A Take Away Show is a web concert series that features hipster-compliant bands playing their music while traveling around Paris. It's half Unplugged and half outdoor concert. Not all the performances are great. The format prizes talent and charisma, which are not always in supply, and sometimes rather surprisingly: The National are slightly underwhelming, and while Phoenix are good, their lead singer is a little too embarrassed to commit properly. It makes clear that St. Vincent is female Jeff Buckley, with great guitar skills and a jazz-friendly voice.

The episodes I like best are Bowerbirds (hipster alert: once saw them in Chapel Hill with Heather MacIntyre's pre-Mount Moriah band) and Yo La Tengo. Bowerbirds are good at making their music fill the space--though, as always, I'm not sure how much I like the songs. Yo La Tengo does simply incredible things with their set-up: "Sugarcube" and "Periodically Double or Triple" sound credibly like their electric versions--Ira Kaplan even does an electric guitar-style solo on the latter. I find something really compelling in their shyness.

The Clash, "Rock the Casbah"

This has shown up a few times recently on random play. It leads me to wonder: is it even conceivable that this song could be written today, much less that it become the most successful single by a band as politically motivated as The Clash?

Lindi Ortega, "I'm No Elvis Presley"

The Dolly Parton voice, the assertiveness that belies the voice, the facility with a wide variety of country and early rock-n-roll song styles. I'm not sure which I like best. Moving farther into her recordings, there's also a favor shown to unusual chord progressions. Country music's a bit funny: a musician can get by with quite pedestrian music if the lyrics are sufficiently interesting, and can similarly pass with pedestrian lyrics if the music is unusual enough.* I'm not quite sold on the depth of songwriting, or the depth of metaphors, in Ortega's music, but her songs are all enjoyable to listen to, and sometimes that's enough.


*Alejandro Escovedo is my go-to example of someone who is not quite interesting enough with lyrics or music to warrant greater attention.

If This Isn't Indie's Epitaph, It Ought to Be

Boy, if this Pitchfork review isn't a sign Belle and Sebastian are heading in the right direction, I don't know what is:

Besides, Murdoch is surely trifling if he doesn't think sweeping, sophisticated pop has a place on the charts: Adele and Sam Smith are two singers who've carved their niche by singing right to your parents. A flippant comment to Pitchfork about how listeners would rather lose themselves in Nina Simone than Beyoncé shows not just a flagrant misunderstanding of how people listen to Beyoncé, but to the artists they love. He means well, but it faintly stinks of snobbery that's gotten other indie acts in trouble when they've tried to explain their theory of pop with, well, a lot of theory. Tom Krell of How to Dress Well raised hackles when he told Pitchfork he wanted to be "pop, but not populist." But what's wrong with trying to appeal to as many people as possible?

Getting a reviewer that mad is usually a sign of having gotten something right that the offended party would prefer not to admit. "What's wrong with trying to appeal to as many people as possible?" is such a remarkable abdication of coolness that it's shocking anyone would write it for a website that purports to hold certain standards. There's nothing wrong with trying to appeal to lots of people, after all, but it's orthogonal to quality. The Velvet Underground may have wanted to sell lots of albums, but they also wanted to write good music, and we have some historical evidence to suggest which they valued more. Believing there's nothing wrong with Beyonce but that Nina Simone is deeper on a number of levels seems not so much snobbish as an accurate reflection of reality. Calling it snobbery is a defense based around the absence of better arguments.

On Critical Judgments and the Band Responsible for "Heart Factory"

Since The Dissolve is discussing how critical views can change over time, I will expand on a related thought I expressed on twitter recently:

"Thesis: articles explaining why the new album by [hipster band] is good are the new explaining why the new Rolling Stones/U2 album is good."

