S/FJ

ON TOP OF THE PAVING STONES, THE DISCO

With me stuck right between Albini and RZA, missing only Madonna, one picture capturing more than I'd like to admit.

FAST MORNING THINKING BETWEEN DROP-OFFS

You know we think the album is strong, because we can forgive long and occasionally wrong in the face of counterbalancing kick-assness. (Wish I had talked more about "Roses," which, like Kevin Costner's Message In A Bottle, is corn better than the more restrained versions of pain it describes.) The TV moment? If you think it wasn't balls-out brave, you're simply overexposed to Kanye—it was a balls-out No, definitely un-focus grouped and probably made somebody at Universal want to jump out of the window. (Yay.) And now, Kanye is the internet meme of the year, maybe, his fifteen Warhol minutes timestretched into a chopped and screwed loop of refusal and rejection. You can say the motherfucker is annoying and confused, but you can't say he isn't major. Not anymore. I think—perish the old-fashioned thought—the best thing about him is how uncalculated his good and bad ideas are.

Tying the tin cans of Bush's racism to the getaway Caddy of Bush's corporate wedding? Shows you that—I'll put in the link later—dipshits who wanna dismiss hip-hop as bloviation simply can't see the fire, or the water.

CLASSICAL HISTORY

This obit printed more that a month ago (web translation: this item is seventeen years old), but I have a feeling that it's more than just web overload that made the death of an old Chinese lady a less attractive web item than, say, pictures of sneakers shaped like Yoda or Cam'ron's Fresh Direct bill. (Free log-in, no worries.)

MTV UPDATE (SCANDINAVIAN FEED)

(I know some of these are in rotation in the U.S.)

Darin, "Step Up"
This young man says the boy band aesthetic is not dead, or in any case it has not been entirely exhausted, especially if you goose it with a Lil Jon synth patch or two.

The Cardigans, "I Need A Fine Wine and You, You Need To..."
This is from the not-yet-released, new album (woo) Super Extra Gravity . The video—Nina swinging mic stand around, leaning on band members, playing out bad wait staff scenarios—suggests a parsing of Persson's long, complicated but continuing relationship with her band. It’s a good conceit but it would be dead wood if Persson hadn’t managed to be genuinely compelling in a music video, an apparently hard assignment, if we use the existing body of successful videos as our sample. Nina Persson is, with or without a screen between her and the world, one of the bestest working front people. We love her and her band, in all their incarnations. (Remember that the last album was pretty much straight Nash-pop.)

The West Coast footwear ad with baile funk
This recalls those London TV ads from 1996 with drum and bass backing, not the later car ads with deracinated d&b pips, but the first ones where some new hire at Saatchi dropped a Hype track behind a Lucozade ad because nobody had the time to imitate the original and didn't expect some jungle DJ to come after them with a lawyer. (Footnote: I made $1000 once imitating Hype for an Icebreakers gum ad. True.)

Shakira, "Tortura" (Shaketon mix)
You can't just grease up a beautiful woman with petroleum (Texas tea, not Vaseline) and make her do The Fibrillation Wop. There must be a DRAMATIC REASON. Otherwise it looks hella creepy, like Flashdance and E.R. sutured together by Michael Bays.

Franz Ferdinand, "Do You Want To"
Still popular, still determined to not give into the hetero dollar, still kinda great. Matching satin jackets—Romantics, holler.

The Duke Spirit
I rode on a plane from London with all the guys in this band last October. (The lead singing lady, who is the interesting one, was on a different flight.) It was funny watching all their gear come out onto the luggage belt, each case stickered with their band logo. Like maybe the other band on the plane was gonna take their stuff by accident. You’re in a band. We get it.

Backstreet Boys, "Just Want You To Know"
Remake of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the docudramatic footnote that suggests Spinal Tap was not realistic enough. Sad sad sad. Boy band aesthetic being apologized for, with hipster icing on a very stale cake. Decent song.

Crazy Frog still the ringtone of the year in EU. I keep hoping that the DJ named Scumfrog is Crazy Frog but he is not.

U2, "City of Blinding Lights"
In a confusing move that blurs the fine line separating them, U2 stole the lighting rig from Coldplay’s "Speed of Sound" video, enlarged it (natch), added a real chorus (double natch) and—perhaps to remind the Apple Martins of the world who is the Daddy of this Secular Faith Rock game—an adoring audience, a visual representation likely not exaggerated in either size or kind. I have affection for both songs, though I prefer Coldplay's Autobahn icepack. "Speed of Sound" is not huge in Sweden but it was larger than Al Roker in Italy, where a killer house cover is already rocking on il radio. (Joshua says the two videos are contemporaneous and U2 may have come first. So, correlation but maybe no causation.)

Craig David, some song
Without two-step's popcorn sonics, David’s voice floats in the mist of a sorta quiet storm, not nearly as sweet and nimble as it was the first few times out. Not sure what the point of him is now.

