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1997 I get a copy of Simon Frith's Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, and it's the best highbrow defense of rock (among other things) I've read. He cogently outlines the reasons why lyrics are hardly the sole vehicle of rock meaning; argues that responses to music, whether it be rock or classical or otherwise, can't be accurately described if we assume that mind is mind and body is body and never the twain shall meet; and, at the same time, uncovers the implicit racism in most contemporary accounts of the "sexuality" and "earthiness" of rhythm. Finally, there's a rigorous formulation of stuff I've been suspecting for a while -- and a way to explain why I hate hate HATE the Red Hot Chili Peppers so. I also get Greil Marcus Invisible Republic, which is half-moving and half-incomprehensible. But what really fascinates me is his description of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. It sounds so good that I almost wonder if he's making this shit up. I mean, if it's as central to musical history as he claims, howcum I don't rememeber ever hearing of it before? A couple months later, it's released and I think it's beauteous, and soon enough, I'm buying folk and blues CDs with the same expectation and sense of wonder that I buy...anything. I go back to See/Hear for the first time in a while and I don't like what I see. Lots of my old favorites have disappeared -- I didn't really expect otherwise -- but they seem to have shifted their focus away from music to more "underground" subjects like alt.sex, death, tattoos, and your standard issue hipster voyeur BS. I guess they know their clientele, and that clientele has precious little to do with me. Hooray, my computer dies. No, this is a good thing. It means I can buy a new one, a fast one with a blazin' 56K modem. It also prompts me to switch my internet provider from AOL to ibm.net, which means I can log on as long as I want whenver I want, hassle-free. Now using RealAudio is no longer a forgone conclusion. Better yet, after years of complaining, I finally have a decent computer at work, one with access to the company's T1 line, something which I will find highly useful a year or two later. As it is, I can still use it on my own free time. Chuck Eddy's new book is published and I'm not finding any reviews of it anywhere on the 'net. I mosey on over to deja-news and find there's this one guy who goes by the name of Tom Ewing who frequents alt.music.alternative and has an Eddy quote in his sig file. It goes (as Tom would paraphrase later) "When people call music 'intense' or 'emotional' or 'soulful', it usually means 'This seems like something I'm supposed to like.'" Now since I had very limited exposure to USENET, I pretty much assumed that since it lacked the (enforced) civility of the AOL boards, a newsgroup devoted to alternative music would be just a bunch of caffienated prepubescent boys going GREEN DAY RULEZ at each other, over and over again. Ah no. Looking at the posts for a.m.a., I find there's weirdness and immaturity, to be sure -- and even a resident net.kook with a sickeningly obsessive adoration of melody over all other musical features. But the stuff on this newsgroup is full of the kind of loving rigour that is scarce elsewhere in the mediasphere (including the 'net). They proceed as if something is at stake here. So I e-mail Tom and hand him some well-deserved compliments, and ask him for some advice as to how to insert myself in the talk. After a few false starts, I'm rolling. I learn the ways and means of Lulu, Ned, Jackie, deX!, Kris, and just as the group hits a holiday lull, Fred. We talk of many things: irony and the British, the rock canon, rock lists, rock critics that suck and those that don't, Oasis vs. Blur, Andy Rooney vs. Kurt Cobain, the Beatles vs. Marcel Duchamp, Geir vs. everybody. It's way fun -- a reason to come home early every work day. There's a shock of recognition when I read their stuff, even when I disagree with it, because they all seem to have roughly arrived at recognizably similar philosophies of rock music: a distrust of certain recived notions of what is good, bad and proper in the music and a thirst for the shameless. I secretly think that some of these guys should get paid to do this. I'm daunted, so it forces me to write and defend my arguments, something I haven't done in a while. I end a post with a "cultural artifact of the moment" drawing attention to a particularly excellent slate.com article -- I find the little .sig thing so useful that I end up using it in all my correspondence, drawing attention to whatever bit of media detritus that catches my ire or fancy. Usually hideous commercials. 1996 January 12. The family subscribes to MSN, and a day later, AOL. I'm finally on the internet, and yes, it's all that it smokes crack to be. I look for a suitably highbrow AOL profile. After trying some permutations of the names of characters from Wu Ch'Eng-En's Journey to the West, I flip through a book of modern poetry and find an excellent name in Paul Blackburn's "The Watchers." In the poem, Epicharmus -- "not/the Sicilian writer of comedies, 6 A.D., but/his ancestor" -- is cited as having added two consonants to the Greek alphabet. (Now you know.) My mom gets mightily pissed that I spend all my time playing Myst on her computer so soon I get my own. Initially I use it for bonding with other fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000, not for getting music info. There really isn't anything very interesting out there anyway. Later in the year, I do check out each and every listing in Yahoo!'s listing for "alternative magazines," but only a few of them are interesting (or even online), and the ones that are fully functioning members of the community, like Consumable and Perfect Sound Forever and Addicted to Noise, but none of them are compelling enough for me to actually read except on a once-in-a-while basis. There are also websites where you can buy and (more importantly) sample music, but I'm still not comfortable with the idea of buying anything online, and sampling music via RealAudio is pretty much out of the question when all you've got is a measly 14.4 modem. Dovetailing nicely with my search for musical out-there is David Toop's Ocean of Sound. The beauties of its malingering, evocative-rather-than-argumentative prose is not lost on me. It gets me thinking some about the qualities and types and extremes of sound for the sake of sound, which I'd been a self-conscious fan of since I'd been aware of the neo-psychedelic qualities of sample-based music around ten years ago. Much of my music listening is "ambient" anyway: I typically consume music now when I type stuff on my computer as my beloved five-CD changer or the TV (usually tuned to MTV or VH1, God knows why) in the background. Inspired by Ocean of Sound, I get my mom and my stepdad "relaxing" gifts for Christmas: some Debussy, some Satie, and Brian Eno's Music for Airports. The trouble with buying music for love ones, especially ones you live with, is the ever-present possibility that you'll take back their gifts for your own use, and I'm not proud to say that's what happened with MFA, which quickly becomes my falling-asleep music of choice. I listen to it several hundred times in the next couple of years, probably more than any other record I've ever had, and I fall asleep to it without fail, every single time. Very useful. Negative musical memory of the decade: getting extraordinarily drunk at a party consisting of old college friends, then shoving off for a grope session with some guy, waking up, nauseous, throwing up, the ceiling spinning with the very beginning of Nearly God's "Tattoo" looping through my mind like dirty laundry in a washing machine. (I don't drink to excess anymore, thanks for asking.) 1995 My first serious boyfriend ever, and he loves Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos. With one exception, for the next couple of years all my boyfriends have irksome taste in music. (I even date a Jim Steinman obsessive.) About a month after we start dating I catch mono, and when not in unbearable pain I spend my time realizing how just how angry Joni Mitchell's music was. I'm getting somewhat desperate, music-wise. From the little scraps of information about the musical cutting edge I recieve from the Village Voice and the ocassional music magazine, I know damned well I'm missing something...but I don't what direction to take, for the most part. There aren't really any iconoclastic critics offering meaningful, well-sketched versions of the past and present canon for me to follow and learn and surpass the way I did with Marsh, Christgau and Marcus. The exception, of course, is Simon Reynolds, whose article on "post-rock" sickens me because, well, he's trying doing that revolution-mongering schtick I detest, but also because I genuninely feel like the music scene is passing me by, that there's some potentially life-changing music out there and I'm still listening to Sebadoh and Guided By Voices, both of whom I dearly love knowing full well there's something retrograde and even morally suspect about the two of them. I snap up a few albums by bands mentioned in the article, namely Techno Animal and Flying Saucer Attack, and find them heavenly -- and also find them ace falling-asleep music as well. I hear about Macro Dub Infection somewhere, and fall in love with its synthetic soundscapes. Christgau raves about Tricky, and likewise...that summer, Nelson George describes the hot-new-UK-thing "jungle" in his Pazz-and-Jop commentary and namechecks Goldie's "Inner City Life" as being particularly good. I find it on a compilation called Counterforce, and hooray, it's the first techno album I really really like. Once the full force of jungle's knotty beats kick in on the second track, Hyper on the Experience's "Disturbance," my jaw hits the floor. (The same night I buy that also get Moby's Everything Is Wrong knowing full damn well he's not all there is to techno, but I figure he's better than nothing.) Goldie's really good, too. So good in fact that I buy an import copy of Timeless, and once the full force of knotty-beat'd simpiness kicks in on "Sea of Tears," I realize I've blown thirty bucks on revamped Flora Purim. Lesson painfully learned: any techno album that gets near-universal hosannahs from the British music mags probably sucks large quantities of penguin dicks. In fact, in this year and the next, I buy a number of overpriced post-disco coffee table albums -- Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2, LTJ Bukem's Logical Progression, Orbital's Orbital 2, Massive Attack's No Protection -- that with few exceptions, wind up being sold a month later. Lesson painfully learned: don't buy import records of stuff you've never heard of. In other news, I go to Patti Smith's quite dandy comeback concert at Central Park, and the audience is easily the most pretentious group of people I've ever been in -- college never even came close. The next day I go to Lollapalooza. Except when Beck and his band nearly get heckled off the stage (remember that this is the pre-Odelay period when all the hip people still think he's a stoner retard), I stay close to the second-stage bands, seeing Moby (of all people) give an especially ecstatic performance. 