Back soon, until then:

…(in 1905) the humor magazine Puck satirized this rapid turnover in a series of ‘diary entries,’ written from the point of view of a popular song, recounting its creation, its plugging, its meteoric rise, and its precipitous descent into neglect–all in the span of five weeks.

David Suisman, “Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music” (previously)

Janelle Monae, performing “Let’s Go Crazy,” in front of Prince, at last night’s BET Awards. Me, last Friday at the Voice, wondering if she’s too weird to cross over into wide acceptance. Much more to come from me on her, soonish.

Also more to come from me/here/soonish on M.I.A. and Drake, both of whom I chatted a bit about, in a hurried bloggish manner, last week.

I’m over at Village Voice’s Sound of the City Blog today and tomorrow, lending my expertise on a variety of subjects, including that insane new Books track, that *yawn* new Interpol *yawn*, and best of all, puns galore with possible Weird Al/Lady Gaga songs.

I was there doing the same thing two months ago, too, which you can see if you click here and scroll a bit.  This being the highlight, of course.

Larry Jon Wilson passed away today, drifting off into the Big Ephemeral. Thirty-five years ago he released a country-folk record that has become very important to me. It is called New Beginnings, and at the time, it represented a new beginning for Wilson. More than that, it represents the potential in each of us to be reborn, to enjoy a new beginning in life, to surprise ourselves and—by virtue of catching ourselves off-guard—surprise our friends & family & community as well.

Wilson taught himself to play guitar at age 30 and—with a wife, three kids and a career as a technician at a fiberglass manufacturing plant—he released his first LP at age 35. The year was 1975 and the LP was New Beginnings, released on Monument Records (home to records by Roy Orbison, Kris Kristofferson, Tony Joe White, Willie Nelson and Robert Mitchum). “Back then I was making money—now I’m making music,” Wilson said of his new beginning. I’m really fucking inspired by that. Next time you’re taking a sober inventory of your life’s checklist, in fact, feel free to file him next to Leonard Cohen. I certainly do.  Allow this comparison to add some much-needed levity to the post-inventory emotional tableau you’re left to lay gaze upon, and not because these two didn’t “begin” their body of artistic work until their 30s. The number—Malcolm Gladwell be damned—is  less important than the fact that they risked jumping into the kid’s pool at a time when there were many on the sidelines who probably had plenty to say about their ability to stay afloat on the shallow end.

New Beginnings is the album that I recommend you dive into first. My favorite song, however, is a gorgeous number called “Loose Change“, the title track to his third LP from 1977. This goes out like a werewolf-bound silver bullet to fans of Townes Van Zandt’s first seven LPs and Willie Nelson’s in-betweener ’70s material like Phases and Stages and Redheaded Stranger (neither of which really fit into either of his more lucrative and famous outlaw country or standards crooning phases). It’s a tale told from the voice of a pan-handling wino, and I just love to hear Wilson sing it:

Living ain’t easy, but dying ain’t, too / And hanging on just leaves you like me / I’d leave women and whiskey alone if I was you /
But I ain’t and I ain’t likely to be
The reason for coming up to you this way / Wasn’t my story, but simply to say
Loose change, loose change / Have you got some to waste / Not for my supper / But to buy me a taste
Loose change, loose change / Have you got some to spare / When I drink my fillin’ / The good Lord be willin’
Someday I’ll have some loose change to share

Wilson first landed on my radar (as I’m sure is the case with most of his fans my age and younger) when I saw the documentary Heartworn Highways a few years back when it was reissued on DVD. The film (which also features Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Earle and David Allan Coe, among others) opens up to Wilson looking absolutely ragged but sounding golden, the total embodiment of the outlaw country musician from that time, tightrope-walking the seemingly divergent images of the hard livin’ badboy and the wise grandfatherly sage, imbued with a sense of poetic urgency and emotional vulnerability. His pockmark-chiseled face is rife with mythological import, a physical manifestation of the rivet-laden dynamic of his deep voice.

The songs that Wilson was making did not align with the taste of popular country music fans in the mid- to late-70s, a fact which ultimately led to his leaving the music industry altogether in 1980. The four LPs’ worth of songs that he did release, however, are the stuff of outsider folk junkie gold. Tone angels smile down upon these songs, just slightly too smart to really go for the big hooks, yet soulful enough to not get lost in the monochromatic morass. Though it’s terribly sad that Wilson is no longer with us—especially after he released his first album in 29 years last year (on Drag City) and we maybe were in store for more songs—I can’t help but feel that this is maybe the start of a new chapter for Wilson (the storied Final Chapter), one in which his material might finally get the sort of acclaim that’s due. He had a lot to share, and it all started with him stepping up and saying it out loud with a little melody. His new beginning is one for the ages, and hopefully will inspire many others.

