So instead of putting off writing and editing a big, formulated post/essay, I figured I’d go for a bunch of disparate thoughts that more accurately represents my thought process and interests. Bear with me, Since I’ll be all over the place.

The Pitchfork Peoples List

If you haven’t checked it out, Pitchfork compiled a user generated list of the top 200 albums from the past 15 years. There were very few surprises on the list; I think it was already obvious that people who read Pitchfork like Radiohead as much as Pitchfork does. In fact, there’s so little to debate about the main list that I almost immediately started thinking about things I wish they had done with the data. I first should mention that they did have some interesting statistics on the location and demographics of their submissions. Like, did you know that Japan is the only country to rate Kid A higher than Ok Computer? But there was so much potential in the data they collected that what is presented seems a bit limited. I would have really liked to see the point total of each album instead of just a ranking, just to see if there were any big jumps in totals as you go down the list. I wanna know by how much which Radiohead album the people preferred. Or maybe more than a top 20 on the detailed demographic lists. Some of those barely had two Radiohead albums in them!

Anyway, I had a lot more fun making my personal list and wasting my time ordering albums in the 80-100 range where there was little to no difference to how much I liked them. I do wish the designers of the list had given us the ability to play around with our lists after the poll closed, they obviously put some time into this project so it seems like a bit of a waste to throw that work away. You would think that Pitchfork would be all for sustainability.

Vaporwave?

Adam Harper - Vaporwave and the Pop-Art of the Virtual Plaza

So it’s somewhat gratifying to see an article come out about a new(?) internet(?) genre(?) of lo-fi music(?) that I had been finding here and there on my crawls through similar artist trees on Last.fm; I hadn’t realized how limited the scene was, if you could call it a scene. Admittedly, I often feel out of touch with what’s going on these days. Living away from a major cultural center or people my age means that I only really consume things en masse from download binges without much outside, direct human input. So it’s kinda weird how I have mixed feelings about this article, mostly because I found it almost two months after it was written.

Hmmm, I guess this is more of a comment on the impermanence of internet dialogue. I wish I had a chance to comment on the topic while it was fresh, since I had some ideas bouncing around my head for a few months beforehand but I’ve lost most of them. What I’ve read has now replaced my personal thoughts and now I can’t tell if its all some meta-commentary on how transient ideas are these days and how that is reflected in music that invokes a transient feeling or what. I still like the stuff, you could almost call it Smooth Industrial. Advertwave? Post-Pop?

I should mention that the next article that Adam Harper wrote is about the modern phenomenon of silly genre names, or rather, why do people dismiss and deride any attempts to name a nascent genre. Its another great read, I’m coming to realize how rare it is to find a music critic who writes about current topics with any sense of authority, and doesn’t hide behind a veneer of sarcasm or cynicism.

Sight and Sound and Lists

Earlier this month the new Sight and Sound poll of the  ”greatest films of all time” came out. It’s only compiled every ten years, and serves as one of the most venerable guides to what critics think about cinematic history. While its easy to see how biased this list is for “the classics”, it is still a great go-to if you want to see what some of the most influential movies ever made. The big news about this decade’s list is how Vertigo has unseated Citizen Kane for the #1 spot, a position it had held for 50 years. Of course, this may have happened because the amount of critics tapped for this list more than doubled from the 2002 edition, but it still is worth some notice.

Cooler still is how BFI has also released all of the individual lists from the critics and directors that were asked to contribute. I have a feeling that I’m going to spend too much time trying to find the hidden gems, though it not like I’ve seen most of these movies anyway.

Sex House, and the Rise of the Web Series

If you haven’t been watching The Onion’s Sex House, you’ve been missing the best TV show of the summer. Thats right, I’m rating it higher than Breaking Bad (or Louie). It is at once a deconstruction of a Big-Brother style reality show, a satire on the sexulization of popular media, and an example of fantastic absurdist humor that revels in the horrific. The only criticism I can find is how hard it its to convince people to start watching a show called Sex House. You should watch the first two episodes at least, the brilliance of the series really starts to show as the series reveals itself.

And the most surprising and wonderful part is that it’s a web series that only has 6-8 minute episodes that come out once a week. If you told me six months ago that a web series could make it onto my list of “must-watch” shows, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here it is, and its great. It is so impressive that the writers are able to fit such a nuanced, pointed take on this type of show in such a short amount of time. I’m so glad that this series exists, if only for the fact that it showed me how an internet-based series can be a viable alternative to network and cable shows.

