RIFF MARKET

LCD CHORUS ALUM MATTY FASANO DEBUT 7"

2011-07-21T09:00:00.003-04:00

Matty Fasano: "Unkind" b/w "Unusual"

FREE DOWNLOAD @ BANDCAMP: http://mattyfasano.bandcamp.com/

recorded and mixed by: Matt LeMay and Nick Sylvester
mastered by: Joe Lambert

Unkind/Unusual by Matty Fasano

Matty Fasano:

-sang with "Mr. Dream and the State Street Singers", aka the Men's Chorus for the final LCD Soundsystem shows

-plays bass in ARMS, who have an awesome new album coming out this fall

-has a truly special voice, capable of both Antony-like theatricality and the breathy intimacy type moves of your Nick Drakes and Elliot Smiths

-infamously kicked out Mr. Dream's Matt Morello from a short-lived band called Shout To Talk

-has a solo show August 1 at Pianos, featuring (ha ha ha) Matt Morello on drums

"Unkind"/"Unusual":

-two sparse piano/voice meditations that slayed me and matt lemay in demo form. if i'm being honest this is what i had hoped the james blake album would sound like: a little more weathered, creepier, wearier. more like a minimalist tim buckley maybe? i don't know. matt and i were honored to record and mix matty's debut. this is really special stuff.

-piano recorded with two nice ribbons in Boerum Hill courtesy Matt Morello and Konrad Kaczmarek, another LCD Chorus alum. many thanks to Konrad for letting us get in there

-voice and aux percussion recorded in Williamsburg at A Question of Frequency

-take a look at those beautiful wavey waveforms and get yourself to Joe Lambert for all your mastering needs

PERINEUM 9: MONTGOMERYVILLE (STORIES BY NICK SYLVESTER)

2011-07-06T00:01:00.002-04:00

zach baron and nick sylvester present
PERINEUM #9: MONTGOMERYVILLE

seven really short stories

featuring
>> "Puppy Biscuit"
>> "The Fittest Man"
>> "Pornography"

and also
>> "What Happened To The Bosses Number"

drawings by
>> Mina Kimes

not included
>> "You Can Practically Feel The Drum Beats Coming Off The Page"

other stuff
>> limited run of 100 copies
>> ideally you pay for postage
>> email me and zach at perineum.nyc at gmail dot com

happy summer

MY FAVORITE PUNK BAND IN BROOKLYN

2011-04-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

THE SPEED OF LIGHT BECOMES THE WORLD
AN INTRODUCTION TO SLEEPIES

There are, I admit, a lot of bands writing fast songs and playing the shit out of them. Ty Segall, Little Girls, Screaming Females, Sweet Bulbs, Male Bonding, Happy Birthday, Jeff the Brotherhood... These are the bigger names and maybe you haven't even heard of them. Punk is weird like that. It operates outside the Pitchfork-industrial complex, and (to my ears) there's no rhyme/reason as to who breaks through. Some of these bands call themselves "garage" rock, which I guess is one way to cut your losses. The whole deliberately obscure thing (as you know) happens a lot with this stuff too: cassette releases, barely publicized shows in badly lit neighborhoods, etc. It's a preemptive strike, though sometimes I get the feeling that, for a lot of Brooklyn bands, making punk music is less a calling and more a thing to pass time until the "digital creative agencies" start hiring again.

Keeping it real is one way to put off the inevitable, folks!

So: What makes one "fast songs, shit played out of them"-type band better than another? Is it a taste thing? Local boosterism? Desperation? The kind of desperation that a press release insists you can, in fact, hear in the recordings? To the point: What makes Sleepies the new Buzzcocks, and not the new--I don't know--the new Sham 69?

A few months ago I wouldn't have been able to answer that. I saw Sleepies play and of course loved them. They are a killer band with great range, and more importantly, they look pretty damn sharp on stage. But I couldn't articulate what truly made them special, which they are. It wasn't the aggression, though they have a few tricks in that department. Josh, who plays bass, knows how to write basslines that sound amazing with distortion. There's an art to that, writing distorted bass lines. The line has to be both sparse and melodic, otherwise it will sound like a walrus in death throes.

What about Thomas then. Thomas, who handles guitars and vocals, has an outrageous rock shout-sing. It's up there with Rick Froberg's, though Thomas is less sneering and more maniacal. Beyond that he is a super smart, handsome dude with great taste in sweaters and even better taste in thoughtful, surprising arrangements. The extra beat in the verse of "Feelers" is so efficient and disarming, yet it makes perfect sense. Thomas is incapable of frivolity. This man owns zero effects pedals. Zero!

So maybe it was Max, their drummer, who made them so special. Max can kick steady eighth notes on the bass drum, which is a real bitch to do. It's an old Wipers move for keeping momentum when the guitars ride the same chord for a while. You can hear him do that in "Sludge River Mouth" toward the end. But that wasn't it at all. Steady eighth notes on the kick isn't why my girlfriend told me she likes these guys more than my own band.

I asked Sleepies if they'd let me record a few songs for them. "No charge," I said coolly. "This one's on me." Red flags do not come in bigger sizes! But they said yeah sure, let's see what happens. I have to assume they knew they were throwing me a bone. Either way. We spent a weekend at my rehearsal space, tracking as much as we could until the metal band next door came in and ruined our room tone. We ate doner pitas. We recorded hours and hours of handclaps and auxiliary percussion that I knew we'd never use, just because. It was a fun weekend. Then for a host of reasons, including a burglary, it took me forever to mix, and I apologize for that. But it's out today, and their two of my favorite songs this year, and if you have two bucks to spare you should pick it up on bandcamp or amazon or itunes.

On the walk home that weekend I encountered that homeless guy on North 7th, right by the subway stop. This is not the old Polish guy who trolls the taco cart area in his underwear, though he's great too. I'm talking about the insanely tall homeless man who kind of looks like a worst case scenario Wayne Barrett. He's balding, with a crown of long craggy hair, and he wears a long coat, and he shouts a lot. The man was in the middle of Bedford Ave this time, screaming at people as they came up from the train. "The speed of light does not transform the world!! It becomes the world!!! Globalization is the speed of light!!" He was really on a roll.

This is as close as I can get to explaining why Sleepies are so special, so necessary. All these bands you don't know, screaming TOTAL NONSENSE at you, all the time... At a certain point they all start to resemble each other, and the only way you can deal is by ignoring them all. This band is the one bum out of a million you'll hear and think, Huh. Maybe he's right?

84 RIFFS

OUT TODAY: SLEEPIES 'HOT SINGLES' 7"
BUY IT AT BANDCAMP or AMAZON
SEE SLEEPIES TONIGHT 4-19 AT DBA IN WILLIAMSBURG

SLEEPIES IS:
THOMAS SEELY (GUITAR, VOX)
JOSH INTRATOR (BASS, VOX)
MAX TREMBLAY (DRUMS)

HOT SINGLES IS:
'FEELERS' & 'SLUDGE RIVER MOUTH'

OUT NOW ON DOOM SONG

SONGS BY THOMAS AND JOSH AND MAX
RECORDED AT SOUND CITY IN BROOKLYN
PRODUCED BY NICK SYLVESTER
MASTERED BY ROMAN VAIL AT JLM SOUND IN DUMBO

NICK SYLVESTER 2010-

2010-07-22T09:00:00.001-04:00

FIVE ANNOUNCEMENTS

1. I finished out a four-year stint at Viacom television entertainment property THE COLBERT REPORT earlier this month. Sometimes I felt like Michael Clayton, other times like the dancing guy from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It was an honor.

2. It's more certain than before that I will complete a legible draft of THE EDUCATION OF HAROLD HENRY early this fall. The book is about a high school genius type who dies when an abandoned cathedral collapses on him. Themes include Wu-Tang, Philly, Jesuits, memory palaces, false memory, dildo pranks and other types of pranks, the Aeneid, posthumous legacy, monuments more lasting than bronze, brown notes, organ music, all-boys schools, finding out you're not as good as you thought you were, knowing when to throw in the towel. It'll be a quick read, 250-300 pages. The tone and style are in line with my pieces in Perineum. If you are in the business of making money off this kind of thing, and you want to read it, email me at my first name dot my last name at gmail dot com.

3. Speaking of PERINEUM, I am pleased to report that Lizzie Widdicombe, Zach Baron, and I have begun working on Number Nine. The rough theme is BOSSES. We are doing this one in-house, no submissions, which is our way of keeping the snake from eating its tail here. More details to follow. Expect something this fall.

4. My band MR. DREAM begins recording its debut full-length LP this weekend. As with the Goes To Jail and No Girls Allowed and Scarred For Life releases, it is my honor to be producing this one. Matt LeMay will be mixing at least one or two tracks too, to say nothing of his general support throughout. (We're lucky to have such talented and generous friends.) Songs will include: "Shotgun Tricks", "Cool Down, Apollo", "Learn The Language", "AC2010" a/k/a "Winner" a/k/a "Bob Zombie", "Satisfying Bridge", "Joyless", and other all-new material. I'm guessing our album will have already leaked by the time I hit 'publish post'. Teaser single out soon on God Mode Records.

5. I am honored to be writing a weekly music column for New York Public Access's culture website THIRTEEN.ORG, which relaunched this afternoon. The column is called RIFF CITY. There will be a new piece/riff every Wednesday. Today's is about Wavves.

THANKS
NBS

REMEMBERING THE VINES

2010-06-28T09:00:00.001-04:00

REMEMBERING THE VINES 2002-2010

rob and i have a limited number of 'remembering the vines' zines left over from friday's party. the zine is eight pages long and focuses on the 'outtathaway!' video directed by david lachapelle. if you are interested in a copy (only 100 were printed) email me your address at riffmarket@gmail.com.

PERINEUM NUMBER EIGHT

2010-03-18T09:00:00.001-04:00

featuring:
ZACH BARON (MIKE'S APARTMENT)
NICK CATUCCI (DAILY VULTURE)
ROBERT CHRISTGAU (DEAN OF AMERICAN ROCK CRITICS)
CAMILLE DODERO (SOUND OF THE CITY)
J. ROBERT LENNON (PIECES FOR THE LEFT HAND)
SAM MCPHEETERS (BORN AGAINST)
MARISA MELTZER (GIRL POWER)
NICK SYLVESTER (MR DREAM)
LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE (TALK OF THE TOWN)

now accepting pre-orders:
perineum.nyc@gmail.com

lenny kravitz:

"IT AINT OVER TIL IT'S OVER..."

follow us on twitter:
@EdwardDroste

PERINEUM NUMBER SEVEN

2009-11-30T08:00:00.001-05:00

coming december 10

new pieces by
MAX MORTON (heartworm)
CLANCY MARTIN (how to sell)
MICHAEL ROBBINS (alien vs predator)
CHRIS RYAN (gabe said)
RACHEL KHONG (arizona)
THESSALY LAFORCE (book bench)
ADRIANE QUINLAN (you are all in for a treat)
ADAM MOERDER (mr dream)
LIZ PHANG (the glass walkway)
LEON NEYFAKH (ex-dramadairy)
ANSELM SHEPARD (lenny kravitz alias)
FRANCIS CASH (the man behind all your favorite records)
NICK SYLVESTER (daily blogger, riffmarket.com)
ZACH BARON (a one-man party of helicopters)

now accepting preorders at perineum.nyc@gmail.com

WE WENT TO JAIL AND NOW WE'RE BACK

2009-09-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

mr. dream - 9pm
the tony castles - 10pm
acrylics - 11pm

saturday september 12

union pool
484 union ave, brooklyn ny
l train to lorimer stop
$6

(many thanks to jona/yacht for the poster)

MR. DREAM GOES TO JAIL - COMING SOON

2009-08-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

JULY 30: MR. DREAM VS. HOSPITALITY

2009-07-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

THURSDAY JULY 30

BRUAR FALLS
245 GRAND ST
WILLIAMSBURG

MR. DREAM - 8PM
HOSPITALITY - 9PM
HORSE'S HA - 10PM
SUNDELLES - 11PM

MR. DREAM GOES TO JAIL

MR. DREAM GOES TO JAIL

2009-07-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

PERINEUM ISSUE 3: GUEST EDITOR LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE

2009-07-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

NOW ACCEPTING PREORDERS

Perineum #3 features new works by Philadelphia writers Artemis Lang and George LaRue. Guest-edited by The New Yorker's Lizzie Widdicombe, it arrives Sunday July 12. Preorders can be made by emailing Zach Baron and Nick Sylvester at perineum.nyc@gmail.com.

MR DREAM CAKE SHOP JUNE 29

2009-06-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

CLICK

GUEST RIFF MONDAYS: THE DEAD AT MSG

2009-04-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

Every so often I check the inbox at riffmarket@gmail.com for guest riff submissions. I get a lot of Jim Jones fan fiction still, stuff that's basically unprintable by the third line in, when "Jimmy" inevitably "pops a 'joner'" and it's... the whole piece is just too graphic not to have been submitted by someone really close to the action. But this morning, after pages of PR emails, I found a long, detailed account of the Dead's show at Madison Square Garden, April 25, 2009, written by Duncan Bigsby and Derrick Trimble. I'm running it in full below. Enjoy. -NBS.

The Dead at MSG
By Duncan Bigsby and Derrick Trimble

Another grown man in a purple shirt ran up Eighth Avenue--communicating via cellular phone with a comrade inside already, did I miss anything did I miss anything, skip-sliding through a crowd of non-believers with his left hand keeping the contra banded, just like the first purple shirt man we saw--and that was when we realized there was something special about tonight. Madison Square Garden (April 25, 2009), we began to think, might have a spot next to Winterland Arena (December 23, 1970) and Frost Amphitheatre (October 10, 1982)...

Something about the duality of the night so far, something you notice in the good Dead show, Grateful or otherwise. Two drummers on stage of course, two Persian rugs, two atoms of oxygen in THC, two sides to the bagel we scarfed down by the entrance, two front seats in the Chevy Nova on 21st St, the one covered in Deadheads, which (as you know) have two colors: red and blue, irreducible, two colors that, even in 2009, refuse to run. Two flags in Madison Square Garden, the United States and Canada, which is also a country. Two seats, which we had paid for with two hundred dollar bills, two twenties, two fives--to an old black man with two hands and two feet. Madison Square Garden (April 25, 2009)... it really could be better than Sam Boyd Silver Bowl (June 24, 1994) couldn't it. One of us sold a lot of t-shirts at that show...

First few songs tonight were Jerry's. I (Derrick) hope he was listening up there. Somewhere between "China Cat Sunflower" and "Shakedown Street", somewhere in the Gordian knot of Lesh and Weir's dueling guitar solos, was a quote of John McLaughlin's solo in Miles's "Right Off." What a cad, whoever who played this one. Reminded me of a hyperbola, those two (two!) disjointed lines bending caddycorner: the first arpeggio reached towards infinity, then the second arpeggio, doomed never to touch the ground again...

You know how sometimes you just, like, know? "Shakedown Street" hadn't even began yet, but the man in the pirate skull-print cargo shorts already had screwed up his face into the shape necessary to speak our truth: WELL, WELL, WELL, YOU CAN NEVER TELL. "I knew it," he said, an index finger in his girlfriend's face, "I fucking knew it." He had called "Shakedown Street" in the car-ride over; don't tell me this town ain't got no heart... Every time I (Derrick) hear this song, and I hear it a lot because it's my ringtone and the factory warranty on my automobile has expired, second notice--every time, I think to myself: Well I forget what I think at the moment, but I just realized this is a disco tune and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Now some people will tell you that "Sugaree" in the first set was the treat, but I point you to the noble grandeur of "He's Gone": On the hottest day of the year so far, this folk-rock classic went down like an ice cold beer. So what if he's had a beer before, this man wants another, and it tastes just as good as the first. Grown men stood up for this one like it was the National Anthem, crossing their arms in salute, tilting their heads just slightly to the right and smiling, as if to say, "My son, you have returned." Like a steam locomotive rolling down the track... The jam grew quieter, stretched into the distance like the backlight of a subway car. In real life, the light of that car becomes too faint to see at a certain point. But imagine if you could still see that light. Two billion light years away, in a different life, you could still feel it. Nothing's gonna bring you back...

We met Dave, a young insurance salesman. His face was too small for the broad smile it wore, and his baseball cap hid a mind well-expanded. He "fell off the wagon" five years ago--that's five years without the Dead, he explained--but now he's back. He said he surfs and sells insurance plans to colleges, racks up so many miles that he can pretty much go surfing wherever he wants. He wore a sports jersey with numbers printed on it. We had no reason to doubt him.

In the bathroom, the conversation among the men was one, each person building on the last person's thoughts--like a well-choreographed dance: "Pick a favorite..." a man in line said. "How can I pick a favorite? 'Cassidy' was the weakest and it was above average," said the man behind him. A different man emerged from the stall to wash his hands. "It's already better than last night," he said--and then the man to my left asked the shaman who put this jam-on-jam in motion when the set started. Did he miss anything before "Ship Of Fools", seems to be the question. They tell him, he nods--and then they all turn towards me, wanting to know what I think.

Space and drums start the second set. There's some pretty serious drumming on the giant hanging sheets behind the kits. I found it deeply elemental and moving. "Similar to the Blue Man Group," Derrick pointed out. Makes you think about that moment in '75 or '84 when someone said to himself, "What if I did a show with the same drumming, but three drummers. Everyone's in body paint. Everyone is free..."

Three words in Blue Man Group, three syllables...

The Dead--the band, its doings, setlists yes but also details like "where were they standing onstage"--are obsessively documented. Tonight I (Duncan) had planned to do my part, using a camera with a telephoto lens. "Is that a telephoto lens?" It was the man in the pirate skull cargo shorts. I sensed his disapproval; Dave, the insurance salesman, had mentioned something too, now that I think about it. So did the woman next to me, who made a habit of smacking my arm every time I took a photo, gesturing sharply at the stage with a disbelieving expression on her face. It's hard to imagine how they manage to document this band so obsessively, when documenting seems to be forbidden--to say nothing of the fact that there are probably better ways to get someone to relax and take it in than by smacking his arm and staring him down like Gollum.

My brother, meanwhile, followed the setlist as it evolved online, texting me how lucky I was to be there. I disagreed. He had seen the Dead play "Good Lovin'" in Worcester a week before, so for now he was the lucky one. I was in a bad spot when they finished "Unbroken Chain" and the applause died down and--wait a minute. I recognize that guitar lick. And the drums coming in behind it--that's, I mean that's what happens when the Stones play OH MY GOD CAN YOU BELIEVE WE'RE HERE FOR THEM PLAYING THIS. "Gimme" Fucking "Shelter"? Two words... This was suddenly more than a Dead show--it was a Dead show.

On the way out, where good feeling was palpable, one man high-fived a bearded member of the event staff, a sleeper agent for the cause in arena uniform. In the crush of bodies outside the front gates, another man's hand triumphantly held a sunflower aloft, foregrounded against a backdrop of the giant mural with all the hockey players. The crowd thinned and we saw a man playing what I (Duncan) now know is the djembe but at the time identified as a "hippie drum", playing what I now know was the beat from Missy Elliott's "Pass that Dutch" but at the time identified as "beat that makes people lose their shit to the dance." A girl with dreadlocks danced in a way that you knew she knew would make every guy there fall in love with her. We stood there and played our part, taking in contact satisfaction from the satisfaction our people emanated.

Then we turned the corner and saw the balloons. Not the festive ones that had been bouncing around all show... These were filled with gas spewing out from missile-like nitrous tanks, manned by sober overweight men grabbing wads of cash from people's hands and handing over balloons as quickly as the missile could fill them. These people lined the brick walls and loading docks of 31st Street, the length of an avenue, unclenching their thumbs and sucking down the gas in nervous, horrible gulps.

An old man--maybe he was an accountant, or somebody's father, definitely he was somebody's son--collapsed from his high. He slid down the wall like someone had shot him. Neither man on either side of him moved. Maybe they'd seen it a thousand times before. Maybe they themselves were too zonked to care. But these were the people who couldn't end the night by dancing it out. Who physically couldn't handle the withdrawal symptoms. They coped by keeping the party going, sucking on these balloons until there was simply no more left.

77 RIFFS

THEORETICALLY UNPUBLISHABLE PIECE RE: LADY SOVEREIGN, RE: COVERAGE OF HER NEW ADMITTEDLY NOT THAT GREAT BUT STILL ALBUM, RE: BEING MATES, ETC.

2009-04-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

LET'S BE MATES

Five years ago, back when Pitchfork.com was a livestock seller and Lemon-Red.org a must-read, I and a few others tried to cover a new music called grime. The genre was a cross of drum&bass sonics and two-step rhythms, with lyrics rapped in a reggae-like patois but with the muscle of American hip-hop. We were late to the game. But I remember thinking it was like nothing and everything I had heard before, which is to say I am loathe to click through emails circa '04, '05, bearing likely the sentiment if not the sentence: How lucky am I? A new planet has just swam into my ken. By some cut of fate, I am about to live through a musical revolution--this my bebop, my punk, my hip-hop. One day, I will wake up with grandchildren on every knee, begging me for stories about the first time I heard Crazy Titch. "It all started," I will say, putting down my snifter, submitting my deep brow to the dream, "With a 64kbps pirate radio rip I downloaded from a man named PenisMcGrundle666, on a Python port of Soulseek..."

Crazy Titch killed a man in 2006, so he's in prison, and I've had my own issues to work through too. Long story short, neither of us have had as much time to dedicate to grime as we had hoped. So who failed whom here? I tried my hardest to keep up, swear to Christgau. Read Chantelle Fiddy, woofed down the Lord tapes and Sama podcasts, the newest of the new I was assured, from the grime groundzero bowels of East London--only to find out I was listening to tracks released years ago. Another problem was, often, I couldn't understand a single word these guys said, so thick was the cockney. The more I knew, the less I knew, that kind of a deal. As a fan this was fine; as the improbably bad-ass internet rock critic I fancied myself, it was infuriating. Grime was on the ground, East London, out of reach. It was fiercely localized, well beyond the internet's grasp, maybe even a little xenophobic or at least it felt that way. I listened to so much of it but, knowing nothing of the culture first-hand, I was a fool trying to make sense of the music, despite being awash--Sisyphus pushing Tantalus up the hill, but I was also Tantalus, drowning in a hydrant shot of low-bitrate cicadas.

Then there's Pitchfork: Grime oddly coincided with a change in the site's attitude towards non-indie rock--if not accelerated it. Current Editor-in-Chief Scott Plagenhoef debuted reviewing grime emcee Dizzee Rascal's first album, Boy In Da Corner--9.4. The idea of this Pitchfork Panopticon developed, all eyes everywhere, so too this responsibility to find you, the reader, the best possible stuff in every possible genre, which over time would become the über-genre known as Pitchfork Music. Cherrypickers but not cherries. We obeyed an aesthetic we couldn't fully comprehend.

So here was grime in East London, and here was Pitchfork, and halfway between the two was a teenager named Louise Amanda Harman. Among much nascent dreck, Lady Sovereign stood out in grime, her persona fully formed. A female court jester of sorts, teenage, fearless of blowback, referential in a hip-hop way, verbally dexterous, intelligible to stateside ears, intimidating like she might just punch you in the nose for no apparent reason, but also kinda cute. More importantly, her output was manageable. At the time, she had two key songs, "Cha-Ching (Cheque 1 2 Remix)" and "Random", with a smattering of diss tracks and some track about hitting someone with a broom--years before Gorilla Zoe thought to do the same. I am under the impression that I have heard everything Lady Sovereign has recorded and disseminated--and this feeling of manageability, the possibility of completism, made me less afraid to cover her. Another way to say all of this, if we're being honest is: Lady Sovereign was the most like American rappers. She called herself Feminem, which is to say she knew this too.

I don't mean to drag you through the whys and hows here, but what I want to set up, hint at, get across, if anything, is the extent and nature of the disappointment I felt when Lady Sovereign stopped being, in my mind, Lady Sovereign. Readers of the Guardian will remember my outrageously incomprehensible slams on Sov's "Hoodie" and "9-5", which helped launch a fake trend called Bloglish. Being kind, you might say I was lost for words. But what it comes down to is, Sov stopped making grime and started making "grime-influenced" pop songs. Her flow slowed to the pace of playground rhymes, her words lost specificity. It felt like pandering, if not outright puppetry. Not the best time for me and Jay-Z, who had signed Sov to Def Jam, who I worried would stuff her into some one of the few pre-existing American hip-hop character types available to women. She was working with Dr. Luke, what can you say. This wasn't betrayal--and Public Warning was hardly bad hip-pop--but you might liken this to the beginnings of a falling out: Either she wasn't the person I thought she was, or she was growing into something that was, for lack of better, un-Pitchforklike. Like a one-night stand, the site's mutually beneficial relationship with Lady Sovereign came to its end.

So maybe this was all part of the plan--and maybe I was the mark she married to get her green card. Maybe grime was mere catalyst, brought her to where she wanted to be now, four years later, on Jigsaw, her second album, distributed by EMI.

Were I to review this album, I would have an obligation to you, the Lady Sovereign googler, to assess not my own disappointment, but this here new album, on its own terms, what it is and not what I want it to be. If to no one else, I have an obligation to Lady Sovereign herself, who chides in "Pennies", "How many pennies have you got from me?" A gentle reminder that, between the reviews and track reviews and live reviews and features I've written about her, the answer is probably several, so, theoretically, here you go:

This is a pop album, first of all. Much more than Public Warning. For most tracks, Sov doesn't rap so much as talk in a drowsy, slack-jawed sing-song, in a way that might recall a listless M.I.A. if we're being generous, an actual Amanda Blank if we're being honest. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, get it, each tracks works in a different genre--electro to pop-rock to autotune r&b to a polished version of grime--though without the Def Jam coffers, the production budget has been crunched, or at least sounds so. "Let's Be Mates" isn't so terrible of an electro number, with a jumpy synthesizer rhythm, stuffed horn sounds, a rotund four-four kick. But even still, it sounds like a rough draft of a Basement Jaxx track, right before they throw in the sink and blender. It sounds plastic, but not decidedly cheap a la Crystal Castles. "So Human," the track after that, is based on an 'interpolation' of The Cure's "Close To Me," which is a kind way, usually, of saying we couldn't afford the audio rights. Listening to Public Warning again now, I am stunned at the difference in quality of the very sounds themselves. "Jigsaw", which is Sov's Kelly Clarkson pop-rock go-for-it, has these string parts, sometimes swooping in chorus, other times plucked on the beat, that bear extreme likeness to certain test drives I've done on Microsoft Songsmith--same thing with the guitar sounds on "Bang Bang," and the liberal vocal effects on "I Got You Dancing." It's just a bummer because, actually, I don't mind the instrumentals in the abstract.

What keeps me from ending it there though, like seemingly everybody else who went anywhere near this album, is that Sov might be right when she says this album is a "massive leap forward for mankind." For a major label distribution, this album has some brave lyrics. "I'm weird, you're weird, let's be mates," the first line of _Jigsaw_'s first song, means only one thing. "Dirty kisses, dirty dishes, in my sink I'll be your missus"--same story. Kate Perry said she kissed a girl and look at the outrage. The number of grown-ass rappers confused by the idea of other rappers wearing jeans that fit them properly... Hip-hop is still homophobic in a bad way; at least the military has 'don't ask don't tell'. But outside of outright lampooning those fears ad absurdum, or becoming something of a modern-day Amazonian, you don't see much in the way of love or heartbreak--it's all lust, carnage. "My heart is like a jigsaw puzzle/ pick it up and fix it for me," Sov sings. I cringe at every single word in that sentence, including "Sov sings", and yet I find it difficult to slag, considering. Excited it's happening though? Maybe this paragraph is some kind of indie rock affirmative action at work, not unlike the dance done for charity albums, but hey, if you have a better idea, write me a letter.

That said, I have no plans to listen to this album again. Not For Me isn't just the nice way of putting it--the same reason why I'd feel icky reviewing Miley Cyrus or whoever is the new Nickelback these days, wound up because they're not what I want them to be. Makes me think, or at least leave room for some subconscious possibility, that Lady Sovereign never really wanted to be grime in the first place--sacked it up though, kept up because she had to.

34 ETC

RE HIPSTER RUNOFF'S ANIMAL COLLECTIVE POST

2009-01-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

RE HIPSTER RUNOFF'S ANIMAL COLLECTIVE POST

Several people have asked me what I think about Hipster Runoff, specifically his post on Animal Collective. My guess is this is because HRO and my previous enterprises Riff Central and Riff Raff (R.I.P.) played similar performo-critical games, or were the "funny" music blogs, something like that. Maybe we're the same person even--or maybe I've never heard of him. Maybe you're one of those matchmaker types, and maybe you think Carles and I might like each other. Except maybe Carles and I already go on man-dates and maybe we order two different entrees so we can taste more of the menu. Maybe we're that tight--or would be, given the shot. Or maybe I would hate him. Maybe he's my "ironic creative fiction" nemesis. Who knows.

I didn't know about HRO until early 2008. That might have been when he hit his stride, but I have no idea. I'll assume I was late. "The most authentic blog on the information super highway, yall," HRO is an intense parody of how "entry-level alts"--whoever they are, whatever they are--attempt to construct authentic "personal brands" through their technologies, clothes, haircuts, drugs, music choices, etc. Thinking aloud in the babbling patois of his targets, HRO obsesses over authentic vs. inauthentic, mainstream vs. alternative, selling out vs. keeping it real, on and on and on. If my identity is predicated on liking something precisely because other people don't know about said something, and then said something becomes a thing that other people like--how does this affect my personal brand?

At the same time, HRO's character fears the end of this extended adolescence. When do I stop giving a shit? When do I grow up? Does growing up mean giving up? Etc., etc. One post Carles is proud of--I know this because he made a big image link for it and put it on the right column--involves a screen grab from Daft Punk's Electroma and short declarative sentences emblazoned on the bottom third: "Should I get a gym membership?", "I want to invent a meaningful Web 2.0 service", "Will my hair fall out?", "I want to make over $100K a year" are my favorites. If you like reading about this stuff, I point you to Chris Ott's "Bjorn Against" post and from there Adam Sternbergh's piece in NY Mag about grups, if you missed that one.

Anyway I had Hipster Runoff on my reader for a few months. When The Dark Knight came out, I enjoyed all the photos Carles compiled of people dressed like the Joker--and you know, I got his point. I laughed. Here was a bunch of extremely young people trying to be/look/act cool--just like everyone else ever. But unlike everyone else, their brains told them: One awesome way to be cool is to re-appropriate the face paint of a terrifying nihilistic villain. This is smart and ironic because (a) I am not a terrifying nihilistic villain, and (b) by wearing the face paint, I am undermining the terror/nihilism/villainy of the Joker, and (c) the man who played Joker is dead, possibly because this role drove him nuts, however, I will not go nuts, I am not an idiot. Ergo: Joker paint. This is cool thing to do. Maybe a girl will think I am funny by doing this ridiculous yet easy thing. Maybe I will become "the funny person" in my grade and then maybe a girl will kiss me.

Carles lucked out with this one. You should find those posts, if only for the curatorial work he did. I also remember a post about Cut Copy, and whether or not they were authentic, and the ever-popular question: At concerts, why do some people really "get into" the mood more than others? Even when something is bullshit, like that band [X], how do people not know? Isn't it obvious? And HRO's answer inevitably boils down to a distinction between entry-level alt bros and full-fledged tried-and-true alt bros--the latter party, of course, having developed their personal brands to differentiate themselves from the entry-level alt bros, etc., etc.

The comedic engine of HRO is this, then: Nobody really likes something on its own terms. Tastes aren't one-way, they're reflexive--or rather, the things we like are reflective, mirror-like, ciphers in themselves. Most people out there aren't interested in the things themselves, or incapable, so much as what it means for them to like these things. Carles doesn't exclude himself from this predicament--he's just the only one telling it like it is. There is a lot of bullshit out there and yet people like it. Most people are (ta-da) hipster runoff.

So you can see why I stopped reading this blog as soon as the Joker posts dwindled. Hipster Runoff is really fucking boring. Not just old ideas, but ones made irrelevant by the internet’s infinite capability of accommodating niche interests, and with that a decline of truly “mainstream” moments. Mainstream versus alternative? "Alternative is just a construct of the mainstream"? "Young people don't know who they are and I am going to make fun of them to the delight of slightly less young people who don't know who they are yet either"? Really dude! Are you a grad student? Did you study continental philosophy at a small liberal arts college? Do you buy Monocle off the newsstand so the subscription interns don't know you read it?

