Brown paper packages tied up with string...

Okay, just to reiterate: I srsly can't get enough of that LCD Soundsystem track I posted below. It's, like, a near-perfect piece of music man! It's all I want to listen to right now.

Prior to this, the last piece of music that I couldn't get enough of was Joanna Newsom's Ys, and since it still doesn't come out for another 3 weeks or so, I've upped the whole damn thing for all you lovely people. Now this one actually I could imagine many people disliking...but oh well. Sounds kinda like a medieval Bjork. Will maybe write more about it, but I think my main point is that while this is coming from a very similar place as most indie rock, I think it manages to completely rise above most of the dreck that gets put out. I think it's really pushing things forward in an interesting direction, while still being quite accesible and tuneful. Anyway, make up your own mind:

Joanna Newsom - Ys

The Knife - Like a Pen

?

Srsly, how great is this video? More creativity in three frames than the entire thursday night primetime television schedule. But what does it all mean? For one thing, that is clearly a pencil.

What to the running

LCD Soundsystem - 45:33: Nike+ Original Run


So many reasons why this is good.

1. It's a solid 45+ min track of space disco gold, shifting through numerous stages of wonderful kick-assitude.
2. It was commissioned by Nike specifically for the purpose of being a soundtrack to jogging, and is available only as a DRM-protected mp3 on iTunes. This song couldn't be more sold-out. (For those who are confused, selling-out is the opposite of all that rock, and especially indie rock, stands for in this day and age, and is therefore good).
3. I actually really want to try jogging to this. This music is so wonderfully calculated in its pure functionality: it's made for dancing and/or jogging, none of this being artistic crap.
4. Despite/because of all this it's actually alternatively beautiful, hypnotic, funky and calming.
*edit* 6. I forgot: it's also loosely inspired by Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4, whichi is, like, the greatest peice of post-krautrock, pre-techno dance music ever!

Love it.


(yes posting's have been a bit slack round here, i'm still on the downward slope of that graph posted below. Hopefully I'll have a good post up soon about the use of liberal critiques of Muslim and Arab society as a tool for racist oppression...fun!)

This one should be a hit: Planet of the Arabs!

Via brownfemipower via lenin's tomb via some other websites. Ah internet memes. Still, a pretty disturbing viewing.

Bonanza!

Negative correlation between start of class and amount of blog posting, p < .05.

In apologia, here's a brief summary of what i've been into recently, because I've been balls deep in good music this last little while. also, please download the robag wruhme track, it will bring joy to your life, honest!


Recent Purchases:

burial - s/t [finally got my hands on a copy of this]
ali farka toure - savane [somewhat embarrassingly only heard about him when he died, but checking out his stuff, i really liked it. 'african blues' they call it, which sorta describes it, but not really]
fuckpony - s/t [a bit undistinguished, but with some nice highlights]
rhythm & sound - see mi yah remixes [a couple of duds, but mostly gold]
keith fullerton whitman - lisbon [update of one of my all-time favs Playthroughs. not quite as good (unsurprisingly), but very interesting nonetheless]


Other Albums I've been feeling:

gene clark - white light [tip off from Woebot's excellent rundown of 60's and 70's folk/rock from LA]
the knife - silent shout [should have cottoned on to this when it came out in january, but man! super dark and mean sounding, yet still quite pop and catchy. Very interesting sound, here's a taster: the title track]
junior boys - so this is goodbye [I think I like this better than their first one, not quite as r&b influenced, more of a house/disco vibe too it. Still very polished and melodic though]
hot chip - coming on strong [still enjoying this, still haven't bothered to write anything about it, may never get around to it, oh well]


joanna newsom - ys [this is the one, something else entirely. not out until november, but it will be huge. so lovely. i may have completely underestimated freak-folk as a movement].



Trax I've been feeling:

robag wruhme feat helge schneider, rocko schamoni, lenja fina and dorle - katze geil [was expecting more minimal from wruhme, but instead he turns in something reminiscent of St. Germain at his best (think "So Flute" and "Rose Rouge") except touched with an oddball minimal aesthetic. Sorry, I didn't make it clear: IF YOU DON'T LIKE THIS SONG YOU DON'T LIKE FUN! Really, this should be very appealing to normal techno-phobes, the beat is super happy-catchy. Sounds like it should be soundtracking George Clooney committing a sophisticated diamond robbery while a bunch of germans party it up in the room next door. really, DONWLOAD THIS TRACK. your head will bob]

