Works of art, ideas about art (which are kinds of art), “come in families, lineages, tribes, whole populations, just like people. They have relations with one another as well as with the people who create and circulate them as individual objects. They marry, so to speak, and beget offspring, which bear the stamp of their antecedents” (Alfred Gell). A fine metaphor, though apparently Gell did not mean it metaphorical, but rather that works of art were living beings; I’m not sure I buy that, I’ll have to read more of his work, but the metaphor above helps explain what depresses me about so much modern, internet-influenced art: all artistic objects emerge from other works, all works of art are “mash-ups” to some degree, but when the aesthetic focus is on the mechanics of the collage, then of course the content needs to be familiar and immediate: a mash-up of LaMonte Young and Mahjoub Sharif would be fascinating, but not as a mash-up, because it would not stimulate the average listener with juxtapositions of the familiar. The cliche is that we live in an ocean of information, and so slapping together a few aesthetic bits in a way that draws attention to the fact that they are a few aesthetic bits slapped together is supposed to reflect the state of living in said ocean. We don’t live in such an ocean, however; we live in something more like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of mass-produced iterations of cultural junk, and so the same junk gets slapped together in more or less the same way, and we get to pretend that we’ve seen something new, something stimulating, like Iron Man 2 or Lady GaGa. One reason pastiche is so popular is that it’s is simple to produce, there is a formula, and since those in charge of distributing art have a vested interest in consolidating power and because the formula is not very interesting (especially for producers!), the distribution itself becomes a kind of elite art form (just ask Will.i.Am). Many US poets have been lost in the same mess for decades, except that instead of talking about generating multiple income-streams and Real-Time Personalization, they talk about “poetics” and schools of poetry… and boy is it getting long in the tooth, as witnessed by such desperate attempts to maintain institutional genealogies as The New Thing.
270) Tom Waits: Orphans
3 CDs worth of odds and ends, some fabulous (versions of “What Keeps Mankind Alive” and Daniel Johnston’s “King Kong,” and 2 Ramones covers!), some just interesting (the song about Ants), some not really fabulous or interesting, but groovy nonetheless…I’ve met a lot of people who hate Tom Waits, which baffles me, but then I’ve met lots of people who really like Pizza Hut, so there you go.
271) Little Feat: Shake Me Up
I’ve heard lots of Little Feat over the years, and the only song I remember is “Mojo Haiku,” because I like the title. I know the Lowell George stuff is funky and well-written, and that this CD is not from that era; it is: bland, MOR flailing with the occasional capitivating guitar break.
272) Fishbone: In Your Face
That the Red Hot Chili Peppers became B-list glitterati and Fishbone did not is just plain wrong. But then Fishbone are black, and political, and like to make songs about their testicles…
My lovely wife expressed some envy about the way I read, that is, the way I read 7 or 8 books at once, bopping back and forth between them. I have always done so, I like how they books often talk to one another, and I have books assigned to different times and places: my read in bed book (currently: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal), my downstairs bathroom book (currently: The Pelican History of the World), my upstairs bathroom book (currently: Run With the Horsemen) my waiting around book that I keep in my car (currently: On Bullshit), and then the 3-4 others I read when not in bed, the bathroom, or waiting somewhere… my wife reads many things each day, as we all do, but prefers one book at a time, which I find just as puzzling as she does my multiple book habit. I suppose my reading habits also mean I am not the target audience for eBook readers, since I would have to chain it to a pierced nipple of something so I was sure to have access to books at all those times and places…
267) Linda Thompson: Fashionably Late
The story of Linda Thompson’s crippling stage fright (hysterical dysphonia) is fascinating, she couldn’t sing for 17 years; I’m certainly glad she found her way out the other side, as she is a wonderful vocalist and also a fine songwriter, as is clear from this recording. And Richard even shows up to play a bit, which is somehow comforting.