But then so Mark's Animal Collective review ran on Pitchfork. A long-standing fan of the band, he gave Merriweather Post Pavilion a 9.6--the highest Pitchfork grade in a history of mostly highs for the band. Richardson is one of the site's earliest contributors. His professional writing career started with the site, I think. He used to be "Mark Richard-San" back when Pitchfork was Ryan and Ryan did some things simply because he thought that would be funny--that is how far he goes back. He was at the first Pitchfork "convention", which I think was shorthand for beers and weed at some lake house in Minnesota. Mark is one of Pitchfork's best writers, if not the best. He has the ability to make the most daunting music very intelligible, very approachable. It's a Midas-like touch he has--everything becomes warm. He can do this because he has the ability to analyze his own visceral reactions, and provide reasons for them. Super-rare quality in people, let alone internet music critics. The process seems to be: I like the way these sounds make me feel; Why do they make me feel this way?; How is different from the way I feel about things that don't make me feel this way? I will now write a critical assessment of this album.

Goes without saying: A history of music listening is built into his reactions, and he discusses it when appropriate. That is, he situates the music personally, before moving into the abstract and critical. This is difficult to do. He's aware of his soft spots--e.g. heavily processed guitar sounds, like Fennesz--but he doesn't dismiss these soft spots for the sake of the show, which a less confident critic most certainly would if called out for the same. He’s not embarrassed by their existence. He seems incapable of liking something ironically, and might likely convulse at the thought of loving something so. If you believe that some writers aspire to be honest and communicate honestly, and can be delightful and entertaining too--if this is something you think can happen without guile or alterior motive, then Mark Richardson might be your guy. If you believe in the possibility of having visceral reactions to music, and the worthiness or at least entertainment value of talented writers coming to terms with why they feel those ways, here's a dude for you.

I admit I'm cheating a bit here, because I've also had the pleasure of spending some time with Mark, back when Ryan and Scott were only "thinking" about firing me. Mark is older than me, much taller and handsomer and kinder and so on, but at that time I was in most awe how confident he seemed as a critic. Not that he knew where he stood on everything, so much as he wasn't afraid to admit his ignorance. In a car full of critics, in the company of our driver boss and his iPod on shuffle, Mark was the one who asked the names of the songs he didn't know, while the rest of us tried to catch the chorus so we could google afterwards. It was some song by Jim O'Rourke. Was this part of the Pitchfork canon that we all were just supposed to know? Was this some kind of pop quiz? I'll speak for the back seat: The relief was palpable.

So the review runs. MPP had leaked a few weeks prior, a lot of us in New York had heard it much earlier too, and the consensus was: This was easily Animal Collective's best album. So many of the beautiful melodies and rhythms they hinted at in those early Spirit They've Vanished and Dance Manatee albums--the band had figured out a way to get them out of their heads and bodies and instruments and really shape them up nicely. They got the guy who engineered Gnarls Barkley to produce the album, and he murdered the low-end and worked wonders on the vocal mix. Avey Tare has a compelling but difficult voice, and all the good qualities remain and all the physically uncomfortable ones are gone. The three members have gotten better with their gear, and on this psychic level, they've proven to themselves that they're more than "just a band." People know they're experimental musicians. There's very little burden on Animal Collective to prove that anymore. When you're young and in you're in New York, it's like, time to blow some motherfucking minds here. Tommy's Tavern, here I come. I'm going to do a show on my knees, ass up, and when I turn around, you all better be gone.

But they don't seem to feel that way anymore--partly because they're sure that anything they make now will go through this weird "gateway" of weirdness, therefore ensuring some requisite amount of weirdness in their music, because their brains are just programmed to think like that, to respond to certain weirdnesses. It's awesome and beautiful. It's how mediocre artists become awesome artists. At some point they figured out they were artists, maybe since Sung Tongs, and since then they've concentrated on their craft. It's been hit or miss for me with them, but mostly hits.

But I was really inspired by Merriweather Post Pavilion. These guys are only a few years older than I am, and the urgency of striking it big when you’re young is super intense, especially in New York. Yet they were patient. They knew they were onto something, but... They knew they would only get to this point if they worked hard. I echo every fawning praise for this album, which aims to re-imagine popular music, and the way it can sound, and the structures it might take, and the games it might play.

Step into the music, the lyrics, and you realize this album is about three thirty year-olds trying to figure out how not to become grups. They are fundamentally different from the parents, living totally different lives--and yet they love their parents, probably respect the jobs they did on them, want the same for their own. The clash between knowing how screwy life is, being relatively set in your ways, and yet still wanting to remain wide-eyed--open to new possibilities the way you were at age 9, 19, 29—this is what I hear in MPP. A big vulnerable theme, and I admire them not for their answers so much as their bravery to just fucking go for it like this.

A little after the Pitchfork review and the gigabytes of praise heaped on the album on blogs and message boards, HRO posted "Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet." You'll notice Carles breaks character a bit in this post. The sentences are more periodical, heavier with abstract nouns. He even dabbles in some litotes ("you can't really deny that they grew at a healthy rate..." etc). Carles the Serious Thinker wants us to take him seriously. Or is that the character Carles is playing wants to be taken seriously? It's an ass-to-ass situation we've got here. Who's fucking whom? Who's the old guy throwing money on their backs? Who's the double-sided dildo? Are you the double-sided dildo?

Whoever wrote it, one basic question of the piece is:

"Where does Animal Collective realistically sit in this hierarchy of critical acclaim vs. pop appeal vs. actually selling albums?"

This is where Carles makes the observation that internet popularity does not translate to financial success or "actual" popularity. He also observes that, if you are an indie music fan, you are small subset of "culturally relevant society." This subset is vocal within its boundaries, so something like Animal Collective can seem bigger than they actually are.

(Ladies and gentlemen, have you heard that the internet has allowed for niche interest groups to thrive and proliferate? That the primary movers of culture--the Big Media companies like Viacom and Time Warner and so on--dictate less than they used to? Paul Revere, throw some motherfucking Ds on this guy!)

But Animal Collective, he insists, are "an important band because they are one of the first 'transcendent' independent bands to gather most of their acclaim on the internet." He credits the band for controlling its rise on the internet, unlike Black Kids. "Much of their 'acclaim' has come in the post-p4k era," he says.

What does this mean exactly? Especially when almost every recent successful independent band has seen their acclaim, with or without scare quotes, come directly from or helped along by Pitchfork Media. It means nothing. And look. I've told you how Mark is. And as much as I think Ryan and Scott have misfired with a few Best New Musics, and as many times as Ryan and Scott have fired me and rehired me only to fire me again, I can tell you they take their job seriously. They know the site doesn't exist in a vacuum. They are extremely cautious of their own influence. They err on the side of second-guessing their writers, if anything. And they don't want to fuck everything up by seeing whether they can "trick" everyone into liking a band--not now anymore, not when people are already so skeptical of the site to begin with--reading it, liking their picks, but skeptical nonetheless, because by now the site has normalized itself. There are no more "Pitchfork bands." But surely Carles knows this. Dude’s just making jokes!

"There is nothing more annoying than Conceptual Artists/Bands who have allegedly garnered mainstream praise," Carles goes on. "I think the main gimmick behind these bands is convincing yourself that their 'product' stands for something more than music."

Pause and let the Dipset reference sink in. We've reached another ass to ass moment. There is nothing more annoying than people liking music for the wrong reasons? Not to pull a Chuck Eddy, but are there wrong reasons for listening to music? If blasting DMX out your Wrangler as you're pulling into some high school girl's driveway makes you feel awesome, makes you feel like a fucking bad-ass, is that wrong? If listening to metal makes you feel tougher, less insecure, is it my job to tell you that you are an idiot? You know when some people say "music is like a drug for me", this is what they're talking about: the simple act of listening to music makes them feel good. Imagine someone saying "You're enjoying heroin for all the wrong reasons." Are there right reasons? Is ‘empirical knowledge as to the effects heroin has on my body’ the right reason? I don't think so! Regardless of the myriad horrible reasons that might lead them to it, people probably do heroin because it makes them feel good.

I have this relationship with music. There is this cold and dizzy feeling that overtakes me sometimes, when a song or a passage of a song happens to gun it to my heart. And I am addicted to this feeling--I seek it out, sludging through days upon days of music, much of it very objectively "good", for those moments capable of the cold and dizzy. There are all sorts of biochemical and culturally normative/dictated reasons for what comprises these particular moments for me--but their deconstruction doesn't take away from the fact that they still happen. Their deconstruction doesn't cheapen them, at least not for me.

So you can understand my frustration with a blog that posits everything as "just" a pose, "just" a biochemical and culturally dictated" reaction. One of us is happy, the other is angry because happiness is just a construct, there is no happiness, there is no spoon, etc. But like I don't know this already! Like I'm the lesser man for seeing what you've torn apart, but putting everything back together again.

He can't possibly think this, right? Carles is making a parody of an argument, right? That's the whole point of his blog, right, understanding why we might like certain musics, questioning those reasons, but ultimately getting back to liking those certain musics, no? I am really worried I'm wrong. This is why: A good many people think this post is The Truth About Animal Collective, and The Truth About Animal Collective Fans. One is Idolator's Maura Johnston. Maura, who has been looking for cogent reasons to express her distaste for Animal Collective, seems more than happy to have had someone do her thinking for her. I will give her the benefit of the doubt and just assume she's incapable of close reading.

Another person is SPIN editor Charles Aaron. Aaron loves the band but finds himself shaken up by Hipster Runoff's post--second-guessing his reasons for liking the band, worrying aloud that they are the next Moby, wondering to what extent such a toxic event might affect his love for the band, and so second-guessing his reasons for liking music in the first place.

The way Aaron goes about his self-evaluation is curious. Here is my favorite part:

"After several free whiskeys at the River Room, a co-worker and I were concocting plans to throw a way outer-borough warehouse party where we'd get some cool-ass young DJ (like James Murphy's current weed carrier) to spin and rewind and cut/mash up Merriweather Post Pavillion for, like, 10 hours straight (some insane Danny Tenaglia, where-we-gettin'-brunch? marathon) backed by, say, the best visual extravaganza you could finagle from a Pratt Institute Digital Arts major."

Is this self-parody? Who is James Murphy's weed carrier? Justin? Pat Mahoney? Galkin? Petunia? Insane Danny Tenaglia? Where we gettin' brunch? Come on. If you know anything about Long Island City, you know the brunch options are dire. There's that one diner by the 7, and the Quiznos across the street. The Global Underground is that way.

I've certainly written stuff that tries to sound cool. Some of them do sound cool, but I am not exactly proud of these pieces, and there are some in the Voice that three years later really make me wonder. But Charles Aaron is OG. Why is he writing like this? I read this and I think about my own divorced aunt, fatter than she thinks, incongruously fake boobs, picking up her kids at school in a pink crop top and lycra leggings. And then I wonder whether Carles reads Aaron's post and thinks to himself, "What a fucking sucker. You are exactly what I'm talking about." Because what does Aaron see in this album exactly, per this post? "I've been babbling about how wonderful and original and transcendent it is, how it single-handedly reinvents indie rock and electronic dance music, and how it makes me wish I still took E (or 2CB) or whatever designer party pill is making the clubscum rounds."

This is what a grown man who is paid to be in touch with his reasons for liking music thinks about this album. Bums me out so much, especially when MPP is struggling with growing old and out of touch and losing your ability to love music and be hit by it and want everyone in the whole goddamn world to hear it because you fundamentally believe that if everyone hears this album, maybe the world will be a better place. A silly thought, but a real one, one I imagine a young Aaron probably thought about more than a few albums when he first started listening. Instead of listening to this album though—all the answers are in this album, swear--he's reading Hipster Runoff's Animal Collective post and then writing, "It makes me wanna embrace the wonders of existence one day, and fucking off myself the next." A grown man has read this parody of an argument against Animal Collective and just wrote he wants to kill himself. But maybe he's kidding? It's just a blog post, who cares, just an expression?

Ass to ass.

Aaron’s and HRO’s shared big worry or hope or disaster-like event, without connotation, is that Animal Collective might cross over by the sheer posturing force of the internet fanbase who is purportedly too smart to pay for music. But so the Billboard results came in this week--and though these numbers can be really tricky, lo and behold, Animal Collective were #13 on the album sales charts. 25,000 or so copies. But more importantly, in the #12 spot was Andrew Bird. Andrew fucking Bird! When the hell did this happen?

Imagine Hipster Runoff logic being applied to Andrew Bird. "People want to like Andrew Bird because he uses big words and sounds sophisticated, and people want their music to be smart, because then it reflects their own intelligence. And also there is among the yuppie class a worry that liking pop music constitutes some kind of mental deficiency--like their brains can't handle the intricacies of classical music, or they don't have the patience. But how to differentiate yourself from the masses of people who like pop music, without actually having to listen to complicated music? Well I guess I will like Andrew Bird, who uses big words and has violins and plays Carnegie Hall, a place where Important Adult Music happens on a nightly basis, Jethro Tull, throw some Ds on me."

Then imagine the Charles Aaron response post to this: "Oh man! That Hipster Runoff guy just totally shook me up with this post on Andrew Bird. Here I am, listening to the new album way back in 2008. And then there's a party in the Regis Hotel, where they are playing the record, and I'm like, this isn't the kind of party I want to throw. I want to have this party in a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment, and have Andrea Bocelli's weed carrier sing interpretations of Mr. Bird's music in his native tongue. But now I realize that maybe I am just posturing. Maybe I want people to think I am sophisticated, on account of editing a magazine whose target audience is in the 13 to 18 demographic, and I don't want people to think I have a short attention span, so I better get my Andrew Bird on, you know? Or off? I don't even know anymore. I better just throw on my best Joseph Banks suit and get to work on this post. What will I listen to if everyone starts liking Andrew Bird? Max Richter, Ds please"

This is a stupid game to play—there is a great deal of Charles Aaron in all of us, as there should be, as there necessarily is. Mostly because everyone is constructing an identity at all times, whether or not they even realize it. Mostly because you can sweat almost anything down to this basic biological truth: Culture is a mating ritual. We are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves so as to attract one another. That is the deep dark secret of everything we do. It might be that black and white.

But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the nuances of these rituals--the etiquettes of modern dating, the long ten-minute build before the drums ever come in, the hundreds of pages of exposition before the plot moves forward. These things are great. I love these things. I live for these things. Mark Richardson lives for these things. Animal Collective live for these things. So many people who like this band clearly live for these things. So many people believe that music still has some ability to be "more than music."

But this is subtle and hopeful and vulnerable stuff--it doesn't cut to the quick and dark truth. That's the power and allure of Hipster Runoff--he knows there's a little Charles Aaron in us all too--but ultimately that's his blog's deep and ugly flaw, something that not only bores me with its bluntness, but one that I also find morally reprehensible the softer his targets become, the more virulent his nihilism.

Recall the Joker from the Dark Knight. There was something so seductive about this man whose only m.o. was "shake things up." Whose position in any situation was "how I can show that everyone else secretly doesn't know what their positions are." Whose goal is to say "Everyone is a phony. No one really likes anything. Everyone is a little too secure and righteous—but I know they’re all really insecure."

I don't mean to paint things in binary but there are two basic poles here, with all of us probably falling in between them. You can be open, and vulnerable, and ignorant, and admit to your ignorance, and try to understand your own wiring and ignorance, and come to terms with the fact that you are one complex motherfucker with complex and not exactly logical or objective reasons for liking and loving what you do, but nevertheless still liking and loving the things that you do, or you can be the person who points out that everyone is pretty fucking ignorant, nobody ever has a clue what they're really doing on this earth, everybody's reasons are all so screwy, and do so on a daily basis, as a way of masking your own ignorance and insignificance and vulnerability. You can try to know, and own the fact that there are things you do not know, or you can be knowing, and hide your own ignorance with sideways shots of been-there done-that familiarity. You can understand that shit happens and try your best to keep things together and accomplish something against all odds--YOU CAN DANCE, as this album begins--or you can blow up the hospital just to show everyone that at any moment anywhere, a hospital can blow up for no fucking reason whatsoever.

In the Hipster Runoff universe, the only acceptable worldview is blowing up the hospital. HRO needs rugs, and people to stand on them, so that it can pull it out from them and show how stupid they were for thinking they were safe, for “pretending” they knew who they were. Just like Gawker, HRO won't stop until we're all too afraid to do anything, to step on the rug and take a fucking chance, to give a shit. Until we're all crippled by self-consciousness, and the worry of making a mistake. The targets will get younger and softer until we're laughing at thirteen year olds and ten year olds and five year olds, how stupid they are, how they embarrass themselves, how they believe they can do things it's so obvious to the rest of us they just can't do--so fucking obvious because we know so fucking much.

Don't you know how important it is to be able to make mistakes? To fuck up with impunity? Why won't you let my kids be kids? They will be the better for it. And you were too--and I'm so sad you don't see that. I'm so sad you don't remember how fucking hard it is, being that age, not knowing fuck-all how anything or anybody works, let alone yourself.

You can't justify nihilism. There is no justification. Personal opinion. But go ahead hater, bring it. I know you won't though. Because the second you wash off all the face paint, we'll all know who you really are: a "failed creative type" just like the rest of us, who gets off pointing out how we're all failed creative types just so you don't have to confront your own lack of vision.

56 RIFFS

PERINEUM ISSUE 6: NOW ACCEPTING PREORDERS

2009-01-13T10:00:00.002-05:00

We are now accepting preorders for Issue 6 of Perineum, to be released January 22. Perineum is curated by Zach Baron and Nick Sylvester, and features contributions from new downtown writers. For more info contact us at perineum.nyc@gmail.com.

THEORETICALLY UNPUBLISHED PIECE ABOUT GIRL TALK, FOR A THEORETICAL NEW YORK MAGAZINE KIND OF AUDIENCE, GIVE OR TAKE AN OX ON SUICIDE WATCH

2008-12-22T07:00:00.001-05:00

Too Late, Too Long

//PREFACE//
This ridiculous and unwieldy piece grew out of conversations I had with my friend David Marx, whom you might know as the musician Marxy, whom you might know as the brain behind the Momus-baiting Neojaponisme, a popular site about Japanese culture. It is running on his site today too.

For a minute, we thought someone outside our circles might be interested in reading about our struggles with Girl Talk, so we pulled back the narthex jokes and spelled out a lot of concepts that will strike most of you as pretty whatever. These concepts include: mashups, Pitchfork, the Pitchfork Effect, blogs, laptop computers, and rapping. Bear with us. And this will also explain why I refer to Sean Fennessey and Ryan Dombal as "critics" and not "two of my all-time favorite people in the entire world" or even "two of the sharpest critics out there right now." Hopefully this will also explain why I give two of my all-time favorite people in the entire world a hard time for getting behind Girl Talk. I am excited to hear what they have to say in response--but also I want to apologize upfront for the Plunderphonics jab, which four months later reads pretty snotty.

Any parts you don't like were probably written by David.

A month or so ago, n+1 published an article by Jace Clayton called "Confessions of a DJ." First time through, my first thought was "holy shit, it's 2008 and dj/rupture just made a joke about laptop DJs checking their email during sets." My second time through, what stood out was Clayton's humility. "I was inspired to become a DJ by nights spent in an after-hours club in Boston where you couldn't see the DJ performing. The DJ wasn't an icon of cool there, he or she was a faceless person surfing the restless slipstream of musical pleasure," he writes towards the end. Clayton is one of the best DJs out there, from every possible angle. He digs deep and wide, he has style and technique, he knows the theory and could egg heads forever, but more than anything, you get the sense he'd rather you just dance. If any straight-up DJ wanted to claim he's an Artist, it's Clayton.

And yet he doesn't, and in fact you could say the piece is about Clayton refusing the title of artist. The distinction for him is a somewhat counterintuitive economical one: Artists make products, and at the moment, it's neither financially nor legally possible for the theoretical DJ-artist Clayton to make the DJ-Art-Product that he would theoretically art-sell. Instead he seems to think of himself as a technician, and his performances as careful recitals of other people's music. He's a gifted performer, in the same way that (I don't know) Luciano Pavarotti is (was?) a gifted singer or Glenn Gould a gifted pianist or Freddie Hubbard a gifted trumpet player.

At some point, I don't know when--I remember Wyatt in The Recognitions going on about this at one point--it became cooler (not sure that's the word) to be an "original artist" than a "gifted performer." I'm sure the economy has something to do with this. (Maybe the word is money-savvy.) The line in The Recognitions is

That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original . . . Even 200 years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.

I bring all this up not to shit on Freddie Hubbard's original compositions, but to make room for the totally fine and great possibility that Girl Talk is a technically proficient user of audio software. Let's poke out his eyes and call him the laptop Bocelli. Seriously. I mean do whatever you want here. But please let him be what he is. Do not do this:

I decided in the end to choose the records that I enjoyed the most, period—pleasure principle over agonizingly weighted critical judgment. Which is how I arrived at Girl Talk, aka Pittsburgh DJ Gregg Gillis, and his exuberant collages of classic rock, raunchy hip-hop, power ballads, and '80s bubblegum. (Typical segue: Unk into Twisted Sister into Huey Lewis and the News.) Some would have you believe that Gillis' songs say something serious about musical genre or the carnal and the spiritual. And they do say something—just not something serious. Girl Talk is a comedian, really. Beat-matching and pitch-shifting software has taken the technical wizardry out of mashup art, and what's left to Gillis are in-jokes, funny contrasts, a cheeky higher form of fanboyism. In "Let Me See You," he sets up a battle of the sexes showdown between 2 Live Crew's "I Wanna Rock" and MIA's "Boyz": The Miami rappers command "Pop that pussy!"; M.I.A. answers with a schoolyard taunt: "Na na na na na na na na!"

Gillis' signature trick is juxtaposing melodramatic rock instrumentals with filthy hip-hop to underscore the pathos and the silliness and the plain fun that lurks in both gangsta rap and bombastic rock—an equal-opportunity celebration of pop's depths and pop's shallows. The irony is that while Girl Talk's mashups epitomize musical ADD in the iPod era, Feed the Animals is an expertly paced and sequenced song suite. Many tracks begin with snippets of the song that ended the previous one, and the whole megillah is framed by the UGK/Outkast song "International Player's Anthem," with the album coming full circle, Finnegans Wake style, to end where it began. In other words, Feed the Animals hangs together like a traditional album better than most anything else I heard this year. Which may be Gillis' best joke of all.

So instead of an "agonizingly weighted critical judgment" that Slate expects Rosen to deliver, he gives us this agonizingly apologetic bullshit for why Girl Talk is really guys an Artist. The first sentence of the second paragraph... Look, I can forgive him for going on about things that "epitomize musical ADD in the iPod era." I mean, it's Slate. You pretty much have to drop one of these gems in every other sentence. But Jesus, the first tune is the same as the last tune and he calls it "Finnegans Wake style." His shirt matches his pants and suddenly it's a "battle of the sexes showdown." You're seeing dead people, Jody! You're like the guy from fucking Pi!

One reason you don't see music writers talking about technique is because many of them review music they don't know how to make or play, so how would they even begin. Let alone the recording process. Lord knows I am not saying you need to know how to play banjo or else your Sufjan Stevens review is just worthless. We've been through this. You know I don't feel this way. Sufjan might actually feel this way if I remember correctly, but I don't. Granted I don't have some willfully naive approach either, but anyway so:

There is this really helpful distinction that music writers could make when they talk about Gillis--the performer vs artist one--and part of me thinks had we made that distinction from the beginning, he wouldn't be going around talking these huge lines about being an Original Artist. And more importantly, lest you think we've spent thousands of words quibbling over a semantic distinction, maybe Gillis would have realized the wildly insulting comment his Girl Talk project is making about pop music in the process.

Etc., etc.

-NBS

//MAIN FEATURE//

GIRL TALK, THE MASHUP DETONATOR

Gregg Gillis, a 26-year-old college graduate who likes pop music and owns a laptop, became Girl Talk in the first year of the 21st century. Taking cues from Britney Spears' self-positioning circa 2001 — when she was famously "Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman" — Gillis is not a DJ, but not a traditional musician either. With the aid of computer editing software, he creates danceable sound collages that often incorporate over 15-20 audio sources: namely, popular and less popular rock, rap, dance, and electronic songs, no era or genre excluded. The sources are mostly recognizable, and his songs — Gillis calls them "songs" — carry the force of nostalgia but are reconfigured and "mashed up" enough so as to sound fresh and new and free of the groan that collects when somebody insists on playing all four minutes and seventeen seconds of MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" at the holiday party. With Girl Talk, we get that blissful moment of recognition without having to suffer through the next three minutes and thirty seconds remembering exactly why it hasn't been Hammertime for more than a decade now.

Like many others before and after him, Gillis found his success after the indie music website Pitchfork Media bestowed positive reviews upon his third album, 2006's Night Ripper. "Pittsburgh native Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up," wrote reviewer Sean Fennessey. "As an illegal art form, it's surprising no one came along with an idea like this sooner." The review came out on July 17 — so maybe the summer heat kept the typically spot-on Fennessey from remembering John Oswald's Plunderphonics, the all-stolen-sample recording from 1985.

Either way, for Pitchfork and many others, Girl Talk raised the bastard-pop bar. He was not just playing two songs on top of each other like 2ManyDJs or Freelance Hellraiser, nor was he playing two songs next to each other in an anything-goes free-for-all DJ set a la Optimo or Erol Alkan. Instead Gillis is something of a surgeon, scalpeling out drum breaks from one song, vocal melodies from another, a guitar riff from another, and stitching them into some danceable semblance of a new song. These Frankensteins were emblematic of the indie-rockcentric Pitchfork's growing appreciation for Southern rap, modern pop, and dance music too, so it was no surprise when the site took the opportunity to award Gillis's album Best New Music, its highest honor — to celebrate Girl Talk was, in a way, to celebrate the site itself.

Around that time, Gillis hooked up with the Chicago-based Pitchfork buds Windish Agency. He quickly began touring the world with his sweaty dance parties. He had a well-blogged reputation for inviting people on stage to dance with him as he huddled over his computer, triggering his samples live, and soon he became a festival headliner. A career in music firmly established, soon Gillis quit his Pittsburgh day-job as a biomedical engineer. And now Gillis is at the point fame-wise where MTV News is more than happy to run a story about his last show, to take place on December 21, 2012. That date counts for the end of the Mayan calendar — believed by some to be the day the world will end. For a guy who plays others people's music, more or less, Gillis is not doing so bad for himself.

I'LL BE YOUR WHATEVER YOU WANT

Girl Talk, to his immense credit, is an avatar of the most important musical-technological developments and music-industrial complications from the last decade: (illegal) music hyper-consumption in the face of record industry meltdown; the blurring of distinctions in major and indie labels; the plumbing of indie cool; an indie-rock about-face towards "selling out"; an unprecedented participatory music culture, a next-next-level fan club. (i.e.: It's not enough just to go to the shows, or buy the t-shirts, or track down the seven-inches.) The mega-fans are remixing their favorite songs, lacing them with dance beats and synthesizer presets, posting their remixes on their blogs, commenting on those of others. Even if there were precedents for these complications, the 21st century form of mashups is a very palpable convergence: an internet-mediated, meta-pop moment.

There was a time of openly loathing but secretly loving 2ManyDJ's blend of Skee-Lo's "I Wish" over "Cannonball" by the Breeders. But it wasn't clear at the time (late 2002) that this would be a New Musical Movement with artist heroes and collectives. The mashup was at best the democratization of once elite techie show-off skills. Pro Tools Free or Fruity Loops or Live (cracked or otherwise) were now widely available, and so anybody with an ounce of computer know-how was able to twist and contort their favorite songs into a seamless mixtape. Soon, an army of sixteen year-olds would surely adopt the mashup as a standard protocol in their early musical careers. Soon they'll figure out a way to impress girls by putting Indigo Girls tracks over "Tootsie Roll."

HE WISHES HE WAS A BALLER

A month after Night Ripper received Best New Music, Gillis told critic Ryan Dombal, "I'm trying to separate myself from other people by having songs that would be considered — technically — original things. I don't seek out mashups. I'm associated with the whole mashup movement, and it's too bad because I'm not a huge fan of them." Two years later, Gillis told Robert Levine of the New York Times, straight up, "I want to be a musician and not just a party D.J. ….and like any musician I want to put out a classic album." Then again, Gillis doesn't need to say anything of this sort, with the militia of sycophants he has lined up to defend his work. Our favorite is Chris Bodenner, a guest blogger at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog. Bodenner not only insists Girl Talk is an artist, but believes him to be "the artist for the Age of Obama":

[Obama]'s campaign — buoyed by young fans and volunteers — embodies that generation in so many ways, as does Girl Talk. Obama is a young, diverse, and unique politician running an innovative, grassroots campaign that thrives offs the Internet. Similarly, Girl Talk is a young, innovative, Internet-based artist whose level of sampling is unique and incredibly diverse — racially and stylistically. And both Obama and Gillis draw from the same demographics: African-Americans and young liberal whites. Plus, they both put on killer live shows.

Suffice it to say, we did not expect the glorification of mashers-up to the point of being artists — as if "talented DJ" just couldn't suffice. Even Belgian duo 2 Many DJs kept their dark arts in the realm of the "DJ mix." The Skee-Lo/Breeders track, for example, boasted no pretensions of song title other than a listing of its ingredients. But for some reason this Night Ripper set was an "album" rather than a "mix," made of "songs" and not of "mashups."

Perhaps this posing is required, however, because Night Ripper doesn't particularly work as a straight DJ mix. There is no build; it doesn't breathe. The genius of 2 Many DJs and some of the other first wave mashup artists was the naturalness of their blends. Without tinkering too much, the harmonic and melodic elements would align to make a sonically pleasing moment. Christina Aguilera sounded plausible singing over The Strokes in "A Stroke of Genius." No DJ superhero could be heard pulling the strings. In the pre-Girl Talk days, the standard of judgment was the seamlessness, the beauty of a ridiculously paired, yet ironically similar set of songs.

But this is Girl Talk. Night Ripper is a "postmodern musical creation." This posits itself as Art — challenging all prior definitions of what it means to make music.

A NITPICKY DIGRESSION B/W BEFORE THEY WERE GIRL TALKS

Technology obscures the fact, a simple one to me, that "mashing up" is the fundamental process for music making: i.e. combining and recombining different sounds into pleasing and/or at the very least hopefully-not-boring configurations. Lynyrd Skynyrd were known to mash up guitar and bass and drums into the configuration of "Sweet Home Alabama." Weezer had a pretty good mashup called "Say It Ain't So." Some people/bands make terrible mashups. Other people/bands make pretty good mashups!

All's to say, there is a context for Girl Talk's cut-and-paste aesthetic. Technically he is working in the tradition of musique concrete, which when Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and Stockhausen and friends did it, comprised cutting up physical vinyl records and tape reels and re-pasting them together — using prerecorded sounds and reconfiguring them and then playing them as pastiche.

These were compositions but not traditional songs. And most of these compositions, to be frank, are more fun to think about than listen to. But since then, the concrete nature of recording has been exploited tremendously as part of the modern recording studio setup. Most radio pop songs are cut-and-pastes of previous takes actually, looped and warped and seamlessly woven together. And so musique concrete, one could reasonably argue, has significantly altered the path of recorded music, not necessarily with its content but as a process.

ROMAN CANDLE IN THE WIND

What's tricky is that Gillis wants the Art-ness of musique concrete and the Popularity of Pop Music. Unlike musique concrete artists, even more popular ones like Matmos, Gillis wants, needs even, his samples to be fully recognizable. He is using well-known songs too, not field recordings of, say, a squeaky door hinge — so there is an element of junior-high level trainspotting to the album's appeal, right down to the title: Night Ripper clearly plays on the Beatles song title "Day Tripper." The tracklisting of the Night Ripper song "Smash Your Head" counts (at least) 17 samples, from Fall Out Boy to X-Ray-Spex to the Pharcyde, whose "Passing Me By" itself samples at least two songs. The effect is an advanced version of that game on the iPod, which challenges you to figure out what the song is from a four second random clip. It's a game, and because Gillis keeps a steady beat, it's technically danceable too.

