marathonpacks' 2008 Mid-Term Mix, Vol. II

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Finally! I'm really happy with this one, you guys. It took a while to finish, owing to plenty of dawdling and taking a French translation class. (You'd be surprised at how much French you remember when it's been 10 years since you've thought about French. Also, how much French you forget). But I like this mix a lot. And I've taken the advice of a few whiners helpful emailers and am offering it in two ways: as a single-track monster jam and individual files in the .zip format. They should load into your iTunes in order and everything; if they don't, it'll sound weird because they have half-transitions and stuff on them. But I guess this way if there's a song you don't like, you can skip it (that last sentence was me with digital music technology. Yay!). Have fun everyone.

single track mp3 (62:17/192k/85.6 MB) || 18-mp3 .zip of the same thing

1. Portishead "The Rip" I'm not quite sure how quickly I learned to love "Sour Times" in 1994 when we played it at the radio station, but yeah, it was really really fast. Back then, I couldn't tell trip-hop from shinola, and my reference points for Dummy were like, um, hip-hop, and maybe I think I told someone they sounded like the Eurythmics or something. Dummy, for all of its coldness and distance, was, from an approachability standpoint, extremely accessible, and easy to fall in love with. 3, not so much. It's been a while since I've felt this totally alienated from a group I thought I had on lock, but well that's what 11 years and a refusal to do the same thing twice will do. "The Rip" has an underlying guitar motif with the paranoid, classical air of Love's Forever Changes, and Beth Gibbons is still the same Mata Hari she ever was: don't get drawn in for a minute by the sultry suffering. It's a trap.

2. My Brightest Diamond "Apples" I saw this little fucking dynamo live, and then started giving a shit about My Brightest Diamond, which I'd previously consigned to the milquetoast NPR bin of my promo pile. She's tiny, super-intense, and possessed of a wicked amazing conservatory-quality singing voice. "Apples" is one of the Bjorkier moments from the new one, which don't sleep on it, is just as good as its closest living relative (and it fits really well between numbers 1 and 3, too).

3. Dominique Leone "Goodbye" Off the first LP from the guy who wrote this review. The Runt and Wizard and 20/20 comparisons are being bandied about, and on this track at least, they're spot-on. Except none of those records had anything this good on it. What a wonderful little song!

4. Au "rr vs. d" Another year, another jam from Luke Wyland on my midterm mix. Seriously, music world: why is Au not doted upon with the fervor of those bullshit peddlers Animal Collective? We all know that Verbs, as well as this collective's self-titled first album, are far superior to some garbage like Strawberry Jam. Then what is it? Is it Portland? It's Portland, isn't it.

5. Sigur Ros "Gobbledigook" Personally, I'd like to see "Gobbledigook" soundtrack its own CSI scene, in which Grissom and Willows investigate blood spatter patterns at a commune murder site, where 4 naked hippies were sustainably slain. It'd have to be a fast-paced montage, in which the two gradually become accustomed to the locale as the investigation continues, it goes downhill really fast, and by the end they're wiping warpaint mud on each others' faces and making a pact to share the labor in food-foraging.

6. Cut Copy "Feel the Love" WE ARE DAFT PUNK AND WE ARE YOUR SAILING INSTRUCTORS. They're riding the goodwill wave of Daft Punk and the indie trend toward beach-party music, and I wish they'd just release an entire record of songs with this one's enormity and ease.

7. Sebastien Tellier "Divine" The dorkiest (and most Beck-like) song on a album full of incredibly dorky French sex-jams.

8. Santogold "L.E.S. Artistes" Santi White, songwriter for hire and former A&R exec, has a participant/observer perspective on the networked field of industry folks, critics, assholes and hangers-on surrounding pop music that few musicians enjoy. It gives her a distinct and clear set of hopes and fears, as well, all bound up and wonderfully presented in her first single. She's more concerned with losing face while pursuing her chosen hustle than her imagined critics could ever be, and the chorus to "Artistes" is a blast of self-affirming, skittish shock and awe that pre-empts any opponent's first punch.