268) The Neville Brothers: A History of the Nevilles
Such a weird double CD; the cover is a weirdly drawn picture of Cyrille Art and Aaron, smiling away, and the tracks alternate, one after the other, between Neville Bros tracks and Meters tracks. Great songs, of course, but a strange package… and this is odd, too, though also cool: a fan-made “Hercules” video mashed up with scenes from Meanstreets:
269) The Be Good Tanyas: Hello Love
I first heard these women while driving through Kentucky and Tennessee, up and down the foothills, desperately searching for something that was neither glitter-country crap nor classic rock nor wackadoo preachers, and lo, I found it, though I’ve still no idea what station it was, because they played 4 songs by The Be Good Tanyas, minimal, delicate, raw country folk, and then the station broke into static. I may have dreamed the whole thing, and could in fact be laying in a ditch on the side of Route 65 even as I am dreaming of writing this… but probably not.
Hmmm:
The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.
–Ivan Illich
That sounds familiar, though Illich wrote it in 1971. He also wrote a lot about substituting “webs” of learning for “funnels,” meaning the learn-to-work training mission of modern education. Unfortunately, management shamans have got hold of things even more than they did in 1971, assessment and accountability and other such empty buzzwords drive curricula, and students learn to toe the line or else. Same as it ever was. I teach in a college, and can’t ever quite tell if I’m helping people learn and explore and find meaning, or if I’m just another fool who thinks they can “change the system from within,” otherwise known as Jerry Rubin syndrome. And I guess I won’t ever know, and it’s probably not as bleak as it seems, there are good people teaching here and there, I’ve been taught by some of them… ah well. Sometimes it’s reassuring to know you are too far gone to ever be properly assimilated.
264) Kool Keith: Black Elvis/Lost in Space
Lots of great, funny songs, and I’m a fan of the pre-grime production beeps and fuzz bass wobbles on here, some is Sadat X, some is other folks… and he drops Stretch Armstrong, Chairhead Chippendale, Argonauts, Ringling Bros, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and the Vulcan Neck Pinch in one verse, for god’s sake.
265) Loudon Wainwright III: Attempted Mustache
Loudon and Kool Keith, that makes sense somehow, they should do a song together. I like watching Loudon on M.A.S.H., but all the clips of him from that show on YouTube have been taken down, so instead, the first song on this CD:
266) The Kinks: Muswell Hillbillies
One of their best, most consistent recordings; even the fluff (“Have A Cuppa Tea”) is inspired, and the band sounds tight and bluesy, and, and, and, well, even if it only had “Complicated Life” and 10 versions of “Louie Louie” I would buy a copy. Really:
I must post more CDs, I am getting behind again. Reflexive update: I am listening to all the CDs I own, in order, because my wife challenged me to do so and, well, why not?
260) Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: Freak Out!
Freak out indeed, an early Zappa recording, Suzy Creamcheese and so forth, “Help, I’m a Rock!,” “Wowie Zowie,” it’s Zappa, great if you when you are in the mood, and luckily I was when this one’s turn came…
261) Prince: Sign O’ The Times
I thought “If I Was Your Girlfriend” was the greatest pop song ever for about 2 months after I heard it; I still think it’s a great song, but the spoken word goofiness in the middle part is a little too Prince-peculiar. But wow, what a consistantly great collection of songs, stunningly, uniformly of a quality most songwriters could only dream of…
262) Cabaret Voltaire: The Original Sound of Sheffield ‘78/’82
Very lo-fi electronic weirdness, not nearly as poppy or danceable as their later stuff (which is saying something); interesting in parts, dull as hell in other parts, might be fun to chop up and remix.
263) Astor Piazzolla: Tango: Zero Hour
I think I will listen to the Piazzolla box set when I hit #300. I can’t say enough about Piazzolla’s compositions, which would be stunning even if he were just a bandleader, but good god, be plays this stuff on a bandoneon…
As is wont to happen on the internet, several of the threads I was following got snarled together. Many people mistake these snarls for braids, or even weaving, but usually they are just snarls. So, while listening to Shogun Kunitoki, a Finnish electro band, I check out their website and find a brief statement of intent:
Shogun Kunitoki is a band from Helsinki, Finland, with a mission to help electronic music regress back to a more human state, the time of the tube organ and the ring modulator, the spring reverb and the test oscillator.