It's rarely listenable though — at least in any traditional, "I am taking pleasure in the configuration of these simultaneously occurring sounds and words" sense of pop music listening. Although Girl Talk has a few choice moments like the "Where Is My Mind" vs. "Hate Me Now" blend, he relies on pitch-shifting and time-distorting everything to fit within the same BPM — cramming all his various found elements into the same one-size-fits-all bed a la Greek villain Procrustes. He is obedient more to his process than the finished product. His most beloved blend of Biggie Smalls and Elton John pitches up "Tiny Dancer" to a ludicrous degree, and to add insult to injury, Gillis lets John's artificially-chipmunked lyrics step all over Biggie's rhymes. (This would surely prompt a severe drubbing if done in real life.) Gillis' labored matching of "Ain't to Proud to Beg" over "Friends of P" just sounds like "I Love the '90s" projectile vomiting.

There are also sloppy segments on Night Ripper where the songs' keys don't match up — like Ciara's "Oh" over Elastica's "Connection" — which I doubt was an intentional experiment in audience-polarizing post-modernism. Maybe we shouldn't say that the errors are "unmusical" but they have the groove of a elementary school violin recital.

The ultimate glory of Girl Talk is supposed to reside in a brand new expression of "pop obsession" for a radically-different generation. But as it stands, Girl Talk just seems to love pop music as a sadistic steward, morphing all the hooks and cherished moments of the last forty years into devalued fodder for a long stream of time-stretched mid-range EQ mush with no peaks or dynamics.

Notice we don't find Girl Talk offensive to copyright, "the ontology of art," or pop music in general. We just think the relatively innovative gimmick of his style has exempted him from critical thought put towards the actual result. Are we a pop culture generation easily placated to hear our "references" bounced back to us, no matter the context or skill? Recall the Weezer video for "Pork and Beans." Is the whole game now: "Hey, I know what that is!!"?

I'M GONNA ADD SOME BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

Late this summer, Girl Talk released his Night Ripper follow-up called Feed the Animals. (This is possibly a subtle reference to Belly's "Feed the Trees," but I doubt it.) Since Night Ripper, Gillis's technical abilities improved, and there are fewer "unmusical" moments when keys don't line up or samples seem sloppy. With fewer mistakes to distract us, the Girl Talk Thesis Statement seems more apparent, i.e. there is a Girl Talk Thesis Statement after all. Like a good crate-digging producer, Gillis aims to salvage what the past has discarded and wishes to figure out how to make worn-out songs sound good again.

A pretty clean example of that: He updates the build of "Dance To the Music" by Sly and the Family Stone, the part when Sly sings "I'm gonna add a little organ" and then the organ comes in, repeat with guitar, repeat with bass — except Girl Talk makes very simple substitutions for the original responses to Sly's calls. If anything, it's clever, a good party trick. Later Girl Talk rescues the one great chorus from an otherwise terrible Southern rap track (cf. Shawty Lo's "They Know" or Cassidy's "Drink N My 2 Step") and finds it a better backbeat. Gillis sometimes just goes for broke and it works, combining awesome with awesome and giving us awesomer: For an all-too-brief time, Blackstreet's "No Diggity" chorus glides over Kanye's "Flashing Lights" instrumental. Getting paid is a forte; this is something else entirely.

Girl Talk is definitely Gillis's Ongoing Project — and these records, as long as he keeps making them (four more years, dude!), could very well approach an Aesthetic if not a Point. From a technical standpoint, this is also a project that requires a certain degree of time and effort and patience (and an endless supply of a cappellas). He could just be combining any old songs, but he isn't.

Obviously sometimes his combinations and sequences don't taste good. But with music at least, the best moments are more value-indicative to me than the plethora of shitty ones. Shittiness is an inevitability. As pointed out, digital music manipulation tools have become cheaper and more available and the d-word, shudder, democratized. The ignobile vulgus doesn't have the best track record when it comes to artmaking. Remember what happened when synthesizers became readily available in late disco, giving birth to house music: We first got Frankie Knuckles' "Your Love," but then we got, you know, everything else after that. Some of it was awesome. Most was terrible.

We're not saying Girl Talk is the Frankie Knuckles of mash-ups. But compare him with the rest of what the internet has put out there for us — all the ridiculous song title puns — and you realize the extent to which he does care how he puts things together. His records have rough patches sonically, and he doesn't have a handle on pacing, knowing only one speed (fast) and one density (brick) and one EQ setting (lots of mids). But he's not exactly taking the piss, or the same kind of piss, as the rest of these people.

DJ HERO

That being said, Girl Talk's insistence on not being a pure DJ is a key to why the music sounds like it does, why it has only one speed, one timbre, and one density: if he lets a sample or phrase or loop breath on its own without some kind of additional percussion or secondary element, he is violating his own semantic scruples. Rule Number One of Girl Talk Club: Everything must be mashed at all times or otherwise the whole musique concrete / "art compounded from other art" rationale falls away, and Gillis is "just a DJ."

This is a bar of poetic, Babel-like heights — an exciting concept, one to which Girl Talk's execution rarely lives up. But in doing so, Girl Talk has deftly avoided the mashup label, and the musique concrete label, in favor of a brand-new artform whose result, critics be damned, has no point of comparison.

If not an outright lie, most times uniqueness is a bad excuse for Not Art. Many artists recoil at the mere suggestion that someone is doing something else just like them. To that end, these artists create new rules so that no one is on the same court. They get away with it, in no small part because most snobby music fans hate the idea of music having a "playing field" anyway, where music becomes like sports — scratch DJs or guitar soloists who have to practice, practice, practice, who try to outdo their rivals through sheer technical skill, who play at Madison Square Garden for screaming fans, who wipe the sweat with actual towels. (Except when it's a video game, then we suddenly love it.)

Girl Talk doesn't want to go to the Wimbledon of mash-ups, so he created his own sport. Let's call it Speed Mashball. I don't think he's the best Speed Mashball player he could be (he's definitely gotten better since the Night Ripper Tournament), but with no competition stepping to the plate to kick a "goober-ball" (we will discuss the rules and jargon of this complicated athletic metaphor later), Girl Talk is the undisputed gold medalist. And by using every sample known to man (and every a cappella downloaded from Jam Glue), he basically outmoded the entire circa 2003 mash-up sport.

We can put Girl Talk under the umbrellas of musique concrete or loop-based pop music itself, but these titles further confuse Gillis, making him out to be some kind of outsider or misunderstood auteur. Truth is, however, Girl Talk is first and foremost a campus favorite, a party rocker, that serious DJ flown in for the Kappa Alpha party who you go and ask if he has any De La Soul; he screams at you indignantly "I just played some!" and then you go back to looking for where Carrie Ann went off to. Unlike Matmos or Pierre Schaeffer or anything musique concrete, Girl Talk needs "the critics" as much as Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday does — which is to say, not at all. Dude's likely got every weekend for the next year booked without all the ink spilled from the pens of eggheads.

As a second cousin, Girl Talk has that guy who sped-up all the Beatles albums to fit in a single ten minute file. But that particular music auteur gets no love from Pitchfork, no respect as "an artist." Must be his subpar Street Team.

THE LEGOMANIAC

Can a process truly be called "repurposing" or "recontextualizing" when Repurpose and Recontext is built into the content's genetic code? When it's all part of the master plan? Disco and funk producers didn't intend for their drum breaks to become the stuff of rap samples — yet with Girl Talk compositions, one wonders how much of Gillis's ease is a testament to his technical prowess, and how much is just an articulation of the fact that pop music has become increasingly standardized, its parts more or less interchangeable. All major rap singles, for instance, come with an instrumental and a vocal a cappella; the verses are mostly all the same length, about 16 bars; the choruses are all more of less the same length of time too. It is understood within the architecture of pop and hip-hop music these days that the song is waiting, begging even, to be mashed up.

A modern audience likely won't find anything remotely violent or controversial or confrontational to Girl Talk presenting this information either. Rock has coexisted with hip-hop has coexisted with noise. Our ears are better-than-ever equipped to handle these kinds of recombinations. Girl Talk has a moment on Feed The Animals when he puts a rap over the French disco-house track "Music Sounds Better With You," and another one when we hear Lil Mama over Metallica's "One." It's telling how little these tracks sound out of the ordinary, because ten years ago I suspect they would have. Just last year, Kanye took Daft Punk's electro track "Harder Better Faster Stronger" and put rapping over it, called it "Stronger," and it went to #1 on the Billboard Pop 100. Discounting the precedent of the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z's best-selling Black Album in 2003 was filled with Lil Mama/Metallica-type moments. In the public imagination, these artistic decisions are no longer scandalous.

We're seeing this in other situations, as the idea of user-generated content delights our commerce so — that the line between Ultimate Fan and Actual Artist is rendered the same in terms of exchange value. In 2008, Girl Talk is pop music's Ultimate Fan. But the extent to which the music he's working with is so portable, so building-block ready, makes it seem like he's not making art so much as merely following industry directions: Step by step, like he's putting together a Lego spaceship. There is no violence in this process, in other words; he's hardly repurposing much of anything. Instead it's like a video game in which Gillis has found the warp level — yet keep in mind, somebody somewhere had to program that warp level precisely so that it would be discovered.

THE 21ST NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER

And as the Ultimate Fan, Girl Talk exists as a mover not of music but nostalgia. He is the guy at the party who says, "Remember slap bracelets?" Dude: How about devil sticks?

Although there are things to hate about the whole "mass nostalgia" angle, who can gainsay the fact that the first major role of our new internet-based culture is to dig back in the near past and scream, "Yo, you remember this shit?" — whether it's 1970s toy commercials on YouTube or Super Mario Bros. mycology sets on BoingBoing or funny Russian Speed Racer overdubs on Some Awful Thing. There is no way VH1 could have a "nostalgia for this week" show unless they felt the pressure to one-up the Internet where it's all nostalgia all the time. Girl Talk fits into our national cultural mood extremely well. Gillis is the musical equivalent of "Best Week Ever." And I am sure that even that show could be legitimized as "a perfect manifestation of what McLuhan and Warhol augured" rather than Lowest Common Denominator TV.

(A personal note from David: As someone living in the far Orient and generally ignoring recent American "popular" music to listen to David Brooks and Mark Shields battle it out on podcasts, I am either the least or most qualified person to make a judgment on Girl Talk. I had no idea Kayne West made music; I just thought he was that whiny Fauntleroy in shutter sunglasses always hanging out at colette in Paris. Forget art. The question is, without a public hungry for the references, is Feed the Animals anything at all? Does Girl Talk hold up as "music" without all the extratextual information? If you had no idea about mash-ups or hip-hop or "No Diggity" or "Epic" by Faith No More would you really be all that impressed? It would just be a long stream of unstructured pop drone. Imaginary straw-men that have lived in a underground bunker for fifty years would totally hate Girl Talk!)

To extend the earlier Lego metaphor: Just as bloggers have two basic options — write original content or become a central link warehouse — musicians now can either mold the musical blocks for other "secondary" artists or build the "spaceship" from the publicly available kit. But these are not equal options. I doubt that anyone will ever sample Kayne's "Stronger." It's a dead-end, a cultural vasectomy.

A REALLY EASY WAY TO CONNECT TO PEOPLE

"The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs," Gillis told Pitchfork. "Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people."

If Girl Talk has done anything, his dead-end project is a reminder of how fiercely dominant Western pop music has become. This is a capitulation, an audio essay even, of the last 25 years of American pop music: loop-based, interchangeable parts that, turns out, are more similar than maybe we'd like to admit. The "isn't it funny how 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' sounds like that Boston song" moment is taken to its darkest, veil-lifted extreme. That we're back in the Tin Pan Alley, and all pop music might actually be the same after all. That the difference is truly manufactured, that the concerns of each song are not interesting. Taking cues from the Grand Wizard Theodor: pop music is not art, but sound design.

Therein lies the insidiousness. Adorno pulled no punches. But Girl Talk poses as a pop optimist. He loves pop music — all pop music. It's all so unique. It's all just so great to him. Implicit in his project is that: It's all so similar to him too. That it all sounds the same in the end. That listening to a bunch of songs we used to care about in his refracted, rejiggered form is, at its heart, the same exact thing, compositionally and otherwise, as listening to a brand new song by a brand new musician. Why bother, right? This project, worse than any covert corporate sponsorship, he calls a celebration of pop music. What he himself doesn't know is we already had a name for it: la danse macabre.

VETERANS STADIUM IS THE HIPPEST PLACE IN TOWN

2008-10-24T03:00:00.002-04:00

A Non Fan's Notes, Etc.

So maybe this isn't specific to Philadelphia. Maybe this happens in Boston and Tampa and wherever else baseball is played these days. In fact it can't be just a Philly thing, at least not entirely. Nobody likes a frontrunner or fairweather sports fan, especially one from his own town. I imagine this is a sports fan's nightmare: You show up for "work" (watching the game) every day (game), you struggle with a team for 168 nights and an interminable off-season reading gossip on Deadspin, "your" team finally does something right such as getting itself to the Big Game, the Fall Classic, people start throwing "World Series" themed cocktail parties you're not invited to, your favorite bars grow more crowded with people who still have the tags on their just-bought jerseys (unintentionally, though I've heard this is a thing, and I know what it means) of players whose first names they can't remember, and there you are--there you fucking are--unspeakably angry at these people because they are freeloading on all the "work" you did the last six months, watching the game, supporting the team, while these Non Fans were doing whatever people do if they don't watch sports (you don't know, on account of being a lifetime sports fan). Scott Rolen or Sonny Rollins or Rolling Rock or Sitting Bull hits a home run, the team wins Game 3, the group of vaguely attractive women behind you who haven't been watching the game at all are suddenly jumping up and down and hugging each other and you are livid, as these people have no right to be excited, not a single fucking right at all.

Now that I think about it, this is pretty much a subplot to every major sports movie I've ever seen (I've only seen Fever Pitch). But to get to why I am even writing this down, why I am feeling so utterly vexed right now as this team progresses through the World Series, I do believe everything is a little more precarious in Philadelphia, with Phillies fans and fans of Philadelphia, with fans "from Philadelphia" and fans "actually from Philadelphia," on and on and on.

I have not followed the Philadelphia Phillies closely my entire life. My parents let me play baseball, and I had this wacky pitch I threw that got me onto a few select teams in my early teens, but when my eyes went bad and my Latin homework picked up and my general disregard for physical strength took hold, I was more than happy to put the glove back in the shed. "The Sylvesters are just not good at sports" is an actual thing my father has said to me. The most I've ever seen my dad get excited about sports was some Superbowl maybe 15 years ago, I forget who was playing. The whole fucking day he kept walking around the house, completely sober, yelling in what he thought was a sports announcer voice, "It's Superbowl Sunday!" And what this meant was that, after dinner, he was going to take out the gallons upon gallons of ice cream and toppings he had bought at Genuardi's that afternoon and make each of us a "Superbowl Sundae." I'm pretty sure he stole this idea from Bennigan's. Additionally: we weren't allowed to eat ice cream in the family room anyway, so we all sat around the kitchen table, eating these pretty terrible anything-goes type sundaes my dad had made for us, while the game played on the television we couldn't see on mute, because my mom didn't like the noise while eating. She said it made her antsy. This is the house I grew up in. We listened to a lot of Kool & the Gang, and we made a lot of home videos of my brother Anthony dancing to "Love Shack." I've never seen my dad drink more than two beers--and I remember the day he drank two beers like it was yesterday. I was so nervous he was going to do something rash.

The way I imagine normal people interact with pop music--in this passive, osmotic kind of way--was how I was with Philadelphia sports. I knew the basic talking points. I knew players names and general reputations. I had passable short-term memory for when we won and knew when we lost. I had seen, if not live then on the nightly news, very important moments in our history of failures and unexpected triumphs: Randall Cunningham jumping over that dude; John Kruk getting beaned; the Joe Carter homerun; Jim McMahon's sunglasses; the concept of Von Hayes. The concept of Von Hayes, I imagine, is akin to the concept of bloghouse. Bloghouse is very important to a lot of people! And once I left the city in 2000, I ceased to partake in even the osmosis. To know about Philadelphia sports would require an active degree of interest that I just never had, and one which, being totally honest, I may have been raised to look down on. Time watching sports on television was time not doing yard work, time not setting the table or doing the dishes, time not practicing trumpet. To this day I get really fucking antsy when I'm not working on or towards something.

And yet! And yet I go to my friend's last night to watch Game Two--and I am by far the loudest, most emotionally attached viewer of this World Series in the room. People confused me for an actual fan of major league baseball. One of the Phillies hit a solo homer in a later inning, someone asked me who hit it, I still can't tell you who hit that home run, and yet I definitely sprung out of my chair and yelled and threw my hands up like an actual fan of Philadelphia sports teams. All the little bullshitting people do during sports broadcasts--talking about what pitch the pitcher "has" to throw next, stuff like that--I was all over it. I had opinions about every single move and motion. I said things like "if they're down by four now, they're either going to have a five-run inning in the top of the ninth or they're going to lose it." I likely characterized this potential arc of gameplay as "such a Phillies move." And when I walked back to my apartment after the game (they lost), I past a man walking his dog, and I said "how's it going" and he said "it's going! how's it going for you?" and I said "the Phillies just lost, I'm fucking miserable."

I am still under the impression that I meant this. I was upset. Not in a "my team lost" kind of way but a "my city lost" kind of way. This is the part where things get magnificently mental and fucked up, so if you want to bow I understand. Philadelphia--a place I have never lived in properly, though I spent four long years on Girard Ave thinking I did; a general area I haven't really lived in for eight years; a woe-is-me grass-is-greener anti-intellectual willfully-blue-collar everything-sucks-and/or-is-gay state of mind I don't believe I ever really inhabited ever--is my city. I identify this place as the reason I am who I am who I am who I am, etc., and yet I really have little to do with the place. There is nothing to it that I fully agree with, and in fact, there are aspects of Philadelphia that I have serious problems with. There's a reason I don't live there, the biggest one being: It's a really negative place! The stereotypical Philadelphian is skeptical to a fault, more likely to subject himself psychically to pain than to pleasure, because at least pain has no lie to it. Pain is real, and the real is most important. Pleasure has the possibility of not being real. Pleasure has the possibility of being yet another promise gone wrong, in a city that has seen so many things not go its way that--and this is what's so difficult for me about living there, the fucking tautology of the place--I sometimes worry the negativity fulfills its own prophecy. That nothing ever good happens, because if something good were to happen, it wouldn't be Philadelphia. So when I said I was miserable about the Phillies losing, I was miserable about Philadelphia losing, over and over again, Liberty One be damned.

I am not just miserable in this stupid abstract Poor Philadelphia way though: I am actually miserable for being miserable. Not just because I have no right to be miserable, in the exasperated "hardworking" sports fan sort of way I mentioned above, but because let's face it: What kind of asshole am I for writing what I just wrote a second ago? Poor Philadelphia? Really dude? There's this thing on the internet called GoodReads, which is a book Facebook basically. On Goodreads I wrote a review of Philly ex-pat Bruce Buschel's book called _Walking Broad_, in which he revisits the city and his memories there good and bad etc., in which he said exactly the same thing as above, more/less, except he did it in his own hacky fake Mitch Albom kind of way. And the book came off very self-congratulatory--like look at me, I'm such a fucking genius for escaping Philadelphia. Thank God I got out of that place, now my life is so much better, drinking zinfandel with my wife and writing pretty boring articles for magazines nobody under 55 reads, etc. I hated this guy's book. It was a hatchet job on Philly--the projection of all his setbacks and life obstacles. It was his The Beast.

And in that sense, as his wife concluded at the end of the book, he is still something of a Philadelphian. The problem is that he's the worst fucking kind of Philadelphian there is. And there are so many people in the city and from the city who are not like this. Two of my best smartest bookish friends in New York are from Philly--real fucking champs who get murdered by their high school friends for leaving the city. One of them emailed me earlier this week and asked whether we "should" be in Philly just in case they win the World Series. By now you should know how loaded this proposition is. Two ex-pats, from New York no less, who don't follow the Phillies, coming down the nights of Games 3 4 5, to celebrate the victory of "our" team, "our" city. We'd get the shit kicked out of us! We would be hospitalized, and the doctors on call would know what happened, and they would leave us to die. For a bulk of its residents, the second you leave Philadelphia, it is no longer "your" city. I know and feel this to be so true, that as I watched Game Two--the only baseball game I've watched on television this year--my bad karma may actively have been harming the team's performance. (My other Philly friend assured me that Mitch Williams, who is in the booth commentating--do people know this? why are my superstitious living-in-Philly friends not completely livid about this?--is likely the source of the bad karma, if it exists.)

Speaking for myself: I'm susceptible to constructing "if only...then I" hurdles and then granting them cosmic life-altering significance. If only I get new job X then I will be able to find the constancy to save money; if only I get a piece published at magazine Y then I will feel validated as a writer; if only Barack Obama wins then I will feel like I can listen to pop music seriously without feeling a tad irresponsible; if only I break up with this guy or this girl, I can rebuild my entire life and totem in an order more pleasing to me.

Some of you surely do shit like this too. After the hurdle is cleared, there is always another "if only"--ALWAYS--but that is how we grow and learn and generally get better at what we're trying to do and where we're trying to go with our lives, etc. And when we approach certain hurdles and realize they're likely insurmountable, we either break them down into "mini hurdles" or we rethink that specific route and take on new hurdles, which themselves will have their own mini hurdles, onwards and onwards. But the point here is that--speaking for myself again--I've cleared enough hurdles in my life that I am generally up to the challenge of clearing hurdles. I am generally of the temperament that I will be happier having cleared hurdle x, as this has generally been the case for me in the past. It's easier to get up in the morning as you begin to think with more and more frequency, hey, maybe today won't be so bad. Maybe, today, something will go my way.

Philly has its share of hurdle clearers and all-around thrivers--but I cannot underscore enough how much easier it would be for every single Philadelphian in the entire fucking world to get up out of bed in the morning if s/he knew the Phillies won the 2008 World Series. This won't be a point of strut--this will be a break. Because we all secretly believe we live in or lived in or "lived just outside of" the best city that has ever existed. We do believe we are special. And we have been told for decades that we are not special. We have been told forever that we are the asshole of Northeast Seaboard, the perineum of the country at large. We have been told we are the fattest, ugliest, stupidest city. We have been told that we're only famous for the fucking Roots. And at a certain point we started believing you. We started believing that we were nobodies. We started liking the Roots.

But if the Phillies won--I mean look. It's not going to slacken the murder rate, it's not going to do anything remotely tangible or immediate or anything you can turn into a smarmy salon.com piece without crediting my blog like usual. But if the Phillies won... Christ, imagine going your WHOLE FUCKING LIFE without catching a break. Not once. You have given up on the idea of catching breaks. You have learned how to "make the best of it," which in the case of Philly means being in a permanent state of exasperation: people ordering cheesesteaks in foreign languages, Santa Claus showing up at an Eagles game, people from Chestnut Hill saying they're from the city, dogs that bark too much. (R.I.P. Duke the Dog.) It's not great feeling exasperated but at least you're not wallowing. If the Phillies won, for many people this would be bigger than Barack Obama. It's the same Yes We Can idea we're talking about, obviously. A win might give that one dude at that one bar the confidence, say, that he maybe can cross the insane hurdle that is tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt. A win might ease Dude X's guard just enough that he decides, you know what, maybe I'm going to give this Mayor Nutter guy a chance. His first 100 days weren't superb but maybe he can deliver on Things A B C. Maybe everybody isn't out to get me after all; maybe my life wasn't doomed from the fucking start.

POTENTIAL IDEAS IN THE VEIN OF PITCHFORK'S 'BEARDO' SHOW FEATURING LES SAVY FAV'S TIM HARRINGTON, AN INDIE ROCKER WHO HAS A BEARD

2008-10-22T17:15:00.004-04:00

Stereogum, Holler!

-weekly show where sufjan stevens goes to church

-daily show where parts & labor work as auto mechanics to make ends meet

-weekly show, hour-long, thriller, in which the members of interpol hunt down criminals

-show where asian guy from fuck buttons taps people in the balls

-jackass-type prank show in which moustache guy from hold steady randomly shows up in people's bedrooms, and stares at them while they sleep and then they wake up and the first thing they see is his face

-show in which a new person on the internet each week leaks the next deerhunter album

-performance art show in which different bands watch nitsuh abebe play with his shirt sleeves

CREATE POST

2008-09-05T13:05:00.002-04:00

FOR NOW

LOVERBOY HERCULES

2008-02-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

TO: INTERNET
FROM: RIFFMARKET
SUBJ: HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR
6 FEBRUARY 2008

A month after I'm supposed to care, it's still kind of unbelievable to me how little NYC disco made it into Zach's poll or the other one--no Baby Oliver, Still Going, Holy Ghost!, Lee Douglas, Shit Robot, Hercules & Love Affair, Lovefingers/Runaway/Wurst edits, or (to be clear) any track that seemed at all remotely relevant to my spacetime. Granted very few people are making cases for this stuff in major internet outlets, and most people who vote in these things primarily interact with music via the internet, and (from what I can tell) most of that most leave dance music to a for-download scim of Sherburne's free monthly column or the increasingly irrelevant scattershot me-first self-serving boosterism of Pitchfork's loopy fiasco, the Forkcast. So I admit, the only person I have to blame is myself. Maybe I should have put up more of a fight. Maybe I should have given more of a run for the title of Russ Limbaugh of Music Criticism, currently held by these guys.

Bygones for sure. I feel like the music press/disco relationship is more parasitic than symbiotic anyway, which is to say part of me wonders whether I'm delighted when a truly brilliant edit like M.E.'s "R&B Drunkie" or something like Baby Oliver's "Shot Caller" avoids the net's panopticon. The internet music press's (IMP) ethnological tendencies cause more harm than less--cf the blockbuster screenplay I'm writing entitled "I Killed Grime and All I Got Was This Random Google Alert" starring S1mon Reyno1ds and Mart1n C1ark--and cashwise/credwise the IMP kingmaker has significantly more to gain for its kingmaking, with impunity!, than the made king himself. In a word: poor Black Kids.

And yet despite that--despite the sick and sobering fact that people have a shitload more to gain cashwise/credwise from jumping on the Hercules & Love Affair bandwagon, more than H&LA itself--I really hope people jump on the Hercules & Love Affair bandwagon. I really hope Andy Butler gets a SPIN cover. I really hope Antony Hegarty is enough of a hook here to backdoor increasingly uptight indie rock circles--who I couldn't care less whether they actually liked the record, just that they know it would be a good look if they did, since (like or not) these people control the IMPs with pull.

This album is tremendous. Not all floorkillers but the tracks are very physical, mixed and mastered in a way that overcomes the usual digital loss of so-called oomph. This isn't fully Butler's gag, as there was at least one other Hercules I know of who had the same idea: But if there ever was an avatar of this tough-sounding but sexually-charged and ultimately extremely gay loverboyish disco-house sound, it is the man/myth/Disney shill Hercules. "Hercules' Theme" is, in fact, a theme, a display of the rich sonic contradictions that play out the rest of the album, alpha-male funk octaves in the bassline next to the breathy dude moans, discordant counterpoint chromatic runs on the horns next to a bright and peacocky trumpet solo. "Athene", same deal except the flip: the goddess of victory and in-war asskicking, a woman but also a "warman", here Kim Ann "singing a woman/warman's song"--but there's something virginal about the track too, desexualized, parthenene. Pretty moving. The most swaggering, biggest-beat toughest-sounding house song,"You Belong", is an admission of defeat: "You belong to him tonight/ there is nothing I can do." Except for Monday morning, when I was so bummed out over something that I ended up putting on (of all things) Isn't Anything, the last week or so I have listened to "You Belong" on repeat every morning and night commute.

This being an impossibly smart DFA full-length, explicit sonic references bubble under. I think my favorite is the song at the top, "Time Will," which deploys an echo of our friend Frankie Knuckles's "Your Love" at the bridge--if you're going to align yourself with any one house record, that's not a bad choice, even if I heard from somebody that it's in a car commercial. The last track "True False, Fake Real" doesn't really offer an apology either; "true" runs the same length in the vocals as "fake", and "false" and "real" are merely respective echoes. Which is to say the implicit sonic reference, to my ears, is: You have to remember that so many old disco records, even the shittiest ones with the terrible bridges, had seriously kick-ass session players behind them. Technically talented musicians played even the cheesiest Philly International string swoops. I'm not sure what the true/false fake/real breakdown is on Hercules's string and horn parts, my guess is producer Tim and Hercules worked with high-quality synthesizer sounds whose genetic makeup came from expensively recorded string and horn instruments--but the point is this album is very lush, very (for lack of a better word) expensive-sounding record, just so enormous, made to play the Big Room, made for a time when records like "Blind" did in fact play those Big Rooms.

Right now those Big Rooms are, EMI assumes, only in the EU and UK, which (from what I understand) might be why EMI still hasn't figured out a US release for H&LA. It makes sense as a European dance-pop act, but US pop has hip-hop and dancerock on the mind, nothing as straight-up gay/house/disco as this album, so radio-/MSM-wise Hercules would be an uphill battle, a thirteenth labor (if you will), probably a losing investment.

I don't feel this way about many smalltime/non-Radiohead/non-Bjork acts but: If Hercules & Love Affair actually got the push from the right mainstream-making places--and again, I don't even care if these people would be pushing H&LA for disgusting, self-serving, credmongering reasons either--if it got that push, I feel like it could register a seismic and great change for mainstream pop music and MPM audiences. I feel like this record could open the door for similar records. And since it's a dance act, I feel like there's another post to be thought out in which the industry moves away from (for lack of better) rock-type commerce (event-as-spectacle, non-functional one-way products, more overhead and initial investment, fewer but bigger acts) to something like a dance-type commerce (non-spectacle events, functional decentralized and debureaucratized two-way musicmaking, less overhead and forcefed "artist development" more but smaller acts). To a great extent I am a relativist about music--you have yours, I have mine, both are "the best"--but I actually think everyone would be better off hearing this album, things being pangaeatically shitty as they are these days, than not.

THE LOST RIFF OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: MATT WARBURTON

2007-12-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR, I'M A-U-D-I. -FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: MATT WARBURTON
Pitchfork Feature: The 20 Worst Album Covers of 2007

The Worst Album Covers of 2007!!!!!!!

Radiohead – In Rainbows
I get it! I get it! The album’s called “In Rainbows”! Yeesh!

Deerhunter – Cryptograms
You are getting verrrrry sleeeeepy – because of—Bambi?!!!!!! Yuck.

Wu Tang Clan – 8 Diagrams
Too bad none of the diagrams was of what a better album cover might be like. Nice try.

Beirut – The Flying Club Cup
Where’d you get this photo from, my Grandmother?! Nice try.

Feist – The Reminder
I don’t have a good one for this one.

Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Hey, Dan Flavin called and he wants his-- Oh, wait, I thought of a great one for the Feist one. “Hey, look at me, I have colored strings or whatever coming out of my neck. I must be on LSD! Nice album cover, huh?” God, so bad.

Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
“Hey, Lady! Over here! We’re taking the picture for the record album!!!!!” Then she turns around and is ugly. Horrible.

Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer?
The “Mandelbrot” Set? More like The “I-Hate-This” I-Hate-This. Nice try.

The New Pornographers – Challengers
I wish that the guy on this would just punch me. Right in the face. So hard that I just fall back and hit the corner of a table and black out or something. Then I just— I wouldn’t have to look at this. Why did they do this? Why did they do this to me?

Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
Look, I just-- I work really hard and, whatever, I like listening to music and so I go to the store or whatever and I buy this and I want to listen to it. But I just see the cover and I— I’m sorry. This sounds crazy. It’s just. I hate it. I hate it more than anything. I can’t even say--

Dirty Projectors – Rise Above
Why? Why do this? We live in a world full of dark things. And then a band makes me see this. It’s like. I don’t know. I close my eyes and I just keep seeing this. I don’t want to keep dealing with this. I just--

The Field – From Here We Go Sublime
I just can’t—

Okkervil River – The Stage Names
I can’t.

