Entries associated with the tag "Music Journalism":

I got pretty steamed last weekend reading a splashy one-page Tribune feature by Joshua Klein called "The Fading Borders of 'World' Music." It's behind the paper's online pay wall now, but I don't recommend spending the money to read it unless you're itching to be appalled yourself--the piece couldn't have been more wrongheaded and provincial.

The story opens by citing the 1981 David Byrne-Brian Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (reissued in 2006 by Nonesuch) as "an album cheekily designed to imitate the exoticism of so-called 'world' music." Where to begin? The term "world music" didn't come into currency until 1983, after a consortium of DJs and label folks met in England to come up with a way to market records that had no clear home in Western music stores--they found it frustrating that African records were routinely shoved in the reggae section, for example. Given that "world music" hadn't yet acquired its present popular meaning in 1981, much less its connotation of shallow exoticism, how could Byrne and Eno have set out specifically to tweak it?

Perhaps more ridiculous is the claim that Byrne and Eno were being cheeky. Those guys have keen senses of humor, for sure, but more than most musicians they harbor a deep, sincere interest in global traditions. Even if Bush of Ghosts had been a "world music" record--and it's not, at least not exclusively, since the varied samples layered atop its thick, funky rhythmic musculature include familiar American music side-by-side with African sounds--there's absolutely no reason to characterize Byrne and Eno's treatment of foreign material as snarky, irreverent, or mocking.

Klein goes on to provide short profiles of six acts that are supposedly "new faces of world music," and it's here that he really goes off the rails. Of course he includes New York's Vampire Weekend (pictured), who play a sold-out show at the Metro on Sunday and whose inexplicable popularity is clearly the engine for this asinine trend piece. I'm not necessarily down on the band--all I can blame them for is being mediocre and dubbing their indie pop "Upper West Side Soweto"--but the alleged African elements in their sound have allowed plenty of rock critics to demonstrate how little they know about music from that part of the world. Robert Christgau wrote a thorough analysis of the situation a couple of months ago, so I won't go into detail here--except to point out that Klein is only slightly less than 100 percent wrong when he claims Vampire Weekend use "Congolese dance rhythms." They do ineptly ape the bubbly, crystalline guitar sound of Congolese rumba on a few songs, and on a few others they bang on a conga. Otherwise there's nothing remotely African about their music.

I have no idea why Klein mentions Panda Bear of the Animal Collective, aka Noah Lennox, except maybe because he lives in Lisbon, which is after all in a foreign country. The same goes for the Ruby Suns, a New Zealand group fronted by a Californian expat, Ryan McPhun--if you sing one tune in Maori on a bland, boilerplate indie-pop record like Sea Lion (Sub Pop), does that make it "world music" now?

Klein also nominates New York's Yeasayer, and I admit, I actually kinda like their recent debut, All Our Cymbals (We Are Free)--but it reminds me more of Genesis than of any kind of world music. Rounding out the list are sampladelic acts El Guincho (from Spain) and Kutiman (from Israel), but only the former builds its music mostly from international sounds. By the end it's clear that Klein is giving "world music" a definition even more debased than the one it already has--he's talking about Western pop that has some exotic spicing, nothing more. He doesn't seem to give a fuck about music that actually has its roots in Africa, Asia, or South America.

To be clear, it's not the bands I'm taking issue with. Music from other countries has always bled into rock--hell, early gems by New Orleans proto-rockers like Dave Bartholomew and Professor Longhair were practically built on the Cuban rhythmic unit known as the clave. I just find it depressing that so many music writers still aren't willing to do some exploring on their own to discover interesting and progressive artists from other lands, even with the Internet making it easier than ever--instead they fall in line to hype second-rate American acts who feebly pillage third-hand notions of world music. Imagine the alternate universe where an article about "new faces" in world music would point you at X Plastaz, Os Ritmistas, or Mahala Rai Banda.

Today's playlist:

Anthony Ortega, Afternoon in Paris (Hatology)
Christine Sehnaoui, Solo (Olof Bright)
Hecker, Electronic Music Soundtrack for "The Disenchanted Forest x 1001" by Angela Bulloch (Editions Mego)
Vierergruppe Gschlößl, I Take Everything (Jazzwerkstatt)
Skyphone, Fabula (Rune Grammofon)

Interest in America’s musical past is almost as old as American music, but since the Anthology of American Folk Music, the legendary box set assembled by Harry Smith and first released in 1952, was reissued on CD by Smithsonian Folkways a decade ago, there has been a more or less steady effort to uncover and make available just about every blues, old-time, gospel, and country record made prior to World War II. Labels like Revenant and Dust-to-Digital, to say nothing of longtime standard-bearer Yazoo, have put out one gem after another. Recently Tompkins Square Records got involved by releasing the three-CD box set People Take Warning, a wonderfully annotated collection of murder ballads and “disaster songs” that breaks down the violence and death into three distinct categories: man vs. nature, man vs. machine, and man vs. man.

