RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: ROB DUBBIN
The Music Was Fantastic But The Singing Caused Nightmares

There’s a lot of stuff out there. It’s apocryphal but NBS once told me his colleague Bob said bands make more music in a year than there are seconds in the year to listen to music. I guess you could halve that problem by mixing two iPods into the same set of headphones, but at that point you’re not really respecting either artists’ work, are you.

I don’t think of myself as one of those people. Meaning, the kind who doesn’t respect artists’ work, not the kind who would mix two iPods into the same set of headphones. Nobody should do that, it would sound terrible.

The thing is that barring my irrational hatred of Rod Stewart, I’d like to believe that I’m the kind of guy who gives every band a fair shot at my fandom. But I also know that it took me less time to hear about, download, listen to, and get sick of most albums this year than it took the artist to figure out which alternative comedian he’d thank in the liner notes. See, I’d decided that in 2006 I really wanted to “follow” music, to hear every possible album for myself, as it leaked, so I could form an opinion before the masses even knew, to furnish one example, that the music was fantastic but the singing caused nightmares.

It only sort of worked out that way. I listened to almost a hundred and thirty 2006 albums, obliterating my previous record of maybe three dozen, but here we are at the end of the year and my favorite is still the first one I heard, way back in November of 2005. The only thing I really gained from my ambitious (for me) canvassing of this year’s scene was a serious case of burnout, a thin handful of serendipitous discoveries, and an iTunes library riddled with truly vile shit from bands like Gomez and Some by Sea.

That’s what it took me until about August to realize: I’m not very good at being a 0-day music consumer, because I don’t have the patience to digest that much material and still enjoy new stuff from the bands I actually like. This year I was so caught up in my self-imposed grueling pace that I rarely gave albums a third or even second chance, the musical equivalent of shooting twelve bears at Chimney Rock and only carrying 100 pounds back to the wagon.

Naturally the lesson there is, don’t be an idiot and try to carry all the bear meat by yourself. One of the reasons I went rogue in 2006 was my general disillusionment with music blogs in 2005 -- too many people competing for good seats on the next trend, not enough people trying to write well – but after my experience this year I think it’s time I yielded to superior authority again. That doesn’t mean I’m going to start slurping up the bands Microsoft uses to advertise the Zune, it just means I’m going to be a little less defensive about letting other people’s opinions dictate what I listen to.

Of course, as with music, opinions are something the Internet has in droves. Or I guess packs, to keep the bear thing going. Herds? No wait, I looked it up. Bears travel in sleuths. And that’s fitting, because my current plan for 2007, such as it exists, is to put roughly the same energy into finding good opinions that I put this year into finding good music. I’m hoping to meet with a lot more success and a lot less Gomez.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: SEAN FENNESSEY
Kim Weston: “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While)”

