Cornershop Cornershop and the Double-o-Groove of (Ample Play)

In my review of Cornershop’s 2009 album Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast, I recalled the band’s quick rise in the mid-to-late-90s post-alternative nation free-for-all, as a key part of semi-pop’s semi-sudden global-a-go-go. With this year’s sublime, and asScott Plagenhoef wrote, wonderfully out-of-fashion Cornershop and the Double-‘o’ Groove of, they were once again buried by the more fleeting, hype-happy stuff, but they’re used to that by now. Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayers are doing just fine self-releasing theatrical odes to the vibrant Indian culture pulsating in the heart of England. A cult band from the start, a cult band they remain. This is their second best album. That’s cool.

The heart of the album is the vocal presence of Bubbley Kaur, an otherwise everyday New Delhi-born/Lancashire-residing housewife who Tjinder Singh met at a party several years ago (it’s a pseudonym). By 2004, Singh had built the irresistible “Topknot” around her voice. Like on the impossibly great When I Was Born for the Seventh Time, Singh merged Punjabi musical elements with those drawn from Western dance and hip-hop music, but what really stuck on this track is the hook. It’s not one of Kaur’s best-recorded vocals (it sounded purposefully “old”), and though the cadence felt a bit knotty to my Western ears, it was a blast training myself to recognize that the last thing the melodies were ever going to do would be to resolve in a way I was used to. Gradually, I just marveled at the way she bobbed around the rhythm, like a guitar virtuoso gliding over jazzy chord changes and making it sound fluid in a pop context.

Rough Trade released it, Peel wore out his 7”, but the track got little to no traction in the U.S. Ironically, critics would go insane for a mixtape released late that year by a fierce London art-student and Sri Lankan Tamil expat who’d dropped a guest verse on “Topknot”s remix. Maybe it’s because I don’t dig deep enough into Punjabi pop, but in 2011, “Topknot” still sounds cooler and less of-its-time than most other top 50 singles striving to do the same stuff.

“Topknot,” along with “United Provinces of India”—which dates back to 2003, and which by the way boasts one of 2011’s straight-up fiercest beats—and the minimalist drum-and-bass march of “Natch,” is the core of Double-‘o’s rhythm-driven, technicolor fantasia. Kaur sings her vocals entirely in Punjabi, and Singh fuses them to tracks that, as is the group’s wont, see no tradition, scene, or culture they can’t pull from. For the most part, he starts with basic rhythm tracks, and sometimes he stops there. But not always: “The Biro Pen” is a quaint ode to the springloaded ballpoint technology (I think), but it’s presented with the flashy widescreen giddiness of a peak-period Pizzicato Five track. “Double-Decker Eyelashes” merges Kaur’s loping vocal with an arid, courtly, British harpsichord, a patient coffeeshop bassline (you can hear hands sliding on strings), and periodic tabla fills. I’m hard-pressed to find music released in 2011 (aside from the Holy Ghost LP and the Go! Team’s “Apollo Throwdown”) that fills me with as much weird joy as this album.

Curren$y “Daze of Thunder”/Curren$y f. Big K.R.I.T & Killa Kyleon “Moon & Stars (Remix)”/Bad Meets Evil “Fast Lane”

I like driving, and I like rap songs about cars and driving, which is why I like these songs. Yes, the Curren$y tracks are from his least-heralded mixtape of the year (I love Weekend at Burnie’s for what it’s worth), but because it dropped so long ago, they’ve stuck around and soundtracked many of my own behind-the-wheel stints this year. “Daze of Thunder” is blissfully simple, just Curren$y spitting with no hooks or choruses (and few breaths) over Kanye’s track for Rick Ross’s “Live Fast, Die Young” from last year. It’s as if at the beginning of the track he merges onto the interstate, weaves in and out of traffic without alerting the cops during his verse, and then slowly arrives at his destination as the track winds down. “Moon and Stars (Remix)” was originally featured on 2010’s K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, and I’m including it because it’s got an insanely smooth G-Funk hook, I didn’t write about it last year, and K.R.I.T. calls weed “Yoda” in it. As for Bad Meets Evil, it’s a generally awkward step in Eminem’s attempt to be “real” and not a celebrity-as-rapper, an initiative he dumbly calls “Shady 2.0″, which pairs him up with long-time pal Royce da 5′9″ (”hi, Rihanna“). And “Fast Lane” works really well; mostly because of its trunk-rattling track, solid Nate Dogg-esque hook with an extended car metaphor, some tongue-twisting speed-rap from Marshall, and either because of or despite (I can’t decide yet) Em’s super gross Nicki Minaj shout-out and Royce’s admission of his evolution from “massive masturbator” to “Michael Jackson’s activator.” It’s the only song I listened to off the album, and I did so like 100 times.

Deerhunter “Nosebleed”/Atlas Sound “Mona Lisa”/Jeremy Jay “Out on the Highway”

Deerhunter didn’t release an album this year, but they put out a track that ranks among their best work yet. “Nosebleed”–the b-side of the “Memory Boy” single–is a simple acoustic-guitar-driven rave-up mini-anthem that clocks in at less than 3 minutes and crams in all the stuff that makes Deerhunter great. An awesome shout-along vocal and chorus hook from Cox, a killer riff, lyrics about the fallibility of memory and doing things you’re not supposed to do, um…bleeding. I’m not a big Atlas Sound fan, though I’m totally in support of an artist pushing his artistic limits publicly as much as Cox does. I’m much happier when his voice melds with the ambient surroundings of the textures he creates for this project, and thus I chafe when he tries to actually sing, as he does too often on Parallax in a crooner style that doesn’t fit his strengths at all. On “Mona Lisa,” however, he uses his voice as a breathy lead instrument for a quaint, incredibly charming folk song. God, this guy just has hooks coming out of his ears, doesn’t he? Finally, if you want evidence that Deerhunter’s influence has started to spread and infiltrate others, you only need to check the lead track “Out on the Highway” from Jeremy Jay’s otherwise ignorable Dream Diary. Does he need to pay Cox (or Lockett Pundt) residuals for this? It’s a really good song, but come on dude. Pay up.

