WORDCOUNTOO2:
In the ongoing saga of Spin's collapse, they have found a replacement for all the strong music writers recently fired from their staff in an indie porn star who is no doubt a very very talented writer and who will no doubt lend enormous credibility to their future plans to become more like...alternative press or Maxim. And here we thought laddism was only for the Brits. Hey wait a minute...
Begs the question: what does a girl have to do to get hired at the new Spin? I thought the Guccione Jr. days were over?
3.30.2006
3.29.2006
zombies, again...but really
okay. reading the news posts from seattle, i mean. just wtf? i wait for the reporting to unfold but it is scary to me to think that they could not even find a motivation. it is weirdly calm in the media thus far as to the fact that the victims were goth/ravers, many were underage and there were drugs found in the house. in fact, it seems that the seattle media is being very quick to spin it that there is no way this is anything but a terrible murder of innocent people and even fox is just reporting the basic facts (although they left out that the gunman was a fan of country...).
UPDATE:
The Stranger in Seattle has a pretty amazing oral history of the people who were in the house when the murders happened.
This is a chilling beginning portrait of the killer. Will anyone ever know more?
Also. Trenchcoats. outsiders. metal. will it unfold?
Philip Dawdy defends rave culture and has a hearbreaking quote from one of the friends of a victim. ""What was hurting you so bad? Why didn't he ask us for what he needed? Did he need a helping hand or love? I don't know what made him not a human being, or what was hurting him that bad." - this breaks my heart, it's the essence of a kind of forgiveness I've only seen in my truly faithful xtian friends.
UPDATEx2
A good response to questions about why the news continues to search for answers about the murderer's intent.
The article above refrences getting kids in on the dialogue and creating a more supporting and understanding community about the rave scene in Seattle and a gesture of faith reprints a high school newspaper's story about the Seattle rave scene. Pretty cool.
UPDATE:
The Stranger in Seattle has a pretty amazing oral history of the people who were in the house when the murders happened.
This is a chilling beginning portrait of the killer. Will anyone ever know more?
Also. Trenchcoats. outsiders. metal. will it unfold?
Philip Dawdy defends rave culture and has a hearbreaking quote from one of the friends of a victim. ""What was hurting you so bad? Why didn't he ask us for what he needed? Did he need a helping hand or love? I don't know what made him not a human being, or what was hurting him that bad." - this breaks my heart, it's the essence of a kind of forgiveness I've only seen in my truly faithful xtian friends.
UPDATEx2
A good response to questions about why the news continues to search for answers about the murderer's intent.
The article above refrences getting kids in on the dialogue and creating a more supporting and understanding community about the rave scene in Seattle and a gesture of faith reprints a high school newspaper's story about the Seattle rave scene. Pretty cool.
3.28.2006
spunk zombies
watched this weird zombie movie a few weeks ago, and ended up having a chat about the the cultural relevance of zombies which i can see wasn't just us in the living room but apparently a whole cultural movement, hey wait? how do you shoot images of a half million activist protesters in the streets of LA so that they DON'T look like zombies in hollywood's biggest film? hmm...
in other news: Spunk's En Aldeles Forferdelic Skydom is on constant rotation in this house. It's the 10th anniversary of the all-girl norwegian freejazz quartet, and the best CD of their three by far. Sounds like musique concrete in its precision and textural beauty/varience, and has both beautiful feminine vocal interjections that sound nashville pure and cookie monster evil dins of noise.
in other news: Spunk's En Aldeles Forferdelic Skydom is on constant rotation in this house. It's the 10th anniversary of the all-girl norwegian freejazz quartet, and the best CD of their three by far. Sounds like musique concrete in its precision and textural beauty/varience, and has both beautiful feminine vocal interjections that sound nashville pure and cookie monster evil dins of noise.
3.27.2006
dero on canons
Dero's take on the rockism debate, as viewed through the moment's obsession with not just listmaking, but complaining about listmaking and the maker's rights. all well-deserved, but i think this piece misses the point: it's not about NOT having a canon, it's about having more inclusive qualifications for the canon (see below). Kraftwerk, NWA and the Beatles have all made great albums, but they are not great in the same ways and that's better than okay, that's the way it should be. maybe the problem is how they are grouped together and written about as if they were all just 10 out of 10 and therefore equal. anyway, my vote is for more incomparable goodness and unquantifable original weirdness, please.
Speaking of which, I am the last person in the world to listen to the Hasidic pop-reggae star Matisyahu, which is what I'm doing right now. You know, they warn you when you move to NYC not to talk to strangers in Washington Square Park, and maybe that's why this is good advice.
Speaking of which, I am the last person in the world to listen to the Hasidic pop-reggae star Matisyahu, which is what I'm doing right now. You know, they warn you when you move to NYC not to talk to strangers in Washington Square Park, and maybe that's why this is good advice.