Ed. Note: Chris Swanson comes to us from Dead Oceans/Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian HQ in Bloomington, Indiana, where many graduate students take solace in stories of starting a meaningful, creative well into one’s thirties.  Ahem. Previously, Chris has brought us wonderful tunes from the likes of Van Morrison, Caroline Crawford, Dion, Mad Season, Donnie & Joe Emerson, Pip Proud, and Dwight Twilley.

(top photo: Voxtrot.  Bottom photo: no idea but surely not Vampire Weekend) (EDIT: that’s Dr. Dog and yes, IU’s Union Board needs to better tag its indie band clip art)

I took this photo at the height of my baseball fandom and my not-coincidental fascination with statistics.  I was either 10 or 11, and this was the first pro baseball game I’d ever attended.  I kept score for this game on the scoresheet in the program, the same way I did for about 1/3 of that season, via WGN in the living room.  When dad’s friends met us at the game, he had them quiz me on Cub players’ batting averages, ERAs, etc.  I think I did pretty well, and definitely felt pretty smart.  Dad really didn’t like getting his picture taken (one of the things he passed on to me, though which I’ve been trying to overcome), and this is one of the few photos I could find where he wasn’t making a ridiculous face, or just sort of scowling at the camera.  The cane was to help compensate for all those steps–dad really had trouble with steps (that right leg was a prosthetic).  The mitt: mine, obviously.

Yes, this one’s a couple months late.  But it might be my favorite of the first three, too.  Maybe because I’ve sat on it for longer.  Regardless, here’s yr rock (with incessant references to John Lennon to boot).  Then, it’s time to move on–so much amazing music has been released over the past six months!  Thus, the next batch of mixes–with new stuff from the 2010’s packed second quarter and some leftovers/missed jams from 1Q–should be coming in the next few weeks.  Here are the first and second mixes, still available.

