Hold on to your hats, it’s a new issue of Terminal Boredom: in two installations: A-M and N-Z. Rich Kroeniss chimes in on the new Personal & The Pizzas single:
Personal & The Pizzas “Dead Meat vs. Joanie” 7” The Total Punk offshoot label of the Floridas Dying empire debuts with the latest two song lunch from Personal & The Pizzas (or Pizza, as there seems to be only one other band member here), and it starts with a Stiv-solo style leather jacket power-punker called “Dead Meat” that I think has a motorcycle chain solo on it. Tough as grease. “Joanie” mashes together “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Swallow My Pride” (and maybe a dozen other Ramones cuts) with a ballsy little fuzz guitar thing for an ode to eating out and Happy Days perhaps (insert garage Fonzie gag here, harhar). Total ‘End of the Century’ vibes. Scum stats: 600 pressed, hand stamped and totally punk. “Peter Davis = dead meat”?! (RK)
Also includes reviews of Pygmy Shrews, Sic Alps, Nobunny, X-Ray Eyeballs, Thee Oh Sees, a new release of 1995 demos by Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, and lots of other indie gutter snipes. Go get em.
Video for Lana Del Rey, “Video Games” (Stranger Records, 2011)
I am on board with this. Though I don’t really buy her schtick—the vaguely vampy, quote unquote Los Angeles, quote unquote 1955-1965 James Dean, drag strip chicken, stretch pants and stage jewelry sort of thing—I am more than slightly in love with the way this chorus unfolds. It’s long, and takes its time winding around a number of different sonorities, all while making some totally tired sentiment sound alluring and profound. That she’s singing about what I can only imagine is dirty, dirty sex in the same breath as video games, and in such a way that you can easily assume that she’s actually talking about video games, is an added bonus. She probably did not understand what JT was talking about back in “Ayo Technology.” She was probably also like 15 when that came out.
View of Manhattan. Detail from a hotel advertisement, 1989.
It seems to me—and I could be alone in this—that the last time locality seemed to mean much to American pop music was sometime soon after the summer of 2005. Soon thereafter the Internet visited upon the traditions of music in U.S. cities an incredibly swift conversion to internationality, to the conditions of mass-response. Simon Reynolds has called this the “Ibizification” of pop, but the comparison is made fragile by the historical reality of the Ibiza phenomenon. But the fact that Drake, a Canadian child television star, should be the leading man in American hip-hop seems like it would be inconceivable in any era when New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, or Chicago had anything to say in the matter.
The three convergences that strike me as being relevant are: the collapse of well-structured R&B music that occurred in the nineties (epitomized, or transcended, by R. Kelly), the cross-breeding of Top-40 pop with rap (that Biggie, as central as he was to rap, predestined), and the ascendency of European dance music (through, for one, Madonna’s stewardship—and bleeding through the spectrum for example in the production collaborations of Bjork—and the crash of Daft Punk upon America). It is true that hip-hop has been, since the mid-1990s, weaning itself off songs that speak primarily to individuals—rather, it seems to have approximated focus group response, it’s successfully conformed to the marketplace. But even in late-era Lil Jon club-bangers and the DayQuil sunset of Screwed Up Click in 2006–2007, underneath the strings and echo, I feel like I could make out the outline of Atlanta or Houston; the local traditions in the form still, on some level, seemed to dictate the tonality of the approach.
Meanwhile, underground hip-hop has returned from its retreat in social-consciousness and artificial, overwritten “alternative” but found itself as a denatured, Internet-era artform, where Diplo and mixtapes dictate history. And at the other end, Rihanna and Drake have found that origins are something to be invented, not built upon. Today no ramshackle Southern studio (or Williams/Hugo) personality stands a chance of coloring the American landscape. Sometimes it seems like there is no specifically American landscape left.
In this post over at The Paris Review Daily I describe a recent solo piano performance by Jason Moran at A Gathering of Tribes. One of the things I didn’t have the chance to discuss in the piece is what makes Moran such an important figure in jazz. That would probably take a book. But if you listen to a song like “Refraction 2” you’ll see how Moran, like all great jazz artists before him, has mastered the tradition and absorbed the popular idioms of his time. Anyone who listens to contemporary jazz will quickly see that the overwhelming majority of artists, both “avant-garde” and “mainstream,” work within a paradigm that is fifty years old, some of them, such as Wynton Marsalis, with remarkable skill. I enjoy Marsalis, but offhand I can’t think of a single composition of his that sounds like it could have only been made during his particular active years. As with most of Moran’s music, “Refraction 2” sounds completely contemporary. It isn’t hard bop or free. It isn’t soul jazz or post-bop. There’s no name for it really, but I think what distinguishes it, in part, from earlier jazz is how Moran draws so naturally from hip-hop. He shows an understanding of how both forms operate. Jazz, particularly hard bop, which originated in New York City, predates what you might call “Cadillac music.” Most hard bop is busy, even when its funky. Rap music, as it has evolved from the disco-derived music of late ’70s NYC, has become increasingly about repose, grooves. You ride to it. These are two different, though not necessarily incompatible, paradigms. Moran has successfully integrated them (with elements of free jazz and post-bop, of course), and you’ll notice that the result is something new: jazz for our time.
Still from an advertisement for a soft drink, 1975
From an interview in Freize between Dan Fox and Simon Reynolds about the latter’s new book, Retromania (which I will be reading and likely quoting from shortly):
DF In Retromania you talk about the changing economy, from ‘primary production’ music made in the 30 years after World War II, which you describe as being blue collar, to ‘postproduction’ music, which is more white collar in terms of skill sets used. This reflects changes in the broader economy: wealth generation via manufacture versus wealth generation via signification in entertainment and media.
SR Fredric Jameson wrote about how the culture of late capitalism reflects this increasingly gaseous, ungrounded nature of the economy. It struck me that many of the most innovative periods of pop music come from a time when the people making it grew up around industry or agriculture. There’s something about a culture that’s based around making stuff that’s bound to affect music making in some way. Now, increasingly music making is done with computers, and it’s about knowledge games, which is a level of abstraction up from just making things. ‘Over-accumulation’ seems like a good way of describing how all this music history has built up. What we’re living in is a salvage economy, like a flea market: there’s this mound of stuff accumulated and people are going through it like rag pickers, looking for elements that could be reused.
In the Guardian blog, Simon Reynolds in yet another great piece, this on the “Ibizification” of pop:
The other day we were driving in the car, listening to one of Los Angeles’s top 40 stations, and I turned to my wife and asked: “How come everything on the radio sounds like a peak-hour tune from Ibiza?”
All these smash hits have the Auto-Tuned big-chorus bolted on top. But underneath, there are riffs and vamps, pulses and pounding beats, glistening synthetic textures and an overall banging boshing feel; it’s like these tracks have been beamed straight from Gatecrasher or Love Parade circa 1999.
This week the Quietus ran a piece on a particularly bludgeoning and tyrannical aspect of the now-pop, what writer Daniel Barrow calls “the soar”: the wooshing, ascending, hands-in-the-air chorus, which has been divorced from its original context (90s underground dance and drug culture) and repurposed as the trigger for a kind of release-without-release.
… He goes on to analyze Taio Cruz and the Black Eyed Peas and the “Esperanto-like qualities of the now-pop.”