9. R.E.M. "Living Well is the Best Revenge" The first second I put Accelerate on for the very first time, "Living Well" gave me such a rush of nostalgia and pride; I was happy again that I'd made R.E.M. my first all-time favorite band back freshman year in college. It's got the call -to-arms energy of "These Days" and the manic counsel of "Live and How to Live It," and while the target's a bit obvious, the sentiment is still delivered with the oblique poetry of Murmur or Reckoning. Michael Stipe is totally fucking pissed off, but he channels that anger into righteousness and good advices. Good for him and good for fucking R.E.M., too. I remember the exact moment in 1997 when I realized that New Adventures in Hi-Fi was one of the band's 2 or 3 best albums, and then realized that they'd put out one of their best works nearly 20 years into their career. I was only 20 then, and I suddenly felt like an adult for the first time I can recall. And Accelerate is just a frantic burst of well-crafted, radiant pop-rock, like the music's point is to color in the album cover by the time it's over. Every time I listen to Accelerate is the best 30 minutes of that day, it seems.

10. Deerhunter "Nothing Ever Happened" So guess what: Deerhunter's a pretty damn good band. Not quite great yet, but Microcastle is a solid step in that direction. The album, in terms of song structure and overall tone, is dream-pop where Cryptograms and the EP were nightmares, but approachable tunes doesn't mean Bradford Cox's macabre fever-dream aesthetic disappears. "Nothing Ever Happened" is just a mannered punk song, delivered with the worrisome air of a guy trying to come to terms with his own cloudy memory. Alan Moulder c. 1991 would have had a field day with the tourettic guitar freak-out that comprises the last couple minutes of this song.

11. No Age "Sleeper Hold" It took me a while (a couple months, I guess) to figure out the source after recognition the very first time I heard the song, but the opening guitar bit from "Sleeper Hold" is totally biting from "Alec Eiffel." And with how these guys go about making music, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a total happy accident, like how George Harrison was just strumming backstage before a show one time, found a melody he liked, and wrote it down. And that melody happened to be really similar to the Chiffons' "He's So Fine." And then he got sued. For the record, I don't think the Pixies will sue No Age. Side note about "Alec Eiffel": for the first like 8 months or so that I listened to Trompe le Monde, it was via a tape dub, without a tracklist or anything, and also way pre-Internet. So instead of asking anyone, lest I seem unknowledgeable, I just thought the song's chorus was "Little Lifeboat." Actually, now that I remember, I thought "Palace of the Brine" was "How to Say Goodbye," which I actually like better (think about it). On Nouns, No Age seems to quite purposefully aim toward multiple interpretations, buried as the vocals are in the soupy mix, and resonant of so many ambient and punk touchstones as the music is. In the lyrics, I hear "With passion, it's true," which reminds me of Rites of Spring or Fugazi. I'm good with that.

12. Sybris "Oh Man!" "Oh Man! Daydream Nation is Awesome!" is the full title of this song, but the band wisely chose to abbreviate it for the album. I love how Angela Mullenhour asserts herself vocally now more than before; she's doing the band a lot of favors.

13. Blood on the Wall "Rize" More 90s indie stuff WOOT
More of a Royal Trux/Mudhoney angle here, but they nail it to the wall. Hence: blood.

14. School of Language "Poor Boy" Because anything that this guy lays his hands on is gold to me. SoL isn't on par with any of Brewis' Field Music stuff, but now and again a song like this breaks free of those rigid-ass meters and dissonant tones he works his ideas through for this project, and, well, reminds me of Field Music.

15. Vampire Weekend "Walcott" NYC ska band, does Petty cover; RIYL miscegenation, cable-knit.

16. White Hinterland "Lindberghs and Metal Birds" "Your city's sinking, it was built on sand. You should have planned ahead. Or, leave it up to the Lindberghs and metal birds." Casey Dienel's song about war and responsibility, sung as if channeling a precocious little girl at a WWI-era military show.

17. Britta Persson "At 7" I really hope Britta Persson gets the same sort of shake given to Feist, with whom Persson's easily on par. The gospel undertones here and elsewhere on the wonderfully-titled Kill Hollywood Me, along with Persson's lazy, humid vocals actually push it a bit ahead of Feist's more precious, unitarded soft-pop.

18. Duffy "Rockferry" The best Welsh soul export since some A&R guy pulled Tom Jones out of a coal mine? Does that even mean anything? Duffy reminds me most of Lulu, that other single-named blue-eyed soul singer with her fair share of outsize sentimentality (god, that's a great song). I'm not made of stone here, people: "Rockferry" just pushes every single affective button I have right now.

Rejected: Gummi Bachelorette Party Straws

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Is This Photo Enough To Spur You To Action

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I mentioned this a loooong time ago, but now I'm finally doing it. Those of you who subscribe to this feed should seriously consider switching over to this one, because I'm deleting the first one at the end of the week. So, click on that second link (or, that big orange square on the sidebar) and add it to your reader, and then get rid of the first one, which still links to an email address that I haven't used since THE WEB 1.0 ERA or thereabouts.

