The Immortals #93 - Booker T. And The MG's

Too much is made of their being an integrated band. Recognition for their monumental importance as the house band at Stax, a fine bit of historical revisionism. Their sound? Overestimated. And that's a shame, because they really should be loved for exactly what they were.

First, addressing the obvious- they had no vocalist. One of only 2 entrants in the Immortals list not to have featured a singer. But, at the risk of sounding an apologist, I'd posit that the organ and guitar on those records were a duo worthy of mention alongside any fronting duo in rock history. And I don't mean Booker T. Jones and Steve Cropper, not the men or how they played those instruments/parts- that's an important distinction. I mean that the organ and the guitar on those records were Mick and Keith, John and Paul... or maybe more appropriately Sam and Dave. Even backing Wilson Pickett or Eddie Floyd, the instrumental track itself always seemed to present another frontman and sidekick, commanding the listener up front in the mix.

It's good that they had their effect on other people's records, because they released precious few compositions of their own (the landmark Green Onions contains a mere 3 original tunes.) Most if Onions is composed of reproductions of songs they'd already fleshed-out on other people's records, and yeah, it's sort of impossible not to prefer the originals we know and love. That's not to say that it isn't a sheer pleasure to listen to Booker T. and the boys- that title track is utterly un-improvable. But it would frankly be a lot easier to overlook the fact of their own songs' scarcity if it didn't highlight a suspicion you get listening to the MG's: that in a few records-worth of material, they could have ended up so much more than extras for the Akroyd/Landis canon.

In another universe they might have been the Animals (if never the Stones): remembered for their lasting influence but also beneficiaries of an era of mania that let them cash in while they were young enough to enjoy it. Instead, they get the distinction of being imitated in modern music just as often as they're sampled outright, a more obscured legacy (though certainly one of honor itself.) Maybe that's all fitting, just as well for the world's best backing band.

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The Immortals #94 - Nine Inch Nails

Nine Inch Nails are the most popular "industrial rock" band of all time. So yeah, Trent Reznor got famous, but just technically.

No era of popular music was ever as accepting of naked emotional release as the 1990s, but as the grunge boom snowballed out of control, we lost our sense for deciding quality from insistence, meaning any two-bit lump could and would be signed to a multi-record deal worth many major label millions for our eagerness to confuse earnestness with talent. This would be taken to even further extremes (bordering on the grotesque and/or humorous) in the early 2000s with nu-metal and emo ascendant, but in 1994, that shit was juuust about to ripen. And so, after a modestly successful (but only cautiously embraced) also-ran debut called Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails was ready set the new curve.

The resulting album, The Downward Spiral, feels pretty transparently like exactly the record Steve Albini and Brian Eno's hyperneurotic trust fund kid would make. And not really in a cool way, but I fully get how it would have been taken that way 15 years ago.

In hindsight, think the most compelling thing about the album today- like so much about the alternative/industrial genres- isn't the fact of it's peripheral associations. No matter how schlocky Mark Romanek's video for "Closer" seems in a post-Saw-franchise-society, the truth is it's actually every bit as vital as the song for most of us, and probably more. Johnny Cash had a knack for stealing the songs he covered by virtue of the indelible, unmistakable mark he left on the source material, but I think we can all tell that he had an easier time of it elevating album-closer "Hurt" by virtue of the patina of superficiality it carries when eventually filed away in the Reznor oeuvre. I mean, Bowie himself wrote the damned piece in the original "Immortals" issue of RS, and for a while there in my thought proccess that alone seemed as interesting thing to write about as anything else related to The Downward Spiral.

And it was. And that's why I just said that. Yet Michael Trent Reznor remains a semi-famous, sort-of rock star... and a damned millionaire to boot! Does that dredge up any of the anger we were supposedly feeling and embracing in the 90s? Not really.

What were we talking about again?

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The Immortals #95 - Lynyrd Skynyrd

Today I talk about my personal feelings regarding Lynyrd Skynyrd.

