Country music, the most conservative of genres:

As you can see, country is the most "upbeat and conventional" genre of music. A preference for "upbeat and conventional" music is negatively correlated with "openness" and positively correlated with "conscientiousness," and so, as you would then expect, self-described conservatives tend to like "upbeat and conventional" music (more than any other kind), while self-described liberals tend to like everything else better.

Again, those low in "openness" are less likely to visit other countries, try new kinds of food, take drugs, or buck conventional norms generally. This would suggest that most conservatives aren't going to seek and find much intense and meaningful emotion in exotic travel, hallucinogenic ecstasy, sexual experimentation, or challenging aesthetic experience. The emotional highlights of the low-openness life are going to be the type celebrated in "One Boy, One Girl": the moment of falling in love with "the one," the wedding day, the birth one's children (though I guess the song is about a surprising ultrasound). More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through life's stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I was a girl with a mother, now I'm a mother with a girl. My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them. I was once a teenage boy threatened by a girl's gun-loving father, now I'm a gun-loving father threatening my girl's teenage boy. Etc. And country is full of assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives.

My conjecture, then, is that country music functions in part to reinforce in low-openness individuals the idea that life's most powerful, meaningful emotional experiences are precisely those to which conservative personalities living conventional lives are most likely to have access. And it functions as a device to coordinate members of conservative-minded communities on the incomparable emotional weight of traditional milestone experiences.

Sometime in the past week, it has occurred to me that Billy Corgan has a problem. It's not the problem of his rather well-known temper or his control-freak nature: plenty of musicians are perfectionists, even if most of them don't take it to the extreme of not allowing their bandmates to play on a record, as Corgan did on Siamese Dream. I think Corgan's problem is more basic: he doesn't understand his own unique talents and how best to use them.

I came to this line of thinking because I watched Singles again last week, and have had the soundtrack on in my car since. The songs on the soundtrack, Jimi Hendrix aside, all are about a minute too long: you could edit down Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden and the rest without much difficulty or loss. The Smashing Pumpkins were the other exception: you could cut about four minutes from that song without a problem. It's an eight-minute song, so that means it still makes for a really excellent pop song: it could just do without the attempted guitar pyrotechnics at the end.

And this, I think, is the problem: Corgan writes really good pop songs; he's an average guitar player; he is not very good at sustaining musical or thematic concepts beyond four minutes. But he seems to estimate his own abilities in precisely the opposite order. Hence Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, whose five or six singles ("Bullet With Butterfly Wings" "Zero" "1979" "Tonight, Tonight" "Thirty Three"--I might be missing one) are all excellent, and excellent across a variety of modes and styles, but the rest of the album is weighted down by poorly conceptualized tracks and the chronic inability to self-edit his nine-minute songs. So also his sprawling post-Pumpkins work, which doubles down on the conceptual avant-garde nature of his music (with occasional, dubious attempts to 'return to form') and mostly fails to recapture what made him worth paying attention to in the first place.

He is, in other words, the American Noel Gallagher, minus Noel's well-noted ability to charm people. The lesson, I suppose, is if you can't be good, you should at least be likable. But probably better to be good.

Spring Break, more or less.

I still love this song, with all the purity one can love something at 15.

I object to the following, on rock musicians selling out by recording an album of standards:

If you're worried that the world may remember you primarily for wearing Spandex pants and snarling "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?," what better penance than to croon "Isn't It Romantic?" in a rakish coat and tie, carried along by a lush string section?

"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" is a terrible song that nevertheless indicates Rod Stewart listened to Gilberto Gil at least once in his life (Stewart's steal begins at 0:43, and reappears several times in the song), which is a much more significant sign of artistry than doing a lifeless rendition of an old-timey song.

Sometimes it's right before Spring Break and things get extra busy. That's what all 17:28 of "Sister Ray" are for.

Best not to pay close attention to the lyrics.

I am not actually sure how I feel about Matthew Perpetua's argument that Rihanna is being irresponsible to her fans by considering working with Chris Brown again, but it's an interesting point to consider.

It was a Bob Dylan 1965 kinda weekend.

Dispatches from the Front Lines of Attempting to Maintain a Guitar-Based Pop Music Industry, a periodic series:



They Might Be Giants wsg Jonathan Coulton

Look: in a healthy, functioning indie guitar-based music scene, there has to be space for a band like They Might Be Giants--weird, more self-consciously nerdy than everyone else, fun. We should love and appreciate them as earlier generations appreciated... They Might Be Giants... or our hipper-than-thou forbears insisted that Randy Newman was actually really good, when taken in small doses. "Small doses" is the key phrase--I'm not TMBG aficionado, though I know four or five of their songs and can recognize others ("oh, right, they wrote a song about James K. Polk. I knew that.")--but just shy of two hours of nasal vocals, joke-songs, and what I can only describe as the largest number of guitar solos I've ever seen outside of a Phish concert does begin to wear after awhile (the two extended breaks for a puppet show seemed to indicate even the band acknowledged this). And their most significant redeeming feature, for me, is that not all their songs are intended as jokes. See, for example, "Birdhouse in Your Soul."