3.25.2006
dreamed i dream
Topics covered: shopping, sonic youth, new york noise II, failure, inspirations, reading music journalism, Best Music Writing
Today I was shopping in Soho, for the hell of it. I went in Vivienne Tam to see how people could take fashion as seriously as music: the clothes are art. I went in Anna Sui to see how people could rock and roll as fashion: the clothes are punk. Then, after kamakazi mission to H&M, when I lost my shopping co-conspirator, I went into Kenneth Cole. They were playing the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs song: Gold Lion. It made me want to buy the beautiful black high collar dress, yes. It did.
Does that mean that I want to be Karen O?
A story: My old roommate went to high school with Karen. When we lived together, she was going through intense untreated depression stemming in part from that terrible post-college feeling that life would not be as swell as one imagined when they began. One day we were sitting in the kitchen and she told me that she had been in Walmart, pushing a giant buggy down the aisle mindlessly and full of big box dispair when she passed the media section. There was a flatscreen tv playing the "Maps" video. Sitting in the kitchen recounting the story, she was calm, but I can imagine the feeling she had: a profound sense of failure, dread and anxiety. This was a moment of measure for her.
Fucking youth
Working youth
Fucking youth
Working youth
Fucking youth
Fucking youth
Working youth
Wasted youth. My friend was feeling the pang of jealousy (we hate it when our friends become successful?) and the anxiety of knowing that youth was behind her enough that peers had become successful in the adult world: on MTV, touring the world, being stars. My friend didn't want to be a rock star, I'm sure, but she didn't want to be pushing a buggy around Walmart in a fit of depression either.
Look before you leap, okay?
Do you read me?
May all your dreams come true
Who knows if Karen O wants to be Karen O, but she is. When I saw the Yeah Yeahs play at Bowery Ballroom a few weeks ago I was singularly struck: this woman is an inspired entertainer, the Siouxsie of my generation. She makes glitter a verb, a space between Souxsie's dazzle and Eno's glam. I had never seen them perform, in part because I secretly felt like my friend, but with a different intensity: Karen is my peer, when to the same college that I did, had many of the same friends as I in the post-college years. We were in bands at the same time. What if I saw them play and was hit with the same feeling as my friend had been in Walmart?
A lot of people suffer
From impotence
But it didn't happen. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a fantastic pop band and I think that I may be a converted fan, but it is not my music. I am right now (right NOW) nearly finished with a piece about Cosey Fanni Tutti for the new Stop Smiling. I am listening to the New York Noise II comp, to Sonic Youth's 1982 track "Dreamed I Dream." When I think about Cosey and Kim, this is when my mind travels back to high school, to early college when I believed that I would be in a fantastic, fucked up and brilliant band: an Important Band. Not just important: an important New York City experimental band. I worshipped at the alter (puns unforgivable like high school fantasies). I wanted it so badly. I went to NYU instead of USC because Thurston wanted to kill all the California Girls and I didn't want him to hate me. I joined the Program Board, NYU's kinda DIY style show producing club, before school even began. I searched out musicians, made friends, joined bands.
I had three friends who were similary afflicted with this Sonic Youth-induced desire for musical profoundness in New York City. One became my boyfriend, the other two were boyfriend and girlfriend, our best friends, his roommate. The other couple were so overzealous in their fandom that they rang Kim and Thurston's doorbell on Thanksgiving asking to be let in to enjoy a meal with them. ("I was walking up Lafayette street. It's real empty and I looked out and it turned into a big field, and I looked up in the sky, and I looked up in the clouds, and I saw this face looking down at me, and it's a women's face, and she threw a quarter down at me and she said: "honey, here's a quarter go put it in the washing machine"). We wanted someone to toss down a quarter to us too.
Of those three people, all are lost to me as friends. One I saw in passing at a fashion week party last year but no nothing else of. One is in a prominent NYC experimental band. One has been named as one of the most important experimental musicians of our generation.
You slept
Did I drift?
Do I dream?
I dream
Sound today are you sound today
are you sound today?
Sound today are you sound today
are you sound today?
How do I know this? Because I am a rock critic. I read rock criticism, and have recently finished reading hundreds and hundreds of pieces for a book anthologizing music criticism. I am a firm believer that one can write great things about bad bands, but many prefer to write great things about great bands. As such, I have read pieces about this latter former musical friend, someone with whom I spent my college career and with whom I played and recorded music. It was not until the work for this anthology that I had read pieces about the person because, I have come to realize, this person is my Karen O, plus. Sitting on the couch, reading through a stack of some of the most inspired work by my peers, I read a piece promising the first glimpse of intimacy with this band notorious for its mystery. I have not spoken to a member of the band for years, but nothing of this piece was new to me. Still, I was terrified to read it.
