little souvenirs from a terrible year

this was actually kind of cool. now im wondering how long until...

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:38:13 -0400

this was actually kind of cool. now im wondering how long until some 16 year old wizard gets mini famous stacking different dubstep songs and breakdowns on top of one another. happy friday

Video

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:15:59 -0400

a people's history of EDC

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:23:48 -0400

The best person at the Electric Daisy Carnival was wearing moon boots, pink and white neon stretchy pants, and an over-the-shoulder-ammo belt filled with glow sticks instead of slugs. His girlfriend was wearing moonboots, a neon pencil skirt no longer than an actual pencil, and Lil Kim stickies over her nipples. The worst person was wearing blue jeans and an Oxford. He was they one they called Historian.

One thing that surprised this historian—there would be many—was just how hard everyone was going, playing 2 a.m. sets all hours of the day. Our research time arrived around 4:30 eventually ended up at the Bass Pod, where 12th Planet (ahem, 12th Pleezy) was cycling through trap, dubstep and dutch house like the whole thing was about to go up in flames. He sounded great, but in the middle of the country’s most stimulating parking lot, not great enough to keep us from wondering towards the Wideawake Artcar (a shiny riverboat with some light-up lilypads in front) and the Neon Garden (neither neon nor a garden, but where we saw that aforementioned couple).

Besides my lack of cell service (can Insomniac reimburse me for the favorites I would have gotten for tweets like “seems appropriate that instead of tickets they give you little debit cards,” “weird that this guy is wearing a bob dylan shirt oh nevermind it’s from cornell spring weekend,” and “happy birthday mc armani”?), the only real problem was logistical. As you can see, even as 3D graphics the Circuit Grounds are way to close to the Kinetic Field, and so when you’ve got someone like Zeds Dead playing at the Field and La Roux playing at the Grounds, every song she plays is going to be a on the spot dubstep remix.

Later, when Eric Prydz played the Field and Steve Angello played the Grounds, the sound was less of an issue (though there was a moment of standing between the two stages when I could have sworn they were playing the same song) but the whole area became overcrowded with peaking ravers. So back to the Bass Pod, where Borgore at one point mixed Skrillex into Suavemente into the Tetris theme, and then I went home.

not to get all 'same song'

Sun, 12 May 2013 23:02:00 -0400

but french montana’s “Freaks” is trying so hard to be kid rock’s “All Summer Long” so bad that it almost hurts. hurts so good, you might say, but then you might wonder why it was Zevon instead of Mellencamp who played the Doug E. Fresh & Vicious role on the former, something that i think about surprisingly regularly.

maricolin: Fan de corazon

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:43:18 -0400

maricolin:

Fan de corazon

“To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:22:28 -0400

“To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.”

If I had one problem with Spring Breakers, it’s that the film’s desire to be a music video mostly made me want to watch the music video it desired to be. Namely, the one for ”I Could be the One” by Avicii and Nicky Romero—Nicktim, if you’re in a hurry. Like Breakers, “Be the One” breaks up linear time, but unlike Breakers, it divides the action into two storylines, the first taking place in a standard office, the second in a alternate/future/fantasy/callitwillyouwill reality where the main character lives life the way she thinks she wants to live it.

The office storyline proceeds as office storylines tend to. Every day, our red-headed, overweight heroine wakes to the same alarm, brews the same coffee, puts on the same pencil skirt, and heads to work to deal with the same miserable co-workers. “It it because you gained weight?” one asks when she admits she has been feeling down. It’s not, but it’s certianly possible that that has something to do with it.

For this ennui, the system producing it offers three solutions: First, obviously, is pills, the boring kind that the woman’s psychologist prescribes when she repeats her mistake and admits to her that she’s been feeling down. Then there’s self-help (TAKE BACK YOUR LIFE, her computer screen at one point reads) and if that doesn’t work, one’s best bet is to identify with the system to the point that it begins to seem appealing, or at least worth putting up with.