Mix 3: “Make it Easy on Your Host” | 192k | 46:48 | 64.4mb

1. Field Music “Them That Do Nothing” (Memphis Industries) If you like your indie with more knees-and-elbows than hospital corners, Field Music’s probably not for you.  If, like me, you like your punk prim to the point of pinched, you’ve found one of your favorite bands. And “Nothing,” which manages to swing and groove without wrinkling its trousers, just might be my favorite Field Music song yet.  To wit: The guitars alternate between the crisp, colorful acoustic tones of English Settlement-era XTC and, for those brief breaks, the soft gospel-blues flashiness of the early 70s Clapton/Allman/Harrison axis.  Peter’s off-kilter, jazz-infused drumming set things to a jazz-derived swing, and his fills are perfectly complemented by those handclaps.  It’s all capped by David’s alternately opaque and sentimental lyrics, which as always mix clever wordplay, detached social comment, and wistful what-if musings, perfectly delivered in the nearly passionate tone that rises through the verse bars.
2. Vampire Weekend “Cousins” (XL) Straight jittery nerd fury, shook up and shot off.  Koenig’s fiery guitar runs scald the skin, Baio’s bassline boils, and Tomson’s drums crack open like giant popcorn kernels.  But it’s the words that make the song, the words that piss people off so much, the words that signal that Koenig’s doubled-down on this track, directly addressing his band’s own public and folding them into his own mythology.  “Dad was a risk-taker/ His was a shoe-maker/ You 2006 greatest hits little listmaker”: right here, Koenig’s fascinations with the privileges of lineage and the boring nu-bourgeoisie of the online indie chattering class, all shaped into one sharp dart.  Corralling his own crowd into his own song, splitting fantasy and realty: it’s a lyrical move perfected by hip-hop, but earlier practiced just as well by Lennon and Strummer.  “Me and my cousins/You and your cousins”: in its own sly way, this is Ezra’s take on “posse”; but the sort you’re born into. Which provide you with all the protection and cred you’ll need, and which are impossible to escape.  Vampire Weekend’s detractors like to accuse the band of striving toward embedding themselves in this culture, but they’re mistaken.  This ain’t autobiography, or some white boy’s wish-fulfillment narrative: it’s the clever ambivalence of an observant outsider.
3. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists “Bottled in Cork” (Matador)  The sweet, sentimental, strummy road tune on an album full of piss and vinegar.  Ted Leo’s own “Ballad of John and Yoko,” stirred up with some good old emo self-realization and no shortage of good advices.  I have so much to say about this album–my favorite of the year in a non-surprise/total surprise–but I’ll wait.  This song says enough for now.
4. Jaill “Everyone’s Hip” (Sub Pop) See below (there’s a reason the next two songs are in this order)
5. David Vandervelde “Wave Country” (Secretly Canadian) What we need right now is David Vandervelde, who is possessed of the unique capacity, long forgotten by too many rock musicians, to invent imagined worlds in which the only currency is cool–in the social and meteorological senses of the word.  He’s from Chicago, and his “Wave Country” has nothing to do with beaches or water.  His waves are what happens to that hot blacktop under those parked cars–solar psychedelia, as it were.  But that’s not it: like Lennon did with “Rain,” Vandervelde baked in in the heat long enough to come to the realization that “you’re not any cooler in the shade.”  If you were there, you’d understand.  For the time being, though, just hear that hook rise up from the ground–it’s enough to feather your hair.
6. Malachai “Shitkicker” (Domino) Some imaginary ‘66 British freakbeat band, doing the opening credit music for a Western parody TV pilot that, for many reasons, never got picked up.
7. Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La” (Sub Pop) So many bands have tried this retro formula over the past few years, and Dum Dum Girls get it so incredibly, undeniably right with this song (and side A of I Will Be, for that matter).  A 16mm punk/girl-girl group damsel in distress tale with Lesley Gore’s approach to the role of the boyfriend (manly savior).  Everything bathed in echo, but the drums crisp and powerful, pushing everything forward.  And that chorus, ostensibly too wordy but delivered with a passion and emotional release that actually makes me believe in this teen drama.
8. Giant Drag “Swan Song” (Roar Scratch) Not sure if we’re supposed to take the title of this song autobiographically or not–honestly, I’d assumed Giant Drag’s swan song came 5 years ago, after being dropped from their label deal after not keeping pace in the label-sponsored “next Yeah Yeah Yeahs” 5k Run of ‘03-’05.  If this is the last we’re gonna hear from Giant Drag, though, it couldn’t be more of a fitting epilogue: more or less the band’s signature drowsy, dirty riffage (here, think “Teenage Riot” at molasses speed) and Annie Hardy’s exhausted little-girl-lost smoker’s squeal, lamenting broken hearts and crooked teeth.  All of which eventually self-immolates (of course).
9. Serena-Maneesh “Reprobate!” (4AD) Seriously, music: if you keep recycling the basic Lush formula and stirring in different elements/theme variations, I’ll keep buying (into) it.  These guys sound like they have absolutely no idea what they’re supposed to be doing, but hey.
10. Liars “Scarecrows on a Killer Slant” (Mute) Marc Masters opened his Pitchfork review of Sisterworld with this simple statement: “whatever or wherever Sisterworld is, it sounds like a pretty creepy place.”  Yes, indeed.  But they’re not the first to travel there, though.  Liars most clearly evoke Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising here, down to “Scarecrow”’s perhaps-accidental similarity to that album’s cover.  Liars specifically wanted to make a dark, scary punk record to push against the LA-style optimism they saw in the post-Obama glow, sort of their own way of saying that despite all hope, society is in fact still quite the hole.  “Scarecrows” packs the album’s most furious squall, somewhere sort of somewhere between SY’s post-Branca sound-assault and the take-no-prisoners industrial punk screamathon of Nine Inch Nails’ Broken.  Pretty creepy place.
11. Besnard Lakes “And This is What We Call Progress” (Jagjaguwar) I’ve got a lot more to say about this soon, but one of the reasons I don’t believe the Boomer generation is going to loosen its hegemonic grip over music/advertising/entertainment culture anytime soon has nothing to do with the actual Boomers and their bands getting old and dying.  It has to do with the fact that bands, labels, fans, ad executives, and so on (of later generations) are going to continue looking for the things they loved about the Boomer-inspired/created canon of the 60’s and 70’s.  It’s incredibly hard, no matter how much we try, to shake the fact that rock music was born and nurtured through a particular set of aesthetic ideologies, and that while the original bands might go away, those ideologies aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  Ever wonder why groups like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, the National, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, are the most incredibly popular groups to rise from the indie rock clamor over the past few years?  It’s because they’re appealing to the same core, residual principles established in the original rock moment, which aren’t going to die out anytime soon.  And which means that, hopefully, we’ll get more amazing arena-psych from groups like Besnard Lakes.  This is Pink Floyd’s ghost reanimated, or some unknown Canadian studio wizards who dropped a concept record in ‘74 and disappeared.  I take this song title as a joke: it’s not progress, but that’s also not the question we should be asking here.
12. Shearwater “Black Eyes” (Matador)  1) Has anyone ever done the “American Radiohead” thing with Shearwater?  Because while Jonathan Meiberg might not have the genius of the Greenwood brothers behind him, he’s certainly got the American Thom Yorke Voice (and they’ve got their “Pyramid Song” covered, too).  2) Shearwater’s not-so-secret weapon is drummer “Thor,” who ably and forcefully steers the band, as flexible with rhythms as Meiburg is going from Yorkean eunuch howl to the stentorian field general’s timbre of “Black Eyes.”  I really like Shearwater, but I love this Shearwater–Meiburg cantering in on a gallant steed, pausing for a moment, then subtly signaling for Thor to ride up.  He comes clomping in on something much larger–a slo-motion medieval funk patter–to the degree that you imagine a cameraman having to zoom out to get him in the frame.  The greatest thing about this band is that they’re able to make these grand lefty/proggy gestures–a grand trilogy of albums themed around the vanishing environment (see this column for more details)–without ever seeming unnecessarily high-minded or dry.  The opposite, actually: “Black Eyes” is on my running mix, and when it comes on, I feel like I can sprint up a mountain.
13. Future Islands “Tin Man” (Thrill Jockey) I like this record so much for the same reasons I like Shearwater so much.  Namely, these guys are so completely unafraid to risk sounding completely over-the-top and totally cheesy, but they somehow never do.  Hell, until I saw them live a couple weeks ago and realized that they’re a Bmore art-world gallery band with a self-annihilating Jack Black as lead singer, I had Faith No More as their closest analog–psychotic lead singer, competent-yet-unobtrusive-yet-banging rhythm section, heavy on the synths, “anthem” in the DNA of every track.
14. Arches “Another Fading Memory” (Somewhere on the Internet) Yr 2010 “#9 Dream”-style psychedelic indie jawn.  Hey indie rock!  Maybe we can ditch the Brian Wilson and go for the Mind Games-era John Lennon for a while?  Arches and Tame Impala leading the way?  What?  You say Panda Bear’s got a new album dropping this year?  Oh.