See, by way of generational contrast, Jonathan Coulton. He writes and sings significantly more accessible material--by-the-numbers guitar pop--and maintains a strictly postmodern banter onstage. But it's hard not to notice the Nice Guy™shtick: most of his songs are kind of mean, in which Coulton or his protagonist evinces contempt for the people he's singing about, or anyone who is not him ("Good Morning Tucson" was the most notable offender--all these stupid terrible people putting me on tv). If this is the future of indie comic pop, maybe it deserves to die.

Richard Thompson, guitar hero.

A loving tribute to the b-side, that greatest of musical curiosity shops:

During the 80s, the heyday of standalone B-sides, there were dozens of these little miracles from Prince (Erotic City), the Smiths (Asleep), the Jam (Butterfly Collector), Depeche Mode (But Not Tonight), REM (Ages of You), Pixies (Winterlong) and New Order (1963). And a few 90s bands dignified the industry's CD-single overload, including Blur (Young & Lovely), Pulp (Like a Friend), Radiohead (Talk Show Host) and Saint Etienne (I Buy American Records). Some songwriters should perhaps have been more frugal. Like a giddy pools-winner, Noel Gallagher blew his initial songwriting bounty on bonus tracks (Acquiesce, Half the World Away) when he would have been better off holding something back for the lean years.

There's a wonderful meritocracy with B-sides. Bad ones are quietly ignored while good ones get promoted. In the days of vinyl, DJs sometimes overruled record labels and started playing the flipsides instead: Rock Around the Clock, Unchained Melody, I Will Survive, Maggie May, How Soon Is Now? and Born Slippy all started out as bridesmaids. Others became album tracks (The Cure's 10:15 Saturday Night) or came to feel like ones via popular collections (Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady, the Smiths' The World Won't Listen).

Maybe I'm the only person who ever thought this, but: wasn't Whitney Houston the equivalent of all those 80s metal bands (hair- and otherwise) who were technically proficient but for that reason not particularly emotionally resonant? I mean, Amy Winehouse at least wrote her own material.

This is leaving aside the double tragedy of her life: that she didn't take care of herself and she didn't respect or understand her unique vocal gifts well enough to protect them.

Love, "Alone Again Or" and "A House Is Not a Motel"

I don't listen to the radio. I stopped listening to it sometime in 1997, if not before. I have a passing familiarity with the radio hits of the present day as a result of a slightly higher rate of attendance at the sort of places that play today's radio hits, and whatever I pick up in friends' cars (the girlfriend has satellite radio, which is really just slight variation on an itunes/pandora playlist).

There are two consequences of this policy: I tend to listen almost exclusively to albums (some exceptions made for playlists, generally of my own composition), and I still learn about music the old-fashioned way--by reading what people write about it. Experimentation tends to be on the edges, things I know I should listen to but haven't yet; Robert Christgau is an invaluable resource in this respect, as well as many years of reading rock mags.

Love is one of those bands. Forever Changes is one of those minor-masterpiece albums, one of the highlights of pre-70s L.A. rock, psychedelic but not 'psychedelic,' pop but not 'pop.' And for possibly all these reasons, I've had a hard time convincing myself the album is worth paying money for. But the occasional, periodic listen of the two big singles off the album, above and below, is slowly inching me towards these idea of purchasing the whole thing. But we'll see.

Your periodic and completely unnecessary update as to the top 10 most-played songs on my itunes:

1. "She's Losing It" -Belle & Sebastian
2. "Spit on a Stranger" -Pavement
3. "Flip Your Wig" -Hüsker Dü
4. "Dyslexic Heart" -Paul Westerberg
5. "Calamity Song" -The Decemberists
"Makes No Sense at All" -Hüsker Dü
6. "Freaks and Geeks" -Childish Gambino
7. "On Returning" -Wire
"Gold Soundz" -Pavement
8. "From a Motel 6" -Yo La Tengo
9. "Motor Away" -Guided By Voices
10. "Oklahoma U.S.A." -The Kinks

I think the only one of these not to appear on my blog in some form or another is "She's Losing It," which is pretty much the ur-Belle and Sebastian song. Enjoy:

i. Big Star covering my favorite Flying Burrito Brothers song. Pretty much perfect.

ii. Woke up with this song in my head Wednesday morning.

iii. This one:

If there were remaining doubts about whether Yo La Tengo is now my favorite band, which were not otherwise resolved by my beginning to purchase the odds and ends of their career recordings (Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo has a instrumental/muzak-y version of "Blitzkrieg Bop"!), the Yo La Tengo Sell Out pages on their website would settle that definitively settle the question:

The year was 1996. The Atlanta Olympics were on the horizon, and the braintrust at Coca-Cola were searching for that special sound that would say to Americans: "I'm so glad the Olympics are back and I sure could go for a Coke." Is it any wonder they turned to Yo La Tengo?