The author of this web site (his name is not Phil) and I had a conversation recently where he floated an idea (one of his big ones) about music that is designed to be heard in certain formats. Not so much the cassette vs. compact disc convo (though I would have had that one) or the compact disc vs. vinyl one (I definitely would not have had that one), but rather the sort that involves a song that is meant to be heard via digitally encoded sound. He used Motown’s sound as a counterpoint to the .mp3 revo-solution. Motown was built to last on the radio, on AM stations high in treble and tone, lacking the deep bass, he said. Digital music is meant to amplify deep, full sounds, ones that don’t need a high-pitched melody to win. This, he says, or David Banner says, or Not Phil Banner says, is why Southern rap music does so well with downloaders. The compositions are by design digital sonatas. Not Phil is a pretty sharp guy, so I kinda took him at his word and gave him the old “Oh, wouldn’t that be interesting, you wily muskrat” chitchat back. Right back at him – pow. So, later we go on our merry way (at least, my way was merry. His could have been paved with broken bottles of Cristal. I blame Jay-Z.) and I start thinking about his thoughts on Motown. I’d seen Dreamgirls, the major motion picture starring people you’ve heard of, the night prior and was galvanized by one of the stagy, cutesy scenes in the film. The burgeoning record entrepreneur from Detroit that basically is Berry Gordy, played by Jamie Foxx, fashions a recording studio out of his garage/car dealership, just as Gordy did when he opened Hitsville USA in Detroit in 1959. During a recording sesh in the film, a drummer uses the spokes of a rim as a hi-hat, and a bassist plucks cables and a man holding a greasy chain, one you might see in a garage like that, shakes it melodically, as if it were a tambourine or jingle bell. It’s a real Emmet Otter Jug Band moment – DIY shit. My major trouble with this scene is if you own a car dealership, one assumes you can buy a goddamn tambourine, but this is another matter. So I leave Not Phil, scurry up my stairs, sit down in front of my desk and slide too-tight headphones on. I start Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection 1959-1971, a boxed set released in 1992 that’s probably never going to be topped as far as by-the-second quality goes. So I crank from the beginning and something becomes clearer and clearer. Not Phil is full of fucking shit. Sure, the bass is buried in the cut, and my rubbish hearing phones can’t churn up the quality. But on Kim Weston’s “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While),” the opening seconds – SHOTGUN SNARE, PUFFY ¾ BASS DRUM, A TAMBOURINE (OR A GREASY CHAIN OR WHATEVER) – aren’t designed for anything. The vocal is faint, distant, traipsing away from the rest of the sounds which are sharp and sinewy. The song structure may have been written for the radio, in so far as it’s catchy as all hell, thanks to HDH and Smokey and Gordy himself and scads of other songwriters and the rhythm band and that greasy chain. But it’s not written with an emitted sound in mind. Same goes for Martha Reeves & The Vandellas “Nowhere to Run” and The Temptations “My Girl” (have you heard that bass line, Not Phil!) and especially The Contours’ “Do You Love Me, which feels like it was recorded on a hematoma on my skull, it’s that bulbous, the opposite of buried. They couldn’t have been written that way because they were recorded in a godforsaken garage – though admittedly the garage thing is a myth, the studio at Hitsville USA was actually just out in the back of the building. At the same time, Phil Spector arranges in a million dollar studio. Brian Wilson burns downs homes to find the perfect sound. Burt Bacharach composes for seventy piece orchestras. Berry Gordy puts Kim Weston’s two octave off-key purr in a fucking converted garage. Any why, cuz he had to that’s why, so we don’t begrudge – only black artists released music on Motown until Rare Earth came along and fucked things up, things were tight in the beginning. But this insinuation that someone was writing for the acoustics of the radio is snake oil salesman shit and I won’t stand for it. So: 6 Riffs.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: TOM BREIHAN
A Whole Other Can Of Worms

So my pet obsession this year has been metal. The music is only part of it, though a lot of the music is great. But what's really been resonating with me lately is the sweeping immersiveness of the whole shit: metal isn't even just one world, it's a string of tangentially connected sub-worlds, all with their own ideas about how to best convey a worldview defined by ambient, directionless rage. Part of what attracts me so much is how repellant it is. Seems like metal has spent the past decade or so bleaching itself of crossover urges, folding in on itself instead. As far as I know, metal 2006 has no Danzig figure, no titanic figure who can capture eighth-graders' imaginations the way Danzig captured mine when I was an eighth-grader. Instead, it's turned itself into an only-for-obsessives cult, comfortable with its own ridiculousness. Xasthur can say in interviews that he pretty much devotes his life to attaining a platonic ideal of black-metalness, for instance. That's a completely ridiculous thing for a grown man to be doing, but I'm really glad someone is doing it anyway.