Rolling Stone, rather famously, will give 4-5 stars to any album by either of those or any associated entity, which is why Mick Jagger's solo albums always end up with 4.5 stars. It's an abdication of judgment in the face of an unenviable situation for a reviewer. U2 and/or the Rolling Stones are good writers and good musicians, which means the majority of any album of new music either writes will be good; were they anonymous bands one might even be able to judge them as respectable. Each has hit some of the greatest highs of music, however, and so the question presented by a new album is now "is it good?" but "does it match up with Sticky Fingers/Achtung Baby?" The new albums never do, because how could they? Thus is born the face-saving compromise for all involved.

As 90s nostalgia has ramped up, and culturally significant but underappreciated bands have decided to go in for some easy money by releasing new material, there's been a tendency to give them a similar pass: if it's not their best work, but it's fine, who's to begrudge them for enjoying newfound popularity and commercial viability? It's entirely possible that all of these bands save the Pixies, the Stooges, and Guided By Voices (who were loose cannons at the best of times) made good albums, but it seems as likely that people were not prepared to hear--or admit--a harsher truth. And hey, I'll rep for "Thief in the Night" and "How Can I Stop?" as excellent Rolling Stones songs (which I think they are, and not just within the context of later-period Stones), so I'm aware of the manner in which we all become compromised.

Sleater-Kinney has a new album out, its first in about ten years, and people are falling all over themselves to praise it very much in the manner of a new Rolling Stones album. Feature articles talk about the band's relevance, which is almost always a discussion of its relevance in the riot grrrl scene in the mid-late 90s. The "best album since x" distinction is broken out, often with the same self-aware ironic dimension in which "their best album since Achtung Baby" is deployed. Reviews will quite strenuously note how much the band sounds like how it used to.

Having listened to the album myself, I would put it in the same "good but not that good" camp as The Woods.* It's not a classic Sleater-Kinney album, nor is it even the classic rock revivalism of The Woods. It does, however, sound very much like an album made by the people who were responsible for the Corin Tucker Band and Wild Flag, i.e. a bunch of perfectly good albums whose preferred musical textures were borrowed from classic rock and 80s power pop. In the end, a lot of the rough elements that made the band sound like themselves are not there, and there's an abundance of metaphor-songs, never the band's strongest suit.

(Here's how I know not to take these reviews too seriously: none of them mention the absence of the defining element of the 'classic' Sleater-Kinney sound, already becoming absent on The Woods: guitars in counterpoint. Most of the older material works--creates the tension it does--because neither the melody nor the rhythm is dependent on one guitar part, but passes it between the two. An ingenious solution to not having a bass player--as was the prominence of baritone guitar--but requiring considerably more time to develop.)

One can compare this reaction to that greeting the new Belle and Sebastian and Decemberists albums, which is decidedly mixed. I like Belle and Sebastian and have never cared much for the Decemberists, but I find these reviews to be more plausible because it seems likely that in a four- or five-year hiatus between albums, a band's sound will have changed, and not all of these changes will necessarily be good. I always find "this thing you're predisposed to like is as good as you hoped it would be!" to be the emptiest of critical stances, conflating "better than you might have expected" with "excellent," and retroactively causing me to revisit the things that came before.** If this is excellent, and of a piece with the rest of their work, then perhaps I mistakenly understood its merits, a train of thought that rarely redounds to the benefit of the thing being considered.


*Important footnote: I have been listening to S-K since 1996, when I included Call the Doctor as 'album of the year' in my junior high newspaper. Your attempts to hipster-than-thou me will fail.

**There's also the weird effect this has on a band's catalogue: previous albums tend to be viewed as 'of a piece,' which they very rarely are, and to simultaneously raise or lower the critical profile of albums as the narrative requires. The Hot Rock, All Hands on the Bad One, One Beat, and The Woods were divisive when they were released. It's possible that critics focused too much on individual flaws rendered less important in the context of a body of work, but it also seems just possible that taking the body of work as a whole reduces the need to think about its individual elements, much in the way that streaming an entire season of a tv show reduces critical attention to smaller but meaningful flaws in each individual element. Confession time: I find there to be no S-K albums that are listenable front-to-back: each of them has at least one wildly misconceived song ("Heart Factory" is the best example). They're still a great band, and their highs are very high, but they're not perfect. The last thing the indie world needs is to require the unquestioning loyalty of Phish fans.