renegade legion - torsion [pure darkness. good for clearing out the webs if you've been listening to too much sad-sack music]
dillard & clark - the radio song [favorite song off the dillard & clark collab mention in the Woebot piece. Much of the rest of the album gets a little too country for me, but this is pure folk beauty].
justin timberlake ft t.i. - my love [already posted it, but still, sooooo good]
jojo - too little too late [classic r&b ballad--what a chorus! also, i totally love saying her name. JoJo...JoJo]
cassie - me & u [kick ass r&b minimalism]
azzido da bass feat. johnny blake - lonely by your side (booka shade deep mix) [grabbed from ohmygosh -- oh my gosh do i love booka shade]
fred falke - omega man [another forgotten gem on my harddrive unearthed by random play. classic big french house, reminds me how good that alan braxe album was from last year]
audion - mouth to mouth [aka "the swarm of bees track" large, large tune]
agoria - les violons ivres [classic strings plus bleepy chuggy beat == heaven!]
the knife - we share our mothers health (radio slave's secret base rmx) [now THIS is minimal. dark epic and grooving. kicks a whole lot of ass]

booka shade - essential mix 07/02/06 [the first half of this is a live set that completely makes up for their rather disappointing album. absolutely awesome. if you ask nice i'm might up this]



oof. this post went epic.

Why all politcal debate is essentially null

Oh man, this is so depressing. Really, the title says it all: in the end everyone's bought into the ideology, despite any surface differences. :(

Jumpstyle!

Oh man this is so cool. Totally restores my faith in techno to keep pumping out wack shit well into the future. There's a whole bunch of videos of very euro kids doing this dance to crazy hardcore gabber on youtube, all under the tag "jumpstyle" which is apparently what the dance is called.

This one in particular is really neat, just the setting alone, in some random school yard/town square in either belgium or holland somewhere with a crowd of people around is kinda interesting. I also like how they're all just standing there calmly, with their hands in their pockets, and then all of a sudden the beat drops and they go MOTHERFUCKING KICK DANCE! and just fucking bust out the dancing like nothing else.

The music is great too, btw. But you knew I'd say that.

Idiots!

The White House, while reiterating its traditional stance of not commenting on classified reports, said The New York Times story "isn't representative of the complete document." [from here]

How the hell do you write that sentence without your brain exploding? I mean, had he completely forgotten about the first half of that sentence by the time he got to the second half??? Man, journalists are dumb.

OMG NOT SO LOLZ!!1

S E V E R E Driving off the road: 254,419 Falling: 146,542 Accidental poisoning: 140,327

H I G H Dying from work: 59,730 Walking down the street: 52,000. Accidentally drowning: 38,302

E L E V A T E D Killed by the flu: 19,415 Dying from a hernia: 16,742

G U A R D E D Accidental firing of a gun: 8,536 Electrocution: 5,171

L O W Being shot by law enforcement: 3,949 Terrorism: 3147 Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554

Mortality rates, by category, in the US since 1995. From this Wired article. Where is the war on walking down the street?

OMG LOLZ!!!11

NYC Unviels 9/11 Memorial Hole

Yesterday being 9/11 Part 5 obviously necessitated endless bullshit parades from the jackals that sit barking at us from our televisions. Amongst the jagged braying and "grief porn" money shots of teary-eyed mothers there were occasional moments of relative sanity and insight, but the oppressive weight of Remembrance and Mourning was hard to escape. It must truly be hard to have lost someone in 9/11, your grieving process forever hijacked by ideological narratives, dredged up every year because WE MUST NEVER FORGET those patriots who died that day, those worthy victims. Oh to have a son who died of AIDS, his death would be swept so nicely under the rug, referred to only obliquely through the occasional statistics-quoting talking head.

But this is getting away from what I wanted to talk about, which was Slavoj Zizek's article in the Guardian. Now firstly if you haven't read Zizek's piece written right after September 11, you really should get on it. It's a very insightful take on the symbolic importance of the attacks on the American psyche, and is quite readable despite the occasional forays into Theory-speak. In Zizek's article yesterday he continues his description of 9/11 in terms of Hollywood fantasies writ Real (and then consumed as fantasies once more). The one specific point he makes that really struck me though was one concerning the two recent 9/11-based movies United 93 and World Trade Center. These movies were praised upon release for their realism and lack of sensationalism. But, as Zizek explains:

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of "cognitive mapping" is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That's the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as "subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda".

This, it strikes me, is extremely true. How is it that a movie set in a "bombed high-rise building in Beirut" would inevitably be seen as making a political statement, yet a similarly-made movie about the WTC can be praised for being apolitical? Why are our victims depoliticized, but their's politicized? Sure, racism, yeah, but that seems too reductive an explanation. Similarly, Zizek's claim that the movies' abstention from direct message gives an implicit message of trust in one's government seems to miss the more interesting implications of his posed question.