Looking at most of my favorite metal records of the year (Mastodon, Celtic Frost, Nachtmystium, Enslaved, Gojira), there aren't a whole lot of hooks to be found. Songs don't follow standard pop-song structure, and neither do they intentionally fuck around with pop-song structure the way the Unicorns or Deerhoof or whatever other boring indie bands do. Their sprawl is more symphonic: songs lurching from movement to movement, prettiness to ugliness, punishing blastbeat to squabbling solo, not following any logic I know how to recognize. The big exceptions here are In Flames, who I guess are pop stars in Sweden and thus pretty much inhabit another universe entirely, and the Sword. The Sword is a whole other can of worms. They're unapologetically retro, and they write songs with hooks and structures and stuff. They're also signed with Kemado, an indie-rock label. All that stuff, from what I can tell, makes actual metal dudes react to this band with extreme suspicion, the sort of thing I remember from my high-school punk days when we worried that any remotely catchy band was trying to piggyback on the purity of our scene to get dirty mainstream money or whatever. When the Sword opened for Trivium a couple of months ago, there was this weird shouting match that went down: some kids chanting for Trivium, others screaming "THE SWOOOORD!" back at them. It was funny. And Trivium aren't exactly standard-bearers for pure-metal authenticity either; they're twenty-year-olds with flashy onstage theatrics and painfully obvious next-Metallica ambitions. You pretty much can't advance beyond suspicion in metal unless you live in a cave and eat candles and stab your own eyes out, so that's sort of what some people do.

Anyway, the whole Sword thing brings me to something else: a lot of ostensibly indie-rock people like me have also been nurturing pet metal obsessions this year, and that's probably because indie-rock has purged itself of all its ugliest, most misanthropic impulses on the way to being Sufjanized. This whole phenomenon would help explain, for instance, how that garbage-ass Boris album ended up getting so much love. Metal types, of course, are pretty uncomfortable with the idea of their power-fantasy scene being invaded and diluted by all these dilettantes; that's why Decibel, the best music magazine in the world right now, did its hipster-metal roundtable. But then, that's basically the fate of anyone who wants to explore a whole lot of scenes: you're an outsider wherever you go.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: MANHATTAN CEREAL
2% Lycra

Buying new jeans - better or worse than a humiliating experience at ALIFE Rivington Club during which I was tricked into buying the women's version of the Air Max 1s.

I didn't wear jeans from 1995-2001, but by 2001 I felt ready to buy a pair of "cool" jeans. So, when Jasmine Sola Men offered an opening weekend sale on jeans, I went for them. They turned out to be 2% lycra or something, way too much, and my college roommates stole them, stretched them over several layers of pants, and ran around in "Win's new denim snowpants."

A month later, I bought a pair of black jeans on sale at the Gap. My friends tore me to shreds (see pic above).

Spring of 2003: I spent 2 weeks quietly walking in and out of the Diesel store, questioning my values, wondering why I'd felt a terrible need to conform in recent years, and worrying that it will only get worse. I took a $130 plunge, and they were awesome - they fit perfectly, I loved them, and the spandex was not an issue.

I wore them for 3.5 years - wore them out. They tore in November, and I realized that it was finally time to buy new ones. I'd spent recent months glancing at jeans at "cool" stores, and I was resolved to find the most expensive, stove pipiest, tightest, rawest Japanese denim. I found them at Odin, which I'm pretty sure is a cool store in the East Village. The storekeepers ignored me for 20 minutes as I struggled to find my size. The jeans were completely unlabeled, which I liked, but it was a bit challenging to find 34s. Finally, after serving myself under the dirty gazes of the storekeepers, I went to the dressing room and tried a few different cuts. I steeled myself to keep going tighter and tighter...and, because I was scared to walk out of the store without spending money, I decided to buy them.

"Um, we have those in raw denim," muttered the guy at the register. My heart fluttered. "Oh, uh, really. Uh, I, uh, I guess I'll get those instead."

They hurt my legs. They're stiff and uncomfortable. They'll stain my body, shoes, shirts, and furniture for 6 months (this isn't a joke). I can't wash them until next summer, at which point I'm supposed to take a cold shower while wearing them. They're already loosening up a bit in the wrong places, and it's my fault. Odin was playing Bloc Party on its stereo. When I got home, I looked up the brand online - yup, a big deal in 2005. And not in 2006. It's not as though I wasn't warned. 12 RIFFS

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: SAM UBL
Probably reading too many novels, not enough discobelle.net. Best: Sam.