The days we spent go on and on
I dream
Do you read me?
Keep him on the porch, one of the band members said: a Lou Reed-ism about not being friendly to journalists. An aside about the misery of college, a detailed portrait of current friendships and relationships. This has nothing to do with me has something to do with me. But there on the page it is obvious. Those three years of friendship, playing, acid-riddled crazy inspiring conversation, chuckleheaded late night walks and hours of intense listening are gone from history. The former friend, when we last spoke said, "I don't even know you, who are you," and I picked up the tab at Cozy Diner and that was it. History is erased to the friend, to the record, to everyone but me. In the years since this, for me, painful end I have run into the friend on the street, been at parties, and even (in a fit of NYC band incest only understood from this side of the Williamsburg Bridge) had a practice space across the hall from their band: We would walk down the hall to our respective doors in a silence that belied an estrangement deeper than that of strangers.
My first serious boyfriend in high school was a stargazer, a beautiful boy whose life went astray when our mutual friend and bandmate killed himself in our senior year of high school. When I found out that I got into NYU, he said to me, "That's horrible, you're going to turn into one of those people." It broke my heart, "One of those people." But I did want to be some version of 'those people,' and I knew that I had the talent to do so. So did my boyfriend, he was a fantastic guitarist and one of the most brilliant, sensitive people I will ever meet. For years afterward, whenever I saw the first star of the evening, I wished on it that he would become on of those people too. It was this boy who introduced me to Sonic Youth. We even tried to learn how to play "Teenage Riot" I believe.
These things don't happen
automatically
So the friendship ended, my friend became took important steps to becoming Important, and I took them too, but in another direction. I played music before I wrote and until my junior year of high school believed I would go to conservatory and become a professional cellist. Three things happened to change that: my high school orchestra became so competitive that it killed the sense of comraderie inherent in making music together; I became passionate about writing; I discovered punk. I went to Other Music on my birthday the summer before my senior year and bought my first indie rock albums: the Swirlies, Versus and Stereolab. I returned my senior year, broke up with my Sonic Youth-boyfriend, and focused my energies on three things: playing punk rock, making a zine and getting into NYU.
While at NYU, I put on shows, played shows and edited the music section of the college newspaper. Do not ask me what classes I took, because I don't remember. I graduated with an individualized major in music history, journalism and graphic design: a major in music zine production. I stopped my zine because the zines in NYC were so much better, so much more professional. I met two of the most important and influential characters in my life: Eventide Fanzine publisher Toby Carroll and then Insound zinestand guru Laris Kreslins, who is now the publisher of Arthur. These two people showed me how to be punk and professional, how to take my writing and ideas to the next level and how to make enough money to exist while not compromising my ethics.
My junior year I decided to go abroad to London to satisfy my Anglo-phile lust. For months before leaving, the friend begged me not to go. The week before I left, we recorded an album of songs together, all live takes recorded in a rambling farmhouse. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life - playing and singing with people I loved in a relaxed place. Almost immediately upon the seperation, things happened for both of us. My friend began to play music in earnest, and I got an internship at Mojo that would prove to be my first magazine writing. I also met Jenny Bulley and Lois Wilson, two tough and talented ladies who were my earliest mentors. While this was happening, maybe because it was happening, things veered into the negative with my friend and within two months of my arrival in London, we ceased talking. What happened, I am not sure because we never spoke about it properly, but what I remember is this: I was in Norway writing about Supersilent for the Wire. I had written a train from Oslo to Bergen and while on it, a group of Norwegian teenagers played acoustic guitar and quietly sang. As we chugged along, the snow turned blue in the waning light of Scandanvian winter. I thought it was the most beautiful musical experience of my life. When I got to Bergen, I emailed my friend saying that when we travelled together, as we planned in the summer, we ought to learn some songs that people could sing along with. "Learn Blackbird," I advised.
That was not to happen. The friend was offended at the suggestion that we would become cultural imperialists, pushing the Beatles on foreign lands. Only original music, nothing less. It was our last correspondence. The album we recorded was never released, although something was released under the title we'd given our project back on that winter week.
Edith moves each step
In the years since, I have mostly given up playing music and am a full-time music critic and a budding ethnomusicologist. When I was asked to become the series editor for Best Music Writing, I was honored and afraid. How could I stand in judgment of my peers? Do I deserve such a gig? "And you may ask yourself, well...how did I get here?" I was afraid at the moment of being asked that by taking the gig I would somehow alienate my peers - having to select the best neccessarily meaning ennacting judgment, including and excluding. It also means something very strange and real: that this is my world, that music journalism is my passion about which I have been given the oppurtunity to create a meta-discourse or narrative. As someone (hopefully) thoughtful about the subject, a student and practioner, there are few greater satisfactions than this, no matter the potential for upsetting things. Or maybe just for that reason.
