I’ve switched database servers to make everything a lot faster. This, in turn, makes the archives usable, so those are back.

The move involved a disagreement over which character set Pastemob uses, so if you notice while reading that something untoward has happened to a letter with an umlaut or accent, let me know.

Love,
GRvS

After the emo band he was in broke up, Justin Roelofs went to South America to learn about “holograms, the Mayan calendar, sonic power and the illusion of time.” He came back sounding like a one-guy collaboration between Beck and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which is as good an argument for the reality of the divine as any. I want to think that some actual insight, however mangled, has to be there when somebody can make an interesting record while saying, “To manipulate sound vibrations in specific ways, especially with the voice, can cause a torrent of positive energy to be released to the world. [...] The inherent obligation of the artist, I believe, is the transmission of pure energy. That’s what matters.”

But I often don’t get what I want. I guess you could argue just as easily that if engaging music comes from a Kansas hippie who looks like Rick Wakeman with a disastrous beard, we obviously live in a fallen world.

iTunes now has seven Dykehouse songs you can’t buy on CD: a new EP, plus compilation track “I Want To Give To You What I’ve Got To Put Into You” and b-side “FYD”. Some schoolteacher in me demands the right to tut-tut about Mike Dykehouse’s inconstancy; the EP has three of his overdriven neo-shoegazer songs followed by two poppy covers (the Smiths and Dinosaur Jr.), while both of the other songs are dancefloor tracks made of tongue-in-cheek sleaze.

At least, I think that’s where Dykehouse’s tongue is. How seriously he takes himself has no bearing on how much fun the music is, but it could hold the key to what ties Dykehouse’s personalities together. Did the little artistic voice that told him to make “Nostalgia Radar” genuinely sad also sign off on stripping the neurosis from a J. Mascis song? More importantly, can we get him firing on all three cylinders at once again so that he can record a companion to 2004’s brilliant “Chain Smoking”?

If I’m unenthusiastic about the format for this purchase, “Chain Smoking” is why. Buying songs online creates higher expectations for each individual track to stand out– not the best expectations with which to hear new songs by a guy who’s achieved perfection exactly once.

“Shine On” isn’t the weirdest song of its era that Stephan Groth could have covered– hands up, who wants to hear him do “Fools Gold” by the Stone Roses?– but you have to wonder why it works.

Apop’s version is brutal and devoid of context; on the other hand, so is teenage love, isn’t it? Guy Chadwick from House Of Love sang “I’m so young… just eighteen” as if ruefully whispering to himself: what have I gotten myself into? Groth, instead, sounds greedy, savoring what he’s about to get.

His vocals also steamroll the ambiguity of the original in other places, but okay, that was ambiguity, not subtlety. He wants you to identify with everything in the song: the narrator, the cruel sun, the girl, the plastic chair, the purple sky, and Jesus. The emotional landscape is hermetic, incomprehensible, pointless. As it should be.

[Wrap-up:

(1) You can hear the song by watching its video on the Apoptygma Berzerk webpage. This is not a recommendation for the video itself.

(2) Not much else to speak of on the EP, nor on You And Me Against The World, the Apoptygma Berzerk record where "Shine On" first showed up as a bonus track.

(3) If an emotion has a point, what is it? Is how it feels its point? That only makes us ask what's left of the emotion when you take away how it feels. Is its point what it makes you do? It might not make you do anything, and so on.]

I had never heard of Seldes before finding this book on the curb, and it’s dry reading, but I’m glad I picked it up.

As with anyone whose primary distinction is that his ideas were ahead of their time, Seldes did not himself hold my interest here; the fun part was having to imagine the state of the world when one idea or another was new. For example, Seldes pushed very early the idea that popular culture deserved the same kind of criticism and praise as high culture. He published his manifesto The 7 Lively Arts in 1924, after already praising Krazy Kat et al. in magazine articles for a few years.

