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By jdb, March 17, 2009

Maybe I was wrong. In this post, I was concerned about the backwards-lookingness of indie rock during the last decade, but my spasm of FUD has abated. The pop music of today looks forward to the future enough. Plenty. It’s never been the job of indie/college music to look forward or explore new territory – ironically, given that its for the young, but apparently not young enough… mainstream pop music is where the new sound comes from and it’s the fifteen and sixteen year olds that embrace the new sounds. Until, that is, they become mature and investigate the campy sounds of their fathers. That’s why twenty something scenester stuff sounds like an amalgam of kitsch. It’s created by the effort of growing up. Boo, I say, boo!

The same thing happened in the eighties’ indie/college scene. Lest we forget how ‘retro’ REM was or how kitschy the b-52′s were. I suppose they reflected certain cultural obsessions of conservative times.

*Speaking of Amy Whinehouse, some guy told me he thought she was the best thing that had happened to R&B in a generation! Gross. As a pretty big fan of the classic genre, of which Whineho is a pale imitation, I think if you substitute ‘Last’ for ‘Best’ in that phrase then you are getting somewhere.

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By jdb, February 28, 2009

Bowie is overrated.

Really, I mean he’s not that great. He just gets lots of great press every time his catalog is reissued. He keeps getting called ‘innovative’. Maybe it’s because he plays the fashion game and just looks kind of innovative, becuase the music never was. He began doing “Art Rock” when it was the cool thing to get into. Then he jumped on the “Glam Rock” bandwagon which was already popular when he began doing it. Then he changed his sound again to what Eno and Fripp were already doing. In fact, Eno played a big part in his “Sound” not to mention his “Vision” during those years. Then in the 1980’s he copied the Duran Duran “Look and Style”, which was their attempt to copy Roxy Music during the “Siren” period, and Bowie rode on the coattails of a great producer into pop megastardom, just as he had ridden Eno’s into pop artdom. How was this guy ‘progressive’ at all?

He may not be the musical heavyweight people make him out to be, but Bowie IS in the fashion game, a creature of it, a mover and shaker, surely as influential as Gucci – well maybe not quite. He certainly helped transform the industry into one of mega-media image instead of music. The music business in general is fashion. By this I mean not only the specific kind of fashion, clothing etc., but also general fashion – trends, trendiness. The buying habits of a jaded public in search of ‘the new’ and a youth in search of an identity that they see as separate from thier elders. When a band is in fashion, it is popular. When out, it is not.

If a record company executive doesn’t think he can sell a band’s look, that band will either wear what they are asked to wear or begin to say goodbye to thier contract because they are not playing the game. If they do wear the clothes the designers hand them, they are not exactly going to brag about it. It’s embarrassing. Unless you rap. A lot of Hip-hop dudes seem to think it’s neat being a mannequin.

But wait a minute, wasn’t rock, at least, supposed to be honest? I think there were honest people who played it. There were a precious few guys who got to play what they wanted and wear what they wanted – when that kind of thing was fashionable. But the crap they were surrounded by was just a show. In the midst of the show some people got some honest expression across, gave people something real. At best, Rock was a show about honesty. At it’s best, it was real – it testifed to real human contact and emotion. It didn’t need lipstick. Lipstick is the oil that seperates skin, that keeps me from you, and the kiss of rock was late night and raw.

Rock was a show about honesty. Or, in the case of Bowie, covered as he was in the trappings of old-time vaudevillian show biz, progressive only in name, the way a vinyl suburb symbolized the immediate future, in the case of Bowie, Rock was a show without honesty.

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By jdb, February 28, 2009

I was reading Gilles Ivains Situationist essay “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, because I am passionately interested in cranky old semi-marxist art movements.  Anyhow, I came to this last passage:

 ”The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas — and of Reno, that caricature of free love — though they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.”

And it reminded me of disneyland – and, Lo and Behold, this guy has written an entire essay comparing the SI to Walt Disney. Awesome!

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By jdb, December 11, 2008

(This post is from 2007)

Information wants to be deleted. It wants to be forgotten to make room for more. Observe a fragment of information over it’s ‘lifespan’, and not only does information in any form tend towards stasis, passively awaiting it’s fate, it tends towards the null – whether in our brains, in the noosphere, or the cybernetic infosphere. We have to want to remember, we have to want to communicate, or information becomes nothing.

Information does not want to be free. It wants to sit where it is until we, for whatever reason, reveal it to other people. We move it, we keep it, examine it, collect it, it’s not enough to claim that information, like some vital force that has a life of it’s own, does anything at all except sit and gather e-dust. Or that it is ‘trapped’ when it is in it’s natural condition of inertia. Humans move information, and we are responsible for the consequences.

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By jdb, November 15, 2008

All thats left of that cold war rebellion, that great swath of culture centered around the rock music of the 20th century, is kitsch. A kid in 69, 79, 89, maybe even 99, saw a Stratocaster and instinctively understood that he could fight back – he could stick it up the bad guy’s ass, maybe even use culture to affect social change. It seems that in 2009 a kid, maybe even the same kid, anyone under fifty or so, sees a Stratocaster and thinks it looks cool in his apartment downtown, leaning up against the moldy orange and brown afghan his girlfriend bought at a ‘vintage’ boutique. The once proud stratocaster is reduced from icon of rebellion to cultural artifact on a landscape where it’s just more stuff, castrated to the point where it has negative ability to create new culture – instead it spawns the same old shit. Removed from any meaningful context and strewn in with any other aesthetically compatible object, it’s NormanRockwellized, Republicanized. It’s fashion, and fashion is just what you wear when you are young and moving to the city.

All of those wonderful expressions of the 20th century really are gone now, mixed up and spit back out with plenty of black and pastel paint, from the gaping maw of the great corporations into the bucket shaped mouths of the waiting baby birds, three generations of people rendered so powerless that they can do nothing but gaze inwards and place their faith in some facsimile of culture whipped up in the boardroom by the powers that be, or gaze fondly through buddy holly specs at an idealized past, when culture was still a living, organic thing made by the people of the street, not the people of the ivy league marketing program.

In the final analysis, it’s all because the assholes won. We should have known this since sometime around the anti-WTO rallies, when a bunch of weak and scared children thought they could fight the massive edifice of modern capital by breaking a couple of windows and throwing rocks. They gazed up at a wall of cops in black body armor with paramilitary training, got the shit beat out of them, a faceful of teargas, and a lifetime of federal surveilance as a reward. The assholes had won, and turned the struggling people into marks, measured only by productivity and the size of bank debt that can be bought and sold.

So put on your bomber jacket, slap on them horn rims and hop on the scooter, baby, and go go go. Its a long hard slog out of the burbs and into the city, into the fake night of seafoam green jukebox signs, made in China circa 2009, ride to the newly revitalized town center where the good bottled brew can be found, where the best vintage dresses hang by the fistful in shining boutiques that line the clean white streets. Go, baby, Go, keep looking back.