In blog years, I’ve been away for long enough to put out a reunion album.  If only I had more to show for it.

Not that I haven’t been “being productive.”  The opposite, actually.  It’s just that said productivity hasn’t manifested itself publicly.  Yet.  Along with taking trips out of town for various reasons (the Pitchfork Festival, a Cubs game/bachelor party, a glorious Tom Petty ampitheater show, WEEN–most of which I’ll write about soon, along with other stuff), I’ve been typing my ass off.  About 10-12,000 words, most of them copy-edited and good.  Weirdly enough, though, for two vastly different audiences.

If you were around these parts last year about this time, you can probably guess the two audiences.  The (much) larger audience will get to read the more enjoyable piece in a few weeks, so word on that will wait until that goes up.  The other audience, of four academics, will get to read the equally long, much drier piece (and then grill me on it) that’s been swirling around my head since last September.  It’s called a “dissertation prospectus,” it’s gone through four drafts, and finally I get to defend it at the end of this month.

I’m cutting it pretty close, to be honest.  I was lucky enough to receive a 2010-11 Mellon Foundation grant via the Sawyer Foundation, which will allow me the rare opportunity to truly/madly/deeply engage in my own research (without having to teach, which takes up 30-40 hours a week) while participating and helping organize a year-long series of symposia and other events around IU’s campus.  It’s seriously the greatest academic honor I’ve ever received, and I’m amazingly psyched to start it.  August can be loooooooong.

If you click around the Sawyer site for a few minutes, you can get a good idea of the sort of research on which I’m preparing to embark (and if you were at SxSW ‘10 or around Bloomington’s Landlocked Music this past Record Store Day, you’ve already seen me embarking): an anthropological study of music circulation.  Exciting!  If you want to stick around for a bit, I’ll clarify (to a degree) what it is I’ll be doing with my time, and how I’ll be doing it.  In as few words as possible, and with (ideally) a minimum of jargon.  I get asked about what I study a lot, and I have a hard time cramming everything into blurbs between beers.  Hopefully this will make up for my interpersonal insufficiencies.  Maybe (maybe) it’ll even give you some ideas.  The following are some big, weird, and decidedly formative ideas, but they’re the stuff I’ve become passionate about.  At the least, they’ll hopefully explain a lot of what I jabber about here.

NB: A dissertation (as I started talking about in this post) is a document intended for particular audiences, and is written in a very particular way.  Think of reading a legal brief, or leafing through a lengthy dossier of scientific findings on something–you’ll find tons of insider language and decoder-ring jargon meant for a specific (small) audience of other academics.  Think of it this way: the research I’m doing is designed as a report back to a small(ish) community of academics.  A lot of the stuff I discover might be super-obvious to people reading this blog, or people like me who keep up with the micro-grooves of digital music circulation, indie music, and so forth.  At the same time, though, I can guarantee you that anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, linguists, sociologists, folklorists, and/or cultural studies theorists are not as up-to-date.  Hopefully I’ll help them out, and do a reasonably good job of it.

Ahem.

Circulation hasn’t always been something that anthropologists (or anyone doing ethnographic research) have concerned themselves with.  Really, it’s been since the rise of global technological infrastructures (radio, TV, internet, web) that field research has devoted itself toward “following” cultural objects (which can be a text, a mode of performance, a set of ideas, etc) across many different locales and domains.  It’s become crucial, in other words, to discover how and why culture moves, what people do with it when it reaches them, how it transforms them and they it, and so on.  Honestly, it only really took off in the late 80s.  Bureaucracy, y’know.  Contextually: The academic journal Public Culture has blazed many trails in this area, as have “famous” anthropologists of circulation like Arjun Appadurai, Bruno Latour, Greg Urban, and wonderful theorists of publics and social imaginaries like Benedict Anderson, Yochai Benkler, Charles Taylor, and (especially) Michael Warner (if the cover of Warner’s book alone doesn’t make you want it, then I don’t know what to do with you).

If, like me, you’re interested in understanding what’s happened to music over the past decade or so, circulation is just about the only way you can go.  In this piece from last year, I started aiming in this direction: okay, we’ve effectively burned down the old factory.  What are we putting up in its place?  What is driving the circulation of music and music culture now? How does it compare to the old models, and what can we learn from the changes and continuities?