*Ahem*

Fuck classic rock
Fuck 3 guitars
Fuck solos
Fuck that hat
Fuck saying fuck Neil Young
Fuck multiple bridges
Fuck back-up singing wives
Fuck pride
Fuck confederate flags
Fuck stupid spellings for stupid band names
Fuck reunion tours
Fuck plane crashes

I'll try to get it some day, I really will. In another life, I'll say that my 3 years in Arkansas were an elaborate field study of southern culture. I'll actually chart the estimated thousand times a month that Clearchannel stations play "Sweet Home Alabama" in a given month and publish colorful spreadsheets. I'll listen to more than the first 3 minutes of "Freebird" before getting sick of it and turning it off. I promise I'll try. But now, at the age of 26, I know that I've spent enough of my life peripherally engaged by Lynyrd Skynyrd to know that I've never been ready to give them a fair shake. And I'm still not now.

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Neon Hustle's Totally Subjective and Woefully Incomplete Guide to the Best Music of 2008, Part 1

This is part 1 of an ongoing, year-end series from your buddies at NH.

Entries are presented in no particular order. Each author's parts were crafted independently of one another, and should pretty much never be taken as representative of an opinion/endorsement by the collective. Except when they are. But that'll probably be for totally different reasons anyway.

Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight

Let's call a spade a spade here, shall we? Emo generally sucks. Beyond the monotonic soundscape and whiny upper-middle class perspective lies a wasteland of lyrics so vastly insipid that Lou Pearlman has to be ROFLing in his prison cell.

With the bar set so low, then, it shouldn't be hard to make a "good" emo record, and The Midnight Organ Fight is certainly that. It's also one of the best albums of the year. It's caustic and funny and genuine -- you have to be legitimately scarred to write lines like "You won't find love in a hole / It takes more than fucking someone / You don't know to keep warm". And the music itself is strikingly affecting alt-folk, not the same upbeat pop-punk tune we've heard scores of times from the likes of Panic! At the Disco or their unfortunate clone, My Chemical Romance.

-Steven

Ezra Furman and the Harpoons - Inside the Human Body

There's something of a rarity that exists today, in a world about to see the release of the first 10 disc CD/Blu-Ray volley of the "Neil Young Archives" box sets and which welcomed the 8th (eighth!) installment of Dylan's long-running Bootleg series in 2008. That rare thing to which I refer is the opposite of those retrospective-obsessed dinosaurs: the young, unestablished artist whose output isn't yet outpaced by their creative productivity. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but sometimes it can mean you've just been lucky enough to stumble in on a musician documenting the process of writing good songs and throwing them together to make an honest to goodness long-player. And if you're lucky and it turns out that his records don't suck, that's pretty sepcial, right?

Ezra Furman is still basically a kid, his Harpoons having been formed in 2006 after playing parties at Tufts, this year saw their 3rd album, Inside the Human Body released on Minty Fresh. Furman spends 45 minutes careening between imitations of influences and contemporaries alike, and at times you'll swear Furman's vocals are channeling Alec Ounsworth, Gordon Gano, Spencer Krug, and/or Robert Smith, even as his band plays indie rock, folk-punk, or Modern Lovers-styled decosntructo-pop. You can call it amatuerish and derrivitive, or you can step back and wonder at how anybody writes a track as monolithic as "Take Off Your Sunglasses."

-Brendan

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver's debut dropped in February, which means it's been talked about as a potential record of the year for so long that the "it's overrated" backlash has begun.

It's all flimshaw.

There's something timeless about a lot of the songs on For Emma, or maybe anachronistic. It's easy enough to imagine "Skinny Love" being sung around a campfire on the American frontier, or "The Wolves" being the keystone to a movie soundtrack 100 years from now. And in the here and now, there's an austere intimacy to each track that provides a nice antidote to the in-your-face spectacles that defined 2008.

-Steven

David Byne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Old people would have you believe that Everything that Happens could never be as good as the first Byrne/Eno record, 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I know they are old people, because they probably care about the influence of samples and world music on types of borderline popular music that nobody actually listens to today.

Despite the reported influences of gospel and soul having been filtered through Byrne's hermit-like prickishness or Brian Eno's eventual and complete tanshumanist merge of consciousness into a downloadable iPhone application, Everything that Happens is good because it's made up of songs. Real, catchy, pretty songs, songs better than anything either has released in quite a while. And if it sometimes sounds like a lost hit from 1988, well, that's probably all for the better then, isn't it?

-Brendan

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The Immortals #96 - Martha and the Vandellas

Everything I wrote about Berry Gordy applies to Martha and the Vandellas too. Plus a few controversial claims which I will make after the jump.

They're ranked ahead of the Supremes on this list because, on average, any three members of the Vandellas were better singers than any three members in the Supremes' history.