Ford & Lopatin “Emergency Room”/Gardens & Villa “Orange Blossom”

Daniel Lopatin spent most of the last part of 2011 getting serious dap for going art-world on Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, but “Emergency Room” wins the 2011 Altered Zones award as the track that would have blown the fuck up on the 1982 version of MTV that no one outside major markets could get on cable yet. Gardens & Villa–the Secretly Canadian signees that everyone overlooks and that I can’t hope to be objective about–are still regretting buying that Beta player and racking up high scores on Galaga too, but they actually have a vocalist, and play a killer live set (with a Gary Numan cover). Think Yeasayer with all the excess gloop removed. (Speaking of these dudes, remember White Williams? Whatever happened to that guy?)

The Go! Team “Apollo Throwdown”

The Go! Team has always sounded like a producer stumbled upon a vault of Malcolm McLaren’s unreleased discoveries, fell in love with his field-recordings of some kids double-dutching in a 1983 playground, and then went fucking Bomb Squad on them. The real story’s a little different–Brighton UK producer makes album in bedroom, builds band to tour around it–but I like my version better. “Apollo Throwdown” comes off what might be the band’s last album. If that’s the case, too bad (they’re super fun), but also: good job ending with far and away your best song. “Throwdown” brings all the best Go! Team stuff to the table–teenage girls sing-rapping, groups of kids sing-rapping, a chorus that spirals heavenward, a giddy vibe that makes you want to choreograph a huge Busby Berkeley-type dance sequence for the thing–but adds just the right dash of psychedelic wonder to the mix that pushes it past simple pastiche. I’ve narrowed it down to a sample from Harry Nilsson’s “Birds” that elevates the track into something that could have sequenced well on the Avalanches’ Since I Left You. One day back in early February, in the midst of an absolutely horrible emotional week, I ran mundane errands for an entire afternoon with nothing but this song on a loop. After about an hour, it was all I could do not to swing around lampposts.

Lower Dens “Batman”

Speaking of bands without new LPs but who released killer pop tracks on singles! Right?! Hey Lower Dens, I dig Second-Hand Movement but more songs like “Batman”–maybe 2-3 stabs at stuff like it on forthcoming albums even–is only going to do well for you. Love: Eric.

My Morning Jacket “Circuital”/Megafaun “Get Right”

My Morning Jacket’s sixth album, and first since the turd that was Evil Urges, is way better than it has any right to be. Gone are the dorky funk pastiches and woefully misguided attempts to make Jim James’s voice sound like Kermit-doing-Rob Halford. All that’s left is what a big-budget, druggy roots rock album should sound like in 2011. It’s the album that firmly establishes MMJ with the Flaming Lips and the (sadly underperforming) Wilco as the default “good”  ampitheater/festival rock bands of the moment. There are doofy elements on Circuitalof course, but that’s okay. The title track isn’t one: it’s MMJ doing their version of an early-seventies Who song. It takes about 2 minutes to wind through an acoustic intro, and then soars into a straight-up anthem for several more minutes–James’ tremendous vocal performance (his best in years) buffered by a bed of acoustic strumming, nervous piano, a rad solo, and fist-pumping breakdowns.

Now then: how long before Megafaun makes it to MMJ/FL/Wilco territory? Do they want to? Sure sounds like it on their tremendous self-titled second 2xLP, on which they cram as many of America’s weird musical traditions into one release as I’ve heard in a while. There are straight-up Neil Young-style folk jams, excursions into free jazz freakiness and slight returns to John Fahey-esque compositions, stuff that’s based in the church/stuff that comes from the fields/still more ambient/electronic noises that come from computers, even one song (”Second Friend”) that sounds like fucking Ray Davies and has a bassoon in it. On top of all that is “Get Right,” a 8 and a half minute gospel-tinged shoegaze strumfest and shoe-in for 2011’s fucking grooviest song (bro). I was sort of dumbfounded at the corporate-look of Megafaun’s album cover this year–looks like it could be the logo for something called GloboChem or something (Megafaun itself sounds like a Mike Judge-style fake corporation that sells baby animals or something)–but it’s fitting in a weird way, I suppose. Because in all of its sublimely well-executed complexity, Megafaun is the band as brand–an entity that’s open to incorporating any and everything.

“Rebel, Rebel, No” [66:08 | 192k | 90.9mb]

1. Deerhoof “Secret Mobilization”
2. Sandro Perri “How Will I”
3. Thundercat “For Love I Come”
4. Destroyer “Savage Night at the Opera”
5. Wild Beasts “Bed of Nails”
6. Atlas Sound “Mona Lisa”
7. Megafaun “Get Right”
8. Bill Callahan “America!”
9. Thao & Mirah “How Dare You”
10. James Pants “Screams of Passion”
11. Blanck Mass “Chernobyl”
12. Mark McGuire “Get Lost”
13. Future Islands “The Great Fire”
14. Karl Blau “Celebrate By Singing”
15. Skeletons “More Than the One Thing”
16. Tune-Yards “Powa”

It’s one big mix, the tracklist is in the “lyrics” part of the mp3, so it shows up all fancy in your iPhone.

“Like a Killer” [61:40 | 192k | 84.8mb]

1. Cornershop f. Bubbley Kaur “Natch”
2. Battles f. Kazu Makino “Sweetie & Shag”
3. WIN WIN f. Lizzie Bougatsos “Releaserpm”
4. SBTRKT f. Yukimi Nagano “Wildfire”
5. Jai Paul “BTSTU”
6. High Places “Year Off”
7. John Maus “Believer”
8. Radiohead “Separator”
9. St. Vincent “Surgeon”
10. Purity Ring “Ungirthed”
11. Araabmuzik “Streetz Tonight”
12. The Rapture “Come Back to Me”
13. Hercules & Love Affair “Falling”
14. Holy Ghost “Jam for Jerry”
15. Jacques Greene “Another Girl”
16. Zomby “Natalia’s Song”
17. Clams Casino “Illest Alive”

These questions are difficult because they’re part and parcel with a situation that would define us as a list of cultural commodities we’ve consumed. This is a very banal idea. Facebook doesn’t seem to have our genetic code on it– it has the list of books we “like.” That’s how we define ourselves today. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like a douchebag making an obvious point. One can’t help but sound like a douchebag when talking about the books you like.