Things I’ve Been Re-discovering

I’ve taken some time to go back and try to understand all of the political mob-stuff going on in the background of The Sopranos. Between the New Jersey accent and the unexplained jargon of organized crime, I would suspect that most of the audience had as hard of a time as I did keeping all of the side characters straight and following all of their relationships. It’s surprisingly not too important for the overall picture of the show, but theres so much fictional history contained in each season that its hard to resist the urge to learn it all. If anything, it makes me appreciate how much time the creators spent building up this world.

It seems like Pharrell is more of an influential artist and less of a current creative force these days. Dunno why I have that sense, maybe Kanye takes up too much space in the “black producer/rapper/artist/entrepreneur” realm for the others to stand out like they once did. But I’ve always been a fan of Pharrell’s work, especially N*E*R*D’s 2006 album Fly or Die. There’s a lot of flaws with the album I guess, mostly with how many tracks are actually two songs joined with a bit of silence. That gets really annoying when you only want to hear one, and prevents me from ever using those songs in playlists or mixes. But I’m willing to forgive this oversight for how good much of the album sounds. I used to listen to the album all the time in high school, streaming it from their website in an era when albums were rarely ever streamed in total before being released.

Animal Collective Inspires the Worst Writing

The new Animal Collective album Centipede Hz (streaming here) has generated some of the purplest music writing I’ve ever seen. I’m seriously getting flashbacks to the Pitchfork Kid A review.

From The Quietus:

“…an album that burned when it should have dissolved, which laughed as the electric thud of childhood’s warm summer blood ran cold, which exploded at the very dead-end of peacefulness, and which at every stage rendered the listener an object inside, looking out.”

What.

Granted, this is about their previous album, Merriweather Post Pavillion, but the stuff later on isn’t much better:

“Whereas before their method of expressing boundless joy - those tumbling-over-themselves structures - was rooted in serenity, here there’s something almost hungry about their quest for bliss. You could describe it as intensity. It’s as if their fractured schemes for the pursuit of pleasure have become destabilized, curdling into volatility”

“Like a Michel Gondry montage it seems to spin, scattering a dizzying array of choruses, bridges, breaks, crescendos and peaks - what could be 10 independent sections but what feels like a hundred. Imagine ‘In The Flowers’ mid-point flash in cubomaniacal battle with The Beatles’ entire back catalogue.”

“He is the ‘Mercury Man’, imprisoned in fizzing digitalism and dreaming of life as a real boy…The pace increases and gradually anguish cedes to a celebration of life; but life as lived in any form, even an artificial one.”

“…it’s all elbow-pads and sandals. Salvation from mundanity arrives with another gorgeous vocal melody and a final act of Mardi Gras delirium, sounding not unlike Ibiza pop filtered through ‘Hounds Of Love’”

I don’t think this is a great way to write about music, since I don’t really get what these esoteric statements mean. I understand the desire to find words that attempt to capture a certain intangible quality of what you are listening to, I may have done it in the past. But it’s too easy to get caught up in your own overwrought metaphors and stop describing the actual music to potential listeners. Writing like this doesn’t help me understand why I should listen to the album or not, it just shows me that you like to write about your thoughts.

I’ll contrast this review with one of my favorite short pieces of music writing, Derek Miller’s review of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. Somehow he is able to be metaphorical without being overwrought, descriptive without being flowery.

From the end:

“It’s the sense of someone waiting on you without hanging or pestering, this quiet love of custom and comfort that comes from long-acquaintance. And, frankly, that’s exactly what Veckatimest is: this aged, oft-peaceful thing you feel you’ve known since youth. I have a feeling Grizzly Bear will go on to make better records. But Veckatimest might well be the one you return to most fondly. It’s an album with flaws you grow cozy with over time—a gorgeous thing with a tiny cheek-scar whose eyes are all you see anyway. As we all know, those are the ones you keep close.”

It’s rare to find an album review that works as a good piece of writing outside of its inherent utility. I find it almost sad that it has to be attached to an album that immediately anchors it to a point in time, as it’s too easy to lose a review like this in the shuffle.

But so it goes I suppose.