Obviously the dead of 9/11 have been used extensively for political ends, yet somehow in making these movies they have been presented as just "normal" people who happen to get caught up in this catastrophe. Now I haven't seen these movies, but from what I've read it appears that by avoiding showing the perpetrators of these crimes, or spending time delving into their motivations, the movies effectively depoliticize the events. It can't be argued against that the events took place; however politics enters into the equation when you try to explain why they took place. Did the attackers have some legitimate grievances, and if so, who is responsible for these grievances? Could the attacks have been prevented had certain groups preformed their jobs more thoroughly? These are the two most contentious questions, I would argue, and would almost inevitably be encountered if some of the broader context of the attacks been covered.

In our hypothetical Beirut movie, we could similarly never show the American-made Israeli warplanes dropping bombs from above, never discuss why they were attacking, whether it was justified or not. But still, in showing the required scenes of crying parents and suffering children, the film's political critique would become unavoidable. Because we know who dropped the bombs causing this suffering, and we can't help but ask why we would ever create such suffering. Why does one movie provoke such a questioning reaction, the other not?

Five years on, the events of 9/11 no longer posses the traumatic punch that they once did, they have been fully assimilated into the ongoing storyline of "the war on terror," becoming, if not actually understood, at least absorbed into the culture. (The Real has returned into the symbolic order, Zizek would say, or at least something like that). The Western story about 9/11 heavily involves its victims, the poor innocents killed by savage terrorists. The Western story about the conflict in the Middle East (for example) largely has to do with what the Arabs have done to us (or our allies in Israel). A story about the victims of 9/11 fits nicely into the dominant narrative (or dare I say, discourse?) being espoused by our politicians and media. A story about the Lebanese victims (or Iraqi or Haitian or...) of American violence does not fit into the dominant discourse about these events.

The first thing that is almost always brought up in "proper" complaints about the war in Iraq is the number of American soldiers killed, when in fact this number is far FAR smaller than the number of Iraqi civilians killed (this goes the same for Vietnam too: oh it was a costly war for America was it?). If we are to go by the basic moral standard that the lives of innocents have the same value regardless of race, sex, religion or culture (as Chomsky so often reminds us), then surely the emphasis of these narratives are grossly skewed towards American lives. WTC and United 93 continue with this government-approved bias, while a hypothetical Beirut movie would uncomfortably puncture this communal fantasy, placing the victims of American violence on the same plane as American victims.

Most people, when confronted with the suffering of others will feel compassion regardless of race, religion, etc. Discussion of 9/11 is suffused with mention of its victims, so why would seeing a movie about its victims cause any confusion or questioning among the viewer? However in discussion of America's follies in the Middle East and elsewhere, mention of civilian victims is relegated to a code word: "collateral damage". The confusion one would feel, the questioning that would occur were you to see this collateral damage up close, if only in movie form, comes from the struggle to fit this information into a discourse that leaves this tragedy as a footnote for historians.


I suppose in the end it is just good old racism.

RANDOM

So, feeling in a somewhat musically unsettled mood the last few days, I put my entire downloads directory (sitting at about 15 GB, I really need to tidy it up) on random play. These are some of the gems I've forgotten about but in fact really kick ass. [warning to those who care, mostly dan i guess, this post is a fucking gold mine!]


Answering Machine - Call Me Mr. Telephone (Lindstrom & Prins Thomas Remix)

Super long cosmic/beardo disco remix by it boys Lindstrom & Prins Thomas. The best part is around 6:30 were the vocals suddenly get all desperate and haunting with a mean synth somwhere in the background. Other than that, titanic groover.


Liquid Crystal - You Got Me
Essence of Aura - Destiny

Oh man rave music. Oh man. The piano build up in the first track is damn near unstoppable euphoria. And that second track? Pure rave evil. Oh man.


Pineapples - come on closer

Shitty radio rip that I really need to find a better version of, but oh fuck, posibly the best italodisco track ever! How could you not love this? Your heart would have to be a frozen peice of rock with big pointy thorns on it covered with barbed wire and dead puppies or something.


Sudenten Geche - Are Kiss

German new-wave (aka Neue Deutche Welle), big in some necks of the old internet-woods. Sounds like moody 80's electro-pop, at least this one, though others are much more punky.