If you think old sold in 2006, consider the year's best album. Despite packing more jams than a canefield, Rather Ripped was met by critic dudes with all the enthusiasm of a Walmart cashier on X-mas Eve overtime. Sonic Youth plug in to bug out, to "let melody ring" (Thurston's words), and the kids don't bag it? Sam is brain hurts.

But-- shock shock-- kids don't want old farts at play. They want what's hot and for cheap, and nuanced iconoclasm comes at a high price. If few felt Thurston's "sunshine beat", who's surprised? A million Christmases won't make America's shit any shallower. Computes, then, that shock-and-awe noise sorties and bunker-busting hipster metal fed the experience vacuum in '06, arming the intelligensia against a rising surf of scary words from exotic lands. Reliably contrary, Sonic Youth rediscovered the fun, the straightahead, the hummable while avoiding the buzzworthy like the plague. Boris et al inspired loftier thinkpieces, but Rather Ripped remembered that pop can just as successfully be enlisted in the name of an avant-garde ethos (whatever that means) as it can in defiance of one.

I thought I thought rap sucked this year, but a cursory top 10 suggests otherwise. Among those I suffered gladdest: Trae (rhino), Weezy (cheetah), Pitbull (...). Spare Ross for the "fat boy in a big body" line, Luda for "Grew Up a Screw Up." I'll forever remember 2006 as the year I stopped throwing darts at my will.i.am dartboard, because he gave Game the most hilariously infantilizing hook ever on "Gangsta Boogie", and because I figured out hot international girls really love the Black Eyed Peas. Lupe's leak was better than the finished product, and I'll jam that Pharrell/DJ Drama tape all motherfucking day before I mess with In My Mind. Meanwhile, don't even ack like you don't love Young Dro.

The Clipse really do make everyone look foolish, though, especially the rap-retarded bloggers they've drawn into the coke rap discourse. For my monies, Hell Hath No Fury toilet-paperizes everyone in part because its production dramatizes G-rap hyperrealities more creatively than the gunshot-sample addled, ghetto-cheap-synth driven tableaux we're used to. And trap-hop deniers are blind if they can't see that the words more than fulfill the sub-zero flows' weighty promise. The Clipse may hit the streets with all the joie de Visa of troubled young talent, but remember, these are boys who claim to read Deepak Chopra when they're not toasting motion-free. Everyone, regardless of hustle, is pretty much constantly dogged by the kind of questions money can't chase away.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: RYAN DOMBAL
Excuses Never Win

To those who have heard the show me "What you Got" version by Lil Wayne: Listen to the song close enough to hear this dumb shit he says..."I have no Brain, I am retarded"..."My flow is outta this world I am a Marshen..." really wtf is up with this dude lmao...Lil wayne is just a fuckin dumbass spitting stupid shit in my opnion. -- fre$h @ Hype Beast

Marshen? Wow. Dwayne was tired. And why is Brain capitalized? Dwayne was very tired. But he liked seeing the sites. The kiss heard 'round the world, ha. He'd already scrolled through the community. Why is Young Jeezy so inspirational? He liked to see his name flicker, coherency be damned. I must be Lebron James if he's Jordan. He almost wished he didn't have to roll over that track, though. To roll over him.

Dwayne heard the album on Saturday afternoon and let it wash at first. Phone. Texts. Friends passing. TV set to sports. I rebuke you little nigga. He was still excited to hear it even after the boats figured eights and the waves screwed-in Miss Teen America. Worried a bit. That first listen was blurry. I don't know. Second listen he flipped the lights down. Zoned out. Two fingertips on his forehead, trying--failing--to brood. Worth it? Really don't know.