But label head Josh Rosenthal isn’t only interested in the preserved past. In the summer of 2006 he checked out an exhibition of Alan Lomax photos and recordings in New York and was struck by a 1959 shot of Spencer Moore, a singer and guitarist Lomax had recorded “four and a half” songs by. The caption said Moore still played every week at a BP station near his home in Chilhowie, Virginia, so Rosenthal--as he writes in his liner notes for Moore's self-titled debut album, released on Tompkins Square this summer--traveled to Virginia three weeks later to record him.

Moore, 88, played in a tent show with the Carter Family when he was much younger, and he's the kind of living repository of American song that's rapidly becoming extinct. Though the quality of his voice has clearly diminished since the Lomax stuff, he still has astonishing presence and delivery. Most of the songs are from the standard repertoire--tunes associated with people like Roy Acuff, Vernon Dalhart, Riley Puckett, and Charlie Poole--but Moore’s time-ravaged croak and rudimentary guitar skills serve him best on a clutch of original tunes written by him and his wife. I shudder every time hear the stark “Our Baby Boy Is Gone,” which Moore succinctly introduces with, “My wife, she wrote a song after our boy passed away.” The song recounts the loss with austere frankness, and his willful decision to stop grieving because he’s certain they’ll meet again in heaven does little to blunt his pain.

Making sense of these old-time and early country reissues remains tough, despite the great number of them coming out--dozens of artists recorded just a handful of tracks apiece, a situation that means the tunes are often scattered across compilations. This difficulty is just one reason I’ve been so taken with a new reference book by British music historian Tony Russell. Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost (Oxford) isn’t a landmark work of scholarship--most of the shortish entries were written for specialist magazines--but as a single volume it does an excellent job briefly discussing the lives and work of some of American’s best- and least-known musical pioneers. He’s done his research, and reading some of the 110 entries has left me hungry to track down the actual music, a task made much easier by the handy discographical information that details where various tunes can be found on CD.

Today’s playlist:
Mônica Salmaso, Noites de Gala, Samba na Rua (Biscoito Fino)
Simon Nabatov & Nils Wogram, Jazz Limbo (Leo)
Floratone, Floratone (Blue Note)
Issac Delgado, En Primera Plana (La Calle/Univision)
Tin Hat, The Sad Machinery of Spring (Hannibal)

A provocative piece by Sasha Frere-Jones in the current issue of the New Yorker takes on indie rock for its explicit whiteness, pining for the days when bands like the Clash or PiL openly borrowed from black music. Watching a concert by Arcade Fire spurred him to the subject, as he noticed the total lack of rhythmic variety and low-end in the group’s music, which he otherwise enjoyed. He identifies a shift in the 90s when indie rock stopped incorporating any trace of black music, pinpointing the popular rise of hip-hop as the cause; honkies knew they’d sound either racist or plain stupid by trying hip-hop when the real masters of the form were everywhere.

Naturally, I'm oversimplifying his argument. Frere-Jones's analysis is for the most part dead-on, but he is guilty of a few mistakes and omissions. He suggests it was the Clash and PiL that paved the way for indie rock, but they did so only in the most general sense. Indie rock as we know it emerged out of America’s post-hardcore scene, when bands like the Meat Puppets, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Die Kreuzen, the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, and the Minutemen (the only one of that group SFJ mentions) started screwing around with the formula, embracing their punk roots while exploring stylistic freedom. That development may not be crucial to the piece’s ultimate point—the loss of swing, bass, and soul in the music—but it’s an important stop along the continuum, and one Frere-Jones hardly touches.

The more glaring omission, in my opinion—and this is something that I’ve written about before—is how the Internet has allowed little niches to thrive and grow at the expense of outside influences. With technology making it so easy for people to be completely myopic in their worldviews, it’s entirely possible that a kid who thinks music begins and ends with Pavement could easily ignore a lot of what came before and after. Why should we expect young musicians obsessed with indie rock made over the last 15 years to play around with dub or go-go—they probably don’t know what that stuff is in the first place.

Yes, I’m exaggerating. But do you see my point?

Today’s playlist:

Max Romeo, Open the Iron Gate 1973-77 (Blood and Fire)
Rudi Mahall, Solo (Psi)

It’s been a few years since I’ve checked out the Oxford American’s annual music issue, but this year’s installment seems as good as any I’ve ever seen. There are a couple of lengthier pieces—Sean Wilentz on the making of Blonde on Blonde, Bill Wasik on the reality of online music marketing (with North Carolina indie rock band the Annuals as the test case)—but the bulk of the issue consists of shorter profiles and meditations on the 26 artists included on the accompanying CD, which is unusually strong. I'd never heard of Sandy Posey, Amy LaVere, Zakary Thaks, Teddy Grace, Parchman Prison Band, and Jon Bennett & the Sparkletones, but now I'm curious to hear more. Gems from lesser-known favorites of mine like the Clovers, Karen Dalton, Mayo Thompson, Iris DeMent, and Don Redman were great to hear in the context of what is ultimately a very cool mix. Who can argue with a compilation that follows Thelonious Monk with rapper David Banner and folkie Fred Neil?