Oof, right? That’s what I and a bunch of other people thought. There were other aspects of the piece that made people cringe as well. On Odd Future, he lapsed into highbrow crit-speak: “they have an attitude we could all learn from. It’s at the point of piteously forgetting the human condition and becoming its own fetish. It walks that line carefully.” He would later lambaste record stores, expressing contentment that they were going out of business (a statement he would soon retract, though dubiously–how many Megastores ever hired snobby clerks?), and perhaps glibly resent the fact that he hadn’t “wept at the feet of a leper or something.”

The interview immediately irked me, to the degree that on a break from writing, I Googled “meme generator” and made these things. People thought they were funny, which was my goal (if you don’t know, I’m sort of a poorly-edited windbag/class-clown on the web). Then I moved on.

But I soon regretted my little gimmick. Partially because it was immature and catty, partially because it was unfair to Maus as a polemical artist (more on that in a minute), but mostly because 1) in the embedded quote above, he’s both correct and holds to his own personal aesthetic philosophy, 2) I’m more like him than I felt comfortable admitting, and 3) I failed to properly account for my own artist-as-public-figure biases. So, here we go.

First, a bit about Maus. He’s both  working toward two (2) (!) PhDs, one in Political Science and another in Philosophy, and he’s musical auto-didact and artist’s artist, having self-released a slew of stuff since he was a teenager. His latest–quite good–album is inspired by the psychoanalytical political philosophy of Alain Badiou, specifically his 15 Theses on Contemporary Art. Here’s #14:

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

The last sentence of that quote gave Maus’s new album its title. The sentence directly before it explains things a bit more: “Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy.” In other words, once we agree to the terms provided to us by Power (here, it’s the State), they don’t have to actively propagandize, or limit our expression–we internalize their ideology and unconsciously do it ourselves. Then there’s #11: “The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience.” Does this sound like the sort of worldview that jibes with, well, the foundational populist/democratic principles of rock and pop, let alone a magazine piece about one’s favorite commodities? Of course not, and that’s why we should appreciate Maus.

On a personal level, after re-reading the feature a few times, I started seeing lots of myself in his responses. If we accept his Badiouian reverence, Maus doesn’t make music for polemical and personal reasons, not to garner Best New Music designations or submit to the superficial rigors of the online music PR machine. But he’s pals with Ariel Pink, and his newest album taps into the sort of soft-focus early-80s FM nostalgia that happens to be really hip right now, and so he gets upstreamed to a larger public, like it or not, and he’s dealing with it in his own way. I have no way to prove this right now, but I’d argue that he’s signifying a bit, stepping in front of the narrative critics and journalists might want to build around him, and asserting his theoretical and high-culture bonafides before anything else.

On a much smaller level, that’s the exact same thing I did for the first few years I worked as a music critic. I knew my writing chops weren’t at the level of my favorite writers, so I foregrounded the stuff I knew I had on them–all the books I was reading for grad seminars. Hell, I still do that fairly often: it’s what I got, why not try and flaunt it? For the record, I’m also an Adorno fan, despite his failings. In fact, Maus’s public persona has more than a bit of Cranky Old Theodor in it as well, if I may be so bold.

Which is the third and most important point I want to make: we need public musical figures like John Maus. Cranky, irascible, contradictory, polemical, and most of all button-pushing public figures. Don’t get me wrong: I firmly draw the line at those who pump bile into the public sphere for shock’s sake, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the effort. To put it another way: if we want to grant certain members of society who possess particular talents the privilege of publicly entertaining us, we need to allow them to behave in ways we wouldn’t, for instance, want from our friends. They can fill that role for us.

This past March, I watched a Smith Westerns set at South By Southwest, during which frontman Cullen Omori berated a girl in the front of the crowd, asserting that she (I’m paraphrasing) “talked shit about me on Twitter.” My friend rolled her eyes, but I was moved to defend the barely-legal little shit. My argument: doesn’t someone have to act like this? Like film villains, isn’t it best when those people are over there entertaining us, letting us use them as a dartboard for our own anxieties and antipathies in exchange for our attention and money?

Music of course predates film, if not written language, and it’s a vastly more atmospheric element of our everyday lives, which often leads us to unconsciously feel an intimacy (or fear, loathing, etc.) toward musicians that we don’t toward actors. We often assume that musicians aren’t playing a role; that what we see is who they really are. It’s a distinction a lot of folks like to make, but I think it’s the wrong one. Performances are public, and though Maus and Badiou likely disagree, they inherently have to assume some sort of stance or relationship to an audience. And one particularly entertaining (see also: infuriating, enlightening, time/money-wasting, etc) stance is that of the brat. Like when Maus’s pal Ariel stormed off the stage at the most recent Pitchfork Fest. Because fuck what you want; this is what I’m giving you.

Now, we should always feel obligated to call artists on their bullshit when it’s purposefully hateful (and I can excuse my Maus-memes because they were responding to an interview he gave to a major music magazine), but I’m still convinced that music, and society at large, needs brats. Theory-quoting aesthetes like Maus are only using a slightly different language than nihilistic punks, boyish tantrum throwers, and general-issue arrogant fucksticks. They can challenge our preconceptions about what makes an effective performance, push our conversations forward, give subsequent artists something to respond to.  We may despise their attitudes, but–and this is something I need to personally account for much more–we need to account for the fact that they have no interest in hanging out with us, or making us love them. Quite the opposite, actually. That’s why they’re artists.

Um, yeah.

It’s been a while, right? Errrrr…um…how have you been? You look great.

So, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. There’s…someone else. And there has been, for a while now. I couldn’t work up the nerve to tell you; it just never seemed like the right time. But yeah.

