Jesse Jarnow

frow show, episode 12

Episode 12: Dig the ribbit!
Odds & ends & a spot of purdiness.

Listen here

1. “Waitin’ For A Train” – Beck (from Stereopathetic Soul Manure)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine (from Freckle Wars)
4. “Masa Depanmu” – Ariesta Birawa Group (from Ariesta Birawa Group)
5. “Princess Knows” – Elf Power (from Treasures From The Trash Heap)
6. “Temptation” – The Sunshine Fix (from The Spiraling World of Pop EP)
7. “Trombone Dixie” – Marbles (from OpticalAtlas.com)
8. “Now She Sleeps in a Box in the Good Soil of Denmark” – David and the Citizens (from David and the Citizens EP)
9. “Wizard’s Sleeve” – Yo La Tengo (from Shortbus OST)
10. “I’m Your Puppet” – Yo La Tengo (from Mr. Tough 7-inch)
11. “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” – The Beach Boys (from The Beach Boys’ Party)
12. “Verse Chorus Verse” – Nirvana (from No Alternative compilation)
13. “St. Judy’s Comet” – Paul Simon (from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon)
14. “I’ll Keep It With Mine” – Nico (from Chelsea Girls)
15. “Gone Beyond” – Akron/Family (from Meek Warrior)
16. “I’m Of No More Use To Me” – Sam and Simon (from Brudders)
17. “Time Passing” – Max Richter feat. Robert Wyatt (from Songs From Before)

“hey bulldog” – the beatles & songbook

“Hey Bulldog” – The Beatles (download here)
from Yellow Submarine OST (1968)
released by Capitol Records (buy)

For whatever reason (soundtrack cut, etc.), the Beatles’ “Hey Bulldog” totally eluded me, and that’s rather awesome. There’s no reason to validate my love for the Beatles, or even to analyze what I love about “Hey Bulldog.” But it was pretty rad to discover, for me, what was essentially a new Beatles tune. If you’ll forgive me the rockist gushing, it reminds me of a Nick Hornby quote from Songbook, the warm ‘n’ fuzzy type of rock criticism that makes somebody like Hornby just as necessary as somebody like the Beatles.

In Victorian London they used to burn phosphorous at séances in an attempt to see ghosts, and I suspect that the pop music equivalent is our obsessions with B-sides and alternate versions and unreleased material. If you can hear Dylan and the Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak — but unmistakably themselves in a way we haven’t heard a thousand, a million times before — then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their sprit, and it’s as close as we’ll ever get, those of us born in the wrong time, to knowing what it must have been like to have those great records burst out of the radio at you when you weren’t expecting them, or anything like them.

Hyperbole, I guess, but Cosby sweater/feel good hyperbole, and not entirely wrong. Beneath that, though, there is something a bit sad. The quest for b-sides, I think, can often be an attempt not to find out what something sounded like new, but to find something that might approximate an experience that one has worn out. It grows from the most atavistic of pop impulses: to want to hear more of what one liked before except, y’know, different. It’s not often that anything about the Beatles sounds new to me. Eventually, though, “Hey Bulldog” will dull, too. It will still be wonderful, of course, but that internalized, well-understood wonderful instead of that cue-and-recue-that-opening-groove wonderful. That’s maybe a little sad, because then I’ll (maybe) have no more Beatles songs to discover. For now, though: rawk.

cosmic clock & “the language of stationary travelers” – the olivia tremor control

“The Language of Stationary Travelers” – The Olivia Tremor Control (download here)
from Jumping Fences EP (1998)
released by Blue Rose (buy)

(file expires February 5th.)

Finally, some more of Dad’s animation on YouTube! Here, in the first of what will hopefully become a regular series, is “Cosmic Clock,” one my personal faves. Originally aired on PBS’s 3-2-1 Contact, “Cosmic Clock” is to linear time what the Powers of Ten was to physical space. For an alternate soundtrack, try the above “Language of Stationary Travelers” by the Olivia Tremor Control. (When the animation ends just, y’know, start the Olivias again.)

see also: Yak!

“okie from muskogee” – the grateful dead with the beach boys

“Okie From Muskogee” – the Grateful Dead with the Beach Boys (download here)
recorded 27 April 1971
Fillmore East, NYC

(file expires February 2nd)

“We’ve got another famous California group here,” Jerry Garcia announced without much drama midway through the middle night of the Grateful Dead’s five-night run to close out the Fillmore East in April 1971. “It’s the Beach Boys.”

And out they came, or the post Brian Wilson incarnation anyway, to join the Dead for five songs, and to play two of their own in the middle. Like many sloppy superjams before and many since, it didn’t quite add up, but remains rather amusing. There are some great moments, from Carl Wilson’s fucking baked-ass “hello” as he arrives onstage to the Deadheads’ cries of “bring back the Dead” between Deadless renditions of “Good Vibrations” and “I Get Around” (the former introduced by Bruce Johnston as “a song that reflects these really fucked-up times”) (wha?).

