frow show, FMU-150
Generated by KenzoDB ( http://kenzodb.com ), (C) 2000-2011 Ken Garson
“sexy and i know it” – LMFAO
An occasional project, where I arbitrarily write about the #1 pop song du jour from the perspective of somebody who barely listens to that kind of music and has only a passing knowledge of current mega-stars. It doesn’t sound as strange to my ears as it did when I started doing this in 2003, but it still sounds like it’s from another planet.
“Sexy and I Know It” – LMFAO
released by Interscope
week of 14 January 2012
#1 this week, #1 last week, 18 weeks on chart
After a year of world travel and robust sleep research, my pal Vape Stiles recently observed to me that the two most dominant genres of global pop music are hip-hop and mutant techno-disco, both derivable back to fringe cultures of early ’70s NYC. Probably so. Not sure what it means that two are finally starting to bleed into each other, which probably happened during my last sojourn away from the pop charts. The bleed was the dominant force in the last song I listened to, Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” though that felt mostly like a production choice compared to LMFAO, whose “Sexy & I Know It” makes their second #1 and finds a gaudy new way to cross the proverbial club with the proverbial Thai beach rave.
I kind of like it. Don’t love it. But it seems properly stupid. It’s self-produced, too, which makes it easier to think of as less manufactured, even if these guys were assured at a major label contract. At least one them is Berry Gordy’s grandson. That is, this slab of ridiculous 21st century pop (the chorus: “girl, look at that body, I work out”) named after a piece of internet slang was made by a descendant of the man who founded Motown. If the song is still in my head in a few weeks, maybe I’ll think more about what that means. At the very least, I dig goofy dance-pop far more than Rihanna’s self-serious melodrama. “Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle,” one of the Gordys (they’re both Gordys) chants, which is one of the many nooks available in the song for dance moves, cheers, sing-alongs. It’s fun and busy, but that seems about it, but a lot less has been done with a lot more.
frow show, FMU-149
29. The Necks – “Daylights” – Mindset (ReR)
30. Unitard – “Year To Be Hated” – Yes New York (Vice)
Generated by KenzoDB ( http://kenzodb.com ), (C) 2000-2011 Ken Garson
the brief, undefaced life of the williamsburg bon iver billboard (pazz & jop notes 2011)
A few months ago, a new ad went up at the corner of Grand Street, down the Bedford Avenue central drag in Williamsburg. As with the wall of Lou Reeds that covered a construction site a while back, near the new Duane Reade, I really wanted to see it covered in graffiti. Eventually, somebody mustered up an “I fucked Vincent Gallo” speech bubble for poor ol’ Lou, who seemed more like a set decoration than anything else. What was it an ad for, though? There was no text. Was it Lou’s leather jacket? Maybe just the Lou brand?
It was late summer, I’m pretty sure, when Bon Iver came to Williamsburg. His painted visage sat there on a guitar amp next to his bandmates [correction: his managers, including his brother], looking like a brah among brahs, in a Jagjaguwar shirt, arms open, doofy vibes, and hawking whiskey. One of us! And, brah, Bushmills! After about a month, somebody pasted some street art parody QR codes ungracefully over Mr. Iver’s junk, as well as similar regions of the other fellows in his band. I meant to take a picture the next time I walked by, but they’d been quickly scraped off. Not made for brick, it seems.
That nobody otherwise abused Justin Vernon’s not-selling-out-buying-in likeness is absolutely a deep personal failure on my part. I really should have done it, if only on general principle. It means that Bon Iver has already won. And I’m just not sure how I feel about that. I’ve got no real beef with the guy personally. But mostly I still hate most corny-ass non-jazz saxophone and Bruce Hornsby and 1980s/1990s Grateful Dead, which is what Bon Iver and Justin Vernon represent to me, the triumph of the crappy part of hippiedom over righteous experimentation and thoughtful chaos. Despite the fact that Vernon’s music seems genetically bred for me–almost as if under some creepy lab conditions with nostalgia-plumping steroids–I’ve never connected with it remotely, never been able to recall a hook or a melody or even a lyric. I’ve tried. He seems like a sweet guy, from all my interactions with him, culturally mediated or otherwise. Still nothing.
