When I went to the SFMOMA retrospective with R (in May), there was one piece that really stood out to me– a city map doctored with text that seemed sometimes facetious (a contact address is listed as “2470 Purgatoire”) and sometimes outside cartography’s normal discursive bounds entirely (the legend “Main Gate - Security is a child against a building.”) It was titled “Different Drugs”, by Simon Evans, and when I finally remembered to look him up yesterday, I was thrilled to learn that all of his work is kind of like that:

Simon Evans (small images of selected works)

I’m a sucker for this sort of thing; eerie, abrasive, verbal. “ORIGINAL LOCATION OF ANGRY MUSIC FOR COWARDS”, “TOUGH VOICE MAKES MY HEAD LOOK SMALLER”, “IF YOU CAN’T KEEP YOUR SHIT TOGETHER ON TV WE WILL EAT YOU”. I was not surprised to read that he’s a big fan of The Fall. I was more surprised, though it makes sense, to see that he’d exhibited with Brendan Fowler of BARR, whose spoken-word pieces keep threatening to be generically confessional in the same way Evans threatens to be generically political; both of them seem to love wriggling out of their own traps.

Hear it on Youtube

I’m temporarily fascinated by this song. As Uffie says early on, “There’s two kinds of MCs out there / The ones who rap and the ones who don’t care / And frankly I don’t give a fuck”. In other words, she’s too tough to bother being good at music, and that toughness is (unspokenly) exactly what she thinks makes her qualified to be a rapper. That and record sales, anyway.

I feel like that’s the aesthetic argument implicit in a lot of Ol’ Dirty Bastard too. I mean, plenty of performers are more endearing for lacking technical skills, but most genres don’t have a convention of totally identifying some non-musical characteristic with being good at that genre. Maybe if Madonna or Britney wrote a clumsy song about how lazy she was, in a way that made laziness seem sexy?

There must be some other example involving slackerhood and mid-90s indie rock. It’s tough, though; I never felt like the looseness of “Slack Motherfucker” would have been self-described as incompetence by the band at the time. Maybe!

Bloc Party’s first album was produced by the exceptional Paul Epworth, their second by middlebrow drama merchant Jacknife Lee. So for the third album, they brought in both producers, and the result plays very much like a battle for Bloc Party’s soul, except that really, this is one of those twisty caper movies where it turns out Bloc Party pawned their soul years ago in order to buy gear, and the whole thing was a setup to deliver Epworth into Lee’s hands for the ransom money, and then internet people argue for months over whether the final scene meant that singer Kele Okereke really was Debbie Harry or what.

Y’know?

Anyway: a few bangin’ tracks that I suspect are Epworth’s and a few definite snoozers I suspect are Lee’s. (We might learn the truth once it comes out for real; at the moment, it’s digital-only and lacking credits.) Then we have a baffling, intriguing handful like “Mercury” where the band spend the whole time pulling quarters out of each other’s ears– there’s a viable, handsome new style that lies in that direction, I think, but I don’t know whether they’ll make it there if they try to go on foot.

Bloc Party on MySpace
Epworth (as Epic Man) producing UK rapper Plan B | Epworth remixing Interpol

Fully explores the surprisingly tiny range of styles between old Dressy Bessy (dazed-brat indiepop) and old Breeders. I think I’ve always underestimated them a little because of their terrible name– like for example, their two tracks used in “But I’m A Cheerleader” were the ones a friend of mine was saddest about when it turned out the movie’s soundtrack wasn’t going to be released, and I just didn’t get it. Oh yeah, those songs are great, but don’t you know it’s DRESSY BESSY? Hmm.

Anyway, Pink Stars Yellow Moons was classic and this is mostly just okay, but the exceptions are better than the rest, not worse, so my heart is a little warm.

The other day, something reminded me of 12 Inches Of Snow, the first album by Canadian reggae vocalist Snow. Its title is a rare example of a triple-entendre in popular culture: “12 inches of snowfall”, “a 12-inch record (i.e. an LP) by Snow”, and “Snow’s penis is 12 inches long!”

At least, I think such things are rare. The only other one I can come up with, off the top of my head, is the name of Parappa’s master in Parappa The Rapper. Chop Chop Master Onion is an animated onion (something you chop up), an Asian stereotype (”chop chop!”), and a martial-arts master (who teaches Parappa to do a karate chop).

In both cases, I’m not totally confident all three meanings were intended by the creators, though it seems likely. (The fact that LPs are exactly a foot across might seem too obscure to refer to were it not for “twelve-inches”, i.e. non-LP singles of that size. But also, that was 15 years ago, and even if nobody was buying vinyl, it was still a pretty vivid cultural memory.)

Possibly I have idiosyncratic criteria for ‘real’ triple-entendres, but there must be more. At the very least, there must be a third one!

Foil - Reviver Gene (mp3)

From 1998’s Spread It All Around. By 1998 anyone who listened to “alternative rock” had their bullshit detector wound tight to flash NO NO NO if they were offered a UK guitar band who were “sort of grunge, but not really”. But this Scottish single deserved better (if not the rest of the album–I couldn’t get into it). The guitars sound like shoegazer guitars to me, only with too many notes in the main riff to blend in on a My Bloody Valentine record; singer Hugh Duggie has an initial twinkle-eyed cool that gives way to moments of Eddie Vedder snarl on low notes and little-kid glee on high notes, all without actually sounding versatile or anything. He’s just this guy, and for four minutes he is WINNING AT LIFE.

