oops!

I've gotta figure out how to make in-text links here. Surely it's easy...right?

I Hear a New World

is a great blog that i found just this morning thanks to the serendipity of the internets. Googling "Cate Brothers + Lane Lindsey" in order to try to find anything on an old friend who road managed the Cates during their major label days, I found a nice short take on the musical pleasures and lyrical problematics of the song "Union Man." Now think that the lyrics to "Union Man" are a little more ambiguous than the way The Sad Billionaire reads them, but I also know that i'm fundamentally disposed to hear all things Cate Brothers in a positive light, and that it' s likely true that , as John A. Arkensawyer once said, "Union Man is a great song with lousy politics."

So on the blog I Hear a new World (http://ihearanewworld.blogspot.com/) The Sad Billionaire ponders, very briefly the connection between the Cates' apparent populist anti-unionism and their proximity to Bentonville, the home of Wal-Mart, a link that I've been thinking about for awhile now. Scrolling up from this post which was put up on Feb. 7th 2008, I found a thoughtful entry that drew on Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn" to contextualize those over-exploited youtube remarks by Jeremiah Wright, and a critical disquisition about the birth of the neoliberal grotesque, among other gems. This has all helped to unloose some thoughts about the neoliberal landscapes of the post-civil rights south (and Northwest Arkansas in particular) that I'll try to put together in a future post.

Just glancing through, I can tell that this is great, smart stuff. A music blog with academic smarts, a critical-left political engagement, and a sense of humor. I'm adding it to the sidebar forthwith. I can't find an easy way to link directly to the "Union Man" entry, but it's at the very bottom of the current page and it's called (quotes and all) "I've had a rough night and i hate the fucking Eagles, man." go read it and everything else written by the mysterious Sad Billionaire.

*this post brought to you by Sesame Street, and by littles, who is sitting on my lap as I type.

When We Refuse To Suffer

is a hell of a song from the new Jonathon Richman album. Bought it 2 weeks ago before a road trip (forgetting that we can only listen to "mama loves you music" [the African Dreams CD] in the car with littles these days, and that new music is only good driving music if you can really crank it) and am just now listening to it for the first time., low volume on earbuds while the rest of the house is asleep.

First thoughts: that this is the record I had been wishing Jonathon would make since I saw him a couple of times in Fayetteville around 2002 or so. No Rick Ocasek, No band (so far) just Jonathon playing that amplified gut string and Tommy Larkins on the stand up drum kit. It's very immediate and intimate and I'm certain that some jerkoff reviewer is going to call it "low-fi" when it's just the opposite. Well, maybe not the opposite : it's not "hi-fi" it's just..."fi," as in fi-delicious, as in fi-i-i-ine!

Second thoughts: that description makes it sound like it isn't rock and roll. Not true. Following Lunsford's theory of rock and roll (the more instruments you have the less each person can play) this format really frees Jonathon and Tommy to work these small-but-mighty rock and roll songs for all their worth. Oh, there is a band now, kind of, or at least some piano and electric guitar. Just enough.

Third thoughts: More on the songs after I've absorbed them. Right now the lyrics that leap out are like this from "Our Party Will Be on the Beach Tonight": "We'll spill things there, and we won't care...and we won't care." No, I know, but you have to hear him sing it.

Fourth Thoughts: by the second version, i'm pretty sure that i have some serious disagreements with the central argument in "When We Refuse To Suffer" but its still a great song.

last thoughts: nice little post about this album's special connections to the Mission District in San Francisco, where Jonathon has lived for a few years now. http://missionmission.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/because-her-beauty-is-raw-and-wild/

Hey Bo Diddley

ABD!

I took and passed my comps on Monday, and as it turns out none of that extended theory mongering RE Walter Benjamin (who I really have little business writing about) came into play at all, and we spent much more time talking about the dissertation project than anything else. I'm kind of letting all of that stuff simmer right now, so i don't want to talk about that. And, I had a few other things, including new clues to the mystery of what the hell kind of guitar that i bought form Screamin' John before I left Fayetteville, and an upcoming radio show on George Mitchell, a blues documentarian that I'm trying to document, but I'm too sleepy now. So we'll save those things for later, over and out.