They sound a lot like Philip Glass, actually, but driving rather than meditative. In any case, they want to regress humanity back to a more human state, and through the use of moderately old electronic instruments; we were more human back in the 1970’s and 80’s, apparently. A common enough trope, the idea that we were closer to what is essentially human “back then,” though usually people cast back further… like, before electricity was readily available, for example, or, for Socrates, before the accursed new technology “writing” ruined humanities’ ability to know things:
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. (from Phaedrus)
This suggestion of a pre-technological Golden Age has a lot in common with the post-apocalyptic trope so prevalent today, be it the “cosy catastrophe” where we are returned to a more pure age of naked power (supplanted with canned goods and rifle caches, of course) or a more bleak portrait, like C. McCarthy’s cowardly piece of titillation, The Road. In both cases, a desire to escape the anxiety of culture and other people is manifest, but if our very fragile civilization were really to crumble, our dependance on other people would very rapidly intensify, especially after we were herded into protective camps (because, my wee patriots, the folks behind stuff like the Joint Operating Environment report (PDF) have many more guns than you could even dream about, and the will besides). Certainly, this blogging shit would be right out. I recall reading somewhere that the post WWII generation were the first to grow up under the threat of total annihilation of the species, which almost seems quaint, or at least tidy, when you consider that more recent generations hae to live under the threat of the gradual, messy, tortured annihilation of the species. So, what to preserve, and how? “Why” is a questions for another day. James Lovelock:
We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of recorded history. I prefer sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s view of us as unfortunate tribal carnivores that have acquired intelligence. Our evolution is more like that of social insects; the advances in knowledge and understanding that we prize are more a property of the human nests we call civilization than of its individual members. The nest is always more powerful than a collection of individuals. Who dares disturb the hornet’s nest? Small bees easily destroy the huge and powerful but solitary Japanese hornet when it invades their nest. They cluster around it in a ball and cook it to death at 50oC. A large brain offers no protection for the sperm whale when attacked by possibly less-intelligent human hunters.
As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or switches? The important difference that separates us from the social insects is that they carry the instructions for nest building in their genes. We have no permanent ubiquitous record of our civilization from which to restore it should it fail. We would have to start again at the beginning.
And so, some projects for preserving a record are collected here, and they are all infused with sadness, and not a little naivete; the door to the Crypt for Civilization, buried at Ogelthorpe University in GA, USA, has the following inscription:
We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.
Sportsmanship of poserity, indeed. As Lovelock notes elsewhere is his essay, “we live in adversarial, not thoughtful, times,” and sportsmanship has no place. It seems funny to even contemplate that there was a time when sportsmanship seemed a foundational notion, a part of how we conducted ourselves. And then I think about Georgia in 1936, and I realize I have fallen into the golden age trap myself. Sportsmanship my ass.
Guess I’ll keep doing my little part of preserving the species, pathetic as it is: everything we produce as a species in ephemeral, but the internet makes that quality more pronounced, everything you read on the web is electricity…
256) The Lustre Kings: Mark Gamsjager Rocks and the Lustre Kings Roll
Serviceable rockabilly, a little country swing, but way too steeped in self-consicous retroism; the liner notes say “this is that mythical American music. This is that walk, that talk, that look and that car. Bowling shoes and sharp shirts…” and it goes on from there. Talk about worshipping a golden age. Ah well, I’m sure they’re fun to see live.
257) Bebel Gilberto: Tanto Tempo Remixes
Unusual in that the remixes are uniformly good, but different enough to make the whole CD worth owning; the original CD is a nicely written collection of sleepy samba and bossa nova songs, and is well worth owning, but this one stands on its own as well.
258) The Flaming Lips: Transmissions From the Satellite Heart
This CD is right about when the Flaming Lips’ sound began to jell into something more than a Led Zep/Butthole Surfers hybrid. “She Don’t Use Jelly” was the hit, and still is a fun pop recording, but there are a bunch of well written songs here, usually with goofy titles: “Chewing the Apple of Your Eye,” “Pilot Canat the Queer of God,” and such like.