For the major labels, it’s more or less variations on the 20th century model: They have the rights to music, they exploit those rights exclusively, through the channels they choose and with the handcuffs they select, and if you don’t like it then they’ll sue you like crazy.  Ask Irving Azoff, he’s still fighting.  Of course, their model doesn’t work, and so they’re trying to milk revenue out of other areas–performance, merchandise, etc–traditionally controlled by artists and/or non-label affiliated unsavory characters.

But indie labels and the new crop of tech capitalists, on the other hand, have been much more flexible, prone to experimentation, and resistant to publicly shaming fans and possible consumers (with notable exceptions, of course).  This, to me, is much more interesting (and of course, so is the music).  Because there’s been so much change and expansion within their ranks, these groups of folks are who I’m primarily studying.

But how?  Glad you asked.

First, by studying the effects of discourse on circulation.  Which, let me explain.  Above, I linked to Greg Urban’s book Metaculture.  In said book, he claims that culture can and should be studied alongside other forces of motion that propel objects through the world.  Culture itself is immaterial–accumulated, socially learned knowledge–but it finds transitory homes in the material world.  But what moves culture through the world?  For Urban, it’s discourse.  The way we talk about things, the way we compare “new” things to the “old” things that they resemble: this is how culture moves–through metacultural responses to cultural objects.  For Urban, we don’t know anything about culture without knowing it through the metacultural responses that travel with it.  We don’t approach anything in a vacuum, in other words–stuff gets to us for a reason.

Think about music, and all the culture that’s associated with music, in this way.  A song is immaterial culture at its core: artists soak up what’s around them, what they’ve learned, what their friends like, and make new, unique things out of these experiences.  They record this stuff and release it, and hope to make money off it.  But there’s more–and this is specific to how music is a different sort of commodity than films (what Urban uses as his examples).  The recording is the primary commodity form of music, but over the past century, tons of other ancillary commodities have emerged to help drive sales of recordings.  There are those that the artist or label uses to flesh out their image/move some product (live performances, advertising campaigns, merchandise, music videos), and those that are totally metacultural, based on people’s responses to the recordings and all that stuff (criticism, fandom, journalism, and the like).  Ideally, the latter parenthetical group works together with the former group, and you get the Beatles or Radiohead. If they don’t?  Well.

Which is where I come in, and where my research will jump off.  How is indie (music and culture) adapting to the last 10-15 years of massive digital changes?  What are the new forces driving circulation? When any old John Q. Pitchfork has the same access to music that only critics or mega-geeks had a decade ago, how have these forces been altered, and what does that say about indie music, not to mention the way we use new technologies?  What hath blogs and message boards and Twitter wrought?  A couple weeks ago, A.O. Scott wrote a short and sweet article about Inception, but really about the new paradigm of critics critiquing critics as part of mainstream film criticism–often before the stuff even comes out.  This sort of thing is part and parcel of the vastly accelerated cycle of critical (and fan-driven) discourse now that access has been, ahem, “democratized” to a large degree–and indie is no exception, of course.

Not to mention that within indie culture, we’ve created our own discursive forces–the kind of stuff completely foreign to mainstream rock.  Indie ideologies–best espoused by Wendy Fonarow–have traditionally walled off indie recordings, made fans work for them (”How many indie kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  You mean you don’t know?).  The opposite of the idea of acceleration so necessary to making money from music.  What’s happening to those?  We also metaculturally evaluate indie music–and therefore circulate it to others–based on what label it’s on, what score it got on Pitchfork, what artists are RIYL’ed by a blogger.

What I’m driving at, of course, is that when we talk about music, we’re not just talking about notes and melodies and timbres.  We’re talking about lots of other things, as well (please subscribe to Nitsuh’s wonderful blog and read his wonderful column if you want to know more about this stuff).  Over the past decade, we’ve started talking about technologies and indie rock together in interesting ways.  You find mentions of mp3s and blogs in so many reviews of indie albums–how do discourses merging music and technologies help to circulate the music.  Hell, how do they help to circulate the technologies?

This last point is a major one–technologies facilitate the circulation of music as much as discourse does.  This is sort of a “duh” point.  But one thing that goes underreported is how technologies themselves circulate–discursively and otherwise.  What does it mean that some music is referred to as “blog rock”?  What does this reflect about blogs, or blogging, let alone Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?  Is there any precedent for the amount of music press that has been devoted to mp3 technology?  What does this say about where music journalism is right now?