I posted my year-end mixes there, but to be honest, there’s not been much other in-depth activity other than the semi-frequent posting of photos and links. The new one is RSS-able, and you can switch the feed over from this one if it’s been collecting cobwebs in your reader.

If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, you can check the “about” link. I’ve been busy this summer, and my name’s started showing up at some interesting new locations. I’ll be writing some more longform bloggy stuff soon, I promise, and all of that will be copied here. No need for the piddly everyday stuff.

I still have feelings for you. I’ll see you around?

Mix 1 [51:58, 192kbps, 71.5mb]

1. Egyptrixx “Drive U Crazy” (from the Battle for North America EP)
2. Tanlines “Real Life” (from the Settings EP)
3. Gyptian f. Nicki Minaj “Hold Yuh” (original from Hold You)
4. Wayne Marshall “Galangs (M.I.A. + Vijay Iler)” (Vimeo)
5. Kanye West f. Dwele “POWER” (from My Dark Beautiful Twisted Fantasy)
6. Major Lazer/La Roux “Bulletproof (Nacey Remix f. Matt Hemerlein)” (from Lazerproof)
7. Gorillaz f. Mick Jones & Paul Simonon “Plastic Beach” (from Plastic Beach)
8. Gonjasufi “Candylane” (from A Sufi and A Killer)
9. Caribou “Odessa” (from Swim)
10. High Places “On Giving Up” (from High Places vs. Mankind)
11. Janelle Monae “Wondaland” (from The ArchAndroid)
12. Big Boi f. Andre 3000 “Lookin’ 4 Ya” (unreleased)
13. El Guincho “FM Tan Sexy” (from Pop Negro)
14. Vampire Weekend “Giving Up the Gun” (from Contra)

Mix 2 [53:06, 192kbps, 73.1mb]

1. Lil Wayne f. Cory Gunz “6′7″” (from The Carter IV)
2. Yelawolf “Looking for Alien Love” (unreleased)
3. Big K.R.I.T. “As Small As A Giant” (from K.R.I.T. Wuz Here)
4. Freddie Gibbs “The Ghetto” (from Str8 Killa No Filla)
5. Curren$y f. Young Roddy, Trademark “Hold On” (from Pilot Talk II)
6. Starlito “Alright” (from Renaissance Gangster)
7. Jay Electronica “Exhibit C” (single)
8. Twista f. Raekwon “The Heat” (from The Perfect Storm)
9. Fat Joe f. Young Jeezy ” (Ha Ha) Slow Down” (from The Darkside, Vol. 1)
10. E-40 f. Gucci Mane “Whip It Up” (from Revenue Retrievin: Day Shift)
11. J. Cole “Who Dat” (single)
12. Big Boi f. George Clinton, Too $hort “Fo Yo Sorrows” (from Sir Lucious Leftfoot)
13. Wiz Khalifa f. Nesby “Supply” (from Kush and Orange Juice)
14. Das Racist f. Lakutis “Rapping 2 U” (from Sit Down, Man)

Long before Gordon Lightfoot was a Canadian folk legend, he was a legend in my father’s white Riviera convertible. It was the early ’80s and that’s the only place he existed in my small world, but it was a place where music dominated. It was a place where my small world felt huge. Of the dozens of cassettes my father had in his otherwise spotless car, Gord’s Gold stood out in a special way to me. As a perennial passenger (though in hindsight I’d like to say that I was the GTO-in-training), there was ample time to sit and stare at all the cassettes trying to make sense of the music we were cruising to; trying to connect whatever dots I possibly could with the strange and intoxicating sounds coming out of the speakers; mythologizing without even knowing it; superimposing and fusing the seemingly disparate visual fundamentals of color, shape, texture and my ever-evolving sense of beauty with the audio dimension in which I was immersed. He had a name that could have easily placed him in a position of high rank in the Star Wars universe and — looking a great deal like my father (perm-and-all) — had an especially-rugged handsomeness that appealed to this particularly Indiana Jones-obsessed youth.

And the songs sounded like a day with Dad.

Fast forward to my sophomore year of college. As a DJ at WIUS here in Bloomington, I had the pleasure of having up-and-coming singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith on my radio show. I’d fallen in love with his debut and was lucky enough to hustle him onto my show when he passed through town opening for John Hiatt (at what was then called Mars). We chatted awkwardly (as two shy souls are prone to do) for about 15 minutes before he started to play some songs with his acoustic guitar and a voice which came from another time. Among the songs was Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” originally released on his ‘66 debut Lightfoot! and then re-packaged in ‘75 as the opening track on Gord’s Gold.

Ribbon of darkness over me  /  Since my true love walked out the door
Tears I never had before  /  Ribbon of Darkness over me

I taped that radio program. Though I haven’t listened to it since the day it was taped, I think about digging out that cassette three or four times a year, negotiating my humility for a chance to once again hear Ron’s performance of that song to an audience of one. It remains one of my favorite folk songs of all time. A universal tune that is so well-written as to allow the singer performing it to wear it like a costume, to fill it with his own particularities, to take the universal and give it a sense of time & place.

Oh how I wish your heart could see  /  How mine just aches and breaks all day
Come on home and take away  /  This ribbon of darkness over me

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in Bloomington, Indiana, where half the adult men also look like Gordon Lightfoot.  Previously, Chris has spiced our ear-hams wonderful tunes from the likes of Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, Dion, Mad Season, Donnie & Joe Emerson, Pip Proud, Dwight Twilley, and Larry Jon Wilson.

Radio didn’t air the music so the first punk albums failed to sell and further adventurous signings ceased. SST released the equivalent of six or seven albums by Hüsker Dü or the Meat Puppets before they were signed by major labels; that’s insane. How many bands even last that long? Midway through their SST careers the bands managed to get the ears of some of the erstwhile music press and that got us requests for their albums from the major labels. They claimed to dig the bands but as realistic, responsible A&R men, they knew they had to listen with Lee Abrams’ ears and those were simply deaf to the era. Black Flag didn’t want to run a record label, they wanted to sign to a major label in 1978! The New York offices signed most of the first punk bands but the LA offices knew the LA bands from that one non-Abrams station, KROQ, and from local press and the early doc, The Decline of Western Civilization (1980). The LA majors also saw that by 1981 The Germs, X, Black Flag, The Adolescents, and others were selling enough records in the greater SoCal market that if you extrapolated out to the rest of the country they’d be going gold on their debut releases! But the major labels also knew that Lee Abrams was there to stop that all from being conceivable.