Dwayne knew he could give more life to an exposed tapejob than, you know, the blockbuster heart, could...but he still was cautious. Teacher/pupil. Trouble. It always seems obvious on TV. Deep underneath the dread, though, was giddiness. Best rapper alive. Little louder. Best rapper alive. Lips curled...and stopped. A taste. I'm eatin' so much I'm gonna fuck around and barf. He knew the turn would occur. No way he could be ready. Excuses never win. Everyone can't do it, no matter the dedication. This was it. Suits vs. Rhymes. Coumadin vs. Xanax. Human vs. Marshen.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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In December of this year, Leila Lakshmi conducted this interview with Vali Chandrasekaran for Sapna Magazine. For reasons unknown to Riff Market, the interview was never published (foul play is suspected). Ms. Lakshmi's estate has granted Riff Market permission to run the interview below:

An Evening with Vali Chandrasekaran
By Leila Lakshmi

I always arrive fifteen minutes early to my interviews. It helps me get my bearings, compose myself, and come up with a few witty/charming things to say during the conversation. I agreed to meet “My Name is Earl” writer Vali Chandrasekaran at a restaurant he suggested called & (pronounced EY-nus). None of my LA friends had heard of this place and I could not find any reference to it on the internet, but Vali assured me it was real and gave me the address only after I promised not to reveal it in the article. I arrived at & even earlier than normal only to find Vali already there. I was about to voice my surprise when the maître d’ shushed me, explaining, “Mr. Chandrasekaran will be ready for dinner in twenty minutes, when he’s finished meditating.”

At the exact moment the interview was supposed to start, Vali emerged from his trance. “How’s your drink?” he inquired as he started a quick set of one-armed pushups.

“One of the best I’ve ever had,” I replied. “What’s in it?”

He finished his pushups and returned to the table.

“The main ingredient is a wine distilled from some rare orchids that I grow. I bring some into & as often as I can.”

“Stop right there. What is this plac—“ Before I could finish I noticed a man leaning over Vali, whispering something into his ear. At this moment I first took notice of Vali’s appearance. His statuesque face. His endless brown eyes. His ferociously well-tailored dinner jacket. Then my eyes snapped back up to the man now patting Vali on the shoulder. Or should I say: my eyes snapped up to see Jack Nicholson patting Vali’s shoulder.

“Anyways, thanks for the stock tip,” Nicholson said as he left. Vali looked embarrassed.

“I owed him one,” Vali explained. “He let me borrow his race horse last week to settle a bet.”

“You race horses?”

“I race against horses. Anyways, where were we?”

He races against horses? Was I being subjected to some manner of elaborate prank? Is this the sort of thing he thinks is funny? A little professionalism doesn’t seem like too much to ask from an interviewee. Kal Penn (cutie!) didn’t try to pull any of this bullsh*t on me. I wasn’t going to waste any more of SAPNA’s time and money on this joker. I resolved to walk out on this interview, but before my brain could signal my limbs to take me out of this place, Vali grabbed my hand and whisked me back into the kitchen.

We moved quickly though the kitchen. Vali barely slowed to share a wordless fist-bump with Mario Batali who, similarly, didn’t miss a beat in his heated conversation with Tom Brokaw. (We were moving quickly, so all I heard of the conversation was Batali screaming, “No! I don’t care what relative is coming to town. You gave me those NASCAR tickets as a gift and I’m going to use them!)

After we left the kitchen we began walking faster and in what felt like circles. At least twice, Vali abruptly stopped and started walking back in the direction we just came from. We must have walked through twenty different doors or the same door twenty times before passing through a final door. Behind that final door was a man in a lab coat and a dog flipping through an issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

“Leila, this is Doctor Aristotle Williamsport and the reading dog is –”

“—just kiss me,” I implored.

“Shut up, this is important,” he shot back in a voice that wasn’t coddling or mean, yet was tender and authoritative.

“You know why he won’t kiss you, don’t you?” My brain struggled to understand what just happened; the words sounded like they just came from the dog. Then I watched the dog’s mouth move as he enunciated, “He won’t kiss you because he’s gay.”