Public Image Ltd. - Poptones

Classic, classic post-punk from John Lydon's (aka Johnny Rotten's) second, less famous, and perferred-by-me band. Heavily led by a the wonderful bass of Jah Wobble, sounding like punk only in it's attitude, not its sound, thankfully. You should see the performance of this song and "Careering" that they did on American Bandstand, pulling audience members on to the stage to dance, Lydon not even bothering to lip sync, Dick Clark clearly having no idea what to do with these people, it's just mindblowing but apparently Clark had it removed from youtube the fucking bastard. Dick Clark should die, though obviously you can't kill what is already dead.


Isolee - Cite Grande Terre (Luciano's Luck of Lucien Edit)

Last and definitely not least, this absolutely stunning Luciano mix, easily one of my tracks of the year. The absolute calm space and beauty of this track is just enthralling. The beat exists in this weird half-ambient-yet-propulsive realm that keeps you in this kind of pleasant stasis throughout the whole track. Ultra-minimal yet hyper-detailed (just try to follow all the shards of sound comprising what would otherwise be known as the high-hat/snare drum pattern), this one really seems to grow and expand on you as the track progresses, punctuated by the dubbed out echoes of Isolee's original work. Let it sit with you for a bit.


well, let it not be said that ALL i listen to is pop music, eh?


Anyway, I know many of you really prefer the non-music posts, but I don't really have anything to say right now on the politix front that isn't being said elsewhere, and I don't really feel like providing a bunch of links right now, so screw you. :)

I WROTE THIS SONG FOR THE GIRL PARIS HILTON (or, how i learned to stop worrying and love pop music)

There are a lot of good reasons to hate Paris Hilton. She's had her whole life handed to her on a silver platter and acts like she was entitled to every bit of it simply because of who she is. She's a symbol of Western excess, greed and uncaring as well as the selfish egotism of good old latter-day capitalism. Furthermore, the terms of her success have been almost entirely defined by her ability to fit into male fantasy: the rich heiress, the blond bimbo, the spoiled daddy's girl. Which is not to say that her appeal is aimed entirely at men, she undoubtedly has as many female fans as male ones (though "fan" may not be quite the right word here), and she can be said to embody a kind of strong female role, in that her success has come through her skillful manipulation of these fantasies (The Simple Life would be a good example of this). In fact, it is this manipulation of image that I find so interesting about Paris; I don't really know what kind of person she is outside her mediatized image, and frankly I don't care. But Paris Hilton the image, and how that image came to be, are a lot more intriguing topics.

It's very interesting to me that Paris actually acquired the trappings of fame after she became famous, sort of as a post-hoc justification for her fame. This rearranges the supposed order of celebrity, in which fame follows as a symptom from staring in TV shows, movies and pop albums, to a new order where being a movie star or a pop singer are symptoms of being famous. It is as if, once we (the people, the big Other) accepted her as famous, we almost forced her to do these things in order to justify our belief in her fame. This is becoming more and more the case in celebrity culture--witness the number of actors or musicians branching out into as many other mediums as possible. Do these young stars feel pressured to justify their massive fame by taking on as many new projects as possible? Yet Paris stands above them as the first person to completely shortcut the whole process of becoming famous, simply just starting out being famous, showing the paradoxically self-referential nature of fame: the most important aspect of fame is being famous. And Paris the persona could only ever be famous, it's a required precondition to her being Paris. Once achieved, she is swallowed whole into the celebrity machine, slotting perfectly into the place that was already there for her. For Paris does know how to fit into the machine--either unwittingly or knowingly or both; she is able to work her celebrity image in her own favour like few others.


Paris Hilton - Fightin' Over Me ft. Jadakiss and Fat Joe


Witness her new album Paris, an expertly crafted pop music gem. Others stars have tried to step into the pop music arena and failed miserably (Jennifer Love Hewitt, anyone?), but somehow, against all odds Paris has avoided this fate. Using a similar formula for success that many others have tried (throw lots of money at all the best current-day pop producers) she nevertheless has come up with a pop album that stands competitively against the best of this year's crop of pop such as Nelly Furtado's Loose and Rihanna's A Girl Like Me (though not as good as JT's new album!). If we take the view of this excellent review on the Plan B website, we can argue that Paris represents the ultimate test for those still hung up on notions of authenticity when it comes to music--and judging from the reaction on the Plan B forum there are still a lot of them out there (Plan B's demographic is essentially run-of-the mill indie fans, btw). Her music is indeed slick and breathy, as one would expect, expertly toying with her image (as in the above track) and continuing her tabloid feedback loop (as in the below rather excellent discussion of her relationship with Nicole Ritchie).