Unusual Lines of Influence, Part I

Oasis, "Bonehead's Bank Holiday"




Neil Young, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere"


Not sure I had heard this line of influence before. Pretty sure Noel Gallagher would be horrified to realize it. Still prefer the Small Faces, T. Rex, and Slade, in that order.

On Radio

For the first time since 1997--not counting listening for traffic reports when I worked in Chicago--I have been listening to the radio. Not internet radio, which I find an iffy proposition. Nor, worse, streaming services. As the ipod has been sidelined with some occasional connectivity issues, and the cd of Underworld's Second Toughest in the Infants finally having worn out its novelty, I turned to good old broadcast-from-a-tower, received-by-an-antenna radio. It's been quite the revelation.

After one Taylor Swift song, a few acceptable R&B numbers, and far more Christian talk programming than I would have guessed, the scan function landed on 88.1, which was playing a very weird song. The very lowest end of the dial is usually reserved for pirate radio stations, so this was promising. As it turned out, the station was something even better: WKNC, NC State's radio station. A charming and very amateur interview with a local bluegrass band later on in the same car ride confirmed this as a winning option, and it has become my listening method of choice on subsequent trips.

The advantages of live college radio are best explained in comparison to their opposition. Internet radio is as good as the underlying station. WFMU has a good radio simulcast because it is a good station; the average station owned by a conglomerate with a playlist determined nationally will not. Sirius and XM, in virtue of their narrow identities as stations, tend to play the same sort of thing over and over again. One requires many stations in those cases to get minimally acceptable variation. I've never had the feeling that Pandora and its ilk are anything but antiseptic: if I must go to the trouble of telling a service what I would like them to play, I might as well make my own playlist and only hear songs I want to hear. The radio solution is a station that is only likely to play songs you want to hear, but not repeat any of those songs so many times as to get sick of them.

The dirty secret of coolness, especially in its college expression, is that it never changes. This is the way--and pretty much the only way--that someone like me, now no longer remotely cool, could stumble on the hipster coffee shop at Chicago as the 'comfortable' option. There will be new expressions of its themes, but these follow the same general trends: garage rock, appropriations of 1950s song styles, some light electronic music, the occasional screamer band, the edge of hip-hop, some country (both authentic Hank Williams Sr and all possible alt- configurations), guitar pop, and the slightest bit of world music.

College radio, then, is a solution to the problem of radio: a predictable but not repetitive collection of music that will hit far more often than it misses, but requiring no work of the listener.

10,000 Maniacs, "Eat for Two"


Nostalgia-based revisionism is usually helpful for clarifying our relationship to the past. In music, the cycle of events as they are being experienced is very different than how they appear in retrospect. To take a very 90s example, Stone Temple Pilot are both much less popular and somewhat more critically regarded than they were in their time. No one will mistake them for original, but no one spends time wringing hands over whether they are simply a Pearl Jam ripoff. They weren't; they were a good sight better than the lesser bands that actually were ripping off Nirvana and Pearl Jam; their lasting contribution is perhaps only six songs, but that's better than many bands can manage.

The omissions of that revisionism are also telling. 10,000 Maniacs were college rock mainstays in the late 80 and early 90s, and like their good friends in R.E.M., were a band whose popularity steadily increased. Unplugged, their last album together, was the height of their popularity, especially the then-ubiquitous cover of the Patti Smith/Bruce Springsteen song "Because the Night." Natalie Merchant, their lead singer, went on to a solo career, and her first album was something of a massive success.