More on the characters who go for choice C in a moment, but in the mean time there’s that other story line, the one where our hero is free at last, free at last. Here, she’s on an island or by the sea, staying at what can only be an all inclusive resort but also venturing out into the country to smoke weed with locals, get hit from behind while sailing on a boat, gape at the rather large penis that is inexplicably being shaken in her face, and ride down the beach on a white horse with her arms around a black man. It’s very much worth noting that all of these people (except our hero, of course) are of color, as is the littler girl whose sand castle that hero literally stomps over. This is her world, everyone else is just a supporting character.

So the video progresses, cross cutting between the two realitites faster and faster, the build up in editing matching the build up in the action and the build up in the song, all approaching the point where the two storylines finally meet. And then they don’t.

It starts at 3:32, when the woman’s boss smashes an unreasonably hefty stash of papers and folders onto her desk. Presumably she’s supposed to read these things. Instead she picks them up, spins around, and throws them across the room, then picks up the printer and drops it on the floor and gives her coworkers the ‘suck it’ gesture where you cross your arms and slap them against your legs. Some are appalled, some are nonplused, one is even so disturbed that he immediately vomits. These coworkers have identified with the system to such a degree that the woman’s rejection is not even thinkable, and in terms of the video, their reactions validate the woman’s decision to quit work and (to paraphrase the note she writes to herself earlier on) stop giving a fuck not only as her most pleasurable course of action but also as genuine rebellion.

The song coming to a close, the woman she leaves the office with her phone in hand—“Barbados, one way!”—and as she runs toward her car a van—“2Late: Rush Delivery”—emerges from screen right, knocking her off beyond screen left. To restate the quote above and risk overemphasizing the point, her desires were revealed to be inaccessible the very moment that they became truly unbearable.

Actually, that’s not quite the point. The point is that while one fantasy is run over by a truck, another one lives on. This one—the one suggesting that the woman’s tropical fantasy existed outside of the system that tried to placate her with pills and weekends, and that her exchange of one for the other constituted some genuine rebellion—is the one that’s more important and the one that underwrites not only the careers of Nick and Tim but also “EDM” more generally. EDM has sold this fantasy better than any one else, but the fantasy (particularly the first half of it) extends deep enough into the way we live and think that it seems willfully ignorant (ideological?) to attempt to confine it to a single genre of music (*cough*) or even music itself (*cough cough*). I opened this post with a Houllebecq quote because, whatever you make of his work, he understands this better than any writer I know. The quote’s from Possibility of an Island, but it’s particularly evident in Platform and Lanzarote, the short novel that takes place almost entirely in a resort community on the easternmost of the Canary Islands.

I realize that I should probably also talk a little bit more about the song that the video supports, but since I’m writing this on my lunch break I’ll just say that “Do you think about me when the crowd is gone?” is the realest, most self-referential EDM lyric to come out at least since people started using the term EDM.

The newest issue of Guernica is out today, and it features a...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:03:44 -0400

The newest issue of Guernica is out today, and it features a long interview I did with the landscape architect/urbanist Diana Balmori, designer of (among other things) cities, rooftops, linear parks, marshes, and the staircase pictured above. As it turns out, one of my favorite parts of the conversation didn’t make the final edit, so I’ll post it here.

———

Guernica: Since we’re sitting right next to it, I should also ask what you think of the High Line.

Diana Balmori: What do you think about it?

Guernica: In terms of landscape and architecture, I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s a shame the way it’s been used to change the neighborhood, to push out a certain population and bring in a new one.

Diana Balmori: I do too, and we may be pushed out by it too! This is becoming too expensive for us.

Guernica: When you build something, do you think about it in these terms?

Diana Balmori: I do. There are many times I can’t do anything about it, but at least I bring it up and bring it up and bring it up and say, “This is going to change the neighborhood.” There needs to be a provision for saving these valuable things and the proportion of people that can live in this thing. It needs to be worked in politically from day one. And if not, if it’s left to market forces, it’s just going to be completely wiped out. So it has to be something that does not work with market forces but that works with social forces. I really think that in the end it becomes a better city, and in the end that’s going to pay because it’s a much more interesting city. You want to go there, you want to be there. It’s a city that represents and contains many more social levels than these do. And I really think that that’s the pity of these. I really think that they’re going to put a tower here, be it offices or be it apartments. I’m just waiting to hear.

More here.