97 S'FANGS

SPIDERRIFFMAS!: WILL WELCH

2007-12-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

***THIS POST CONCLUDES THE 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS***

THANKS FOR READING

-FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: WILL WELCH
I Just Sent An Email

Fang,

I didn’t write anything. I just sent an email to a bunch of people and asked them to spend less than a minute answering three questions. I figured if 35 of them wrote back each having spent under a minute then I would come in under the limbo bar that is my allotted Riff-Quota. 32 wrote back, 2 came in by phone and 1 came in by text message. Thus leaving not one to beg and none to spare. Much thanks to all 35.

Will

* * *

Diplo
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... LCD Soundsystem, “Someone Great.” And the Jama Masjid intro on Bedford & Fulton at 5AM every morning.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... stop drinkin.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... South Africa.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... weird.

Marissa Nadler
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Sammi Smith “Sunday Morning Coming Down”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... get significantly better at the piano.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is...Helsinki, Finland
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... the saunas

Chris Isenberg
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Willie Colon, “Que Lio”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... hold onto my apartment on Leonard between Ainsle and Devoe. A bad, bad beat.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Sun Valley, Idaho
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... fly fishing with Zoe and how good she looked in galoshes.

Brian Winton
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... The Hold Steady, Boys And Girls in America. At first cause I couldn't believe how much they messed up, then because I thought maybe I was wrong, then cause I realized it is Awesome.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... Regrets are for pussies, I have too many to list.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Southaven, MS
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... the most amazing Little League fields I have ever seen, like a Little League stadium almost! Growing up in Southaven probably kind of sucks, but playing baseball there definitely does not.

T-Pain
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Cee-Lo Green, OutKast, and numerous other artists.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... have sexy with Oprah Winfrey.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Japan.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... the Japanese people are very respectful.

Pascal Spengemann
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Delaney & Bonnie & Friends On Tour with Eric Clapton from 1970, starting on New Years Eve 2007 cleaning up after the party. So amazing, and you know where Jason Pierce took his live big band cues from. Coming down in sheets indeed.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... Play a Hex Message show in ’07!
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is...
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... I rode a chartered bus from Austin TX to a ranch in Wimberley, TX for a wedding. Took in the beautiful hill-country landscape with the tinny P.A. piping in a mixtape of Texas artists from Bob Wills to Willy Nelson to Jerry Jeff Walker and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Not every jam was a winner but it kinda made me jealous that I couldn't get all locally nationalistic with my listening. I mean I'm from Northern California so that would be like only having Grateful Dead, Dead Kennedys, Operation Ivy, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape...hold on...that sounds awesome!

Andrew Kuo
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Vampire Weekend CD-R and Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... do a ton of things. Go to Yankee Stadium, read a good book, leave the country, etc etc. But cry me a river... it was a good enough year.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Miami
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... the food sucked.

Ed Droste
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Beach House, Beach House
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... Hang out with Will Welch more, in fact I've only gotten to once in my life, which is fairly tragic.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Dublin, Ireland.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... Playing a show at Whelen's and loving the people there. We were relieved to be out of England.

Caroline McCloskey
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... do my taxes.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Paris
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... a toss-up: getting engaged/stealing a Ricard ashtray from an outdoor cafe on the banks of the Seine/accidentally wearing my dress inside out on the flight back.

Antony
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Nomi’s demos
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... turn gay.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Istanbul.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... being handed a wad of tissues at the door of the sweltering trannie club because I was perceived to be fish.

Jean Touitou
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... "Chérie BB" by Bertrand Burgalat
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... Can’t find regrets. Sorry.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Zürich
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... buildings with the right proportion all over the place.

Michael Schmelling
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Bobby Charles, “I Must Be in a Good Place Now.”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... It sounds stupid to say, “no regrets,” but I'm too superstitious not too. But it woulda been nice to have gone tubing or fishing probably.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Cairo, Egypt
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... The view out of the hotel window at 5AM.

M.I.A.
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... ?
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... learn to fly and get a pilot’s license. What with already bein on the threat list, I had to shelf it and rewrite the year’s goals.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Nîmes, France. It’s where denim was invented.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... celebrating my LP release around a fan's house. His dad cooked amazing food for my whole band and friends and cracked open their best booze and made me smoke cigars all nite.

Jason Nocito
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... the theme song to the Sopranos.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... move out of NYC.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Atlanta.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... going to a strip club called Body Tap and getting called “The Geico Man” by the MC all night.

Rob Mazurek
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Satie, "Famous Pieces," performed by Jeanne Pierre Armengaud
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... learn Portuguese.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Zilina, Slovakia.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... Jason Ajemian's bass exploding during the Exploding Star Orchestra concert.

Nico Muhly
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Final Fantasy, The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... spend a week without speaking.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Gøta, the Faroe Islands, for a music festival.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... lunch with a lady Marine Biologist of a Certain Age and she had me smell the metallic tang of her whaling knife.

Patterson Hood
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Sly and the Family Stone There’s A Riot Goin On (Reissue)
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... actually take a vacation.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Tulsa, OK
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... Playing at Cain’s Ballroom (former home of Bob Wills). Great venue.

Knox Robinson
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... a tie between Kellz “Same Girl” remix and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble “War.”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... manage the band I was “managing.”
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Dublin.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... pouring a full bottle of Spanish rioja on a beautiful girl and watching her get thrown out of the club for it.

Brian Degraw
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Brian Eno, Another Day On Earth
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... dry out.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Istanbul.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... severe panic attacks.

Mark Ronson
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... the opening theme to the TV program “Arrested Development.”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... clean my room.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Moscow.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... walking through Red Square at 2 in the morning.

Valgeir Sigurdsson
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Sam Amidon, All is Well, which is going to be out in 2008.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... spend enough time with Ben Frost.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Minneapolis. Well actually the Minneapolis airport.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... that regardless of me being deported, my friends and bandmates, lead by Nico Muhly, still performed my music and his to a sold-out crowd at the Southern Theater, as scheduled.

Damon McMahon
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Burial
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... think of a thing I didn’t manage to do that I regret.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Kiev.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... eating a ham sandwich, and this waitress with big tits.

Cole Alexander
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Wendy Rene, “After Laughter (Comes Tears).” It is dark sad weird and I guess funny. It’s beautiful, it was probably made most famous now ’days from being sampled by Wu Tang Clan on their 36 Chambers record.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... My only regret is when I lost my passport and got stranded in Portugal and missed playing on “The Culture Show” on the BBC. It would have been cool and I was all alone and bored.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Bethlehem
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... It was quite distinct for me. We played next to a mosque. It was quite sweet and there were lots of children. It was a strange context for our rock band. The most distinct moment was when we played “Johhny B. Goode” and the kids were familiar with it and they sang a Hamas chant over the top of it.

Juston Stens
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Sibylle Baier, Colour Green
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... convince Giselle Bundchen to go on a date with me.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Brisbane.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... driving an hour south to Springbrook for a hike. On the path we came along a little mullet, a common skink.

Hank Shteamer
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Say Anything, “Alive with the Glory of Love”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... learn how to play the piano.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Lubbock, TX.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... playing a show with a party rapper who went by the name Burgers.

Thomas Bartlett
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... R Kelly, “Step in the Name of Love”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... blackout for more than a few hours at a time.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Moscow.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... sitting in traffic.

Paul Major
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... the Geico Caveman commercial where he's on the moving sidewalk at the airport. “And every place I go, always something to remind me, of another place and time....” Song of the year.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... pay off my back taxes.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Buffalo, NY.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... being on Endless Boogie tour where it took 45 minutes to find a candy bar even though we were downtown. The place is deserted...

David Banner
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... The Greatest Story Ever Told (my new album) because it has been a year in the making.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... spend more time with my father before he passed.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Prague.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... 7000 non-English speaking Europeans screaming DA-ZID BANNAH and chanting the words to my songs.

Brian De Ran
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... The Best of Tim Hardin.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... buy a new bed.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Las Vegas.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... breast implants and blackjack.

Ewen Spencer
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Teenage Fanclub, “Take the Skinheads Bowling” (from a live BBC session).
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... meet up with Martin.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Lublijana, Slovenia.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... swimming in a purpose built
19th century oak pool, fed by a 26 degree [Celsius] warm natural spring, situated in a
remote valley covered with snow.

Joshua Wildman
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Esther Phillips, “Home is Where the Hatred Is.”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... Get out of the country. I didn’t leave the States. That’s a bummer.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Fayetteville, Arkansas
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... I saw the most drunk people I ever saw. They were all zombies. The whole bar.

Rick Ross
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... “We Taken Over.” It was a big record for my brother DJ Khaled and the entire movement. We shot it in my city. It was genius. I knew it was gonna be pretty big but when Akon came the way he came, he took it there.
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... sign an in-house producer to the company. We about expanding. Someone who can bring that custom sound. Snoop had his Dre, Big had his Puff. In 2008, that’s definitely goin down.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... The Dominican Republic.
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... that it’s one of the islands we always overlooked. We do shows in the islands all the time but we had never really touched that spot. My distinct memory is the strip clubs. It reminded me of a very extra-Spanish Miami. There was like a bunch of J-Lo’s in the club. Some of them were badder than J-Lo.

Hank Sullivant
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Spacemen 3, “Big City (Everybody I Know Can Be Found Here)”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... decide Myspace wasn’t gay.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... London
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... I remember playing on the BBC radio Christmas special with MGMT surrounded by a sauced Kazoo marching band and a bonzo-wasted reindeer helium choir. Airs Christmas Eve. Real.

Carol Lim
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... Beachwood Sparks, “By Your Side”
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... go to the pyramids.
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Guimaraes, Portugal
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... the monastery hotel is so enchanting.

Kevin Pedersen
1. The piece of music I listened to more than any other in 2007 has been... ?
2. One regret about 2007 is that I never managed to... ?
3. a. One city or town I went to this year that I had never been to before is... Vancouver
b. My most distinct memory from being there is... I was there to see this band Sex Vid—their single “Tania” is a rager. It was a week before my brother’s bachelor party and I had dinner and strip clubs planned but nothing crazy. Anyway in Van City there was an old man singing with this band and I asked my local friend Jeff, “Who is the geezer?” He says, “Oh that’s William Gibson.” My brother was a huge WG fan and on one occasion made me go to a book signing for him. Here was my chance to convince my brother’s favorite author to fly to NY and hang out and blow my bro’s mind with some far out stories and cement my place as coolest brother ever. I went up to the old guy as he was thrusting his hips toward a wall in some bizarre dance and asked, “Are you William Gibson?” He replied, “Only if there’s cash in advance.”

97 S'FANGS

THE TWELFTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: CHRIS SCHLEICHER

2007-12-24T21:00:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist-- FANG.

YEAR IN RIFFS: CHRIS SCHLEICHER
My Riff: The Year in Music

When I was first asked to cover the year in music, I was a little intimidated. Me writing about music? For some background, I kind of look like a 1950s prom king and my music sensibilities tend to be very Dick-Clark-American-Bandstand-it-has-a-good-beat-and-you-can-dance-to-it. Who am I to judge music? I don’t even know what Pitchfork is. Is it a magazine? Is it a website? No, wait, maybe it’s a blogosphere. I’m pretty sure it’s a blogosphere.

But wait a second, I have just as much of a right to say what I think about the year in music as any of those hipster indie types. (Did I use those words right? Can hipster and indie be the same thing or are they deadly enemies like Bloods and Kryps?) I may be a slave to the top 40, but that doesn’t mean I can’t come up with a valid top 10 songs that made a difference in music this year. Strap yourselves in and get ready for a ride into my dome. This is my year in music:

#10 – Rihanna ft. Jay-Z – Umbrella
Nothing happened in music between Jan. 1 and March 28th. Then Rihanna dropped this bomb on us all the way from Barbados – a place I’m pretty sure is a country, but might be a resort in Florida somewhere. And this bomb wasn’t one of those scary bombs that hurt the nervous systems of subway-goers. It was a bomb filled with joy, life, Apple Garageband’s Vintage Funk Kit 03, and a good beat that you could dance to. Yes, Rihanna, I will stand under your umbrella anytime. And I will gladly listen to Jay-Z rap while we comfortable share one of those large golf umbrellas that are awkward to walk down a sidewalk with.

#9 – Rihanna – Umbrella (Lindbergh Palace Remix)
You can only play the original “Umbrella” a couple thousand times before it gets boring. Let’s remix this bad boy. I’m sitting around listening to “Umbrella,” caressing my signed autograph of Rihanna when I think to myself, “I wish there was a version of Umbrella that was a lot like the original, but somehow gayer.” Then I hear this remix. It makes you want to go out, put on some body glitter, sit down to watch “Project Runway,” but then change the channel to a hockey game because you refuse to perpetuate a stereotype. This one comes in at #9 because of the unfortunate reference to Lindbergh in the title. Did you know he was a Nazi?

#8 – Rihanna ft. Elephant Man – Umbrella (Dancehall Remix)
I shake my Magic 8 ball and say, “Magic 8 ball, send me a reggaeton version of Umbrella.” It sends me this delightful re-imagining of... the greatest song ever written? P.S. Rihanna, have I ever told you that you are beautiful? Because I think you are beautiful. You don’t have to respond. Just mull it over.

#7 – Rihanna ft. Lil Mama – Umbrella Remix
I like when people are clear with their intentions. Lil Mama, you didn’t disappoint me, starting your remix with the words “Remix. This is the remix. Remix. This is the remix.” You make me wonder how in fact “Umbrella” is like “The Magic School Bus” as you claim. But then I realize. “Umbrella” is a lot like “The Magic School Bus.” They’re both about learning, loving, living, and the water cycle.

#6 – Rihanna ft. Ne-Yo - Hate That I Love You
Nice job, Rihanna. You’ve remixed this to an almost unrecognizable level. New lyrics too. I’m starting to worry about you though. Maybe you should get back to basics. And who’s this Ne-Yo guy? Maybe you should get around to answering your fan mail before you go out making new friends and writing new lyrics. Just saying. Maybe you should give something back every now and then. I made you a hand-turkey. Still waiting for the “thank you.”

#5 – Rihanna ft. Travis Barker – Umbrella Remix
There we go, Rihanna. A lot like the original but much, much louder. Check plus.

#4 – Mandy Moore – Umbrella
I loved Chasing Liberty.

#3 – Rihanna - Umbrella (acoustic)
I’m so sorry that I doubted you, Rihanna. God damn you, I love you so much. Why do you make me do this to myself, Rihanna?

#2 – Rihanna ft. Chris Brown - Cinderella Under the Umbrella
Ok, Rihanna. I get it. You’ve found another Chris. And he’s gonna make you his Cinderella. I understand. He’s a big movie star. Stomp the Yard was great and truthspirational, and I’m sure Last Christmas is fun for the whole family, but come on. I gave you my heart. I’m sorry about all those messages I left you. I just... relationships are tough, huh. But you know, “took an oath I’m-a stick it out to the end” and all that. I’m gonna be a big man about this. I’m not jealous of this Chris Brown. I’m gonna put this song at #2 just to prove it to you.

#1 – Rihanna ft. Jay-Z – Umbrella (via youtube)
It’s been a rough year for the two of us. Ups and downs. Rainstorms and more rainstorms. I’d almost forgotten what made me love you. I usually stop watching your video on youtube when it seems like the song is over. But this time, I watched it to the end, and saw your personal message: “Thanks for watching my new video. I’m really excited about being a CoverGirl, so make sure you check out my favorite gloss, Fruit Spritzers at covergirl.com.” All this time, you’d been thanking me every time I watched your video and I was just too impatient to realize it. I can be such an idiot sometimes. I love you because you are a CoverGirl and you are easy and breezy and beautiful and yes I will try out Fruit Spritzers. They look delicious.

97 S'FANGS

THE TWELFTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: SEAN BOYLAND

2007-12-24T18:00:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist-- FANG.

YEAR IN RIFFS: SEAN BOYLAND
The Song Belongs To Everyone Now

A caveat: Prior to riffing, I conducted research to find out what happened this year in music, since I did not, for the most part, notice. An obvious exception is Person Pitch, which was good. Did you know that? More information on the topic can be found on the Internet. I deleted my first and dull effort, preserving in the following two key points - my clumsy efforts to connect to today's youth, and the apparent continuing existence of The Pipettes. I added a charming personal anecdote, and the eschatological woes which consumed many of my idle moments in 2007.

Neon Bible was bad, but 8 Diagrams and In Rainbows were not.

A while ago, I decided that I should familiarize myself with popular American culture, and watch High School Musical or its sequel or listen to My Chemical Romance or Rihanna or etc, but I did not. At Thanksgiving, my cousins and I had to explain what High School Musical and Hannah Montana were to our various parents. Then my older cousins and I had to try to discuss the Hudgens nude pictures and other High School Musical related scandals without letting Anna, who is younger, know what we were talking talking about. It was hilarious.

I have not yet found the kind of skeptical-yet-forgiving mood that would compel me to watch I'm Not There, so add that to your list of things I did not do in 2007. Another entry is "care about Walk Hard." I saw Rock the Bells, which was great.

Western civilization is going to collapse. Climate change, AIDS, super-resistant bacteria, and impoverished former SSR's with nuclear arsenals have been with us for a while. It's just that now they're all going to happen. Did you know that Russia has more nuclear warheads than the rest of the world combined? I hope that everything is going well over there! I bet it is! I just bring up all this doom and gloom stuff for fun because there is going to be a global economic depression imminently.

The Pipettes (they still exist!) seem like the musical equivalent of the magic jelly-beans in Harry Potter that taste like earwax. Clearly not the sort of jelly-bean anyone should put in their mouths, yet look at all the children, grinning like monkeys and holding bags of the things. Go figure! Except I think part of the Pipettes' appeal is sex appeal, so imagine the children also have pornography. Fetish pornography, for people who get turned on by giant eyeglasses and women dressed in the kind of clothes our grandmothers wore. I imagine there's a really juicy spread in the middle of the magazine with a woman talking on a bakelite phone while using a canister vacuum and rationing meat. Are you ready to have sex yet, reader? Did you know that the Pipettes don't even write their own music? That's right: sweater-wearing greasy-haired nerds are now a lucrative enough demographic that someone manufactured a Menudo/Vengaboys style fake music group just to cater to them. Who is your favorite Pipette? Mine's the ugly one!

I never thought I would say this, but I became somewhat fond of a song by the Incredible String Band, "Swift As the Wind." For the benefit of younger readers, Incredible String Band is similar to and almost as awful as The Decembrists (sp?).

Song of the year - honorable mentions to Nurse & Soldier for that song I liked, "Goin' Against Your Mind" which I listened to more this year than last, "Wolves" of course, next year's "Three Way" from the Magnetic Fields, "Hey Muscles I Love You," Liz Pappademas, Aqueduct, The Little Ones, "Violent Past," oh, all kinds of great songs. And the winner is: "Five Years" by David Bowie. Enjoy it while you can, because next year it will be comically inaccurate. Because next year it will only be four years until the apocalypse. And zero years until the global economic depression.

The best album of 2007 was Spiderman of the Rings by Dan Deacon.

But, reader! I actually did join in on part of contemporary culture this year. I learned how to crank dat Soulja Boy. In totally 2007 fashion, I loaded up "Soulja Boy Tellem - How to Crank That - INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO!" on my Wii's Opera, cleared my coffee table to the side, and obeyed patiently. I am one of the over twenty one million views of Soulja Boy's instructional video on how to crank dat. In fact, I'm several, maybe a couple dozen. I don't crank dat well; I don't crank dat suitably for public exhibition, but if pressed, I can crank dat. Yes, note my repeated use of "dat" where Soulja Boy himself at times says "that." Look, jerks, the song belongs to everyone now, that's the whole point. It doesn't matter. I did it because I liked the song. Because I liked the way the people on YouTube danced, all the teens in their uniformly nice suburban houses, with the same undecorated beige walls from the YouTube videos of teens playing songs on electric piano from Final Fantasy IV or Regina Spektor or what have you and the same as all YouTube videos - you know, AMERICA, where I resent teens for being upper middle class, but sympathize with them for their mundane parents' dull beige homes, but also envy their abilities to play the electric piano/dance. I did it because I generally mean to dance more, in my private moments, to get better at dancing and to exercise, although I rarely remember. Because it's fun to have projects. Because I really do want to connect somehow with America's youth. The whole process was super earnest, readers! Suck it!

If I had money, I guess I would probably convert my cash and other financial assets into hard goods, mainly bullets and some canned foods. If, if, if! I know it sucks to be a war profiteer, but it also sucks to not be a war profiteer in a world where only war profiteers have fun. Anyways, we only have so many years of uncivilized chaos before climate change and epidemics kill everyone, so may as well live it up trading bullets for cigarettes, right?

I'd like to live in a cave in Nunavut for a while, cook on the fire, hunt for food and talk to my dog. I'd like to loot the occasional condo complex. I'd like to steal a book from the library about how to plant things, compile my own sort of Junior Woodchuck's Guidebook/Tobin's Spirit Guide/American Boy's Handy Book. Folks, I think I'm going to like the latest of many arrivals of the eternal hun! Until we all die from heat stroke and lack of potable water.

Some Loud Thunder - **** of *****. Did that come out in 2007 or 2006?

97 S'FANGS

THE TWELFTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: PETER NELSON

2007-12-24T15:00:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist-- FANG.

YEAR IN RIFFS: PETER NELSON
Classical Music in 2007

So I've been hearing some conflicting facts about classical music these days:

"Classical music is dead!"

"Classical music is more alive than ever!"

"So classical music is both dead and alive like some sort of vampire-zombie?!?!"

"Have you played Quake? You can only kill zombies with explosives."

What to make of all this? I've boiled down all the hubbub to the absolute core essentials:

-Over 19,000 new classical music releases this year alone.

-Pregnant women listening to Mozart will give birth to babies that look a lot like Mozart.

-Yo-Yo Ma is still alive.

Even though none of these things is true, it still makes me optimistic for 2008.

Plus, here's my all-time top five classical music albums (revised for 2007):
1. Amadeus Soundtrack
2. Amadeus Gold Soundtrack
3. Amadeus Special Remaster Soundtrack
4. Amadeus [listening to the DVD audio with the TV turned off]
5. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

In sum, I present you with some notable happenings of classical music's 2007:

-Philip Glass' new composition, The Book of Longing, was set to the poetry of Leonard Cohen.

-Electric violinist Tracy Silverman played concerts of John Adams' ethereal The Dharma at Big Sur.

-Dawn Upshaw sang again and received a MacArthur grant.

-Twenty-six year old sensation Gustavo Dudamel took the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

-New Yorker critic Alex Ross released his much-anticipated, expansive, and inordinately sage The Rest Is Noise.

-Choral composer Morten Lauridsen was recognized with a National Medal of Arts.

-Zarin Mehta announced the New York Philharmonic will be cultural ambassadors to Pyongyang.

-András Schiff played and talked about all 32 Beethoven sonatas for The Guardian, who released these lectures for free online.

-The passings of Stockhausen, Rostropovich, Sills, and Pavarotti were mourned.

97 S'FANGS

THE TWELFTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: ALAN YANG

2007-12-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist-- FANG.

YEAR IN RIFFS: ALAN YANG
THIS YEAR IN GUNS

This year, instead of listening to music, I decided to get into guns. It wasn’t hard. Every time I thought about listening to a song on iTunes, I shot Steve Jobs instead. Every time I wanted to hear Arcade Fire, I let Win Butler shoot Steve Jobs. Guns are very versatile.

Wikipedia defines a gun as a metal thing that shoots holes in cowboys’ hats [citation needed]. Armed with this information, I went to a gun range, where I armed myself in a different way – with information from a gun brochure.

I then went back to this gun range every day for the remainder of 2007. Needless to say, I learned a lot about guns. You shouldn’t wave them around, even if you make it very clear you’re doing a bit. You can paint a gun gold, but you can’t force people to call you The Man With The Golden Gun. You can grind guns up, and that’s how you make gunpowder. I tried many guns:

9 MILLIMETER
This is a starter gun, or as it’s advertised, “Finally, a gun for babies designed by babies.”

STARBURY HANDGUN
Because he sympathizes so much with underprivileged youth, professional basketballer Stephon Marbury came up with the idea of manufacturing these guns, which retail for a very reasonable five cents per gun. The only catch is, everyone knows how cheap they are, so they’re not cool – even though they’re guns. Also, they’re not guns. They are plastic knives.

DICK CHENEY RIFLE
A fluted bolt shroud and stainless steel barrel make this rifle lighter than most, and a .705 inch muzzle diameter enhances accuracy and heat resistance.

RUGER P345, “THE HUMAN-KILLER”
“Human-Killer” is a misnomer – this gun specializes in killing women.

WALTHER P22 SEMI-AUTOMATIC, CHO SEUNG-HUI AUTOGRAPHED MODEL
They don’t sell this. That would be pretty fucked up if they did, though.

CHO SEUNG-HUI
I brought in a supersized poster of this guy and they allowed me to use it as my target.

MATTHEW MURRAY
Likewise.

JFK
They did not allow this one.

A SHEET OF PAPER WITH THE WORDS “THE PRESIDENT” WRITTEN ON IT
No.

FASHION’S TOP “GUNN” OF 2007
Michael Kors.

97 S'FANGS

THE TWELFTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: ROB KLEIN

2007-12-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist-- FANG.

YEAR IN RIFFS: ROB KLEIN
One Morning in the Life of a Guy Who Posts Comments on the Internet

Good morning, internet! You're looking well, old friend. Share with me now your delights, won't you?

I believe I shall begin with youtube. I do so love a good youtube! Look, here is a short comedic video made by some teenagers.

...

Hm. Not as funny as I'd hoped. Though I do suppose it could've been worse. I shall offer them my honest reaction by typing out a brief yet pithy comment: "I think...that you guys are fags...and I honestly wish...I could cut off your dicks...and rape you to death with them..."

There. That seems fair. Onward then, to politics! I think I'll read some conservative blogs today. I know I'm a democrat but perhaps this will be the day OH MY GOD WHAT THE MOTHERFUCK IS THIS. WHO DOES THIS GAPING ASSHOLE THINK HE IS EXPRESSING CONSERVATIVE VIEWPOINTS ON A WEBSITE FOR CONSERVATIVES. Goodness. I must help this vulgarian to see the error in his ways. I shall do this by comparing him to a bucket full of a retarded man's farts.

Aaaand done. What's next? Ah, here's an imdb thread addressing the films of Will Ferrell. And this commenter thinks "Blades of Glory" his best performance. Ha! I shall set him straight, posthaste! "Everyone...with half a brain...knows the jews planned 9-11."

You know, I'm not certain that actually gets across all my thoughts on Will Ferrell. Yet it makes some valuable points, like my hatred of jews, and the fact that I am an idiot. I think I'll leave it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go chat with some coworkers and serve as coach to my daughter's youth soccer team.

97 S'FANGS

THE NINTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: DON POLLYANNA

2007-12-21T16:00:00.000-05:00

Dark knights! You know it's been a minute since I've been back in old fang country--Wu Wear HQ whaddup!--coasting the ferry parking lots on my 'goose, bunnyhopping over boxes of ganked Yankee farmteam merch till Ma Liberty killed the moonlights, my man Don Pollyanna riding on my back pegs looking for half-smokes to puff, the Jack Sparrow of this shit if there ever was one--it has been a minute!! So what I'm going to do is take it back for you, when the internet was just a thing I drew on Mario Paint, when a man was a man when the second after Boy Meets World finished up 9pm, he was in the bathroom getting his quiet riot on to Topanga's hot asian friend in that doubledate episode with all the frenching. IT HAS BEEN A MINUTE!!

LADIES AND GENTLEMAN THIS IS A JAZZY PHANG INTRODUCTION: MY MAN DON POLLYANNA IS IN THE BUILDING!! CHECK IT OUT!

ALSO CHECK OUT:
YEAR IN RIFFS: P. COLTON SPIDERFANG
YEAR IN RIFFS: THE REAL JAKE THE SNAKE

YEAR IN RIFFS: DON POLLYANNA
Ambler Campus

What would Johnson, Frodo, Ranger or Jones be without Boswell, Tonto, Sam or Short-Round? Well, what would a canvas be without an easel? I first learned of the sidekick and their rich tradition while studying at Temple University's Ambler Campus; auditing course called Ill Get That, Boss: Behind Every Great man, Another Man. But to know how I joined this regal fellowship, and how I met the great man, and how I would become the man behind him, one most go back 10 years, to hip-hop's raging days of puberty.

They say only bastards and frozen yogurt come from New Jersey and in 1995 I found a dark metaphorical truth to the cliché. For, in my soul, I was just a recently-orphaned child, wandering through a gargantuan TCBY, looking for, in the parlance of the time, for someone to shove.

I was a pauper then. I had lost a small fortune in the great angel dust crash of 91, and had squandered the rest of my savings in an ill advised investment in the Troop clothing line's first foray into the men's fragrance arena (blunt smoke...perhaps you recall it). I found myself in a barren way, so I took to wandering the garden state for revival of finance and spirit.

It was on the periphery of the set of New Jersey Drive that I met Spiderfang. The location for the under-appreciated Nick Gomez film had become, ironically, something of a Wailing Wall for the region's most enterprising car thieves, as well as any other man of nefarious intentions. On the outskirts of the film's motor pool we created our own Moss Eisley space port. It was a band of brothers. We sang the blues.

'Everybody on the Isle knows I'm the original “Incarcerated Scarface.” Raekwon got no fucking respect for intellectual property!

“1989, right? I was in the bing for stealing the stereo volume knobs out of Mercury Cougars, cause my thieving game was so fucking personally tailored to the wants and needs of the Tri-state stolen auto accessories consumer. I got sent on an up north trip. Not my first. And I didn’t give a fuck because I was in my Chippewa Indian zone, and bars can't contain the motherfucking Little Sturgeon!’

This brief digression was hardly an inconsequential. I would later find that Spider considered the Wu-Tang Clan to be kleptomaniacs when it came to his ideas. In the early 90’s, upon his release fro Valhalla, Spider was in the process of raising a 9-man rap ensemble, the iconography and vocabulary of which were rooted in his fascination with the Chippewa tribe. Spider’s vision for the group, which he had dubbed War Eagles, was to include a no doubt potent mix of Chippewa imagery, shot through the lens of the trife life he had lived on the streets of Staten Island.

When the Wu-Tang Clan commenced their Sherman’s March into the American consciousness, Spider was crestfallen.

‘Staten Island is a small fucking place. Bitches talk. It’s like Designing Women,’ he told me, in his inimitable style. In his view point, one I share, as if it needs to be stated, the Rza had appropriated the mythological infrastructure of War Eagles, replaced the Native American spirituality with the Orientalist, zen-warrior mysticism of Kung-Fu films, and deftly sold it to the youth of White America who were desperately looking for a version of rap that wasn’t so dogmatically concerned with reality.

“Enter the 36 Chambers…Squaking Buffalo of the High Country…you telling me that’sa coincidence?

So the seeds of lifelong feud with members of Wu-Tang were already sowed before Raekwon got his cocaine dusted hands on another piece of Spider Fang’s personal history.

“One day in the weight lifting area, some dude cut the line for the 20-pound dumbbells. So I told him if he didn’t respect the order of the yard I was gonna take that dumbbell and examine his prostate with it.! I ain’t gay! But you need to let these sluts know the pecking order!

“This little fucking Gremlin whips out an Oral B 24-Soft fashioned into fucking Excalibur. I shouted, ‘Not the face!’ And you know what happens next? He cut my face! But I respected that. Never let another man tell what is and isn’t possible!’

His disfiguration was not without its charms. Prison puts a high value on empirical evidence of one’s mettle (or so I’m told). And nothing says, ‘I’m a superconductor of violence’ like a scar from a crude blade/oral hygiene tool, bisecting one’s face. Spider became the stuff nightmares are made of; there was chatter: “Spiderfang, the scarface from C-Block, he’ll give you a colonoscopy with a dumbbell and he won’t even ask nicely before he goes in.”