Abrams was quite clear about the destruction he’d accomplished by 1980. He’s apparently appeared on several Alan Parsons’ albums, the nadir of engineered musique concrte that these numbers guys created while tripping on drugs left behind by musicians — it was pod music for pod people, “lifestylers” in the parlance of SST, the perfect wallpaper for the leather couch. Failing to reach Art, the engineers reached only design. Any doubts Lee might’ve had about shit-canning an entire next generation of rock bands were certainly relieved by every new issue of Rolling Stone magazine in those years (1975 – 1991). Unlike Lee, Jan hasn’t come clean, though he is at least out-of-the-closet now, which probably calls for a revisionist book about the magazine and its effect, updating the Robert Sam Anson and Robert Draper books, neither of which really put the musical wood to Mr. Straight Arrow. And its what happened to music that matters. Rolling Stone followed up on later New Journalism through the seventies but it gave up on music.

As Abrams joined XM satellite radio in 2004 he was happy to acknowledge his crimes in the next context of all the miracles of Art he expected to achieve at XM. Unfortunately the hundreds of channels available allowed him just to subdivide the music further. The bastard-child rock and roll that he initially found as a kid on sixties radio humoring R&B, garage rock, C&W, surf, rod, bluebeat, Sinatra, jug band, blues, acid rock, movie themes, folk, et. al., was dissected, drawn-and-quartered, pulled-apart racially, sonically, stylistically, classwise and other ways and then these have been further subdivided at XM and its former competitor Sirius and then beamed down from satellite with the destructive force of those SDI directed energy weapons, only those were theoretical.

If you care to read more about any of this stuff, I wrote a piece a couple years ago for the music recommendation website Pitchfork on the Abrams-fueled rise of “classic rock,” and the dissipating materiality of (the Abrams-strangled medium of) satellite radio transmissions.  I really should update that thing when I get time; there’s a ton of different directions I could take it.

A friend of mine used to have a tape made by his college roommate’s band. They were from Lansing, Mich., they were called the Smalls, and as far as I know they played only a small handful of gigs years ago. I am not even sure if they considered themselves a real band, but they wrote some songs, and at some point they thought to put them down on this demo tape. And since I once spent a lot of time driving around with this friend, and there were only a few tapes in the car, I wound up listening to the Smalls. And I grew to really like this tape. They were in some ways a pretty typical early-1990s band, indebted to R.E.M. and college rock, though they had a much better sense of humor, with a flair for absurdity that Beck would be known for a couple of years later. “Give me your telephone number, I’ll fax you the story of my life,” went one line, which was a pretty sly nod to technology at the time. Fax machines seemed futuristic.

Since this was a demo tape, and there were probably five or 10 made, and very few people ever heard this band, and the copy of the tape I once had is long gone, this music exists only in my head. There is literally one person in the world, my friend who originally pointed out the Smalls to me, that I can talk to about it. Every other time it came up, it would be in the context of describing what it was like, the story of this tape, like I am explaining to you now. I can’t play it for anybody. So for me, as music goes, it’s as scarce as it gets. And the Smalls tape is my most coveted musical artifact. Anything “good,” that I know other people care about, I can get in a couple of clicks, no problem. But the Smalls is harder to find, maybe impossible. This is why people say they will grab old photographs first if fleeing a burning building.

I have one of these too!  There was a guy I met junior year of college (around 1997)–a friend of Spencer, my roommate’s boyfriend.  Named Dave Something.  I only met him maybe once or twice, but I sure heard about him a lot.  He was an audio freak and total collector–he worked the soundboards for big university productions, had a massive and massively weird LP collection in the apartment he lived in by himself, and most important for this story, and this memory, he made his own music, too.

Weird, fun, catchy, and in its own way “smart” music.  This is a guy, mind you, that auditioned for and performed during IU’s yearly fraternity/sorority “hot bod” competition, despite being about 5′7″, scrawny, and really hairy.  This is also a guy, mind you, who was confronted by his two roommates on the Charles Perez show, after getting caught peeping on them having sex, perched in their closet.  Dave was a total jerk on the show, smirking and wearing a long leather jacket, assailing crowd members as they each stood up and tried to put him in his place.  And of course, it was all made up.

That particular episode comprises the entirety of side two of Police Beats (and Locations), a tape Dave made under the moniker Heavy Vegetation.  It’s about 45 minutes long–the magic duration favored by cassette sides and hour-long TV shows with commercials. On side one of the tape, however, was actual “music,” including the song Spencer originally brought up in conversation enough times that it felt legendary before I’d ever heard it.

Dave had been working part-time at a local townie bar, see, and one night Night Ranger played.  Or the guy from Night Ranger played with a new band–I can’t quite remember the details.  Either way, the Night Ranger guy comes up to the bar and asks for a shot of Wild Turkey.  Dave tells the Night Ranger guy that they don’t have Wild Turkey, and would he like Jim Beam instead.  The night ranger guy goes somewhat apoplectic at this state of affairs, but Dave–quiet and calm–just keeps doing his job.  Then he goes home and writes a song about it.  Spencer called it “No Turkey For Night Ranger,” because that’s the hook, but that’s not what was listed in the liner notes.

The tape hit me right where Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! and We’re Only In It for the Money did a few months earlier.  It was weird music, made by a weirdo, with interstitials disguised as “suites,” funny things that weren’t funny as much as, you know, weird.  It was smart, but playfully so.  The rapped parts were very much MC 900 Foot Jesus.