(pic via)

Zach Baron wraps up a slick, strategically-written defense of Drake over at the Village Voice.  Here’s his “whaaa?” kicker, which is quite brilliant actually:

Like the similarly loathed Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, who have eloquently staked out the territory of upper-middle-class malaise in cinema, Drake’s done the same thing in rap. How much this bothers you probably depends on how much the upper-middle-class bothers you. But that’s your problem, not his.

It’s a nice rhetorical move that more or less equates Drake’s dispatches from the frontlines of 2010 pop stardom (and his background as a child actor with connected folks) with the “upper-middle-class malaise” of The Royal Tenenbaums or The Virgin Suicides.  And if you’re uncomfortable with that, the argument goes, well, maybe that’s the point of the art.

Of course, this is a highly superficial comparison made to prove another point, and which does no real justice to any of the artists or works he mentions.  It elides the actual art in favor of the context of the art (which is sort of what Drake himself does too…I’ll get to that in a second), skimming over the fact that neither of those films were about the authors’ own lives (nor do their plots have anything to do with Drake’s self-obsessed celeb culture fascinations).

All this is to say that it’s unfair for Baron to imply that that disliking Drake comes out of a particular classist worldview that listeners might be struggling with and unconsciously projecting.  The class point relates to the rockist one that Baron makes earlier in the post–critics can handle “struggle” in rap narratives, but not Drake’s tales of upper-middle-class connections and pop machinations–though the rockism thing is something I’m really not as interested in.

Drake is a whiner, which isn’t exactly a new thing in pop, but it’s the style and content of his whining that gets me.*  His first official LP, the one that enters him into the pop star arms race, is wholly made up of meta-level reflections of his own pop stardom, along with the cultural and socio-economic machinations that brought him here.  Which brings me to the important question: and? What I find so unpleasant about Drake is what I dislike so much about 2010-era pop culture in general: meta-level oversharing as art (and celebrity) itself, with precious little else to hold onto.

In other words, Thank Me Later isn’t pulling from the tragi-comic, semi-sweet upper-middle class narrative style of Coppola or Anderson, not even close.  Instead, it’s the new “reality rap,” and I’ve no doubt that lots of people are going to love it, in the same way that lots of people love watching others make pseudo-stars out of themselves in the sterilized world of reality television, former celebrities try to pull themselves back up to a lost level of fame by humiliating themselves in the same venue, or incessantly sharing mundane “thoughts” on Twitter.  Drake’s story is unique and interesting, but he leverages it within this framework.  He’s complaining about the trials and tribulations of being the lead member of rap’s 2010 nouveau riche on the same album that proves that point, and you’re not a rockist or classist for finding this irritating.

On a bad day, I’d call Drake rap’s Ashton Kutcher.  But to be honest, Drake’s a talented guy who’s made an incredibly boring album-about-making-an-album and the tiresome celebrity culture that comes with it. What’s important about that is that this whole thing so perfectly reflects 2010–in all the wrong ways.  Thank Me Later to be brief, is only possible at a particular time when we too often don’t really care about the actual content of a pop star’s icon or personality or art as much as we want to know what they think about it.

*There are many other, much more musical things I don’t like about this album, but I’ll leave those for later, or for others.