Category: music

Chalk it up to a number of things. Election results. Flying to the east coast the weekend Daylight Savings Time ended. A court date yesterday N & I spent a very long time preparing for. I fell asleep (maybe? never clear whether I was out or just trying to be) past 1:30 last night and woke up for no good reason at 4:00. Around 5:30 I got out of bed and went to read on the couch.

Right now it’s 8:15.

These days I’m reading a biography of Talking Heads. David Byrne has been a hero of mine at least as far back as my senior year of high school, when I wrote about him and Warhol and Picasso in a college application essay. The movie he directed, True Stories, and the overall embrace of pop culture that it and his music presented which somehow also made room for critiquing it,^[x] is what helped me see DeLillo’s White Noise as a feeble thing written with the critical acumen of a dull pencil when assigned it in graduate school.

Talking Heads’ story is a sad one about three art school friends, two of whom get married after the third serially ditches them for collaborators he’s more excited by. Where I am in the book is they just put out Remain in Light, which is both their most collaboratively created record and the one (if their biographer is to be believed) with the skeeviest denial of credit-giving. Tina and Chris did the cover up at MIT, but all the credit went to the design firm that laid out the liner notes. After agreeing on a “Songs by” credit with all four members + Eno in alphabetical order, the first pressing said, “All songs by David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Talking Heads.” Even, you can see up there, their faces are masked.

It’s not my favorite of their records,^[y] but it’s the one I’ve been listening to the most these days. I don’t have a point in this post. I just need to wake up to get my day started. I need to read students’ thesis work closely enough to understand what it’s trying to do and come up with constructive tips for revision. This is a kind of collaborative work.

I have periodically in the past collaborated with writers and artists. The Cupboard was created with the idea of being an anonymous collaborating collective, but that iteration never took off. What I like about collaboration is making something that’s mine and yet new to me, that’s something I wouldn’t’ve been able to make, stuck as I am in my own brain.

It is, though, a vulnerable place to put myself in. To have another person negate a thing I added in the pursuit of creation is scary, and when it happens it hurts and makes me feel stupider than I am. I imagine it’s like co-parenting a child. Maybe collaboration is a way to grow up.

I’m led, in the Heads biography, to sympathize with Tina Weymouth, who seemed only to want to make art with her friends for the rest of her life. Is it a form of arrested development? There’s a tie between collaboration and open relationships I could make if I were better rested.

Right now “Listening Wind” is about to end. Byrne is singing about the wind in his heart and the dust in his head. Once again he’s saying it better than I can.

blg post about anaconda video. the boringest thing that a woman can be is sexy. i don’t say this as a gay man, and I don’t say it as a prude, though I’ve been accused of being both. I say it as a person who for most of his life has been shown women in entertainment being sex objects. this is what the world has been conditioned to expect of women in a video. it’s like seeing jack nicholson grin in a pair of sunglasses. whether it’s on her own terms or the terms of some male exec, the fact is that minaj in her video is giving the market what it demands. the market for female music artists demands they be sexy if they want to sell records. it doesn’t demand that they hold their own behind a mic with the likes of kanye west and jay z. but that’s what minaj can do. no it’s not all she can do but it’s what maybe only she can do. rather than remind a public in maybe constant need of reminding about it, she’s instead, she’s rubbing her whole ass on drake of all people while rapping half-assedly along with a novelty hiphop footnote from my high school days. for whom is this any kind of victory?

(also quote this problematic part of the bitch article: “There are questions and criticisms that the video was shot, directed, and produced by men to satisfy the male gaze, to further perpetuate the commodification of another black female body. But this condemnation ignores and silences Minaj’s voice and ability to make decisions about her own representations as an artist and a business person.”) http://bitchmagazine.org/post/nicki-minajs-unapologetic-sexuality-anaconda-video-feminism (also wrestle with this bit from grantland: ” Cutting up a metaphorical dick onscreen makes it even more clear that the “Anaconda” video is about Nicki asserting her power, not as a sexual object but a sexual subject.”) http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/nicki-minaj-reclaims-the-twerk-in-the-anaconda-music-video/

My favorite band is Camper Van Beethoven. And I’ve long been a nostalgist for The Comedy Channel, particular early-season MST3K, The Higgins Boys and Gruber, and Rich Hall’s Onion World. Rich Hall had a weird influence on me and my pal Clay growing up. We’d both get Sniglet page-a-day calendars, for instance. Also: Rich Hall was a big Camper Van Beethoven fan.