The Vandellas had nearly half as many "hits", but they were all roughly 2.6 times better than most of those Supremes songs.

Martha and the Vandellas were more popular with black people at the time. Back then (as with today, but especially back then) that was important because rock and roll had only been stolen a couple of decades earlier. White peoples' taste wasn't that good in the early going (that's why we'll probably never catch up.)

Martha didn't leave Detroit.

Unlike most "pop" girl groups, when you listen to Martha and the Vandellas, you can feel your organs start burning inside your chest a little. Which is rad.

20th Century Masters: The Millenium Collection by Martha and the Vandellas

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The Immortals #97 - Diana Ross and the Supremes

The significance of Diana Ross and the Supremes is not about Diana Ross. Everybody, from Rolling Stone to the Kennedy Center would have you believe that she is a special talent, and honestly, yeah, she could sing a little. But that's not why she matters (if she matters.) Neither is her relevance to anybody about Florence Ballard, or Cindy Birdsong, or Mary Wilson, or Holland, Dozier and Holland or the Funk Brothers or fucking anybody else save for one man. The significance of Diana Ross and the Supremes is that they were the crowing achievement of one man: Berry Gordy Jr.

Pop music in the 1960s wasn't really driven by The Beatles and Dylan and Brian Wilson all pushing one another, though that's a nice way to romanticize everything. In fact, those artists influenced one another and many more artists to make music that was on the fringe of the furthest acceptable boundaries at the time for rock music. Smile is nice and all, but even had it been released when originally planned, it wasn't going to rival the sales of "She Loves You" 45s, nor would it be accepted as idealized gospel of the psychedelic brilliance of what is, in hindsight, a great and important time in our cultural history. Fuck that shit. The popular consciousness is represented first and foremost by what sold enough to qualify as truly "pop" music, and the man who made the most profitable, popular music on the planet for the better part of a decade was Berry Gordy with his Motown sound. Keep your pitiful sales of Revolver, to this day more people know twice as many Gordy Motown hits by heart as can even name a track other than "Yellow Submarine." Truth. Hendrix is the soundtrack to our revisionism. Gordy, Motown, and Diana Ross and the Supremes were the soundtrack to the entire country's trip to the grocery store.

Included in Gordy's genius was his coordination of talented people with interesting people. That's what differentiated him from the other most important producer of that era, Phil Spector. Spector made hits without personalities- name me the drummer who pounded the first kick, kick-kick, snare on "Be My Baby." Nobody can. Practically everybody who wrote/co-produced/played/sang on a Spector hit in that era was sublimated to one man's singular vision... and that vision was more or less of himself.

Gordy, on the other hand, made personalities into hits, taking a just-alright singer who was kind of an insufferable bitch and made her the name in front for an already successful group. He recognized what sold their records and gave her top-billing, growing both the person and the brand in the process. Maybe the greatest music marketer of all time, and he had an ear too. He made more hits than he could count. Any of them could represent the man. But on this list, he's represented by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

The Best of Diana Ross and the Supremes by Diana Ross and the Supremes

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Invisible Men

To anybody who's reading this, yes, we still exist.

But Just Barely.

See, we have jobs. We have other projects. We have stressful and time-consuming pursuits of postgraduate degrees. And at the end of the day, Top Chef ain't gonna watch itself, you dig?

An idea for a new beginning for Neon Hustle has been floated around. Perhaps it will take, perhaps it won't. Either way, we're just as pop/culture-obsessive as ever. I'd recommend against removing NH from your feeds, as I have a feeling we'll come up with something eventually to intrude upon your minds once more.

Thanks for reading.

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IX: OMG GG

After undertaking to re-watch the first season of The OCsuch that I could write essays by the episode, a curious thing happened: I couldn't stop watching. The same vortex that ensnared me on its premiere had me again. This isn't to say that I've stopped - far from it - but to explain my curiously intertwined absence.

Gossip Girl is the sort of cultural phenomenon that can escape one entirely if they don't own a television and aren't plugged into the right circles. I know this because it happened to me. When I woke up one morning to find my days filled with blog subscriptions instead of my second job, I found a world with a show so popular it has its own tag on Gawker. And here I thought I was still with it?