Upon his release, and his return to Shaolin (as it was by then re-christened) the legend of the ‘Incarcerated Scarface’ grew. Spider did little to temper the rumor mongering, paying no heed to those who might be in the business of appropriating the legend for their own purposes. Spider liked to invoke Charles Foster Kane, “You can't buy a bag of peanuts in this town without someone writing a song about you. AND THAT’S WHAT THAT BURGLAR SHALLAH RAEKWON DID! BUT HE DIDN’T ADD, “DEDICATED TO AND INSPIRED BY THE ORIGINAL RIVER FROM WHERE MY CREEK OF A CAREER IS DRAWN, THE ARACHNOID MC SPIDERFANG; MY ARTISTIC FATHERFIGURE UNDER WHICH I SUFFER THE GREAT ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE!”

You could’ve heard a Dutch being split.

97 S'FANGS

THE NINTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: THE REAL JAKE THE SNAKE

2007-12-21T14:00:00.000-05:00

Dark knights! You know it's been a minute since I've been back in old fang country--Wu Wear HQ whaddup!--coasting the ferry parking lots on my 'goose, bunnyhopping over boxes of ganked Yankee farmteam merch till Ma Liberty killed the moonlights, my man Don Pollyanna riding on my back pegs looking for half-smokes to puff, the Jack Sparrow of this shit if there ever was one--it has been a minute!! So what I'm going to do is take it back for you, when the internet was just a thing I drew on Mario Paint, when a man was a man when the second after Boy Meets World finished up 9pm, he was in the bathroom getting his quiet riot on to Topanga's hot asian friend in that doubledate episode with all the frenching. IT HAS BEEN A MINUTE!!

On the ninth day of SPIDERRIFFMAS today I got my man the Real Jake the Snake giving you a taste of his next verse for my next single, it's gonna be called FANG GANG. It's got this soul feel to it, but with like ten-thousand guitars. Shoutout to my man DJ Hometaping--he's murdering the game! FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: THE REAL JAKE THE SNAKE
GUEST VERSE

Real recognize real, Fang. Snake's in the motha fuckin house. Let 'em know.

Hey, yo, yo, Fang talk about trickin all his "Google Earth Bitches".

Meanwhile Snake constrictin on all you fuckin snitches.

My scales, my scales, my scales, uh!

Poison, bitch!

Let's go!

Defamation, desquamation, A! A!

Hustlin, bitch, you know snake's got that yay! Ya!

You don't see me, but I'm comin,

So slippery, Snake in the grass,

Rat-tat-a-tat-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tattle,

I straight fuck up yo' life when I bite all yo' tenda cattle.

Hustlin, bustlin, rappin, bitin, hissin, rattlin, killin, lova,

Makin that pussy all kinds of wet when Snake's winding up inside ya

Mad, crazy nice, son,

Eatin tons of mice, son,

That's the type of shit I'm on,

Rattlin to the break of dawn,

Pussy ass rappers best get gone,

I'll bite you.

Snakes.

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!

I'm out.

Get venom!

97 S'FANGS

THE NINTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: P. COLTON SPIDERFANG

2007-12-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

YEAR IN RIFFS: P. COLTON SPIDERFANG
Genesis

Dark knights! You know it's been a minute since I've been back in old fang country--Wu Wear HQ whaddup!--coasting the ferry parking lots on my 'goose, bunnyhopping over boxes of ganked Yankee farmteam merch till Ma Liberty killed the moonlights, my man Don Pollyanna riding on my back pegs looking for half-smokes to puff, the Jack Sparrow of this shit if there ever was one--it has been a minute!! So what I'm going to do is take it back for you, when the internet was just a thing I drew on Mario Paint, when a man was a man when the second after Boy Meets World finished up 9pm, he was in the bathroom getting his quiet riot on to Topanga's hot asian friend in that doubledate episode with all the frenching. IT HAS BEEN A MINUTE!! You think Topanga's hot asian friend's got a Google Alert? Chirp back lover! THEREALSPIDERFANG@GMAIL.COM. Anyway this is my year in riffs I was talking about way back, it's called GENESIS. It's got this cool style, it's how I used to think before the accident. Flip those 'burgers! FANG.

Genesis by Spiderfang

In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them. I took off my shirt thinking my shirt is off believing if she sees me with my shirt off she'll see my valley the valley in my chest it looks like darkness when I shower it goes to sleep hoping I wish the darkness would go to sleep forever. In the water was a face that was my face, and in my face were eyes, and mouths with crumb stains, they hung from follicles I had never seen but knew I had them, like we forget that we have blood in our hands until those hands are cut, and what bleeds isn't blood but a reminder of our bloodness.

I look at the face in the water. It's a kind face but a tired face, weathered with lines like tree rings, some fat others skinny if I am tree then a tree is an I, if is were she would not know she would never see under the shirt, if were was I would be a tree and my shirt is just the bloodness of my pastness. I punch the face. I punch it and it goes away, but then it comes back again, laughing at my fist with its waves and laughing at my face which is the same face, slurping back first in waves like the ocean then little ones like pa's fish bowl when he would put my fingers in it. He would put our fingers in it and the fish would nibble at our fingers and I would think this fish is going to eat all my fingers but my fingers won't come back like my face in the spring and the water would get cold he doesn't care about my finger he just cares about my not-finger and I would cry because I like my finger but pa likes my not-finger and pa likes the fish. Colton, pa said, you stop crying Colton, you stop that now. Goldie got to ett, he said to me, and Colton that's why you never wash your hands, never wash your hands Colton, Goldie got to ett. And he said this to me, and his eyes were like holes in trees and scaring me like my darkness.

I will never wash my hands ever again

Looking into the spring I lean down and my hands are dirty from the mud by the water. My shirt is off still but it is not dirty, it is pure. I sit there looking up at the sun, right at it like it wants to say something to me. I want to stop the looking but looking believes more than remembering looking never again, not for nothing. I take my hands and I push them towards each other on my belly, the mud and the hair together and my belly is now two hills and in between the hills is a valley, a dark line where the hair hides and the mud. I am looking into the spring. I see the belly in the spring, and I see the two hills thinking there are four hills now thinking there are four hills and two valleys and two faces and twenty fingers and no fishes I pull my fingers away from my belly before the fishes get our fingers, but the mud is still there and my shirt is on the grass by the mud, and it is pure. Never wash your hands Colton ok pa I won't Colton why don't you put the bike down and help your pa with something in the garage I look at the shirt and put my hands on the shirt, and then I look back at the sun and I cry. The smoke from the factories, I see the city lights and the purple fog of overnight commerce hang over the island, and I see the stadium and the beaten colors of the vending machine, yellowed from the distance and the sun, thinking cash rules everything around me looking back at the sun and looking for the my valley but it was disappeared.

IN CONCLUSION: IT HAS BEEN A MINUTE!!

Download: "Triple FAT Goose (The Real Spiderfang Fangs Out Fangmix)"

97 S'FANGS

THE EIGHTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: DANNY CHUN

2007-12-20T14:30:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist-- FANG.

YEAR IN RIFFS: DANNY CHUN
My Favorite Part of the Song

It was a great year for music. I don’t think anyone would argue that 2007 was all about the quarter notes. And if December’s new releases are any indication, ’08 will be the year of the half rest, and that excites the fuck out of me.

Anyway, this piece is about Rock Band. You're all as familiar with that game as I am, right? No? Here we go!

What It Is Like To Be A Fan At A Concert
In The Game Rock Band

SETTING: NEW YORK’S LEGENDARY HEEBIE JEEBIE’S.
I’m so excited for this show. The band, The Farts, is from London but they won a private jet at a concert and now they’re in America looking for a sound guy so that next they can get roadies. I’ve never heard them but they say the drummer, KindBud1337, is really good, plus he’s got a new pair of pants that he’s pretty happy with. Oh weird, that fan over there looks exactly like me. Come to think of it, there are only like four different kinds of people in this whole audience. And they’re all pumping their fists in unison. As am I.

Nice, the band just got on stage. They're doing a random setlist, which is one of those concerts where the band doesn't know what song they're going to play until it starts. I wish they'd just play their hits, like "Say It Ain’t So" and "Dani California."

There’s the singer, a black guy with sunglasses and a leisure suit. And his amazing guitarist, a long-haired goth with spiky shoulder pads. And their rock-solid bass player, a girl in a miniskirt. And there’s KindBud1337 on the drums. Boy am I ready to hear some rock music!

Yes, they’re playing their new song "Vasoline" by Stone Temple Pilots! I love this song! KindBud1337 is really tearing it up on drums. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap -- the man is out of control! Every time he hits the drum, four notes come out. Uh oh here comes a yellow note...he got it! He made ten notes in a row without messing up -- I’m going to start appreciating him twice as much per note. If he does it again, my appreciation will triple. When it comes to rock music, nothing matters like consistency. Oh man, his drum fills are awful. How can his normal playing be so magical, yet his drum fills so horrendous?

This is my favorite part of the song. But the drummer keeps messing up! And now he's been kicked out of the band, mid-song. He's just sitting there doing nothing. Wait, the guitar player tilted his guitar and now the drummer can play again. I guess I'm fine with that. All right, the song's over. What will they play next?

“29 Fingers" by the Konks? What is this shit? I’m out of here. Oh wait, I can’t move.

Jesus, his drum fills are terrible.

97 S'FANGS

THE EIGHTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: LEILA STRACHAN

2007-12-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist

FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: LEILA STRACHAN
AN INTERVIEW WITH LES VINYL

This week I had the privilege of interviewing American singer-songwriter Les Vinyl to get his take on 2007.

LAS: First of all, I’m a huge fan. Thank you for doing this interview.

Les Vinyl: Wow, so this must be so weird for you then. Wow. I'm imagining being you: I feel excited, honored, hungry… Wow. You're so welcome.

LAS: I hope you don’t mind the Old Spaghetti Factory. I love this place.

LV: I prefer the Cheesecake Factory but Spaghetti Factory is also pretty perfect. Did you ever go to that dance club Sound Factory? The food is terrible.

LAS: Once I went to the Harley Davidson Factory. I didn’t eat any food, but our tour guide did tell us that they “try to use as many robots as possible”. Oh, and definitely order whatever you want. This is totally on me, by the way. Alright, let’s do this: Concerts. I went to see The Handsome Family this year, and they have a song about Tesla and in it he eats saltines. I guess for that reason, it was my favorite concert of 2007. Also I think maybe it was the only concert I went to. What is your best 2007 concert story? I’ve thrown out Tesla/saltines. Top it.

LV: The Animal Collective dudes were definitely the group of the year. Strawberry Jam, Person Pitch, Pullhair Rubeye (re-reversed): Those were my most played albums this year. I saw Animal Collective twice. Once at the South Street Seaport and the other time at Webster Hall. The Webster Hall show was baller. Everything they play is so deliberate. I was dancing with strangers all night. Months prior to the concert I had downloaded loads of live performance torrents so when the show rolled around I was familiar with every song. I also saw Panda Bear play solo at Bowery Ballroom. That was a Blastoise (awesome pokemon reference).

LAS: Okay let’s get real: the Kanye West/50 Cent feud. What was your role in all this?

LV: Look, I only sell bullets. Does that mean I know where, who, and why they are used? Friend, the answer is no. Only when.

LAS: Do you think Kanye got dissed at the MTVVMAs? That guy complains a lot. But also he’s so awesome! How do you reconcile these facts?

LV: I admit it. I mean, I wouldn’t say I have my Player Hater Degree but ugghhh, I’m so mad at all the attention this little gopher-cheeked-baby-bitch gets. Then I hear “Flashing Lights”- double ugghhh. I really love mid/late 90s pop rap and Kanye knows how to take me there.

LAS: Also remember at the MTVVMAs when Chris Brown was doing awesome dancing and he was totally jumping from one thing onto another thing, like “Fuck it, whatever, I’ll jump that shit, don’t even worry about it.”? That was awesome.

LV: Truth is I was controlling him from my computer. It said I can win a free ipod if I jump Chris Brown from one stage thing to another. Unfortunately, all I won was a sub par Rihanna performance of “umbrella” with more distorted guitars and live drums. I guess I’m stuck with this MiniDisc player.

LAS: How is your Mizithra sauce by the way? That’s the thing I always think I’m going to order, but then never do, you know?

LV: Zeus couldn’t have made it better himself. I could be eating Ambrosia, I can’t tell.

LAS: Okay, I really love your song “Ghosts”. Can I tell you a scary story? True story: I was all alone in this big house in the middle of the night. And there was a lot of creaking and rattling. And then I started hearing weird gothic piano music, and then maybe some Bjork. And then Joni Mitchell. And then some They Might Be Giants. And it was impossible to tell where it was coming from. I’ve watched enough Medium and Criminal Minds to know that this was obviously either a ghost or a serial killer trying to gaslight me. It was probably my most important musical experience of 2007. Do you have any 2007 ghost stories?

LV: One. It was around June. I was continuously spilling hot coffee on my crotch until the cups I had laid out turned cold. You see, I had a lot of time to kill because I was late for meeting with my late wife (may she rest in peace) Rebecca “The Vertigo” Hitchcock. She had news for me… She’s late! I anticipated this so I dropped a clammy handful of money on the table of St. Peter’s Gourmet and bounced. I took the shuttle bus from heaven to my red bean bag chair hideout. Yeah, June was cray-cray.

LAS: No one said having the gift would be easy. I think that’s the point of that show Ghost Whisperer, but I don’t know I’ve never actually seen it. Now, the one thing on everybody’s mind: 2007 and still no flying cars? Wtf, right?

LV: Riiiiiiiiiight. Wink! Write that. Write “wink”.

LAS: We lost a lot of big names this year. I’ve included an abbreviated deathwall below. What song would you dedicate to each person? (You can include songs from any year, including the future.)

Norman Mailer (Writer)
LV: As tribute to “The White Negro” and to Norman, I choose Eminem – Without Me

Ingmar Bergman (Filmmaker)
LV: Keepin’ it Swedish: The Cardigans – Beautiful One

Jerry Fallwell (Evangelist)
LV: The Hidden Cameras – Ban Marriage

Evel “The Daredevil” Knievel (Daredevil)
LV: Gorillaz – DARE. I know. “too easy”. First off, go stab yourself in the face! Second: I will always love this song and this man.

Marcel Marceau (Mime)
LV: Oh man, The Shangri-Las – Out in Street

Ernst Gallo (Winemaker)
LV: Mobb Deep – Quiet Storm. I want either this or neutral milk hotel – three peaches played at my funeral.

LAS: Okay, I get it. I didn’t ask for your life story.

Vladimir Kryuchkov (KGB Chief, Gorbachev plotter-againster)
LV: TLC – Red Light Special

Barbaro (Racehorse)
LV: Department of Eagles – The Horse You Ride

Jean Baudrillard (Philosopher)
LV: Cracker – Get out of my head

Momfuku Ando (Cup of Noodles inventor)
LV: No Doubt – Don’t Speak

LAS: Let’s end this thing. Any plans for 2008?

LV: Yes. I’m going to be like famous; like boy band fame. Like I’ll be like Michael Jordan without all that whining bullshit! My resolution is to fight that dude. Put it your planner, Toon Squad.

LAS: …

LV: That was the name of the team in Space Jam. Do you think people will get that? That soundtrack was good. Oh man, remember Jock Jams?

LAS: You have a lot of food left. Are you going to box that? You should box that.

For more Les Vinyl visit myspace.com/lesvinyl. LAS faves: “Ghosts”, “Deadly Fucking Silent”, “To The Moon For The North Atlantic, Part 1”, “Adam and Cave Man Woman”.

For more on the Old Spaghetti Factory visit www.osf.com.

97 S'FANGS

THE EIGHTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: NICK SYLVESTER

2007-12-20T03:30:00.000-05:00

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist

FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: NICK SYLVESTER
Another Five Years of Life

A lot easier to write last year's. Stupid decisions, the personally/creatively catastrophic sort, have a way of aligning everything you didn't think needed alignment, plus with brute clarity you'd never get from the shrink sesh or cozy pray-on-it. Pants down and balls out and egg cracked wide open, suddenly you find out the limits of your current ideas and your abilities to translate them; the people who understood you and the people who merely said they did; down to the hundredth of a thousandth of latitudinal/longitudinal degrees, with option for street view, where exactly you stand in the world. If after all that you still happen to give a shit, you connect the dots and scour for those missing pieces to What Exactly You Were Getting At. You reacquaint yourself with yourself, spend a lot of time hitting the speedbag in the barn. Then maybe you come back to the rink and slug your own personal Racki, then maybe you jump off the ice and onto a sexually explicit videotape with some youngblood, then you watch Keanu Reeves run away with your career, and then it's Year In Riffs time: wash rinse repeat.

These days I spend a lot of time hitting the speedbag in the barn. Where I published seemed off Google's radar, what I wrote was exercise. I bought cookbooks and watched my face pock from the splashback of hot olive oil. There's a cat now, and an apartment with a couch, and a mattress on a boxspring. In two months I saw Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, 8 1/2, Blow-Up, Blue Velvet, Breathless, Days Of Heaven... you get the idea. Major catch-up. Rules of the Game. For whatever reason I had always begrudged film the uninterrupted two-hour burden it supposedly placed on me, one that music, even the most difficult stuff, supposedly never had the arrogance to do. Wash, rinse, then: twelve-grand in credit card debt--twelve grand! It took me the whole year but I beat it down to goose eggs. Lots of Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Juan Atkins. Lots of Faulkner. Long mostly fruitless hours in front of certain hundreds of thousands of words I called in finite jest the Ten Minute Wait, and only now, a year and a half into it, am I realizing why I have to see them through. Writing has to be the most roundabout way imaginable of making friends, trying to be loved, curbing social reflux, connecting on the astral plane--especially in this city, when best friends are a half-hour subway ride away and don't make you jump through verbal hoops for said astral planitude. Except most of them write too, or hide in their studios audio and visual, and one doesn't begrudge the other (at least one hopes not) for the time and energy and aloneness their roundabout communications by nature require. Lots of emails.

(Which is to say that "All My Friends" is not "about" aging. I don't know why everybody keeps saying that, except that I know exactly why people keep saying that: Every Pop Song Ever Is About Aging. Somebody on the internet got paid money to pass off that nugget as criticism, as his own, and nobody called him on it because unlike most somebodies on the internet, he can at least write a good sentence. Anyway the song sums up last graf's sentiment better than I could. "Where are your friends tonight?" isn't just for missing them. It's also what you say to yourself when you've hit upon some brilliant riff in your black mold studio, when that clear turn of phrase comes to you on a Friday night and you decide to stay in and feel it out, when after a decade of hedonism you figure out you have a voice, and something of astral planar significance you want to say, and a good reason as to why you in particular have to say it. You hole up and work your ass off and suddenly you're touring the world to much acclaim and yeah you're tired but hey: "Where are your friends tonight?" They're watching Frasier reruns like they always do. Like they always do, tomorrow they will wake up and go to work. Or more likely they're doing exactly as you are, good because it gives slack to guilt, bad because you're not the only one stuck alone in the proverbial middle of France. So the question you ask when you're lonely as all fuck, it's the same one for when you've realized your time away has scored cosmic dividends. A really tangled emotion to deal with--let alone put to beat. See also Panda Bear's "Bros": "I'm not trying to forget you/ I just like to be my own/ Come and give me the space I need/ And you may and you may/ And you may and you may and you may/ Find that we're all right.")

Double digits of friends are out of work at the moment. If you've been reading the last few days, you've seen their names and could with minimal dogpiling find out when and where you've seen their work elsewhere. It's not so much the money-lack that's tough but the uncertainty timewise. Difficult to commit to writing something like a screenplay, say, when you don't know exactly how much time you'll have to work on it. All bets off, they've all lost their psychic exhaust pipes--no way to, as Mike Schur put it, sublimate fear. Granted nobody's in tears or anything but the funk is thick and undeniable.

A few weeks ago some of us made it out to Friday Night Fights, this amateur boxing night that happens underneath the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on 60th and Columbus. We went down the steps to what looked like a grade school cafeteria, except there was a ring lit up in the middle of the room, lunchlady types selling beer and hotdogs and popcorn out the kitchen, "Cher Chez LaGhost" loud on fat speakers, two white screens on either side the room with half-baked video art and foreign television advertisements projected onto them, elsewhere vinyl banners announcing the Fights' sponsors: Singha, Le Tigre, Wallstreet.com, Mohegan Sun, New York Post. I'd seen one fight before, by accident. But just from the way people around us talked about the fights, you got the sense they were new to this too, the bulk of our boxing and fighting knowledge cribbed from Punch-Out! and Tekken and Mortal Kombat and (to a lesser extent) Blades of Steel. Father Martinez, the church pastor, got into the ring and made the fights' introductory remarks. "People say to me, 'Isn't it too violent for a church?'" he said. Most screamed back no--not too violent. "Well, yes, it is," he said. "But like all good sports, it teaches us who we really are."

Martinez skirted the question he started with but whatever, that's not the point. In Muay Thai kickboxing, Fighter #1 often tries to land huge hits on the thigh of Fighter #2's leading leg. The kick makes this fat dad's-belt-on-the-ass kind of sound if it lands square, and from there maybe the guy next to you will start screaming stuff like "KICK HIS ASS, SEABASS!" or "RIP HIS HEAD OFF!" or "I KNOW YOU GUYS ARE AMATEURS AND ALL BUT WHY DON'T YOU THROW SOME PUNCHES!" before returning to his lady, whom he's now gripping by her backfat. Otherwise the kick is rather uneventful--no blood code, like a cheap Chun Li roundhouse sweep. I found myself drifting in and out, making Sagat jokes, drinking Singhas, then caught sight of my friend Chris's face. Another kick had just landed. He was rapt, smiling. "They're trying to give each other charley horses," he said.

97 S'FANGS

THE SEVENTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: STEVE HELY

2007-12-19T15:30:00.000-05:00

All you internet Homer Simpsons out there get your heads out Veronica Belmont's donuts, it's the BIG DOH REHAB here on the SEVENTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist

FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: STEVE HELY
THE RIDICULOUS RACE: EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

This is an excerpt from the book “The Ridiculous Race”, co-authored by Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran. Look for it in bookstores in June 2008!

A Conversation Which I Imagine Must Have Occurred Somewhere in Ulaanbaatar on the Night of May 6, 2007, Following My Attempt to Eat Lunch

Starring Tishgilit and Borte, two Mongolian girls.

TISHGILIT: ‘Sup, Borte.

BORTE : Hey Tishgilit.

TISHGILIT: Hey, how was work today at Yochin Booye?

BORTE: Just another day at “Mongolian national fast food.” The craziest thing happened today.

TISHGALIT: Really? What?

BORTE: Well, this American guy came in – at least I think he was American. He had like a huge backpack on, and his hair was all crazy and he was totally sweaty and everything. So he walked up to the counter, and started saying stuff in English.

TISHGALIT: What’d you do?

BORTE: So, I was like, “I don’t understand,” but of course he didn’t speak Mongolian, so that didn’t help. So he starts pointing randomly at the menu, and going like this. (SHE PANTOMIMES EATING.) And I was like, “okay, I get it, asshole, I’m not an idiot. You want some food. What do you want?”

TISHGALIT: And he of course keeps babbling.

BORTE: Of course. So, finally, a guy, a Mongolian guy, in the restaurant comes up, and says he speaks French, and maybe he can translate. So he and the American guy start speaking French. Except that it’s pretty obvious this American guy can’t speak French very well, so this takes, like, ten minutes. During which the American guy keeps making the “eating” gesture. Finally the Mongolian guy is like, “he says he just wants whatever’s good.” So, I’m like, okay.

TISHGALIT: So you give him the sauced fat lump?

BORTE: Right, exactly, I give him sauced fat lump with a fried egg on it, and some salty tea.

TISHGALIT: Salt tea, good call.

BORTE: Right, a totally delicious meal. And of course it takes him forever to figure out the money.

TISHGALIT: God, he couldn’t figure out the togrog? What a fuckface.

BORTE: So that takes him forever, and he acts really grateful. But then he sits down with his sauced fat – which is totally good, by the way, and sort of picks at it.

TISHGALIT: Huh. Was there something wrong with it? Was it beige?

BORTE: Of course it was beige! I gave him like the beigest piece we had! And he still didn’t like it!

TISHGALIT: Weird. What about the salt tea?

BORTE: Oh, he tastes the salt tea, and it’s like this dude has never tasted salted tea before. Cause he’s all like, surprised, when he tastes it.

TISHGALIT: Ugh. What the blog?

BORTE: I know. And I’d made it extra salty, just for him! But then he tries to pretend that he really likes it, and keeps looking at me and smiling. Meanwhile he’s, like, picking at the sauced fat. And I’m just staring at him, and thinking, “Dude, I don’t know how you got here, or what you’re doing, but if you don’t like beige fat with fried egg, you’re gonna have a hard time in Mongolia man.”

TISHGALIT: True that. Anyway. Only one way to relax after a day like that.

BORTE, TISHGALIT (simultaneous): Fermented mare’s milk!

They pour themselves two big glasses of fermented mare’s milk and high-five.

97 S'FANGS

THE SEVENTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: ADAM MOERDER

2007-12-19T13:30:00.000-05:00

All you internet Homer Simpsons out there get your heads out Veronica Belmont's donuts, it's the BIG DOH REHAB here on the SEVENTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist

FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: ADAM MOERDER
Lat Pull-Downs: Favorite Musical Moments of 2007

After spending the last month very academically and mechanically procuring year-end album and singles lists, I defragged my brain by going back and listening to whatever songs gave me the most visceral kick. Below are some very subjective moments from those songs that made me the most excited about music in 2007, regardless of whether or not they were in any way "important" to music on the whole.

The Tough Alliance - "Miami" @ 1:35
My former college roommate is a huge Miami sports fan, so when Eric Burgland lets out that first huge sighing chorus of "ah"s on this tropical-tinged ballad, I'm always reminded what a shitty sports year it's been for the city. The Marlins, Dolphins and Heat all suck, Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis got dealt, U of M football is in a tailspin, and of course, the Sean Taylor shooting. I think TTA's Situationist politics bit is pretty intriguing, even if I'm not quite sure exactly what it entails, but "Miami" is my favorite song from them, probably because they step down from their soapbox and let you fill in the blanks, but also because it still registers when taken out of TTA's barnstorming context.

Animal Collective - "For Reverend Green" @ 4:55
There are a lot of times I feel really bad about being a staunch atheist, especially that period this year when I read new books by Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens back-to-back and incessantly harangued all my friends about how the Middle East should be blown up and that Billy Graham is worse than Hitler. I'm sorry, guys. Anyway, the worst feeling though is when the church I was confirmed in sends me a birthday card each year, single-handedly one-upping all those Facebook wall posts and pokes, and how I'm reminded of my former reverend, Reverend Roberts, who suffered a stroke halfway through my confirmation classes and has been placed in assisted living ever since. Now she was a reverend in the U.C.C. church, so out of all the Biblical stuff to get excited about--the four horsemen stuff, the time God killed a guy for picking up a stick on Sunday, et al--she became most animated when discussing how more movies need to depict aliens as loving creatures like E.T. rather than the soulless conquerors stereotype we're used to seeing in sci-fi. Pretty heavy stuff, which is why when Avey Tare repeatedly yelps "For Reverend Green!", I can't help but think of that one confirmation class when a crazed Reverend Roberts denounced Independence Day as "horseshit."

Justice - "Genesis" @ 2:16
One of my 2007 pet peeves was all the comments/criticism Justice received for sounding coked up, a lot of it coming from critics who've never even done cocaine. Cross has a lot of cogent moments--sexy even, which would be impossible if they were so coked up since cocaine makes your dick numb--the first of which occurring 136 seconds into the album. The minute or so surrounding this moment on Cross's opener was my go-to adrenaline fix at the gym, helping push me through many sets of bench press and lat pull-downs while saving me a lot of money I would've wasted on NO-Xplode otherwise.

Of Montreal - "We Were Born the Mutants Again With Leafling" @ 3:38
Usually I maintain a pretty good poker face re: songs about relationships, but Hissing Fauna synched up so Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz-like to my own girl troubles that I couldn't help but indulge myself in Barnes's medicated heartbreak. That's not to say I regressed here to junior high levels of schmaltz, cranking up Weezer's blue album and writing shitty poetry in my bedroom because a girl I liked didn't sit next to me in the cafeteria. "Mutants" is a really pretty, optimistic closer to a dark album filled with misogyny and medicinal/recreational drug struggles. Not to wax Klosterman, but my personal Hissing Fauna ended with a girlfriend level-up on par with the upgrade from Super Mario Bros. 2 to Super Mario Bros. 3--lots of fun new levels, new costumes, a warp whistle, etc. As for the lyrics on this song, I have no idea what's going on so it's hard to for me to relate, though I guess I also felt like a "mutant" earlier this year when I had a really bad sinus infection.

97 S'FANGS

THE SEVENTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: MIKE SCHUR

2007-12-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

All you internet Homer Simpsons out there get your heads out Veronica Belmont's donuts, it's the BIG DOH REHAB here on the SEVENTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS:

Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist

FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: MIKE SCHUR
A Garbage-Filled Room w/ Shitty Drop-Ceiling

Writing is a dark and dank profession. Either you sit in a room alone, miserable, and self-doubting, and think about how you’re a fraud whose best ideas are both behind you and weren’t even that good to begin with, or else you sit in a garbage-filled room w/ shitty drop-ceiling with twelve other people who are all trying to make jokes to hide the fact that they all think they’re frauds whose best ideas are behind them/weren’t very good to begin with. So: the strike, which is relentlessly terrible and is putting thousands of people out of work because six of the largest companies in the world refuse to acknowledge the somehow controversial fact that a computer is just a differently-shaped box you can use to watch TV shows, might afford me one possible good among its many evils, I thought, a few months ago: the chance to rebecome a human being.

This would include, I figured: walking around, meeting friends for dinners, seeing types of doctors I hadn’t seen this century, and most of all, interestingly, writing something. Irony of ironies -- the only way I figured I would write those short stories I had always talked about, or that small little movie idea, or the novel that is definitely in me, might be during a writers strike. So then we went on strike, so then: here we go!

Except that it turns out there’s a real “Iceman Cometh” aspect to the strike that was not anticipated and is not very cool at all. While I work at a show, all I dream about is all of the other wonderful kinds of writing that I could be doing if not for this damned job that I have. And now that I have all the hours in my day, I can’t do a fucking thing. I can’t even open a document. I picket in the morning, and then I just kind of sit there. I pass hours. I watch “Around the Horn” unironically, because it is better than having to write. And apparently it has become crucial for me to check the same 12 websites continuously, on a rotating basis, in case anything new is posted. (One of these sites is my own blog.) I’m not lying when I say that I accepted NBS’s assignment, here, because it would force me to open a document and type words.

N.B. that I did not have this problem pre-strike. When I was writing, I could keep writing on other projects. It is the absence of regular writing that has led to me not being able to write other things. Which is interesting in some psychological way that I can’t quite parse.

I read in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that in order to counteract the horrifyingly cramped quarters in which hens are forced to live on conventional farms, organic hen farms also have to have a small outdoors area where the hens can run around and play and be hens. But the thing is, hens just hang out where the food is, and since the food is distributed in the horrifyingly cramped quarters in which the hens live, they just ignore the outdoor area, because they’re forgotten how to like relax and hen it up. I think you see where this is going. It turns out I love and miss and crave the shitty drop ceiling and the garbage smell and jokes made by other fear-sublimating writers on the staff. I want to go back to my hen house. It’s weird and cold and lonely outside.

So that’s why the strike should end. Is that what I’m supposed to be writing about? I’m 33 minutes in, so it’s too late anyway. And by the way, lest this document fall into the wrong hands and in any way be used as agitprop about how weak the WGA is and how we’re all going to crack, allow me to add that the companies are being greedy disingenuous dummies and I’d rather watch 50,000 Around the Horns than sign their crappy deal and trade the future of union labor in this country for $250.

One piece of good news = I have seen a lot of the doctors I wanted to see. I have five cavities and my vision has gotten worse since 2002. But dermatologically, we’re good.

97 S'FANGS

THE SIXTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: COLIN JOST

2007-12-18T14:00:00.000-05:00

YYES! It's the (day after the) FIFTH DAY of Spiderriffmas hosted by your man The Real Spiderfang, and I will give the beeper number for the guy who used to play Code-man on Step By Step to the first person who can correctly guess what my true love gave to me today, the fifth day of Spiderriffmas. What's that?!

FIVE GOLDEN LINKS!