About You, Now.

More than anything else (I'll leave the "else" to the entire Internet), isn't the above performance another fascinating example of Jay-Z's continuing efforts at world domination through identity synergy? Think about it: Jay-Z settling a "beef" at Glastonbury with arguably the CEO of the festival at this point, by adopting part of Gallagher's brand (the glasses, the guitar, the scarf) and incorporating it into his own strategy. In the process, Jay squashes any bad mojo while simultaneously adding to his own brand/legend/aura. Similarly, remember when he played with Phish, with the full knowledge that the "I ain't pass the bar but i know a little bit/ Enough that you won't illegally search my shit" lyric was tailor-made for crossover to that crowd? Remember last year? Jay, way too self-established to just do a soundtrack for American Gangster, instead created a parallel-universe bio of his own, calling back to the film only by name and broadly-drawn narrative structure. Jay-Z is huge, but because he's such an established brand as well, he's much, much bigger than himself. While certainly goofy, gimmicks like this weekend's (peep the Zooropa backdrop!) show that Jay has long since moved past any idea of hip-hop street-cred defining how he manages his career and brand, and is well-immersed in a phase of his career much more akin to a corporation going global, adopting its logo and advertising plans for foreign cultures. There's a reason Kanye looks up to him so much.

Is There Even A Middle Ground Anymore

The Man Man cover band, Fan Fan. (via)

First, this somewhat batshit, totally unexpected ending to an otherwise pretty basic Radiohead/NIN thing (emphasis mine):

But more troubling even than the hypocrisy of a few rock stars is the narcissism at the heart of the phenomenon of home remixing--the notion that to take a work of creative expression and make it "ours" is to improve it. It is a colossal mistake to coerce an expression of others into an expression of ourselves. The premise of open-source remixing is that finally we can admire nobody so much as ourselves. But in music, as in all art and love and politics, there is usually more to gain in trying to understand what belongs, uniquely and idiosyncratically and serendipitously, to somebody else.

Thing is, up until this last paragraph, this guy was on-point re: Radiohead keeping full rights to all the submitted remixes of "Nude," catching something a lot of other people missed. He was off on a lot of other stuff, though, but I was willing to accept that in the New Republic, I guess. Then he drops this paragraph on us like a pillowcase full of doorknobs, erasing my goodwill toward his above appraisal and making me wonder if he even wrote it, or if an editor with a stick up his butt did it for him.

Then this completely unproveable (though convenient) claim (emphasis mine) and similar baby/bathwater solution, on the other end of the participatory culture spectrum:

Music videos aren't dead, they're just dying, and they're dying because of bloated videos like "Everybody Hurts." When fans can use their favorite songs to make their amateur films without fear of losing their comparatively miniscule cookie jars, then the new age of promotional video will be here at last.

Yeah, bloated music videos are what ended music videos, not like you know, the fact that music videos large or small aren't being played on TV anymore, regardless of bloatation-level (and, if anything, it was the bigger videos keeping the fledgling network afloat). It's the venue, then, not the aesthetic choices, which I think this guy secretly knows. And! There's 100 times more unwatchable fan-created garbage out there than good stuff, and even the great stuff looks like garbage on Youtube. I don't want fan-created videos to redefine music promotion. I don't ever want to see a homemade light-saber battle again, either. I want talented artists with video-making talent to make videos and put them on TV again. There's a reason why the majority of people who make music videos do it professionally. It's hard, and it takes more than a torrented version of Final Cut to do it well. Access to technology ≠ access to actual creative skill that people want to watch, not which is just dumb enough to drive people to iTunes.

Have You Been Half-Asleep and Have You Heard Voices

Family and friends said Scott shared his namesake's whimsical smile.

IT'S NOT CALLED GLOW IN THE DARK FOR NO REASON SQUID BRAINS!

I HIT THE STAGE AND PEOPLE HAD BEEN THROWING SHIT ON THE STAGE AND HAD ACTUALLY HIT THE JANE SCREEN WITH, I GUESS BOTTLES OR SOMETHING AND HAD BROKEN MY FUCKING SCREEN. REMEMBER WHEN YOU WERE A SHORTY AND WATER WOULD HIT THE TV??????

SOMETIMES I GO 2, 3 DAYS W/O SLEEP WORKING ON MY PERFORMANCE... I HAVE TO ICE MY KNEES AFTER EVERY SHOW AND THEY HURT WHEN I WALK THROUGH THE AIRPORT...