Walter Benjamin Authenticity Interface

I had thought, or set of thoughts come loose while rereading Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" this morning. Page numbers refer to the 2007 Schocken books/Random House edition of the 1968 Harry Zohn translation. The paradoxical importance of notions of authenticity in (mass market, duplicable, industrialized) postwar popular music is a theme that I keep circling, so maybe that means its good blog fodder. We'll see, but in the meantime, here's Benjamin:

“The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” (221)

– But it’s worth noting that during the postwar period a lot of pop music exhibits qualities that are transmissible only because of the recording process, that are created through the recording and duplication process. (I’m including microphones and perhaps even megaphones here because the amplified sound produced is a shade different in time and history than the original vocalization) Benjamin’s thought here doesn’t take into account the way that the process is utilized to create new forms of “art.” A useful ethnographic exploration of this process in action is Louise Mientjes' Sound of Africa! which locates the recording studio right in the middle of the produciton of musical identities. So here, the multitracked recording creates an art object (Benjamin might argue with that) which has no original referant other than its duplicable form, unless we count master tapes and alternate mixes which do narrate authenticity without most of us ever hearing them and which arent' any more "real" really than the two track mixdown. This is all longhand for the slogan written across Cyclops, the old TV set that the Rex Rootz used to use on stage sometimes which read "The Bands in Yer head."

But: this is right on, and still holds true: “since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former too is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.” (221)

-I have two interrelated thoughts here: one that he’s absolutely right, that whatever the actual conditions of the postwar musical era, we have enough of the cult of the art object hanging over our sense of aesthetic pleasure that we want to make a claim for the authenticity of our experience of the song by locating some essence of what we hear behind or above or beyond the processes by which it comes to us.

The second and related point is that the lack of an original at any point in our experience of the song creates a void that we fill with various significations of authenticity.* These can come from a variety of places in our engagement with the recorded object: one of them is the way that blues record collectors, following the aesthetic that Hamilton** credits James Mckune with establishing among his coterie, locate authenticity in the primitive (“honest” “transparent”) recording of the highly personalized and individualized expression of vernacular tradition. This finds the least-mediated to be a ‘captured’ version of the unmediated and rests on the power of a (seeming) one to one communication that elides space, time, and the social and economic barriers that might sit between player and listener in a real “one to one” moment. This is the same aesthetic of personal authentic testimony that legitimates indie and lo-fi recordings with their audiences, and its similar to the more specific discourse regarding overdubbing in jazz and classical recordings.

Another intervention, one that’s more common I think, is the substitution of personal experience with the duplicated object for the experience that in Benjamin’s formulation accrues within the original object. That is, we think of where we were when we first heard “Sweet Child O’ Mine” or “When Doves Cry” and the various permutations and experiences that we’ve undergone in relation to our continued experiences of those recordings of those songs, which become simply “those songs.” This is healthy I think in the way it allows us to involve ourselves emotionally with music, the way that it defeats the elitism that surrounds high and fine art by placing the experience of them behind barriers that place severe limits on who can see them when.

It’s unhealthy though in the way that it hides the material processes that produce those recordings (the absolute substitution of “the song” for “the recorded song”) and thus hides (in plain view) the material relations that produce and deliver those recordings to us & thus hides the imbrications between our emotional lives and various systems built on alienated labor. Those relations stay hidden usually unless they are summoned into being in a benign way such as the “Live Aid” performances where the apparatus of the music industry becomes all at once a charitable structure, or if they bubble up to the surface as when old blues and R& B artists try to recover lost royalties or when, like during the controversy over Graceland, the power discrepancies between auteur artists and the specialist musicians that they employ to achieve certain effects becomes too audible. In the latter case it’s a conflict between our longstanding, market nurtured affective investment in the headline artist as auteur, and our immediate affective response (renewed and renewing investment in) to the textural, timbered and rhythmic pleasures we find in the songs themselves. It’s a Paul Simon album, but the things we like most about it don’t issue forth from Simon unless we embrace a version of auteur theory so drastic that it flies in the face of the socialist rhetoric that emanated from the French New Wave directors who pioneered auteur theory in cinema. This only works if we recognize it as a Paul Simon album beforehand and maintain that recognition through the intervention of the systems of legitimation that comes down to us through the Western classical composition tradition. It’s a Paul Simon album because he “wrote” all the “songs.”