Go and listen to Unplugged, or earlier efforts In My Tribe or Our Time in Eden, and 10,000 Maniacs seem an excellent candidate for revival: lots of well-constructed songs with solid melodies and interesting lyrics, all constructed with an evident lightness or playfulness. "Eat for Two," about an unintended pregnancy, could easily be a song that drowns in its own self-importance, but instead wisely varies the verses, pre-chorus, and chorus, all the better to keep the song light on its toes.

If there's anything that holds them back, it's the frequency with which social or political messages end up in the songs, which only makes me long for the late 80s/early 90s even more: the last time when musicians felt it necessary to speak about the socially-relevant dimensions of their own experience. There's another post for another time about how Rhythm Nation 1814 has more or less the same amount of political commentary as What's Going On, controlling for album length, etc, and these are hardly the only examples.

The Beatles were my favorite band in the world for about a year, when I had one of those extended-length compilation albums, and back when I was working through R.E.M. albums every six months or so. It's not hard to see why they'd be the favorite band of someone who was young, since they embrace traditional songcraft, and their more experimental moments are within that framework, so nothing gets too out of hand. It's also not hard to see why a kid might prefer a best-of compilation to the actual albums of other bands. Selecting only the best gives a distorted sense of what a band was about.

That period ended definitively once I discovered The Who's Tommy. I have had limited interest in them since then, though I will confess some enduring weakness for "Rain," "Martha My Dear," "Strawberry Fields Forever," and a few others. The Beatles' problem is that for any particular thing they did in their career, their is another band that did the same thing, at a similar or higher level of quality, for a longer time.

The usual defense for this is "The Beatles did it first, though," which, aside from the various ways in which that's not especially true--since they were building at first on the Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley, girl groups, r&b, blues, etc*--is not much of a defense. If you were alive at the time, "first" holds some importance, but if you weren't, it's hard to see the value of "first" as opposed to "best." After all, Thespis was first, but he won't get many votes for best actor of all time.

I find this phenomenon interesting because it's one common manifestation of a tendency that shows up elsewhere. People sometimes appear to have thought over an issue once in their teenage years, and never quite revisited it since: religion, politics, books, movies and music. I've never quite understood it. During grad school I would occasionally check my work by engaging in the following thought experiment: what would be the case if I were completely wrong on this topic? What are the things I'd be missing, and how would I assemble that argument? It clips one's wings a touch and keeps one honest. My tendency to occasionally revisit things I believe myself not to like comes from the same place: assuming I think the same as I used to is dubious at best, and maybe this movie/author/music will sound different to me now. I have reduced the amount I read on the internet because I get a sinking feeling whenever I find something I agree with too much--am I agreeing because of the strength of the argument or because it's flattering my beliefs? And so also here: the Beatles are a perfectly good band to have as one's favorite at the age of 12, but if they're still the favorite at 30, something has probably gone wrong.



*And if you're concerned about racism, sexism, intersectionality, etc, there's something problematic about assuming that it hadn't been "done" until it was done by white men; this is also the problem with discussions of Elvis' novelty. The better defense of Elvis, of course, is that he was a good musician and entertainer who had one of the really excellent backing bands ever.

Prince > Michael Jackson

Prince, Sign 'O' the Times (available for free for all you Amazon Prime havers)

A few months ago, I was listening to a Michael Jackson song--"Bad," probably--in the way that it is occasionally possible to hear something you've heard a thousand times with comparatively new ears. What I heard was a basically strong melody and composition that was positively swimming in dated 1980s recording effects--compression, chorus (a light delay that is more or less coterminous with 80s-sounding music), synthesizers everywhere rather than actual instruments. If it were a song produced by anyone else, I would set it aside as a nostalgia piece, and nothing more. Having heard it in one song, it was easy enough to hear in the rest--Dangerous ups its production values to the state of 1989's art--and it made me wonder how something so obviously time-contained could remain so popular. But people still like Bon Jovi, so there really is no accounting for taste.