Here’s what came to mind, for me, in thinking about mid-20s culture before I read this book: Dada had already happened; Surrealism had just begun or was about to. Eliot and Joyce were established. What else… no rock and roll for a long time, though popular music existed. TV was decades away.

Here’s what didn’t come to mind, because I hadn’t realized it: Radio was still brand-new as a popular medium. Radio.

Similarly, 1950s-era debates over whether television inherently made people dumber probably didn’t– I realized while reading– have the knee-jerk qualities that debate always has when repeated today. Some of the people arguing remembered a time before movies; all of them could see the difference between the world of radio’s mass debut and the world they lived in, which meant most of them had theories about what part radio played in that change.

Most of all, Seldes seems to have loved variety. Occasional creative disasters, to him, were just the price a network or publisher paid for trying new things in an attempt to higher instincts that were going unfulfilled in the audience– maybe ones the audience didn’t even know about yet.

Anyway, not earthshaking, but interesting, particularly considering how many of the controversies Seldes weighed in on have parallels today in debates at Pitchfork or ILX and forums of that ilk.

Well, on many of you.

Mo. Town Denies Unmarried Couple Permit

When I first read about this, I assumed they had gotten turned down for domestic partnership registration, or maybe some kind of public aid. But no: The city council of a Missouri town declined to change– and the mayor suggested he might soon enforce– a rule forbidding four or more people from living together unless connected by “blood, marriage or adoption”. If you try, you can be evicted by the city.

(This came up when an unmarried couple with three children was refused an occupancy permit, which seems like an insane interpretation of the law in the first place; the kids are blood relatives of both parents, after all. Saying that any pair of people has to be connected directly to each other by blood/marriage/adoption would essentially forbid two people that each had a child in a previous marriage from getting married, even if both parents adopted the other’s kid– the children still wouldn’t be blood relatives.)

I have to ask: Are there unenforced laws like this all over the place which I just haven’t heard about? (Are there enforced laws like this, in which case I would feel very naive?)

I… don’t get it. This seems not only like a shaggy-dog story, but like a particularly UNmodern one. Most of it’s about ill-starred romance and people acting above their station.

Having just lost another hundred books to flooding (this time perhaps my own fault, what with that ‘another’ there), I’m reminded that I’d rather read a book I haven’t seen before than fret over being a Philistine on the subject of one I’ve finished. On the other hand, I still feel guilty about it. I guess that’s what ‘canon’ means: its claims last longer than its charms.

Their full-length album put me off temporarily; on these EPs they’ve gone back to sounding like the salvation of indie-rock, albeit packed with so much gangly disorder that you might wonder whether indie-rock needed saving before they walked in the room. It’s possible these guys spent all day secretly loosening the bolts to make themselves look good later. (Some sample mp3s here.)

Cee-Lo collaborating with DJ Danger Mouse, the guy who combined Albums White and Black to make grey. As it happens, it’s come out just a month or two before the first proper album by another mash-up pioneer, Freelance Hellraiser.

The Hellraiser album is hideous; I thought, on first hearing it, that it was something else, mislabeled through a manufacturing error. Skimming through the advance press for it reveals (if I’m reading correctly) that Roy Kerr just did mashups as a stunt to get attention; what he really wanted to do, once he got his foot in the door, was to be like his friends in Snow Patrol.

Seriously, he said that. And, more to the point, did it.

St. Elsewhere has the persuasive incongruity of a good mash-up– built from scratch, no less. I was hoping for something to get me past my indifference to Cee-Lo, though, which I didn’t get. The Grey Album didn’t turn me on to the Beatles, either; mysterious. But it’s awfully nice that, at least in some hands, the so-subversive-but-so-appropriable fad of mash-ups has fed into the creation of a cultural style whose products stand on their own.

I’m pretty sure they intentionally sequenced this so that people of normal Sufjan-tolerance could turn it off after 35 great minutes and not miss anything; the obsessives and the generous of heart get 40 more minutes of diminishing returns after that. But isn’t there a parable in the Bible about not releasing albums that consist entirely of songs left over from recording your last one? [Out July 25.]