That's right, I've joined Linkpasser. It's a social bookmarking website, the best of the internet picked by your friends. So while I was in bed this morning switching out my road wheels for something more all-terrain--let me tell you, that pint of Sahadis babaganush, that six-pack of microbrew I pick up from this guy parked behind the adult book store on Hoyt, these are all-organic food stuffs lover, no preservatives, no antibiotics in the feed, and let me tell you, they do not deliver themselves--while I was in bed pumping tire, my main girl Wife Huckabee was up on the internet, passing links to your boy FANG, sliding up and down the world wide web like Zap on a joust pole. Lycos.com, we takin over!

Each contributor to the 12 Days of Spiderriffmas was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

This week I got some serious names lined up. I got my man Curtis Hanson, Don Pollyanna's supposed to holler like Wednesday, plus I got my own Spiderriff I'm working on, it's called GENESIS. Sonic CD, holler! Game Genie, get your paper up! FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: COLIN JOST
Letter To Mayor Bloomberg

Dear Mr. Mayor, Let me begin by saying that I admire all you’ve accomplished in your first 6 years. “It ain’t easy being mayor,” as they say. Well, I say. I’m quoting myself. Enough small talk. I need to talk to you about a serious threat to our city. You: Really? Come right in. Me: Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. You: Not at all. You seem like a reasonable person. Reasonably handsome. Me: Mr. Mayor, please. You: Sorry. Me: Mr. Mayor, what if we made a sequel to Jaws? You: They already did. They made three or four sequels. Me: One of them was a prequel. You: Really? The one at SeaWorld? Me: No, that was the son of Jaws. You: The one with the killer whale? Me: No, that was Orca. Look, it doesn’t matter if they’ve already made a sequel. Look at Rocky Balboa. Look at John Rambo or whatever his name is. You can always make another sequel. The question is: How do you update Jaws? What’s the modern-day equivalent of a shark? You: An investment banker! Me: … You: Sorry. Me: The answer is: A pigeon. You: A pigeon. Me: Yes. You: You’re proposing that we make a sequel to Jaws, but we replace the shark with a pigeon? Me: Not just one pigeon. Many pigeons. You: Isn’t that the premise of The Birds? Me: Yeah, but in our movie, the pigeons actually attack people. You: You haven’t seen The Birds, have you? Me: … It’s in my Netflix queue. You: Ok, even assuming this is somehow distinct from The Birds – which I frankly doubt – why would the current mayor of New York make a “sequel” to Jaws about pigeons? Me: (slow, dramatic clapping) You: What are you doing? Me: Wait, I might have jumped the gun. Did you just say, “I’ve already made that movie – in my heart”? You: No. Me: Then forget the clapping. You know what, forget the movie altogether. It was a metaphor. You: For what? Me: Pigeons. You: I don’t know if that really counts as a metaphor. Me: (slow, dramatic clapping) You: Stop it. Me: Sorry. You: If you’re trying to call my attention to the growing pigeon problem, thank you. I’m well aware of the situation and I’m trying to find an effective yet humane solution. Me: Kill ‘em with kindness, right? You: Not exactly. Me: With poison? You: No. Me: Exactly. And that’s where I come in. You: You heard me say ‘No,’ right? Me: Loud and clear. So I dress up like a pigeon, go to a public park, and eat a bunch of poison. The real pigeons look at me and think, “Wow. Poison must be the new iPod or something.” You remember what happened with iPods, right? Cut to six months later. The press is swarming. “Mr. Mayor! Mr. Mayor! All the pigeons are gone! Children can breathe again! The murder rate has dropped below zero such that hundreds of corpses are reanimated every year! How did you do it (‘it’ being the elimination of all pigeons)?!” You stare off into the distance. With binoculars. And you see a tombstone. It’s mine. It reads “Husband. Father. Fake Pigeon. Hero. Friend. Popular. Always wanted to open a pizzeria.” Etc. We’ll work out the details. You cry a solitary tear and tell the press, “It was worth it. It was all worth it.” Then you walk away, confusing them. You: (slow, dramatic clapping) Me: Welcome aboard, Mr. Mayor. Let’s do this. You: What? Oh, I was just shutting off the lights. They’re on that Clapper system. I’m leaving. Anyway, you get the point. There’s a pigeon problem. But you’re a smart guy. You’ll think of something. Catch you on the flippety-flop. -Me

97 S'FANGS

THE SIXTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: ROB DUBBIN

2007-12-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

YEAR IN RIFFS: ROB DUBBIN
All Of Us Over Here At EMI Just Downloaded Your New Album

After last year's burnout I played 2007 pretty safe, a strategy reflected in a year-end list that is 90% albums from bands I have liked for a very long time. For example, Carl Newman appears to have perfected a frighteningly effective awesome-generating algorithm. I picture him being in acquisition talks with the usual suspects.

Anyway: rather than riff on music, I will instead share a memo I accidentally received from EMI Music CEO Eric Nicoli in the early morning hours of October 11th. This is the sort of thing that happens when your email address is one letter off from Phil Selway's. See you next year!

--

From: Eric Nicoli, CEO, EMI Music To: Radiohead Subject: LP7 Well, it's 12:05am on 10/11, and all of us over here at EMI just downloaded your new album. Really great. Very exciting. We hope you understand our decision, in keeping with our business model, not to pay for "In Rainbows," and instead to bill you for the time it took for the transfer to complete. In case you're wondering, no I haven't listened to any songs yet. Stings, doesn't it? Are you starting to realize just what a huge mistake you've made? Well, it's about to get worse. Because if I know Radiohead, and I think I do, what you guys really care about is money. And I'm about to listen to your album for the first time and list, track by track and right off the top of my head, a few of the improvements our supposedly obsolete company would have made. Here we go: 1) 15 Step - Okay - I'm picturing a commercial, for a car, a powerful car, like the 2008 Dodge Caravan. We're driving in the Caravan, me and all of you guys, over some rocks, and then it turns out that the rocks are Red Rocks, and we all get out and throw on this massive jam, and obviously Dave Matthews Band is also there, because they live there full-time because it's prime fiddle-altitude. You guys do a mashup of this song and "Two Step" called "Seventeen Step" or "Thirty Step" or however - I mean you guys are the math geniuses. Speaking of math: I'm thinking eighty-five a pop for tickets, fifteen dollar service charge, plus eight dollar handling charge, plus tax, plus rock-repainting charge. Next! 2) Bodysnatchers - So "Young Folks" was kind of the soundtrack to 2007, right? Three series premieres, ten commercials, the music video for "Young Folks." Well I know Peter, Bjorn, and John personally, and let me tell you, right now they could call their band Peter, Bjorn, John, and Money. I'm thinking we do the same thing with this track, right after we overdub some whistling into the chorus. Wherever the chorus is. 3) Nude - In terms of a music video, I'm thinking shot-for-shot remake of TKA's "Louder than Love." How comfortable are you guys with turtlenecks and mimed dry-fucking? 4) Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - This one seems ripe for merchandising. I'm going to riff off your lyrics here: "In the deepest ocean..." live five teenage cartoon fishes! The theme song, which obviously we'd let you guys write, could go something like: "Hey hey we're the Weird Fishes Fighting crime in the ocean Maybe you didn't think there was crime in the ocean Well that's how good we are at fighting it Everyone transform!" Then they transform into tiny undersea Dodge Caravans, the official van of fighting crime. Also the fish would be based on your appearances, since I think we can all agree that Colin Greenwood already looks like a flounder. 5) All I Need - Didn't really vibe to this one. Kept expecting a rap verse. 6) Faust Arp - Here's where things get totally viral. We put the entire album in stores, right? On a CD? But when people buy it, they find that we've LEFT THIS SONG OUT. If they wanna surf the Arp, they're going to have to upload a sweet youtube vid of themselves asking for it! Then we charge them another five dollars. 7) Reckoner - This would be a for-sure number one hit, like an "Elevation" level jock jam, if you replaced all the lyrics with the ones from "Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye." 8) House of Cards - Rename it "House of Coffee" and bam! Starbucks tie-in. We also have a script kicking around for a sequel to "Akeelah and the Bee," called "Akeelah and the Creep." Creep's on this album, right? 9) Jigsaw Falling Into Place - We can get a million dollars a month to use the first seven seconds of this song in a Chase commercial that repeats on constant loop whenever someone gets into a taxi. These are the kinds of moves that turn songs into art. Money art. 10) Videotape - Campaign song for Sony Blu-Ray. I know how much you guys like irony. 11) No secret track? Is this career suicide? Good luck on your sinking ship, Eric

97 S'FANGS

THE FIFTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: JAMES HARVEY

2007-12-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

YYES! It's the FIFTH DAY of Spiderriffmas hosted by your man The Real Spiderfang, and I will give the beeper number for the guy who used to play Code-man on Step By Step to the first person who can correctly guess what my true love gave to me today, the fifth day of Spiderriffmas. What's that?!

FIVE GOLDEN LINKS!

That's right, I've joined Linkpasser. It's a social bookmarking website, the best of the internet picked by your friends. So while I was in bed this morning switching out my road wheels for something more all-terrain--let me tell you, that pint of Sahadis babaganush, that six-pack of microbrew I pick up from this guy parked behind the adult book store on Hoyt, these are all-organic food stuffs lover, no preservatives, no antibiotics in the feed, and let me tell you, they do not deliver themselves--while I was in bed pumping tire, my main girl Wife Huckabee was up on the internet, passing links to your boy FANG, sliding up and down the world wide web like Zap on a joust pole. Lycos.com, we takin over!

Each contributor to the 12 Days of Spiderriffmas was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

This week I got some serious names lined up. I got my man Curtis Hanson, Don Pollyanna's supposed to holler like Wednesday, plus I got my own Spiderriff I'm working on, it's called GENESIS. Sonic CD, holler! Game Genie, get your paper up! FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: JAMES HARVEY
Castle On A Cloud

I am sitting on a crowded R train, discreetly changing tracks on my iPod so the guy who just sold me a blank CD-ROM for 10 bucks won't notice I'm listening to Act 1 of Les Miserables. He's laughing, for two reasons: 1) I bought the CD even though I saw it clearly labeled as a CD-ROM and knew immediately it wasn't compatible with any type of computer I've owned in about a decade, and 2) He caught a glimpse of me queuing up showtunes, which tells him I was probably lying when I admitted that I did, in fact, enjoy remixed rap music. Just to prove him wrong on reason number two, here are some remixes I made in 2007:

"James Harvey's extended break-up Remix": The Wrens "The Meadowlands" in an iTunes playlist, set on shuffle and repeat.

"Ode to NYC (The Remix)": In a large iTunes playlist, I import various sound bytes of Wesley Autrey, the Subway Hero. I open up the iTunes cross-fade and set it to some ridiculous level, like 12 seconds or something, so I can imagine, in the brief moments of overlap when one clip ends and the next one begins, that a second Wesley Autrey is out there somewhere.

"Crank That (Club Edit)": Soulja Boy's "Crank That" playing with my iTunes equalizer set to +12 dB in the following ranges: 32, 64, 125, and 250. Ideally, you have like six of my Dell laptop computers playing this song at the same time because the speakers are kind of tinny.

"Crank That (Explicit Version)": Same as the original song, but with an added introduction explaining Soulja Boy's Superman dance mocks crippled people.

"Sam Harris vs. Richard Dawkins (Seminars for Long Term Thinking Mashup)": Cut up lectures by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, edited together as if they were debating religion. Dawkins responds to each point Harris makes by saying nearly the same thing, except that in a debate context it seems as if he's just affecting a British accent and sarcastically mimicking everything Harris says. The crowd thinks this is hilarious. Sam Harris's closing remarks are interrupted numerous times by the dude who screamed "Judas!" at Bob Dylan.

97 S'FANGS

THE FIFTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMASS: ZACH KANIN

2007-12-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

YEAR IN RIFFS: CURTIS HANSON
A Miracle, Or Just A Mirage

Word up, friends, rock & roll interviewer Curtis Hanson here. 2007 was a major year for me, and for my various works. I know people have to get back to shopping for rotating-head-action hip-attachment St. Elmo dildos or whatever consumers are “into” this holiday fuckfest, so I’ll keep it short: 2007 was a year of incredible thoughtlessness.

I hate to drag a rusted tomb of a ship out of the freezing murk just for the sake of an example, but let’s talk about the Titanic for a second. Sure, it was a tragedy: an old zombie woman lost her necklace, Leonardo DiCaprio had to have sex with a fat lady, and don’t even get me started on how the captain of the iceberg felt. But what about my loss? Sure, you could say, “Curtis, why are you upset? You even won a ten thousand dollar bet that the ship would sink before the movie was over.” Well, you know how the band is playing as the ship goes down? That was my favorite band.

Now you know two things about me: I have ten thousand dollars, and I play favorites.

The other day I was interviewing this homeless guy about what he thinks about the movie “Margot at the Wedding,” and a car splashes through a puddle and water gets all over my pants. It was straight out of “Harold and Maude” or something. Something ephemeral. You gotta admit though, the homeless are our future.

I’ve gotten a lot more thoughtful myself as the world crumbles around me like so many ancient, magical civilizations that we learn so much from but when it is all but too late. Take Rome for instance. Everyone says Rome didn’t fall in a day. Well, don’t look now, but Rome is still standing. I went there in August for a custody hearing (don’t worry, no one I knew). The place is just like it always has been. They got pasta, they have temples, plenty of ruins, the Coliseum is doing fine, and the music scene is from a planet I wish I had a spaceship to get to. The point is: everyone thinks it was destroyed and is vanished, but there are tons of people there, trying to get by just like the average Joe USA. Does no one even read a book or look at a computer? Rome exists people, and not just in your hearts. Read a paper.

And sexwise. I know everyone wants to read my mind about sex, and let me put it this way: let the lady come first. Plain and simple. That will make it easier when you gotta split. I might be getting older, but I DON’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES I USED TO.

I CAN’T GET MY CAP LOCKS BUTTON TO TURN OFF. I KEEP PRESSING IT, OH JESUS, WHTAT THE FUCK. AkKAKKaK AA Ok, I got it. Nick, you take care of this, will you? Thanks. Anyways, here is that interview you asked for:

Curtis Hanson: So, J.J., what do you stand for?

Jack Johnson: Where did you get my work number? [Hangs up]

Curtis Hanson: Does music interest your folks too? Is talent a miracle, or just a mirage? What kind of music is your favorite? Will God ever date a woman who isn’t so “holy”?

Peace x 100,000.00

Curtis Hanson

(Thanks for this opportunity, Spiderfang, I really haven’t been getting too much work lately and this is really a big help. I’ll see you at Meg’s X-mas brunch hopefully, if I’m not stuck with the kids.)

97 S'FANGS

THE SECOND DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: MATT MURRAY

2007-12-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

DID SOMEBODY CALL THE EXTERMINATOR?! Yolanda?! Ha ha! Nope with a capital P! But seriously this is your man The Real Spiderfang, aka the Nope Pope, aka Three-Piece Crank Addict, aka Spiderfang, aka Frosty the All-Organic Hummus-Eating Snowman, aka Lemme Just Say that it is with great pleasure to say that it is the second day of Spiderriffmas here at Riff Market. This week and next I got lined up some of the hottest talent in the game to tell you all what's what. What?! For the next week or so you're gonna be getting your internet Neutrogena on at the riff sink and every damn day there's gonna be like a hundred spiders crawling out the drain being like "damn lover you're gonna need a lot more than 2.5% salicylic to stop this breakout"--let the boys be boys am I right?!?! Each contributor to the 12 Days of Spiderriffmas was told listen: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? 2006 may have been the Year of the Dog but you don't gotta ask Charlotte to know 2007 is the Year of Some Pig. Rell! XOXO. -FANG

"Don't Riff Me, Bro!"
By Diablo Cody

Not to get all Zeitgeisty McZeitgeist on y'all, but is it me or was like 2007 like an entire year directed by David Lynch on crack?! First of all, I've found myself spending more time in Hell.A., Cali-PORN-ia than any self-respecting member of the blogerati ever should. (Believe me, I would rather perform a Dirty Sanchez on Darth Cheney while watching Ishtar than admit that I live in a town full of silicone-tastic, man-scaping celebutards. Honestly, sometimes I feel so out of place it's like I'm Balki Bartokomous!) Then, every movie critic this side of Fallujah is saying that the little flick I doodled out is all of a sudden becoming my generation's Napoleon Dynamite. So surreal, you guys.

Anyway, here's the dealio on some of the things this year that have made me totally rock out with my cock out:

TV Show:
Californication - Do you ever have that feeling where you watch something and you're just like, " Jeebus H. Christmas, I wish I had wrote that!" That's how I feel whenever I watch Californication (not that I've owned a tv since like, Charles in Charge. By the way is C in C era Scott Baio like a total Babe-raham Lincoln or what? I totally get a lady-boner just thinking about it!). At any rate, there's such a dope truthiness about the dialog, characters, and situations in this show, it's more like reading a great novel than watching television, which again, I don't.

Album:
Matt & Kim (s/t) - These guys are like a really obscure version of the White Stripes, but like waaaay darker. There's a part of Brooklyn called Williamsburg that I have been to and this album is like the soundtrack to that place. It's that cool.

Movie:
I know, you're probably thinking I'm gonna be all Pluggy McObviousberg here and pick the J-Dog, but I'm gonna say that the best movie you've never seen this year was this. Or this. Or this. Where do I find this stuff? I know what you're thinking. Am I the sick one for posting it or are you sick for liking it?

Serious Issue:
Darfur.

97 S'FANGS

THE SECOND DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: FARLEY KATZ

2007-12-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

YEAR IN RIFFS: FARLEY KATZ
WAR AND PEACE

97 S'FANGS

THE FIRST DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: BEN DOUGAN

2007-12-13T14:00:00.000-05:00

DID SOMEBODY CALL THE EXTERMINATOR?! Yolanda?! Ha ha! Nope with a capital P! But seriously this is your man The Real Spiderfang, aka the Nope Pope, aka Three-Piece Crank Addict, aka Spiderfang, aka Frosty the All-Organic Hummus-Eating Snowman, aka Lemme Just Say that it is with great pleasure to say that it is the first day of Spiderriffmas here at Riff Market. This week and next I got lined up some of the hottest talent in the game to tell you all what's what. What?! For the next week or so you're gonna be getting your internet Neutrogena on at the riff sink and every damn day there's gonna be like a hundred spiders crawling out the drain being like "damn lover you're gonna need a lot more than 2.5% salicylic to stop this breakout"--let the boys be boys am I right?!?! Each contributor to the 12 Days of Spiderriffmas was told listen: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? 2006 may have been the Year of the Dog but you don't gotta ask Charlotte to know 2007 is the Year of Some Pig. Rell! XOXO. -FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: BEN DOUGAN
Back In Dillon

“I was wondering, I have an extra ticket to the Decemberists, and I thought maybe…”
“Oh… yeah!”
-Julie Taylor and Matt Saracen, Friday Night Lights

Dillon, Texas
11.02.07

The standing-room-only crowd is buzzing with excitement. This is the night they’ve been dreaming about ever since tickets sold out in 45 seconds on the day the concert was announced two years ago. After a seemingly endless national tour, The Decemberists are back in Dillon.

The venue is a veritable who’s who of local celebrities. Up front, Panthers coach Eric Taylor wonders aloud whether organist Jenny Conlee will cover Laura Veirs’s guest vocals on “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then).” Meanwhile, running back Smash Williams eagerly explains to car dealer Buddy Garrity that “The Bachelor and the Bride” is a reference to the Marcel Duchamp sculpture La mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même--of which Garrity, judging by his bored look, is obviously well aware already.

“Shanty for the Arethusa!” Tim Riggins shouts, in between long pulls on a handle of Cutty Sark, which he says he drinks because the logo reminds him of the cover art for Castaways and Cutouts. “Fucking play Shanty for the Arethusa!” Guidance counselor Tami Taylor just shakes her head, as if to say: Yeah, like they’d open with Shanty.

Finally, the band appears and – as Decemberists fan club president Tyra Collette would later describe it – everyone surges toward the stage “like a wave cresting over a brigantine’s gunwale.”

It’s Friday night, and nobody could give fuck one about high school football.

97 S'FANGS

THE FIRST DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS: ERIK KENWARD

2007-12-13T10:00:00.000-05:00

DID SOMEBODY CALL THE EXTERMINATOR?! Yolanda?! Ha ha! Nope with a capital P! But seriously this is your man The Real Spiderfang, aka the Nope Pope, aka Three-Piece Crank Addict, aka Spiderfang, aka Frosty the All-Organic Hummus-Eating Snowman, aka Lemme Just Say that it is with great pleasure to say that it is the first day of Spiderriffmas here at Riff Market. This week and next I got lined up some of the hottest talent in the game to tell you all what's what. What?! For the next week or so you're gonna be getting your internet Neutrogena on at the riff sink and every damn day there's gonna be like a hundred spiders crawling out the drain being like "damn lover you're gonna need a lot more than 2.5% salicylic to stop this breakout"--let the boys be boys am I right?!?! Each contributor to the 12 Days of Spiderriffmas was told listen: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito? 2006 may have been the Year of the Dog but you don't gotta ask Charlotte to know 2007 is the Year of Some Pig. Rell! XOXO. -FANG

YEAR IN RIFFS: ERIK KENWARD
The Diamond Mine

Writers’ strike notwithstanding, I earn my living as a comedy writer. My memory isn’t always the greatest so I carry around one of those check-me-out-I’m-a-writer Moleskine notebooks. I know dude, but seriously no judgment zone, okay? Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I finally filled one of them up after five years. The following is a semi-annotated selection of bits, premises, lines, jokes, “jokes,” detritus, ephemera, riffs and other assorted comedy ingredients that I can assure you will never see the light of day elsewhere, mostly because they are about butts, poops, dicks, and boobs. I know, right? Anyway, they are all terrible, more or less useless and largely transcribed verbatim.

-You know how some people tell everyone “oh, I don’t own a t.v. set?” A sketch about a guy who proudly tells everyone that he “doesn’t own a toilet” because he’s just “not into all that bathroom-y stuff.” Like he’s above it. He just shits wherever. “I don’t make a big deal out it.”

-Something for a sassy, but inspiring gay guy to say: “Mind your own beave’ wax, honey.” (Maybe this is something people say already and I just don’t know? Historically I don’t write a lot of things with characters who could credibly say things like that so this little conversation nug has been on ice for quite a few years now.)

-Asshole transplants

-As part of the “Lord Of The Rings” DVD extras, an interview with the guy from WETA who sculpted the cave troll’s dick and balls. He knows that ultimately it’s not going to be seen by the audience – covered by a loincloth – but he’s still proud of it on the grounds of strict verisimilitude. He talks about their prototype designs, how it was important not to be constrained by notions of humanoid anatomy – like maybe it could have a tusk on the end, or a baby’s face, or a mouth, an opposable thumb, or have horns like a ram’s head and suckers like an octopus. There are further interviews with the guy they had to hire to serve as the genital model because the artist wasn’t comfortable using his own penis and testicles as a reference.

-Something for a weird guy to say: “My buddy has a thing like one of those jet engine space heaters. Except it shoots horse manure.”

-A mom and dad rent a Moonbounce for their son’s birthday, but it is shaped like a giant ass with a realistic, textured butt hole.

-An “urban” remake of the horror classic “The Blob,” called the “The Bass,” about super-low frequencies that eat people. (This is not such a bad idea actually. Maybe I’ll write this after the strike.)

-A conversation with a guy who’s really into Ernie Hudson movies (I don’t know where I thought this particular idea was going when I wrote it down. As I consult Ernie Hudson’s IMDB entry I see that he’s worked very consistently for the last thirty years. I also see that one of his ‘in production,’ 2008 credits is for “Ghostbusters: The Video Game.”)

-A public service announcement-looking ad with an obviously mentally disabled kid and a big baseball player swinging a bat. Scenes of the baseball player with other disabled kids. You think the ad is going to be about how the baseball player does United Way charity work; then you realize that actually this guy has been going around smacking kids in the head with a baseball bat, damaging their brains. Tagline: “Every time he takes a bat in his hands he makes a new retarded person.”

-A sketch about a troop of very clinically precise Miami-style booty rappers who are fixated on the design and musculature of the butt not so much in terms of sex (although there is that too), but as marvel of evolution – i.e. the notion that human beings evolved anal sphincters as a consequence of walking upright, otherwise loose turds would fall out on the ground all the time, etc.
Sample lines:
-“Leave your ass broke, shit leaking out the anus/My cock so big, it got two heads like Janus”
-“Got the bass to make you shake your shitbin” (A lot of this one looks like it’s not in my handwriting. The lines seem to have very little to do with the premise.)

-An ad for a body spray for idiots, like TAG or Ax. It smells like a big ol’ dirty dick. The conceit – as far as idiots are concerned – being that ladies will think you have a big dick if it’s so apparently smelly. BAG: The dick amplifier?

-Something a very dumb guy who seems smarter than he is could say: “Look. Cars are the most famous thing on Earth.”

-In old movies when a character is poisoned by the natives’ poison he always hears the pounding of the drums – “The drums! The drums!” Sketch about a very successful r&b producer named Dr. Ibogaine whose only production technique is to shoot people with poisoned blowgun darts. Renowned for his drum programming.

-Terrible product name: Herbal Auschwitz Shampoo

-A fake movie promo: Ghost President. “This fall the commander in chief … is a ghost! After a successful assassination attempt, the leader of the free world is now a mischievous, fun-loving ghost. But he can’t let other the other world leaders know the truth.” His trusty chief of staff has to cover for him. His Achilles’ heel is that he can’t help but say “boo” all the time.

-A TV chef with very bad similes – “You want the chicken breast to be a deep brown – brown like a homeless man’s tan.” “Look at this fresh mozzarella – mmm, mmm – white like the eye of a sightless cavefish.”

-Bad name for an “extreme candy” (like Warheads or Alien Drool): Granddad’s Jism

-An office tech services guy who insists on referring to laptops as “nut cancer machines.”

-A terrible character sketch comedy character (or an equally terrible name for a hardcore band): John Wayne Gacy Kasem

-A terrible name for any kind of band: Shitsplitter

-Bad fake lyrics to “Easy” by Lionel Ritchie: "And I'm greasy/Greasy like a monkey's nutsack."

-Pot comedy set in Nazi Germany – filmmaker, Stoni Reefer-stahl.

Also, these are my top ten favorite albums of 2007 not on my personal official list of top ten best albums of 2007. In no particular order:

Middian – Age Eternal
Stars Of The Lid – And Their Refinement Of The Decline
Alcest – Souvenirs d’un autre monde
Jay-Z – American Gangster
Deathspell Omega – Fas – Ite, Maledicti, In Ignem Aeternum
Caribou –Andorra
Kalabrese – Rumpelzirkus
Parts & Labor – Mapmaker
Pantha Du Prince – This Bliss
Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy – Cornell 1964

The Middian album is easily one of the best flat-out rock records of the year and it doesn’t seem like anyone is really talking about it; “Dreamless Eye” makes getting stared at by Galactus sound like one of the most kick-ass predicaments ever. I think I probably physically played Stars of the Lid more than anything else this year. And the Mingus album is truly heartbreaking – an alternate universe best band in Jazz history. Clifford Jordan’s solo on “Take The ‘A’ Train” still stuns. And that it basically flatfoots Eric Dolphy, of all people, is still hard to get one’s head around.

97 S'FANGS

SPIDERFANG PRESENTS: THE 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS

2007-12-12T09:00:00.000-05:00

PARTRIDGE FAMILY IN A PEAR TREE, MANG!

Yes! This is the Real Spiderfang here, coming at you live four hours ago with a special announcement about THE 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS:

ZIP UP WITH YOUR DICK UP!

IT IS ON!

You don't even want to know who I got lined up for this. I've got my man Ghost Blazer. I've got Thomas from Thomas' Myspace Editor. I've got Pimp from Pimp My Profile.com. Did somebody say Diablo Cody?! Take two of these slap bracelets and call me in the morning, lover! You're on timeout! I've got Diablo Cody. All next week and maybe tomorrow and Friday depending on whether my man Ghost Blazer gets back to me, as well as this girl I know who did guerrilla PR for the Josh Groban record, you are not going to wanting to be leaving this spot!

RUSTY IS STILL IN THE NAVY!

Also if anybody found my rabbit fur coat can you hit me on an email blast? Pretty sure I left it outside Sahadi's after a hummus run. MAILTO: REALSPIDERFANG@GMAIL.COM

-FANG

SPIDERFANG VS. SPIDERBITERS

2007-11-10T15:45:00.000-05:00

SPIDERBITERS FORCE THE REAL SPIDERFANG TO THROW DOWN THE INFINITY GAUNTLET

TURN UP ALL MY MOTHERFUCKING LEVELS

ARACHNOFANGBIA IS IN FULL EFFECT

VENOM THROW SOME D'S ON ME

WHODI WHO

They say imitation is flattery but look when you're already forced to spoonfeed a rap side project post by post just so the muppets you used to call your colleagues don't forkcast your ass into the WTF section while the fucking The Tough Alliance get BNM for inventing the music equivalent of that Ikea wardrobe made of corrugated plastic and a fucking burlap sack--when you're already forced to dumb yourself down (and allah forbid you make a song about it, the next thing you know you're the subject of a Status Ain't Hood post on a slow news day and butt of a joke of a man who named himself after a piece of cotton on a stick, Lupe my man, keep your Ds to yourself already!), the last thing you need is some garbanzo coming at you on an email blast about "yo this is Spiderfang LOL, I got a new song on Myspace ROFL, it's called Google Earth Bitches WHODI WHOO, it's exactly just like the song you just mentioned you were thinking about recording on the riffs blog, I'm doing you son!" and then signing off like he's the real Spiderfang. Like he knows what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with the sweat frozen to your eyebrows because your landlord's a shyster and your eyebrows haven't been plucked since ninth grade, in a sweat because you figured out how to cap that line you wrote about "a menstruating woman walks into a blood drive": "tries to squeegie her tampons tells doc i'm trying to survive." Big Daddy Kane, hold onto your receipts!

At the moment I am a serious recording artist. I do not have time to be playing around on the internet like it's 1998 and we're all moving gifs, like it's 2002 and we're all the Napster of Porn. If you want to touch nuts, lover, touch nuts, none of this graze nuts shit you ripped off the Eddie Murphy RAW video. Don't watch me, watch that Georgetown chick on Vimeo. Point being:

1. I am the Real Spiderfang.

2. For clarity, I am switching my name from Spiderfang to The Real Spiderfang. This is a temporary measure until all the other Spiderfangs play themselves out like fat aunts shouting "W00t W00t!" during disco songs at your best friend's bar mitzvah, like the skinny aunts complaining how disappointed they are that "Crank That" will never be the new Macarena.

3. I'm working on a new song, it's called "Danny Power Glover." The basic premise is, you seen that movie Royal Tansenbaum, my thing is: How would the movie be different if after Royal called Henry "Coltrane" in the kitchen, what if Henry busted out a tenor and started playing "Syeeda's Song Flute"? I am of the opinion that this would have significantly changed the outcome of the movie.

74 S-FANGS

-FANG

SPIDERFANG BRAINSTORMER BARNBURNER! GET YOUR PAPER UP WILLY! THREE-PIECE CRANKS!

2007-11-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

CUT THOSE FANGANAILS BROVIUS!

SPIDERFANG AT THE DRAFTING TABLE
HOLLER, NEW YORK 10069

WHODI WHO

Ghost and goblins whaddup! Hello new world and a special hello new world to my girl Carmen Sandiego! I am your loot your warrant your crook--holla at me baby! Venus H. Pencil, throw some Ds on me! So check it. Here are some new ideas for some songs I've been thinking about:

"Google Earth Bitches": You ever look at a map and say to yourself damn Fang! South America looking fresh today! Europa girlfriend, you my girl but we need to put you on the Spiderfang Workout Plan A-S-A-P! T.I. throw some Ds on me! Anyway the point of the song is freedom, cause all the continents--they're my Google Earth Bitches. Key verse: George Bush don't you pee on me/ Atlantis throw some Ds on me

"My Pet Monster.com" This is coming from somewhere in my heart, so you know it's true. Everything I do...HA. Just playing. This is a mean cut about how My Pet Monster (1989 holler!) applies for a job using Monster.com. Obviously the beat is sampling the My Pet Monster commercial from the television, but I'm also going to be typing over the beat, like it's I'm applying for a job on the internet. There's going to be a pretty fly verse up in this song too where My Pet Monster is reading a job description for like, a deliveryman or something, I haven't figured it out yet, maybe a postman (Juelz jump on this!), but anyway Monster's reading the description and at the end of it it says "monsters need not apply." Then Monster's like "FUCK THAT!" lol. Key verse: Don't give me no cookies/ I ain't like that/ Just give me the nookie/ And some health insurance/ And a 401K

76 S-FANGS

WATCH OUT CHARLOTTE! NEW SPIDERFANG MERCH! CHALLAH!!