Whereas Josh Schwarz's previous project, The OC came at the beginning of the TV revolution - DVR was a distinctly luxury item and streaming piracy was naught but a twinkle in the eyes of the college students who scoured the torrents for Canadian Television rips of network shows - GG arrived into a world whose television viewers were in control. Apart from this, and its meager challenge to the final season of The Wire for the title of "Cultural Item of Note: 2007-2008 Television Season Category," I can think of no other reason why Gossip Girl did not reach the pan-cultural, iconic status of The OC. Not only is it practically the same show, but it arrived in a culture even so status obsessed that it can sustain The Hills and an American edition of the British OK tabloid.



Gossip Girl is, in its essence, the refinement of The OC. A comparison less on its tastes, sentiments, or even a coastal rivalry, GG is Schwarz distilling the same plots, the same themes, and even some of the same characters through the filters of network lessons learned and East Coast location filming.

In his new series, Schwarz has matured not just in his style, but also in his content. In Episode 9, "The Heights," The OC is at its high school soap opera best. Even with its B-Plot of the Balboa Wetlands development project, it is a John Hughes movie writ television. The tomboyish friend who helps her guy friend crush get the other girl, the missed connections that nearly tear apart the nascent star-crossed teenage romance, the showdown on the soccer field where Ryan tackles his nemesis because he thinks Luke is still after his girl! In this episode, and indeed much of that which redeems the series, the is high school, or at least its cultural simulacrum. Distorted, Technicolor, glossed, and exaggerated but not so impossible as to take it completely out of the sphere of the shared experience.

Gossip Girl owes no allegiance to your petty nostalgia. Insomuch as school exists, it is purposeful background to absurd shenanigans. Sure, in Orange County there was the USC obsession, but in the Upper East Side the Ivy League application process involves courting your author/idol and outing your best friend as a recovering alcoholic. And if you're not at that school, you're a home-schooled filmmaker. Or whatever it is that Vanessa does when she's not turning Rufus's gallery into a cafe.

The OC thrived on contrivance. Characters drawn deep enough to like and shallow enough to turn the plot on the dime, wildly unlikable personas cast as unlikely heroes, aspirational locations and people and products. And though I'd be lying if I said GG weren't possessed of these same flaws, I'd be no less dishonest if I didn't admit it I loved it. In part for the same reasons that I got caught up in The OC in the first place, but also because GG, for all its flaws, seems- at least on first watching- to dig a little bit deeper for its story lines. Little J's pyrrhic war with Blair, Dan and Serena's romance, Rufus's tragi-comic love life. Though these stories on occasion fall victim to television's peculiar coincidences, they're driven by characters that both define and are defined by their experiences.

And it's not that Gossip Girl didn't open the second season with a bizarre series of wildly unlikely and unfortunate events that all led up to one wonderfully salacious payoff. But at least when GG does bad, it does bad incredibly well.

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VIII: The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies

Some may consider it an abomination to even mention Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the same breath as The OC. However, it is in the same way that we owe Kafka the psychological referent for the nightmare of the bureaucratic state that we owe Solzhenitsyn for the visceral emotional referents of the autocratic regime. In America, we thankfully live far from the Soviet reign of terror, but The Gulag Archipelago is rife with reminders that the distance has been growing narrower at an alarming rate. The lack of recourse to the rule of law, the coercive interrogation techniques, the use of the legal system for political ends, the uncertainty.

When Episode 8 finds Julie Cooper attempting to relegate Marissa to an institution, without the consent of her father, we find her in a situation that is physically entirely dissimilar from that of Ivan Denisovich. For one thing, Southern California is much warmer. But for another, when we are supposed to assume adolescence for everything and we are supposed to accept Julie Cooper as a scheming dictator, we can see something closer. Solzhenitsyn's lessons may have been meant for his people, and may even have been meant as specific warnings against the dangers of the Soviet state, but their significance goes much further. In his writings under threat of destruction, imprisonment, and death, Solzhenitsyn's stories of the terror and absurdity and incoherence and danger of a totalitarian state bent on the preservation of power for its own sake stand as a warning against all malfeasance and corruption within the status quo. It is naive folly to say that either power or government is intrinsically malevolent, but it is thanks to writers like Solzhenitsyn that we will always have the memory of just how far astray either can go such that we may stay far from such paths.