Last night I saw the Family Guy episode where they hunt for the origin of dirty jokes. (Stay tuned for more on this one.) There’s a bit where they talk about who heard the joke from whom, which gets them to an R.E.O. Speedwagon “Heard It From A Friend” joke. It reminded me of a story I heard about Camper Van Beethoven back when they were opening for R.E.M. on the Pageant tour, I think it was. CVB pissed their elders off, reportedly, because they kept putting R.E.O. Speedwagon stickers on their equipment.

This is exactly why I love Camper Van Beethoven. They’re a punk band that decided instead to sound like a eastern-European ska band. They were smart brats at a time when I enjoyed being a smart brat.

Also, they were on Onion World once, I’ll always remember. The Internet couldn’t possibly have a clip of it, though, could it?

Best part is Greg Lisher (who, it only now occurs to me, looks a lot like my friend Chris Farrell) singing along to the words at the beginning.

You’ve heard the chorus to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” before:

Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know what you got till it's gone.
They paved paradise
and put up a parking lot.

It’s always seemed to me a childish, naive complaint. Not because of progress in the free-market enterprise sense, but because of art and culture in the progressivist, futurist sense. I always heard Mitchell’s song in the shadow of a better one, Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers”:

(Nothing But) Flowers from Pentagram on Vimeo.

(I was going to link to a performance of this song at the 2010 TED conference with David Byrne, Thomas Dolby, and a string quartet, but at the first chorus the TEDers start clapping along and it’s…. Well you can imagine it’s excruciating.)

The lyrics are clear if you watch the video, but if you’re not an online video-watcher (me neither!) here’s a sampling:

There was a shopping mall
Now it's all covered with flowers
You've got it, you've got it

If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
You've got it, you've got it

...

This used to be real estate
Now it's only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it's nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we'd start over
But I guess I was wrong

...

We used to microwave
Now we just eat nuts and berries
You got it, you got it

This was a discount store
Now it's turned into a cornfield
You got it, you got it

Don't leave me stranded here
I can't get used to this lifestyle

Byrne’s lyrics are far more evocative, brave, and tragic than Mitchell’s, not only in their specificity (and there’s also just more of them) but in their treatment of the world. Just how, he seems to ask her, are we to live in paradise? What’s a person supposed to even do there?

It’s also why I could never fully enjoy DeLillo’s White Noise (or Cosmopolis, which is guilty of similar missteps): he treats the mess of mass culture with this bewildered Boomer-esque gawking. Every other page he’s all “Can you believe this, folks?” I can believe it, Don. This world Mitchell laments and you shake your head at is the only world I’ve known.

DeLillo is 77. Mitchell is 70. David Byrne’s only 62. It’s not much younger. But for whatever reason he was able to treat the pop of our culture the way Wordworth treated flowers and clouds—as a place where we might find salvation. That’s why he’s been my go-to guy since I wrote my college entrance essay on him.

This morning, I realized that what I needed was an app or Web engine that could recommend new music to me based on old music I liked back when it was of use to the music industry for me to like it. Because it’s rare that I hear guitars in new pop/rock music today, distorted ones at least. And I like distorted guitars. Surely someone’s using fuzzboxes?

I imagine it’d go like this. The app or site would prompt you to fill in the blank:

When I was young enough to be marketed to, I loved…

And then it would use algorithms or something to figure out what the closest present-day analogue is:

Now that you’re older, the album the kids are listening to that you might also love is…

But then you have to trust the algorithm, and what little I know about tech people and big data tells me I might not want to, that I might go When I was young enough to be marketed to, I loved…

And it would then go Now that you’re older, the album the kids are listening to that you might also love is…

So be careful, enterprising tech people. Don’t recommend that I listen to Imagine Dragons. And get on it. Why not? Yesterday I was followed on Twitter by an app I can download to help schedule my office hours and other student meetings. Why waste time on voice mail or email trying to arrange a meeting? Why try to diminish my interactions with students which can’t be mined for data?

