Impending Cheer

All right, let's get the year-end list out of the way so that we can usher in 2008.

First, however, I'll answer my own inquiry from the previous post:

I think Hillary Clinton might in fact make a horrible president, but as some readers pointed out, anyone might.

I have seen a Pink Floyd laser show. It was at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.

I would have made out with Robert Plant in 1974. Hopefully while listening to Physical Graffiti.

And I can't recall for certain, but during my high school years I probably used song lyrics to express myself in a letter. Most likely The Replacements. Paul Westerberg was my poet laureate for a long time.

That's it, I'm afraid.

Ok, 2007.

Albums: The National's Boxer and Blitzen Trapper's Wild Mountain Nation.

The National caught me off guard. I had not listened to their previous work and I bought Boxer on a whim. The first surprise was that I liked it immediately. Not in the instantly gratifying way that actually predicts fatigue, if not outright rejection, after subsequent listens (this phenomenon happens a lot with catchy songs on albums, it's harder to tolerate those songs later on). With The National, it was the singer's voice that drew me in. Deep but not booming. Subdued in a way that conjures atmosphere not apathy. It's vulnerable without veering towards a mock sensitivity. The National's songs remind me of some of The Church's great tunes. The way they swirl around the room so that there is no reason to pick anything apart, they seep into the space and fill the air. The songs take on the shapes of the surroundings, of living room walls or car interiors, like the melodies are turning solid objects into porous ones. For this reason, I listened to Boxer more than any other album this year, it made the spaces I was in sing.

Blitzen Trapper came through my speakers with claws. The first three songs on Wild Mountain Nation were enough to let me know they were the band I was going to preach about all year at cocktail party sermons and in email asides. The opening song, Devil's A Go-Go, is jerky and contorted, it forces the listener to chase the beat but you only get to claim it for a moment. I felt like a cat following a laser pointer. The title track is a beautiful song that brings to mind The Dead, The Kinks, and The Band, if they sang from mountaintops and lived for sunny days when you can see Mt. Hood from any Portland street corner.

In brief.

Television: The Wire Season 4 on DVD.

Film: No Country For Old Men (But maybe only because Portland is too small a market to have yet given us The Savages or There Will Be Blood)

Books: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.

Untimely Farewells: Dan Fogelberg and Liam Rector. R.I.P

Monitor Mix will be taking a break from blogging during the holiday week.
Have a wonderful Christmas.
Thank you for reading and take care.

1:45 PM ET | 12-21-2007 | permalink

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Thursday Treasure Hunt

If you are so inclined, please respond if you fall into one or more of the following categories. If you do choose to respond, please provide a brief explanation (if necessary). Thanks.

You have a bumper sticker on your car expressing a political belief or opinion
You have a band's sticker on your car
You voted for Bush in 2004
You think Hillary Clinton would make a horrible president
You would vote for Mike Huckabee
You don't like The Beatles
You would have made out with Robert Plant in 1974
You have seen a Pink Floyd laser show
You have one leg shorter than the other
You used to have your nose pierced
You have made a gift or baked cookies for a band you love
You have never been to a play or musical
Yellow is your favorite color to wear
You have never cut your hair
You have been or are in the military
You currently have an un-ironic moustache
You have more than five siblings
You have a treadmill at home
You are a hunter
You have never purchased a vinyl record
You don't know how to drive a car
You live in the city in which you were born
You don't own a television
You have a pool in your yard
You are still in high school
You are retired
You have never used an iron
You don't have a home phone
You used to carry a beeper
You have a song as your cell phone greeting (as opposed to ringtone)
You have never voted
You only wear one brand of tennis shoes
You call your mom or dad every day
You fall asleep to music
You drive a Prius
You drive a Hummer
You were in the Olympics
You've put song lyrics in a letter or email to help explain yourself
You've done a stage dive
You've met a member of ZZ Top

4:05 AM ET | 12-20-2007 | permalink

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The Sound of Where You Are

Portland's local alternative station has one standout show. It's called "The Bottom Forty." It airs Sunday nights and is hosted by Greg Glover. Tonight, on a drizzly evening, I was driving downtown, when I tuned into the show during the middle of a live track. At first I wasn't sure who the band was. After a few more seconds I was able to recognize the voice; it belonged to Bob Mould. I didn't even know the song. The chorus was catchy as is the case with most of Mould's work, but not saccharine. Nor are his songs infectious; they are too full of ache to spin incessantly like little tornadoes in your head. Rather, the songs seize on a moment and wrestle it to the ground; they are intimate and memorable emotional battles, fought and not always won. Mould's songs catch me off guard; they are shadowy tunes that flirt with but don't always find the light of day.

