mate" they could come up with for someone of my breed. After completing a 15-minute personality and preference survey, they gave me this:






















Rejected from online dating! How tragic! The most advanced matching system on the web, and I still come out single. It's like a big online joke, and this page is the glorious punchline. I like their line about how they "sometimes choose not to provide service rather than risk an uncertain match." Because I suppose they have their reputation to worry about; they wouldn't want to match a defective like me up with somebody who might complain.

Then again, they do mention that their matching system is created through research with married couples. Perhaps they could ascertain from my answers that I'm not the marrying type, so naturally I don't belong on a site that boasts "90 marriages a day." But I answered honestly, just as they asked. I also noticed that their questions seemed primarily concerned with how well you can solve conflicts and whether you are a "leader" or a "follower", as if it were some kind of job questionnaire. No room for followers here! Only leaders will get ahead in a relationship! Be firm and commanding with your employee/mate! Experience preferred!
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"Daddy is the breadwinner..."

What happens when you re-dub Darth Vader's dialogue in the original Star Wars with snippets from other James Earl Jones movies? A brilliant side story about Vader losing his marbles. You dig that?

you're the one listening to it.

I thought I'd respond to an article that I read recently. I mean, feminism vs. emo? How can I resist? The article: Emo: Where the Girls Aren't by Jessica Hopper.

It is my belief that the guys in emo bands are merely the boy-band type who have undergone stylistic metamorphosis, emerging from their spike-studded chrysalis singing a song of self-pity instead of self-promotion. However, their lusts haven't changed; the girls they write their angsty songs about are essentially the same "summer girls" that those hair-gel models LFO wrote their shitty single about back in 1999. You remember; that ode to materialistic fetishism that boasted such poetry as "when I met you I said my name was Rich/you look like a girl from Abercrombie and Fitch." Back then, rich boys knew they could woo shallow teeny boppers by wearing confidence in the form of an expensive polo shirt.



These days, the emo boys have made a grand discovery; that if they act hurt and sensitive, not only will they attract the Abercrombie girls, but the Hot Topic girls as well. Their ballads about being fed up with flaky girls are nothing more than a means to attract more flaky girls. I suppose my main point is that any girl who actually listens to emo doesn't deserve "better songs" written about them. They date the misogynistic guy, they stroke his musical ego, and they proceed to buy the album he writes about their breakup. How can you rip the singer for being a jerk and a sore loser when the girl was only dating him to show off to her friends? The verdict: the poet and the muse are BOTH IDIOTS. Emo is silly overdramatic music written by silly overdramatic boys for silly overdramatic girls. Everyone else need only stand back and chuckle. So what is Ms. Hopper getting so worked up about?



Being from Punk Planet, which I believe is somewhere in the Iggypop System, she seems to be upset because Planet Emo, while quite a great distance from the Loureed Sun, is nonetheless eclipsing her own world and drawing several colonists of the younger generation. She realizes that, unfortunately, emo is what the kids are listening to these days, and she doesn't like the idea of such a dominant form of American rock music having such a damning message towards women. I guess I can agree with these sentiments, but I wouldn't prescribe Bikini Kill for this illness. Call me a fag, but I don't think the answer to whiny boy rock is obnoxious, aggressive grrrl rock. Early in the article she mentions being forced to retreat into the "cavelike recesses of electronic, DJ and experimental music." Oh, the horror! Music that doesn't have distorted guitars! So I guess her reasoning is that the only alternative to crappy anti-woman lyrics is crappy anti-men lyrics, or no lyrics at all. Hm. Such is life on Punk Planet...

I was afraid Ms. Hopper would bring up "Under My Thumb," and sure enough, here it is once again as exhibit B in the case against woman-bashing rock. It's become an old feminist favorite, hasn't it? Yeah, it's a rough song, but if you really want to toss The Rolling Stones in with the woman-hating emo, tie it up with a conversation you had with some jackass you associate with, and say "Here I have a bag full of reason to hate rock'n roll for being misogynist," I'm afraid it says more about you than about the history of pop music. Sure, it is true that a good 90% of rock songs - or pop songs in general - are written by men about women, but that isn't sexism. No, that's just the tail end of a couple thousand years of sexually frustrated, artistically-inclined men who want desperately to impress a woman but can't afford a Cadillac. But you see? That's a different can of worms altogether. And as far as Zeppelin goes, even die hard fans will agree that the band doesn't have the deepest lyrics. To attack "Communication Breakdown" on the grounds of it being misogynist is like shunning "You Are My Sunshine" for having rapist undertones.

One last thing: "We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us."

You're right. I'm going to tell Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, Elvis, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, and The Beatles that they were all wasting their time. They can't hold a candle to Bikini Kill. And they better start saving for that Cadillac.
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feed your inner Japanese kid.

I have an inner Japanese kid. He's the one who periodically screams "I need ramen!" or "I need green tea!" or "those people are too loud!" And I usually listen to him. Here are some things that have been appeasing my inner Japanese kid recently:

The Taste of Tea

Katsuhito Ishii's wonderful film about...well, nothing really, but featuring a string of strange situations and charming characters. Movies like this make me wonder if it's possible to make a bad movie in Japan, since there are so many great things to film over there. Simple shots of country roads and high school interiors just look so good, and Ishii really embraces that. It also stars Tadanobu Asano, that guy who is in every Japanese movie.

Ryusuke Works

English blog by the manga artist Ryusuke Hamamoto, who still manages to stand out in the endless sea of global manga artists. You can browse his beautiful drawings on his DeviantArt page. I read his blog for the great Engrish poetry that makes up daily posts:
"I'm eating a lunch with my friend.
I choise a vegetable curry and spinach salad.
My friend choise a honey toast with ice cream.
it's dericious! and I want to eat a honey toast too!"

Merry Daily

Merry Daily is the blog for a Harajuku clothing store called Tokyo Bopper. There are great photos and "style samples" of slick outfits. I'm glad to see Tokyo kids leaning toward more colorful fashions again- the goths and gangstas got old fast.
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