perfidy

It's an unjust world that doesn't hail Andrew Bird with parades and midnight fetes.

Eight years ago or so, when the Chicago-based violinist and songwriter formed Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, I nearly wrote him off right then and there. At the time, Bird,a Suzuki-trained musician who claimed to have barely heard any rock music at all, ever, was a hot-jazz violinist somewhat in the mold of the great French player Stéphane Grappelli and a sometime member of swing revivalists The Squirrel Nut Zippers. Given that the neo-swing revival lasted all of two years, and my patience with it considerably less time, I was disinclined to give Andrew Bird a pass.

With The Bowl of Fire, Bird put out Thrills (Rykodisc, 1998) and Oh! The Grandeur (Rykodisc, 1999), two albums which I received as basically updated museum pieces, kind of neato like a garage-built replica of a Model T Ford, but like a Model T replica more curiosities than accomplishments. His archly retro songs and arrangements were entertaining amalgams of ragtime, hot jazz and swing, Weimar-era cabaret, Eastern European folk music, and other similarly unfashionable influences, but their appeal (for me, at least) stopped at the eardrums. The albums seemed to sell passably well, he built a small and dedicated fanbase, but for my part I had my fill of Andrew Bird pretty quickly. (Full disclosure: I was working for the label that put out Bird's first three albums. As if that makes me any more patient with nonsense.)

And then it all got weird.
Bird's third album went in what you might call a completely unexpected direction. I suspected it might be getting interesting when, one afternoon, I was instructed to find a Hohner Beatle bass on short notice for Andrew to make use of in the studio (luckily for me, Manhattan is sick with Beatle basses for rent), and my suspicions were borne out when he delivered his third Bowl of Fire album, The Swimming Hour (Rykodisc, 2001). Gone were the hot jazz, the Hungarian folk music and the two-step beats. Gone were the one always-arched eyebrow and the sense that every note was part of some elaborate in-joke.

Instead, Andrew Bird had learned in his own way to rock.

But, being a classical music junkie and polymath, Bird didn't just sit down and pen a raft of "easy" by-the-numbers garage rock songs and dress them up with electric violin and Beatle bass. No, no no. Instead, Bird sat down and listened to what must have been the entire history of rock and roll music from Elvis up to Pavement, and then went off and encapsulated that history in one neat and quirky package. From the clattery Ray Charles jump blues of "How Indiscreet" (which featured a Raelettes-style backing chorus) to nods to Latin music, Burt Bacharach chamber pop, that Weimar cabaret again, it was a dizzyingly accomplished leap forward. Every song still featured his signature violin, but it appeared in a thousand disguises - distorted, plucked, and echoed, and his light and mellow voice became a secret weapon as he slyly intoned little stories about rest stops and mistaken identity. It was rock music, yes, but coming from a wholly original place and sensibility that had little to do with the blues, Chuck Berry, Zep or the Stones. In short, The Swimming Hour was a smart and original album of marvelous songs played in a marvelous fashion, and I thought to myself, "no way" that Andrew Frigging Bird "is gonna top this."

Boy, was I wrong. Having gone solo starting with 2003’s Weather Systems (Grimsey Records,) each of his subsequent albums has been better, deeper, more mature and masterful than the last. His songwriting has become more confident as he has developed his own voice - his own genre - that nods at but does not rely on anything else that's been done before. Ever. His lyrics have become sharper, blending keen observation with poetry and Tin Pan Alley wordplay, and he has become (check this out) a master whistler.

Andrew Bird's latest album, Armchair Apocrypha (Fat Possum, 2007) was released in March to... thunderous silence. I don't get it. Andrew Bird has made the album of the year, an absolutely breathtaking tour de force of beautiful and brilliant... something... pop? I don't know what it is... and the only press I'm seeing is in the usual places that review indie-rock (Pitchfork, The Onion). No ticker-tape, no guest stint coaching the vocal gymnasts on American Idol, and it's a crying shame.

Bird created Armchair Apocrypha with the help of electronic-music experimentalist Martin Dosh. Dosh's influence seems mainly to be in the way that most of the productions are big as Western vistas, full of nuance and texture and sweeping motion, even when they are quiet as whispers. When Bird takes full advantage of his singing voice - a light, agile tenor not too different from Jeff Buckley's - or his multifacted violin, or the whistling that sounds more like a Theremin than something human, and sets these monstrous talents off against Dosh's expansive productions, the effect is breathtaking. When from time to time, the electronic flourishes intrude a little more, as with the canned shuffle beat on "Simple X" or the storm of drums that ends "Armchairs," it's usually to the song's advantage. (But not always; “Simple X” is probably the weakest track, relatively speaking, on an otherwise stellar album.)

Somewhat like David Byrne (whom he resembles in eyebrow and cheekbone), Bird's lyrics are full of wordplay and detached observation that seems to come from a wry weariness, taking on the persona of someone who's seen enough to know that he doesn't want to see any more. On Armchair Apocrypha, disaster seems to lurk just underneath every surface. You find yourself grooving to "Heretics" well before you figure out that the chorus runs, "Thank God it's fatal," and the album-opening "Fiery Crash" seems to contemplate the titular tragedy in order to ward it off.

Bird even delves obliquely into politics for what I believe is the first time with "Scythian Empires," which pulls together three millennia worth of Middle East conquests and their subsequent fiascos over a gently driving beat built on acoustic guitar, plucked violin, and that ever-present Greek chorus of Bird's otherworldly whistling:

five day forecast bring black tar rains and hellfire
while handpicked handler's kid gloves tear at the inseams

their Halliburton attaché cases are useless

while Scotch-Guard Macintoshes shall be carbonized

now they're offering views of exiting empires
such breathtaking views of Scythian empires

Scythian empire
horsemen of the Russian steppe
Scythian empire
archers of an afterthought

routed by Sarmatians
thwarted by the Thracians
Scythian empire

kings of Macedonia
and the Scythian empire

Halliburton attaché cases, by the way, are fantastic.