Listening to New York Noise II, I think of the role of curating. It is just that, creating a narrative, giving context, rethinking history. Here I sit listening to "Dreamed I dream" as I had listened to it in high school - a drumless downtempo guitar jangle with some funny 80s Kim ramble/Lee croon. But ten years later, nine years after moving to New York and seeing how it all works, experiencing what I have, I hear it differently. In 1982 Sonic Youth was only a year old, a new band and not yet Important. All of the other bands on New York Noise II were just as likely. Have you heard Pulsallama, Mofungo, Hunter Gatherer, Red Transistor, Vortex OST, Certain General, Rhys Chatham, Clandestine, Glorious Strangers, Felix, The Del Byzantines, Don King, Jill Kroesen, Ut, The Static or Y Pants? Probably not, and may not that crucial that you do. But if you love this era and this music, then hearing these forgotten bands gives a greater understanding to how sonic youth became Sonic Youth. Is that important? Maybe not for art, but it is for history.
The 2006 Best Music Writing will not be your regularly scheduled viewing, I hope. As a compilation confined by the descriptors "2006" and "best" and the open field of "music writing" I decided upon a version of curatorial that invites work from across disiciplines, with different voices, registers and stories to tell. The list I submitted includes academic writing and blogs, finely wrought poetics and near psychotic rants, old timers and young turks. It is not an overture to political correctness that drives me to this spirit of inclusion, but my deep-seated belief that the guiding principles of the "best" "music writing" are control of language, sense of purpose, passion, originality and vision. It so happens that these criteria allow for a wide variety of output, and as such I have combed mountains of paper to make a need stack that will hopefully inspire others to passion about musical discussion, be in by pen or in bar chit chat. Initially afraid, I am now excited about the prospect of that conversation and hope that unlike years past, where discussion mostly revolved around the spirit of exclusion that seemed to guide the title, 2006 will be a year that where the editorial vision is less challenged than the ideas within the works themselves.
Sitting on my couch reading, I did have that Walmart shopping cart moment, but it passed. My old friend is a fantastically successful musician and an inspiration to our generation of Important New York City bands. I didn't need to waste my starwishes for it to happen either - I knew it would from the moment we met. It was the outcome of wishing for myself that I wasn't so sure, and in the years between then and now my wondering if and how my own dreams might come true filled up a lot of my time. Reading that piece was heartbreaking in that I still recognize a former friend and beautiful person with whom I developed many of the ideas about music that I hold today. An inspiration. Until now I have been embarrassed to write about our friendship because I was also jealous, in a way, that those dreams that we dicussed together worked out differently that I had hoped. And as I listen to this New York Noise comp, I wonder about all the other bands here - how much inspiration did they give Sonic Youth? How jealous are they to have been written out of the record until now? With the recent post-punk/nowave revival including the first and second New York Noise comps the aural history is coming together. To know how these sounds relate, it is up to the writers to find the stories and tell them, for books like those of Reynolds, Gendron, McNeil to weave together history and music, conversations and context. This is a different craft than making music but no less a noble one. I have finally and completely accepted. And it happens to be the one I am capable of acheiving in my lifetime. So when I hear Karen O singing while I am looking at lovely and too expensive dresses I can relate them: these are beautiful things that I might have been able to have if I wanted them, but I wanted something else.
And I am finally comfortable in my clothes.
I am a curator of contemporary writing about music, a music writer and lover of histories both traditional and alternate. Here I am, telling you how I got here and maybe a little of how another got somewhere else. I am happy to be here now telling you this. More happy than I have ever been.
Today I was shopping in Soho, for the hell of it. I went in Vivienne Tam to see how people could take fashion as seriously as music: the clothes are art. I went in Anna Sui to see how people could rock and roll as fashion: the clothes are punk. Then, after kamakazi mission to H&M, when I lost my shopping co-conspirator, I went into Kenneth Cole. They were playing the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs song: Gold Lion. It made me want to buy the beautiful black high collar dress, yes. It did.
Does that mean that I want to be Karen O?
A story: My old roommate went to high school with Karen. When we lived together, she was going through intense untreated depression stemming in part from that terrible post-college feeling that life would not be as swell as one imagined when they began. One day we were sitting in the kitchen and she told me that she had been in Walmart, pushing a giant buggy down the aisle mindlessly and full of big box dispair when she passed the media section. There was a flatscreen tv playing the "Maps" video. Sitting in the kitchen recounting the story, she was calm, but I can imagine the feeling she had: a profound sense of failure, dread and anxiety. This was a moment of measure for her.