Since 2:01pm, Billboard readers have been able to click through...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:58:46 -0400

Since 2:01pm, Billboard readers have been able to click through a very nice profile of the people behind the Boiler Room, the live video mix series that—now I know—is watched by literally millions of people around the world. As it turns out (look at me) I was at the taping the author opens her story with, and it was definitely an interesting experience. Looking back, the show stands out for two reasons: It was the first time I heard Just Blaze toy with the EDM/trap sound that he would tour the country behind a few months later, and it was the first time I heard of Capital Steez, whose verse on “Survival Tactics” was the highlight of the night, no small feat when that night goes on to include performances by Flying Lotus and ?uestlove.

At the time, though, I thought it was boring as hell and oddly discomforting. If you click on the YouTube link that I have so conveniently embedded, you can hear ?uest play a nicely mixed set of—according to his hypeman—J Dilla covers recorded at a Roots practice. Very cool, only at the time we had no idea. It was clear he was doing something Dilla-themed, but the sound was so loud and so poorly mixed, each snare hit making my tinnitus more and more immanent, that you couldn’t make out much more.

“We created this space in which artists could hang out and not feel like they had a thousand fans standing right in front of them,” says the company’s CEO, and if you watch the video above, then click Watch on YouTube and take a look at the majority of the thumbnails that line the right side of the window, you notice that artists don’t have to worry about standing in front of a thousand fans because they are never standing in front of more than 10 or 20. Everybody else is standing behind them, less at a party than on a set, extras paid for their time in free sponsored drinks and chance to say (to no one in particular) that they were there. This sort of simulation is nothing new, of course, but it’s something that’s difficult to criticize without reproducing the conditions that require it to exist in the first place. In other words, dropping the bpms slightly, I can say that I had a mediocre time at the Boiler Room because it was kind of fake compared to the thing I attended the night before or the night after, but it’s that fetishization of the real experience that the Boiler Room turns around and sells to its fans and sponsors, at least one of them maintains a spot in the Fortune 100.

For the film section of this week’s Voice, I wrote a few...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:37:25 -0400

For the film section of this week’s Voice, I wrote a few words about the Museum of the Moving Image’s new exhibit of music videos, though if I weren’t limited by the constraints of print, I could have written many. With something like 700 hours of footage, I can’t imagine anyone who won’t find something new and wonderful— the above claymation Nina Simone short was a personal favorite.

Cause = Tumblr: Everything That You Wanted to Know about Brad Paisley But Didn't Care Enough to Ask

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:14:00 -0400

Cause = Tumblr: Everything That You Wanted to Know about Brad Paisley But Didn't Care Enough to Ask:

nickrkm:

1. background

At the moment, country music has no shortage of cornball male stars. The most popular song on the radio was recorded by the reformed frontman of Hootie and the Blowfish, number two is called “Sure Be Cool If You Did and was recorded by a reality show host who spends…

edit—- this was supposed to be a reblog from Alex here (http://microphoneheartbeats.tumblr.com/post/47484328634/everything-that-you-wanted-to-know-about-brad-paisley) but i think i did it wrong

“what it is is a narrative that basically ignores the past and also any systemic aspect of racism and boils down the crux of the issue to interpersonal prejudice unconnected to the actual history of racism and race relations and slavery and the Confederacy and the structural systemic racism that emerged from that history and continues to this day.”

Perhaps I’ve giving these guys too much benefit of the doubt, but I really don’t hear this, particularly when Paisley comes in talking about how reconstruction never really happened. Maybe the difference is in how we’re hearing the line “It ain’t like you and me can re-write history”— to me thats not him saying “the past is the past, nothing we can do” but and acknowledgement of the those issues you’re bringing up. Interestingly it’s LL who enters wtih the “let bygones be bygones” line/sentiment.

The “I hope you understand” line is bit more vague, especially coming in the first line of the song when you are still expecting the worst (my guess was that this would be a Seinfeld “Cigar Store Indian” episode type track), but in context I hear it as less “chill bro, just a shirt” than as an the narrator’s admission that he is part of the problem, almost as kind of an apology. Like, I feel as though that narrator would stop wearing the t-shirt in public after finishing the song, you know? Skynyrd t-shirts are worn so often even outside the South, and this song definitely problematizes that, even if it doesn’t decry it so much as use it for a jumping off point to talk about a bunch of other stuff.

