My good friend, I know:
and
Electronic music was a distasteful pariah for me until 2009 when I started clubbing. Clubbing, a term which now sounds shameful and begs a tongue in the cheek to say out loud, was something I sort of shuffled into with ambivalence because it seemed mindless and I was an excruciatingly self-involved nerd in high school, like all the coolest kids I know now were. See we walked through FIRE and now we get to decide what’s cool, Asshole Who Always Bumped Me Up Against Lockers. Don’t care that you’re maybe a future Olympian cyclist, because my name’s already in print, motherfucker! Anyway I’d just been dumped by a girl ten thousand leagues out of my own and bought my first plaid shirt and keffiyeh so why the fuck not right?
Last night Jen and I found this ridiculous dream interpretation book.
Frankston is an honest place. There’s nothing deceptive about it, everything’s on the surface. There are no haves here, only hopefuls, have-nots and don’t-wants. The don’t-wants are have-nots that gave up, their bulging translucent sacks of skin oozing out of their Target wardrobe. The hopefuls are next-gen have nots with Millennial optimism, either they’ll get out or get stuck. Four kids who couldn’t be more than thirteen carry scooters at one end of the train rapping to “Juicy”, which sounds terrible coming out of one of their phone’s speakers. I didn’t even know scooters were still around, I thought they made a brief renaissance when I was a kid and then went away, but then these kids are barely older than I was then so maybe it’s a phase for every generation now, like ska and petty crime and watching porn with friends. They move onto “Butterfly” and their credibility dribbles out of their mouths, escaping with every bar of that insipid hook repeated verbatim. Wait - are they playing Odd Future now? I’m not familiar enough with the catalog to tell before they move carriages. Kids do this a lot, I’ve noticed, bursting through carriage doors like tiny Kramers. Trains must be so exciting to them that it overcomes any nascent sense of public shame.
Post-Sucker Punch face.
Edit Drunk.
Kanye is not an artist you can define yourself with anymore. Used to be there was a time when you could say you’re listening to Kanye and not pre-emptively hold your head in your hands because you know you’re gonna get “Oh sweet! His latest album was so good, “Monster” is awesome.” And you wanna be like “Yeah it’s okay but actually it only has like four really strong tracks and it doesn’t stand up to repeated listens and I still can’t believe he dropped those two G.O.O.D. Friday tracks in there, and its only real importance was in terms of his public perception to the point where the music is basically irrelevant unlike on College Dropout or Late Registration, and track-for-track even Graduation has more jams.” So you nod and drop the only critical bit you can without being written off as a complete asshole (“The Nicki Minaj verse was dope”) and crawl back to your blog because nobody understands you out there, man. Nobody gets it but us.
—I Don't Believe You
The Thermals - “I Don’t Believe You”
“This is how it always goes: An artist gambles against society using his own life as currency. He writes (in this case, songs) about his own experience, but in a manner that is malleable enough to be appreciated by the collective whole. When this is successful, the artist is validated. But if the artist grows too successful, the gears start grinding in reverse; people begin to see absolutely everything the artist says or does as a kind of public art that’s open to interpretation. This makes the artist paranoid and creatively paralyzed. As a result, the artist decides to ignore his own experience completely, insisting that he’s no longer the center of whatever he creates; instead he will write about dead actresses who were went to sanitariums or German novels about the olfactory sensation. His material will be “unpersonal.” But this never works. The artist cannot stop himself from injecting his own experience into these subjects, because that is who the artist is—either you always write about yourself or you never do. It’s not a process you select. So now the artist is trying not to write about himself (but doing so anyway), which means other people’s interpretations of the work will now be extra inaccurate, because the artist has surrendered his agency. Any time you try to tell people what your work isn’t supposed to mean, you only make things worse.”
- Chuck Klosterman, Eating The Dinosaur.
Kurt Vile - “Jesus Fever”
This is the only song I really love off Smoke Ring For My Halo. David Bevan’s review was overly generous and the album felt far less confessional and sincere than he apparently believes. Like, props to Vile for not stressing his melancholy into maudlin territory, but “We’re eavesdropping on the most private of dialogs”?
Sometimes - and I have no basis for this other than vague impressions - it seems like the expected word count for Pitchfork reviews leads writers to expound on things for which they have no convictions because they feel obliged. The lengthy reviews often yield insights into records that would have to be cut in a print edition, which Pitchfork deserves credit for, but sometimes it feels like it’s at the expense of more concise writing.
QED and I are September gurls and December boys respectively.
JC: Okay let’s talk about Big Star! Wooooo! So what did you think of Radio City, generally?
QED: Okay!!! So the first thing is that I only heard Radio City in the context of No. 1 Record. Because In This Day And Age they only come packaged together, apparently? Even digitally? Great!
JC: Even digitally! What an age. Okay, so which one’s better? Because semantically, No. 1 Record seems like the winner. But I wanna challenge the notion that we should judge an album by its title.
—I GUESS THAT'S WHY THEY CALL IT A POUND
JAKE CLELAND - I GUESS THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT A POUND
I didn’t exactly sleep on LCD Soundsystem so much as for the longest time I didn’t even know they existed. In 2005 my high school punk phase was thoroughly in swing and I had no interest in popular music until a couple years ago. However, when GTA:IV came out I put about a billion hours into it, and this is how I initially came across them. The Grand Theft Auto games consistently have the best soundtracks, only rivaled maybe by EA Games/Sports, and one day while cruising around ersatz Brooklyn, that now-familiar snare loop started playing out of the speakers of my stolen vehicle (literally the name of the game, right?) and piqued my interest, but didn’t grab me like Les Savy Fav’s “Rage In the Plague Age” which is what I actually got out of the game along with Juliette Lewis, who voiced a DJ on one of the stations, and “Inside The Cage”. Then This Is Happening came out and I was starting to take more notice of new music, so I downloaded it. When the drums hit on “Dance Yrself Clean”, I suspected I’d made a huge mistake; I knew this would complicate things with Craig Finn.
Who the fuck is LCD Soundsystem’s backing band?
—RAP APOLOGISM
JAKE CLELAND - “RAP APOLOGISM”
This is dope, promise.