No matter whether Bird is punning on, well, birds on "Spare-ohs" and the clever album art, or contemplating mortality and the game of Operation on "Dark Matter," every shot hits the target dead center. This album is as career-defining and as one of a kind as Pink Moon, Tapestry or Dark Side of the Moon, and I'm frankly shocked that music this good - even if it's not immediately comprehensible as "pop" - isn't burning up the adult alternative radio charts, being written up in Rolling Stone, and generally being lauded as great.

Today, I'm at the point where I'm tempted to run to my nearest music store, order a 30-count box full of Armchair Apocrypha and run into the streets thrusting the album into every passing hand. It's that good, that different, that lovely. Not to everybody's taste, maybe not your particular cup of tea, but objectively a great, great album.

Andrew Bird has come a long way since I rolled my eyes at "Ides of Swing" and "Candy Shop" from Thrills and Oh! The Grandeur. Before I said it because I still doubted his ability to pull off anything he wanted; now I'm saying it because practically nobody makes two albums this good in a career (even while I hope that this is not true): no way is Andrew Frigging Bird gonna top this.

Midriff Records has a really nice thing going. Founded in 2001 by the New England band The Beatings for the purposes of releasing their own music, they have built a stable of high quality indie-pop bands who mostly trend toward (from what I've heard) to the bittersweet and hooky side of the spectrum. In some respects (notably in that Midriff bands seem to all be friends and in some cases brothers), Midriff is becoming a power-pop version of Elephant 6 or K Records, two labels who took a friends-and-family approach to artist development and who are now legendary in some circles. Indeed, the last year or so has seen at least three high-quality releases that should cement Midriff's reputation as a label to rely on: a stellar release from The Beatings themselves; an excellent solo album from Beatings guitarist Eldridge Rodriguez; and now Scuba with a self-titled debut.

Like The Beatings, Scuba exist to invoke (and improve on) some of the most revered sounds of the past thirty years or so. But where The Beatings draw on The Pixies, Mission of Burma and Sonic Youth, Scuba are best described as - get this - shoegazer revivalists.

Shoegazer! When's the last time you thought about that word? For me it musta been back in college in Ohio in the mid-1990s, hepped up on Mickey's Big Mouths and listening to My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr., and leaving the room every time anyone put on anything by the execrable Sebadoh. Remember when The Jesus and Mary Chain were on Lollapalooza? When The Cure were having hits? When Bob Mould was releasing records as Sugar and even got on the radio? I sure do! And I loved it!

But it's both condescending and limiting to describe a band as solely the sum of their influences. On their website, Scuba themselves acknowledge their fuzzy and moody pop roots, saying "We're not a shoe-gazer band. Though we look at a lot of things apparently our shoes are not one of them. Or rather they're not looked at for long enough to become a quote-unquote 'gaze' unquote."

Okay, so fair enough. "Shoegazer" implies that Scuba are a tribute band, which isn't correct. So what's the deal with Scuba? Well, the fuzzy guitars and washes of noise aside, they play sumptuous and hypnotic power pop that delivers on what Neil Young said about Crazy Horse, his backing band: "It's all one big, growing, smoldering sound, and I'm part of it. It's like gliding, or some sort of natural surfing." Although you can namecheck great bands of the past one after the other as the songs pass by (right now I'm listening to the leadoff single "Gary Powers' Spy Plane" and dreaming of Boston's late lamented The Sheila Divine), the truth is the songwriting is strong and original and more than the sum of its (My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, New Order, Sugar, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure) influences.

The big trick with playing noisy pop-inflected rock is to have it not all sound the same. I've heard literally dozens of boring bands who play boring music that sounds great for three point five minutes until they start their next song and you realize that one song is really all they have. Luckily, Scuba duck the "samey" tag with aplomb by using studio and songwriting tricks to good effect, sometimes washing the sound-field with enormous distortion, other times pulling back to a tunneling bassline and a few chimed guitar notes, sometimes compressing everything into angular chords.

Scuba manage to duck the other great pitfall of modern power-pop as well, which is the "softLOUDsoft" formula that The Pixies invented and Nirvana made famous. Instead, in the great tradition of their shoegazer forebears, Scuba manage the flow of each song beautifully, creating new textures and moods through smart production and layering of sounds, rather than the crass expedient of stomping the distortion pedal and blasting out the windows every time the chorus comes around.

Highlights include the album opener "You Break My Heart in 1000 Different Ways," the echoey suspended overdrive of "Freight," the gorgeous Joy-Division wail of "Maybe It's Different With Johnny" and the gigantic suspended-chord riff of "Into The Water, Down To The Bottom." In a just world, or a different time, any one of these songs should be, or shoulda been, a monster underground hit, part of the lingua franca of cool youth to be passed down by word of mouth.

Simply put, Scuba have made a well-written and beautifully produced debut record in a decidedly unfashionable genre, one that makes aging hipsters like me feel like rock has a future that isn't limited to Franz Ferdinand, Pink, and tenth-generation SoCal punk. Granted, for the time being the band are leaning hard on their influences, but they're a long way past merely paying tribute to them, which is a whole lot more than million-sellers like Queens of the Stone Age, Sum 182, or, heaven forfend, Nickelback can claim with a straight face.

Those who know me well know that I'm fairly flexible on matters of language. Go ahead, say "ain't" or write a double negative. I don't care all that much unless the context calls for precision. Coin a word! I do it all the time! (I'm personally very proud of "libervasion," as in "Five years in, the libervasion of Iraq has yet to draw to a favorable close for the USA.")

But what really burns my bacon is people who consistently fail to realize that two homophones are different. Case in point: Marshal, and Marshall. One denotes a person of high or ultimate rank in an organization, like Field Marshal or Fire Marshal. The other is a proper given name, like Marshall Mathers or Marshall Fauk. When everyone from high-school dropouts to tenured faculty, plus the guys who enter the scrolling headlines on major news networks, consistently write "Fire Marshal" as "Fire Marshall" I go a little nuts inside and wonder which Marshall it is who has fucked up so badly that his ass needs to be fired on the afternoon news.

That is all.