Everything That You Wanted to Know about Brad Paisley But Didn't Care Enough to Ask

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:18:00 -0400

1. background

At the moment, country music has no shortage of cornball male stars. The most popular song on the radio was recorded by the reformed frontman of Hootie and the Blowfish, number two is called “Sure Be Cool If You Did and was recorded by a reality show host who spends his days tweeting zingers at other artists and jokes like “#nowplaying with myself”, and number nine is by Kenny Chesney and it’s called “Pirate Flag.” Brad Paisley, though, remains the corniest. You don’t even have to listen to his music to pick this up— just look at the some of the song titles (e.g. “Cornography,” “Cluster Pluck,” “Ticks” [as in, “I’d like to search you for…”]) and trust me when I tell you that he not only programs the lasers he that serve as the backdrop for his live shows but that he programs them really well.

Still, it’s the music we’re here to talk about. Puja (whose favorite song in the Paisley ouvre, if i remember correctly, is “I’m Gonna Miss Her,” the one where the singer’s wife makes him choose between her and fishing only to find that it’s not really much of a choice) describes it as ‘Raffi for adults,’ which I think is apt except for the occasions when he just makes regular Raffi for kids, as he did on his contribution to the Cars OST, “Find Yourself,” a song that I have to admit I find genuinely moving. And that’s one thing about Brad Paisley’s music: A lot of country singers can you feel gooey, a few can even make you laugh, but no one is as a good as Brad when it comes to making you do both in the same song. Take “Waitin’ on a Woman,” in which our hero strikes up a conversation with Andy Griffith while the two sit on a bench waiting for for their respective wives to get ready. In verses uno and dos, Griffith tells Paisley not to sweat it, as he’s been waiting on his woman since their first date in 1952, even managing to crack a gross old man joke how the honeymoon was “worth it,” then verse three goes back to Brad, who offers this reflection:

I’ve read somewhere statistics show

The man’s always the first to go

And that makes sense ‘cause I know

She won’t be ready

Funny, right? A nice, skillfully delivered middle-aged man joke. But then:

So when it finally comes my time

And I get to the other side

I’ll find myself a bench

If they’ve got any

Maybe it doesn’t come across on tumblr, but it’s the perfect ending, moving the song forward while bringing it back to bench of line one.

As you can see, Paisley the songwriter is a master of the three verse structure of most narrative country songs take, a form that is probably deserving of a its own essay, particularly something on how it facilitates the ‘reproductive futurism’ that is at the heart of country music today. Take above George Strait chart-topper about a father and son: In verse 1 the son is a boy having ‘the best day’ going camping with his pop, in verse 2 he is on the verge of manhood and has ‘the best day’ driving the car his dad gave him, and in verse 3 he is fully grown and the best day is his wedding day, starting the cycle anew.

Paisley does this often and effectively. “Toothbrush” is one of the most obvious, endearing, and (of course) corny examples, opening with the singer brushing his teeth before a big first date and closing with the singer brushing his son’s teeth before bed. The chorus (so Raffi):

Everything that’s anything

Starts out as a little thing

Just needs a little time and room to grow

I’m worried now that this post is going to negative. There’s an interesting divide between country writers, who go out of their way to characterize Paisley as a subversive, justifying his more conservative records as lesser material recorded only to appease conservative fans, and people outside of country, who just, I don’t know, figure that he’s full of shit. If you know me, you probably know that I’m going to be a pain in the ass and suggest that neither gets it right.

2. little moments

Brad Paisley is definitely one of the more liberal country artists. I supposed this is a good thing, but that fact is certainly not the reason why he matters and has little to do with what makes him great. American Saturday Night, the post-Obama liberal favorite, is not his best album and it’s not very close. (Mud on the Tires, y’all) But he’s also not full of shit. At least not totally.

As “Waitin’ on a Woman” and “Toothbrush” begin to suggest, Paisley is at his best as a chronicler of day-to-day domestic life. That’s not to say he doesn’t have range (there are story songs, instrumental jams, country music tributes, and “Whiskey Lullaby,” probably his best known) but that’s the core his persona, the good-natured and senstive Southerner who sings things like “It’s not who wears the pants, it’s who wears the skirt” but at the end of the day is, alas, still a guy.