By comparison, this is disc 2 of Sign 'O' the Times:
"U Got the Look"
"If I Was Your Girlfriend"
"Strange Relationship"
"I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man"
"The Cross"
"It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night"
"Adore"

Seven songs, six of which are legitimate Prince classics, one of which ("The Cross") on the short list of his best songs ever. The seventh song is a nine-minute funk jam and workout, a format at which Prince excels. What's impressive is how the songs vary: "U Got the Look" is very late-80s in its production; "The Cross" could be from pretty much any period of time. But even accounting for the time-bound features of the album, it transcends them all. A few speculative reasons for this: for as much as Prince is synonymous with synthesizers, he is also a multi-instrument specialist, and it makes a notable difference that many of the synth-y sounds are actually guitars; it gives a fullness to the composition of each track that Michael Jackson can't hope to match, even on his Quincy Jones-produced songs (whose merits redound to Quincy Jones, if anyone). Many of Prince's songs would be as good, or better, stripped of their studio-enhanced qualities. The songs manage to cover a wide range of textures and song styles, but all sound quite distinctively of Prince.

And really, any comparison of Michael Jackson and Prince will face the depth-of-catalogue issue: Michael had Off the Wall (parts of it), Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous (parts of it), and a few late singles of negligible quality. Prince had Controversy, Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Sign 'O' the Times, Lovesexy, and Diamonds and Pearls before turning into the r&b Ryan Adams, releasing so much music so quickly that it becomes hard to track what's good. MJ might (barely) have had a higher peak, but Prince produced more quality music over a longer period.

The Flatlanders, "Dallas"

Odd but true: Jimmie Dale Gilmore has a small part in The Big Lebowski. This is sort of like finding out that Sonic Youth's original drummer was in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

I first heard this song when it was covered by R.E.M., at some shows they did in London with Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock and a few others, which appeared on a "rare concert recording" someone was nice enough to make a copy of for me back in the halcyon days of the internet. I knew it was a song by a band called The Flatlanders, but could find no other information about the band, much less any of their recordings; I chalked it up to a name that had been misheard or mis-transcribed. Turns out that the album was out of print, hard to find, or perhaps nonexistent when I was looking for it.

The brilliance of the song is that it works as a slow song or a fast song, and it uses its chord changes to good effect--each one intensifies the song by going down, rather than up.

Yo La Tengo, "Big Day Coming"

New York Dolls, "Jet Boy"

Indie music being essentially conservative, its adherents tend to focus on direct lines of transmission and influence. The New York Dolls are an exemplary middle stage, connecting the David Bowie-Lou Reed-Iggy Pop axis of influence with more explicit 1950s references and New York toughness (and cross-dressing). Remove the wigs and dresses, and it's not too difficult to see a progenitor of the Ramones, or the continued relevance of singer-guitar-bass-drums set-ups over the work of individual musician-auteurs; Patti Smith, David Byrne, Richard Hell, and Tom Verlaine all felt the need to have actual bands.

But this influence is not entirely self-contained. "Jet Boy," among other songs on New York Dolls, sounds rather distinctly like late-70s Aerosmith, and, as it happened, the Dolls toured with Aerosmith during their early years; if you're looking for reasons that Toys in the Attic and Get Your Wings sound radically different than Aerosmith, that would be the primary one. A band most people have never heard of had a decisive influence on one everyone has heard of.

(This post was inspired by watching Scrooged this past week, and marveling at the very wide and very strange collection of things David Johansen has managed to do in his life. We should all be so lucky.)

J.S. Bach, Cantata 140: Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140

On this particular Sunday morning, I found myself walking up to church with the head pastor, her husband, and their newborn child (she's still on maternity leave, and this was her first time seeing how her son would handle the noise of a service). I sat in the back pew along with the guy who is usually one pew behind me, and around the usual mix of people in the back-right; no one ends up there by accident, and most of us like it better than anywhere else. The service was one of the two "high" services of the year--Easter, and one in Advent before people leave for the holidays--and was welcomedly packed. The other hymns were a resetting of lyrics to the melody of "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" and "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" I'm thankful for the typical Reformed mid-level liturgy in the average service, but glad to be at a church that will break out the full orchestra and choir on special occasions.

Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"

Ian McLagan, the keyboardist for the Small Faces, died last week. The Small Faces/Faces were one of those bands that regularly put out quality music on the pop/blues/rock spectrum, and managed to do so for a long time. All their early singles are at least good; Ogden's Nut Gone Flake better than average for a psychedelic album; they were the secret weapon on Rod Stewart's early, good albums. All of them enjoyed pretty good or well-respected careers, or both: Steve Marriott went on to front Humble Pie; Ronnie Lane is on the short list of every music fan's underappreciated musicians ("One for the Road"); Kenney Jones was Keith Moon's replacement in The Who. The two guys who joined when the band became The Faces--Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart--went on to do all right for themselves. McLagan didn't quite have any of these careers, but he seems to have steadily worked with a wide variety of people, which is something.

While I like a lot of the British Invasion music, I love "Tin Soldier." The best bands did their best work by establishing a sonic texture and executing it well--the samba of "Sympathy for the Devil" or the editing work on "Tomorrow Never Knows," for example. This song, by contrast, does four or five different rhythms and tempos, and that allows the tension to build throughout to the rising-chord crescendo at the end. Nothing tapers off or resolves, it is just transferred to the next section.

Gram Parsons, "A Song For You"

'Country music' is an odd target for ire, popular though it may be. For a long time, country's second home was in southern California, and this even before the rise of country-rock bands in the late 60s. Its distinctive features are all borrowed from other genres of music--it's particularly hard to imagine country music without the influence of blues--and it runs from slow-paced twang and whine all the way to music indistinguishable from the average 90s alternative band. It's focused less on the rhythm than the lyrics, and the vocal phrasing of particular lines, and can thus require a bit of patience. But when it's on, it's marvelous.

Kendrick Lamar, "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst"


good kid, m.A.A.d city is, on general consensus, an excellent hip-hop album. It is also explicitly Christian in its narrative. The average listener would not be likely to pick this up, if the annotations a Rap Genius are any indication, and it goes without saying that mentioning sex or violence, whatever the narrative intention, make the album impossible for a majority of Christian audiences. But what else does one say about an album that opens with the Sinner's Prayer, spends its running time contemplating--and using the language of--sin, and sends its titular character through endless litanies of doubt before emerging, triumphant, after repeating that same Sinner's Prayer at the end of the album's climax?

It's an odd thing to say, too, because Christian culture has accepted its place in the contemporary world. We have vast riches consisting of the very best for a thousand years or more: Rembrandt or Van Gogh, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Dante or Bunyan, Bach or any of the innumerable authors of sacred music--which Nick Hornby once liked, not wrongly, to "cheating", the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Contemporary Christians have decreased their scope to some minor writers--Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor--and you will find anywhere else you look a resignation that something's mediocrity is directly related to the extent which it self-identifies as 'Christian.' That something could be good and popular and Christian seems unlikely. That it could be excellent and well-regarded and enormously influential (and funny and profane and in touch with the squeamish sides of human life) and Christian seems impossible.

Hootie and the Blowfish, "Hold My Hand"

My very first hipster moment: I was in to Hootie a month or two before they started to blow up. It was, and remains, fashionable to dislike them, what with the terrible name and a year of suffocating ubiquity. That Cracked Rear View can't withstand this level of scrutiny is not surprising. Almost no album can, and the rare examples are easily named since there are two: Rumors and Nevermind. Even with these, their follows ups were widely regarded as disappointing--as failures--despite maintaining the creative level. Being famous is difficult.

