Here are a few concerts of some smaller bands that I am attending this winter. I suggest taking a look if you enjoy new, live music:
Trampled by Turtles is a small bluegrass band out of Minnesota that mixes classic bluegrass instrumentals with catchy pop hooks. They are playing at the State Theater in Falls Church and the tickets are $15 a piece.
"fun." is a band comprised of ex-format leader Nate Ruess and his compadres from such bands as Steel Train and Anathallo. The band released their first album last year and is on their first U.S. headlining tour. They are stopping in D.C. on December 2nd at the 9:30 club, and the tickets are only $15 a piece.
I know what you're thinking... isn't this the band that is known only for their mediocre pop hit "The Middle" which came out ten years ago? Well I'm here to tell you that they are much more than that and actually have a pretty diverse and long discography. The band has been around since 1993 and have accumulated quite the fan base as seen by the size of the crowd in the video above. They are playing an unheard of small show at the 9:30 club in February which is sure to be an awesome song. They will most likely play some of their deeper licks in this small show which makes it worth the $35 ticket price.
Yes, yes, yes, I know. I've been bad about updating things up here. I have a reason--an excuse--though. And that reason is as follows:
I spent the early part of June applying for a position on the PopMatters blogger staff. Readers, I received that job. Thus, I'll be crashing the boards over there with Bosh-like vehemence. I hope you'll come along for the ride as I take my talents to an even bigger Internet.
I thought I would give you all a taste of the song (and band) that give this blog it's name, My Bloody Valentine's classic track "You Made Me Realise."
"You Made Me Realise" starts out like a pretty run-of-the-mill punk song, even for My Bloody Valentine, but things get pretty turbulent around 1:40 where the song bursts out into shards of hard noise and atonality. At concerts, the band would extend this relatively small span of noise into a span of over twenty minutes that they called "The Holocaust." Witnesses say the experience was much like standing with your head right next to a jet engine, and plenty of people have cited MBV concerts as having given them ear damage. Also note the phantasmagorical video subject. It's hard to say what it all means, let alone how all of it fits together, maybe a more extreme example of the fast, jittery Postcards that we have been reading. I'd say this track and this video are actually pretty postmodern.
This was only the beginning of MBV's progressive noise experiments. They would go on to accomplish much more with their subsequent albums Isn't Anything and Loveless.
I figured I'd link us to some of the key multimedia artifacts that Carl Wilson discusses in the first half of Let's Talk About Love. Might want to break out the earplugs:
First off, I'm digging this conversation about Angela's post. Nice work, folks!
Secondly, my argument for the day is admittedly reductive and concrete, but it's hump day, so I'm begging for a little slack. Upon listening to M83's Before the Dawn Heals Us last night (and BTW, Dawn is the messiest post-shoegaze masterpiece out there, so pick it up promptly), after our class met, I was reminded of this Pitchfork article that calls attention to Anthony Gonzalez's own brand of resistance to power. It was probably a dumb move on his part, which is why he eventually apologized. Regardless, we now have some hump day fodder. Which leads me to all of these points:
After yesterday's conversation, I wanted to call all of your attention to some of the examples that I can conjure which suggest that heterosexual relationships--that frequently normalize heterosexual, childbearing sex--are still at the center of contemporary representations of romance. It's also fitting to note that many of these representations emerge from "reality" and "family" television, so make of that what you will.
Rob Mitchum over at Pitchfork has written an interesting review of U2's recent concert at Chicago's Soldier Field. In many ways, pointing out U2's shameless acts of self-commodifcation are about as commonplace as, well, hearing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" on the radio. However, what's most striking about the article is the way that it reveals U2's (read: Bono's) politicking as its own kind of commodity. Here, all of Bono's touchstone political statements--comments on AIDS in Africa, comments on Iran, and comments on Obama--all come off as trademarked, the type of stuff that seem to reflect Bono's highly stylized political posturing as opposed to any kind of communal, genuinely active kind of activism. Also, these comments are, at this point, so predictable that they seem more choreographed than, well, the concert itself.
Sure, at the end of the day, the world would probably be a better place if we had more Bonos around and fewer--at least as of right now--Kanye Wests, but, seriously, encouraging the crowd to recreate the Milky Way via cell phone couldn't seem less green--and more shameless:
The following clip is simultaneously moving and deeply, deeply troubling. What you’ll see is a montage of clips, the first third of which depict stock images of Americana—football and such. Then, at roughly the 1:35 mark, you’ll see 9/11 footage of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the World Trade Center. All of this is set to the track “A Song for Our Fathers” by the post-rock group Explosions in the Sky.
What’s moving about the clip is that it does a fair job of making a fairly sophisticated political statement about American foreign policy. It also, according to the gloss on youtube, was apparently a class project (grade unknown—to me, at least). In that context, I’d happily give the students credit.
What’s troubling about the clip is that it frames its politics in terms of 9/11—that event is literally and grotesquely the catalyst here—and in doing so soundtracks those politics with EITS’s music. Explosions have been notoriously linked to 9/11 in ways that are flat out wrong. Absolutely wrong. Click here for the poison. And here for the antidote. Sure, the band’s name absolutely demands this type of historicizing, but it’s still unsettling to see how even in an era where nearly open access to media—and the ability to manipulate it—doesn’t always seem to result in increased awareness of what information is actually being manipulated—in short what is true and what isn’t. Certainly there are larger theoretical questions circulating here about the nature of truth and representation, and I’d be happy to see people put pressure on those questions in the comments section. But in this case, the tendency to mythologize EITS as a 9/11 band does them and 9/11 a disservice, I would argue.