2007-11-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

SPIDERFANG ATTACKS THE WORLD WIDE WEB

A lot of people have been asking me "where can I buy a Spiderfang hoodie? how can I join the movement?" and up until a few seconds ago, there was no place to buy a Spiderhoodie, and the only thing moving was me, up and down and left and right the sweet silk of the cobweb I call hip-hop. Damn, Gina! I've also been working on some merch. I've been up on custom t-shirts dot com, and I've been up on Google Image Search, looking for the perfect clipart. You wouldn't believe all the whack Spiderfang biters up on Google Image Search. World of Warcraft watch your back! If anybody has a warez'd copy of World of Warcraft they can z-share me (with SN#) I think I can get you a discount on the new merch. FANG

75 S-FANGS

THE FIRST DAY OF MY VACATION

2007-11-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

I WOKE UP

Was not expecting American Gangster to hit so hard. The obvious stuff, beats rhymes and life, your usual suspects have already run down in the usual spots ad nauseam, no need to belabor the obvious here (ie when Jay's on there's few better). "Ignorant Shit" hit me this morning finally, especially Bean's verse, the line about all-you-want edits though the curse will remain, the Scarface The Movie vs. The Rapper stuff--just how we take it as a given things can and will (and maybe even should) be censored musically, that at least TV adaptations have the benefit of the uncut in the theater debut. Is shorty a ten, or the shit? Big difference. Beyond that my guess is we're going to see a lot more of these "I remember when..." framed rap albums, not unlike what Nas did for Street Disciple, everything piped through as decade-old nostalgia, not brags in medias res but on the beat they carry the same punch. It's how old talented rappers can and will navigate a hip-hop landscape that wants nothing to do with old people or talented rappers. The extension here is Soulja Boy fifteen years from now. Will he remember for us how he cranked that?

THEN I WENT DOWNTOWN TO LOOK FOR A JOB

Trying to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. If he actually thinks the motorcycles (or the furniture, or the tele, or the carpet, which the audience so misleadingly coos for, like carpets are housewife diamonds or something, or maybe I just don't have respect for carpets, post Kawasaki's Disease, look it up) run six figures... I mean maybe he's been out to sea that long, forgets how much things cost, I don't know. My guess is he misconstrued "the entire showcase" as "everything that has been to this very second won or at least offered as a prize on today's episode of The Price Is Right," in which case you can't fault him for being so fucking amped. But then there's that recantation, a quarter of his original bid--so he still thinks the motorcycles/furniture/carpet/television are in the $60K range. The woman irks me. I know she's smart to bid a buck and seal the deal shit-in-facewise for Jose--who could resist, but it strikes me cruel. Jose clearly wanted those motorcycles.

THEN I HUNG OUT IN FRONT OF THE DRUG STORE

Money-wise this vacation will be awful in the "can't buy an iPhone next week, back to eating Quaker Oats one-minute" sense, but hey I'm a survivor, and hey I have a secret rap side project I can return to, and hey perhaps you want to know if I am Spiderfang?

THEN I GOT A JOB, KEEPING PEOPLE FROM HANGING AROUND IN FRONT OF THE DRUG STORE

Strongly recommending Excepter's new 'Burgers 12"--the apostrophe is most operative.

86 RIFFS

SHORT ZACH BRAFF ENDORSES THE SHORT BOOK

2007-10-19T12:00:00.000-04:00

This concludes Zachary Kanin week on Riff Market. For more info, visit "The Short Book" at Smallotry.

ZACHARY KANIN WEEK: READING AT KGB BAR THIS SUNDAY

2007-10-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

Illustration by Zach Kanin

ZACH KANIN READS "THE SHORT BOOK"
KGB BAR
85 East 4th St
More info here

RIFF MARKET CONTINUES TO PRESENT: ZACHARY KANIN WEEK AT RIFF MARKET

2007-10-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

ZACH KANIN WEEK: DAY THREE
THE MOMENT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR
EXCLUSIVE RIFF MARKET BOOK REVIEW OF ZACH KANIN'S "THE SHORT BOOK"

I haven't read this book. Zach and I sat at Eatery a few weeks back, the book was there on the table, I said, "Can I borrow this book so I can write a review of it on Riff Market, as part of the Zach Kanin Week on Riff Market we've been talking about for a while now, this meal being the culmination of years of planning," and he told me, in no uncertain terms, that I could not borrow this book, that the publishers had only given him a few copies, that if I were to buy the book, say, on Amazon.com, I could singlehandedly bump his Amazon ratings by the hundred-thousands, that I kinda sorta had a lot of nerve asking him to borrow the book when so much was at stake. So I haven't read the book, and am still debating whether I will ever make plans to, whenever the 300 copies I ordered finally arrive.

In the meantime there is plenty to talk about, such as this exclusive excerpt. There hasn't been much critical thought put (to my knowledge) into how a musician's height affects his ability to make music, the kind of music he aspires to, the instruments he is capable of playing at (so to speak) high levels of technique. Prince, Thom Yorke, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Dolly Parton--the bum's question is what do these short musicians have in common. Can we characterize their music, as we can them, as short. I don't think we can! I just don't think it's possible. Or more bluntly: How many of these short musicians, from a legal standpoint, have seen or wanted to see the secret pair of "short breasts" Dolly Parton keeps flapped under her regular ones? None! My guess is Parton herself has no idea about the breasts.

One critique of the book I have, just on principle, is the title. The scenario I'm imagining goes like this. I'm short. I go into the Barnes and Noble at Astor, downstairs into the reference section, then maybe go upstairs for a bit and rip off the protective plastic around the expensive magazines like I'm the fucking Peter Pan of the publishing industry. Then I go downstairs to the line where the checkout is, then wait in line behind some guido-looking guy about to buy that Clublife book by Rob the Bouncer. Eventually I get to the cashier, who is beautiful in a Barnes and Noble sort of way, and I'm holding a book called The Short Book. Keep in mind I'm short. She takes the book and smiles at me, maybe even winks, like she gets it, like don't worry your secret's safe with me. "It's for a friend," I say. "I mean Zach's my friend. I'm actually totally comfortable with my physical appearance." She thanks for me for shopping at Barnes and Noble, and I'm on my way, and you'll notice that in this entire transaction she didn't even think to ask me if I wanted a Barnes and Noble membership.

Zach is a brilliant writer, relentlessly funny here mostly because the book's premise is not height but insecurity, and how we deal with insecurity. Not to say there's a dark side to this book in the way there was in Simon's, , but both writers operate with implicit gravitas for sure, Simon's based in the tragedy of the weak, Zach's in the concept of physical grossness. You look at Zach's art or read this book and the driving belief is not that short people aren't gross, but that ALL people are gross. That we, short fat tall skinny beautiful ugly, are all just as unsightly as the cockroaches we stomp on indiscriminately, the rats we're convinced are genetically modified to terrorize us, the skunks we used to put into brown paper bags and light on fire when we were young. You're not going to hear that anywhere I don't think--you shouldn't really; the book is basically a super-funny bathroom-type jokebook masquerading as a reference guide--but if you're wondering why Zach's jokes hit and yours don't, it might have to do with the size of his ticker, smaller physically, a bit weird looking, but infinitely kinder.

91 RIFFS

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: ZACHARY KANIN

2007-10-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

ZACH KANIN: DAY TWO
RIFF MARKET PRESENTS: ZACHARY KANIN WEEK
TODAY: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR/ILLUSTRATOR OF THE SHORT BOOK (AS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR/ILLUSTRATOR)

Yesterday I kicked off Zachary Kanin Week at Riff Market, in support of the New Yorker cartoonist's debut release The Short Book, out now and purchasable. Today Zach provides exclusive answers for some of the more popular interview questions he's had to field over the last few weeks. Thanks for reading. --NBS

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: ZACHARY KANIN

What is your favorite thing to do?
ZK: My favorite thing to do is to ride in my Dad’s 1986 Volvo Sedan from Providence to New Bedford with the windows down at night, wearing one of those blue bubble jackets with a fur or fleece interior, smoking cigarettes, and listening to shitty guitar rock from the 70s.

What kind of cigarettes?
Unimportant. I don’t know how to smoke cigarettes so I just try to keep them lit without smoking too much.

What do you do in New Bedford?
Nobody goes to New Bedford, they’re all just passin’ through.

Do you want to talk about the book?
Yes.

Please.
Looking at your post from yesterday I noticed that that is probably the worst excerpt from the book.

I thought it was good.
It’s out of context. The context is that the whole book is about musicians and that chapter is just about short ones. Sort of misleading.

Now you’re being misleading.
I’m trying to sell myself here. Do you remember in late 2004 whenever you would go to a Loew’s movie theater and the movie screen would sing “Thank you for coming to Loews, sit back and relax, enjoy the show!” and everyone in the audience would respond “Thank you the pleasures all ours, we’re really relaxed, so start the show!”?

Of course. That happened at every movie playing at Loews throughout the whole country.
What a crazy phenomenon. Someday I’ll tell my kids about that.

How are your kids?
They’re not good. Hilsy’s got the mumps and Josh Rogan Josh has the hiccups goin’ on three year now. Thanks for asking though.

We’re running out of space, do you want to say anything else about the book?
Sure. If you feel short sometimes, this book deals with a lot of your issues, and is mainly just a really funny book with some funny illustrations. Christina did a lot of research for it also, and there are a lot of interesting facts and anecdotes in it. It’s also a good bathroom read, because it is broken into increments that correspond to various bathroom acts in terms of time.

Where can you buy it?
Any bookstore. It’s in the reference section of a lot of bookstores, which is confusing because that means it’s between LSAT books and dictionaries. But that speaks volumes about how well this book can help you on your LSATs.

What’s the worst part of being short?
Just livin’ man. It’s almost too much to take.

What’s the best part?
The broads.

…
This sort of turned into a James Lipton interview at some point. I’m sorry about that.

When did you write this book?
I started writing it about four years ago for a Blue Mountain Books internship. Then I rewrote it from last October through June about. I did the illustrations June-July.

But you were working at the time?
I was working at The New Yorker as the Assistant Cartoon Editor. I read all of the captions for the caption contest at the back of the magazine and narrowed them down.

How many captions was that?
About 8000 a week on average. I started to have serious problems with my eyes by the time I left, which was worrisome to me, because I need my eyes.

And you were cartooning?
Right, I was and am submitting about 15 cartoons a week to The New Yorker.

What is your best cartoon?
My most popular cartoon is a tombstone with the inscription “Wouldn’t Stop Picking At It.” My least popular cartoon was two guys with scalpels operating on something on a table and saying “There’s gotta be an easier way to get candy from a baby.”

That seems a little out there for The New Yorker.
A lot of people wrote in. One guy wrote that injury to an infant is unacceptable to the species. People thought that I (and therefore The New Yorker) was advocating dissecting babies for their candy.

And you weren’t?
I submitted a follow-up cartoon that had two guys holding a vacuum cleaner to a baby’s mouth and saying “There’s gotta be an easier way to get an appendix out of a baby.” It didn’t fly.

RIFF MARKET PRESENTS: ZACHARY KANIN WEEK AT RIFF MARKET

2007-10-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Illustrations by Zachary Kanin

ZACH KANIN: DAY ONE
RIFF MARKET PIMPS "THE SHORT BOOK" FIVE-PART MINI-SPECIAL
EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

Zachary Kanin, a New Yorker cartoonist and old friend of Riff Market, has just released his first book, entitled The Short Book: Tall Stories, Freakish Facts, and the Long and Short of Being Small in a Great Big World, available for purchase on Amazon and from what I understand, misleadingly, in the reference sections of actual bookstores. The book is a mishmash of short-centric humor pieces, bizarre found facts such as celebrity heights and this story about one person murdering another person over an argument about James Brown's height, and misc riffs on the science of short and the short lifestyle.

Riff Market ostensibly being a music blog, Zach gave me an exclusive excerpt from his book, "Chapter 41. Musicians," the one in which he deals with the legacy of short musicians. That's for today. Tomorrow I will be interview Zach about his writing process, and later in the week I'll be publishing some book-related surprises Zach has put together exclusively for Riff Market. The book's own blog, Smallotry, can be found here.

Chapter 41. Musicians
By Zachary Kanin

“If music be the food of love, then it must not be very nutritious, or else the following geniuses would have been taller.”
--William Shakespeare

Sammy Davis Jr.: 5’3
A member of the famous “Rat Pack” with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, Sammy mixed comedy and charm with lounge singing. While Sinatra was known as “Old Blue Eyes,” Sammy had only one real eye and enjoyed a less complimentary nickname: “Mr. Little Bones.”

Greatest Composer in History
Ludwig Van Beethoven: 5’4
Not only was Beethoven short, but he also became deaf, and yet he still composed some of the best sounding and tallest symphonies ever.

Prince: 5’2
No matter what name he wants to be called, he’s the prince of being short and musical. He once made a man pregnant by making love to a woman near him—that is how potent the dude is.

Little Jimmy Dickens: 4’11
This country music legend and hall-of-famer was known for his hits “Take an Old Cold Tater (and Wait)” and “I’m Little but I’m Proud.” He referred to himself as “Mighty Mouse in his pajamas.”

Bob Dylan: 5’6
Some scholars believe that Dylan’s anti-war anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind” was actually about a day when a strong gust knocked him off his little feet and sent him thousands of miles to Vietnam where he could witness the futile atrocities of the war firsthand. Others say that never happened.

Did someone say, “More musicians please?”
-Gustav Mahler (5’4; composer)
-Igor Stravinsky (5’4; composer)
-Paul Simon (5’3; singer/songwriter)
-Pat Benatar (5’1; rock singer)
-Phil Collins (5’5; pop singer)
-Dolly Parton (5’0; country singer/actress)
-Thom Yorke (5’4; lead singer of Radiohead)

NEW YORK STORY

2007-09-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

RIFFMARKET NEW YORK DANCE MUSIC CELEBRATION

Off the top of my head we've had:

LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
LCD Soundsystem: North American Scum (Onastic Dub)
LCD Soundsystem: Freak Out/Starry Eyes
Lee Douglas: New York Story
Escort: All Through The Night
Escort: A Bright New Life
Baby Oliver: Primetime (Uptown Express)
Baby Oliver: The Shots
Audion: I Gave You Away
!!!: Heart of Hearts
Holy Ghost: Hold On
Still Going: Still Going Theme
Woolfy: Odyssey
V/A: After Dark
Hercules & Love Affair: Roar

And I'm forgetting who knows how many others, some mixes too, to say nothing of all the disco edits and remixes, to say nothing of non-dance releases. A DFA-heavy list for sure but DFA/Rong/Environ/Italians comprise something of a do-no-wrong axis in these parts. Also taken by how many of these tracks, more than usual it seems, trading in that NYcentric melancholy I increasingly find myself attracted to, of wanting to have kicked it here twenty years ago, of walking by 647 Broadway and hoping I might catch a chill but instead crossing the street and checking out the prices on Atrium's import denim. As bright and full-sounding as some of these tracks get too, they're pent up, tightly wound, pensive--silver-age material, wise to their own anachronism. I guess that means 205 Club, maybe only 205 Club, which if you can stomach the front-of-house's pained attempts to manufacture some kind of exclusivity, a move that ratchets up the number of people worthy of exclusion and makes both sides more miserable than they have to be, is one of the few consistently good times out anymore.

The rest of the night seems interchangeable and h*pster in the glib sense of the word, laptop dudes riding the mashup train (still!) or dutifully importing the same French vinyl everyone else is. Beating the horse dead I know. Thing is I don't doubt Kitsune and friends will, as house did to disco, produce something worthwhile out of all these low-budget open rehearsals. But at least when house did it there was the rarity factor, the location, the community, the bodily danger (bad drugs; AIDS)--all really physical things we're more/less deprived of at this point. Dance music without a strong physical component is what again? It's a second-order abstraction of dance music, intent primarily on sounding like dance music, only secondarily on making people dance.

(Related sidenote, fucking wow, how terrible that you can't even go to a party and act like an idiot without having to worry that this city's most vile and worthless subset will try and turn you out. Have we reached the point that I thought we would just not this soon, when "nice people in real life, assholes on the internet" have largely become "assholes in both real life and the internet"? Reminds me of something J said, which is it's not the idiot bankers who've killed this city but the mostly ugly semi-idiot liberal arts-educated hangers-on who aren't talented enough to produce and aren't stupid enough just to enjoy themselves. Instead they try to bring the rest of us down with them, a last-ditch impulse born only of self-loathing nihilism. Until the next print mag job opens up!)

There's feedback loopage at work here obviously, one I'm not crazy about sticking by because I'm skeptical of one-to-one "product reflects its environment" PR as it is, eg first-wave techno packaging itself as the sound of Detroit. For whom exactly? But yes I'm making out 2007 NYC-produced dance music to be like this glitch in our matrix, and maybe that's just it, lots of tracks here that suggest they come from more than abstractions, that really want to rescue some kind of first-order function, in New York, the wistful lyrics ("Hold On"; Sound of Silver), the anguished yelps ("Roar"), the will to silliness ("Primetime"), that last trait being the most crucial.

45 RIFFS

ON THE NATURE OF STRIPPERS

2007-09-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

In a few weeks, I anticipate having to go to several strip clubs for a friend's bachelor party. There is talk of getting some barbeque beforehand, which I'm also pretty psyched about. In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about the playlist I'm going to put together for whatever club my bros and I end up at, since by now the really swanky NYC strip clubs are hip to the iPod DJ thing that's been happening fairly regularly at some non-strip clubs I frequent, e.g. the Apple Store on Prince; the other Apple Store in midtown. If you're not hip to it, and you own a strip club, I strongly suggest buying yourself a copy of The Long Tail. My guess is some strippers have "their songs" too, which could end up being a problem for me. Honestly? It's pretty bullshit strippers always have to complain about the music on iPod nights. They know it's coming, week after week, why don't they bring their own iPod and get in line to play their three songs like the rest of us. The new shuffles are not at all cumbersome; I don't think I'm being unreasonable.

Either way I tend to be pretty democratic at my strip club DJ gigs, and I'm definitely going to come prepared with a mix of personal favorites and club classics. This is what my playlist looks like so far:

Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Radio Edit)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Isak Original)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Voltaxx Radio Edit)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Greece Dub)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Robbie Rivera Remix)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Steve Murano Remix)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Voltaxx Remix)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (DJ I.C.O.N. Remix)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (B-Deep Remix)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Isak Original Instrumental)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Greece Dub Instrumental)"
Benny Benassi: "Satisfaction (Isak Original Edit)"

75 RIFFS

A PLACE TO BURY RIFFS

2007-09-13T10:00:00.000-04:00

RIFFMARKET "STATE OF THE ALBUM" EDITION

Rather than dismiss A Place to Bury Strangers's S/T as a songless one-trick turd or call out its lone booster for becoming his site's most shameless autoeroticist, I'd like to point out that this record probably isn't that bad of a marketing tool for the effects processors the band's frontman apparently builds. There's not a song on here worth talking about, which is to say there's no song that will get in the way of the man demonstrating to us all the different settings and kinds and configurations of distortion pedals he can put together. It's sort of like the preset song on one of those Casio keyboards with a lot of buttons. Not the best song, but you're not buying the song, etc. Taking this a step further, it might be nice to see more equipment makers sponsor indie bands, with the obvious strings attached. A fair record deal in my mind would be the Equipment Maker gives its best equipment to the band, with a 50/50 on record sales after EM recoups production costs; album art that heavily features the sponsoring equipment; a complete equipment list in the liners or at the very least in the PR email whatever press monkey sends around on their behalf; the prices of the various equipment in the liners, and maybe some kind of discount for people who bought the album; a few songs with alternate equipment-referencing titles (e.g. Metallica's "Enter Ziljian," Jay's "(Can I Get A) Mexican Stratocaster"); none of the band's songs are allowed to be too good.

28 RIFFS

IF 'AYO TECHNOLOGY' WAS CALLED 'YAYO TECHNOLOGY'

2007-09-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

NEW VIDEO SYNOPSIS

-50 Cent and Justin are still dancing in that black room, but in the back corner of the room Tony Yayo is sitting in a leather desk chair, reading an instruction manual for programming a universal remote control.

-In the scene where all the strippers are voguing on Justin, cut to a conference room where a different stripper is unzipping Yayo's fly. Camera tight on Yayo's face. When the stripper gets the thing zipped all the way down, camera cuts back to reveal that Yayo has his hand in his pants and is now shining a red laser pointer into the stripper's eyes.

-A good portion of Yayo's verse is dedicated to complaining about how annoying it is when somebody calls his cell phone from a Restricted number.

-Timbaland's Ghost and Goblins beat would be peppered with the sound of Yayo screaming obscenities at himself for not being able to land a Benihana in Tony Hawk 3.

-All of the original video's Matrix cuts would be replaced by a lengthy scene in which Tony Yayo jerks off to Caddyshack.

63 RIFFS

RIFFMARKET BACK TO SCHOOL EDITION

2007-09-10T10:00:00.000-04:00

From afar I've watched two respectable scribes day-in-day-out for their muppet-looking thirtysomething nobody of a boss, phoning in daily gossipy industry schlock so entirely beneath them you just have to pray they know so or hope they're merely trying to pay the bills just like everybody else, playacting the muckracking whatever rebel-blogger of 2002 like it wasn't a parody of itself way back in 2004--I mean the Stuff-shilling queen of it, well past her own fifteen, turned her back on it in the big print format she so jealously criticized and (we guess) now returns to her inner cheese, wearing red lipstick that matches her A&F red cumberbund belts, jeans with stilettos, funky-colored thongs, the works, friends, the works--from afar I've watched them, and at the very least I'd expect one or somebody else out there to hit this Britney Spears VMA 2007 softball out the park, somebody who has the smarts enough to realize that the people creating pop culture are by/large far more intelligent than the people carping on it, that in 2007 these Creators' Creations often come designed with these very Carps in mind but lo I was wrong. If you scrawled jizz letters on stolen Getty images, you'd say as much and maybe get to meet a few celebrities too.

Who was playing who exactly? Viacom web2.0'd your ass, preying on the fact that most internet users are incapable of anything but the obvious reaction, turning Spears commentary into de facto the most subversive meme of 2007. Television, once a semi-live free-for-all where PiL can storm the Bandstand crowd or an 8-year-old can tell Bozo the clown to go fuck himself, everybody knows is scripted and post-produced to no end--and so the calculated manufacturing of the MISTAKE, of the absolute heinous can't-believe-that-happened goof, is really TV's last outlet for excitement. Mistakes are the new Road Rules van. We want impact, we want it raw, we want pornography and violence, and we want to be able to comment about how pornographic and violent and embarrassing it was, we arrogantly want the interactivity. Viacom delivered. Smart creative people want to get paid too. Big Media is not that stupid.

Thing is Spears didn't go out there trying to kill the thing either. She knew she couldn't, but you wonder what the backroom talks were like. My guess is everybody knew this was a stunt--I mean that outfit--but very few knew she'd be so listless, that the performance would be so cynical. That was all Spears. Reports of physical self-sabotage abound, but she's trying to kill off "Britney Spears" the icon as well--maybe the only decision she'll make in her career that's actually her own. Because imagine if she went out there and really gave it the good old high-school dropout try: She'd still be fat, listless, embarrassing, past her prime, lipsynching, publicly humiliated, Pinocchio'd, everything else. Can't condone the performance but my heart goes out.

If there's one thing I've taken from my few months off the Riffwagon, observing the fray but refusing to two-cent it, it's the dramatic speed with which the general intelligence of the internet has fallen to the level of the general populace. I remember it being a self-selecting crew, and almost like a "thing" to turn to the blogspot for a sweet dose of smart and sideways, the kind of thing Byron so brilliantly parodied from almost day one. The real thing runs so close to the parody anymore though, it'll be no surprise when we're all back reading just the Times and New Yorker and Dusted Magazine again, and maybe a few novels here and there, and maybe Weather.com until the hurricane finally hits.

ALBUMS
Enon: Grey Geysers Carbon Clouds
Ricardo Villalobos: Fabric 36
James Murphy & Pat Mahoney: Fabriclive 36
Body Language 5
Charalambides: Likeness
White Rainbow: Prism of Eternal Now
Felix Da Housecat: Virgo Blakto and the Movie Disco

SONGS
Still Going: "Still Going Theme"
Omar S: "Dirty Distortions"

OLDIES BUT GOODIES
Fam-Lay: Grand Theft Ghetto
Frankie Knuckles: Choice (A Classic Collection)

QUOTES
Horace: "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo."

51 RIFFS

EVERY INDIE ROCK ALBUM THIS YEAR IS AWESOME

2007-06-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

RIFFMARKET ENDORSES THE CONSUMPTION OF THE FOLLOWING DELICIOUS BIRD

HERE HAVE ANOTHER ONE

I KEEP FEEDING YA

AND FEEDING YA

MAN WAS I WRONG ABOUT BLOG HOUSE

Seriously! Why didn't anyone tell me. This stuff is definitely on par with Apostle of Hustle, and might even be better than Belly. There was that guy in the comments section who started talking about monads, sure, but I really would have appreciated somebody just grabbing this blog by the clit and screaming into the thing like he was Zach De LaRocha and the clit was a cordless microphone. Trust me! I would have gotten the message.

As you can imagine I have a lot of fucking blog posts to remix now, but for the time being:

55 RIFFS

YOU THINK YOU CAN DO BETTER?

2007-06-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

RIFFMARKET "LIVES WITH HIS LANDLADY IN TORONTO, LOVES THE FACT THAT HE CAN WALK TO THE CLUB" EDITION

AN ODE TO CANADIAN CHUBROCK AND THE BUM IN CAMBRIDGE WITH ONE HUGE DREAD

WELCOME BACK, INTERNET

It occurred to me that I'd never been to a concert where somebody screamed "hey you, asshole with the face, you fucking suck" and the asshole with the face stopped his bandmates, presumably other As with Fs, and screamed back at the guy, "what you think you can do better? you think you can get this party started?" and the guy screams back, "why yes, i do think i can do better, in fact for the last ten years i have been preparing for this very moment, practicing several hours a night in my home off the path train, waiting for the day when finally somebody in a band would accept my challenge." then the guy reveals that his plus one to every rock show for the last ten years has been his motherfucking ax. he zips it out of his gig bag, all the strings have been pre-tuned but he has a portable tuner just in case, the guitar's a little showy but you figure what the hell, let's give this guy a chance. he gets on the stage, the lead singer of whatever band is on the side drinking a beer and trying to talk to the rhythm guitarist like they fucking planned the whole thing, and then the guy turns to the band, counts off to four, and rips into toto's africa. five bars in he realizes he's the only guy playing toto's africa, which wouldn't be a problem except africa is tough to pull off on your own, and he's not that good.

"hey asshole you suck" somebody screams; it becomes apparent to the people around him that this particular somebody also has his ax. in the spirit of rock&roll the original ax guy cedes the stage to the new ax guy. meanwhile the guys in the band are really hoping this new guy will just want to play songs the band has written. they know how to play these songs and really like the way they sound. "angel don't cry," he tells the band, "toto." the band has no fucking idea this new guy is talking about "angel don't cry," from 1984's isolation, the only album toto made with vocalist fergie fredriksen. "no," he clarifies, seemingly for my benefit alone, "i mean, angel, don't cry." i stop crying. "we're going to play 'angel don't cry,'" he continues. i start bawling my fucking eyes out.

from there i envision a lot of other audience members going up on stage, replacing the drummer and bassist and keyboardist, who are all now just on the floor talking about how much they regret not buying that stack bundles double-cd at amadou. the new band is both tight and sick. they play three songs. each clocks in at around three hours. the set is danceable, anthemic, unconcerned with authenticity, fun, dubstep, effortless, off the chain, mp3; the merch table on the way out is expensive but you're respectful of the fact that a band has to make its money somehow.

THE SAME THAT BURN CROSSES

2007-05-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

H/T: Soviet Panda

In what might go down as the Oedipus Rex of franco-filter-metal tragedies, it looks like EdBanger finally figured out what song they've been trying to remake and butchering over and over again, their entire stable practically: Rage Against the Machine's "Killing In The Name." Imagine being at this party in Melbourne, these clowns playing several hours of truly vile shit, which you yourself identify real-time as truly vile shit but can't figure out why, and then said clowns close with a futzed-with version of "Killing" and proceed to go nuts like they made the track "work" or something, completely oblivious to the fact that their entire careers are futzed-with versions of "Killing," while the crowd goes nuts too, an entire generation of people who have never stayed up past their bedtimes just so they can call Y100 and vote for "Bulls On Parade" in the 9PM Cage Match.

The other option is they do know they've been ripping "Killing," like the song's their wizard behind the curtain, and they couldn't keep the secret anymore and they just had to tell everybody and everybody's like, you know what, "this party would be a lot better if those guys left and just let the wizard do his thing. I did not buy this 600 dollar pajama print sweatshirt for nothing," etc.

Thing is Erol Alkan had closed a good number of Trash sets with the original "Killing" for what has to be three years now, and Dave Pianka, the Erol Alkan of PhillyNYC, though maybe it's just a Leibniz/Newton thing, has been doing the same for at least two. Yes it's the most incredible feeling ever when, after hours upon hours of electro and disco and 80s music, this bombtrack drops, and all your choreographed dance-fight moves from grade school come back to you, and all you want to do is just beat the shit out of something, anything, because suddenly you remember you've been taking way too much shit since the last time you heard this song, and all the girls you're trying to hit on have fled for their fucking lives to the bar, and in just like five seconds you smell like a 12-year-old who doesn't know he's supposed to shower every night. Deployed well it's this huge, honest release, not that you don't like dancing and pointing out how many old disco twelves you recognize from all the Soul Jazz comps you downloaded, but you get zapped by the fact that nothing you'll ever hear for the rest of your life will affect you as much as the cassingle of "Killing In The Name" that you stole from The Wall because you couldn't afford the s/t.

I was totally surprised to find out, from my musically educated friends in college, that actually Rage Against The Machine were a cheesy band with cheesy lyrics. That never had occurred to me.

All's to say I've found the root of my psychosis with this EdBanger stuff, the reason I believe it to be destroying everything I care about musically, and that is because track after track they are ruining a really fucking good thing, i.e. "Killing In The Name." It's guilty-in-retrospect contamination if such a thing exists, which it does, eg look what happened to "Kashmir" after Diddy sampled it for whatever that song was again, eg look what happened to "Lust For Life" after Jet made the iPod song. On the bright side, at least we still have "Snake Charmer," and that song from the Godzilla soundtrack.

17 RIFFS

THE ENIGMATIC, POSSIBLY MEME-ETIC RETURN OF GUEST RIFF WEDNESDAYS: CHRIS OTT

2007-05-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

EYE HATE CULTURE VULTURES

So i dont know if this comes from blog-overload, or what, but i fucking hate the lower east side. Or maybe it has something to do with horrible rumors i read on gossip sites I fantasized would one day write about me, saying i fucked some dude that wouldn’t donkey punch me with the lights out. i’m outraged. i'm outrageous. i hate myself.

alternative music is dead.

it was DOA. i think. i never tried to understand it. it's not understandable. right? i mean, even the people at the labels that can make moves and direct culture hate alternative music, and i dont blame them. just like network sitcom hipsters (omg how I met yr mother is brilliant) and seven-string guitars, this shit is ready for its grave.

btw, i dont place mcr in this category because mcr is this generation’s nirvana. not straight up sva middle class mallrat bullshit (nevar1).

maybe this post has something to do with me being drunk at the moment. maybe all the posts i've made within the past 30 minutes on various sites has something to do with how much i've drank. maybe it’s that i’m catastrophically insecure, and that i’m realizing i’m so far behind i’ll never be able to convince anyone i have a clue about music. maybe i’m the new lori majewski. but oh my god, teenagers have the worst taste in music.