No song gets to this more precisely than “Little Moments,” another three verser, each one ending with the line “Yeah, I live for little moments like that.” eg:

When she’s laying on my shoulder

On the sofa in the dark

And about the time she falls asleep

So does my right arm

And I want so bad to move it

Cause it’s tingling and it’s number

But she looks so much like an angel

That I don’t want to wake her up.

Yeah I live for little moments like that.

It’s a wonderful song, and its 2003 parent album (the aforementioned Mud) was a breakthrough for Paisley his first to go number one. As much as I love this music, I have to admit that it felt like a retreat, the softer side of Toby Keith’s “shock’n y’all” campaign for American exceptionalism. We hear a variation of this on 2005’s “The World,” in which the the family is held up as the last stand against our reified day-to-day existences, and it’s made even clearer on his new “I Can’t Change the World,” where he reconciles himself to the fact that he can change the world, but only for the girl to whom he sings. This one of the many reason’s my Miranda Lambert’s Kerosene is probably my favorite album of the decade, emerging from this context with her guns literally blazing, tired of “livin’ like some country song” and burning her old life to the ground, but that’s another blog post.

I’m afraid overemphasizing the conservatism again, so I’ll jump to the earlier “All You Really Need Is Love,” a marriage song with a satisfyingly deceptive title. Here, each verse contains the standard platitudes and ends with title line, then jumps into a pair of double time choruses containing addenda like “And a license and a blood test and a bunch of invitations / A minister a white dress and of course a congregation / And flowers and music and candles and cake / And a bunch of rice for folks to throw as you drive away.”

3. wheelhouse

Paisley has always had fun poking out or through the bureaucracy (or to be more specific i/r/t “All You Really Need,” the seemingly arbitrary customs) that structure so much of our lives. A better example might be “The Cigar Song,” the one where Paisley’s narrator is a sucker who loves smoking Cubans can never afford ‘em, so he buys a box and just in case he insures ‘em. Naturally, he cant help but smoke the cigars, but after he does so he calls the insurance company and—perhaps you’ve figured out where he’s going but if not i suggest you swallow whatever youre drinking before —claims that they were destroyed in a series of small fires and thus need to be replaced free of charge. Boo-ya. Until the third verse where he ends sent to jail for arson.

The “Cigar Song” on Wheelhouse is “Death of a Married Man/Harvey Bodine,” which starts good and just keeps getting better. In the prelude, a man named Harvey Bodine (voiced by Eric Idle) suffers a heart attack in the middle of a charades game, and instead of calling an ambulance his family just yells out “heart attack!” Too late. “Harvey Bodine” picks up with our man in the hospital, where the doctors restart his heart and bring him back to life, only poor Harvey released that for those five minutes he had been in heaven—not actual heaven, but heaven in the sense that anywhere without his miserable wife is kind of like heaven. Very Mad Men season premiere, now that I think about it. Anyways, Harvey things about it for a verse than in spends the bridge calling his doctor and his lawyer and escape on a technicality: His wedding vows only promised ‘til death do us part.’ He’s now a free man and (even better) he got the system to work for him, sort of like Johnny Cash’s “One Piece at a Time” but without the surplus value allegory.

What else.. There’s the lead single, “Southern Comfort Zone,” which I talked about a little here, and “Death of a Single Man,” the “Married Man” counterpart that narrates a wedding from the perspective of the groom’s friends who don’t understand “Why with champagne and cake we celebrate / the death of a single man,” and there’s “Those Crazy Christians,” an ambivalent tune about knocking evangelicals for things like how they “get their weekly dose of guilt before they head to Applebee’s” but turning to acknowledge that “If I ever really needed help, well you know who I’d call / Is those crazy Christians.”