The most musical artifact of the set, though, is a rendition of Merle Haggard’s still-newish redneck classic “Okie From Muskogee” which finally gets down to business: hearing Garcia’s guitar dart between the Boys’ harmonies. The Dead had been grooving on Haggard all month (indeed, a lovely Garcia reading of “Sing Me Back Home” would be the encore that night), and the ease with which they play matches the laid back Californicana of the BBs’ severely underrated albums from that period. There, ever so briefly, the great straights from the south and the great freaks from the north clicked, and over what? Some tongue-in-cheek twang. Go figure.

links of dubious usefulness, no. 10

o Kottke ran a particularly geeky overview of iPhone facts and conjecture.

o This dude melted my mind, man, with his theory of “A New Sith,” in which he reconsiders the backstory of the original Star Wars movies in light of the prequels. If George Lucas intended even a quarter of the stuff detailed here, he’s way cooler than I ever gave him credit for.

o Charlie Kaufman’s next picture, Synecdoche, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, sounds ridiculously amazing.

o New Yawkers will soon be able to send cell cam images to 311 and 911. Hope I never need to, but cool innovation.

o James McNew from Yo La Tengo recently DJed a hip-hop set on WFMU.

“irreplaceable” – beyoncé

Time to revive the occasional Good Beat entry. What better way than to get back into it but with the newest single by Beyoncé, whose “Crazy In Love” revived my faith in pop.

week of January 27, 2007
#1 this week, #1 last week, 13 weeks on chart
(download) (buy)

(file expires January 31st)

The use of the acoustic guitar on Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” interests me. Specifically, it’s that in pop there’s nothing given about using one. The normal palette is so much wider than that. The song’s bed could just as easily be a reconstituted horn section and nobody would bat an eye. But here, the Norwegian production team Stargate has chosen to go into strum overdrive. The vibe, then (at least, as a white male accustomed to acoustic guitars), becomes more girl next door than melodramatic pop diva. Of course, it’s one shiny m’fuckin’ acoustic guitar. On first listen, the beat seems nothing more than an amped-up version of the bland drum machines many singer-songwriters normally employ. Considered as that, it’s way more complex, filled with lots of subliminal fills and cross-patterns. And, considered as that, Beyoncé’s vocal performance suddenly becomes more intricate, as well, vocals cooing and layering and harmonizing in a way no coffeehouse crooner could conjure. In creating a little box for itself (Beyoncé as singer-songwriter) and then using pop spit-polish to make it sound so much bigger than that genre, there’s a visceral excitement in “Irreplaceable.” It also reminds me a lot of Mike Doughty’s version of Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love,” especially the “you must not know about me” refrain, which really is rather wistful. Or maybe it’s just Norwegian.

recent articles

Features:
Making ‘History’ With Nicholas Hytner” (profile of History Boys director, from Paste #27)
America On-Line” (wunderkammern27.com, a trip to see the Dave Matthews Band in Central Park)
Engine 27’s Rational Amusements” (wunderkammern27.com, feature on the defunct NYC sound art gallery)
Jackin’ Pop Ballot & Comments, 2006

Song reviews:
Suffer For Fashion” – Of Montreal (PaperThinWalls.com)
Freckle Wars” – Ecstatic Sunshine (PaperThinWalls.com)
Caledonia” – Ghost (PaperThinWalls.com)
Welcome To My Room” – Vietnam (PaperThinWalls.com)
Tas Var Kopek Yok – Bunalim (PaperThinWalls.com)
The End” – David and the Citizens (PaperThinWalls.com)

Album reviews:
Stages 2 – v/a (JamBands.com)
Love – The Beatles (JamBands.com)
We All Belong – Dr. Dog (Relix)

Live reviews:
Joanna Newsom at Webster Hall, 13 November 2006
Tenacious D at Madison Square Garden, 1 December 2006

Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Gratuitous Post-Jamboree #4

Only in print:
o February/March Relix (Lucinda Williams cover): album reviews of Dr. Dog, What’s Happening in Pernambuco compilation, and Ghost; book reviews of Best Music Writing 2006 and Show I’ll Never Forget anthologies; DVD review of Nirvana.
o Paste #28 (The Shins cover): album review of Of Montreal; film reviews of An Unreasonable Man and Venus.
o Signal To Noise #44 (Comets on Fire cover): album reviews of The Diminisher, Icy Demons, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Jean-Claude Vannier.

idiocracy & “come to butt-head” – beavis & butt-head

“Come to Butt-head” – Beavis and Butt-head (download here)
from The Beavis and Butt-head Experience (1993)
released by Geffen (buy)

(file expires January 22nd)

The arguments that Mike Judge’s absolutely fucking hilarious Idiocracy is classist are probably correct. But, as a reason for not distributing the film (it never opened in New York) it seems far more cynical a statement than Idiocracy itself. In the film, Luke Wilson, utterly average dude, wakes up 500 years in the future to discover he’s the smartest man on the planet, the population having devolved owing to the fact that dumb people have more babies than smart people. Hilarity, of course, ensues.