[wik] (Now, if was "Fire Alberto" or "Fire The Stoner Who Took Two Hours To Deliver One Freaking Mushroom Pizza Light On The Mozzarella To My House And Couldn't Even Put Together A Better Response Than To Cut His Reddened Eyes Away From Me And Mutter "Sorry If It's Late" ("Sorry If It's Late?" You Disingenuous Tool? We Both Know You Were Somewhere Doing Bong Hits, That's Fine, Just Don't Pretend You Don't Know What Goddamn Time It Is When A Stone Cold Pizza Arrives At My House In A Cloud Of Resinous Smoke)" then I'd understand. But Fire Marshall? That poor bastard was just doing his job.)

From time to time (as often as our stomachs will allow us to manage it) we at the Ministry will look closely into the depths of human depravity both comical and twisted, and drag up whatever we find there for consideration. The general hope is that by bringing these stories into the light of day we can make them rarer. The usual effect is, instead, we end up sad and depressed about the future of the species.

So, onward!

Dateline: Washington, DC

The Washington Madam scandal has claimed its first victim: The State Department's senior diplomat in charge of USAID, which is devoted to stamping out sex trafficking, human exploitation, and AIDS, has resigned, having copped to using a perfectly innocent telephone service to hire nice Latin American women to come to his house and give him nice therapeutic "massages" in exchange for some untraceable cash money. Nice!!

Dateline: Crazytown

Newsflash: Michelle Malkin has finally completely lost her shit.

Dateline: The Congo and elsewhere

The New York Times has a heartwarmer on the rising use of child soldiers in the pointless conflicts of Africa, because they are loyal, pliable, and uncomplicated by higher philosophical thinking (plus they're easy to make more of). The article also notes that, in a cunning twist, the strongmen who hire them have at this point given up even the thinniest pretenses of a "cause," preferring to cut right to the basic raping, killing, and stealing as their main kinks.

... aaand that's enough for this week. I think I'm going to curl up in my bed under the covers for a while and wish real hard.

Now that I've felt my ever less theoretical son kick me right in the hand (oh, how special!, interjects Mrs. Johno... he's been whaling on my cervix for weeks!), I have a public announcement to make:

I keep making beer, like a fool, for ever more theoretical consumption. At the moment, I have a nice floral and bitter pale ale, a spicy, strong and sweet Abbey, and a plain out freako-delicious Dunkel ready to go, and five gallons of porter curing besides. So, please.... kick my kegs. Run 'em out. I'll make more. Please help... drink all my booze, I'm begging out.

That is all.

Dammit, David Halberstam died. He was one of the finest reporters - and finest writers - of his generation, and he will be missed.

(I imagine we can expect a story from Christopher Hitchens within the next day or two about how Halberstam was really a second-rate hack who slew children to collect their shoes.)

First it was the Irish, with their mining and their farming. Then it was the Slavs, those factory-dwelling scum. Then it was the Latinos with their ambition and willingness to spread mulch and cook your steak frites for little pay. Then it was the Indonesians with their endless garment factories. Then it was the Indians, who have apparently limitless capacity to take shit from irate helpline callers while producing flawless C++ code. And now it's the damn Chinese, taking the job of insane mass murderer away from the white, Christian American males to whom it is their birthright.

No. Seriously. Check this amazing shit out! Media whore Debbie Schlussel is an early frontrunner in the contest to say the least appropriate, most reprehensible thing possible about yesterday's shootings at Virginia Tech, and she's come up with a doozy. Wow!

So, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre is a Chinese national here on a student visa. And, today, this alien did “the job that Americans just won’t do.”

If you really want to be put off your lunch, kite over to her site and check out all the people who somehow agree that yesterday's tragedy is somehow an argument for tighter immigration laws (or evidence of a Great Yellow Conspiracy of unexplained provenance or purpose). Also go to her site if you somehow think I'm taking her out of context or misrepresenting the thrust of her argument. 'Cos I ain't.

Hat tip to Outside the Beltway

[wik]... and check up the to this post, which I found via qando. Just awesome!

**** UPDATE #3, 04/17/07: The shooter has now been identified as a South Korean national.****

**** UPDATE #2: The shooter has now been identified as a Chinese national here on a student visa. Lovely. Yet another reason to stop letting in so many foreign students.****

**** UPDATE: Shootings appear professional, says expert; VTU Alum on school's "Asian" Population; 2nd Amendment-Free Campus/VTU lobbied against students having guns on campus for personal protection ****

Here's what we know about the murderer of at least 32 students and maimer of at least 28 more at Virginia Tech, today:

• The murderer has been identified by law enforcement and media reports as "a young Asian male."
• The Virginia Tech campus has a very large Muslim community, many of which are from Pakistan (per terrorism investigator Bill Warner).
• Pakis are considered "Asian."
• There were 2 attacks at least half a mile apart.
• There have been at least two bomb threats to this campus in the last two weeks.

And dig her rebuttals to the comments:

Posted by: Old Atlantic [TypeKey Profile Page] at April 16, 2007 04:48 PM

Pakis are considered "Asian."

I believe the correct term is "Pakistani".

YOUR BELIEF SYSTEM IS FLAWED. EITHER TERM IS CORRECT. WHAT IS THIS--THE IMUS THOUGHT POLICE? DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL

Welcome to the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's series Meet Your Candidates!

With the 2008 Presidential season already in full swing, it is important that interested voters be out in front of the ever-evolving cast of characters vying for a place at the big table. With that mandate in mind (man-date... isn't that a little gay? Someone find out where Brownback stands on mandates!), we here at the Ministry will be profiling each of the very early candidates for the 2008 Presidential election over the next few weeks for your general edification and amusement. With such an absurdly long and diverse cast of characters (from Tancredo to Kucinich), it's hard to know who's for real and who's just a white shirt stuffed with ambition and the souls of dozens of big donors. We're here to help.

I myself will be profiling the following contenders: US Congressman and composting enthusiast Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Former Massachusetts Governer and yachting type Mitt Romney, former Saturday Night Live host and Mayor of 9/11, excuse me, New York City Mayor Rudy 9/11 Guiliani, retired General and George Clooney stunt-double Wesley Clark, former fatty and the other Man from H.O.P.E., Arkansas Governer Mike Huckabee, and Savior Made Flesh Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

First, some little known facts about your candidates:

The combined candlepower of Romney's, Edwards', and Obama's smiles could provide enough energy to power Bangladesh for a full day. Obama has produced a white paper exploring this phenomenon as a practical solution to Southeast Asia's energy crisis.

