Sunday, February 25, 2007
For Lack of You Name It
Man, it is just so depressing to pass by my blog and see the same old post there, and wonder how many hundreds, if not thousands of readers have done the same, sighed, and consigned me to the huge dustpile of un-updated, not-worth-checking blogs. This must be an occupational hazard? No time yet to hone the next installment of my Spector stuff. Anyway, it's important to remind people that you're alive, so at the risk of turning this into a different type of blog entirely, work continues to kick my ass. I just made the best quesadilla. Have to remember to pay some bills tonight--I love paying bills while watching TV! If I type the phrase "Britney Spears's ass" will I get five thousand extra hits? It's snowing today. I'd say maybe we'll have a snow day and I'll spend all of tomorrow in some kind of blogging paradise. But there's a big sign hung on the gate of this place that says "We Never Close."
Saturday, February 17, 2007
The Bad Art of Phil Spector, Part I
To the faithful: sorry for the meager level of posting, but my employer, a small liberal arts college, has rather, um, liberal notions of the amount of labor it feels entitled to squeeze from its faculty. Don't think I'm not thinking about you!
Anyway, I just saw today that Phil Spector’s murder trial (he is being tried for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson four years ago) is going to be televised; the judge’s reasoning is that it’s time to, as the AP puts it, “get beyond the O. J. Simpson trial.” And it’s true, I guess: if Americans have proven so capable of getting beyond Vietnam, they might well be able to get beyond O. J. as well.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Spector’s work for the past few months. He is certainly a lionized figure, if not the most lionized figure, in the history of rock and pop production. But like a lot of such lions, he’s generally understood through shorthand—largely the phrase “wall of sound” (which is certainly accurate) and a host of stories about his extraordinary misogyny (incidentally, Ronnie Spector’s autobiography, which documents much of this, is one of the better celebrity bios I’ve read), or his penchant for guns (which may have been part of his studio toolbox: he is said to have forced the Ramones to record parts of End of the Century at gunpoint).
The Spector sound is a really fascinating fine art of sounding, well, bad--at least bad in terms of the notion of (high) fidelity, which became predominant with the advent of stereo around the time Spector was making his classic recordings with The Crystals, The Ronettes, Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, etc. Indeed, Spector was famous for wearing a lapel pin reading “Back to Mono,” a replica of which is included in the box set of his work bearing that title (now available fairly cheaply from a lot of online sources). I’ve been thinking of ways of describing and understanding this aesthetic; it’s an ongoing project of mine, and at the risk of boring some of you, I thought I would share some of the basics of these thoughts.
They go back to the 19th century. At least that’s where I understand the history of modern listening to begin, and Spector’s work, in flouting the notion of “fidelity,” has to be understood in terms of listening, because it bucks the idea that everyone wants to listen to perfectly mimetic sound—the is it live or is it memorex ideal. My understanding of this history is not particularly deep by scholarly standards. It’s based, though, on a recent scholarly book by Jonathan Sterne, called The Audible Past. Sterne traces the development of what he calls “audile technique,” a mode of listening that involves separating out some sound from the larger environment, and fixing aural attention upon it. This is how we listen today. Since I can read the minds of cats, I’ll illustrate it this way. When I put Spoon’s Girls Can Tell (incidentally a title swiped from the Spector-produced Crystals) on a little while ago, my cat heard the music, but he didn’t see any particular reason to separate it from the sound of the cars going by outside, or of the heat blowing through the vents, or of my typing on this keyboard. He did not wiggle his butt, bob his head, or tap his paw--and not because he doesn't like Spoon (an essentially impossible state for all animate beings). Spoon was just another element in the ambient sound of the environment. But we humanimals, through a relatively brief history of cultural acclimation, immediately separate out the sound produced by sound reproduction technology and bring Spoon into the foreground, relegating the heat and cars to the background. The fascinating historical dimension of Sterne’s argument is that he traces this back to the development of the stethoscope and the sound telegraph in the early to mid 19th century. These technological developments suggested that sound was manipulable, and an object of isolable attention, in a way that we are all now used to.
Scenes from the next major to minor post:
Brian Eno!
Andy Warhol!
Anyway, I just saw today that Phil Spector’s murder trial (he is being tried for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson four years ago) is going to be televised; the judge’s reasoning is that it’s time to, as the AP puts it, “get beyond the O. J. Simpson trial.” And it’s true, I guess: if Americans have proven so capable of getting beyond Vietnam, they might well be able to get beyond O. J. as well.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Spector’s work for the past few months. He is certainly a lionized figure, if not the most lionized figure, in the history of rock and pop production. But like a lot of such lions, he’s generally understood through shorthand—largely the phrase “wall of sound” (which is certainly accurate) and a host of stories about his extraordinary misogyny (incidentally, Ronnie Spector’s autobiography, which documents much of this, is one of the better celebrity bios I’ve read), or his penchant for guns (which may have been part of his studio toolbox: he is said to have forced the Ramones to record parts of End of the Century at gunpoint).