They asked to license one of our songs. Don't bother writing to ask which one; we won't answer, and if we do answer we will lie. As we have in so many other instances, we looked to the career of Barry Manillow for guidance. Did Barry get to the top by licensing "Mandy"? He did not. Instead, he composed "Just like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." No, Mr. Coca-Cola, we replied. We will not license one of our songs for your commercial, but instead we will write you your very own jingle. Much to our surprise, they said yes.

Ronnie Lane: musical genius. All the songs linked here are wonderful, though I think my favorite is "One for the Road," with its distinctly 1970s British sensibility. They don't write songs like that anymore, alas.

I also have had a weak spot for "The Poacher" since my freshman year of college. /hipster'd

Desert Island Disc #1: Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones

One of the unspoken rules of the internet is that any aesthetic product, no matter how objectively good, must have its detractors who insist that it cannot possibly have any value. Or, worse, that it is inferior to works that are themselves inferior, in objective point of fact. So it goes with this, the best of the Rolling Stones' albums by a far distance. The objection is usually this: the most famous song on the album is "Tumbling Dice," which is 'no one's favorite Rolling Stones song.' The song is brought up to be an unflattering comparison to the other usual candidates, Beggars Banquet ("Sympathy for the Devil"), Let It Bleed ("Gimme Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want") or Sticky Fingers ("Brown Sugar" or "Wild Horses"). But the objection misses the point: Exile isn't better because its highs are higher (though they might be) but because the lows are higher: there's no equivalent to "Jig-Saw Puzzle" (Beggars, though I love it), "Let It Bleed" (Let It Bleed, no one's favorite six-minute song with just two verses) or "Sister Morphine" (Sticky Fingers, because you probably shouldn't write songs about the dangers of doing drugs while doing the drugs mentioned in the song; this is the sort of mawkish sentimentality that the Stones do very poorly, and would taint Exile's "Sweet Black Angel" if anyone could tell it was actually a defense of Angela Davis without being explicitly told).

And it just so happens that the album also contains two of the most unreservedly happy of Stones songs: "Loving Cup," which does an impressive job of combining actual romantic sentiment and innuendo, and shifts effortlessly from acoustic folk to horn-based funk, and "Happy," not Keith's finest vocal turn, nor his best song with lead vocals, but the most irreducibly Keith--lifting from other sources, proclaiming a (believable) indifference to wealth or the lack thereof, and generally well-dispositioned towards life no matter what.

One of my finest pleasures as a whippersnap was waiting until my parents had left the house and then turning this album way, way up and listening to it from start to finish. Minus the parents, it remains one of my great pleasures. I'm not sure there's really anything else you can ask from an album.

Another interesting appreciation of the merits of Patti Smith:

Smith was the president of a fan club that had just one member but a hundred idols: Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Jackson Pollock, Isabelle Eberhardt, Brian Jones, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Burroughs, Renée Falconetti (Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 movie), not to mention Johnny Carson. She evoked these personalities, and more, in her songs and poems and broadsides and chapbooks, in her stage patter, in interviews, and she was not at all coy about enumerating her specific debts to them. She made a point, that is, of publicly enacting a process that most artists keep to themselves. This was doubly brave of her, since as a woman at that time declaring herself to be something more than a singer and decorative stage presence she faced a certain amount of derision anyway. It was easy for lazy journalists to caricature her as a stringbean who looked like Keith Richards, emitted Dylanish word salads, and dropped names—a high-concept tribute act of some sort, very wet behind the ears. But then her first album, Horses, came out in November 1975, and silenced most of the scoffers.

 It's no exaggeration to say that the most fortunate events of my adolescence were discovering R.E.M. and then Smith. It would be hard to imagine warmer or more inviting figures to open up the world of art, who themselves produced work as interesting as the people they wanted to emulate. I doubt rock and roll can be poetry--it might not even be art--but Patti Smith is certainly as close as it comes.

The general rule of thumb for Pavement songs is twofold: first, the music is more likely to direct you to the actual meaning or import of the song than the lyrics ever are (exception that proves the rule: "Date with IKEA," where the earnest Tom Petty rip-off is intended to heighten the irony that the song's about IKEA. Sort of). The second is that, because the songs are often filled with nonsense lyrics, one does well ignoring all those and attempting to discern the meaning of the song from those that remain. In my listening this song has always been the line "honey I'm a prize and you're a catch and we're a perfect match" and a bunch of other lyrics that more or less closely approximate that sentiment, which is supposed to be charmingly funny but is also serious. Either way, this song's now only two plays behind Belle and Sebastian's "She's Losing It" on my itunes, which means I've listened to it about twice as much as anything else in the last month.