Places you could safely hide all the candidates: Mitt Romney's hair; Newt Gingrich's self-regard; Bill Clinton's ballsack (with room to spare).

Of all the candidates, Mike Huckabee has the sweetest smell.

WTC 7 did not collapse, as widely believed, due to damage sustained in the collapse of WTC 1 and 2. Neither was it deliberately demolished by Jews, the CIA or the Trilateral Commission. Rather, it collapsed when Rudy Guiliani, in the heat of his 9/11 crisis-management mode, roundhouse kicked it for being, as he tells it "goddamn insolent."

Newt Gingrich once gave a homeless man $20 to dance for him.

Sam Brownback's safe word is "peaches."

John McCain once carried a litter of wolf pups to term and nursed them to adulthood after accidentally killing their mother while hunting in the Rockies.

Dennis Kucinich is a top-notch shooting guard, especially dangerous from the high post.

Tom Tancredo broke up with his first high-school girlfriend for ordering a burrito for lunch.

Barack Obama has only one kidney. The other currently belongs to a Guatemalan orphan named Paco.

Fred Thompson has repeatedly sought counseling for uncontrollable rages. Onlookers mistake for avuncular pauses the times when he must take a moment to master his urge to crush his coffee mug into dust and, as his children put it, "Hulk out."

Rudy Guiliani practices "Hulking out" in the mirror nightly before bed.

First, let's meet the stormin' Mormon, the man with the million-dollar smile and perfect hair, former Massachusetts Governer Willard "Mitt" Romney.

The first thing to remember about Mitt Romney is that he's a second-generation politician, his father being the Michigan Governor, HUD Secretary, American Motors chairman, Presidential candidate and victim of Asian brainwashing, George W. Romney. It is an iron law of American politics that talent is not cross-generational, and it is this warning that should shape America's perception of Romney. Witness such prodigies of witlessness as John Quincy Adams (a strong contender for our worst President of all time), and George Walker Bush (ditto?) - parental ambition and a childhood familiarity with the political world are no substitute for actual talent, integrity, and all the other bullshit that should be for real but isn't that goes on yard signs during election season.

(And before we go any farther, let us stop a moment to wonder if, after eight years of '70s-era Harvard MBA leadership from son-of-a-politician George W. Bush, we want four to eight more years of '70s-era Harvard MBA son-of-a-politician leadership from Mitt. Call me crazy, but that particular, shall we say 'strategery,' hasn't worked out quite as well as might be hoped so far.)

Anyway, back to the facts... Mitt Romney's biggest claims to fame, prior to his election as GOV, were as head of Bain Capital (where he oversaw a wildly successful run of 113% yearly growth) and as CEO of the 2002 Olympics.

Like other candidates with a business background, Romney claims that this experience makes him an ideal fit for the managerial demands of the Presidency. Truth be told, I'd place more trust in my local School Board chairman to run the United States then a CEO. Note to all hopefuls: Presidents can't fire anybody, restructure or spin off any of the fifty operating divisions, or attempt LBOs of rival firms by way of entrenching market share, and the shareholders and entrenched interests are notoriously tetchy. When Germany stops importing American-made goods in protest of a new policy, there isn't anything in any HBS Case Study (not even PeoplePower, Inc.) to help you power through the issue. Frankly, a turnaround specialist is the worst person to step into control of what is still the most powerful and stable economy the world has ever seen - why fix what ain't broke on that level?

As for his Olympic experience, see above regarding the fitness of CEOs for the Big Seat, and add to this the mistaken equivalence between mediating among the two hundred nations participating in a multinational sporting event and engaging in trilateral talks with North Korea, China and Japan about just where Pyongyang is thinking about landing those nukes that are achieving apogee right about... nnnnnnow.

From the moment of his election to GOV in 2002, Romney openly telegraphed his intention to look past the job to bigger and better things. He was a johnny-come-lately carpetbagger with the air of a Republican in search of a state to win, in order to get that on his resume ASAP. While in office, he openly mocked the people of Massachusetts (as in a 2005 appearance in South Carolina). He practically disappeared from public view, emerging only to pick losing fights with entrenched state interests, to chime in on hot-button issues, or to howl for the heads of Turnpike Commission authorities whenever the Big Dig sprung a leak or killed anyone. If there's any justice in this world, Mitt will be branded a bigger "flip-flopper" than his Bay State nemesis, John Kerry. Mitt was against gay marriage before he was for it, and then against it again, for abortion choice and stem-cell research before he declared that life begins at conception, a lifelong hunter who has hunted once or twice, and against big-government mandates before he passed the nation's first state-funded universal health care scheme.

Truth is, nothing is as important to Mitt Romney as politics itself. As I recently wrote in a comment,

Mitt Romney is a mealy-mouthed walking haircut, an empty suit whose political instincts to find the nearest camera and beam into it are as acute and uncontrollable as a dog in frantic search of a leg to hump.

As governor of Massachusetts (and let’s not forget that getting elected governor of Massachusetts as a Republican hasn’t been any kind of feat since Bill Weld in 1992) he did, well, practically nothing. He lost most of the big showdowns, and tied the rest. Billy Bulger retired from the Senate to take a sinecure of equal if more subtle power as head of UMass. The turnpike commission smacked him around like a skinny third-grader. The state’s finances failed to improve measurably by any standard. Although he didn’t actively *hurt* the state, Romney showed absolutely no spark, no genius for leadership, nothing indeed except for a genius for pandering to whatever audience was in front of him at the time. I don’t give a rat’s ass that he’s a Mormon. What matters is that he thinks failing to outmaneuver the Massachusetts Turnpike Commission qualifies him to enter into deep negotiation with Iran (not to mention Senate Democrats).

Next time you see Mitt in front of a camera, look for two things: a statement that exactly contradicts something he said in the past, with no apology or acknowledgement, and that slightly spastic bending-over thing that men in suits do when they need to surreptitiously move a raging erection from one side of the zipper to the other.