Idiocracy‘s main problem, then, seems to be its form: a cheap-looking CGI comedy. Imagined on the printed page, the story is nothing more than dystopian political parable, connected to vicious satire like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and H.G. Wells’ own classist sci-fi devolution tale, The Time Machine. (Imagined as pop music it’s, uh, Devo.) That is, it puts the issue on the table. But were Fox really that afraid that the movie wouldn’t play in middle America? Isn’t that itself an insulting assessment of middle America? Or maybe the whole classism argument is a strawman, and the assholes in charge still just don’t get how brilliant it is (even after they did the same effing thing to Office Space)?

’cause, man, it’s brilliant: a whole nation of Beavis and Butt-heads, with Wilson and Maya Rudolph as the only sensible folks around. Indeed, much of the humor is drawn from the same wellspring as MTV’s preeminent cartoon meta-critics, from fantastic perversions of language (“we seem to be experimenting some techmerlogical differences”) to nearly Zen arguments (no spoilers, but watch for a joke about electrolytes). Like any dystopian fantasy, maybe it’s right. I don’t know which possible world is scariest: Judge’s vision, or the fact that it slipped through the cracks as it did.

Likely, it’s not a tragedy at all, and Idiocracy is simply a film built the age of the Long Tail, and it’ll just become a huge NetFlix hit. Speaking of which: it’s out now and, yeah, you should probably go put it in your queue.

Related: a good recent profile of Mike Judge, from Esquire.

“puzzlin’ evidence” – talking heads & 1986 nlcs, game 6

“Puzzlin’ Evidence” – Talking Heads (download here)
from True Stories (1986)
released by Sire (buy)

(file expires January 20th)

Watching 20-year old baseball games is way more fun that I’d suspected. In the case of Game 6 of the 1986 National League Championship Series, a 16-inning epic between the Mets and the Houston Astros, the overarching drama yielded dozens of miniature entertainments. Framed by the hyperreal green of the Astrodome’s Astroturf and its roof’s impressionist light slats, there was the simple pleasure of watching the 1986 Mets operate. There were small moments: Keith Hernandez making a routinely amazing grab deep in the hole, and flipping effortlessly to Roger McDowell, covering first. And there were the crowd shots, flickering portraits of the same characters that populated David Byrne’s True Stories, shot and set in Texas that same year.

The first picture, perhaps, is titled: the Starting Pitcher’s Wife in the Top of the 9th. In this case, the starting pitcher was Bob Knepper, working on a two-hit shut-out against the Mets who — moments after this shot — pinch-hit with Len Dykstra, who would triple to deep center, thus beginning a three-run rally that would result (seven innings later) in the Mets’ clinching of the pennant. But she didn’t know that.

frow show, episode 11

Thursday is the new Wednesday. Here’s the Frow Show…

Listen here.

Episode 11: illegal shit
Highlights of bootleg plunderings from Turntable Lab and elsewhere. Also some things that can be legally acquired. But only some.

1. “Carl’s Anti-Drug Radio Spot” – The Beach Boys (from Endless Bummer: The Very Worst of the Beach Boys)
2. “Television is Crack” – Certified Bananas (from CertifiedBananas.com)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “TV on the Radio vs. Afrika Bambaata” – Diplo (from Hollertronix, v. 2)
5. “Music to Watch Girls Cry, part 13” – Andy Votel (from Music to Watch Girls Cry)
6. “Ensemble Melodica Intro” – Dr. Delay (from Psycrunk)
7. “°‹” – Trap Door II (from Trap Door II Mystery Mix)
8. “Naomi” – Neutral Milk Hotel (from the Joe Beats Experiment Presents Indie Rock Blues)
9. “Love Is How You Make It” – Gong (from Four Tet: DJ Kicks)
10. “Where I End and You Begin” – Radiohead/”Stay Fly” – Triple 6 Mafia (from Psycrunk)
11. “Dirt Off Your Shoulders” – Spinjunkies (from Jay-Z’s Dead)
12. “[Untitled]” – Andy Votel (from Songs In the Key of Death)
13. “Chove Chuva” – Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 (from Jorge Ben: Tudo Ben, v. 1 [Rock & Soul])
14. “Soul Master” – Edwin Starr
15. “I Wish it Would Rain” – The Cougars (from Jamaica To Toronto compilation)
16. “Kokomo (Spanish version)” – The Beach Boys (from Endless Bummer: The Very Worst of the Beach Boys)