1994 A year of responsibility-free indieland stasis. I had been reading Maximum Rock & Roll for a couple of years now, really almost out of a voyeuristic curiosity, but when I actually follow up on some record recommendations, it directs me to crap like Rancid. I finally tire of its sanctification of purity, its confusion of good taste and good politics, its innate snobbery and delusions of subversiveness. MR&R goes into the dumpster. That wasn't just punk rock's problem, mind you: the same problem manifested itself throughout all "non-mainstream" rawk culture. Charlie Bertsch: "One way or another, all these folks are actively engaged in the construction of a new high culture. The only difference between the Gerard Cosloys and the Tim Yohannons of the world is how they want to do it. One group wants to preserve aesthetic purity by restricting access. The other wants to evangelize the ignorant mainstream by giving them great art to make them better citizens." I actually tear up when Z-100, the local (and original) "zoo" station, plays Morrissey's "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" and the DJ describes him as a perennial up-and-comer! Since I am the obligatory Gen X-er at work, people feel compelled to ask me about this song they've heard on the radio. "It goes something like 'I'm a jerk, baby, so why don't you shoot me.' It's so catchy it's driving me mad! Do you anything about it?" It's Beck, of course, who I can't stand because there's something terribly opportunistic about him that I can't put my finger on. I come home from Derek Jarman's Blue, feeling oddly, curiously relieved, like I've meditated for a good half-hour or so. When I get home I call up a friend and after we talk for about half-hour or so he tells me he heard Kurt Cobain killed himself. He's says it so off-handedly that I think he's joking but he insists he's not and I turn on the TV and...sure enough. That night I selfishly wish that Kurt will show up in my dreams; instead, I get Beck. For the next two months, I'm drawn into a state of tears and grumpiness, and the reasons remain inscrutable to me. I don't even own any of his music, aside from a CD-single of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" which I never play. I save a copy of the New York Times' front page with his obituary. I go to many concerts, mainly for indieland chancers, stand right at the edge of the stage, wear earplugs, and bob my head around to the music when the rhythm hits me. I hate moshing, because it descends into extreeeeme-stlye macho bullshittery, and I love moshing because you can melt into the warm physical glow of body against body in tune with each other, in tune with the music. I stand in the rain in Lollapalooza 4, polka to the Flaming Lips' "Be My Head" and thrash around to their version of "Under Pressure." I'm floored by Yo La Tengo, who I know nothing about, when on a complete whim I catch them at the Thread Waxing Space. I see them many times afterwards: at Trammps, opening their set with the as-yet-unheard whisper-to-a-scream of "Blue Line Swinger"; an outdoor concert in Union Square, on a beautiful summer day with the breeze in my ears, quietude inside the monster drones, and ending just before a freak summer storm; another concert at Trammps, ending the seamless emotional arc of their set with "Blue Line Swinger," and you could just cry from the chord changes alone. 1993 I choke when I write my senior essay, which ends up a hobbled, conclusion-free mess. I come quite close to having a nervous breakdown. After it's submitted I get extremely drunk and figuratively sob on my friends' shoulders. Suddenly, it strikes me just how great Boyz II Men's "The End of the Road" really is. I assist a friend in getting an Actual Honest-to-God Techno DJ to do a, ahem, "rave" on campus, which I do because I want to learn more about techno. Later, both of us DJ a college end-of-the-year party. Nobody's really supposed to dance, per se, since our time-slot in the middle of the day to a sparsely-filled quad fullof tired people, so we play contemporary alt.rock favorites. We get bumrushed because we’re not playing dance music. Fine. We play slightly obscure-but-excellent cuts by Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, Jorge Ben, Malathini and Funkadelic. Nobody dances. Stupid fuckers. We go back to alt.rock favorites when we're bumrushed again because we're not playing Aretha Franklin who I dearly love and all but just really don't want to hear right now, thank you. Their weird inflexibility -- as if Aretha was shorthand for all that was right and good with the world -- teaches me more about the tyranny of the rock canon than Chuck Eddy ever could. One memorable exhange: "Play some funk! Play some funk!" "We just played some Funkadelic, and nobody danced." "Funkadelic?" "Funkadelic! You know, P-Funk, Parliament-Funkadelic, George Clinton..." "Fuck George Clinton! Play some funk! Play some funk!" The triple-edged irony of this was that the guy was the school's Rhodes Scholar. After school, I come to my new home in Bay Shore. In all my years of autonomous record-buying, I've never bought any Simon & Garfunkel. Until now. I pick up a copy at the same garage sale I'm selling some extra copies of my audiophile Beatle records. Of course, people get them cheap -- I don't care anymore. For reasons now lost on me, I pick up Sebadoh’s Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock. It's another manic-depressive compulsive-obsessive album for me to fall in love with. I blast at top volume "Brand New Love" on my walkman when I ride the subway to work. My job allows me the luxury of listening to WFMU at length and repeatedly. Long stretches of wretched improv, obscure hillbilly sides, Nick Drake, etc. I try some abortive skteches for a fanzine called Wittgenstein's Money (I read the Tractatus this summer) -- it's a pain in the ass without my computer, which I demolished by sending it UPS. I'm broke some of the time, so I don't buy many CDs...but I go to a lot concerts, though. I see Smashing Pumpkins at a concert booked just before they got too big for a venue like Roseland: Mademoiselle Corgan throws several deeply immature hissy fits and I break my glasses in the crippling mosh pit, which I have no choice but to be in. On a whim, I catch an Orb concert, not knowing anything about the band, completely oblivious to the fact that I actually heard The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld back in Santa Fe! They play dance music to dance to, then lots of ambienty things, very nice and pretty, then eventually pick up the tempo, and towards the middle of the night do a punishing gabba set for a while, thereby (in my mind) bringing "James Brown Is Dead" to a logical conclusion. (Half-a-year later I see the concert more-or-less described by two authors in this quickie Gen Xploitation book as the Emperor's New Age Clothes. Pretty obvious when they left, huh?) Having fun, I also book myself down to Maskarave the week after and catch Orbital, Aphex Twin and Moby well before I have any idea who they are. (In fact, years later I look at the bill from the concert I've hoarded and I'm actually amazed I saw said folks.) Again, I have fun, but I glumly admit to myself that I'm already too old to immerse myself into rave culture to any meaningful degree. Mom gets married for the second time in the house we've just moved into, and during the party, the water-conserving toilet overflows, water running down onto the floor, down the basement stairs and onto my vinyl records I have yet to put away. Just about all of my 12"s are permanently ruined. 1992 For some weird reason, I run off a not-terribly serious top-132-songs-of-all-time-list -- something I actually created back in Santa Fe -- and post it in a conspicuous place on the campus. I think Milton Nascimento's "San Vicente" was the number one. People automatically assume that I wrote them up, but I deny it, and some seem to accept my denials. One person: "yeah, I figured it wasn't you since you have much better taste than that." A friend takes me unawares and plays L.A. Style's "James Brown Is Dead" during a dance party and I'm utterly floored and cowed by the jackboot power of the track -- and shit, this right after JB's canonization as a rock saint! Even one of the professors (well, we called them "tutors" at St. John's) has a Free James bumper sticker on his car! This doesn't prevent me from dancing to it. Dancing very very hard, in fact. Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left becomes my favorite chill-out music, stuff I listen to when I'm trying to go to sleep and I'm drunk and all-danced out and full of unrequited lust after dance parties. Other obsessive listens include Wanna Buy a Bridge?, particularly the near-subverbal ecstatic misery of the Raincoats' "In Love", and the Wedding Present's Bizarro, all repetitious sub-Velvets guitar dronathon that never ends and that never lasts long enough. A friend of mine, from whom I borrow all yr typical indie boy stuff from (and who borrows from me the unholy pile Village Voice articles I've hoarded over the years) tells me he buys about 80 to a 100 CDs a year. Maybe more. He's got a job solely to bankroll his CD habit. Oh yeah, I think, I was once like that. He's got a copy of Simon Reynolds' Blissed Out. I only skim through a couple of pages, but my immediate reaction is one of disgust, disgust for his jargon, his neologisms and thirst for the "subversive." During a year-end college party weekend, me and a friend host a take-off on the archetypically pretentious bohemian coffehaus. We call it the "Metal Machine Music Café." The titular album plays at all times. Out of college, I finally buy MMM on CD, along with The Wedding Present's Seamonsters. The same day I'm off to see Pavement and Superchunk open up for My Bloody Valentine in what may very well be the best concert I will ever see in my life. MBV's music demands dancing and moving with the crowd in a not-quite moshing fashion (though there is plenty of that, perhaps the least annoying moshing I've ever witnessed), and I flail around in ecstasy while hoping against hope the CDs don't fall out of my jacket. (I end up losing my turntable cartridge, which I didn't even remember I had in my jacket.) I turn twenty-one during the half-hour long hellacious fuckoff feedback maelstrom of "You Made Me Realise." It sounds like a sky so full of airplanes the sun cannot squeak through. I'm deaf for days afterward - and I wore earplugs. Most of the time. When I get home I play Seamonsters, I just play snippets of the beginnings of each tracks, just to get an idea of the tenor of the album. Sounds awfully soft for the Weddoes. Boy am I surprised when I finally hear the damned thing. Back at college, Automatic for the People is released, and suddenly I don't like R.E.M. anymore. I write a review for the college newspaper saying as much, and then a couple of weeks later, a counter-review appears saying (in effect) that maybe I'm just not sensitive enough to hear the beauty of R.E.M.'s vision and that I was (kinda sorta) giving comfort and shelter to the Bon Jovis of the world. Oh Christ, I think, I was never that bleeding-heart as a teen, not ever. 1991 One of my fellow sophomores is an ex-junkie who used to work at the Strand bookstore. He threatens to send a letter to the editor of our college newspaper which will claim my taste in pop music reeks of false consciousness. We argue about this for a couple hours; later, a mutual friend tells me how impressed he was at the way I defended myself, but all I kept thinking was how I just don't have the sufficient critical apparatus counter that kind of sub-Adornian schtick. One result is that I start brushing up on the contemporary American underground scene, which I had previously dismissed because...well, because Dave Marsh dismissed it. (But Marsh is looking more and more myopic to me -- he didn't even include Public Enemy in The Heart of Rock and Soul! Dickweed!) I see various forms of that kind of highbrow dismissal of pop music now and again at college. Pop music is always described as something much more wilder and anarchic than the music I experience. I always find it disconcerting that people focus on the banality of the lyrics or the "savagery" of rhythm. It somehow misses the point, and strikes me as being implicitly (or explicitly) racist, but again, these are only vague feelings, nothing I can articulate to anywhere near to my satisfaction. In music class, I've already fallen in love with Gregorian chant and early polyphony; now it's time for Bach and Debussy. I like my teacher a lot, and she knows my freshman year roommate. Discussions are often very pleasant, even if remote from the rock music aesthetics I'm used to. People in the class get very, ah, expressionistic when describing music. We spend a lot of time trying to describe get at the semiotics of musical sounds, how they mean things. We're loosely forced to learn a Mozart aria by heart on the piano, which is definitely a great idea in practice but in theory is sheer hell once I'm faced with my naturally terrible coordination and the overbearing asshole who's supposed to guide me in this. I start another tape-piece. The organizing concept: fifty great American composers/musicians of the 20th century. I get a lot of cheap jazz records and borrow some others from the college library. I'm forced to buy a junky turntable for the piece once my experimentation destroys the needle of my "good" turntable -- and this, after all, is a post-vinyl musicscape in a fairly small town, so I can forget about finding a replacement needle. But that's O.K. now, because I can pretty much live off my CDs and tapes now. I threaten to enter it into a composition competition held by the college but I lose my nerve. And as a piece, it feels too rote and schematic, one composer right after another in a boringly sequential fashion. But it has its uses: I end up learning a thing or two about American jazz and "serious" music traditions. I spend the summer catching up on hardcore and remembering how to pronounce Ian Mackaye's name. I'm in a bookstore in the rock section and it turns out this Chuck Eddy guy, a Swellsville contributor, has a book out, a fucking book! How did he manage? It makes me weirdly queasy the way that Christgau's actually-quite-positive (if patrician) review of Joe Carducci's Pop and the Rock Narcotic does. I'm not sure I like having my worldview so violently upended like that. Eddy does lead me to Pere Ubu's Terminal Tower, and the band's first two singles eventually come to mean more to me than the entirety of the Rolling Stones' career. Back in Annapolis, a friend of mine from Santa Fe calls me and tells me I *really* have to check out the new Nirvana album, which I've heard some random whipsers about. Later that day, people play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at Friday dance party. And I can see why because it's a lot of fun to dance to. I'm impressed. I have the pleasure of watching Nirvana get very big and further jolting an already spicy mainstream. 1990 Hooray, it's the nineties. I may or not have inaguarted this decade watching MTV. I don't mean this in a cruel way, but I'm the music geek of the college: someone asks the folks in the dining hall who Peter Frampton's first band was and I'm the one who says Humble Pie. I boogie my ass off to the strange Top-40-and-hiphopcentric-consensus that distinguishes every weekend dance party. When I'm not doing that, I listen to local radio DJs play hardcore techno sets, a mesmerizing blur of sample loops and dub effects. Much harsher compared to "Strings of Life" -- which I thought was "new" when I first heard it -- so I conclude that house music (well, that's what I was *still* referring to it as) is mutating at a positively blinding rate. I wonder why I've never heard N.W.A. or Boogie Down Productions before, and I chalk it up to some kind of beef Marley Marl has between them or something. I'm home and I'm fucking around with an African folk music record and soon enough I'm creating a "tape collage" a la Christian Marclay (whose work I finally hear on NBC's Night Music). Two tapes are created, both are intended to played at the same time (a la the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka) and consist of the sounds produced from things like broken and re-glued records, records spun off-center, records spun at the wrong speed, records played manually at variable speed, sound effects records, my mom's copy of Martin Denny's Exotica, Taana Garnder's "Heartbeat" at the point where she says "this just don't make no kinda sense", about a minute and a half of James Brown's "Cold Sweat" and chopped-up snippets of an all-day reading of Ulysses on Bloomsday. I call it "James Brown Vs. James Joyce." It sounds cosmically cute. I also go to New York City alone for the first time. At the Knitting Factory, I meet a woman who says she was good friends with St. John's dropout Jac Holzman. Oddly, I don't go to any of the record stores, but I do go to See/Hear each time. I pick up lots of fanzines, of all kinds and shapes, the best ones being the Brady Bunch fanzine Teenage Gang Debs and Motorbooty. I come out of the closet as the Gulf War Standoff begins. The same month, no coincidence, I get in my obssesive mode again for bare-nerved self-matyrdom and neuroticism of Big Star’s Third Album. I play it so many times I get physically sick from it. I take the option of going to Santa Fe for sophomore year. There are no good hip-hop stations in Santa Fe, which pretty much destroys my focus on hip-hop for a while...but there's still top 40 radio, and as such, I pay more attention to it than I ever have and ever will. While everyone is wringing their hands over the Gulf War, I review records for for the college newspaper. LL Cool J, Bob Mould, Deee-Lite, Madonna and Miles Davis’ re-issued Agharta, which will end up being my favorite record of 1991. My year-end wrap-up names a whopping fifty songs from 1990 that I can recall with fondness. My college roommate introduces me to all the rock stuff that's been happening in the UK: My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, Primal Scream, the KLF, Nick Drake and a couple of greaaat queercore bands I’ve never anything about since. I introduce him to gamelan and Love's Forever Changes. In school, I learn the fundementals of music theory -- I finally can say with certainty what a chord is. Do I reeeally want to continue this? To carry the story up to the year 2000, I have to go over the last few years of my life, years I do not look back at with great fondness. Musically, though, they've been wonderful: more concerts, Chuck Eddy, Marclayan tape collages, proper aesthetics, techno, Harry Smith, alt.music.alternative, Cubasis and audiomulch, blogging and mp3s. Still, I have to remember the sucky stuff alongside the great stuff, and I'm not sure if I have the strength to do that. We'll see. 1989 At some point, I become vaguely aware that