Mitt Romney is the worst possible Republican candidate for President, aside from all the others. He is a big-government moral conservative who readily panders to more libertine interests when it's convenient to poll ratings, a smug and overtrained businessman whose governance playbook consists of scribbled quotes from "7 Habits of Highly Successful People," Bain Capital annual reports from the Reagan era, and headshots of himself, and a foreign-policy novice whose positions at this point seem reducible to five words: "I agree with the President."

My favorite rock album of 2006 was by the New England collective The Beatings, whose sweet-tart invocation of the greats of Boston's postpunk history (The Pixies, Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma) on Holding Onto Hand Grenades struck me as much more than just attribute to their influences.

In the wake of the release of that album, Beatings guitarist E.R. (aka the improbably named Eldridge Rodriguez) kept going, writing and recording his own stuff under his own name, finally releasing in late February of this year an album of his own, This Conspiracy Against Us.

Many of the songs on Rodriguez' album could fit comfortably on a Beatings record, but where the band as a whole tended toward tense, rigorous arrangements featuring loud and layered guitars, Rodriguez alone is much more relaxed, at times a little more acoustic, and in a welcome way, weirder. He's still comfortably within the basic genre definition of "indie rock" or "postpunk" or whatever, but he sounds like he's having a ball.

What do I mean by "weirder?" Well, for example, although the Beatings have a nice way with a hook, I can't imagine a Beatings song featuring hand claps, 'sha-la-la' backing vocals, or a cheerleader chorus bleating "a-c-t-i-o-n, action, action, we want action" underneath the big hook. But there they are, the female chorus on "You Get What You Want," adding a winsome dimension to what's already a hooky modern rock song.

And I can't imagine, well, anybody with the courage to write a Bowie song and record it in a Bowie voice like Rodriguez does on "Black History Month." Yet, there it is in the middle of what, by rights, ought to be a mildly interesting set of songs by one member of a not-famous-quite-yet rock quartet. This Conspiracy Against Us is full of songs like this, quirky enough to stand out, but strong and restrained enough not to just be irritating, cutesy or precious.

This Conspiracy Against Us probably isn't going to win any awards, and probably isn't (such a crime!) going to break huge and move a million units at retail. But Eldridge Rodriguez has made a very impressive, accomplished and most of all interesting debut album, and that's good news for the future.

In a codicil to my recent posts about the slow death of the major music labels, Daniel Gross of Slate points out that the compact disc, though bruised and somewhat diminished, is alive and well. Classical and boutique sales, as well as nontraditional distribution schemes, continue to thrive as they always have.

About this, I ain't surprised at all. One of the labels I worked for back in the day had made its reputation - and its fortune - in catering to the long tail. They pioneered nonmusic retail partnerships (like what Starbucks is doing now), direct-to-consumer internet sales, and grassroots marketing, and for a long time did fabulously at it. And in a micro-parable of how the industry now goes, only got into serious trouble when they tried to get too big too fast and found themselves caught flatfooted, too small to compete at the level of the majors and too big to effectively cater to the grassroots fanbase that was a big part of their cachet and bottom line. At the end of the day, or at least the end of my career, the Big Giant Album from a Faded Popstar lost money hand over fist with as many returned lots flooding back in as had gone out the door in the first place, and the little record of birthing room music that had sold twenty to forty copies a week for fifteen years continued to sell twenty to forty copies a week, week in and week out.

Guess which one's still in print?

It's not the compact disc that's dead - it's the entire major label system that lives and dies by selling millions of them at a time.

The Onion has a pretty good featurette on songs that work as stories. I don't know all their choices, but the ones I do know are top notch. A couple of my personal favorites, not on the list, are "Can You Fly" by Freedy Johnston, which is about a farmer and his son who find an angel lying bleeding in their field, "Wreck of the Old 97," which by now has transcended everything to become part of the American DNA, and "Poncho and Lefty" as written by Townes van Zandt.

That last one's just amazing. Let's look at the lyrics.

Livin' on the road my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron, and your breath is hard as kerosene
Weren't you mamma's only boy, her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said, goodbye, and sank into your dreams

Poncho was a bandit boy, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to feel
Poncho met his match, you know, on the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dyin' words, but that's the way it goes

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

Lefty he can't sing the blues, all night long like he used to
The dust that Poncho bit down south, ended up in Lefty's mouth
The day they lay poor Poncho low, Lefty split for Ohio
And where he got the bread to go, there ain't nobody knows

All the Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him slip away
Out of kindness I suppose

The poets tell how Poncho fell, and Lefty's livin' in cheap hotels
The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold, and so the story ends we're told
Poncho needs your prayers, it's true, but save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do, and now he's growin' old

All the Federales, say
They could have had him any day
They only let him run so long
Out of kindness I suppose

A few grey Federales say
They could have had him any day
They only let him go wrong
Out of kindness I suppose

The way I see it, the narrator of this song is some middle-aged guy who's seen it all, probably missing a finger or two. He's talking to some 22 year old punk he's known since he was a kid who thinks he's hot shit and is bragging about how he's gonna knock over the mail stage or something, he and this other guy you see, this real tough son of a bitch. And our narrator sighs, kicks back, and tells him all about how bulletproof Poncho thought he was, how badass Lefty thought he was riding with Poncho, and how he was there that day when they laid Poncho low, and saw Lefty piss himself behind a rock, then crawl out as the Feds closed in, snatch the moneybag, and light out for God only knows where. And down through the years, word has gotten back to Colorado how so and so saw Lefty one December in a bar in Cleveland, looking like shit and still waiting for the hammer to fall, with the money long drunk up and all the good parts of his life behind him. And then our narrator gets up, tosses a buck on the table, and leaves the punk kid to contemplate whether any deed is worth a life spent hiding out in Cleveland.

[cue Paul Hogan....] Now that's a knife.

I've started using this tool to generate names for the beers I make. In fact, just last weekend I kegged a batch of Paul Newman's Portentious Sharks With Fricking Laser Beams Tied Their Heads Pale Ale, and it's positively delish!