Fucking youth
Working youth
Fucking youth
Working youth
Fucking youth
Fucking youth
Working youth
Wasted youth. My friend was feeling the pang of jealousy (we hate it when our friends become successful?) and the anxiety of knowing that youth was behind her enough that peers had become successful in the adult world: on MTV, touring the world, being stars. My friend didn't want to be a rock star, I'm sure, but she didn't want to be pushing a buggy around Walmart in a fit of depression either.
Look before you leap, okay?
Do you read me?
May all your dreams come true
Who knows if Karen O wants to be Karen O, but she is. When I saw the Yeah Yeahs play at Bowery Ballroom a few weeks ago I was singularly struck: this woman is an inspired entertainer, the Siouxsie of my generation. She makes glitter a verb, a space between Souxsie's dazzle and Eno's glam. I had never seen them perform, in part because I secretly felt like my friend, but with a different intensity: Karen is my peer, when to the same college that I did, had many of the same friends as I in the post-college years. We were in bands at the same time. What if I saw them play and was hit with the same feeling as my friend had been in Walmart?
A lot of people suffer
From impotence
But it didn't happen. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a fantastic pop band and I think that I may be a converted fan, but it is not my music. I am right now (right NOW) nearly finished with a piece about Cosey Fanni Tutti for the new Stop Smiling. I am listening to the New York Noise II comp, to Sonic Youth's 1982 track "Dreamed I Dream." When I think about Cosey and Kim, this is when my mind travels back to high school, to early college when I believed that I would be in a fantastic, fucked up and brilliant band: an Important Band. Not just important: an important New York City experimental band. I worshipped at the alter (puns unforgivable like high school fantasies). I wanted it so badly. I went to NYU instead of USC because Thurston wanted to kill all the California Girls and I didn't want him to hate me. I joined the Program Board, NYU's kinda DIY style show producing club, before school even began. I searched out musicians, made friends, joined bands.
I had three friends who were similary afflicted with this Sonic Youth-induced desire for musical profoundness in New York City. One became my boyfriend, the other two were boyfriend and girlfriend, our best friends, his roommate. The other couple were so overzealous in their fandom that they rang Kim and Thurston's doorbell on Thanksgiving asking to be let in to enjoy a meal with them. ("I was walking up Lafayette street. It's real empty and I looked out and it turned into a big field, and I looked up in the sky, and I looked up in the clouds, and I saw this face looking down at me, and it's a women's face, and she threw a quarter down at me and she said: "honey, here's a quarter go put it in the washing machine"). We wanted someone to toss down a quarter to us too.
Of those three people, all are lost to me as friends. One I saw in passing at a fashion week party last year but no nothing else of. One is in a prominent NYC experimental band. One has been named as one of the most important experimental musicians of our generation.
You slept
Did I drift?
Do I dream?
I dream
Sound today are you sound today
are you sound today?
Sound today are you sound today
are you sound today?
How do I know this? Because I am a rock critic. I read rock criticism, and have recently finished reading hundreds and hundreds of pieces for a book anthologizing music criticism. I am a firm believer that one can write great things about bad bands, but many prefer to write great things about great bands. As such, I have read pieces about this latter former musical friend, someone with whom I spent my college career and with whom I played and recorded music. It was not until the work for this anthology that I had read pieces about the person because, I have come to realize, this person is my Karen O, plus. Sitting on the couch, reading through a stack of some of the most inspired work by my peers, I read a piece promising the first glimpse of intimacy with this band notorious for its mystery. I have not spoken to a member of the band for years, but nothing of this piece was new to me. Still, I was terrified to read it.
The days we spent go on and on
I dream
Do you read me?
Keep him on the porch, one of the band members said: a Lou Reed-ism about not being friendly to journalists. An aside about the misery of college, a detailed portrait of current friendships and relationships. This has nothing to do with me has something to do with me. But there on the page it is obvious. Those three years of friendship, playing, acid-riddled crazy inspiring conversation, chuckleheaded late night walks and hours of intense listening are gone from history. The former friend, when we last spoke said, "I don't even know you, who are you," and I picked up the tab at Cozy Diner and that was it. History is erased to the friend, to the record, to everyone but me. In the years since this, for me, painful end I have run into the friend on the street, been at parties, and even (in a fit of NYC band incest only understood from this side of the Williamsburg Bridge) had a practice space across the hall from their band: We would walk down the hall to our respective doors in a silence that belied an estrangement deeper than that of strangers.
My first serious boyfriend in high school was a stargazer, a beautiful boy whose life went astray when our mutual friend and bandmate killed himself in our senior year of high school. When I found out that I got into NYU, he said to me, "That's horrible, you're going to turn into one of those people." It broke my heart, "One of those people." But I did want to be some version of 'those people,' and I knew that I had the talent to do so. So did my boyfriend, he was a fantastic guitarist and one of the most brilliant, sensitive people I will ever meet. For years afterward, whenever I saw the first star of the evening, I wished on it that he would become on of those people too. It was this boy who introduced me to Sonic Youth. We even tried to learn how to play "Teenage Riot" I believe.