259) Magma: Udu Wudu
Some Magma fans hate this record (Julian Cope, for one), and it does twinkle with assorted annoying jazz-rock phrases, but there’s plenty of hearty weirdness and interesting melodies, too. And come on, it’s an hour of Christian Vander playing drums…
I used to enjoy following the NCAA tournament, and also pro basketball and pro baseball, and hockey and football, to a lesser degree, and by “follow” I mean the way other people might follow the twists and turns of a soap opera. It’s funny how many men I know bristle when I compare pro sports to soap operas, usually after listening to someone express great outrage at a recent coaching change or some other bit of arcana, followed by a genealogy of all the coaches team X has ever head, their various and sundry vices and virtues, and then, depending on levels of inebriation, a tear or two for days and coaches gone by. I never followed sports to the degree that true fans do, but I took some pleasure in following story lines, reading stats in the paper, and putting games on TV with the sound down while I did other things. But I seem to have lost almost all capacity for following sports this way: I forgot the super bowl was on, and wasn’t interested anyhow; I will probably watch some of the final four of the NCAA tournament, but last year I tried that and couldn’t pay attention for the life of me; I will likely watch at least some of the World Series, if only because of One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest; and I will keep up with the drama of the Bills and Sabres by osmosis, because their story lines drift through the air in Western NY like plankton–but basically whatever it was held my interest in sports before is gone. I watched some of the Olympics, and really liked curling (perhaps because it requires very little of your attention to watch?), but was never particularly engaged. I am attributing at least some of my waning sports-watching ability to pattern satiation, which I’m using to mean something like semantic satiation but for rule-bound, integrated visual and conceptual phenomena: the visual patterns of a baseball game, for example, are predictable within a set of rules, and pleasing because they are predictable, and are furthermore integrated with other conceptual patterns, like the “how are the small-market Pirates going to do this year” narrative arc, creating a series of patterns meant to involve fans on as many cognitive levels as possible. And, I have grown so used to the patterns at this point that I am experiencing something like semantic satiation, in as much as the experience of watching a sporting event is strangely meaningless, I am inhibited from giving meaning to, for example, someone shooting a basketball through the hoop. Part of my mind knows what this means, knows the rules that define it, but I can’t connect that aspect of knowing with the part that makes it mean something more to me. Oh well, more time to listen to all these CDs, I guess.
251) Johnny Guitar Watson: Ain’t That a Bitch
Aside from the completely offensive cover, and the fact that Johnny can’t sing on key to save is life, this is a fun CD; three of the seven songs have “baby” in the title. Noting that JGW is a crappy singer makes more devoted fans of his upset, but since it’s impossible to argue, they usually just shake their heads and look at the floor.
252) Dr.Demento: The Very Best Of…
I wasn’t sure I would be able to sit through this, but I really enjoyed it, actually, probably because there’s only one Weird Al Yankovic song, and two by Zappa… I even laughed out loud a bunch of times, like when this one came on:
253) New Order: Substance
I still love these songs, no pattern satiation here, despite having heard most of them for 20+ years in various discos, house parties, headphones, and in a panoply of cover versions. Danceable–you can feel, rather than listen, if you choose–but also well-written and arranged in curious ways, so you can also listen, if you don’t feel like dancing, and still feel stimulated.
254) The Meters: Good Old Funky Music
I’ve had this CD for at least 20 years… and I do believe everything I said about Substance holds true for this recording too, danceable but interesting even when just lieing on the couch. Zigaboo Modeliste!
255) Van Morrison: Avalon Sunset
This year’s annual Van Morrison CD purchase has several great songs, a few duds, and the kind of flat, bubble-squeak production that characterized a lot of Van’s work from the 1980’s. Still, lifeless production can’t drain all the joy out of songs like “When Will I Ever Learn To Live In God,” or “Coney Island”…
It is another message of folk art that creativity need not lead to the destruction of norms. It can be dedicated to the perfection of things as they stand. . . .Art is our birthright. We are stuck here. Alone, one by one, we are born and die. We are members of groups without which we could not survive our first day. From them we learn. To them we return our learning. And all the time beyond us flows and cracks, without question, a power not ours that we can bend but not master. Art is the way we come to grips with this and make it visible, comprehensible. Born into this mumbo jumbo world, we have a right to make art, and I call conditions good that enable us to be artists, and I condemn conditions that steal art from us. Art is the way we achieve our humanity. The enemies of art are the enemies of humankind. If they say art is a privilege of the rare talented few or the possession of prosperous white men, I say they act criminally toward their kind.