people are partying in large warehouses in the U.K. I try to get my mom to take me to concerts, namely for World Beat acts: Malathini & the Mahotella Queens, Milton Nascimento. All throughout Junior High and High School, kids would wear band t-shirts from the concerts they went to, maybe Genesis or U2 or Metallica or whatever at Nassau Coliseum or something similar. But I never have, mainly because there's really no big name act I'd want to see or would feel comfortable seeing in an arena setting. Plus, I remember the Alabama concert at Nassau Coliseum, and I remember seeing Islanders games there, too, and I just can't imagine finding having a good time when the focus of attention is so far away. Mom agrees to take me to see Toots and the Maytals at Trammps with my mom as a birthday present. As such it’s my first “real” concert. It's kind of awkward: eventually I leave her to go nearer to the stage to see Toots better, but she doesn't mind. Great concert. He brings his arms out and lets people his shake his hand, but I can't reach him. At school, I tell my guidance counselor I want to be a rock critic. I write an essay for Journalism class about why the new R.E.M. album is a disappointment. A girl in that class, not someone I would suspect, tells me casually she likes Bob Dylan -- my peers are finally catching up with me. I have a fight with someone when they suggest that black people can't play rock music. I can't stand the fact that Chuck D's stance is so confidently racist and sexist, but I can't bring myself to deny the music. When I get to college I brag that I go to the same mall that Chuck D does. Public Enemy, De La Soul and at least half of Eric B. & Rakim come from Strong Island. (I learn much later than LL Cool J grew up in Bay Shore.) In my dorm room, I play James Brown and Big Star at ear-shattering levels and no-one complains; I play John Cage and Terry Riley at ordinary levels and people do. People express horror that I actually own a Bobby Brown CD and a Jody Watley 12" -- but my stuff is routinely borrowed for dance parties. In fact, after years of feeling like a freak and dancing in the privacy of my room, I dance in public for the first time. I've watched Soul II Soul's "Keep on Movin' go from exotic new WBLS playlist entry to college party smash. A memory that's burned into my mind: a Halloween dance party, and a guy who have a terrible crush on dances alone to the Pixies' "Gigantic." I specifically request that Bobby find me a copy of Lil' Louis and the World's "French Kiss," with which I will use when DJ an erotic banana-eating contest. I come home from school for Christmas break and I'm mom's car and I switch the radio to WBLS to see what they’re up to, only they're not playing hip-hop, they’re playing what years later I learn is the “stringless” version of Derrick May's “Strings of Life," which I somehow neglected to hear off of Bobby's house music comp. albums. This stuff is luminous -- I sit back and close my eyes and I can see the light. This is all old news in Britain, of course. I get a portable compact disc player for Christmas, which becomes my very favorite material object for the next few years. 1988 A Tower Rcords opens up near Roosevelt Field Mall, and the much larger and more specialized selection opens wide vistas, especially what with the frenzied reissuing campaigns record companies are undergoing thanks to CDs. Two things I get immediately: Big Star's #1 Record/Radio City and Javanese Court Gamelan, a collection I've had my eye since I first picked up The New Rolling Stone Record Guide. Big Star doesn't hit me until about a year later, but once I'm hooked on gamelan and trepedaciously check out non-Western musics of Africa, Asia and Brazil, which is very easy now what with David Byrne's Beleza Tropical sampler. There are times when I go into the store and look at the vast selection and despair at being able to grasp any and all of it. It takes me an hour each time to decide just what I want, a dizzying array of picking up, weeding, remembering, weeding again, and coming up with selections which always seem unsatisfying, somehow. I have a treacherously shitty time during my My European Teen Tour from Hell, so I act contrarian and leave everyone to the comforts of Billy Joel and the Dead while I have my Prince and Minutemen tapes. I hate my alienation and I enjoy it. We go to a smattering of discos and I adamantly refuse to dance, even when people literally drag me onto the dance floor. Trip redeemed somewhat when I find a copy of Wire's Chairs Missing in London, and its apparitional art-strategy punk entrances the remainder of my summer. My first fanzine is Swellsville. It takes the committed eclecticism I find in the Grand Old Critics one step further, and marry it with an enviable anything-goes critical rigor. They confirm what I suspected: I’m living in a great time for music. Hip-hop and house music blow up, WBLS is always good to listen to, and everyone who’s worth a damn in music seems to have six degrees of separation or less from Chuck D., who worries me and thrills me at the same time, and who I know about well before my DJ brother does. In the Village Voice, Barry Walters creates a "better best top 100" as a riposte to Rolling Stone's "100 Best Singles of the Last 25 Years" list, and I flip out at the cheek and perversity of the move -- Taana Gardner's "Heartbeat" is number one, and I've never heard of it before. I find that the contents of his list are more fun to explore and buy than the anything thrown up by the Grand Old Critics. I get a bright red guitar for Christmas but never learn to play it. I write some poems roughly based on Greil Marcus' "Real Life Rock Top Ten" Column. I talk about rock music a lot in my application essay to St. John's College, saying some stray things about Allan Bloom. 1987 For some reason, I start to really dislike listening to records. After timing the speed of Al Green's "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?" and finding it a whole minute off, I ditch my turntable and I hijack the unused family stereo -- one of those credenza-like jobbies in the living room -- until I get a new stereo system. I end up waiting six months. In the meantime, I play records like Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade for the sake of confrontation. Bobby yells at me when I play Ornette Coleman's Song X. I tell him I'm not that weird, I like Janet Jackson, too (which is true) showing him the cover of Spin Magazine that month. Finally, I get a new stereo outfit for my birthday: tuner, record player, tape deck. I want to read more Christgau so I ask my mom and her boyfriend to stop by a kiosk to buy me a Village Voice when we’re all in New York City. I secretly hope there’ll be a master list, a list of all lists, a neat poll - and by god, there’s the 1987 Pazz and Jop poll. It’s literally dizzying - I thirstily read it in spite of my tendency for carsickness. I spend the next few months buying up as many records as I can on the poll and on Christgau's personal list. Some good stuff, too - Jesus and Mary Chain, The Indesctructible Beat of Soweto, Sonny Sharrock, Elvis Costello's Blood and Chocolate. I'm the only one in my little group of high school bohemians who listens to rap. I'm also the only one who takes the Beastie Boys seriously. Marley Marl plays Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise" a couple times. I only pay attention to once I hear the part about Yoko Ono, and when I do, it's another epiphany. I make it a point of reading the Voice as much as possible, and I’m filled in about many of the latest musical convolutions, particularly hip-hop and boho NYC crud. A cover story clues me in to WFMU, which I get to hear on route to a class trip to Philadelphia. The Euclid Beach Band, horror film soundtracks, Big Black, AC/DC, Ornette Coleman: pure eclectic bliss, all the contradictions of popular culture resolved in one ecstatic vision. Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising and Sonic Youth’s Sister are my primary summer listening -- both strike me as incredibly exotic and hypnotic, but I don't understand why people now regard them (and R.E.M.) as sell-outs. I also dip my toes into Classical and Jazz, nothing serious, though I do manage to play the entirety of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps about seven times during the course of a school day. I also check out Phillip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach from the local library and dig its abstractness and numbing power. My self-created want lists based on the Marcus, Christgau and Marsh lists aren't doing their job anymore. I know enough about rock history to suspect that filling the gaps in my knowledge of their version of rock history won't lead to too many additional revelations, plus the stuff I've been buying on their recommendations as of late have sat around my room, unlistened to. What good is rock history if it bores the fuck out of me? Especially when there's so much good music now? I finally, painfully ditch my plans to create a Great Rock Music Reference Library and buy a lot of 12"s. 1986 I read Spin Magazine a lot. An off-hand comment by Steve Albini about rap music and white guilt makes me very depressed for two weeks until I realize that most of the white rap fans in my school are actually quite nakedly racist and have no guilt to assuage. I read a record review of Christian Marclay’s Record Without A Cover, and am utterly fascinated by the noisily radical cultural juxtaposition that Marclay seems to be doing. Carl Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record describes the gold record attached to the Voyager Spacecraft and I’m in awe that the world holds such a variety of music and I'm pissed that I really have no way to really investigate it because my local Record World doesn't have that kind of stuff. Record World is starting to strike me as incredibly provincial. The guy in the classical music section doesn't know who John Cage is, and when I try to order a Burning Spear record the clerk thinks it's real funny that there's a record company called Mango. I get a CD player, after paying thirty bucks for a semi-legal Japanese pressing of Abbey Road. More used record stores: Chris Kenner, the New York Dolls, Ray Charles. I hear some hellishly chaotic track by Ornette Coleman and Prime Time on some VH1 ill-fated jazz program and the world turns upside down again. Looking for classical music, I find that WNYC plays Beethoven, Bartok and Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" one after the other. I fall asleep to the station a lot at night. In the next few years, there’ll be stuff devoted to John Cage, Moondog, Raymond Scott, exotica, ephemeral music and some of John Zorn’s favorite death metal bands. I spend Friday nights in the wintertime on the living room couch, tending a roaring fire, eating chips and salsa, and listening to DJ Marley Marl on WBLS. 1985 I realize it's sick, but I am obsessed with Dave Marsh. His politically committed quickie exploitation Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream makes me do some hard thinking about the intractability of class, race and sex in this country and in rock & roll. (His chapters on the MJ's sexuality are the first time I've heard someone say anything gay positive in my life.) Now I'm not so sorry I missed the Victory Tour last year. His books are my "bathroom read" of choice. I make a big list of every five-star record in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, about 700 of them. It improves my typing skills tremendously. Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica is on the list, and I'm in store for the most difficult listening of my life. I can only listen to one disc per night -- it literally tires me out. I also get Brian Eno’s Another Green World and am so stunned I listen to it twice in a row, completely rapt. I’m not used to hearing music organized these ways, but soon it becomes second nature. I vow to buy each and every record in Greil Marcus’ Stranded discography, and read Mystery Train from cover to cover during Hurricane Gloria, holed up in the basement with all my records in case something happens. I can't fathom why Dave Marsh doesn’t like R.E.M. or why Greil Marcus hates Sgt. Pepper. I'm hurt by their indifference and it takes me a while to accept that lots of people have many different opinions. Both of them expand my mind, though -- I also start to realize that Madonna isn’t evil, disco didn’t suck, and I actually buy (gasp!) a punk rock record. I judge the first Clash record to be good, but not life-changing. I discover Robert Christgau's Rock Albums of the '70s: A Critical Guide and it becomes more data for my lists. Since so many records the big critics recommend are out of print, I ask my mom to go to a used record store for the first time. Everything’s dusty and the owner is a smug fat git. I get Sly and the Family Stone, Dionne Warwick and Moby Grape. I try my hand at rock criticism myself. I fill up a notepad with nauseous jottings about how R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction is supposed to be a concept album about transportation. I fantasize about singing like Sly Stone, Otis Redding and Prince and lipsync to their records all the time while keeping away from my front window. At year’s end, I estimate that I’ve bought eighty records in the last year. I still like MTV. I sit in front of my new color TV and note down each and every last entry in their top 100 videos for 1985 countdown thing. 1984 The levee breaks. This is it, the point of reference. There’s a lot to say about this year: every record purchase is significant, a new freedom. At the end of school, on an unusually warm January day, my mother takes me to the Record World at Roosevelt Field Mall, which will be my primary site for record-buying for the next four years. I buy Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the Police's "Every Breath You Take" 45 and also a copy of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons as a feeble attempt at cultural counterweight. (The process of choosing which recording is so difficult, and the record store staff so unhelpful, I buy only one classical music record in the next five years.) My mom gives me an old self-contained stereo system she's stored away in her closet. I put it on, I don't even realize I need both speakers hooked up. I eat my broccoli first -- I play Vivaldi before the other two. After listening to Thriller I discover that Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. I consider it a bad omen. I'm so smitten with record-buying that next week, we buy Police's Synchronicity and Herbie Hancock's Future Shock. This sets up a pattern of record consumption that I very roughly follow to this day: about an album or two a week. The Compleat Beatles runs on cable and I'm intrigued by the idea that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band could be THAT good. It turns out it is. I really really want Abbey Road too but I'm embarrassed to be seen buying something so old. So I buy Duran Duran's Seven and the Ragged Tiger instead, which I know has some good songs on it but also has the kind of hipness I can't achieve. As I take the record to the counter, the clerk says "GAWD, I HATE this band." I get Abbey Road and I'm laying on the floor staring at the ceiling and "Carry That Weight" comes on and I think this is the best music I've ever ever heard. I am obsessed with the Beatles all summer. Totally, utterly, boringly obssessed. It's all I talk about in conversation. Soon the fact that I openly like the Beatles becomes a source of great laughter amongst my peers. Undeterred, I get Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life based on hearing about its record sales alone: if Thriller and Sgt. Pepper sold around that many, this album must be good, too. Surprise: I recognize some of the songs from my childhood days of listening to the car radio. I'm clearly on to something. Through Time Magazine, I also find about Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock (staying completely oblivious to his past), as well as Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, both of whom dovetail quite nicely into my burgeoning interest in modern art. I like the idea of United States, its epic scope and subject matter, and endlessly pore over the accompanying book trying to find hidden signifigance. By sheer chance, my dad takes me to her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I buy rock books as promiscuously as I do records, and so the outlines of rock history get more finely resolved in mind. The Rock Yearbook 1984 clues me in on all the strange cultural happenings in the UK, albeit about a year and a half behind. Some of the teenybopper magazines that spring up in the wake of the Second British Invasion, like the USA version of Smash Hits, point me in other, unexpected directions. There's stuff about X, Roxy Music, the Residents and R.E.M. I spend a whole afternoon glued to the couch, flipping through Dave Marsh's The Book of Rock Lists. When I get to the top 40 lists at the end, my immediate thought is that there's a whole fuckload of records I've got to investigate. Critics start to matter to me. After thinking Prince is a freak, a positive record review in Newsday makes me reconsider him, and soon enough, I have all of his singles on purple vinyl. I'm a sucker for ALL vinyl collectorama and audiophile paraphenelia. Likewise, I see R.E.M. on MTV's *The Cutting Edge* and initially think they're a joke but then a good review and repeated exposure to the "Pretty Persuasion" video breaks down my doubts. My mom inaugurates her new American Express card by buying me the Thompson Twins' Into the Gap and R.E.M.'s Murmur, to which I fall asleep to. I also buy New Order's "Blue Monday" 12" based on some good press and the awesome cover, and it's the first record I buy sound unheard. (I almost do the same for Run DMC.) It's alien stuff, mesmerizing. After dipping my toes in the waters of backcataloguedom, I start to realize that clerks in record stores generally don’t give a fuck about what you buy, as long as you buy, and so I splurge. I buy The New Rolling Stone Record Guide the night before Thanksgiving, and wind up staying up all night reading it and making a long, long wish list. I don't quite "get" Dylan and the Stones bore me (as they do now) but Astral Weeks and Who's Next are intermittantly super, and I think Joni Mitchell and Neil Young are marvellous. I also like Van Halen and Ratt in spite of their rawk ethos -- unthinkable a year before -- because they're funny. I also like Madness because I think they're cute. 1983 The Eurythmics are almost as bad as David Bowie in the weirdness department, but "Sweet Dreams" is awfully catchy and MTV's mad parade is quite entertaining. (And even Bowie's turned "normal.") I finally get rid of my turntable, the one I only used once back in 1978, the one I played the Anne Murray record on. I tell my dad that people like rock songs one minute and the six months later they don't, so there's no reason for me to buy records. But my anti-rock ethos is slipping. I'm actually able to say intelligent things about pop music to my peers. I even notice that some of these new British bands are actually kind of...umm...nice-looking. I wake in a cold sweat the middle of the night in the summer, thinking I really HAVE to get some Donna Summer and Michael Jackson records. In the fall, I notice Michael Jackson's Thriller is STILL selling. Unbelievable. I've GOT to check it out. On Christmas break, I spend Friday nights alone, watching video shows on cable into the wee hours of the night. I will do this a lot for the next couple of years until I get my color TV and cable connection. I begin to make a mighty conceptual leap: I can like rock music and still be *me*. 