The Spector sound is a really fascinating fine art of sounding, well, bad--at least bad in terms of the notion of (high) fidelity, which became predominant with the advent of stereo around the time Spector was making his classic recordings with The Crystals, The Ronettes, Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, etc. Indeed, Spector was famous for wearing a lapel pin reading “Back to Mono,” a replica of which is included in the box set of his work bearing that title (now available fairly cheaply from a lot of online sources). I’ve been thinking of ways of describing and understanding this aesthetic; it’s an ongoing project of mine, and at the risk of boring some of you, I thought I would share some of the basics of these thoughts.
They go back to the 19th century. At least that’s where I understand the history of modern listening to begin, and Spector’s work, in flouting the notion of “fidelity,” has to be understood in terms of listening, because it bucks the idea that everyone wants to listen to perfectly mimetic sound—the is it live or is it memorex ideal. My understanding of this history is not particularly deep by scholarly standards. It’s based, though, on a recent scholarly book by Jonathan Sterne, called The Audible Past. Sterne traces the development of what he calls “audile technique,” a mode of listening that involves separating out some sound from the larger environment, and fixing aural attention upon it. This is how we listen today. Since I can read the minds of cats, I’ll illustrate it this way. When I put Spoon’s Girls Can Tell (incidentally a title swiped from the Spector-produced Crystals) on a little while ago, my cat heard the music, but he didn’t see any particular reason to separate it from the sound of the cars going by outside, or of the heat blowing through the vents, or of my typing on this keyboard. He did not wiggle his butt, bob his head, or tap his paw--and not because he doesn't like Spoon (an essentially impossible state for all animate beings). Spoon was just another element in the ambient sound of the environment. But we humanimals, through a relatively brief history of cultural acclimation, immediately separate out the sound produced by sound reproduction technology and bring Spoon into the foreground, relegating the heat and cars to the background. The fascinating historical dimension of Sterne’s argument is that he traces this back to the development of the stethoscope and the sound telegraph in the early to mid 19th century. These technological developments suggested that sound was manipulable, and an object of isolable attention, in a way that we are all now used to.
Scenes from the next major to minor post:
Brian Eno!
Andy Warhol!
Thursday, February 8, 2007
M2M reviews the two free MP3s from the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album in real time.
CYHSY are a band that consitute a fair amount of the thread by which I’m tenuously holding onto some knowledge of the “scene,” as it were. They sound like early Talking Heads, they put out their first album entirely on their own, they have a not-too-slick 80s sound that really grows on you, they made the Times Arts and Leisure section around November 05 (which means they are no longer part of the scene, duh, I know that). If you knew me last year, then you know that my former band, Polar Bear Parade (got a problem with that name, buddy?), practiced across the hall from them in Red Hook, Brooklyn, because I relentlessly told people about this for about four months. Nevertheless we only saw them once and were duly sheepish; i.e. tried to act like we didn’t care (that’s what people in New York generally do around celebrities anyway). Anyway, they have a new album out, and as an overworked schnorer I thought I’d record my immediate impressions of the two songs they’ve posted for free on their website.
"Love Song No. 7":
Hmmm. Piano. Slow. They’re trying to sound weirder. There’s something Bowie-esque here, but not the usual Bowie people copy. More the Scary Monsters Bowie. Cool in concept, though I’m still—hey, they just switched to ¾ time! Oh, no, back to 4/4. Someone’s whistling, unless that’s my heat. Accordion—it’s getting slightly twisted, heading into Neutral Milk Hotel territory—and some serious rhythmic jumpiness despite the slowness. The main lyric seems to be “Safe and sound.” Was that someone opening my screen door? Not really coming together for me.
"Underwater (You and Me)":
Bowie again—but Heroes era, by way of Pianosaurus—remember them anyone? The vocal, though, got no Bowie going at all. Oooh. That little descending bit there sounds like “Do They Know its Christmas?” The production is muddy or else these are super crap quality mp3s. I like that tremolo guitar solo, all chords! Lyrics pretty indecipherable on first listen. Midtempo is a risky thing, my friend. My mind is wandering. . . oh, there’s that toy piano again, above the fade. This is the best part! The rest is kind of cluttered.
Later: I accidentally started the first song up on two different pages, with a delay of 20 or 30 seconds, and it sounded really cool.
"Love Song No. 7":
Hmmm. Piano. Slow. They’re trying to sound weirder. There’s something Bowie-esque here, but not the usual Bowie people copy. More the Scary Monsters Bowie. Cool in concept, though I’m still—hey, they just switched to ¾ time! Oh, no, back to 4/4. Someone’s whistling, unless that’s my heat. Accordion—it’s getting slightly twisted, heading into Neutral Milk Hotel territory—and some serious rhythmic jumpiness despite the slowness. The main lyric seems to be “Safe and sound.” Was that someone opening my screen door? Not really coming together for me.