Bob Mould, Sugar, and Husker Du were (or still are) all associated with Minneapolis first and foremost, but only because that was their provenance. Tonight, though, they felt home in the Northwest. Partially because that is where this listener was tuning in, but also because I could hear in Mould's strained voice that of Kurt Cobain's, and the way Cobain's words cracked open as they sang out.

Great music transcends the spot on the map from which it springs forth. But music also captures the nuances and sensibilities of people's lives in a specific place or even becomes a reflection of the city or State itself. Our local bands might be the best example of who we are right now or of who we want to become, or maybe not at all. They might live in Portland and sound like they're from Manchester. So, it's not just the bands who reside in our cities and towns, or who transplant themselves there, that make up the noises that represent our topography or our internal and external landscapes. After all, the chainsaw distortion of Husker Du's guitar sounds conjure the felling of trees as much as Soundgarden embodies our half lit winter months or The Thermals bring to mind a restless frontier.

What musical sounds, what bands, what songs, exemplify the places you inhabit?

For me, in addition to the grittiness of Husker Du, I might also include the crepuscular beauty of Nick Drake and the agitated defiance of The Stiff Little Fingers. Yet I would have to say it is The Wipers, who are from the Northwest (and Portland in particular), who might possess the sound I most closely associate with where I live. Their songs both stab at and harness an unpredictable darkness, one that they are always trying to keep at bay.

The sonic or lyrical exploration and insinuation of place is one reason that music speaks to me. Either it transports me to distant shores, or reminds me of all the reasons why I stay.

3:55 AM ET | 12-17-2007 | permalink

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Vlogging 101

12:23 PM ET | 12-13-2007 | permalink

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Are We Still Winning?

As previously reported, MM HQ was hit with a bout of the flu. NPR was really kind about the whole thing, sending over a cavalcade of restorative foods and beverages. Thanks, Terry Gross, for bringing me dumpling soup. Better than mom used to make!

We all know that feeling under the weather is no fun, but it does allow for guilt free daytime TV viewing. Animal Planet's Growing Up Black Leopard with celebrity host Edie Falco was moving; it elicited tears at both the 8 am and the 5 pm showings. And You, Me, and Dupree was so awful that I momentarily fell out of love with Seth Rogen (who plays a second tier buddy in the film). And I didn't think I could ever stop loving Rogen, not after his character, Ken, fell for the tuba player on Freaks and Geeks.

But, hands down, the most remarkable and horrifying scene I witnessed yesterday was a live performance on The Today Show by the 7 year old Anthony G. Maybe some of you have heard of Anthony G. Possibly you are one of the 3 million people to have already checked him out on You Tube. (How does a 7 year old end up with a video on You Tube? That's right, his parents put it up!)

Since I didn't record the performance, here is the video courtesy of Gawker.

Even though he looks like Clay Aiken crossed with the child from The Shining, that wouldn't matter if he were at home right now playing video games or building a snowman. But Anthony G is not just any kid. No. He is making the rounds on national TV, singing sexed up holiday songs, sounding like Eydie Gorme, and flirting with the camera as if he had been schooled by Tyra Banks herself. Even the usually blithe Today show fans looked confounded.

Certainly, I am not helping matters by blogging about him. Poor Anthony would likely be better off if he was left alone to explore, create and to just be a kid (albeit one who sings like a forty year old woman).

The most disturbing element of the performance was the juxtaposition between little Anthony singing his heart out in a Christmas sweater and the news headlines telling of hate crimes, stabbings, funerals, and labor strikes that were scrolling beneath him on the screen.

I can dismiss Anthony G. as yet another kid getting his 15 minutes of fame, which, it seems, everyone feels entitled to these days. (Or, in Anthony' case, his parents gave him the "gift" of fame and got their 15 minutes vicariously). But it's harder to ignore the fact that the perimeters of what constitutes music and entertainment have been stretched so far that they're like baggy sweats with a broken elastic waistline. In other words, the lines are shapeless, useless even. We can applaud the democratizing ways of You Tube. We can vaunt the power the Internet gives to the underdog. But are there boundaries? Should there be? Maybe it's just that we need a constant stream of inanity to staunch the flow of real events. Bad news keeps coming despite our efforts to distract ourselves. I just wish more music was there to help us tune in, instead of enabling us tune out what we don't want to see.

Or maybe I still have a fever.

3:27 PM ET | 12-12-2007 | permalink

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Please Stand By

Monitor Mix HQ was hit with a bout of the flu.
So, in lieu of a full post, check out a piece I did for NPR's Day to Day.
I'll be doing more contributions for them in the future and will try to let MM readers know about it before hand.