The essays on the artists go well beyond boilerplate, and in some cases they appear to transcend previous scholarship. Chicagoan Aaron Cohen, an associate editor at Down Beat, contributed a piece on the great blues poet Percy Mayfield, while New Yorker editor Ben Greeman offers a revealing portrait of Eldridge Holmes. What the magazine does that no other music publication bothers with is examining music for what it can say about American history, painting a big picture rather than counting column inches.

Today’s playlist:

LSB, Fungus (Moserobie)
Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band, E.P. (Drag City)
Aline de Lima, Arrebol (Naïve)
Synanthesia, s/t (Sunbeam)
Simon Nabatov Quartet, Nature Morte (Leo)

The Arts section of yesterday’s Tribune tackled a valuable premise—“When everybody is an artist, what happens to the art?” Unfortunately, the music coverage blew it. The Internet has obviously changed the music business in a big way, providing unprecedented access and opportunity for the eager musician, but is that necessarily a good thing, the feature asked. Howard Reich’s column on the absence of "dabblers" in  jazz, while essentially accurate, was superfluous. With the exception of some fresh-scrubbed singers, image doesn’t go far in jazz; if you can’t play or don’t have strong ideas, no one’s gonna care.

Greg Kot’s bit on pop music mentions that there’s been a deluge of junk getting in the way of the good stuff, but then he gets wide-eyed about audience involvement—whether it’s getting the chance to remix a Nine Inch Nails track (oh boy!) or shooting footage for a Beastie Boys concert documentary (remember that one?). And it's not as if the rise of the Internet is entirely responsible for this barrage of shitty music--recording and manufacturing costs dropped radically years ago, thanks to the ubiquity of personal computers. Kot concludes his piece with, “Only the most dedicated artists will be able to translate their talents into a career.” This touches on a point that’s rubbed me the wrong way for years. Why does everyone who knows how to play a guitar need to have a music career? What happened to the idea of playing music for the sheer pleasure of the act?

It’s telling that classical critic John von Rhein is the only contributor to make that point. The reason so much music sounds exactly the same is because most of the people making all this assembly-line crap have no business foisting it on an uncaring public. It’s become the exception to the rule for a band to focus on playing gigs before they think about making an album, and the Internet has only made it worse. I love the Internet for the access it’s given me to all sorts of great music from all over the world, but there’s no question in my mind that it’s cheapening music as an art. Hell, it’s cheapening people as people—we’re all becoming products.  

This story in today’s New York Times discusses a new music-critics poll hosted by the New York blog Idolator, a music-oriented spinoff of Gawker. The project, overseen by one-time Reader contributor Michaelangelo Matos, is seeking the opinions (i.e., top-ten lists) from some 1,200 music journalists. The new poll, Jackin’ Pop, was conceived as a challenge to Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Poll, which lost much of its credibility this fall, when the paper dismissed longtime critic and poll “poobah” Robert Christgau. Idolator tried to enlist Christgau to run the show, but he declined—although he will contribute his list and comments to the new poll, as well as the old Voice poll, which will continue under the direction of the paper's current music editor, Rob Harvilla.

I understand the impulse to create a new forum now that the Voice looks so stupid and clueless. But I don’t see a mass exodus of the old guard from Pazz & Jop happening anytime soon, especially when Christgau says he’s still going to contribute. Now we have two competing critics polls, but isn’t one enough? Most of us get some kind of begrudging kick from compiling these lists—Reader music writers will be submitting their top-fives soon—but the Internet has made the whole enterprise feel like overkill. What was good, even noble, about the Voice poll was that it aimed for a critical consensus, even if the consensus was sometimes mediocre. The zillion lists that will pop up on the Web over the next month or two (and I’ll surely produce a top-40 list for this blog) start to look like a comprehensive catalog of every album released the previous year, which makes the utility of lists questionable. And it looks like those lists are only going to keep propagating more lists.

Being that the Idolator is a Web-only publication, I suspect that some veteran critics won’t be involved in Jackin' Pop—more out of laziness that anything else—and I'll bet that if it does take root it will skew more toward younger bands; I doubt the new Yusuf album will turn up anywhere. My ego will probably guarantee my participation, if only to make sure Olivia Block gets represented, but I still yearn for the days when too much information was just that, not the current mental detonation every new Web page threatens to create.