These things don't happen
automatically
So the friendship ended, my friend became took important steps to becoming Important, and I took them too, but in another direction. I played music before I wrote and until my junior year of high school believed I would go to conservatory and become a professional cellist. Three things happened to change that: my high school orchestra became so competitive that it killed the sense of comraderie inherent in making music together; I became passionate about writing; I discovered punk. I went to Other Music on my birthday the summer before my senior year and bought my first indie rock albums: the Swirlies, Versus and Stereolab. I returned my senior year, broke up with my Sonic Youth-boyfriend, and focused my energies on three things: playing punk rock, making a zine and getting into NYU.
While at NYU, I put on shows, played shows and edited the music section of the college newspaper. Do not ask me what classes I took, because I don't remember. I graduated with an individualized major in music history, journalism and graphic design: a major in music zine production. I stopped my zine because the zines in NYC were so much better, so much more professional. I met two of the most important and influential characters in my life: Eventide Fanzine publisher Toby Carroll and then Insound zinestand guru Laris Kreslins, who is now the publisher of Arthur. These two people showed me how to be punk and professional, how to take my writing and ideas to the next level and how to make enough money to exist while not compromising my ethics.
My junior year I decided to go abroad to London to satisfy my Anglo-phile lust. For months before leaving, the friend begged me not to go. The week before I left, we recorded an album of songs together, all live takes recorded in a rambling farmhouse. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life - playing and singing with people I loved in a relaxed place. Almost immediately upon the seperation, things happened for both of us. My friend began to play music in earnest, and I got an internship at Mojo that would prove to be my first magazine writing. I also met Jenny Bulley and Lois Wilson, two tough and talented ladies who were my earliest mentors. While this was happening, maybe because it was happening, things veered into the negative with my friend and within two months of my arrival in London, we ceased talking. What happened, I am not sure because we never spoke about it properly, but what I remember is this: I was in Norway writing about Supersilent for the Wire. I had written a train from Oslo to Bergen and while on it, a group of Norwegian teenagers played acoustic guitar and quietly sang. As we chugged along, the snow turned blue in the waning light of Scandanvian winter. I thought it was the most beautiful musical experience of my life. When I got to Bergen, I emailed my friend saying that when we travelled together, as we planned in the summer, we ought to learn some songs that people could sing along with. "Learn Blackbird," I advised.
That was not to happen. The friend was offended at the suggestion that we would become cultural imperialists, pushing the Beatles on foreign lands. Only original music, nothing less. It was our last correspondence. The album we recorded was never released, although something was released under the title we'd given our project back on that winter week.
Edith moves each step
In the years since, I have mostly given up playing music and am a full-time music critic and a budding ethnomusicologist. When I was asked to become the series editor for Best Music Writing, I was honored and afraid. How could I stand in judgment of my peers? Do I deserve such a gig? "And you may ask yourself, well...how did I get here?" I was afraid at the moment of being asked that by taking the gig I would somehow alienate my peers - having to select the best neccessarily meaning ennacting judgment, including and excluding. It also means something very strange and real: that this is my world, that music journalism is my passion about which I have been given the oppurtunity to create a meta-discourse or narrative. As someone (hopefully) thoughtful about the subject, a student and practioner, there are few greater satisfactions than this, no matter the potential for upsetting things. Or maybe just for that reason.
Listening to New York Noise II, I think of the role of curating. It is just that, creating a narrative, giving context, rethinking history. Here I sit listening to "Dreamed I dream" as I had listened to it in high school - a drumless downtempo guitar jangle with some funny 80s Kim ramble/Lee croon. But ten years later, nine years after moving to New York and seeing how it all works, experiencing what I have, I hear it differently. In 1982 Sonic Youth was only a year old, a new band and not yet Important. All of the other bands on New York Noise II were just as likely. Have you heard Pulsallama, Mofungo, Hunter Gatherer, Red Transistor, Vortex OST, Certain General, Rhys Chatham, Clandestine, Glorious Strangers, Felix, The Del Byzantines, Don King, Jill Kroesen, Ut, The Static or Y Pants? Probably not, and may not that crucial that you do. But if you love this era and this music, then hearing these forgotten bands gives a greater understanding to how sonic youth became Sonic Youth. Is that important? Maybe not for art, but it is for history.