So, that’s why I had to stop reading for a minute and try and figure out who is on either side of that divide, since much of popular culture is not a gift of art but a theft of our own artistic determination, and of course, of our money. To my mind, when a cloud of anonymous shareholders is the determining factor in what sort of pap is thrust into the brainpans of the public, then of course you end up with an audience trained to respond like anonymous wisps of cloud. Too many people have had their own creativity diminished, their own art stolen, by the very institutions that claim they are simply giving the audience what they want; creativity is reduced to swapping the semiotic coin of the realm with peers, chatting in some version of corporatese about the mascara sale at Eckerds, why football is great and soccer is boring, if Lady Gaga has a penis, and why the new Facebook layout sucks. But these are not sufficient, not even close, and so people grow into themselves or explode, or both.
246) Deftones: White Pony
I was so hoping they were going to cover this:
but oh well. Good anyway, nice turns and twists and most are for the sake of the song, not just to be twisty.
247) Verdi: Aida
Apparently someone made a rock opera of this Verdi monolith, Disney, I think, and then Elton John wrote the music… christ, why? is the first thing that comes to mind, then I remember that it’s Disney, in the age of regurgitation, and move on.
248) Mose Allison: The Best of Mose Allison
So damn likeable it’s almost unlikeable, but not quite, and so is fab, and I might just stick this one back in the pile so I get to listen to it a again in a few months.
249) Pamela Lucia: Into Outer Space With Pamela Lucia
Yes. Thanks, Pamela. See you there.
250) Pan Assembly: Hot Steel Music
Steel drums, that is, though there is a version of “Iron Man” here. A good soca, and “Pan In Yuh,” which is apparently a steel drum band standard. A serious din.
Just about finished with You Are Not A Gadget,and it continues to provoke, though there are some whopping gaps in Lanier’s various and sundry arguments, like blaming the current fashion for “retro,” mashups, and the like on the way software is written; I see the connection, but it’s pretty tenuous, and ignores all the other factors that make so much of popular culture so godawful boring, like the influence (and distributive constraints) of corporate culture, which is something that Lanier valorizes other places, claiming that the open source community could never produce an iPhone. Well, duh, but is an iPhone really revolutionary? And if so, then what does that say about our expectations for revolution? Anyhow… one thing this book has helped me think more about is mind/body dualism, as I spent around 10 years explaining to myself that the philosophical separation of mind and body was artificial, a Judeo-Christian boo-boo that Descartes helped persist into the 20th century; that mind was nothing more than an expression of body, a function of brain chemicals interacting with external stimuli. I had begun to realize, prior to reading You Are Not A Gadget, that the stories I had been telling myself about mind/body dualism were in fact a reaction to evils done in the name of dualism: the mortification and denigration of the body and of loved experience (in favor of some future state of spiritual bliss). The idea that a soul floats down (up?) into the shells of our bodies still strikes me as absurd, but there remains, despite the efforts of neuroscientists and AI researchers and the like, something decidedly ineffable in how we move from neuronal activity to thought. There is still a ghost in the machine, and yes the data keeps piling up about what brain cluster lights up when this happens or what chemicals are triggered when that occurs, but the data could be as large as the universe and we still will not have explained human consciousness, perhaps because we are asking the wrong questions, using the wrong languages… but it makes me happy, the idea that I’ve been thinking in the wrong direction for 10 years or so; it makes me happy because now I get to think a different way about the problem, which is in itself a pleasing sensation, but moreso because acknowledging that that nature of our time in these bodies is largely a mystery is somehow delightful, and even liberating.