Paris Hilton - Jealousy


Paris touches base in nearly every modern pop style around, from dance-pop to hip hop to Kelly Clarkson-style pop-rock to the pseudo reggae of her first single "Stars are Blind". For many a pop star this would be interpreted as pandering, but for Paris it's rather beyond the point. Her entire image is so devoid of authenticity that to accuse her of "just giving the people what they want" is to essentially pay her a compliment. And why shouldn't crass populism be seen as a positive feature? Why must artists always be staying true to some sort of occult "artistic vision" that endows their music with some magical true essence of Art? What's wrong with making some good tunes that people will like? To assume that we know what goes on in the artists mind when he or she creates some piece of music, and that we can sense the virtue of the effort and emotion that the artist has put into the music, is just bullshit projection of our own feelings. Hilton's music, because of both her reputation and the sound itself, deflects this hopeless search for the real meat underneath, forcing the listener to confront the song as surface only (this was the same move Glam made back in the 70's, so I understand). For some, the perceived empty heart of this music will be too much to overcome (ie., some people just can't stop hating Paris), but if you can overcome your knee-jerk reaction to her there's a lot to be found within her album.


Paris Hilton - Heartbeat


On the above track, Paris sounds like a lost child expressing dearly-held beliefs of fairy-tale love; in others she is sexy, angry, sultry, playful, but always with a curious lightness that avoids overwhelming the tracks. She does not over-emote, doesn't try too hard to prove anything, simply gliding over expertly produced beats singing in a voice barely more than necessary. It's a relief to hear music so devoid of undertow, where the meaning is up front for you to play with all you want. And the wonderful thing is that the fact that it is Paris Hilton singing only adds to this effect. Unfortunately, a singer such as Kelly Clarkson, who could have pulled this off immediately after her American Idol win, has now climbed so far up Credibility Mountain that her music has gained too much weight to pull off such a lightness of touch (which is not to say that I don't heart Kelly, because few people heart kelly like I heart kelly). Of course this does not guarantee a perfect album, and indeed the final few tracks are rather generic and bland, but the opening string of 7 or 8 tracks have enough quality to justify my (rather exorbitant?) claims.



What I love about Paris (and this also goes for many other pop stars as well) is her ability to show how musical styles so caught up in notions of authenticity can be just as easily performed without any of the bullshit backstory, just the signifiers of the backstory. Strike the pose, play the cords that the best money can provide, and watch as the same feelings are expressed, often with more skill than they were before. One of the initial thrills of Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" was just how well she succeeded in "rocking" despite her so openly fabricated image. (Once again, after success a pop star goes about establishing post-hoc rationalizations of her new image. Though probably unplanned, I'm sure Kelly's agents/handlers couldn't be more pleased with this video that's been making the rounds on the internet of Kelly swigging whiskey and singing Guns 'N Roses songs with random metal cover band Metalskool). Paris has the same effect, showing that it was always the image that we reacted to in the first place. Paris the album is filled with a sense of how fun it is to not have to stick to one image, to try them on and throw them off at will, and that sense of enjoyment comes through in the music itself. This album could only ever be made by someone as fake as Paris Hilton, and that is one of its clear strengths.




*Postscript* This was my first attempt at serious pop music criticism in the vein of some of my more favored writers, so if it veers towards pretension more often then not and makes some pretty wild claims, well shit, it's just a bit more fun that way. I'll probably look back at this and wince at some point in time, but oh well. In other news, I'm still pissed off Pluto is no longer a planet. Also Nicole tells me she has a new pencil. Yes, Paris, Pluto and Pencils, there's a message in there somewhere, you just need to look hard enough. :)

OH MY GOD!!!

Holy holy crap, the new Justin Timberlak album is FUCKING OUTSTANDING. Go here and download now! Here's a little sample to convince you:

Justin Timberlake - My Love ft. T.I.

My jaw literally dropped at the beginning of this track. Those synths! T.I.'s bars! Arrrg, I am clearly overexcited.


Also, yesterday I ate 13 tacos.


*Update* Alright so the last three songs are pretty crap. I blame will.i.am.

Waiting for goddamn nicole post.

Well, in place of my long-delayed and half-completed post on UK Garage, as well as a half-completed post on Paris Hilton's new album (having problems finishing what I started, no?), here's a track off of Rihanna's new album that's for whatever reason has really stuck with me the last two days. Rihanna's album is actually suprisingly slow and mellow, given its lead-off single of S.O.S. (track of the summer, NE1?). This one's a pathos-laden, suprisingly dark, guitar-led piece. The guitar melody really reminds me of some metallica song...maybe the accoustic bit from "one"? Embarissingly it's been a while since I've done any heavy Metallica listing. Anyway:

Rihanna - Final Goodbye