Hm. I'm flaming today. Fascinating.

Anyway, here is the recipe I used:

5 lbs light dried malt extract
1 lb wheat dried malt extract
1/2 lb Crystal malt 60L
5 oz lb Crystal malt 135L
1 oz northern brewer hop pellets
2 oz Crystal hop pellets
SAFbrew #33 dry yeast - 2 packets
Nature's Pride Spring Water

Steeped grains in 1 gal water at 140-160 degrees for one hour. Sparged in 3 gallons of water heating in brewpot. Added steeping liquor. At boil added both DMEs and Northern Brewer.
At -40 added 1 oz crystal hops
at -15 added 1 oz crystal hops
at -1 added 1 oz crystal hops

Removed to ice bath and cooled to 90 degrees in 30 minutes.

Added about 2 gallons cold spring water to carboy and placed near open door to keep cool (during which I forgot to attach the airlock to the carboy, risking contamination of the beer). Strained wort through funnel, with again plenty of opportunity for contamination. Added water to make about 5 1/4 gallons. Pitched dry yeast with the last water addition at about 60 degrees- very low.

[wik] Despite the numerous opportunities I gave everything to contaminate, nothing bad happened; just a nice vigorous fermentation at 68-70 degrees. I let everything sit for about two weeks in the carboy, and kegged directly from primary. I used Munton's KreamyX (which sounds so DIRTY!!) to prime this batch, because I want a nice thick creamy head. (That's what she said! (haw!!))

[alsø wik] In all honesty I was going for a brown ale on the lighter side of the style with a serious hit of hop flavor and aroma without much bitterness. What I ended up with was a dark pale ale with a noticeable but tasteful hop presence. In fact, it tastes almost exactly like Ipswich Pale Ale, which fellow New Englanders will recognize and a very fine example of the style. So, what the hell. It's just beer.

[alsø alsø wik] Speaking of beer, I now have portions of five batches of homebrew in my basement, making a total of approximately 18 gallons. My wife is pregnant and thus is no help; I can no longer fit in my pants what with the constant "sympathy-eating" I'm doing. So, I beg of you, all of you-- please come to my house and drink all of my beer. I'll make more!

In a followup to my thoughts the other day about the self-destructive tactics of the music bidness, the New York Times has an interesting article about the sunset of the album as the dominant commercial musical medium. Last year, digital singles outsold physical albums for the first time, which is bad news for the labels as their per-unit take on digital singles is several orders of magnitude lower than on traditional album sales. In a fascinating turn of events, the Times article also profiles a young group who have signed a singles deal with Universal, and who are thrilled at the low-risk exposure they'll get for recording three to five songs, total, for a major label. The majors in turn are contemplating turning this sort of contract, previously reserved for novelty records and one-off all star fiascos, into one of their most common deal structures. This is a surprising and ironic turn of events.

Well, perhaps it's not surprising to you, but it sure as hell is to me. Not six years ago I sat in a room with the management team of the label group I worked for and listened to them announce that we would be getting out of the singles business forever.

To be fair, it made sense at the time. Back in early 2001, the music industry was even farther away then it is today from figuring out how to make money off of digital downloading, and sales of physical singles had dwindled. The singles floor racks of the 1960s had shrunk in the 1980s to a singles wall, and by the turn of the millennium was just a couple singles next to the checkout counter. Albums ruled the day. All across the industry, labels were getting out of the singles business as sales dried up. Sure, there were a couple markets where they still moved, but for the most part, it was dead as disco. Digital media wasn't even a blip except insofar as it could help market traditional CDs.

And that's the central insight that I think is missing from the usual narrative of how the music industry is hidebound, venal, greedy, etc. etc. etc. (all true anyway no matter what, but still...). For fifty years or more, the music industry has been able to dictate, or at worst, adapt readily, to major shifts in media. This is because new form factors came along at a slow pace, and were never all that disruptive to the current status quo. The grooved record had more than three quarters of a century in the sun, from its introduction in the early years of the 20th century to the late 1970s, before it was supplanted by the tape. Tapes too, had a good twenty-year or more run before they were indisputably tackled by the compact disc. And the compact disc, again, had about twenty years between its major commercial adoption and the current seven-year slow strangulation the industry is currently undergoing.

And this time, it's not just form factor and playback technology that's changing. This time it's the entire distribution chain that's been upended, the very business processes that the labels and their affiilated industries (manufacturing, distribution, commercial radio, retail) have built their success around for, in some cases, a hundred years. That's hard to understand, much less accept. I can't imagine any industry agile enough to turn on a dime like the record industry should have when Napster first came on the scene, so a few years delay in getting their act together is no surprise. But now that seven years have gone by, it's still pretty clear that the industry as a whole is still trying to sell buggy whips to consumers who have never even seen a horse.

As for the irony, I do find it ironic that what seemed like a very sound business decision in 2001 - shutting down the singles shop because singles don't sell - turns out to be an early indicator that the music industry was not only unequpped to adapt to the implications of downloadable music, but at the time the technology matured were actively shutting down the only parts of their business that could even comprehend any part of what the future would hold.

Via Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, the greatest student complaint ever recorded. Just a taste:

I appreciate you taking your inconvenience to instruct us but I really had some problems in your class and I would like to explain them to you now. Every day I wanted to discuss with you about the way you grade my papers and the way you teach the class, but I could not because the things you say in class and your words disturb me so much I can not. You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair. You do not seem to care about our grades only that they are up to your too high standards and I can not talk to you because you make me completely uncomfortable. For example, you say you will talk to us about our grades but you really will not because of how uncomfortable you make me feel with your words and what you say.

I will plan to contest the grade you have given me in this class when I get it because I know it will be much higher with any other teacher. I am a very religious man and you are not a bad person but you do not choose your words with enough care like a teacher should. You try to be objective and the very attempt becomes your flaw because you try so hard to grade fairly and comment wisely that you become biased to your own ideas. You criticize our writings because we are college students and young but do not realize that you offend most of us when you do this. I am always offended when I go to your class and have been on many occasions but I never tell you of my offense because you make me completely uncomfortable so I never say a word.