The White Stripes, "My Doorbell"
Best song on the record, other than "Lonely," rendered here as AN OLDE TYME performance for The Little Rascals, or their twenty-five friends. The video exploits the kids' cuteness but does nothing with them, ignoring the fact that some are crying. (Is that "edgy"?) Ultimately, the kids simply play as shorter-than-average White Stripes fans; White ends up blowing them off as they chase the Stripes’ getaway car—"A Hard Day's Night"-and the analog gangster '30s sedan speeds off to the Hotel Yorba. The camera avoids long shots of White's face, which absents the main figure of the video, and, in the biggest blunder, does nothing with the lyrics, which are both great and blatantly visual. I mean, a good video should not have been hard to make. But see Cardigans entry: music videos turn many smart people into knob-turners and page-staplers.

Teairra Marî, "No Daddy"
This is part softball school porn, part rebel yell. The absent daddies Mari is talking about are not male teachers who cause cuties to throw spitballs in class; the video is scared of a social condition where Teairra is not. But taking over a schoolhouse and locking The Man in his office is cool by me. Good song.

David Gray, “I Am Currently Re-Reading “About A Boy’”
Just fuck off and let Damien Rice do his thing.

Green Day, "Wake Me Up When September Ends"
The song sounds like a take on high-school doldrums but the video brings the pain to Iraq, making it a lesser version of the Dixie Chicks' soldier jam: Long-suffering girl who knows how to buy a hot dog waits for her man to come home while he acts out the end of Saving Private Ryan. The song, like many Billie Joe joints, works better than I expect it to, but the knots never fully hold. I assume Billie thinks war is bad and it is sad to have yr boyfriend be in Iraq but beyond that, I am not sure what it is about September that is worse than, say, November. That is information I would get from a better song.

Bonus beat from plane ride:

The Longest Yard: Beating up prison guards is excellent.

And, yes, business class (only one way) was dope, save for one thing (file under Weather Is No Joke, you soft serve Westerner): If the plane bucks like a bronco all night, you could be laying up in a hyberbaric chamber on a vodka drip, but there will nae be sleep for you, wee writer. So snag on my fancy ass. (Sat next to a guy going to an ammunition factory in Western Sweden that supplies the U.S. Navy. "I have to say, I wish we weren't in business at all, frankly." Not sure if I believed him, and not sure that I didn't.)

WHOLE LOTTA LOVE

No Starbuckses in Stockholm—a typographically similar chain called Wayne's Coffee takes its place—but they've got more 7-Elevens than I've seen anywhere, either in or outside America. A single two block radius boasted three. Many are stylee. I'd love to see that marketing plan. Cab driver said they are known for their coffee.

Also, of note: Jeru tha Damaja, still alive, receiving Swede love.

Sorry for silences. Soon, words about other countries outside America, the Rolling Stones, Gang of Four, Short Dog, hip-hop timetables, and the cryovacking of furniture. (That last part is a bad joke for Arts age editors Google-cheating on their writers. Ha ha ha.)

UPDATES

Recent pieces on Emilana Torrini, Napalm Death, and Robyn are now linked in updated linky section at right. (Lazy me.)

The "Stage to Studio" panel apparently sold out quickly. I am guessing this happened because Ani's core is hardcore, and quick with mice and trackpads. Additionally, I am guessing folks have been lured by the promise of seeing Albini and Diggs recreate classic '90s freestyle battles. (There has been some backstage squabbling about who gets to play Supernatural. Kids!) Me, I have other concerns. Ric "My First Album Is Better Than Yours, Unless I Am Talking To Liz Phair" Ocasek has named his new album Nexterday. This is the topic I intend to push the panel towards, repeatedly, unforgivingly.

ASSORTED PIECES NOT AVAILABLE ON THE WEB

"Electronica Artists Draw Blood," published January 30, 1996 in the Village Voice. (Wagon Christ, Autechre, mu-Ziq, Panasonic.)

"Join The Click," published May 13, 1997 in the Village Voice. (Panasonic, others.)

"Scratching The Surface," published August 19, 1997 in the Village Voice. (Lee Perry.)

COUNTING CUTS

Roger Cramer, former rock band manager, current lawyer, and actual friend, on the relative scarcity of rap Best Ofs:

"I have wondered about this myself, since most rap albums have one to three singles and the rest is filler. If I haven't bothered to acquire the album, I'd rather own the Best Of.

I don't think it's a legal question. Generally speaking, you don't have to re-clear the producers or side artists for different exploitations of the same masters. Samples may require a new clearance: it would depend on the specific license.

As you probably know, artists hate Best Ofs—they love their albums. A lot of Best Of deals that I negotiate involve a new song or two, and a new advance for the new songs, so (I'd have to ask to be sure) I think labels don't want to spend the extra money for a superstar best-of collection when they don't do very well in the market place."

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS

"And yet, as soon as I heard her say “Mr. President! A human approaches!” in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root, and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the edges of some low-income housing, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door Ï was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire." Marcel Proust, "Overture," Moncrieff and Kilmartin edition, page 13 (edits not in original text).