Ok, so “Accidental Racist.” You can say a lot about this song but you cant say that it’s a retreat. I think it might be best to first talk about the song in relation to “Welcome to the Future” and “American Saturday Night,” the second and third singles from that album that (in case you jumped to this point in the post) was one of the two three most critically acclaimed country albums in recent memory. I keep seeing people knocking “Accidental Racist” as some self-congratulatory post-racial BS, which keeps striking me as odd because that’s always how I’ve felt about those much lauded ASN tracks. “Welcome to the Future” begins with the narrator remembering how when he was a kid he thought that it would be dope to play video games in his house and ends (though he’s not named) on the day of Obama’s election, when our narrator remembers the time racist townies burned a cross on one of his friends’ front yard, but now “Wake up Martin Luther / Welcome to future. (When Paisley plays this live he projects civil rights B roll [as well as some very cool laser patterns] on the screen behind him) “American Saturday Night,” meanwhile, is a celebration of our supposed culture melting pot—“There’s a big toga party tonight at the Delta Chi / They got canadian bacon on their pizza pies / They got a cooler full of cold Coroners and Amstel Lights / It’s like we’re all livin’ in a big ol’ cup / Just fire up the blender and mix it all up”—that should also be considered in the context of ongoing debates over immigration.

Either way, that’s not what I hear when I listen to “Accidental Racist,” which if anything seems to acknowledge the problem of those previous songs—“an elephant in the corner of the South.” And far from selling us some more post-racial platitudes, it acknowledges race as fundamental aspect of daily life and talks about how he’ll never be able to understand what it’s like to be anything but a white dude. Still, I was skeptical until the verse where he not only talks about reconstruction but talks about reconstruction as a failed project— Even growing up in New England I didn’t hear about this sort of thing until I got to college. And the hook—”Our generation didn’t start this nation / And we’re still paying for mistakes / That a bunch of folks made long before we came / And caught between southern pride and southern blame”—this is the sort of thing that a school of German critical theorists have been wrestling with for 30 years, and if you don’t believe me I can send you some Axel Honneth essays that would have only been improved if he had opted to get some rappers into the mix.

Is the song awkward and corny? Completely, but how could it not be, given who’s involved what they’re singing about it? But it’s awkward and corny in the way that Adam Kotsko talks about in his short book on the subject, the way things are necessarily awkward and corny when two people or cultures come together and there is “the lack of a third ‘meta-norm’ governing interactions between adherents of two different norms.” It’s difficult terrain, but it’s the terrain Paisley and Cool J are attempting to navigate, and terrain that they are navigating far more thoughtfully than most people seem to be willing to give them credit for

McConaughey has never looked as good as he did in his...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:22:15 -0400

McConaughey has never looked as good as he did in his one Unsolved Mysteries reenactment. (Screenshotted from disc 1 of the incredible “Bizarre Murders” boxset)

P!nk, P!nk’s dancing, P!nk’s songs, and P!nk’s abs, all at Madison Square Garden...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:51:41 -0400

P!nk, P!nk’s dancing, P!nk’s songs, and P!nk’s abs, all at Madison Square Garden on Friday night.

By my parent’s standards, I know a lot about the internet. By the internet’s standards,...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:53:37 -0400

By my parent’s standards, I know a lot about the internet. By the internet’s standards, I know next to nothing, so this question is directed to anyone who thinks or reads about these things more often:

Often when a website posts something controversial (or maybe, ‘controversial’), a post that seems designed to provoke clicks and accumulate pageviews, people will tweet it with link redacted, or one person will tweet it and other people will tell that one person not to include the link so that people dont click on it, or people will tweet the link but tell people not to click on it, whatever, the logic being that your clicking the link will give the website traffic and thus revenue and thus encouragement.

So my questions start here: Since these posts, when they’re done well, easily accumulate five and even six figures of pageviews, how much does one’s reluctance to add an additional three really make difference? If you’re really serious about this cause, wouldn’t the more effective strategy be to target advertisers and explain to them that the traffic numbers they receive are wildly inflated? Do advertisers already know this? And how does the market for online advertising account for this?

A week or so I was tweeting about the lost Terror Squad...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:14:39 -0400

A week or so I was tweeting about the lost Terror Squad “Lean Back” remix that Felix Trinidad walked in to when he fought Ricardo Mayorga (iirc: “See Tito don’t dance he just pull up his pants and / Knockyouflatonyourface”) so today I can’t help but tumbl a video from the time when Jim Lampley said on national television: ”And now the walkout for Angel Manfredy, accompanied by the music of a hip-hop recording artist named Kid Rock, who has written special lyrics now to follow his friend Angel into the ring.”