I met Dave soon after that, and he gave me a copy of the tape. I played it for my select fellow stoners, and we loved it for about a year.  Dave himself would only be a minor presence in my life–he’d show up quietly at parties, standing off to a side; I ran into him after a Bill Cosby performance at the IU Auditorium, which he recorded for the university. The tape, and that song in particular, and the story, would stick around much longer.  I can still say “No Turkey for Night Ranger” to a few friends 13 years later, and they’ll totally laugh.

That song had a biography, as songs will, but the biography circulated much more than the song (as biographies will).  In much the same way as Mark’s story above, I didn’t play the song for people as much as I told them about it, and about Dave.  I was a doofus at the time; I thought I was creative and weird and funny around my friends, but I wasn’t anything compared to Dave.  I sort of aspired to be more like him, but never really cared to put the time into it.  He was more a less a cipher to me as well as the people I told about him, which made the stories cooler.  We passed around the Charles Perez VHS tape for a few months.

I hadn’t had the energy to tune up my old cassette deck–dormant since about 2001–until a few weeks ago (that’s the sort of time-kill dissertation-writing will create).  After getting it up and running again, that meant searching in storage for my old box of cassettes.  And there it was, relatively well-preserved and everything, in an old crate of tapes that had been collecting dust forever:

I haven’t re-listened to the tape yet.  I guess I’m waiting until the exact right time to do so.  I’m ambivalent about posting it here, taking the chance of it breaking loose and circulating widely, separating it from its biography (and my memory).  Maybe it should be one of those things I keep to myself.

I’ve been thinking about this sort of debate a lot over the past couple years, and I thought I’d share some thoughts on Sonic Youth’s 1980s and 1990s label existence, because I think it sheds some light on the ever-slippery nature of “indie” and “major” that Albini–ever the ideologue–likes to handily present as black-and-white.

The full(er) story indeed presents Moore and the rest of the band as anti-Albinis in many ways: musical pragmatists and proud capitalists as well as Capital “A” Artists, who wanted that always elusive label combination of effective distribution, honest accounting, creative control, and cool coworkers.

The fact that Sonic Youth almost got all of those things on their own terms is quietly amazing in its own way, but the fuller narrative, I think, just as interesting for the light it casts on the contingent nature of “indie” as a cultural category that always gets defined in wildly different ways.  On one end of the spectrum Albini represents the dyed-in-the-wool punk lifer.  Sonic Youth…well, they basically predicted where indie is today (and thankfully so!).

After the jump, I piece together the narrative, more or less, from a few sources.  To be clear: this is less about taking sides in a trumped-up, poorly reported “beef” than expounding a bit on the contingency of indie.

First, an excerpt from the controversial part of Albini’s GQ interview (Note that the interviewer introduces the Sonic Youth/major label question to Albini, which is sort of like introducing the raw steak question to a pitbull):

What about bands like Sonic Youth, who signed to a major label with a full adult understanding of the choice they were making.
…a lot of the things that happened as a direct result of their association with the mainstream music industry gave credibility to some of the nonsense notions that hover around the star-making machinery. A lot of that stuff was offensive to me and I saw it as a sellout and a corruption of a perfectly valid, well-oiled music scene. Sonic Youth chose to abandon it in order to become a modestly successful mainstream band—as opposed to being a quite successful independent band that could have used their resources and influence to extend that end of the culture. They chose to join the mainstream culture and become a foot soldier for that culture’s encroachment into my neck of the woods by acting as scouts (…)

Albini makes a good point–there’s validity in the authenticity-laden “keep with your roots” approach to making music–but as is his wont, he too-easily lapses into the ill-founded idea that there’s an actual Main Stream into which bands are able to steer their ships.

Moreover, Albini strategically ignores the messy, often downright unethical reality of 80s indie labels.  He knows all too well that indie was far from “well-oiled” in the 1980s, when Sonic Youth were trying to gain a national foothold for their music, using indie’s rickety infrastructure.  Albini’s quoted in this 2006 Magnet article about SY’s early relationship with Homestead Records–run by Wharton Business School grad Barry Tenenbaum:

“My favorite retarded trick is he would make the numeral and literal amounts of the check different, so our bank couldn’t cash it,” says Albini. “It was like dealing with a small child who’s trying to hide cookies under his pillow. I’m sure it did earn him a small aggregate profit, being so duplicitous about everything. But it seems like so much work to be that devious about small amounts of money.”

Albini dismisses the notion that human error was to blame. “You can’t have a mistake on every single statement without it being intentional,” he says. “It’s impossible. Just by chance, you’d get one of them right, you know?” (…)

Sonic Youth were dealing with a label with tons of indie cred, but…well, the article continues:

Thurston Moore recalls some bad vibes during a business meeting with Homestead management: “Bob Bert, our drummer at the time, said we have an important meeting with Barry, and that we should tape it. It wasn’t like we were trying to sneak the tape in and record the meeting. We were going over some brass tacks with Barry, who’s a totally old-school business dude … Talking to this guy was like talking to the parents in the Peanuts cartoon. It was all ‘wah-wah-wah.’ I could see the look in his eye when he saw the red light on the Walkman. He was completely freaked out by it. He made us turn it off, and the mood in the room just turned nefarious.”

Sounds like a small version of the Reviled Mainstream Label Tactics, doesn’t it?  And a version of same which came at a crucial point in Sonic Youth’s own narrative, when they were big enough to embark on their first national tour–arranged by Homestead’s long-suffering genius Gerard Cosloy–but without the strength of a financially-secure publicity infrastructure.

Most importantly, according to Michael Azerrad’s seminal Our Band Could Be Your Life, there wasn’t an inkling of Albini-esque anti-mainstream bluebloodedness in the band:

“At that time, there was no such thing as ‘Be proud to be indie,’” Moore says.  “Bring indie was just sort of like, there was nothing else you could be–major labels had no interest.”  Sometimes a feeler would go out, though–Warner Brothers had once asked for a copy of Bad Moon Rising.