HAVE ANY OF YOU HEARD OF A BAND CALLED POI DOG PONDERING!?!?1

Music did not start in 1991. Do you know that? Knowing your musical history doesn’t start with knowing who Green River was.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE LISTEN TO DIE KREUZEN. listen to what’s the 10 1/2. LISTEN TO MID-PERIOD BORN-AGAIN VIOLENT FEMMES!!!!! listen to stetsasonic. listen to the kingston trio. listen to codeine. LISTEN TO SOMETHING OTHER THAN WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO TEN YEARS AGO BUT MISSED OUT ON BECAUSE THE DRIVING IMPULSE IN YOUR LIFE HAS ALWAYS BEEN TO BE POPULAR, AND ONCE AND FOR ALL: STOP TREATING MUSIC LIKE IT’S YOUR STICKER COLLECTION.

I STRONGLY ENDORSE COCOROSIE FOR THE POSITION OF META-REACTIONARY BLOG POST TREASURER

2007-05-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

Get Him Eat Him
Bowery Ballroom
May 4

Download: "2x2"

The opening song was "2x2", which I had happened to hear way more than six months ago as an instrumental, when Matt played it for me through broken Grados at that place on First and 10th. I forget where we were before, where we were walking from, but Matt had been talking a bunch on the way about how he was trying to hold back a little with the songwriting, trust his instincts and not rush to the "difficult" decision or the crazy chord that throws everything off or the sudden rhythm change up--how after his debut album he was learning how to let his songs breathe. It's the counter-intuitive instinct at the moment at least in indie rock, which is in both its breakneck rapidriff phase (Fiery Furnaces, Deerhoof, Architecture in Helsinki, Of Montreal, etc.) and its grandiose, super-dramatic indie U2 one too (Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Annuals, etc.), which bands are (mostly for the worse) hyper *cough* aware of.

So I put the broken headphone cups on my ears. The song hasn't started yet. I try to take a fork of this berry tart thing we're splitting and I end up taking a much larger bite, you've been there, a transgression on the basic premise of splitting. I'm looking at Matt, a person I love and respect and admire for a billion reasons and for what's increasingly seeming like a billion years, and he's queuing up a song that, for him, signifies his maturation as a songwriter and in general that critical moment when you stop worrying about what's cool, what's now, what'll be reviewed well, whether the threads of influence are too bare, and just write the songs you want to hear. I'm supposed to listen to this song and more/less corroborate that yes this is everything you say it is, and I'm liking it lots. So anxiety on both sides of the table--especially since our friendship began and thrives on yet another basic premise, that we both enjoy the same kind of music, that our tastes are remarkably in line so much so that we'd go into business together--plus it was hot out.

Obviously I loved the song. Started with this multicolor swell of vocal and instrumental harmonies and vocoder, not unlike LeMay fave the New Pornographers, then eases back, then went right back up to 10 again with this sugary horn passage courtesy the Beirut guys. What struck me was how much rhythm was tucked into otherwise straightforward parts--the track was detailed but wasn't claustrophobic--which frankly was really kept me from really really liking Geography Cones, and yes does constitute this "maturation as a songwriter" thing Matt was pretty sure happened.

So they played this Friday night and it occurred to me that if somebody heard that song you'd think Get Him Eat Him were very Now--huge sincere sound but with lots of quick changeups, lots of different song sections fitting together, building off one another, etc. An album of ADHD "2x2"-type songs and you'd probably see their whole album leaked ten times over blogs by now.

Nice time as any to bring up the fact that Matt and Band really love indie rock--not Peter Bjorn and John / Fujiya & Miyagi girls in tanktops indie rock but the really nerdy sometimes corny often-borderline-emo 90s indie guitar rock stuff Pitchfork got behind before feeling the need to diversify. 12 Rods, Walt Mink, the Wrens, Cap N Jazz, Chavez, Mercury Rev, Polvo, Jawbox, Circulatory System, Bedhead, Skeleton Key, those first couple Trail of Dead albums, Olivia Tremor Control, Built to Spill, Dismemberment Plan, etc.--I mean my guess is 90% of the people who went to the Peter Bjorn and John concerts last week haven't heard a single D-Plan song.

All these bands that everybody's forgotten since indie rock's become so fucking cool... I don't know what to say except that Get Him Eat Him didn't forget them, and they still love that stuff, most of which is very not Now. The rest of Arms Down plays like a glorious homage to these "Pitchfork bands" actually, many of which Matt himself wrote about and escaped in as he was younger, many of which just don't exist anymore or just aren't allowed to because most people there are really worried about getting things "right" and/or worse, have intense preoccupations with their critical reputations. Something that Ryan and Matt and Brent and all the early writers just didn't seem to have...

Basically I highly doubt anybody over there has the balls to write the review Arms Down really wants, i.e. a walk down Pitchfork's memory lane. It'd be solipsistic and irresponsible or "fake Brent D" or whatever, plus the whole ridiculous conflict of interest thing, plus the latent tension between musicians and critics and the taboo of "crossing the line," which remains the most unfortunate legacy of awkward music reviewers who've convinced themselves their reviews count for cultural criticism. I'm not saying this album is by any means a crucial moment in the history of indie rock or online music criticism, but it's very interesting to me to hear a 2007 record that sounds like a Pitchfork 8.9 circa 1999--maybe even better, since Matt can actually sing, and the mixing is as mentioned above extremely smart, dense but not claustrophobic, and the band knows how to write breakdowns really well--and realize that FUCK, the site that practically made this record could very well turn its back on it because none of the lyrics reference Denis Cooper. Etc.

85 RIFFS

I CAN SELL A MILL SAYING EVERYTHING ON THE TRACK

2007-04-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

WAYNE'S WORLD IS AN INVISIBLE COTERIE

GUESS WHAT

YOU ARE NOT PART OF AFOREMENTIONED INVISIBLE COTERIE

Julianne wrote a great piece on Lil Wayne today, worth reading because it is most likely about you, the hyperfingered blogskimming danceremixing motherfucker who hasn't listened to any one song the last six months more than six times, except maybe "Young Folks." The general buzz is that Wayne is all-pleasure anymore, one moneyshot after the next, something like a rapping Girl Talk. He writes lyrics with their repurposing in mind, ready to be quoted out of context, which they happen to be from the outset. He chases tangents because he knows we're not listening; maybe he isn't either?

Am I jumping off the Wayne train? No but I feel like Drought 3 is a dare and I don't expect many people to take Wayne up. Here's a guy who can say whatever the fuck he wants on a track, free-associative, ADHD, "lyrical" or whatever, and most times it will hit really really hard, every two-bars something to take back home, a fount of one-liners that coincides with our embarrassingly short attention spans. Maybe you write these lines down in a moleskine, in a section called "@lyrics" using GTD, or maybe you have a sweet blog that needs a headline to go with an mp3 once in a while--maybe the line ends up there, cleverness by association, etc.

But what happens to all the other rhymes is pretty much the same thing that happens to all the other rappers' rhymes, just sorta forgotten, spit out and gone forever, so my question is: effectively what's the difference for attention-deficient you between a guy who says nothing on the track and a guy who says everything? The internet is basically leaving Wayne on the level of Mims, interacting with him really literally, at best "love of the language" or something equally anti-intellectual or just the kind of anti-intellectual that masks no intellect. I just don't think anybody's going to take the time to weigh the juxtapositions, feel the resonances of those one-liners and how they interact with one another, read and create the connections Wayne is begging us to make with all this ridiculous output.

Granted there's something incredibly liberating to knowing your intended audience doesn't give a fuck what you say as long as there are jokes in it and a sweet beat or a hot rating. Definitely characterized the track reviews glory days when Indie Rock America was bothered simply because there was a black man wearing a purple fur in the tracks graphics box, angered and alienated by that much more than any critical flourish. Zach Baron and Pete L'Official's mini-reviews remain some of my favorite things that have ever run on the internet, just so dead-on critically, tones that rose to the levels of the art they criticized, and if you didn't understand it, it's because it wasn't meant for you to understand. Reading can and should be a challenge sometimes. Sorry mommas, they're so obnoxious, it's not like riding a bike, etc.

So who the hell knows what's going on between the (one-)line(r)s. There could be elaborate missile deployment codes for all we know, or ingredients for a new kind of sandwich. It'll be too much work for your numb face though won't it, plus fuck it all if the virtue of hard work hasn't become the internet avatar of homosexuality, god forbid we act like this stuff is more important than it is, treat it like Langston. Somebody's decided our reading is supposed to be as effortless as Wayne's delivery, which presupposes something really fucking shaky, i.e. that Wayne is an effortless writer. He's prolific for sure but I'd love to see the floor of his chopping block, the lines that don't make it, etc. Except as has been mentioned in prior live action riffing type situations, you'll never get guys like Wayne into the chair to talk about how they write, where they write, what they're drawing from, because they know admitting anything but 100% inspiration 0% perspiration is such a fucking death knell. Because rap music is supposed to be really fun, really popular, an entertainment whose artists ostensibly conflate artistic with statistic, end of story.

So then again what about Wayne, who's giving this stuff out for free before Khaled jumps on the tape and screams lisssssteen! every fifteen fucking seconds, because Wayne knows how annoying that is. What about a rapper who secretly albeit clearly to me gives a shit about what he's doing, so much so that he doesn't even want to get paid for it. He just wants validation. He wants somebody to rise to his level and read the fuck out of these lyrics, really think about how they fit together track after track. The people who buy CDs aren't hearing these tracks. You and I are though and, excepting Julianne, we are utterly (utterly) failing him.

WHO WILL JOIN ME ON THIS JOURNEY?

78 RIFFS

AMY WINEHOUSE VS. LILY ALLEN: A VERDICT HAS BEEN REACHED AND NOBODY'S GOING TO LIKE IT (AKA UK POP AS SPRINGTIME WEATHER ESCAPISM)

2007-04-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

I'VE SAID IT ONCE AND I'LL SAY IT ONCE AGAIN

BAND INTERVIEWS ARE THE NEW MUSIC

This is really heating up to be our generation's Robbie Williams vs. Robbie Williams' electricity bill. Amy Winehouse. Lily Allen. What we have on our hands is the infinity gauntlet of average-looking pop singers and it's not even 4/20 yet. Let me put things in perspective for you. Somebody recently asked me over breakfast burritos whether it was possible for a blogger on the internet to like Amy Winehouse, who I'm pretty sure did shotput at Bellport High School (go clippers), and Lily Allen, a girl who's made a fortune in frequent flyer miles by convincing nice guys that "nice guys are the new asshole," here comes the clit wagon, all those YM columns I read when I was 13 are about to pay off, all aboard!, etc.--whether it was possible to like both these girls at once and not get caught in the middle of one mindblowing reverse Eiffel Tower-type situation. Keep in mind I don't think you can take those subway condoms on the plane with you. No fucking way. So what's the 011, mudfighter? Good luck getting these girls to see a movie together and split a sundae/cone at Sundaes and Cones afterwards.

AMY WINEHOUSE: 71 RIFFS
LILY ALLEN: 48 RIFFS
SUNDAES AND CONES ON 10TH STREET: 72 RIFFS

I AM A PROUD READER OF HARPER'S MAGAZINE

2007-04-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

Best Jobs in the Music Industry

As several people have already inquired, there's a lot of speculation re why I'm back in the blogging game five posts/week after nearly three weeks of 0-1 posts/week. I admit it. I'm like the fucking Blog Lazarus of this blog. Everyday is the Wedding of Cana around here isn't it. Pour wine into my mouth and watch me piss out a crown of thorns. But as none of you have guessed, it is not because I am catching up on some popular movies from the last few years, such as Borat (fat guy not fat enough), Mean Girls (not enough of the Indian kid who likes math--maybe for sequel?), Labyrinth (too similar to actual labyrinths), and Children of Men (should have been exclusively about this guy:

).

As all of you have guessed, it's because I've been doing a lot of thinking about music, and the music industry, specifically best jobs within the biz, i.e. bizjobs. I've also been thinking about the worst bizjobs too but maybe that's implicit. So this is what I've got for you. These are the best and worst jobs in the music industry. If you're on the fence, I would strongly recommend taking one of the best bizjobs before taking one of the worst bizjobs.

BEST BIZJOBS

1. The guy who licenses rap music to the US Army for use in Gitmo torture sessions. I had lunch with this guy over the weekend and he makes a lot more money than you'd think

2. The guy who drives around the city honking at dogs crapping on the sidewalk. Pretty sure he works at Interscope

WORST BIZJOBS

1. lead singer of the Twilight Sad

2. bassist for Alice Coltrane

I'LL NEVER RUN OUT OF SONGS

2007-04-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

RIFF MARKET ARTS ROUNDUP

01. MUSIC VIDEOS. In putting together something on the Kathy Diamond LP, I somehow got back to Crystal Waters, who did "100% Pure Love" and "Gypsy Woman (The Homeless Song)". One thing I'm sorta positive happened though I don't remember for sure is when that homeless chick went to school with us, whether I caught anybody singing la-da-di, la-di-da whenever they saw her. Awful. This must have happened at least once, on a weekend or something, which doesn't make it any more acceptable if you ask me. Truly awful. At the very very least, somebody definitely thought about doing it, which is also pretty bad.

02. BOOKS. Biased obviously but I love Simon's. One thing nobody's said about this book so far is how hilarious it is. A lot of these pieces are extremely funny.

03. TELEVISION. This is a clip from In Living Color, which was basically like a black SNL. I can't believe I found this. This is the song that introduced me to house music.

04. HYPOTHETICAL NYU A CAPELLA GROUP. "Junior Boys Junior."

05. FULL-LENGTH ALBUMS. Pantha Du Prince's This Bliss; Get Him Eat Him's Arms Down; Kathy Diamond's Miss Diamond To You; Prodigy's Return of the Mac.

06. AMAZON.COM USER COMMENTS. From the page for rapper Prodigy's Return of the Mac album:

1 of 8 people found the following review helpful: This is NOT The Prodigy!!!! Crap rap!!!, April 7, 2007 Reviewer: Paul S. Cirulnick (San Diego, Ca USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) this is defintely not The Prodigy; the heavy electronic beats and power that you may wish it is. This is some tired wannabee rap crap, don't waste your $$. This is going on E-Bay right now. This is the worst piece of deception ever, how dare they try to pass this off as The Prodigy!!!!!!!!!!!!

07. INTERNET. Byron; Quick Comic (sorta shitty now but has the potential for greatness); Club Blog; Patry Copyright Blog; Don Rodriguez Soccer Blog.

71 RIFFS

NACHO CHEESE

2007-04-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

SO I HEARD SHE DON'T LIKE MY INTRO
I AGREE
SO I CHANGED IT

RIFF MARKET PRESENTS:

"SPORTS BARS ARE BETTER THAN NON-SPORTS BARS"

For me this all comes down to a lot of things. The first time you're in a city all by yourself with a pocket full of sweet freelanced twenties and the fucking Unicorns album playing on the iRiver, you spend a lot of time walking back and forth on Houston, looking for that bar that Jost took you to, the one with the velvet couches and the bum who stands outside the door and pretends to collect a cover charge. It's called Madame X, it's on Houston St, the font on the top of the bar is in bubble letters and there are all these red lights on, so it's like you're walking into a sextoy store. Then something strikes you. Maybe Madame X isn't the hippest place to be. Yeah they've got a DJ playing the Pete Rock 'Blood Stain' remix of "Jump Around" but is this what I paid that extremely (extremely) convincing bum outside twenty dollars for? I haven't heard this song in ten years so it's debatable.

So from cover charges and fake velvet couches and steps to an upstairs room you're positive has all kinds of pinball machines (maybe Skee-Ball? hello Lansdale), maybe that game where there's the frogs that jump out of those holes, and you hit them with the beater while your buddy hits them with his hands--from Madame X you're suddenly in the realm of Black&White-type bars, which a) are super-loud, b) are not too cheap, c) don't have velvet seats, d) have no pinball promise, e) granted are playing music that's probably a little better or stuff you haven't heard before, maybe something really punkrock like Besnard Lakes or whatever. But it's really uncomfortable, and a pain in the ass getting to the bar, and so many of them don't even accept credit cards, so you end up paying like $20 in fees just to pay $80 for a drop of Souza.

ETC ETC ETC

I've been in the bar game for a few years now, and especially here it's like, what's the coolest place tonight? is this other place I know still cool or whatever? how will I know etc? The thing was: I consistently found myself at the coolest bars, the coolest that night at least. So no big deal right? Except suddenly I realized another thing: anywhere I go ever will be the coolest place that night.

This isn't about "getting back to basics" though, which I'm guessing you thought I might be saying. This is about sports bars, and how they are better than hipster bars, or at the very least the next hipster bar. I don't even like saying hipster bar but I think the term's apt insofar as it's an otherwise unremarkable bar built off the promise that maybe, maybe c-list celebrity X will be there (maybe).

So if you want cliff's notes, here they are:

1. Sports bars have by far the biggest, most technologically advanced televisions in the game. They also have some sort of device that lets them screen sometimes up to six different shows at once, or the same thing on every screen. You go to the right sports bar, you will not miss a beat

2. Lots of these sports bars have these things called table taps, which are these huge plastic tubes, which set you back like $25 bucks or so but they're filled with beer. So basically you just sit at the table with some bros, drinks some brews, and you don't have to get up at all, you don't miss any of the conversations, you put your cocks cap on the table and from there it's pretty much on.

4. So much more space. I'm thinking this is probably because sports bars are anticipating bigger dudes (and bigger ladies? definitely more high heels), so you're going to need more room. For me though it's like I'm Mario in Super Mario Bros 3 in the level where everything is HUGE

5. Cheaper brews? This is debatable. But I'm increasingly up for this debate. I'm thinking sports bars typically have cheaper and better brews than non-sports bars. This is definitely the only kind of bar situation where you can call a Blue Moon a Brew Moon and everybody knows what you're talking about.

6. Music. I know what you're thinking. The music at sports bars must be awful. Lots of Pearl Jam, lots of Clash, "Pour Some Sugar On Me" on the hour, etc. This does not happen at sports bars! I've totally been to sports bars and this has never happened (not counting the Bent Elbow). I was at a sports bar once actually and this is what I heard (not even kidding here): Yes, Clash, "Brown-Eyed Girl", Talking Heads, the bust-a-move song, Led Zep, mid-period Bowie.

7. Food. Most sports bars cater to the fact that huge sports-bar-looking dudes like to eat while they're watching the big game. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and in fact I'm thinking this is probably how it's supposed to be done. Plus I have to say that pretty much everything I've ever eaten in a sports bar has been delicious. Wings, mozza stix, everything. A lot of these places have pretty monster salads too. I get razzed a lot because I'm the guy who orders a cobb salad pretty much all the time, whenever it's on the menu, but what can I say? You get some wings, split a cobb salad with some bros, maybe order a turkey burger and doggybag the leftovers. I call that a good night out.

8. TV. Can we talk about this again? I don't even have a television, so for me to be able to just walk into a place and watch the big game... I just can't take this for granted. You try watching DVDs on your laptop for eight years and counting and you'll know what I'm talking about.

9: Best Sports Bar: ESPN Zone

10. Worst Sports Bar: Chickpea

75 RIFFS

CRAZY CARL

2007-04-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

AFTER MUCH DELIBERATION
TOO MUCH IN FACT
AFTER A GOOD DEAL OF DELIBERATION
RIFF MARKET PRESENTS:

"REVELATION 909"

Download: Faze Action: "In The Trees (Carl Craig C2 Remix)"

There is no possible situation in which you can play this remix, in which it won't sound awesome. This revelation comes after two months of trying to find pretty much exactly that situation. You cannot find it. I definitely couldn't find it but maybe you will?

Exempli gratia. This is a pretty meatheady song. Definitely the kind of song that some of you might expect to kick off the next Ripster Jock Jams comp (Vol 4 is coming along nicely btw, some oldies, some newies, etc.). By the same token, it's a love song. You're getting the picture now aren't you. I'm on the riffwagon walking to Libation. I'm thinking I'm going to go to Libation, queue up this song on my iPod, hop in the club, find the biggest man with the biggest muscles and the most buttons on his collar, then ask him to punch me repeatedly in the face--the face of a man who wears glasses. "I'm going to leave these glasses on my face too!" I practice taunting on the way down, after hours of similar practice in the bathroom while getting my contacts out of my eyes. The bottom line is it's definitely going to add some fuel to the fire. You see where this is going now. There's no possible way this song is going to sound awesome. The earplugs are going to pop out of my ears by the sheer force of this man's fists. I'm not going to be able to hear anything. Maybe for weeks? You don't even want to know where this story goes.

I show up at Libation. I find my man in line. Libation's closed--been closed for months now. My man is actually a friend of mine from the college days. We weren't great friends--different crowds--but we definitely sat next to each other in section. He's working at a bank now and spends what little time he has to himself at the gym lifting weights. He doesn't even do cardio anymore, he thinks it's a waste of time.

91 RIFFS

LUST'S JUST A DISTRACTION

2007-04-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

*BORAT IS NOT A GREAT MOVIE*
RIFF MARKET "I'VE SEEN IT WITH MY OWN EYES" EDITION
I'VE GOT MORE GREAT MOVIES THAN YOU'VE GOT BLACKHEADS

This past weekend I saw the movie Borat, which stars this guy who told blowjob jokes at my college graduation. I believe there were also some weed jokes, something about stealing laptops, and then some jokes about how white people don't understand black people. Anyway, I want you to imagine having to look your grandmother straight in the eye after some white guy pretending to be a black guy wearing a glossy red jumpsuit points in her direction and says "now there is a woman who gives a good blowjob." Imagine having to eat at Chili's on your graduation day because you forgot to make reservations at Pizzeria Uno's. Imagine your father ordering you a mudslide, then telling you to "slide in" (I'm pretty sure this has something to do with drinking mudslides). Then imagine watching a 90-minute movie that stars the blowjob guy from college graduation. You can probably "imagine" I'd have a few problems with that movie.

Basically my only problems with Borat were: 1) I thought the scene when Borat wrestles the fat guy in the hotel room could have been shorter; 2) the fat guy could have been fatter; 3) the soundtrack was a little weak.

67 RIFFS

I SAW LENNY ON FOURTH AND TENTH

2007-04-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

RIFF MARKET: DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK EDITION
UPDATE YOUR LINKS: WWW.RIFFMARKET.COM
THE FUTURE IS USB 2GB DATATRAVELER PORTABLE STORAGE

UPDATE YOUR WARRANTIES

Download: Kathy Diamond: "Over"

It's been exactly fifteen minutes since the last time I thought about Lenny Kravitz, the man behind rock&roll's 67th and 109th best rock&roll songs of all time ("Are You Gonna Go My Way," and this bloghouse remix of "Are You Gonna Go My Way" that replaces LK's guitar solo with the sound of Justice ass-to-assing a double-sided microphone), which means I'm almost exactly fifteen minutes late in recounting the last time I thought I saw Lenny Kravitz enter a lesser-known bodega on Fourth Avenue and 10th Street, right by Black & White and that restaurant everybody says David Bowie goes to. It's called Danal, I've never seen David Bowie in there, but I've had brunch here once, and I know about "the Goblin King," so I'm inclined to believe it.

This is what I remember: I'm on Fourth Avenue and 10th Street, the west side of the street, on my way back from the Strand, carrying a plastic Strand bag filled with lots of those canvas Strand bags that always fall off your shoulder. Across 10th Street, waiting to cross Fourth Avenue, is a man I believe is Lenny Kravitz. He has long dreadlocks and the kind of face that could clog a toilet just by blinking at it. On his feet are black leather platform boots that go up to his thighs, something like a 4inch lift, so we're talking about a man who seems about 10feet tall, who I failed to mention also has a messenger bag on his back, which I failed to mention is probably filled with copies of his greatest hits album, which I'm guessing he probably snacks on like butter-flavored rice cakes whenever the fuck he feels like it. All the sudden the light changes, I go my way, etc., Lenny goes his, "etc.", and all I can think about is what a fucked up world we live in where a man who looks pretty much exactly like Lenny Kravitz has to walk around New York City all by himself, carrying his own messenger bag filled with his own greatest hits, looking both ways on Fourth Avenue even though traffic just goes one.

91 RIFFS

GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, THE BULLETHOLES DO

2007-03-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

RIFFMARKET TO RELAUNCH AS REMIX WEBSITE
"I WILL REMIX ANYTHING--ANYTHING" HE SAYS
ALL REMIXES FINAL

Sorry to beat Status Ain't Hood to the following sentiment--I'm sure you were looking forward to his "Remixes: Please Break Up" headline as much as I was--plus I like to think I'm as much a save-the-sample frontliner type in the war against creatively inhibitive copyright as the next halfassing blogger, parents just don't understand and all that, but: YIKES. This is just a waste, in service of I don't know what, and the worst part is people actually like it.

Months ago I was talking to Elliot about the energy of this new-rave / franco-filter-metal / Edbanger-Institubes / joycore-remix-mashup-mp3mixtape / bloghouse scene, how indie rock had ceased to be participatory and how extremely participatory the bloghouse scene was in contrast. People are not only listening and then telling all their friends how awesome everything is, but now the technologies are so cheap and easy to use that they are actively modifying the music, chopping it up and blending it and sending it to Discobelle with no small hopes of online bigtime. The entry-level audio technologies people are using too aren't that far off from the popular blogger softwares if you think about it, your Bloggers and Livejournals and Typepads and to a lesser extent Wordpresses that more or less automate the process so you don't have to learn CSS styles and PHP, i.e. all you need to do is shit out your text and hit publish, with no understanding of how that text is manipulated to appear on the screen before you. So the speed with which these unofficial remixes are coming about, it's just unbelievable, and somewhat of a dare too, i.e. if you're really so into Digitalism, why haven't you remixed them yet?

Let me just say again that I find all this really exciting in principle, really awesome too to see this sort of interaction serving as an outsiders gateway into dance music. And maybe the obvious decision to make here is just stop listening to all the awful remixes that glut the internet, that speed up the rate of audio consumption, i.e. it's not like these remixes are actively destroying the originals, though admittedly sometimes I feel that way, e.g. Diplo's "Someone Great"/"My Love" mash. But come the fuck on! This is the Internet! All of us--me, you, everybody--have a duty to find things, and have opinions about these things, and give these things arbitrary numerical values, as quickly and as often as possible.

So! My guess is most of these remixes, most of which are awful, are in fact fan-generated, i.e. executed by people self-trained technically and musically, who have an "ear" for things and trust their ears in composition, but most importantly trust their technologies to do most of the heavy-lifting for them: pitchmatching, beatmatching, providing with soundbanks and loops and the ability to tweak these loops within audible parameters, etc. More like babies dressing up Barbie dolls than a different babies playing with Lego bricks, and that is no slight to either, i.e. all my Barbie-playing baby readers, I want absolutely zero shit outta you.

Where I'm going with this is more of a question, and my own kind of dare, to keep kids off remixes obviously but something more than that too hopefully, which is: you'd think people would be embarrassed to put some of this remix stuff out there in the condition it's in, more a collection of preset and loop dressing than any purposeful reconsideration of a tune. Plus I imagine we'll get to the point that these fans aren't even technically the "remixers"--they are merely the vessels through with their entry-level audio software programs are expressing themselves. I'm sure the savvier among you can already spot these earmarks pretty quickly actually.

Like hell I'm going to tell people to stop participating with the musics they love; there are already enough permanently worthless cranks out there who, in between self-loathing cracks about the size of Ultragrrrl's titties, are complaining about everything all the time anyway. More a phenomenon I'm generally interested in, manifesting itself in a young person's culture, etc., i.e. when technology moves from superstar enabler to superstar itself, from aiding art production to crippling it. You know me!

50 RIFFS

Download: Jackson Jones' "I Feel Good, Put Your Pants On" (Pilooski Edit) [zshare]

SPECIAL GIRL, REAL GOOD GIRL

2007-03-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

New Violators
Tonic NYC
March 12

What makes one band that plays Cure songs better than another band that plays what are essentially the same exact Cure songs? Two years ago I was telling every shitty American band I knew to move somewhere unAmerican on the sly a.s.a.p., and/or release their records on EUR labels only, the idea being that, for whatever reason, the internet music community responds better to mainstream American poprock when it's repackaged as the underground and overlooked misfitry of Lady Europa. My guess is Peter Bjorn and John are probably from Nebraska and would have signed a deal with Polyvinyl or whoever had they not stumbled upon my advice and moved to Sweden; New York City's the Bravery meanwhile put out a catchy electro-rock album and nobody can put his finger on why it's so despicable. Britain's no longer a fount of indisputable cool either, though you probably already figured that one out four years ago after buying that MOCO EP. Fuck!

Anyway let's just skip to my loo here. American indie and/or "incubator" bands writing mainstream poprock songs, I have an idea for you (again): Move to Europe, forget how to speak English, relearn some sort of broken variant that underscores your cultural distance, speak to the press in blunt and maybe even accidentally self-conscious terms about the manufacture of your identity, play the "Doctor's Advocate" as I call it. Your Americanness is holding you back; band interviews are the new music. 71 RIFFS

El Sombrero a/k/a "The Hat"
corner of Ludlow and Stanton
Mexican

Everything is surprisingly expensive in here, way more than you'd expect from a place whose main export is a slurpee with alcohol in it. Casual inquiry has led me to believe that every burrito tastes pretty much exactly the same, regardless of innards, and the going rate for a burrito is like eight or nine bucks, which is suspect. I was going to ride hard for this place after eating there last night, having had a much better experience than my last time around, but when I got back to the apartment I had some reflux and coughed up some pollo, so here we are. What's the word, the one on all the rat poison signs?

44 CUIDADO RIFFS

JAROMIR JAGR'S FATHER IS PROSPEROUS AND OWNS A CHAIN OF HOTELS

2007-03-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

GET RIFFS EAT RIFFS
AN IMPROMPTU EXERCISE IN CRUCIAL INTERNET COMMENTARY
2007 MARCH 12

Get Him Eat Him: Arms Down [Download "2X2"]

I played a Forced Premise gig with Matt once in the Lowell House basement. You'd think of all people he'd know we were going to play Radiohead's "National Anthem" in E--it was our killer opener and we had talked about its key several times beforehand. But that night right then and there he just started playing it in D, like he just didn't give a fuck. 89 RIFFS

David Lynch: Eraserhead

Haha! What's to say about this movie that hasn't been said before? That baby's something ain't it! And that chick! This movie should have been in color. 71 RIFFS

The Dude at Dance Tracks Who Was Being a Dick About the Needle
Dance Tracks
March 11

-Hey are you done with the needle, I wanted to listen to these records
-What? Are you kidding me? Dude, I need to return the needle to the counter
-Right
-...
-Well can you return the needle to the counter soon?
-What are you an idiot? My ID is at the counter
-...
-Oh my god. Don't you know you can't listen to a record without a needle?

5 RIFFS

ICY HOT RIFFS FOR WILL WELCH

2007-03-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

RIFF MARKET GRAPESHOT #I'M NOT SURE NO MORE, FEATURING:
-ICY HOT RIFFS
-REGULAR RIFFS
-UNAPOLOGETIC NONSTOP RIFFING
-35 RIFFS

Melee Beats presents Bel Esteem [Stream]

CKjokes and I ended up on Chrystie last night in one of those bars that's supposed to look like somebody's basement, though whose I don't know. The only basements I've been down in had plush carpets and pingpong tables and somebody's boombox playing the Aerosmith best of. Lots of blankets too. 74 DAFT PUNK RIFFS

Kalabrese: Rumpelzirkus [Stream]

Sherburne teased this pretty hard last month but the thing he left out was that this might be the record that (finally) breaks smooth jazz into the sub-40year-old demographic. 2007, I have found you your Jamiroquai. 81 INSANE RIFFS

New Shit New Shit

-->Dan Park, apparently writing about Antarctica, also living in Antarctica. 82 RIFFS

-->Matt Janicak launches new webcomic with Ben Dougan, called Brunch. 82 RIFFS

-->Paul Salveson starts website for his brilliant photographs, preps for next gallery show which opens March 15 here. 82 RIFFS