10:34 AM ET | 12-12-2007 | permalink

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The Year Punk Spoke

The other night I watched the Joe Strummer documentary, The Future is Unwritten. The film opens with black and white footage of a youthful Strummer recording his vocal take for "White Riot." You can't hear the instrument tracks, only his voice. It is a stunning image and an even more jarring sound. His mouth is a megaphone, the words blare out in a hoarse and clipped cry. Strummer's lyrics meant the world to him, and you can see in his delivery an effort to make them as potent as daggers. Whether or not the meaning reached the listener (which it most often did, and still does) the expression on his face suggests that the message had already taken possession of him.

A particularly fascinating segment of the documentary focuses on Strummer's transformation from a longhaired, art school dropout/hippie to one of the forefathers, not to mention indelible symbols, of punk rock. When he joins The Clash, he leaves behind a community of squatters, peaceniks, and folkies. And for many years, at least during The Clash's hey day, he never looks back.

It is always strange to witness, either in film or in real life, a metamorphosis. One of the final steps of the process, of course, is the complete rejection of our former selves. I can recall my own shift from a fairly popular, preppy, and sporty high school sophomore, to a look that consisted of fourteen-hole Doc Martens, a combat jacket, and cut-off Levi's worn over black tights (This was Seattle in 1990. Go watch the movie Singles if you need any confirmation as to whether or not this style was acceptable. No one seemed to care that a flannel shirt tied around your waist, flailing out behind you like a baggy parachute, was not particularly flattering on anyone). With my old friends as reluctant witnesses, I went from spending the weekends playing "How To Host a Murder" in the cozy suburbs to seeing bands like Aspirin Feast and Christ on a Crutch play basement shows in the city. The other high school students called my new group of compatriots "Bat Cavers". Before Nirvana broke into the mainstream, the word "alternative" didn't really exist as a means to describe boys in trench coats or girls with blue hair. Thus, "Bat Caver" became the catchall term for the Goths, SHARPS, punks, and rockers. We didn't have much in common except for a disdain towards the mainstream (mine was a new disdain, which is always the most obnoxious). Looking back, my most embarrassing and regrettable act of "rebellion" was placing a Misfits "Bullet" sticker depicting the assassination of JFK on the bumper of my 1979 Honda CVC. To this day, I can freak out any of my friends by singing the lyrics for that song, which I still know by heart. Sensitive readers are advised not to look up the lyrics to "Bullet". I know, look up the lyrics to "Happy Together" by The Turtles instead. Ahhh, so nice!

For how pointed and abrupt the entry into a new world is, exiting is often less pronounced. I don't remember when I stopped caring about whether my friends had heard of The Verlaines or if they were wearing Vans instead of Nikes. And I can't recall the moment when it no longer felt like social suicide to like The Grateful Dead. Maybe tolerance and acceptance have duller edges, as opposed to the sharp corners that make up the strident boxes of our youth. As we get older, we can move from one sphere to the next without first having to declare our intentions or put a stake in the ground.

And watching the Strummer film, seeing his own journey from hippie to punk to a guy who could see the symmetry between the two, I was glad to have been on similar travels. From a narrow pathway where I could take control of my surroundings and claim them as my own, to a wide open road where I feel ok about not knowing what lies ahead.

1:49 AM ET | 12- 7-2007 | permalink

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Take Me To Your Leader

Dear Reader.

It is time for honesty and it is time to come clean. Recently, I was asked to name the biggest musical disappointment of 2007. My answer was Radiohead's In Rainbows. Now before you throw your computer to the floor or do a Google image search of me in order to use my face as an office dartboard... before you begin composing a vitriolic comment that will take you the entire day to write, allow me to save you some time, and please, let me explain.

For one, I respect Radiohead. I admire the fact that In Rainbows was released via the Internet and that they allowed their fans to determine the value of the songs by paying whatever they wanted. Second, I love complexity: music that hurts your head as much as it does your heart, takes twenty listens to make sense of, and that stretches into irregular beauty as much as it coheres to its more traditional forms.

I think my disappointment in Radiohead is really just a disappointment in myself. Another Radiohead album means yet another year I've let myself down. (That's a total of seven years, but who's counting, right?) I feel like the only one yet to embrace them, but that can't possibly be true. Yet each coffee shop I enter is playing In Rainbows and I hear Radiohead songs in the static bleed of nearly every headphone mix in my vicinity.

When I listen to Radiohead I feel like I've just heard the sonic version of Don Delillo's White Noise. It's eerie, cold, and foreboding. There is a blankness I find difficult to move beyond. I know their music is supposed to capture an ennui, to explain our fragmented selves or our disconnect from the world. But I can't find my way into the songs. I'm not asking for an easy path; in fact, I appreciate an arduous one just as much. Maybe what I'm looking for is a reason why I should clear the way so that the music can find me.

I wish someone could write out in a few words (not a phD dissertation, not a book) why Radiohead should stab me in the heart, and why I should lighten up and let them in.

4:27 PM ET | 12- 4-2007 | permalink

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