For a little context, Manfredy (like the hip-hop recording artist who accompanied him) walked into the arena looking to finish what could have been a break out year. In January, his chin withstood 50 or so Arturo Gatti left hooks before the ref awarded him an 8th round TKO, then in September he beat John Brown for the WBU 130 pound title, and finally on December 19 he was supposed to knock out Floyd Mayweather for the WBC title at the same weight class.

Looking back at this clip, a decade or so after Floyd began to turn himself into the sport’s biggest heel, talking into stacks of money like cell phones, wearing a sombrero before he fights Oscar, his entrance might even be more interesting than Manfredy’s. Contra the musical performance, large posse and disco ball robes, Mayweather enters with only the three people who will stand in his corner and walks quickly, the “Gimme Some More” strings playing over the arena soundsystem. Naturally, the ref has to stop the fight before the end of the second round.

If there’s anything redeeming about January and February, it’s that they’re the...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:36:40 -0400

If there’s anything redeeming about January and February, it’s that they’re the two months of the year when I listen to the most old (let’s say, pre-2005) music, the brief period when I’m not only downloading compilations and discographies but listening to them as well. The first half of March, then, is equally rewarding, because it’s the time when I start to catch up on everything I’ve missed. This new (at least among the laymen) “R.I.P.” Jeezy track, for instance, was probably old news by Christmas, but that didn’t stop me from listening to it repeatedly while I spent the latter half the day making sure readers of the last alt weekly standing could find who’s playing April 3 at Rodeo Bar in but three simple clicks. Either way, that track is exactly what I’m looking for in a 2013 Jeezy single, $hort’s “In the Oaktown” by way of “Lose My Mind.” Chainz over Plies on the feature, but Mustard over Drumma Boy? Not quite yet.

How come my team has won the World Series two of the last three years (after decades of frustration)?

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:19:55 -0500

First inbox question ever and I have no idea who sent it or how I’m supposed to answer. I rooted for the Giants in 2002 (I can remember going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 then watching one of the games at I think the TGIF Fridays in Warwick) but didn’t watch a game in 2010 or 2012. Today I decided I’m going to start following the mets.

After a couple months of delays and procrastinations and one nearly total revision (it’s hard...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:45:00 -0500

After a couple months of delays and procrastinations and one nearly total revision (it’s hard to right a piece about the absence of country radio in New York when 94.7 starts playing country), my story “Gone Country Again” is finally out. Truthfully, I think all the changes were for the better, and I couldn’t be happier to have it published in Maura Magazine. Download the issue here, then buy me an iPad here, and maybe we can compare notes.

There were a bunch of interesting tangents that I couldn’t fit into the piece, long enough as it is, but my favorite involved Ethel Park Richardson, the teacher who became a folklorist who became the first person to sing so-called hillbilly songs on New York radio: In 1955, about 20 years after she exits the story, she returned to the air when NBC cast her as a contestant in their new television game show The Big Surprise. Apparently she dressed in ‘traditional’ attire and told the host stories like the ones she used to tell on the radio and after a week won the program’s grand prize, becoming the first person in the history of television to win $100,000. Even pre-Buzzfeed, this made her fairly well known and the American Song Book that she compiled in the 1920s was put back into print.

Regardless, those interested can click ‘read more’ (just like on the for $$$ blogs) to find an almost comprehensive list of sources I used in the making of. Not included are interviews and those links (all Nash related) that I forgot to copy and paste into my notes doc.

Country Music, U.S.A by Bill Malone (U of Texas Press, 2010)

“Spatial Diffusion of the All-Country Music Radio Stations in the United States, 1971-74” by George O. Carney, John Edwards Music Foundation Quarterly Vol. 13 No 46

“She Kept On A-Goin: Ethel Park Richardson” by Jon G. Smith, JEMFQ Vol. 13 No. 49

“Montana Slim: Canada’s Legendary Wilf Carter” by Jay Taylor, JEMFQ Vol. 13 No. 49

“Tapescript: Interview with Dwight Butcher” JEMFQ, Vol 5 No 13 (Spring 1969)