Leave aside the very 90s combination of mawkish sincerity and ironic detachment from same that fueled their popularity and its backlash. What remains is an ambitious album by a bar band, whose references and influences are impeccable: "Let Her Cry" namechecks Michael Stipe; the guitarist would frequently wear R.E.M. t-shirts; the album ends with a snippet of "Motherless Child." They invested no small part of their popularity in an attempt to get the Stars and Bars taken off the South Carolina state flag ("tired of hearing this shit about 'heritage not hate'" plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, amirite?). They took an endless amount of flack for borrowing some of the lyrics from Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" for "Only Wanna Be With You," but who these days is so hung up on authenticity that stealing from Dylan would be considered a bad thing?

Manic Street Preachers, "Enola/Alone"

Let's say there is a certain pressure in thinking about how we approach culture that denies the existence of phases: if we work to develop taste, the things we like we should always like, and if we shift away from them, it should be for reasons we can identify. This is not always compatible with the emotional resonance of certain things, nor with the accumulation of experience over time, nor with vita brevis longa ars. The reality is that a lot of intense moments of infatuation are not built to last, but we are the people least prepared to see it in ourselves when it happens. I've written elsewhere about the gradual--sometimes stark--move away from T.S. Eliot, Dante, Graham Greene, and others, and it's safe to say that 2004 me would not understand 2014 me's interest in Foucault, critical theory, and 900-page Spanish-language novels.

Music, which provokes the most intense of reactions, tends to be the strangest in retrospect. Pavement were once indisputably my favorite band, and now I rarely listen to them; Sugar had a similar moment; though I've listened to Kanye constantly, what that entails has changed a lot; I once went through several years without listening to Exile on Main Street, an album I'd still consider one of my favorites. What I have begun to conclude is that to last, affection for a particular song, artist, or album has to be built on a sustainable emotional and mental level, and this means it has to survive at the lowest, most technical levels of interest, not the highs of fandom.

There was a time when I had a very strong reaction to this song and its lyrics, and their place within Everything Must Go. But that time was when I was 16. Now, I feel nothing in particular for it because relationship drama no longer does much for me in song lyrics. Instead, I hear that production, the intensity, the way the chord sequence follows that very Britpop thing of one- or two-note changes, the way the outtro sets the rest of the song off by varying rhythm and intensity. It no longer needs to speak to my life; it only needs to be a good song. That's enough.

Steve Albini Was Right!

The funny thing about the music industry, as he says, is that it is fundamentally unconcerned with musicians and audiences. In the old days, it did this by making money regardless of the level of success a band experienced, as documented in its glory by "The Problem With Music". Now, it does so through analytics.

The article, on Shazam, treats data as a verifiable way to determine what music is going to be popular. It is premised on two assumptions that are quite debatable:

1. Musicians will continue to produce music in a range of genres, thus providing a constant stream of product to be sold. The quality of this music is unimportant, only whether people will buy it.

2. The important thing about audience reaction is that it exists. Why an audience reacts to a song is inconsequential.

In other words, Shazam's decisive technological victory is to take songs that have already been written, recorded and distributed, and use the fact that a growing audience has already liked the song, to determine that yet more future people will like it. Presumably, the song popular with a growing audience will continue to grow quite apart from Shazam or any other analytics. "Royals," the article's example, seems to have done just fine without concerted record industry action. Synthesizing this information isn't any kind of innovation at all: one would have to demonstrate that analytics make songs more popular than they would have been otherwise.* If you were looking for evidence that the music industry thinks of music as widgets and fans as lines on a balance sheet, you could hardly do better.


*Analytics make sense in some contexts. For example sports, where there are objective (if subjectively-defined) measures of success, and correlations can be found for the regular production of these measures. Very little is similarly objective in the arts. Certainly not amongst the whole population. If the purpose of analytics in music is to determine which sub-demographics might appreciate a certain type of music, then you're just re-creating the distribution models for independent music, or for niche markets like jazz and classical.