--snip--

I am a very religious man and I love every one but I will forward this letter to the head of your department so he can see that I am a serious student who does not deserve the grade you will give him because I write so very well.

According to the person who shared this partially redacted note (so as to protect the innocent), the writer of this missive, who writes so! very! well! is indeed a native speaker of the language, indeed one whose background suggests access to the very best schools. So, any lack of command of the language is entirely his or her fault, as is the stunning lack of socialization or introspection.

Let's all point and laugh!

Carnival of the Recipes #135, the "Dinner and a Movie" edition is up at Blabber Heads.

Buckethead recently sent me a link to an interesting article in The Consumerist on how one regular innocent music fan found himself driven to desperate piracy by the perversity of the record industry.

In short, this music fan, who has given in his estimate about $20,000 to the various labels in revenues over the years, found himself stymied by the DRM on the most recent Luna album.

Last week while I was busy importing my CD's into iTunes so I could listen to them on my iPod (a most tedious task), I hopped on the internet. iTunes was busy importing a Luna CD, one of my favorite bands, so I decided to see what they were up to since they disbanded a few years back. After a few clicks in Google, I found a blog site describing a posthumous, internet-only release of a collection of covers the band had recorded throughout their career. While I already had many of the songs (they were often featured on b-sides and imported singles, etc.), I couldn't resist tracking down this compilation. As I read further on the blog site I encountered a link to a .zip file containing the entire collection ripped as 128kbps mp3's.

While I must admit being tempted to simply click away and download the collection, I though to myself, "Well, if I buy the music it's only $10, and this way I will get high quality .WAV files. Besides, it's not like Luna were getting rich off of their careers, they could use the money..."

So I headed to Rhino's online store, purchased the music, and downloaded the files.

A little later that evening, I tried to move the .WMA files into iTunes, when I received an error message telling me that iTunes could not import them because they were copy protected. I downloaded the files again (which took another 12 minutes) and again, the same message.

So I called Rhino customer support and after an 8 minute wait spoke with a representative. She informed me that the files were indeed copy protected so that I could only play them on specific music players, most notably not iTunes.

"You don't understand," I said, "These files were not copied or pirated, I actually purchased them."

"Well" she responded, "You didn't actually purchase the files, you really purchased a license to listen to the music, and the license is very specific about how they can be played or listened to."

There's much more there, about how Rhino eventually advised him to keep trying illegal maneuvers until he found a way around their DRM to make the files work with iTunes.

Now, leaving aside the perversity on display here - do the right thing and get giant hassles in return - I am appalled that Rhino, of all labels, hasn't gotten their act together in the eight-odd years since Napster first came on the scene. Eight long years of missing opportunities, making mistakes, and alienating the same public that should be their partners in sharing awesome music together.
And yet, the song the labels sing now is exactly the one they sang when I left the music business four years ago: electronic files are murder; physical media is the past, present and future; consumers are licensees, not purchasers, of the music they consume; and what the hell is with this tech-mology stuff anyway? And that's a death warrant.

Some of you will remember a couple years ago that a Harvard Business School professor did a huge study of the effect on downloaded music on retail music sales (recently published in the Journal of Political Economy as "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis." At the time, he found that the effect was exactly "none." Declines in music sales could be explained through other means, for example the proliferation of other forms of media entertainment competing with music for the public's attention and dollars, as well as the end of the long era in which record and tape owners were upgrading their old media catalogs to compact disc. Indeed, downloaders either tended to download music they'd not have bought anyway, or to treat downloading as a way to sample new music that they then might pay for. In fact, the evidence suggested that there was a significant 'long-tail' effect at work - the million-sellers lost some sales to downloading, but the download-assisted boost in sales of the other thousands of half-forgotten albums out there more than made up for the decline at the top.

Whether or not you agree that downloading in and of itself has a minimal net negative impact on record sales, the facts are that CD sales are down 20% from last year. It now takes far fewer sales to have a #1 hit than it did even three years ago. Right now, indie band The Arcade Fire have the number-two album in the country. What!?! They're fine. They're alright. But they're just The Arcade Fire, and their new album has gotten a lot of good press. Whoop-de-doo. Since they haven't shot platinum yet, I can only surmise that they the overall sales pool is indeed shrinking. Further evidence: abrasive 80s revivalists !!! (that's pronounced however you want - "bang bang bang" or "chick chick chick" are the ones I've heard) are also in the Billboard Top 200. Now, I've heard !!!'s new album, and yeah sure it's fine. But I'm a little bewildered as to why a band whose closest antecedents are cult heroes like Wire and Television and whose name isn't even pronounceable on the radio have a charting album.

I will probably get tired of saying this some day, but not yet: The idiots who run the music industry are slowly strangling their baby by steadfastly refusing to pursue creative ways to adapt to changing realities and partner with their audiences to create new means of selling and buying music. Instead, they are suing the dead and prepubescent children, lashing out at the exact same people they should be embracing, the exact same people who are the key to their future. (Except the dead guy, of course, but he did leave behind children who are currently being sued in his place.) They are even forcing out executives, like EMI's Ted Cohen, who have advocated forcefully and articulately for the industry to stop shitting where it eats its dinner.

For a while, I felt a little bad about all the old-school executives who knew music and only music, who I assumed were ignorant of computers and digital media and only needed some time to get used how things work today. Then, I thought, they'd turn it around and stop it with the lawsuits and the rootkits and the $18 compact discs and the single-vendor licensed media files. But I'm now convinced I was giving them far too much credit. No, those money-grubbing bastards deserve every ounce of pain and humilation that is undoubtedly coming to them.

[wik] Just a final observation. A computer recently came through the tech support shop where I work, that contained more than 12,000 files purchased from iTunes. Can you count with me the ways in which this person has used his money unwisely?

What does it say about me that my initial reaction to an email from the Humane Society titled "Cruel seal hunt just a week away" is "Huh. Wonder if I can get some time off from work?"

People who know me well know that my political views are a hybrid - I'm incredibly socially liberal (in fact I'm buying heroin from a gay BDSM enthusiast right now while putting the finishing touches on my homemade beer sales business) but economically variable.