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VII: Tijuana Hangover

Now think about what this band could sound like on their first full length. Think about what it could sound like when they tighten up the beats and make the arrangements go somewhere, but keep the fun and the energy. Think about what it will sound like when you’re pushing those nifty bass lines through something other than your computer speakers. And think what will happen when that bass player realizes he can play half the notes and be twice as awesome. Pretty sweet, right? (10/08/07)



At Indefinite Articles, the writers undertake Preemptive Strikes, a category of posts subtitled: "Movies we haven't seen, books we haven't read, games we haven't played." Their Long Hauls tackle bodies of work as varied as Highlander, Star Trek: TOS, Doug, and Metal Gear Solid. Writing this as I am under the marque of my series of a season of a show off the air for nearly five years, I have a certain affinity for this project.

Between these two extremes of criticism, lies the status quo of the blogosphere. With neither the willingness to admit to their preconceptions nor the reflection of posterity, the electronically chattering class hops to keyboards as quickly as possible to register its opinions on whatever movie or record crosses their path. Now that "the scoop" is had by hitting post as quickly as possible, one needs only get a link to an mp3 and the critical equivalent of "OMG FRIST!" to claim blog supremacy. Beware quality; that way outdated timestamps lay.

Thus, we have the cycle of buzz: a band exists, gains exposure and then hits critical mass. Immediately, there is a spike in the blogosphere's attention before the only one's inquiring are the one's who care about the music. The brown dwarf that remains after a buzz band's rise to glory.

It was after just such supernova that I first looked at the Black Kids. It was October and I was hopeful. Going back and listening to Wizard of Ahhhhs, I can't help but feel it still. Listening to "Hit the Heartbreaks" the mugginess that pulls the voices together and makes a frenzy of the synthesizers and teenaged voices may not sound professional, but it lent them an urgency more compelling than most punk bands.

On Partie Traumatic, The Black Kids lose this along with much of what made them so special. One of the difficulties in listening to a band that cleans up its sound having finally gained access to professional studio, gear, and production assistance is trying to disentangle one's own ideal images from what the artists envisioned. When the Mountain Goats left the lo-fi era for the 4AD era, they picked up a slew of fans but left a few at the onramp wondering what happened to the songwriter who they'd associated with their own militantly lo-fi ethos. The Goats were of course a curious example in that they eventually picked back up many of those fans, but were also notable in that the tidal shift in their music was one of style and not one of quality. The Black Kids could hardly blame the failures of Ahhhs on a broken boombox: Partie Traumatic sounds remarkably similar apart from brighter synthesizers, better vocal tracking, a bevy of overdubs, and a generally more busy soundscape.



Perhaps these things are a matter of taste, but compare - if you can - the first three seconds of the two versions of "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You." In those three seconds, you have the beginnings of all the problems with the sound of this album. For all the band's failures, restraint was hardly one of them but it only worsened in the studio. The original version could admittedly be recorded more cleanly, but its reverb drenched solo guitar succinctly declares the hook and allows plenty of space into which the band can drop. The new one brightens the tone almost to distraction and leads off by scratching the rhythm before a second, almost identical sounding, guitar comes in to clutter up the track even more. The rest of the track feels like a clinical exercise. The backing vocals are sometimes separated out so far that the shouts seem like they're coming from a different room and the hyperactive bassline from the original still hasn't quite found a groove.

Partie Traumatic isn't all bad, and it certainly deserves more consideration than Pitchfork saw fit to give it. At its best, it's an incredibly accessible dance record that has all the inviting post-punk cues that made them the darlings of the blogosphere in the first place. The musicianship is consistently stronger, and the lead vocals are much stronger than before even if the weakness of the backup vocals (more the parts than the voices) is made awkwardly obvious by the brighter production.

Despite its high points, The Black Kids had little hope of recapturing our imaginations with this album. Even were it to have equalled Wizard of Ahhhs, we would have been left wanting because so much of what we loved in it was unrealized potential. To see them here - a record deal, a record - and but no closer to finding the next gear, is perhaps the biggest disappointment in listening to the album.

Still, we should probably be honest with ourselves: where could they have gone? We wanted to believe that their irresistibility would translate into something more and that they could be more than the sum of their influences. But what cause did we have? When Marissa Cooper got in the Cohen's Land Rover to drive down to Tijuana for the weekend on the heels of all her chaos, did we really expect anything else but for her to end up drinking alone in a sketchy bar before overdosing on pills? Nine times out of ten the dancey 80's revival band will remain just that, and just as frequently the poor little rich girl will mix Cuervo and codeine. When the surprises happen, they're brilliant. A glimmer of redemption for Marissa, Turn on the Bright Lights for the hopeful.

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