The saddest part of it is that I couldn’t even sign up if I wanted to. They’re currently “overloaded with requests.”

That this is the weirdest photo I’ve ever seen of Bill Callahan in the fifteen years I’ve been a fan of his says more than I ever could about how Bill Callahan is a very weird guy.

He’s also probably my favorite working musician, and now he’ll be my first San Francisco concert. At what’s called The Great American Music Hall. Nov 16. I’m excited, but I just realized I’ve made dinner plans I now need to break.

The point of this post is to share that pic with the one reader of this blog I know cares. Also, did you know we live two blocks away from “the Airplane house“? 1992’s Dave Madden would’ve just about shit.

Despite its colorfulness I don’t like the term earworm, but we all get songs stuck in our heads. Or? Man, is there someone who’s never had a song stuck in her head? I want to meet such a person.

At any rate, what I also have are songs that I start singing in my head to kill the earworms I get, songs that are incredibly catchy and sticky but which I also enjoy. I’ve got two, both extremely fey and twee. One’s Belle & Sebastian’s “White Collar Boy”:

The other’s Of Montreal’s “Labyrinthian Pomp”:

I’m especially fond of this stretch of the lyrics:

I got my Georgie Fruit on.
He’s a dark mutation
for my demented pastime:
giving replicators somewhere to go.
But we’re authentic.
You can test my talons
against your cursive body.
The Controller Spheres have disappeared and it hurts!

I think it’s the sudden shriek of pain after so much posturing and strut.

The whole point of this post is to get my three readers to post what their Earworm Killers are, as a kind of public service. When Katy Perry gets stuck in your head, what helps you boot her out?

ef=”http://archive.davemadden.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/bm7-webpic.jpg”>I.
I taught myself the guitar in the spring of 1995.

II.
A dominant seventh chord is a regular triad with an extra note added to it. This note is the seventh on the scale, diminished by a half-step for reasons I’ll explain. So: a C seventh chord (C7) would go from C, the first note, up through D, E, F, G, and A to B, the seventh. But, like I said, it’s diminished by a half-step. In our case: our B becomes a B-flat (Bb). Why this weirdness? Well, a B is already a half-step away from a C. On a piano, those keys aren’t separated by a black key. This causes dissonance. But a Bb is enough removed from the C (the “tonic”) that it sounds like we want to resolve to the tonic without feeling too dissonant.

Actually, a C7 wants to resolve to an F major chord. That I’m having such a hard time explaining why this is the case makes me angry and then relieved that I’m not a music teacher. Let me try.

The C major triad consists of the notes C, E, and G. Remember the scale: C D E F G A B C. The F major triad consists of the notes F, A, and C. Its scale: F G A Bb C D E F. (You’ll see that a major triad is the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale.) You’ll see that C E G Bb (the C7 chord’s notes) are notes that are tonically close to F A C.^[1] E’s just a half-step away from F. Bb’s just a half-step away from A.

Everything about music theory makes sense in the hearing. This is its magic. If, , writing about music is like dancing about architecture, writing about music theory is like texting about blueprints. Come at me with an open hour and I’ll bring the drinks and the keyboard to show you what I mean.

III.
B7 is a B dominant seventh chord (B, D#, F#, A). Bmaj7 is a B major seventh chord (B, D#, F#, A#). Bm7 is a B minor seventh chord, which follows the dominant model (B, D, F#, A).

IV.
I don’t remember the first song I learned with a Bm7 in it, but the first song I ever learned—either Camper Van Beethoven’s “Come on Darkness” or Camper Van Beethoven’s “All Her Favorite Fruit”—had a Bm in it. I knew how to make a Bm into a Bm7 the way I knew how to hide from my friends and classmates the private attentions I paid to the bodies of my male classmates. Here’s how I did it.