“Early Country Radio: Dispelling a Myth” by Richard P. Stockdell JEMFQ Vol. 15 No. 55 Fall 1979

Tex Ritter: America’s Most Beloved Cowboy by Bill O’Neal (Eakin Press, 1998)

“WHN’s Jessie: Bronx Girl Goes Country, With a Bullet” by Mel Shestack, Village Voice (August 30, 1976) [unbelievable pull quote on that one]

WHN: When New York City Went Country by Ed Salamon (Archer Books, 2013)

“WHN Joins Camp of Country Music” by Allen Krebs, New York Times (February 23, 1973)

“Nashville’s Bite of the Big Apple” by Lawrence Levy, New York Times (July 4, 1976)

MusicRadio77 message board

“Ross on Radio: It’s the Beginning Of ‘Nash’-ional Radio, And The Industry Feels Fine?” by Sean Ross

“Cumulus’ Lew Dickey Explains Why NYC’s New NASH-FM ‘Is Good for Nashville’ at CRS” by Jessica Ettinger Gottesman

“Country Returns to the City: After 17 Years, a Home in New York” by Ben Sisario

still got my money

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:26:01 -0500

still got my money

Do I like the Men? Sure. They are a solid rock band with one good and three mediocre records, which...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 10:07:28 -0500

Do I like the Men? Sure. They are a solid rock band with one good and three mediocre records, which is probably one good and two mediocre records more than most bands around here can claim. There was a time when I listened to Leave Home fairly regularly and another time when a co-worker’s brother caught me throwing my body into people at one of their concerts. But do they really deserve the unanimous acclaim, the Best New Musics and Spin Essentials and getting the Eric Sundermann treatment on the cover of the Voice?

Without getting on some Simon Reynolds the-culture-must-move-forward-otherwise-I’m-gonna-write-a-500-page-book-about-it shit, I feel like I can’t be the only one put off by the fact that no one has yet found a way to praise the Men without invoking Our Band Could Be Your Life. MTV introduced them under the header “These Bands Could Be Your Life” and the Washington City Paper under “Our Band Could Be Your Band.” Pitchfork tells us that “listening to Leave Home feels “a lot like living inside of Michael Azerrad’s 1980s indie-rock tome Our Band Could Be Your Life,” All Music notices some “Our Band Could Be Your Life guitar buzz,” Drowned in Sound says Open Your Heart sounds as though the Rolling Stones “had spent some of the last 20 years reading Our Band Could Be Your Life,” etc. etc.

My point isn’t that these comparisons are wrong, it’s that this shouldn’t be an unambiguously good thing. Like, can you imagine an MC getting similar praise for sounding like Rap Attack come to life? Joey Bada$$ is, at the very least, a polarizing figure among critics, and he barely takes it back to last chapter of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. Our Band is a fine book, one that influenced me in high school and blahblahblah nothing you haven’t heard before, but it has weighed on on this culture far too much for far too long, like some sort of cross-generational FOMO hitting Brooklyn hipsters who have access to everything in the world so are left to pine for the shit that happened three years before they were born. Oh, you like the Replacements? Never would have guessed.

Strangely, the OBCBYL record that i most associate the Men with is one I’ve never seen cited: Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising, the one with the Stooges riff and the Creedence title, the point where they start integrating all those older rock reference points back into their sound. Of course, Sonic Youth never (as far as I know, I lose the band’s trail somewhere around Experimental Jet Set) went as far as the Men do on New Moon, a record that either I described to Eric or Eric described to me as dad rock for kids.

It’s sort of strange how among this ’80s worshipping demo, there are few descriptions more damning than dad rock. To be fair, I used to spent what you might call my formative years taking classes directly above the genre’s Hot 97, but still. I can’t speak to what it was like for Sonic Youth et al, but this isn’t a kill yr idols, rip it up and start again sort of rejection of the way things were. This rejection, if one can even call it that, is more ritualized and more distanced. If anything, this generation of indie fans hates dad rock because it’s so painfully obvious that in ten years they are going to become dad rock. But if there’s one thing we can learn from The Men, with their move away from noise and their second-rate Uncle Tupelo ‘country’ songs, it’s that they already have, and only a narcissism of small differences and eleven G train stops can convince them otherwise.