Fuck. Also: Tits.

I doubt there's much more to it than coincidence, but Hua Hsu's Slate piece on "fuck" bands couldn't be better timed. It runs, of course, on the same day that the guy who questioned-- at first humorously, then later, quite seriously-- the same sort of linguistic propriety in a completely different era passed away. This passage from Hsu's piece is especially relevant:

But protections against indecency like the FCC's fine spree of the 1990s and early 2000s assume a world in which the producers of culture are the elites, or at least subject to the whims of elites, a world before conversations across the community were spontaneous, omnipresent, and impossible to earmuff. It is yet another sign of the weakening of traditional forms of broadcast and media that there are so many more points of contact between artists and consumers free from regulation.

I teach a class in which I subject freshman and sophmores to very basic tenets of linguistic anthropology and sociology. There's a day when all we do is cuss; it's fun (and revealing) every semester to see them slowly gain the ability to say "fuck" or "cocksucker" in class. Over the years, Carlin's "Seven Words" routine only seems like it's become dated or even trite, but even something like the low-stakes world of scatalogical indie-rock monikers works as a marker for how far we've come. Take a listen.

Got Live If You Want It (On My Flickr Page)

A discussion of the incessant(ly annoying) urge for folks to make blurry visual documents of the shows they attend is happening here and here and here. Though I've been known to snap a few pix here and there at shows, that tendency has waned exponentially along with my fascination at, you know, being able to do it. I'm not really that awed at my Canon Powershot anymore, nor at the 4 megapixel photomaker on my phone (which, at some point in the past year or so, created the wonderful image above).

Plenty of people are still enamored with theirs, though. Much of the amateur photo concert-glut is attributable to the availability of the technology, of course. But that's not all; the pictures aren't taking themselves. As the ever-entertaining Lindsay Robertson pointed out 2.5 years ago, the urge to make a visual testimonial from what's otherwise a fleeting, transcendent experience is strong:

Hey did anyone take pictures at the Arctic Monkeys show last night at Mercury Lounge? Like, maybe...100 people? Ruining the show for those of us who were there to actually enjoy it, not to prove that we saw it? Causing the lead singer to say after the very first song:

"Wow, lots of cameras...put your cameras down and enjoy the show!"

Guess how many people did? That's right: zero! 'Cause god forbid they just snap a few and then rock out like a normal person. Noooooo, they must get every angle in order to prove to their readers and friends that they were there, that they were at the cool show on the cool night with their cool camera. So cool.

Cameras are ruining everything. Everything.

Okay, well maybe. The urge to document live events has existed as long as the technology's been around to do so, but when dealing with recorded music performed in a live setting, there's a catch, I think, that's led to shows being overrun by people getting those flash-lit photos of, you know, the backs of the heads of people in front of them. To get deeper into this, and maybe move toward why the desire is so prevalent nowadays, let's start with Sasha Frere-Jones' New Yorker article about T-Pain and autotune. Toward the end of the piece, he offers a defense of studio tricks:

there is nothing natural about recorded music. Whether the engineer merely tweaks a few bum notes or makes a singer tootle like Robby the Robot, recorded music is still a composite of sounds that may or may not have happened in real time. An effect is always achieved, and not necessarily the one intended. Aren’t some of the most entertaining and fruitful sounds in pop—distortion, whammy bars, scratching—the result of glorious abuse of the tools? At this late date, it’s hard to see how the invisible use of tools could imply an inauthentic product, as if a layer of manipulation were standing between the audience and an unsullied object. In reality, the unsullied object is the Sasquatch of music. Even a purely live recording is a distortion and paraphrasing of an acoustic event.

Frere-Jones is preceded in this line of thinking (the perception of "inauthenticity" in recorded music) by Simon Frith, who in Performing Rites writes about the unique disconnect between the studio production of a song and the live performance of same. Stick with us here:

To hear music is to see it performed, on stage, with all the trappings. I listen to records in the full knowledge that what I hear is something that never existed, that could never exist, as a 'performance,' something happening in a single time and space; nevertheless, it is now happening, in a single time and space: it is thus a performance and I hear it as one, imagine the performers performing even when this just means a deejay mixing a track, an engineer pulling knobs.

Even without such naivete, I think it can be argued that the 'act' of singing is always contextualized by the 'act' of performing; and if the latter, like any other stage role, is put together behind the scenes, the former takes place in public: we see and hear the movement in and out of character; we watch this aspect of the performance as a performance.