1982 MTV comes to Long Island. It's often stupid and nihilistic as I still imagine rock music to be, but it's also campy and silly, and against my better judgment, I like it sometimes. I believe that J. Geil's "Centerfold" is popular only because it riffs on the theme song from the Smurfs Cartoon Show, but Naked Eyes' hits are like a blast of air-conditioning on a summer day. Toto’s "Africa" and Laura Brannigan’s "Gloria" make me want to dance. Every time I dance, I do many balletic twirls and leg-kicks. I think I'm great, but the other kids make fun of me, so I remember not to dance in public anymore. At some point I take note of Michael Jackson's Thriller. I see no reason to believe why the Quincy Punk Rock Episode isn't an accurate portrayal. 1981 I carry around a tiny radio tuned to KJOY, even when I'm at camp. I tell everyone Muzak is great because it could even turn a punk song melodic. Needless to say, everyone thinks I'm nuts. Again. But I also dream of a musical utopia: I want to hear a radio station that will play classical music, and then a rock song, and then a disco song and then a punk song -- and then act like it's no big deal. I also tune into a radio show that showcases songs from 1971, thinking I'll hear "American Pie" or "Bridge Over Troubled Water" again. I still carry a torch for those two songs, and I keep hoping I'll hear them, by chance, on the radio. Of course I don't actually ask my mom to buy them for me -- it's too embarrassing. I escort my mom to a country multi-act concert at Nassau Coliseum with Alabama as the headlining act. They're very loud. We leave early. I decide I don't like country music, either. Though I do like Juice Newton's "Angel of the Morning", hmm... 1980 Our family has had cable TV since 1976, and I've seen many, many movies I'm far too young to be watching, including *Tommy*. The bullying, the baked beans, the snakes, the needles all CREEP the FUCKING SHIT out of me. The same is true for the polymorphous perversity of David Bowie's videos. "DJ" is the first time I've ever seen a man kiss another man. My eyes bug out. I secretly think the soundtrack to Xanadu is fabulous. Punk is dead, punk is big, punk is scary...but Billy Joel is punk. So is Blondie, who I don't really understand until "The Tide Is High." The Ramones are on The Uncle Floyd Show a lot but I don't think much of them. Our family is no stranger to musical repetition and music as ambience. Mom has the radio in the kitchen tuned to the country station WHN all the time, regardless of whether she's doing her stained glass or gardening or puttering around the house. Bobby plays records, loudly, repeatedly, endlessly to my constant irritation. He even fills up tapes with the same song, so he can listen to Kurtis Blows' "The Breaks" endlessly. I'm coming home from a nice vacation outing in Mystic, Connecticut. Only the trip back home involves over four hours of driving and a boat ride. And I've just developed case of food poisoining. And I'm naturally carsick. When we get home, my mom puts her radio in my room and turns on to KJOY, the local "beautiful music" station. I think it's marvellous! It's an event roughly analogous to the birth of ambient. 1979 Disco sucks. The inside sleeve of my brother's copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall, what with its talking anuses and hammers, repulses and compels. I don't understand it. Nor do I understand "Another Brick in the Wall," because I like school and distrust those who don't. Nor do I understand the glee with which a bunch of kids at camp sing along to AC/DC's "She's Got Balls". I decide that I don't like rock music. Rock music is the music of the kids who beat me up. Rock music is an excuse for boys to act like jerks in a very phony way. This makes me even less popular -- well, less comprehensible -- to other kids. I'm outside now. While vacationing in Montauk, a local radio station does one of these all-time great record countdowns and plays "American Pie" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" back to back. I'm shocked at the latter's shameless grandiosity of the orchestral swells, the piano chords and particularly Art Garfunkel's wimp grandeur. It is, finally, a concrete representation of my most inchoate longings. I beg the other people in the car to just SHUT UP so I can hear them, but nobody does. I'm deeply convinced that this was an event of great importance, and obssess over it for years. I become obsessed with "melodic" music, with countdowns, and with the past. But since I've made a point to other kids that I don't like rock music, I worry that liking Simon & Garfunkel is some kind of contradiction. I keep my obssessions to myself for the most part. 1978 Bobby hates Kiss, Tommy likes Kiss. The spectres of sex, death and grey non-comformity in...the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie make me cry in the theater. I like Grease much better but I still don't like the fact that Sandy had to turn into a slut to get her man. I also like Barry Manilow's shameless grandiosity. I like Anne Murray's "You Needed Me" better still -- I become absolutely, hopelessly infatuated with it. My mother buys me her current record, which I listen to once and once only. I love singing in music class, but whenever an actual musical instrument appears I'm perpetually disallowed from playing it. On our birthdays, the music teacher parades the students around on the piano (and gives us a "birthday spank"), but I don't want to ride on the piano, I want to play it. My mother refuses to let me learn to play the violin, probably because she emembers how much she hated piano lessons. I get something of a reputation for not liking/not knowing anything about the pop stars of the day, which isn't quite true (things seep in ambiently, since I watch TV all the time), but isn't quite false either. 1977 Tommy hates Kiss, Bobby likes Kiss. I also recognize immediately that there's something unwholesome about the band. Their comic book, their stage persona, and their record covers cultivate an air of...evil. Not that I would ever put things in such terms as a kid, but the phrase fits. The same also goes for Alice Cooper, Foreigner, Styx, anything that plays on the classic rock radio station Tommy listens to on those huge headphones of his. The bit in "Hotel California" about stabbing the beast with steely knives scares me. I do like the stuff on the radio, though, particularly Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good", which I hear on my Cookie Monster Clock Radio. I'm the one who informs my mom that Elvis died. A couple of days later, my mom cries in the car when the radio plays "I Can’t Help Falling in Love". If Elvis is dead, I theorize, then the music I'm hearing isn't live but a record. I also tell mom about Bing Crosby's death. Music history is provided by TV record ads for classical music, classic pop, fifties rock. 1974-1976 This is the first memory I can date with precision: it's my brother's birthday and he won't let me play with his new drum set. Mom likes country and Top 40, Dad likes folkish-rockish things. My brothers have completely indiscriminate taste, as most young children do: bossa nova, folk music, the Jackson Five, Jackson Browne, seasonal music, children records of all kinds. We play these records on tiny self-contained turntables, and we love to fuck around with them, playing them too fast or slow or wrong or just destroying them utterly. The radio is always on when we're in the car, and all your favorite mid-seventies hits soundtrack the contemplative moments of my early life. The car radio never seems to be loud enough. Songs always sound spectral, half-there, lonesome, especially at night. I hear a an actual Brady Bunch song on the radio, it had to have been "Time to Change", the sun is shining as we’re driving down the highway, life is beautiful, I get chills. The theme music to The Electric Company frightens me because it’s too loud, too brassy, too exuberant. I also like watching The Monkees and Hee-Haw a lot. My grandmother sings Ella Fitzgerald’s "A Tisket A Tasket" when she holds me in her arms. 1972-1973 I don't remember much. Josh asked me a question about my musical development. Here it is. I take some liberties, but dates are less approximate than you think. 1971 I'm born. The author of naivete.org excels at the cannily ironic examination of America, his new home, effortlessly achieving a kind of intellectual rigor in blogging that I usually try to strive for. One to watch, no doubt. Come on, Steve! I was like only nine or ten years old at the time! Richard Rorty, in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity: What is the moral burden of being gay? That is, what do I, as a gay man or a lesbian, owe other homosexuals? I believe it's this -- to try to prevent cruelty against those who suffer what you have suffered, but are weaker than yourself. "Fair enough if you want to have a monogamous relationship with someone your entire life. Why call it marriage? Why make a contract out of it? Why do it in front of god? Why does it change your legal status? Your tax status?" There is no reason why this cannot apply to heterosexuals as it does homosexuals. In my more contrary moods, I don't recognize the distinction between "underground" and "mainstream." And this applies (again) to both music and in lives lived. Tom C. brings up the marriage thing again in his blog: "In the past, we have been forced not to be complacent and this has provided some wonderful alternatives to 'marriage'." But it's the present. Which isn't to imply that we're now all completely free and happy and have reached utopia and all. Obviously that isn't the case. But things have changed. As homosexuality becomes increasingly acceptable to mainstream society, more and more Americans with solidly bourgeois religious or post-religious values are going to identify themselves as gay and lesbian -- and see no contradiction in that. As such, a growing percentage of the community will look at these 'wonderful alternatives' to marriage and find them utterly alien to everything they stand for. They will compare the burden of expectations attached to being bourgeois individuals with the burden of expectations attached to being homosexual individuals...and in this case choose the burdens of being bourgeois. Some more words about Tom's letter, but first this... Brought to you via Tom E., this Dave Eggars interview/rant is the purest piece of unmitigated drivel I've read in