Moore was enthusiastically angling to get SST’s attention, as well–at the time, they were the American indie label.  His campaign entailed leaving the signature “Hello to Black Flag from Sonic Youth” in venue bathroom stalls, and as Azerrad claims:

…even the whole Creedence/1969/Americana concept (of Bad Moon Rising) seems like a calculated attempt to ingratiate themselves with SST…(whose) beloved Minutemen outspokenly championed Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Compared to Homestead–which the band was no doubt eager to leave anyway–SST was a huge step up in visibility, coolness, album advances, everything.  The band responded with EVOL (and a non-coincidental fascination with celebrity culture), which garnered their first national press, followed by the amazing Sister in 1987.

But then Moore started sniffing similarities to Homestead.  Again, from Our Band:

“SST’s accounting was a bit suspect to us,” Moore says, an alarmingly common complaint of SST bands.  The band was also disturbed that the label had been firing employees.  “We didn’t like what was going on over there–it seemed sort of odd,” says Moore.  “People we liked were being let go.” (…)

By 1987 SST had started to show unmistakable signs of hubris, such as releasing over eighty titles that year, a ridiculous amount even by major label standards. (…)

When they split from SST, Sonic Youth started talking with Paul Smith, who ran the UK indie licensing entity Blast First, and who was trying to start a US label with Sonic Youth as the crown jewel.  Azerrad explains the band’s role in this entrepreneurial endeavor (which most likely also explains the roots of Albini’s lingering stink-eye):

In 1987 Smith set up a New York office and began trying to lure all the U.K. Blast First artists, including Dinosaur Jr (SST), Big Black (Touch & Go), the Butthole Surfers (Touch & Go), and Sonic Youth.  But despite Sonic Youth’s enthusiastic lobbying, none of the other bands made the move.  Even worse, Big Black’s Steve Albini was annoyed at them for trying to spirit away the best-selling artists on his good friend Corey Rusk’s Touch & Go label; Sonic Youth’s relationship with Albini was never the same.

Breaking from SST was both a good and bad idea.  They escaped the unexplained accounting practices, but were left somewhat adrift with a fledgling go-getter managing what would become their magnum opus.  Smith had partnered with Enigma (distro: Capitol, half-owned by EMI) for the US release of Daydream Nation (Moore didn’t want to sign straight up with a major, according to Azerrad, because it would have delayed the release and missed year-end critics’ lists).  Capitol unsurprisingly had no idea what to do with Daydream, and thus totally botched the distribution of one of post-punk’s defining achievements, leaving it a quintessential critic’s album for years.

But to Moore, this was more a failure of Smith–with whom the band had a falling out–and less one of “major label” culture.  Again, it bears repeating that Moore didn’t believe in the indie/major dichotomy of Albini, Jello Biafra, Maximumrockandroll, and the like.  Far from it.  Instead, Moore saw indie culture slowly creeping into the corporate world as an opportunity.  Azerrad highlights Moore’s ostensible Faustian bargain:

…the indie scene wasn’t an alternative network of dedicated music fans anymore, it was now just another industry looking for increased market share–and not doing it very well.  If that was the case, Sonic Youth figured, why not work with people who knew what they were doing? “I didn’t feel any allegiance for the independent scene anymore, that’s for sure,” said Moore, “because it was in disarray as far as I was concerned.”

Again, it’s not that Sonic Youth were necessarily “right” or “wrong” in opting for a major label deal; it’s that Moore and the band were pragmatists, not ideologues.  In 1990, Geffen released Goo.

David Geffen had been a major figure since starting the Laurel Canyon indie singer/songwriter haven Asylum in the early 70s. He started his namesake label with major funding from Warner in 1980, and 10 years later, he would sell that to MCA, became a billionaire, and found the more boutiquey DGC as Geffen’s more progresive, “new talent” imprint.  By 1994, thanks to the “scouting” of Sonic Youth and the cash of DGC, the world had been introduced to Weezer, Beck and Nirvana (whose In Utero, of course, would be produced by Albini as a punk-as-fuck response to the band’s massive fame).

In a July 1992 Spin interview at the height of the grunge/alternative feeding frenzy, Thurston defended signing to DGC for three primary reasons: working with cool, knowledgeable label folk, working on music without holding a day job, and most importantly, working with a label more on the up-and-up than Homestead or SST.  Given the band’s pragmatism and their general (refreshingly so) lack of ideological indie fervor, it’s a totally understandable move:

Thurston: “Look, we’re able to work 24 hours a day at making music.  We don’t have day jobs like most of the musicians we know, working in record stores or copy places.” (…)

It’s a different time now.  The majors all have alternative departments staffed with people from the indie scene.  We could have waited and signed now, and yes, we probably could’ve gotten more money.  Big deal.  We signed for a rather modest amount so we could have complete control over the music.” (…)

“I don’t think most of our fans understand what goes on politically in corporate rock.  Let’s face it, we’re living in corporate America.  And you know what? This record company treats us better than any indie label ever did.  I don’t like the term, but I guess the operative word is professional.”

Kim: “When we were on some indie labels, a lot of times the label was learning as they went.  And they didn’t have the resources we enjoy no.  We don’t work for DGC, we work with them.”

The “we’re living in corporate America” bit really sticks out to me.  How 80s is this: Sonic Youth had seen through the worst aspects of corporate culture–shady financial dealings, zero respect of labor by management–while on two tiny indie punk labels.  And a major with distro is going to be that much worse?

Speaking to Pitchfork.tv’s Nitsuh Abebe in 2008, Moore specified the band’s reasons:

…when we first signed to Geffen Records, it was cool, they were like friends of ours. Ray Farrell from SST Records was working there, Mark Kates, who we knew from college radio, was working there. It was at this time where a lot of people coming out of the scene that we developed together in the 80s, you know, with independent music, were, sort of, getting work at major labels, you know. Post-college radio…so it just kinda made sense, to some degree, that we would sort of, like, work together on this.” (…)

I’m grateful they put our records out. And it was also a sort of secure situation. I mean, we had health care, things like that.