What brought all of this up was an attempt to look for a clip of Explosions performing “Catastrophe and the Cure,” a song that presents a dialectical clash between opposite musical dynamics. The title obviously does the same. I intended to place that clip up here as a way of inciting discussion about social and class conflict, and the ways that these issues are at the heart of virtually any discussion of 9/11/01, whether its anniversary remains a day of mourning or a day of service. My general academic interests lie in the ways in which cultural concerns like class conflict weave their way into the sonic fabric of popular music. However, once I typed Explosions’ name into youtube’s search bar, I got a hit for this video, the image of the burning Trade Center ominously gleaming outward from my computer screen.
Despite my initial frustration, I persevered, and I ultimately found the clip for which I was searching. I’ll be curious to hear what people think about it in light of this broader context. Does the song—musically and performatively—provide a corrective to the tensions of the class project clip? Does the band seem particularly political? Does the song seem political? What conflicts—cultural or otherwise—are presented here (if any are)?
As I’ve been snatching up the assorted Loop reissues that have finally seen the light of day, I’ve spent a whole lot of time trying to determine exactly why it is that I’ve been buying these discs with such zeal. To be clear, I like Loop—quite a bit, actually. Their music holds an important place on the underbelly of British indie that will probably forever go unrecognized by most. Whereas their more popular peers The Stone Roses (and countless others at the time) were spackling the airwaves with Smithsian jangle pop that would ultimately usher in the early dreamier days of Britpop (see: Lush, early Ride, etc.), Loop rode singular pulsating riffs into the ground, birthing the violent hypnotic drones that My Bloody Valentine would transform into shoegaze. But Madchester baggy was obviously more danceable, which is at least one of the reasons as to why it holds such a dear place in our collective hearts (New Order being another reason). And so Shaun Rider remains an important figure in the history of late 80s independent music, while Robert Hampson has all but faded away from the pages of history, if he was ever in any kind of history book to begin with.
Having said all that, the fact remains that I don’t like Loop that much. Truly, my current interest in grabbing all of the remastered discs has more to do with archival reasons than anything else: Prior to last year, Loop’s catalogue was impossible to track down, and whatever drips and drabs of it appeared on ebay always sold for outrageous prices. At one point, Heavens End went for something like $90+ US dollars, and as much as I wanted it, well, I was a graduate student at the time. End of story.
Interestingly enough, however, in my current course preparation, I have been forced to revisit, and to rethink, the tensions between formalism and structuralism, and the way that the latter spills over into broader poststructuralist concerns—all of which has actually helped determine why Loop are so vitally important.
As we know, the main thrust of formalism/new criticism was to sever the ties between the work itself and the broader cultural context surrounding it. This insistence that form was its own kind of closed system, albeit one that was unique to each individual work under examination, set the stage for Saussure’s structuralism, in which the linguistic system was seen as closed and governed by deep structural rules—the langue. As Saussure argued, meaning was created (within that system) primarily by difference i.e. we understand the distinction between the signifiers car and cart (even though they only differ by one letter) precisely because they signify different material objects in the world. Saussure’s emphasis on difference, as well as his close attention to language (textuality, we could say), is what laid the groundwork for culturally based semiotic analysis and poststructuralism more generally. To put it another way, I suppose, the argument which posited that there is only the text—the artifact itself—sowed the seeds of its own deconstruction by birthing the argument that there is nothing outside the text. In even briefer terms, formalism and poststructuralism are probably more closely related than they seem at first glance.
Which brings us to Loop. To a certain extent, all that the band presents is form. Arguably, there has never been another band whose name so accurately represents both the sound and structure of their music. On virtually every Loop track, the band locks in tight in 4/4 time. High pitched guitars squeal as they are fed continuously through wah-wah pedals while the drumtrack holds everything firmly in place: the snare is on every 2 and 4; the kickdrum on every one and three; whatever drum fills there are come in straight 16ths, with almost no variation. In short, every song consists of the same basic beat and basic riffs looped back on top of each other, ad infinitum, for ever and ever amen. And that, as uninventive as it sounds, is actually where the brilliance lies, because this hyperformulaic music, in its intense focus on itself, simultaneously forces the listener’s gaze (and ears!) outward to the music surrounding it. In doing so, Loop’s music becomes almost parodic. As the band spins backward and forward over the same sonic ground, often the same chord or two, for the entirety of each of their songs—in many ways signifying nothing, other than predictable form itself—we hear them parodying, and ultimately deconstructing, the predictable formulas of pop music.
To demonstrate, we could turn to The Joshua Tree, released the same year (1987) as Loop’s debut Heavens End. Superficially, the former seems to be more varied in its stylings because it flirts with gospel (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”), American blues and country (“Trip Through Your Wires”), “hard” rock (“Exit”), and a whole lot of stuff that sounds like U2 (“Where the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You,” “One Tree Hill”). That said, there’s absolutely nothing more predictable than a U2 song. We know, because the band telegraphs it so clearly, when there is a chorus coming: it’s right after The Edge’s delay-laden scraping gets a little faster, and Bono starts howling about love or politics or loving politics. In short, it’s music by the numbers, no more complex than Loop.
Which brings us back to my whole formalism as deconstruction argument: As Loop force us to hear in their work nothing but form, they reveal the constrictions of pop music formulas more generally. As those revelations are made clear, we can hear their forms crashing violently against the constrictions of general pop music formalisms. In doing so, Loop tear down the equally predictable work of the bands around them—outside of them—and pull those bands down into that same dirty underbelly.