241) Ultra-Lounge, V6: Rhapsodia
I never went head-over-heels for the lounge revival of the 90’s, maybe because I already listened to a lot of this stuff already: Julie London is so nice when you are hungover… so, not sure where I got this CD, but it’s a very serviceable mix, though I could do without the Muzzy Marcellino.
242) Housemartins: The Best of the Housemartins
Up Hull! Such an odd voice, Pual Heaton, instantly distinguishable. I never knew Fatboy Slim was in the band for a while…
243) Split Enz: True Colors
Makes sense this would follow the Housemartins; was I looking for nasally singers from more obscure parts of the British Empire at some point? (Hull and New Zealand). Not my favorite Split Enz, but I am a fan, and “Shark Attack” is pretty great, and of course “I Got You.”
244) Jurassic 5: Power In Numbers
If there wasn’t so much godawful hip-hop coming out in the mid-90’s and early 00’s, Jurassic 5 would not have gotten so much hype, methinks. They are a fine hip-hop collective, but very uneven (a good editor sure would help), both musically and lyrically. Still worth owning to throw into a shuffle…
245) Wu Tang Clan: Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
Wu Tang’s version of “I Am Curious, Yellow.” Alright, it’s great. Still makes me think of Kool Keith “Why are you looking hard with a hood on and Timberland boots, / staring at me for one hour – / – when you could walk up and shake my hand? Why? /Why are you making those mean faces in your videos with the fish lens effects? Why?.”
I’m working my way through Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, a gaggle of essays and blog length bits oriented around the idea that much of the internet, thanks to things like Facebook and Twitter and other “web 2.0″ applications (including, importantly, the whole idea of cloud computing) has become an exercise in groupthink. I’m very inclined to agree, even as I type these words into a textbox made by WordPress… but I’m not sure the software is so much the point, except in as much as the way software is written encourages us to think and shape our personalities in reductive, fragmented ways (which also sounds about right). Social networking sites should allow for more individual expression, certainly, but the software is too brittle, from UNIX on, to encourage anything but conformity, which in turn encourages more conformity. I think that is the thrust of his opening arguments, but the book is written in fragments too, which almost seems like one of those parlor game lit theory ideas from the 1970’s and 80’s, Derrida “resisting” meaning through intentionally avoiding meaning, jumbling up the text as a means for resisting the “linear”–but I just think that’s how Lanier organizes things, like a programmer would, into modules of meaning. Perhaps I will know better when I’m done, and the book requires careful reading, lest you sound like this dolt , who makes the old “if it’s too loud, you’re too old” argument and sounds like a preening teen on American Bandstand. In fact, Agger (the dolt) actually helps prove Lanier’s point by reflexively, and with little depth, attacking any critique of the “hive mind” romantic and undemocratic. Decisions made by a mass of anonymous folks are NOT democratic decisions. Gary Kasparov commented in a recent article that more and more, chess masters are playing the way a computer would play, because they are trained by computers, but who wants to watch 2 computers play chess? Or, have a computer program that describes the outcome of a baseball game, rather than actually watching the game… or that makes music, or any one of the manifold human activities that are interesting because of how they deviate from the norm, not because of how the hive anoints them.
237) Animal Collective: Strawberry Jam
Interesting enough noises and production stuff, but not much to the songwriting, and no soul that I can see, not even digital soul… not sure what the hype is about, except that people confuse production values with song quality quite a bit (see: movies that are CGI experiments).
238) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
Also some great production here, but production meant to emphasize a great set of songs, interesting, dynamic, challenging songs, rather than production being an end to itself. Try playing “Hiding All the Way” at your local bar during happy hour, you will be much loved.
239) Minutemen: Double Nickles on the Dime
Still pretty stunning, twenty years and hundreds of listens later. If you are a musician and don’t dig this, you need to go back to school.
240) N.E.R.D: Fly Or Die
And again, production as the key to the kingdom… 2 or 3 good songs, and a lot of wallpaper. Wallpaper is fine, I just don’t want to stare it for long peroids of time.
That’s interesting, I posted a link to a review David Blaine did of my 2nd book here, and the whole post appeared automatically as a comment under the review on the outsiderwriters website. They must also be using WordPress too, I guess?