But I come not to hate on Bon Iver. Really. I come to hate on The National. Man, they suck. I went through a similar pattern with them for an album or two, trying–because of a then-ladyfriend, because of some pals who dug them–to get into music that ultimately just felt bland and wimpy. What Coldplay are to Radiohead, The National seemed to Wilco. Again, dudes seemed alright. They even seem to like the Dead, too, though I’m utterly terrified about the prospect of them curating a Dead tribute disc, which they seem to be doing. The positive that I’ve taken out of all of this, alongside The Nationalol’s recent 6-night run at the Beacon Theater, and other signs: the hippies–or at least their Bon Iver-loving descendants–still make up an authentic silent majority in popular music fandom.
Phish’s Trey Anastasio announced that he was working with The Nationalolol, appeared with them onstage, and a small chunk of the internet blew up. Falling more on The Nationalololololololol side of the equation, I think Anastasio and the 7 sets of conjoined and unconjoined twins that comprise the New York quatturodectet deserve each other in their gentle wimpiness. I wish far better for Anastasio, who at least has a history making adventurous music, though he’s long rivaled Lou Reed in the perversity of his creative choices. I can only hope the silent majority still has some anarchy thumping around inside them somewhere, a latent hippie impulse in the American pop consciousness ready for the word to start raising the freak flags everywhere. Which is what happened over the last few years, of course, between ye olde Fleete Foxes, Animal Collective, and what have you: a head re-entrenchment after years of bloody rockist/poptimist debates.
What I resent is how much of it–the Bon Iver Bushmills ad, the Trey/National collaboration–seems to transform gaudy tie-dye into another shade of beige. The Deadheads and the hippies at large deserve a more vibrant fate than that, something less compliant with the lame rock culture that’s settled over VIP-happy rock clubs and national media, less easy to put on as mellow background listening. Odds are, too, that Bon Iver will score high in Pazz & Jop this year, which means he’s both a critical and popular success.
A lot of the new music I kept coming back to this year abutted on Bon Iver’s territory, even, music that didn’t seem to be competing for anything. Especially, I loved the unadorned folk of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ The Harrow & The Harvest, and Arborea, another husband-wife folk duo specializing in ancient and fully present haunt. Caitlin Rose, a new singer/songwriter from Nashville, released a wonderful debut of ineffably modern countrypolitan songwriting. Not all of it came too close to Iver, though. Akron/Family (more my kind of post-Dead outfit) put out a pretty good album, but I spent more time with the series of Megaupload/Mediafire-distributed bmbz releases that distorted and stretched their psych into noise with buried and already familiar melodies. Oneida put on a few more 10-hour shows and a series of recordings in their various guises, including the late-night brah-out album I’ve been waiting for, Absolute II. Another album I loved was The Ex’s Catch My Shoe, glorious anti-anthems by a 30-year old Dutch punk band with a new lead singer and a horn section. Not usually a formula for awesomeness, but hey.
I spent plenty of the year righteously wallowing in the throes of old music, too, trying to ignore the aggressively weird central argument of Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, which seemed to claim that there was something somehow wrong with this practice. Just as all music is world music, though, all music–or, at least, all recorded music–is old music. It is the most central tenet of fandom, wanting to lift the needle–virtual or real–back to the beginning of the track to listen again and again and again and again. And the hope of being an active fan is to find more music that makes you want to do the same, that contains some fundamental humanity-carrying spark, piping fresh or recorded decades ago, to make you listen again.
It might appear anywhere, in the space between an acoustic guitar and a room tone, in an intentional lyric or unintentional phrasing, even in a big stupid/brilliant pop song. The latter didn’t happen to me this year but, as a hippie, that’s what I want: life flickering, a personality expressed. Also as a hippie, I recognize that there are plenty who seem to get that out of Bon Iver or American Idol or black metal or other sources of music that I’m equally mystified by. I can get down with a certain amount of objectivity, listening to appreciate what makes a finely constructed track/album/band, doling out the best in drone/pop/folk, but at the end of the year, I really just want music that I’m going to personally keep listening to even after the calendar changes. Pop accolades really don’t bother me, though. At least until Bon Iver starts turning up in ads for booze that I have to look at every day on my way to and from wherever.