V.
The strings of a guitar go, vertically, from bottommost nearest your heel to topmost nearest your chin like this:

e
B
G
D
A
E

The lowercase e string is two octaves higher than the uppercase E. Here’s how I’ve played a Bm chord from 1995 until ten minutes ago. The numbers refer to which fret my finger hits the string on:

e-2- 
B-3-
G-2-
D-4-
A-2-
E-2-

Those in the know w/r/t guitars will see this as an Am7 chord barred up two frets.

VI.
Did you know this is also a Bm7 (B, D, F#, A)?

e-2-
B-0-
G-2-
D-0-
A-2-
E-x-

This guy doesn’t seem to know. Nor this guy. It’s not like I’ve been to the top of a mountain, but it is like I’ve only known the 2nd-fret barred A7 shape for B7 and have just tonight learned

e-2-
B-0-
G-2-
D-1-
A-2-
E-x-

VII.
I miss my boyfriend and I miss my friends I can talk music theory with.

[[]]I can type “you’ll see” but I shouldn’t assume this is see-able. (Does it help with this dumb post to know that Adam Peterson is my target audience for it?) So, alphabetically, you’ve got C E G Bb and C F A. I hope it’s clear that these are near triads, compared to, say C E G and F# A# C#. Near meaning non-dissonant and closely resolveable. That G and Bb work together to kinda hug on the A. It sounds dull, but you’d hear it like crazy were we in a music room.[[]]

I.
Okay the easiest job for a critic is to be a judge on a cooking-based reality/game show. That, next to record reviewer, is the world’s easiest job. Music critics, looking as they do at macro levels of the artform, work harder. I mean, looking at how one thing fits into a continuum or context of many historical things (which things include our communal lives and time) takes hard and long thought and (we hope) a way with words. I have a friend who is a very good and esteemed music critic (who is, I should say, in my opinion, too generous toward pop and with whom it’s been too long since I’ve hung out), and knowing her impels me to make this distinction between critic and reviewer. Hell: it’s a distinction everyone’s already made before me.

II.
Here’s what passes for publishable record reviewing in the mostly abysmal Rolling Stone:

Rhythmically flimsy, despite guitar and synth tracks that flash back to “Raspberry Beret”, this apparent one-off offers Eighties nostalgia to match the new mini-fro Prince is rocking. The song is a tale of a suburban girl colliding with a guy who believes in “jazz, rhythm & blues and this thing called soul.” They live screamingly ever after, but the purple mountain majesty faded long ago.”

III.
The problem with most criticism is that the proportion of work done by the critic to work done by the criticized in so infinitesimally fractional that it feels almost from the start like a paltry waste of time. What I should stress here is that the above blockquote is the review of this new Prince track in its entirety. I don’t know how Prince works these days, but no way did this reviewer work half as hard as Prince did. Sure, it’s a track review, not a record one. But it’s easily 60 percent the length of what RS lends to most new records.

IV.
Two grand points to make in this post. One is that, in the end, shitty reviews do the service they’re meant to of telling me new records are out. Will, for instance, the new Corin Tucker Band album live up to the awesomeness that’s been the Wild Flag record? And when will I run out to buy this new Band of Horses record? Two is that I have this very smart music critic friend whom I need to interview on the worth of the record review in a post iTunes era. Ann, if yer reading, let’s you me and my voice recorder grab a drink sometime.

Right? Anyway, one thing I used to do “a lot” of is record beloved records track for track on Apple’s iLife’s Garageband. This was a way to not write that taxidermy book I was supposed to be writing. I did, um…well before the book I did Smog’s Wild Love and then I did Bee Thousand and then I did Camper Van Beethoven’s Key Lime Pie and then I started working for a living and that was sort of over. Plus I couldn’t think of another record to do. I was this close to doing Palace’s Arise, Therefore but who wants to listen to this froggy voice aim too stalwartly at replicating Oldham’s warbles?

At any rate, I found myself trolling through Key Lame Pie recently (that’s the naming convention: self-disparagement) and heard this, and I got really, really proud.

Interlude
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