The 2006 Best Music Writing will not be your regularly scheduled viewing, I hope. As a compilation confined by the descriptors "2006" and "best" and the open field of "music writing" I decided upon a version of curatorial that invites work from across disiciplines, with different voices, registers and stories to tell. The list I submitted includes academic writing and blogs, finely wrought poetics and near psychotic rants, old timers and young turks. It is not an overture to political correctness that drives me to this spirit of inclusion, but my deep-seated belief that the guiding principles of the "best" "music writing" are control of language, sense of purpose, passion, originality and vision. It so happens that these criteria allow for a wide variety of output, and as such I have combed mountains of paper to make a need stack that will hopefully inspire others to passion about musical discussion, be in by pen or in bar chit chat. Initially afraid, I am now excited about the prospect of that conversation and hope that unlike years past, where discussion mostly revolved around the spirit of exclusion that seemed to guide the title, 2006 will be a year that where the editorial vision is less challenged than the ideas within the works themselves.
Sitting on my couch reading, I did have that Walmart shopping cart moment, but it passed. My old friend is a fantastically successful musician and an inspiration to our generation of Important New York City bands. I didn't need to waste my starwishes for it to happen either - I knew it would from the moment we met. It was the outcome of wishing for myself that I wasn't so sure, and in the years between then and now my wondering if and how my own dreams might come true filled up a lot of my time. Reading that piece was heartbreaking in that I still recognize a former friend and beautiful person with whom I developed many of the ideas about music that I hold today. An inspiration. Until now I have been embarrassed to write about our friendship because I was also jealous, in a way, that those dreams that we dicussed together worked out differently that I had hoped. And as I listen to this New York Noise comp, I wonder about all the other bands here - how much inspiration did they give Sonic Youth? How jealous are they to have been written out of the record until now? With the recent post-punk/nowave revival including the first and second New York Noise comps the aural history is coming together. To know how these sounds relate, it is up to the writers to find the stories and tell them, for books like those of Reynolds, Gendron, McNeil to weave together history and music, conversations and context. This is a different craft than making music but no less a noble one. I have finally and completely accepted. And it happens to be the one I am capable of acheiving in my lifetime. So when I hear Karen O singing while I am looking at lovely and too expensive dresses I can relate them: these are beautiful things that I might have been able to have if I wanted them, but I wanted something else.
And I am finally comfortable in my clothes.
I am a curator of contemporary writing about music, a music writer and lover of histories both traditional and alternate. Here I am, telling you how I got here and maybe a little of how another got somewhere else. I am happy to be here now telling you this. More happy than I have ever been.
3.24.2006
the new matmos album rules!!!
it is coming out on may 9 and if you aren't one of those people that get digipacks of garbage + the occasional AMAZING BIT OF EXCELLENTLY CRAFTED, WELL-THOUGHOUT and FUN WEIRDNESS, then mark your calander to get it then.
the first track "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" is like an a grown-up harry potter type english major going to see marilyn manson (as in, you know, that guy made some salient points in bowling for columbine and maybe he isn't just a shockjock), meeting a parade of gay goth teens who invite him vampiro-clubbing, and then going home at 7am to write a paper about the whole thing but the kids' ruboff dark majik turns the paper into a song: digital transfer sexy philo dance sound!
here's a new ongoing news theme for the music issue: music-writing is going to hell in a handbasket I shall hensforth call WORDCOUNT
WORDCOUNTOO1: Look! Rolling Stone not only wants you to be their intern, they want to make areality show about it. Now both your labor AND your likeness can be exploited. Interning is good, the best experience one can get in music writing, I think...but doing it on national television? I mean, really folks. No one cares about rock critics THAT much. do they? if so, please see news item below.
IN OTHER NEWS: the da capo book best music writing 2006 writing selections are done. more comments later when i can think about it and no, i will not tell you if your piece made it into this round. a true lady never tells. but for those of you who do not know but who wrote great pieces none the less, THANK YOU for taking the time to think about music and writing in new, fresh, weird, funny, thoughtful, engaged, passionate, bizarre and original ways. my mind is a sea of thoughts about what it means to write about music and i will accordingly write here as soon as i catch up on my own deadlines (cough cough).
SEEhere: Amazing photos of Chrissie Hynde in EW. The one in the cage? dunno. The one with all the rad chicks...inspiring!
the first track "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" is like an a grown-up harry potter type english major going to see marilyn manson (as in, you know, that guy made some salient points in bowling for columbine and maybe he isn't just a shockjock), meeting a parade of gay goth teens who invite him vampiro-clubbing, and then going home at 7am to write a paper about the whole thing but the kids' ruboff dark majik turns the paper into a song: digital transfer sexy philo dance sound!
here's a new ongoing news theme for the music issue: music-writing is going to hell in a handbasket I shall hensforth call WORDCOUNT
WORDCOUNTOO1: Look! Rolling Stone not only wants you to be their intern, they want to make areality show about it. Now both your labor AND your likeness can be exploited. Interning is good, the best experience one can get in music writing, I think...but doing it on national television? I mean, really folks. No one cares about rock critics THAT much. do they? if so, please see news item below.