There are various ways to work around this elision of the material processes. One of them is I’d call the Dischord records method, whereby live performances are privileged by the band’s (Fugazi’s) insistence that they be accessible (all ages shows, $5.00 cover), their refusal to engage in merchandising at the shows themselves, and a general dictum of demystification and transparency regarding the mechanics of business, record making, touring and performing. Another is the renewal of agency post-recording that Hip-Hop DJs pioneered, and which intellectual copyright laws quickly and effectively neutralized, and another is simply the kind of listening engagement (and a kind of song) that brings the material constraints of the process to the surface as a set of references that allow contact between performers and audiences. I had a great example of this, but I lost it somewhere in the flow of words above & I’ll come back and fill it in when I get it back.

-Update: maybe I was simply thinking of the kind of engagement wherein response to the song includes a response to the material conditions of its production and a conscious foregrounding of the songs performative/recorded history. I think that I;m thinking here of how George Lipsitz posits the “hidden histories” of popular music, especially in “Weeds in a Vacant Lot” in Footsteps in the Dark. There’s also probably a brief for taper culture among jamband audiences here too, as a way to substitute an alternate and more audience-controllable set of relations around recorded objects by positing specific recordings of live sets pinpointed to specific dates as the 'real" versions of the songs. You don't want to go too far with this though because there's alot of elision of material performance production in dead culture too, otherwise there would be/have been a wider recognition of the band as a bunch of junkie millionaires by their fans. I mean, at least Stones fans know what they're buying when they pay the ticket.

*I have an immediate want to quibble with this even as I write it, because we don’t, or I don’t, experience that “void” as a lack of anything in particular, that is that I have to work to historically recover the affective power of the aura that Benjamin so credits with the power of the art object, which suggests to me that both his and my engagement are historically constructed rationalizations after the fact intended to explain the power of an experience with music or art of nay kind, a “coming to self” before the presence of a “text” with the stipulation that the “self” one is coming to is historically constructed, is a self we make of the available materials and experiences of our times and places.

**Marybeth Hamilton, Searching For The Blues. It’s a book about the history of the idea of the blues in the hands of folklorists and record collectors. It’s not a complete history of that by any means, as it cuts off at the beginning of the 50s when, to my mind, things really get interesting, and it does the reader a disservice by not pointing them to either Robert Gordon’s Lost Delta Found or Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk, both of which offer expanded understandings of some of Hamilton’s material.. But it does establish a solid foundation for understanding, for instance, how Mystery Train-era Greil Marcus probably heard Robert Johnson and the role of “the blues’ (especially the “country blues” or “delta blues” in the construction of the boomer-rock aesthetic. Hamilton, according to her introduction, is a teenage New York Dolls fan turned academic historian, so maybe there’s a generational conflict that explains Dave Marsh’s vehement trashing of her text in the New York Times Book Review, or maybe she just hit a little too close to home.

(This)Blog's Not Dead!

Alright folks

I do the oral defense part of my comprehensive exams on Monday and i promise after that to be here on a regular basis. I had some illusions that the informal qualities of blog writing might spur me past the pain of academic writing and generate insights that i could then pour painlessly back into my work. Well, such are the rationalizations that have for years supported my tendency to overextend myself. As it turns out, whatever kind of writing i'm doing it has to take a certian amount of care and consideration and/or the real spark of "that just hit me!" or it turns out as shitty as the half-baked or overbaked piece on the Hold steady that was my last real attempt to put words up here in hyperspace.

So there are a number of things on and in my mind that i hope to put up here after Monday, some generated by the process of preparing for comps, others by free floating encounters with popular music. One thing long overdue is an inquiry into the Hold Steady's second album, Seperation Sunday, in which your intrepid reporter tries to figure out why the literal descriptions of the story of the album (teenage runaway becomes meth addict and is saved by christian rock and the Catholic church) sound so dim and unsatisfying compared to the story that unfolds listening to the record itself. But i don't want to write that now, not only because i have other very important things to do, but because i don't want this to become just a Hold Steady blog.

Instead, I'll just sign off by mentioning that it was Vampire Weekend, and specifically the self-reflexive genius of the song "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" that really made me want to get this blog back up and running. More in a couple of days.