“Stop saying I’m gay!” Vali roared back at the dog. The dog just snickered. “I apologize,” Vali continued. “This dog was captured by the CIA in 2002. Saddam was so violent and paranoid, he could not trust any of his lieutenants or even his own sons. Everybody had a reason to be disloyal to Saddam if the right opportunity presented itself and Saddam knew this. So the only living thing that Saddam trusted was his beloved Labrador.”

“Saddam Hussein had a talking dog?”

“No. Saddam had a trustworthy dog. His dog, this dog, accompanied him at all times.”

“I have a name, human,” dryly noted the dog.

“Of course. Hamid, accompanied Saddam at all times. He was present when Saddam was developing his weapons program and war secrets. Back in 2002 I was working with Dr. Williamsport on a method, the Vali-Williamsport method, to teach animals to speak English. We approached the CIA and two weeks later we had Hamid.”

“Is that how we captured Saddam?”

“In a way, yes. It was not due to information Hamid gave us. It took us about six weeks to get Hamid speaking English. We expected a deluge of information useful to the war, but it turns out we underestimated the bond between Hamid and Saddam. Still loyal to his master, Hamid refused to give us any war secrets – even when doggie treats were offered as rewards. However, the kidnapping of Hamid apparently broke Saddam’s heart. Without his loyal friend and trusted confidant, the old man just gave up.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I think I love you,” Vali said as he closed his eyes and leaned towards me. I did the same and our lips met and wrestled. A few minutes later, Vali and I walked out of & arm-in-arm. It was the perfect ending, just like in every Shahrukh Khan movie.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: CHRIS OTT
200-RIFF: THIS SONG IS CALLED GIVING A SHIT

So I guess I need to come out with it: Yes, I am/was Gerard Vs. Bear, and Yes, I could have done a better job of concealing it if I’d had time to keep up with Shallow Rewards. SR-goes-down/GVB-comes-up was an egregious synchronicity and I feel like a total half-ass for not pulling it off, but my new CBS sitcom Asshole Dad the Rock Critic is taking up more time than anticipated. People told me babies sleep all day - that is total bullshit. (Actually nobody told me that and I’ve been an uncle since I was 13 so this was pretty much no alarms/no surprises).

Duh: my main time drag has been a certain free weekly column wherein I blasted the Pipettes and nobody gave a shit, then said pretty much the same thing about Colin Meloy and it was like Flow My Tears the Policeman Said x 2000 in all-caps, from his ex-girlfriend the children’s book illustrator to Chris “Honeywell Round” Walla’s idiotic “U R JEALOUS CAT” letter, posted on his posey personal website (love that laid-back white-tee belly shot Chris – you should have been on Laguna Beach what a gyp did they call u??!!1).

Colin Meloy has a Google Alert on his name: he emailed me before my editor even knew the piece was online. Then yeah Colin got sick and canceled part of the tour and bro that’s a real shame because really I’m all for you but uhh, two other people in your band emailed me and Didn’t Give a Shit about the piece. Kiss your whip’s ass for setting up this Colbert schtick, ‘cos you were this close to a faceplant on the half-pipe of OOPS up until about five seconds ago.

[FYI Crane Wife will crack 120,000 in January, which is in all likelihood more than I’ll ever sell of anything, but after some complicated math it still adds up to Not Enough Money for Anyone in the Band to Survive On for More Than Three Years. You think the specter of that lesson might be the reason people like Co-co and Ryan Adams have such thin skin? Cry your way through Conrad TOTD’s interview on Pitchfork: dude’s got my back on this one.]

SHINY SHINY (S)HERR RIFFS, 2006 EDITION:

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: W. DAVID MARX (MARXY)
A Bathtub of Oatmeal

To you people on the wrong side of the Pacific, Cornelius is just one of the ex-pinch hitters on the Matador roster - like a Japanese version of Fuck or the Fucking Champs without all the cursing. Here in Tokyo, Japan, where I live, the release of his first album in five years Sensuous last month felt like the closest thing to a "big cultural event" for the remaining under-35s yet to be absorbed into the mainstream or parenthood. For a week, I stopped listening to McNeil-Lehrer Report podcasts and put music back onto my iPod.