These new technologies have also facilitated the rise of new speech genres–new ways of talking about music that accelerate its circulation–unknown a decade or so ago.  Chris Weingarten’s 1000 Times Yes Twitter feed is way too tailor-made for this sort of discourse critique, but his mini-feud with the Hype Machine folks a few months back is ripe for analysis.  Bitter, cynical old-school critic, meet optimistic tech capitalists!  2010!  Much of what Chris complains about in his already-legendary public rants is shot through with nostalgia for the time when things were slower, less people were opining about music and doing it better and for money, and criticism was more easily separable from PR (or so we think).

And nostalgia is a discursive force for music circulation, don’t you forget it.  It always has been, since fledgling turn-of-the-century record manufacturers started mining 19th century standards to move product.  Nowadays, though, it’s different: it can be Weingarten ranting about what others have called the “monoculture,” but it’s also record store owners (and corporate distributors) playing on our nostalgic love for physical media (read: vinyl) by making a yearly holiday out of buying it.

As I’ll argue later in that other piece I mentioned at the beginning of this thing, nostalgia is the residue of progress, and oh, has there been a ton of technological progress over the past decade within indie culture (and music culture in general).  And these technologies can’t be ignored as forces for music circulation, of course.  We just have to be careful how we talk about these things.  This is where Science & Technology Studies and its spinoff, Actor-Network Theory, come into play.  They both work to locate a productive middle-ground between technological determinism (the view in which technologies do everything) and social constructivism (in which humans do everything, regardless of technologies).

In other words, how do new technologies shape particular forms of social interaction?  What do we do with these things, and what do they do to us?  If we treat a technological object as an active participant in social relations–what ANT scholars call an “actant”–we can not only understand those objects better, but we can also start to understand their roles in our everyday lives.  Engineer/sociologist Madeleine Akrich has come up with some interesting ways to think about this topic, and I’m going to steal them from her.  Namely: the difference between the “scripts” written by technology manufacturers (and the other legal/governmental agents guiding their hands) and the “enactment” of those technologies in particular social circumstances.  She calls this “de-scription.”  You can probably guess the technologies I’m going to explore for this part.  Then, there are the infrastructures through which music flows–large-scale affiliations of technologies, people, rules, and the standards and protocols that govern circulation, often invisibly.  How are we linked together through indie music and culture?  How much authority do we really have?

Now, then.

As for the “who” I’m going to study: sorry, but I need to keep that under my cap for now.  There’s the not-so-small matter of getting approval by the University for any research I do, and the less-not-so-small matter of respecting the privacy of my informants (I really enjoy being able to say that).  As for the “how,” that’s a bit easier (though, per the type of research, still rather vague and totally boring).  1) I’m going to travel along with music, from the earliest moments of its creation through the entire cycle of production and circulation.  2) I’m going to explore one particular technological artifact–a website–that could only exist at this moment.  I’m aiming to try to understand why it was built the way it was, what behaviors it tries to predict, and then talk to users to understand how it was taken up.  3) I’m going to South by Southwest 2011 and talking to a ton of people.  4) Same for Record Store Day 2011.

Of course, I’m not going to post research on this blog, but I will post pithy stuff that comes to mind over the next two or three years.  This is an enormous project I’m preparing to undertake–the biggest thing I’ve ever done–and I’m really psyched to get going on it.  Hope you can stick around.

Michelangelo Matos interviews Rob Sheffield over at eMusic’s blog, and it’s long.  It’s also compelling and funny and just plain great.  This bit made me tear up a bit.  Sheffield has a knack for doing that.  I’ll be back tomorrow, with something much less wonderful than this:

A lot of listening to music is memory, and a lot of memory is listening to music. It’s funny that music is always in the present. It always confronts you with the new, the right-now. But it’s always connected to memory. Even if you’re writing about a song that’s playing right now, you’re always writing about it after the fact. It’s always after the moment. Especially writing about dance music—if you can call it a genre of pop-music criticism, it’s my favorite genre, because that’s built into it. The impossibility of trying to recapture that moment—even if you’re writing about something you heard last night, the immediacy of it makes it more exciting to read. There’s something retrospective built into it.

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)