You see, I’m a knee-jerk fiscal liberal. How can it possibly be that there are limits to what the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world (and how good it feels to write that, ya know!) can accomplish? But of course, this lovely theory crashes and burns in practice. I would love, in an ideal world, for our government to handle feeding the poor and clothing the naked and fighting all the good wars and making peace in all the bad ones, but here in the real world, the list of low points in government competence just in recent years is longer than King Kong’s member and growing. Therefore all available evidence suggests that, no matter what my candyland fantasies are, the government is really bad at doing anything even slightly more important than deciding on which Thursday Thanksgiving should fall.

Let me share with you a story I heard recently. It’s a funny story, if by funny you mean “sad,” and it’s a perfect parable for why our government is not to be trusted under any circumstances.

You see, the small seaside town I live in is home to a National Park Service historical site, which as I’m sure you’re all aware means there’s some land, a brown building, and some signs around telling people what it’s all about. As far as parks go there’s a lot of cool stuff to draw on, including a fullsize working replica of a cargo ship from the great age of sail, numerous historic homes, and the good (?) luck to have been the site of a major event in early American history that still brings in tourists by the busload.

But for all the potential, the tours and interpretation at this park (“interpretation” in the public history sense of ‘helping people understand what they’re looking at and why it matters’) are kind of for shit, and I’ve always wondered why.

Back in the 1980s, my small seaside town was not as gentrified as it currently is, and very close to downtown there existed some pockets of serious sketchiness. At that time, the lead protection ranger (the guys with guns) at the Park was a guy whose name I’ll say was Duke. Duke’s job was to enforce the laws of the USA and the Commonwealth on the grounds of the park and in all the adjacent buildings it owned. He had a team of armed rangers who helped him with this important mandate.

One day, the local police force turned up in great numbers to a house owned by the National Park Service, and proceeded to invade the upstairs apartment, which was rented out to civilian tenants. It turned out that this raid was the culmination of a three-year investigation into a major drug trafficking ring operated out of that apartment, which I remind you was owned by the United States of America. Among the parties convicted of felonies were two of the park’s protection rangers, who had participated in drug transactions while armed, on duty, in the employ of the Federal government, on the grounds of the very park they were being paid to protect.

Duke was taken entirely by surprise by the raid; nobody had thought to tell him. It soon emerged that this was deliberate – the drug activity had gone on for so long, and so blatantly, that the local police were convinced that he was either in on it or spectacularly, stupendously, incompetent.

This being the US Government, Duke was not fired from his job for being stupendously incompetent at doing it. Instead, he was placed on a brief administrative leave and then moved to another department. That’s right… Duke, a dangerously incompetent law enforcement officer whose training was nonetheless in the area of law enforcement, was put in charge of the Interpretation department, with the historians and tour guides, where he remains to this day. That is why the tours for the most part suck at the National Park in my small seaside town.

In another more recent case, it took four years for the National Park Service to terminate the employment of a ranger at the same park who was convicted on child porn charges, including, I believe, some based on evidence found on his work computer.

So, as I prepare my 1040s this year, I thank the deity of my choice (“none of the above”) that the business of running our country is in good hands. Clearly the US Government is using my little National Park site as a holding cell for all the morons and misfits, the drain circlers and mouthbreathers, the nebbishes and ne’er-do-wells, who they accidentally gave jobs to and now feel too sorry for to fire. With all of them here, everyone else can go about the business of managing our nations’ affairs with the intelligence, decency, and wisdom that such weighty matters deserve.

Clearly.

In all my life, in nearly thirty years of NASCAR fandom (albeit casual), I have never before seen someone finish a race upside down and on fire.

[wik] For those of you who might be less than fully up to speed on the intricacies of stock car racing, please consult this handy primer on the subject from QandO.

[alsø wik] And because I think it's funny, here's a good recap of the race from the New York Times, including a great shot of the thrillingly close finish.

Here I sit, watching (several years after the fact) the film Jackass, after the MTV show of the same name. Currently on the screen, Steve-O is attempting to cross a tightrope over an alligator pit wearing nothing but a helmet, shoes, and a jock strap with several pounds of meat stuffed in the waistband.

Recently, I watched the new Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, which I highly recommend to all. Some of you know Mike Judge from Beavis and Butthead. Others from King of the Hill. Still others may have seen Office Space a dozen times. The common thread through all these movies is an abiding contempt of the deeply stupid and pointless things and people that make life a little poorer for having encountered them. People mistook Beavis and Butthead for a mere celebration of dimwitted hijinks - I swear to you there's some anger in there also. How else do you explain the Halloween special where Butthead meets a farmer who dismembers people and helps the farmer, in a sequence what actually manages to be a little chilling despite the lo-rent animation, capture and dismember Beavis? King of the Hill features an endless parade of do-gooding dipshits who wreak havoc in the name of 'helping.' Office Space goes after the pettiness of managerial power and the deadening, soul-sapping routines that office life can draw one into.

Anyway, what was I saying before I disappeared up my own anus... O yeah. Idiocracy. Good movie. Not as good as Office Space but pretty great nonetheless, about an average man of today who wakes up 500 years in the future to find he's the smartest man on the planet. The President is a professional wrestler. Garbage is piled up everywhere. La-Z-Boys come with plumbing and a nice comfy toilet seat. The #1 show in the USA is called "Ow! My Balls!" and the biggest Oscar winner is titled Ass. Our hero, because he speaks in complete sentences, is told he "talks like a fag."

So.

Thesis A: Steve-O hanging from a rope as crocodiles lunge at him from below, attracted to the chicken carcass stuffed into his jockstrap, is comic genius of the first water.

Thesis B: Steve-O hanging from that rope not that different from "Ow! My Balls!," the type of comedy which Mike Judge holds in total contempt as the lowest common denominator of culture, a baseless, graceless, debasing parade of farting ass cheeks and nut-shots that not only lacks in any intellectual content, but which actually is hostile to the very idea of intellect, and which as a consequence impoverishes the culture that enjoys it.

So I ask you: as I sit here laughing my ass off, how can both A and B possibly be simultaneously true? They sure as hell seem to be.