All the magazine articles covering the album gave Cornelius plenty of space based on the release timing, but oddly focused all their energy on explaining to young readers why Cornelius was on the cover in the first place. His first band Flipper's Guitar hit it big in 1990 and were kind of like the Nirvana of Japan - not in sound, but in the fact that they broke "indie music" and made things like memorizing Teenage Fanclub trivia a mainstream phenomenon. The U.S. already had a pretty widespread college rock scene in 1991 - the year that "punk" finally "broke" - but Japan's indie submarket for moody lo-fi guitar strum pop apparently had three hundred fans or so when Flipper's Guitar came around.

So continuing with our analog, let's say that Kurt Cobain managed not to have Courtney assassinate him and went solo and finally discovered the fourth chord and got really into non-geometrical guitar progressions and started making meta-pop or abstract-pop albums: you'd probably have to give the guy a bunch of magazine covers every time he had a record out. Musically, this new album Sensuous is kinda pleasant but manages to contain very little explicitly musical content. For most of his career, Cornelius always put the content in places where normal people don't look. Forget "lyrics" and "melodies" and "beats," listen to this pan sequence! check out how much this sounds like the High Llamas! notice this lyrical reference to Jesus & Mary Chain! consider how fucking good this acoustic guitar was recorded! worship my binaural microphones! etc. 1997's Fantasma may be the first pop record about the cultural history of the technology required to listen to pop music (basically an expansion on
"Those Magic Changes" from Grease without the wink and cheese).

2001's Point boiled down the 60s pop music ingredients to sonic abstractions but kept the "album as teleological text adventure" structure. Sensuous is totally disinterested in journey - Oyamada has gotten to that mid-life cocoon stage - I am only guessing - where you are obsessed with everything "sounding good," where a really expensive Les Paul that never ever actually gets played sounds better to you than a crappy Fender Squire that gets played daily. Cornelius' curiosity has dwindled to that of a super stoned sophomore - oh my god i can't believe how good an acoustic guitar sounds when you just pluck out a chord. Okay, track 4 "Toner" is a cool fake-piano and inkjet glitch duet. My guess is he is finally printing out guitar tabs for Arto Lindsay he grabbed from OLGA on Gopher a while back. The remaining songs are pretty much just Nord synth and long delay effects. I am not sure how many songs have already been featured as background music for consumer product commercials, but they all sound like suspects. I think that guy from Kings of Convenience sings on a track.

I am no Tapes N.T. Apes fan and can never remember whether the Arcade Fire put out their first 10" CD on Death From Above '79 Records or not, but there is nothing even remotely close to the "Pitchfork Effect" here in Japan. Every day more and more unemployable young people form bad melocore punk bands and clog up all the pay-for-play "live houses" around town and permanently redefine "indie" as "farm league major label bands that will never, ever actually get to the major label level."

There used to be, however, the "Cornelius Effect" - which was that Cornelius could anoint really weird bands by either putting them out on his Trattoria label or giving them a shout-out in a magazine, and they would suddenly sell in the 10,000s. Thanks to Cornelius, we got a lot of amazing bands like Citrus, Violent Onsen Geisha, Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Neil and Iraiza, and Salon Music (well, the second half of their career). Now that Cornelius is a father with a celebrity son Milo and totally complacent to make "pretty songs" that serve as good background music for writing reviews about his albums, there is a leadership/authority vacuum in the Japanese indie music market. His last effort to personally pick out the successors with his PM remix contest was a wash since Cornelius picked all these really weird Logic glitch-squirt bedroom cases. Nobody from that fraternity ever got the big break.

Obviously it's not entirely Cornelius' fault that the Japanese indie music feels like dropping pennies into a bathtub of oatmeal, but unlike Cobain - who succeeded in giving pre-existing Pixies memes to regular dudes in Indiana - Cornelius was basically responsible for giving Japan this whole stream of international-minded, internationally-relevant indie music. (For those wondering, Boredoms were more on the avant/underground tip far away from consumer culture.) Remember: South Korea doesn't have an "indie scene." There is nothing automatic about tastes/consumers/producers all coming together to make indie happen. Without Oyamada, Japan could have very easily stayed irrelevant. Matador would have been ironically signing bad Japanese hair metal bands in 1999.