So they gave Justin Vernon some heavy cash and he took it. Whatever. I even like Bushmills. What brought it home most for me, though, was when Vernon tweeted about [correction: told a NYT reporter] how he didn’t care about getting nominated for a Grammy, and then some band called him out for the Bushmills ad on Twitter, and then Pitchfork reported on it. They published a brief account of the spat. Just below it was an embedded video, made by Bushmills, featuring (I assume) exclusive footage of the Bushmills/Bon Iver photo shoot. That week, too, Pitchfork was bordered by massive banner ads from the same advertising campaign. I suppose it’s long been the reality, and not even that really bothers me.
What bothers me is the mundanity of it all. As with the beiged tie-dye, it’s just another bit that’s gotten sucked into the great blanding maw of the cultural conversation that has maybe neutered music entirely in the wake of new and weirder ways of meaning, like international debt crises, existential occupations, and phone hacking. WTF could Tom Morello or even Jeff Mangum ever do in such company, anyway? Maybe its best for music to just exit that conversation stage left, right, or even directly through the gift shop. I have no real idea how, or even what that means in concrete terms. Imagine a world without Pitchfork ratings. It’s easy if you try.
One day, I came home, and some guys were painting over the Bon Iver ad. They’d white-washed Vernon & co. (ha!) and were etching some new shapes over them. Specifically, the vague outlines of a Jedi and a Sith Lord, selling some new Star Wars video game. Good and evil mapped themselves over Vernon’s face, and he continued to peer unblinking into the now-fogging afternoon light, and the next day he was gone.
yo la tengo, hanukkah 2011, night #8 setlist
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
27 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 8)*
The Trypes and Chris Elliott opened.
benefit for Oasis New Jersey.
Mix disc by Georgia
(YLT backed Chris Elliott on Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said”)
As The Hour Grows Late (with Rick Rizzo on guitar and John Baumgartner on accordion)
I Threw It All Away (Bob Dylan) (with RR and JB)
Heroin (Velvet Underground) (Roky Erickson version) (with RR)
I Should Have Known Better
Swing For Life
Damage
Liz Beth (Eleventh Dream Day) (RR on vocals)
Big Day Coming (acoustic) (with RR)
The Empty Pool (Yung Wu) with Glenn Mercer on guitar)
From A Motel 6 > (with GM)
Flying (The Beatles) > (with The Trypes)
It’s All Too Much (The Beatles) > (with the Trypes)
I Heard You Looking (with GM, JB on keyboards, and Stan Demeski on drums)
Take Care (Alex Chilton)
*(encore)*
Blue Line Swinger
My Little Corner of the World (Bob Hilliard, Lee Pockriss) (with Marilyn Kaplan on vocals)
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]yo la tengo, hanukkah 2011, night #7 setlist
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
26 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 7)*
Kurt Vile & the Violators and Leo Allen opened.
benefit for Pathfinders International.
Mix discs by Ira
(whole show with Dave Schramm on guitar)
Sudden Organ
Can’t Forget
How To Make A Baby Elephant Float
I Can Hear Music (Ellie Greenwich)
When It’s Dark
Here Comes My Baby (Cat Stevens)
Cone of Silence
Little Eyes
I Feel Like Going Home
Griselda (Antonia) (with Peter Stampfel on fiddle and vocals)
One PM Again (with PS)
The One To Cry (The Escorts (with PS)
Wasn’t Born To Follow (Carole King, Gerry Goffin) (with PS)
Mr. Tough (with PS)
The Summer
Asparagus Song
Center of Gravity
*(encore)*
I Can’t Make It On Time (The Ramones
)
Gates of Steel (Devo)
Prisoners of Rock and Roll (Neil Young)
Thanks to Dom for the setlists.
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]yo la tengo, hanukkah 2011, night #6 setlist
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
25 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 6)*
Dump and Kurt Braunhohler opened.
benefit for Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Mix discs by Tim and Eric.
Dump:
How Many Bells?