IN OTHER NEWS: the da capo book best music writing 2006 writing selections are done. more comments later when i can think about it and no, i will not tell you if your piece made it into this round. a true lady never tells. but for those of you who do not know but who wrote great pieces none the less, THANK YOU for taking the time to think about music and writing in new, fresh, weird, funny, thoughtful, engaged, passionate, bizarre and original ways. my mind is a sea of thoughts about what it means to write about music and i will accordingly write here as soon as i catch up on my own deadlines (cough cough).
SEEhere: Amazing photos of Chrissie Hynde in EW. The one in the cage? dunno. The one with all the rad chicks...inspiring!
3.18.2006
mexican hat dance
just got back from a weird package tour through mexico's copper canyon with my dad. i think i'm sick and have crazy crazy deadlines so might be a little silent for a while.
on the ETHNOTOURISM front:
got a Tarahumara-made violin while in the Copper Canyon. It seems to be strung with guitar strings and be of questionable tunability - a lovely wall decoration! i may be forced to Anderson-ify the thing to make some sound with it.
The 2006 EMP Pop Conference schedule is up. I'm on a panel called "Let's Call It Art" with David Grubbs and Scott Saul, who is talking about David Byrne and will hopefully volley the ball right into my court.
on the ETHNOTOURISM front:
got a Tarahumara-made violin while in the Copper Canyon. It seems to be strung with guitar strings and be of questionable tunability - a lovely wall decoration! i may be forced to Anderson-ify the thing to make some sound with it.
The 2006 EMP Pop Conference schedule is up. I'm on a panel called "Let's Call It Art" with David Grubbs and Scott Saul, who is talking about David Byrne and will hopefully volley the ball right into my court.
3.07.2006
pizza depravity
Your order, 26263520, is complete and has been submitted. An email containing your order total including sales tax and the estimated Delivery/Carryout Time will be sent to:
friends, today is a new day. I have ordered a pizza online because I have no cash and am too busy to leave my house. And I am telling you about it on my blog.
(here insert some kind of sound of whimpering, distant chimes and children playing, as if a memory of times before the armageddon, when we could go outside and enjoy the daylight, the breeze, the soft smell of spring approaching)
But mrha ha ha, tomorrow I am going on VACATION! to mexico, to the copper canyon. to...the land of the ancient peyote rite. With my dad! On a train! Isn't that exciting? I have one whole suitcase of books and papers I need to read while on vacation! I hope to take them on the river raft ride with me, my eyes bulging with the psychedelic continuum of water, land, sky and paperwork. yes!
IN OTHER NEWS (Or, related):
Tomorrow I turn in 1/2 of the Da Capo project. It is hard going, trying to balance the respected tradition of the project with what I personally believe to be the core of 'what good music writing is/does.' I made a list of words just in case anyone forces me to defend my choices, and I'm happy to say what I've picked thus far exceeds many of my expectations. The most lovely moment came from reading a piece that seemed obvious enough but just dropped a small bomb in the middle, one that suddenly and without warning caused my to cry: it was one of those moments, one that EMP folk might call "a magic moment." A moment that wasn't about music or writing, it was about cutting through, communicating, getting it right. Dare I say it? That's what I'm looking for. And of course, some snarkiness about how much better things were 10/20/30/40 years ago.
friends, today is a new day. I have ordered a pizza online because I have no cash and am too busy to leave my house. And I am telling you about it on my blog.
(here insert some kind of sound of whimpering, distant chimes and children playing, as if a memory of times before the armageddon, when we could go outside and enjoy the daylight, the breeze, the soft smell of spring approaching)
But mrha ha ha, tomorrow I am going on VACATION! to mexico, to the copper canyon. to...the land of the ancient peyote rite. With my dad! On a train! Isn't that exciting? I have one whole suitcase of books and papers I need to read while on vacation! I hope to take them on the river raft ride with me, my eyes bulging with the psychedelic continuum of water, land, sky and paperwork. yes!
IN OTHER NEWS (Or, related):
Tomorrow I turn in 1/2 of the Da Capo project. It is hard going, trying to balance the respected tradition of the project with what I personally believe to be the core of 'what good music writing is/does.' I made a list of words just in case anyone forces me to defend my choices, and I'm happy to say what I've picked thus far exceeds many of my expectations. The most lovely moment came from reading a piece that seemed obvious enough but just dropped a small bomb in the middle, one that suddenly and without warning caused my to cry: it was one of those moments, one that EMP folk might call "a magic moment." A moment that wasn't about music or writing, it was about cutting through, communicating, getting it right. Dare I say it? That's what I'm looking for. And of course, some snarkiness about how much better things were 10/20/30/40 years ago.
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