Okay, one more. Philip Auslander is a guy I don't always agree with, but he takes Frith a slight step further here, touching on that ever-so-touchy issue of "authenticity" in a productive way:

Our ability to visualize the performance of rock music as we listen to it is dependent on the availability of visual artifacts that show us what the musicians look like in performance...the listening experience must be supplemented by additional artifacts: posters, booklets that come with the recordings, and the paraphenalia of fandom...While recordings and the visual artifacts proffer evidence of authenticity, only live performance can certify it for rock ideology.

This leads toward the question posed by all these amateur photogs at indie shows: are mp3s-- the common currency for music distribution these days-- also inauthentic representations of the music, helping create a culture in which so many feel the need to not only say "I was there", but also "The band was there!"? In other words, when the majority of people are listening to music as digital files with very limited information of any sort about the artists, does the need to "authenticate" the music by documenting its presence right in front of them increase that much more?

I'm inclined to agree with Frith and Auslander and Frere-Jones that, when you stop and think about it for a minute, recorded music is an unreal experience, something that never really existed in real time, and that is altered in the studio in innumerable (and often unnoticeable) ways. From there, we try to make the experience of simply "listening to music" into something more tangible: At the most basic level, we go to concerts, and at concerts, some of us block others by taking pictures on their cellphones for entire sets. Of course, plenty of people take (and have always taken) wonderful, high-quality photos at shows (Kathryn's the only person who comes to mind, but she's also the best example). Now, though, 20 times more people take blurry, low-light snapshots, often from the exact same position over and over until they get the perfect one, and post all of those pictures on their Flickr account or blog.

I don't think the amateur phenomenon is independent of either the current technologies that facilitate it, or the broader entertainment environment within which it's situated. You know the spiel: Access to the means of media production has been ridiculously dispersed, everything is intangible now, and ye olde evergreen lament is everywhere that No One Is Human Anymore, No One Talks To Anyone In Person Anymore, No One Can Go To A Concert Without Capturing It, and We Are All Devo. "Live"ness is thus still as much of a necessity to authenticate recorded music as it was when people played sheet music in their parlors for their friends. Within indie at the Technorati moment, it's often used as an arbiter of a band's true abilities (blowing live is often seen as tantamount to killing on CD; more than a few groups are "great live", making the mediocre recorded stuff bloom colorfully and fresh) as much as, well, proof that the band is right there.

This sort of authentication happens in the realm of more traditional criticism, too. No Age, a pretty good-but-pretty-not-great band from L.A., is inextricable from its place of origin, by their own design and, as Mike mentioned here, critics' designs as well. In his blog post, Mike laments the conservative impulse to associate authenticity with place:

If you want to see what it looks like when we become our parents, check out the idea that the internet is getting in the way of kids these days having an authentic indie-rock experience. That's only true if the internet is somehow inauthentic, e.g. not a culture of its own, and I think refusing to acknowledge that is much more evidence of being out-of-touch than not liking emo.

I certainly agree with Mike that knee-jerk reactions against the Web's capacity for community-building seem anachronistic at best. In her No Age review that Mike cites, Petrusich claims that the Web has helped disperse and lessen the impact of "real" local scenes. I disagree most strongly with the black/white binary between the two that she offers. If anything, I strongly think that local, real-life music cultures are flourishing right now exactly because they know how to use the Web exceedingly well, and vice-versa. The most conservative impulse separates off-and-online fandom into mutually-exclusive spheres (this sort of thing usually has some sort of political agenda--not necessarily in Amanda's case, though). In reality, the two leech off of each another constantly-- "real" venues benefit from the incredible publicity afforded by the Web, and "virtual" communities trade on the allure of the authenticity of a place like the Smell. Or, pictures of hip bands playing at that place.

There are now, as there have always been, numerous forms of accessorial art/mythmaking/documentation that go along with listening. It's the "coverflow" part of iTunes that slows down my entire computer. It's the reason that I've pretty much stopped buying CDs in lieu of records. It's drumming along on my desk with my fingers. It's standing up and doing this dance to "High Fidelity" and pretending my own audience thinks I'm the transcendent one. And, for better or worse, it's the Powershot brigade, coming soon to a venue near you, to enthusiastically blur beyond recognition and save to a memory card a visual document an event that most always is best kept within the capricious realm of human recollection.

Somewhere in Western Ohio, Sometime Last Month

Let's start a big huge rumor. (Full 1 | Full 2)