many a moon. Which is funny, because once upon a time, I'd say his heart was in the right place. You see, he doesn't care about selling out, man. He just wants to create ART! But OF COURSE he cares about selling out. It clearly obssesses him. If he didn't care, we wouldn't be subjected to all this uberdefensive wounded artist banalarama. I mean, COME ON! The butterfly collector metaphor? (Which, yeah, I used recently -- though not to imply anything as baroquely awful as the collector/critic was picking the wings off the butterfly/artiste.) Jesus! What a teenager! What a baby! When will he ever grow up? Pauline Kael...a critic: "I recognize your assumptions: the critic is supposed to be rational, clever, heartless and empty, envious of the creative fire of the artist...The artist is supposed to be delicate and sensitive and in need of tender care and nourishment. Well, this nineteenth-century romanticism is pretty silly in twentieth-century Bohemia." Segments from Tom's e-mail and my response. Please keep in mind that not everything will be posted in order it was in the e-mail, though I don't think that it'll matter much. I'm not sure that making the world safe for weirdness means very much anymore in Western Society. Sure, I'm a liberal, both in the capital-l and lowercase-l meaning of the term. I do believe that tolerance and diversity are good things. But. I don't think identity politics is the royal road to utopia, regardless of how antithetical homosexuality might be to the deepest core values of patriarchal capitalist society. Because it isn't, in spite of its supposed aversion to monogamy and making babies. Very little is antithetical to contemporary hypercapitalism -- not racism nor diversity, promsicuity nor abstinence, pop nor punk, normalcy nor weirdness, conformity nor noncoformity. (Especially not the latter, the grand overarching myth that's ruled corporate culture for the last ten years.) All that is solid melts into air, as Marx said. And no, this is not a good thing. Sent an ill-concieved letter to Tom of Barbelith about his reponse to my reponse to the whole gay marriage thing: one paragraph is unecessarily hostile, and another is a dubiously relevant sub-Frankfurtian riff so uncharacteristic of me that I woke up this morning in utter disbelief that I had written it. I'll have to embarrass myself by posting the whole thing at some point later today. An uncharacteristically personal confession: I have intense jealousies of certain people who are clearly smarter than me and are doing the sort of things that I know, within my heart of hearts, I should be doing rather than blogging half-nude in my parent's house. One of them is Stephin Merritt, (This one, not this one.); another is this guy, a man who writes a blog Tom just linked to. It appears that he's a man without a name, and a programmer, too. And like the few programming bloggers I've bothered to encounter (there seem to be hundreds out there, but I rarely venture to that particular side of the web), he's a Fred Astaire of ideas and language to whom no subject (law, politics, irony, computing) is foreign. God, how I hate him. And speaking of paying homage to linking sites, let's say a fine howdydo to Katya. Umm... Maybe I should say something about the site instead. Rather than just me. Right? Hooray, the sexily wonderful David K. of Nightcharm has linked to me. For a while, in fact. I've been a bit slow on the uptake thanks to hellish work schedule this week, so consider this my belated thanks to the surfeit of hits the site's been recieving. Perhaps it's about time to get these new folks used to me. Who is this Michael Daddino? He's read books you've only had nightmares about it. He thinks Hugh Jackman as 'Wolverine' looks intolerably sexy in this photo. He has more issues than National Geographic. Also has all but one of every issue from the first ten years of Games Magazine. Believes that Charlemange Palestine's Four Manifestations on Six Elements might be the best album ever. Worries that OCR A Extended isn't readable enough. Loves the smell of citrus and lavender. Puts tabasco on everything. Needs a date. Feels like his birthday has some kind of mystical significance, but surmises that everyone thinks the same. Has a website hosted by Tom Ewing, whose blogs you really should check out. Is listening to Mired Radio. Politically could be considered a bourgeois liberal ironist. Doesn't like many "personal" blogs much. Suffers from depression and stress-related eczema. Can't think of anything better to fill his blog with at the moment. Really needs to clean his apartment and de-frag his hard drive. Tires easily. Dreams about legos at least once a month. Wonders why there's so many great gay bloggers out there. Namedrops Wittgenstein and Kant all the time. Just bought some Martha Stewart pillows at K-Mart. Is a MSTie geek. Realizes that this is beginning to sound like a personal ad. And grossly self-referential. And exhibitionistic. Wears aloha shirts; boxers, not briefs. Has a fucking godamned Amazon Wish List already. Grew up with a lot of country music and cable TV. Doesn't consider himself too weird, since "weird" is such a debased term anyway. Commutes every work day on the Long Island Rail Road. Last movie he saw was Chicken Run. Are you happy? Are you happy now? And so on. "For me the horrors are the Uncle Tom like behaviour of happy little queens on TV and in films..." Note the use of the word "queen." Some feminists have argued that the tendency within gay political movements to equate effiminacy with political passivity is implicitly sexist. Tom from Barbelith sez: "Should gay people 'get married'...Why do it? Are there no alternatives that might provide better options for gay people?...The point of gay politics has been to fight for a space to be different. And that difference doesn't end when you are out of bed (whatever it is people have sex nowadays)..." "But gay people aren't normal. That's kind of the point." Tell me, Tom. What is the point of being gay? I confess -- I lost the manual oh so many years ago. It appears that the point of being gay "to be different." . Not only are homosexuals different, but they practically have an obligation to be different. Some gays and lesbians may say the expectation to get married is an oppressive one, and perhaps they have a point. But I think the expectation that, as a gay man, I have to be "different" -- that it is my duty to experiment with new forms of loving, for example -- this feels even more oppressive to me. Scientists Find Archimedes' Words:"'There is always a residual, traces of what was there,' said Robert Johnston, an archaeologist and RIT professor emeritus. 'It's amazing what can come out. Soon, nothing will be secret or hidden.'" I agree. Now, the irony. The passage I quoted below comes from Awake!, a Jehohvah's Witnesses publication that's quite nakedly prescriptive. It offers correct scriptural guidance for people, which is a less blunt way of saying that they're telling people "what to think and how to feel" if they want to be on good terms with Jehovah. Rock musicians don't generally try to tell their audiences "what to think and how to feel." Even in protest songs, they tend to be (or try to be) descriptive rather than prescriptive. Of course, just as with the news, what tries to be descriptive can be misleading, biased, etc. "In other words, someone else telling these young people what to think and how to feel." So, in other words, after a soul-destroying day of teachers telling them "what to think and how to feel" in school, young heavy metal fans like to kick back and listen to rock music...which consists of rock musicians telling them "what to think and how to feel?" Um, where's the excitement in that? I'm sure the folks at the Journal would say "No, no, that's different...rock stars are just telling kids what they want to hear." Right, exactly. And how is this manipulation again? The music lover, when listening to the music they like, is eliciting within himself certain thoughts, behaviors and emotion he enjoys having. Sounds like self-manipulation. Actually, I don't want to talk about the paradoxes of "selfdom" at length. This is even more interesting to me: why is it "ironic" that that children want to shape their identity using a "public, shared medium." I don't see any unexpected twist in such a concept. Well, maybe the self contains multitudes, and "a more authentic self" is authentic to a particularly special kernel within a self. Or maybe this "authentic self" true to some idea of selfdom that's external to the self. Whatever. Examine the phrase too closely, and it becomes a flimsy thing. I hereby pronounce it psychobabble. (Incidentally, my senior year thesis at St. John's examined -- rather ineptly -- the idea that the concept of "the self" was a necessary fiction. So clearly I'm biased against presenting the self as some hard, gem-like thing.) The first thing I paused at when I read the quote below was the stuff about "a more authentic self." Confusing phrase, that is. What on earth does it mean? Thinking that I might be missing some nuance in the word "authentic", I went to the online Merriam-Webster and looked up "authentic". The fifth definition defines the word as "true to one's own personality, spirit, or character" -- all things that define seldom to me. So taken in that light, "a more authentic self" is a self that's more authentic to...itself. Huh? I'd like to direct your attention to the following quote about music. Meditations to follow. Some preliminary words: the first phrase is referring to the notion that heavy metal and rap have negative subject matter. Tom Wolfe was born a lazy thinker, Tom: he's a hack who got lucky. A guy who thinks having yr typical journo cynicism about Art-with-a-capital-A, academia, the liberal impulse, etc. is reason enough to be taken seriously. Hohoho, it isn't. He'll never get canonized, cause he's too fucking glib. But he is good for a laugh now and again, especially when he starts picking fights with other writers -- I mean, intellectuals that act like rock stars are always rich chuckle sources. Just