Dear Betty Baby (Mayo Thompson)
A Plea For Dump
It’s Not Alright
Another Lonely Christmas (Prince)
Daily Affirmation (with Georgia and Ira)
Superpowerless (with Georgia and Ira)
YLT:
Santa Claus Goes Modern (Sven Swanson)
Barnaby, Hardly Working (with Tara Key on guitar)
Black Hole (The Urinals) (with TK)
Fog Over Frisco (with TK)
Sometimes I Don’t Get You
Flying Lesson (with TK and Gil Divine on guitars)
S
haker (with TK and GD)
Something To Do (with TK)
I’m Set Free (with TK)
Satellite (with Rachel Blumberg on drums and TK)
Nowhere Near (with RB and TK)
Outsmartener (with TK)
Moby Octopad (with TK)
Nothing To Hide (with TK)
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind (with TK)
*(encore)*
Take A Giant Step (Carole King, Gerry Goffin) (with TK)
She’s My Best Friend (Velvet Underground)
Dreaming (Sun Ra)
Thanks to Dom for the setlists.
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]yo la tengo, hanukkah 2011, night #5 setlist
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
24 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 5)*
The Glands and Jon Glaser opened.
benefit for Tommy Brull Foundation.
Mix disc by Mr. Finewine
Big Day Coming (slow) (with Tara Key on keyboards)
Stockholm Syndrome (with TK on guitar for rest of night)
The Crying of Lot G (with TK)
Demons (with TK)
Upside Down (drone version) (with TK)
Beanbag Chair
If It’s True
I’m On My Way (with TK)
Double Dare (alt. arrangement) (with TK)
Five-Cornered Drone (Crispy Duck) (with TK)
Orange Song (Antietam) (with TK)
Decora (with TK)
Big Day Coming (fast)
Little Honda (with TK)
*(encore)*
Rock and Roll Santa (Jan Terri) (with TK)
Night Moves (Bob Seger) (with TK and Jon Glaser as ‘Jon’ on vocals)
Yellow Sarong (The Scene Is Now)
Thanks to Dom & Neil for the setlist.
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]yo la tengo, hanukkah 2011, night #4 setlist
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
23 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 4)*
Pussy Galore and Todd Barry opened.
benefit for Letha Rodman-Melchior Fund.
Mix disc by Chris Knox.
(whole show with Dave Rick on guitar.)
Detouring America With Horns (DR on bass)
Nothing To Hide
Avalon or Someone Very Similar
Porpoise Song (Carole King) (DR on vocals)
The River of Water
Serpentine
Ben Wa Baby (Phil Milstein)
Don’t Have To Be So Sad (with Rachel Blumberg on drums)
Saturday (with RB)
Coloured (Chris Knox)
Black Flowers
Today Is The Day (fast)
Some Kinda Fatigue
Tom Courtenay
More Stars Than There Are In Heaven
*(encore)*
You Don’t Love Me Yet (Roky Erickson) (with RB)
This Ain’t The Summer of Love (Blue Oyster Cult) (with Todd Barry on drums)
Crush (Chris Knox)
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]yo la tengo, hanukkah 2011, night #3 setlist
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s
22 December 2011
*(Hanukkah, night 3)*
Lee Ranaldo Band and Ted Alexandro opened.
benefit for Clean Ocean Action.
Mix disc by Kid Koala.
Nutricia
Sugarcube (alt. arrangement)
Madeleine
Lewis
Mr. Tough
Season of the Shark
Periodically Double or Triple
Doesn’t Anybody Love the Dark (Run On) (with Alan Licht on guitar and vocals)
The Last Days of Disco (with AL, Lee Ranaldo on guitar, and Steve Shelley on drums)
Fourth Time Around (Bob Dylan) (with AL, LR, SS)
Decora (alt. arrangement) (with AL, LR, SS)
Double Dare (with SS)
Mote (Sonic Youth) > (with LR & SS)
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind (with LR, AL, & SS)
*(encore)*
Andalucia (John Cale)
Mandy (Barry Manilow) (with John Cameron Mitchell on vocals)
N.B.: Penguin/Gotham will publish my book, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, on 6 June 2012. Sweet. See also: Twitter.
[ If reposting, kindly credit Frank & Earthy: https://jessejarnow.com/flotsam/ylt ]