"Underwater (You and Me)":
Bowie again—but Heroes era, by way of Pianosaurus—remember them anyone? The vocal, though, got no Bowie going at all. Oooh. That little descending bit there sounds like “Do They Know its Christmas?” The production is muddy or else these are super crap quality mp3s. I like that tremolo guitar solo, all chords! Lyrics pretty indecipherable on first listen. Midtempo is a risky thing, my friend. My mind is wandering. . . oh, there’s that toy piano again, above the fade. This is the best part! The rest is kind of cluttered.
Later: I accidentally started the first song up on two different pages, with a delay of 20 or 30 seconds, and it sounded really cool.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Not So Much
Reader,
I didn’t marry him. That’s not the reason for my quietness of late. No, my numerous arch-foes have succeeded in silencing me for the past two weeks. But don’t worry, I’ve got a sucker punch or two in me. And that’s your last warning, arch-foes!
That said, I have little to declare, except Oscar Wilde’s genius, as well as some fragmentary documentation of my own muted thinking from this lost time. (Warning: Sacvan Bercovitch fans, you'll be disappointed.) Some shards that have crossed my mind:
-The Bob Spitz Beatles bio ended up spouting every tired, racist cliché about Yoko Ono you could ever imagine (at one point he even describes John as the innocent caught in a villainous tug-of-war between two manipulative Asians, Yoko and the Maharishi). It’s a shame that Spitz has the research skills, but then is in the end, at best, a lazy hack.
-The thirty or so seconds of John singing “Ah, Ah” in “A Day in the Life,” directly following the “woke up, got out of bed” interlude, constitute one of the top two or three most sublime moments in pop music history.
-Oh my god, Joe Harvard commented on my post about his Velvet Underground book for the 33 1/3 series! Ok, ok, I admit to tracking down his band’s myspace page and sending him a link, but he responded at length, with extreme grace, and without requiring any further harassment. He even spilled the beans about whether he went to Harvard, but you’ll have to read it yourself to find out.
-Ok, ok, Destroyer is really good.
-Should I try to write a post about the Sports Club Network? Do people know what this is? I’ve been considering it, but it might just turn into a rant about Creed (the band, not the fragrance—was there not a lawsuit? Could that have been a way of stopping them?). Nonetheless, there seems to be a genre of “Straight-to-Sports-Club-Network” videos that might merit comment. Or maybe that is the comment.
-One of the final memories of my marriage—perhaps the last not directly related to splitting up—is of waking up and hearing my ex-wife say, in an uncharacteristically deadpan voice, “I had an erotic dream about Jack White.” This memory actually makes me kind of happy; there’s something aesthetically pleasing about it.
-Whenever I hear some cable news pundit refer to “what they’re saying in the blogosphere” I fully intend to raise my glass to him or her (i.e. to the TV). Or if I’m not holding a glass, something else. My ass comes to mind, but probably not.
I didn’t marry him. That’s not the reason for my quietness of late. No, my numerous arch-foes have succeeded in silencing me for the past two weeks. But don’t worry, I’ve got a sucker punch or two in me. And that’s your last warning, arch-foes!
That said, I have little to declare, except Oscar Wilde’s genius, as well as some fragmentary documentation of my own muted thinking from this lost time. (Warning: Sacvan Bercovitch fans, you'll be disappointed.) Some shards that have crossed my mind:
-The Bob Spitz Beatles bio ended up spouting every tired, racist cliché about Yoko Ono you could ever imagine (at one point he even describes John as the innocent caught in a villainous tug-of-war between two manipulative Asians, Yoko and the Maharishi). It’s a shame that Spitz has the research skills, but then is in the end, at best, a lazy hack.
-The thirty or so seconds of John singing “Ah, Ah” in “A Day in the Life,” directly following the “woke up, got out of bed” interlude, constitute one of the top two or three most sublime moments in pop music history.
-Oh my god, Joe Harvard commented on my post about his Velvet Underground book for the 33 1/3 series! Ok, ok, I admit to tracking down his band’s myspace page and sending him a link, but he responded at length, with extreme grace, and without requiring any further harassment. He even spilled the beans about whether he went to Harvard, but you’ll have to read it yourself to find out.
-Ok, ok, Destroyer is really good.
-Should I try to write a post about the Sports Club Network? Do people know what this is? I’ve been considering it, but it might just turn into a rant about Creed (the band, not the fragrance—was there not a lawsuit? Could that have been a way of stopping them?). Nonetheless, there seems to be a genre of “Straight-to-Sports-Club-Network” videos that might merit comment. Or maybe that is the comment.
-One of the final memories of my marriage—perhaps the last not directly related to splitting up—is of waking up and hearing my ex-wife say, in an uncharacteristically deadpan voice, “I had an erotic dream about Jack White.” This memory actually makes me kind of happy; there’s something aesthetically pleasing about it.
-Whenever I hear some cable news pundit refer to “what they’re saying in the blogosphere” I fully intend to raise my glass to him or her (i.e. to the TV). Or if I’m not holding a glass, something else. My ass comes to mind, but probably not.
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