as I was about to answer some e-mail and set about the arduous task of thinking what to blog for the day, the power went out. Then it came back up. Then it went out again. I stayed in my seat like an overanxious dummy for about a minute or two until fire trucks started wailing in the distance, a obvious sign that this was a problem that wasn't gonna fix itself lickety-split. So I did...nothing. There was nothing to be done. I had a flashlight, yeah, but I didn't want to waste the batteries. My apartment had loads of candles and no matches, so even reading was out the question. No edification, no entertainment, even eating would be difficult, so I hunkered off to bed. Couldn't sleep, though. I'm probably not the only person whose mind gravitates towards depressing post-civilization, post-energy scenarios whenever the power goes out, and I was depressed enough, thank you very much. So I actually sat up on my bed, put my feet up in the lotus position and meditated, something I haven't done in like ages. It's odd that one of my last blog entries was meditation on one man's search for silence because is one good thing about power outages. After a while, the most overpowering sound one hears is one's own head. I assume it's one's own head; in any case, it's a roar in the ears, a hum. The sound is something like the austere minimalism (not an redundant phrase, folks) of Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long, Thin Wire, another piece of unholy minimalism you need. Low glowering tones piled on top of each other and ebbing in and out of consciousness. So I spent about a half-hour of my time focusing on the way this internal music changed in my head, and it was a gas on purely aesthetic terms. I definitely need to meditate more often. The power came back on, eventually. Quality Motel, Florence, South Carolina I don't remember this place very well. Our protagonist may have visited it on a chill spring day. For business. (Oh, if I told you what he did, you'd be bored.) He may have taken the wife, for some reason, or he may have eaten a roast beef sandwich platter while he watched the Huntley-Brinkley Report. Alone. Though that might be a matter of wishful thinking. In any case, I'm sure they used the word "luxe" to describe it. And it is quite pretty, in its way. It's as pretty as it needs to be. Though I'm not sure if it's pretty now. Port Motel, Port Washington, Wisconsin The room had a smell that was maybe not a clean smell, but a still a sweetish, familiar one. Already tired, he took off his shoes and neatly placed them by the door. I'll call, but later. He turned on the radio. A man playing a piano on a scratchy classical record. He had a long trance staring out of the window into the field of grass. They call this a town? Why here, fer chrissakes? He realized he could high-tail it up to Milwaukee, if he wanted to, but. He realized he probably had no neighbors today, because there were only two cars in the parking lot -- his own, and presumably the hotel owner's. He couldn't hear the traffic much, either. He could savor the quiet. He turned off the radio and lay down on the bed. A long pause. Sparrows. There was the noise of the building settling, and the hum of something electric. Must be the TV. He unplugged it, and then unplugged the alarm clock, too -- he had a watch, he could always hook it back up again. The hum disappeared. But he was vaguely irritated that his watch was ticking. He took it off, bunched it up in a undershirt and threw it in his suitcase in the closet. He lay down on the bed. His eyes started to count the little holes in the ceiling tile. A small plane flew overhead. Probably a Cessna. More sparrows. Bel-Air Palms Hotel, El Monte, California He kept looking at his car through the curtain. He popped a stick of gum in his mouth, then another one. He hadn't even taken off his tie yet. Where he came from, the night would bring a gradual settling down of things, but here our protagonist is confronted by the sound of the street inhaling and exhaling. Even at that hour, there were people outside, in cars, and they were doing things and going places. He, too, could be doing something. But it was too late to go out, too late to call home, too late to watch TV. And he already had a nap. His flash counted for nothing here, he reasoned. Maybe the bar was open. He spat the gum out in piece of paper. All that time spent driving, and lo...nothing. He looked at his idiot blue eyes in the mirror and took his tie off. What the HELL is that crap serving as the background caterwaul for Basement Life? There was a Judy Collins documentary on the Lifetime Network about a half-hour ago. Why she hasn't covered "100,000 Fireflies" by now I'll never know. Reading Camworld, I was idly curious as to how bad the NYT "hacker jargon" article could be. I assumed they'd learn a lesson from The Great Grunge Hoax, and they kinda did, seeing as how they actually cite published sources.Well, it's still pretty dumb, the kind of trendspotting glibness that you expect from Vanity Fair or Esquire: Never could stand her. She's averse to the experimental and the vaugely amoral, and her own writing is shockingly dull-as-dirt. I could go to the Times' archive, pick out a random sentence out of a randomly picked essay of hers and say, "eh, she won a Pulitzer for *this* ?!?!" with righteousness in my heart. But the pain involved in reading the damned things wouldn't be worth it -- they're too boring to be camp. This is an even better j-pop website. Cheers to Mr. Proulx! Of course music, even pop music, can be defined in timeless, changeless terms. The question is why anyone would want to do so. Robin: "I find the whole idea of music having to be 'saved' or 'battled for' inherently flawed, because it implies that music can be defined in timeless, changeless terms (the hideous idea of 'quality control', as somebody else might put it)." When do bad intentions affect a record's quality? When the immorality reaches a critical mass -- when garden variety greed becomes callousness -- and become impossible to ignore when listening. Think of most necrophile duets (a la Natalie Cole), etc. What's a good way to discover j-pop? This site and the liberal use of Napster. Momus beats me to the punch, of course. In surely what amounts to lots of dubious cultural projection on my part, I get off on the sheer guilelessness of j-pop (the "j" is for Japanese, silly). When American or Brit artists get "eclectic," you know it's because they're trying to target as many little pieces of the Balkanized music listenership as possible. 'Chris Gaines' allows Garth Brooks, a country guy, to sell records to alt.music.alternative people (in theory, not in actual practice, silly); likewise, the endless, nauseating stream of subpar housey/garagy/handbaggy remixes let crappy-to-begin-with pop and R&B singers sell rekkids to both the bourgie lamers and the clubkids (not like they actually buy records or anything, it's all a post-record-fetish scene anyhoo). Yes, yes, YES, I'm talking to YOU in particular, Mariah Scarey, the way you feel the need to defile Ol' Dirty Bastard, Missy Elliott, 98 Degrees, Brian McKnight, Boyz II Men, Dru Hill, etc. etc. etc. by having them do your dirty work, using their name and talents and dashing good looks to sell "the street" or "the kids" or "the buppies" or whatEVER 'cause everyone knows you and your anorexic Irish ass has, like, no cred to them in those particular demographic subsections. In theory, this shouldn't matter, bad intentions are almost never the reason these records suck. In practice, these records still suck. Yet when some subdued drill & bass (heh) or a raplet spikes Chara's Beatley psyche-pop punch, it seems...I don't know, a whole lot less calculated, I s'pose. I'm assuming that cultural allegiances don't run quite as deep, or at least, mean a whole lot less on that island nation. The Gallery of Regrettable Food Hooray! A link on Jonno's site has broken my writer's block! Cookbooks and women's magazines taught me how to read. I was in it for the yummy (and absurdly ornate) pictures, of course, but eventually, through trial and error and countless questions directed at my mom, I was able to read the books as well. I was easily the only kid in my kindergarden class who could correctly pronounce and spell "asparagus." (What a pity there isn't a website devoted to detergent box packaging design, the other consumerist subject which kept me absolutely rapt as a four-year-old.) I don't remember spotting a culinary nightmare on the order of basting a turkey with 7-UP, since I stayed away from the meat-centric cookbooks, but yes, Mr. Lilek's site Brings Back A Lot of Memories. And raises even more concerns. Seems to me that photographers from the fifties not only had a special knack for oversaturating every last picture with the color red but making potentially appetizing dishes look repellently amorphous and greasy. Mr. Lilek's site is reason enough for the internet... What's more irritating than the Long Island Rail Road screwing up yet again? It's people complaining, in all their passive glory, that the Long Island Rail Road is screwing up yet again. The Oak of the Golden Dreams: Works By Richard Maxfield and Harold Budd Budd's titular work from 1970 is nothing but an enormous eighteen-minute synth drone festooned with squelchy "orientalist" synth-wank that eventually fades off into the distance. That's it, but that's all it needs to be. Listening to it was probably the closest I've ever come to a music-induced trance in my life: I want to close my eyes and greedily soak up the sound, draw it down, make it stop, make it last forever, let it rush through my head as if I was experiencing the scent of honeysuckle or an especially fine orgasm. This review from classical.net actually goes a long towards explaining the appeal of this kind of drone to the novice (though his remarks on Richard Maxfield strike me as dumb and pat), and also goes on at length about Charlemagne Palestine, whose Four Manifestations on Six Elements may be the best album ever made. |
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