Who wouldn’t want to be able to make music for a living, with health care, while working right alongside one’s trustworthy indie pals?  If you’re not one of the dying breed of indie bluebloods, the answer to me would be “no one!”

In another 2008 interview with the Seattle Times Moore further underscores the reality of what “indie” meant to a lot of musicians and label owners: personality, uniqueness, the capacity to relate to your co-workers and feel a direct stake in their benefit:

Geffen Records, at that time, was kind of considered an independent, among those other major labels…the label was a self-sufficient label that utilized the WEA – Warner, Elektra, Atlantic – distribution system…And they had a little house. Their office was like this old, little house on Sunset Boulevard, sort of a holdover from a great era, the late ’60s, early ’70s L.A. music scene.

Of course, it should go without saying that Sonic Youth released some amazing music on Geffen–polished a bit from the Homestead and SST stuff sure, but polished mostly very well–and released that music to a ton of people like me.  At 15, I saw the video for “100%” on MTV, and whoosh, my hair seemed to want to stop being cut.  I got my Santa Cruz skateboard out of the garage, and I was lucky enough to be tall and gawkily skinny for the first time in my life.  The “Youth Against Fascism” lyric “I believe Anita Hill” was my first real musical experience with feminism, and an honest-to-goodness unforeseen alternative to the cartoonish portrayal of adult sex I was getting via CNN and Saturday Night Live. I got a gig at the Franklin College radio station as a DJ, right when it was time to proselytize with one of the band’s most infectious songs, “Bull in the Heather” (”it’s like their own version of Lou Barlow’s ‘Natural One,’” I’d say).  I thought then and still think that Moore’s DGC-backed 1995 solo album Psychic Hearts is ridiculously underrated.

But of course, none of this good luck and wide exposure was going to last forever.  Deregulation and mergers spiraled out of control, MTV ceased being anything other than the VMAs, liquor magnates controlled the pocketbook for musical careers.  This sort of thing is what makes guys like Albini say “I told you so!” From the same interview:

I think six months to a year after we’d signed with them is when they did their corporate merger with Seagram’s (I think that happened in 1995 -ed.), and it became part of the bigger picture (…)

I don’t want to complain about Geffen so much, but it just became a company we didn’t have any sort of personal relationship with for a number of years at the end there. They kept hiring and firing people at such a rate that it didn’t do anybody any good…people disappear and are replaced with a whole other crew of new, young hopefuls wanting to break into the corporate record industry. That happened consecutively, to the last two or three records there, and it was disastrous, in a way (…)

I always thought, at some point, the perception of any band like us that’s on a label like that, it gets somewhat devalued just because of the personality of the label, which is sort of faceless, in a sense.

In 2008, SY left DGC after 18 years.  Think about the steadiness of Sonic Youth’s catalog over that time: 9 albums, a few dozen great songs.  I discovered the band with Dirty at 15, and I’ve more or less grown up with them as a constant companion.

But that’s not all: when they left the major, they returned, somewhat full-circle, to perhaps the greatest indie rock label–certainly the one that balanced adventurousness and experimentation with solid career guidance and support for long-termers.  While Sonic Youth were busy being indie-famous on a major and aging incredibly gracefully, Cosloy was getting Matador off the ground.  Two years after the band reunited with the good dude from Homestead, they would play Matador’s 21st birthday party as one of the label babies.  As a symbolic bookend to the other end of their recently-ended 18 year relationship, they focused their set mainly on their classic immediate pre-DGC run: EVOL, Sister, Daydream Nation.

The indie that Sonic Youth came back to isn’t totally different than the one they left; it’s just bigger and, in many ways, stronger.  In the Pitchfork TV interview, Lee Ranaldo explained the major/indie decision in part by raising the ever-important question of distribution:

…when we moved to a major, it was partly for better distribution, and that situation is not really the same anymore. I mean, a record label like Matador can pretty much distribute as easily as a major, at this point. And in a way, because they’re music lovers, they’re a little bit more savvy about where they can get the records, in a certain way.

While Sonic Youth were on DGC, some interesting collaborations were taking place just slightly out of most people’s everyday experience with music.  In 1993, sniffing the dollar signs of alternative but knowing that keeping their corporate name out of the equation was key, Warner Music Group formed the Alternative Distribution Alliance with Sub Pop.  ADA now circulates Matador’s music (and a ton of other indies).

Distribution and promotion are the keys to successful indie; they always have been.  The good, long-lasting indies know this–Secretly Canadian started its own distro arm while still only servicing voracious European fans of the first Songs: Ohia 7″ back in 1997.  By 2009, they were strong enough to help out a few of those dispossessed by the Touch & Go distribution arm’s closing.  In 2010, labels seem to have totally shed the old psychic baggage of partnering with corporations like Warner in order to gain access to their big box monopoly.  And thankfully, it seems, the majority of indie fans aware of the situation don’t care either–they can buy at their local spots too.  Perhaps I’m stretching things a bit, but Sonic Youth signing to a major in 1990–spurred by pragmatism, bad histories with dodgy indies, and just the right amount of youthful/artistic naivete–laid some of the foundations toward helping us be okay with it 20 years later, at a moment that inspired the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones to recently opine, “the difference between major and indie labels now has less to do with aesthetics than with the way bands conceive of their careers”

Steve Albini gets a lot of press when he rants not just because he’s cranky, but because he’s incredibly smart and well-spoken–enough to serve as the primary exponent of a Puritanical artistic ideology that we’ve equated over the years to “indie.”  But that doesn’t mean he’s right.  I’m trying not to speak of some Platonic ideal when I say that indie labels in 2010, because they’re more willing than ever to embrace the usefulness of major corporations without sacrificing their artistic integrity, seem tantalizingly close to reaching the distribution, promotion, and personal connection levels that Sonic Youth fantasized about DGC maybe being in 1990.

But perhaps more importantly, I think the largely negative online reaction to Albini’s latest tirade, and the fact that it seems positively archaic at this point, only highlights that the now-three-decade reign of this punk-derived ideology doesn’t resonate with that many people anymore, and is perhaps fading away for good.