Which is the real reason this song is not plausibly marketable as grunge: it screams and grinds a little, but it kind of makes me want to hit a home run and then eat ice cream.

I think I first heard about the Balloon Man from Fluxblog a few years ago. Here’s all I can tell you: forty years ago, Bill Morrison had a ‘difficult’ stand-up comedy act involving balloon animals that was briefly successful, and in 1971 he recorded a bunch of one-minute “bio-vignettes” hoping to get them on radio. It didn’t happen, though in the years since he has spent a decade or two as a cult figure on California public access TV. The mp3 below is three of those vignettes strung together, and if you listen to it… well, I can’t promise that if you listen to it you’ll never be the same. But if you DON’T listen to it, then you’ll ALWAYS be the same, and who wants that?

Bill Morrison - Popped Blue Balloon Moods / Get A Balloon / Just Coats With Folks

The Mister Morrison Show on YouTube: 1 2

The CD’s page at CDBaby (out of stock right now)

I like the Hold Steady’s music, but it largely exists as a backdrop– or occasionally a scaffold– to Craig Finn’s lyrics, and at first, I thought Stay Positive mostly failed lyrically. The three central Hold Steady characters, Gideon, Holly and Charlemagne, are nowhere to be found. Most of the songs are vivid but maudlin standard-issue Finn scenes: here’s a college girl who parties with townies, in legal trouble after someone gets stabbed; here’s a guy in love with a girl who’s slowly killing herself with drugs; here’s, like, fifteen references to Jesus in one song.

But in search of more details about a line in “Two Crosses”, I found two things: an interview with Finn in which he says that the album is entirely about the same cast of characters, unnamed to make the task of untangling the narrative more difficult; and a message board thread in which a truly huge number of lyric snippets are cross-referenced and a number of theories (some certainly garbage) are hatched.

Possibly I’m the worst possible sort of listener for this album– attached enough to the idea of a running inter-song narrative that I miss it, but not so attentive that I got the clues. Nor am I sure why eleven stories about the same themes should bother me more than one eleven-song story with lots of thematic repetition. Maybe Stay Positive’s grim theme– the main thread connecting the songs seems to be a murder– made me tune out.

Anyway, the music’s still bombastic; most of the songs are trying way too hard to sound like climaxes and turning points, and the fact that they might actually be those things only partially mitigates it. What would otherwise be cutely self-referential declarations about music’s power to save souls sound defensive. I could see it growing on me (though I’ve liked it less with repetition, not more) or becoming a valued piece of the overall Hold Steady project (you don’t have to listen to read the lyrics!) or being redeemed by the CD-only bonus tracks (Hold Steady b-sides have generally been awesome). But I don’t find myself with the boundless patience I had for their last album.

The Hold Steady on MySpace

The first time I posted this, the links didn’t work. Sorry! Try this.

While I liked other songs on Bluebird (Jagjaguwar, 2000), it was only “Bride” that made Sarah White’s name stay in my head long after she seemed to vanish from the indie world. Her voice sounds like a coffee-table puzzle in which seven different kinds of defeat interlock to form a surprisingly-shaped contentment, which is half of why I loved the song; the other half is the way the guitar acts as the main rhythmic element, constantly anticipating itself with the sound of fingers on strings.

So that was a long time ago, and I guess I burned the blueprint of that song into my brain thoroughly enough that the presence of drums on her newish album White Light (Antenna Farm, 2006) is a constant surprise. Every single whack of the snare drum sounds potentially deafening, like, man, I’m glad that guy is all the way in the corner, or else I’m pretty sure it would overwhelm Sarah White’s voice.

But as I said, “or else I’m pretty sure it would overwhelm her” is White’s specialty.

Sarah White - Bride
Sarah White & The Pearls - Spoken Word

MySpace | home page

I didn’t have the heart to bring Ulysses camping with me, so I stepped sideways to another opaque modern monument that I had wanted a little quiet time with. 77 Dream Songs is the first (and much shorter) of the two books that the Dream Songs were collected into. (Or “was collected into”? The blurbs on the back refer to the 385 poems collectively as one long poem, which seems precious to me but maybe is standard poet talk.)

So okay so, if you don’t know anything about the Dream Songs, the deal is that they are all (all?) about a figure named Henry, who is frequently in conversation with a second, unnamed figure. This figure distinctively addresses Henry as “Mr. Bones”, which makes it very hard not to call HIM, the unnamed friend, “Mr. Bones”. Often, one of the two speaks in a minstrel-show parody of black dialect; probably a lot has been written about what that means, but I haven’t read it. Henry has suffered “an irreversible loss”, which I’m assuming, maybe unimaginatively, is similar to the suicide of Berryman’s father.

Even forgetting Berryman’s own eventual suicide, these are often (dear God!) kind of depressing. I settled on the strategy of taking them in as I would a batch of songs– letting each one off the hook right away if it made no impression and rereading only the ones I wanted to. While good lines were plentiful even in the middle of allusive thickets, I found myself returning to the poems I mostly understood, like #67:

I don't operate often. When I do,
persons take note.
Nurses look amazed. They pale.
The patient is brought back to life, or so.
The reason I don't do this more (I quote)
is: I have a living to fail--

because of my wife & son--to keep from earning.
--Mr Bones, I sees that.
They for these operations thanks you, what?
not pays you. --Right.
You have seldom been so understanding.
Now there is further a difficulty with the light:

I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.
--Mr Bones, you terrifies me.
No wonder they didn't pay you. Will you die?
--My
          friend, I succeeded. Later.