But now Oyamada is a guy making non-essential albums of neato audio experiments. Wife and kids will do that to you. No dissatisfaction to subsume into songwriting, no sublimation of frustration into art. This guy's happiness just brought down an entire consumer subculture.

-W. David Marx
www.neomarxisme.com

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: ANDY DUBBIN
Relevancy

Back in 1999, this guy Lou Bega had sort of a smash hit with “A Little Bit of Mambo.” My dad approved and bought the album in the impulse buy of the century (and mind you he purchased the virtually inoperative Christie Brinkley/Chuck Norris-endorsed “Total Gym” that same year). Anyways, fast-forward to August 2006 and Bega is back with this single “Bachata,” and I’m all over it. I pitched it as a [Pitchfork] track review, procrastinated a lot, and ended up writing a little ditty after school one day on an hour of sleep. It was posted and pulled between 4 and 6 the next morning; an issue of “relevancy” was allegedly the culprit.

I don’t take a lot of personal offense, but the disconcerting thing to me is how the possibility that dredging up a late ‘90s one-hit-wonder would throw a few readers was enough to just expunge a legitimate piece. It’s reasonable to assume that a lot of Pitchfork’s demographic and future are kids around my age that had the same kind of experiences with Lou Bega, and reminiscing on stuff like bar mitzvah songs that went “a little bit of (insert name of bar mitzvah boy here) all night long” is pretty sublime; also to some extent my generation of attention deficit thrives on irrelevancy.

It was great to have the opportunity to write for Pitchfork for those couple of months, and I was always enthusiastic about writing for them. But doesn’t a policy of “sprinting with the flow” and dealing only with trends as they’re pertinent in the MTV sense and scrapping old news for a shitty VH1 decade recap kind of cheapen the things that should matter more to us? Kids have enough to worry about without feeling unfulfilled because they haven’t heard all fifteen new Ryan Adams raps; the occasional reminder that “hey, that Islands album was pretty good” or “you were once ten and loved Mambo #5” or “there are only seven payments left on your total gym” is really refreshing.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: PETE MACIA
Subject: Riffs

from pete macia
to riffmarket@gmail.com
date Dec 9, 2006 9:56 PM
subject riffs

Fuck man. This year-end shit, I don't know. I mean, what do you want? Top 857 Papoose Freestyles? Rank my favorite words on Ys? 5. lissome 4. inchoate 3. diluvian 2. hollyhock 1. a-skulkin'. I don't really have time, dude. I'm sorry. I just got Return of the Yardfather, and I need to parse it. I think. I'm not even sure anymore. I thought I liked Clipse and Wayne, but the internet called me a gay hipster. Or minimal techno, what the fuck is up with that? What I thought was the best minimal techno song of the year turned out to be just like all the other ones even though they clearly did not have the same grasp on horizontal dynamism or whatever. I've been thinking about that Nike+LCD thing that you like, too. Like maybe that is the way, corporate partnerships. If Trader Joe's wanted to hire me as a blogger or cashier today, I would quit every other job I have. Like maybe we are doing ourselves a favor by stealing music and taking all of the money out of "the game," our bald-faced thievery driving the truly ambitious into the arms of smart marketing departments. Not really any different than what record companies used to be anyway. Nerds just like making cute commercials and stuff now. Point being, let's thin the herd through crime and listen to Jeezy for inspiration. Anyway, I'm just saying I can't think of anything for your little season of riffs because I don't like thinking about the past. Onwards and upwards. Kuduro and Deerhunter. And what's up with that fake yawning and shit you pulled the other night? You missed out on pre-dawn conversations about Nas, man. Anyway, I'll be back in NY at some point, and we'll have to talk about some stuff (so homo).

Peace the fuck out. Sorry I'm kinda wired right now.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006