Listener – Ozark Empire

(Or, a Snake Oil Salesman Comes to Your Town).

I wish all Christian music sounded like this. (No offense).

Ozark Empire, or a snake oil salesman comes to your town. from DAN SMITH on Vimeo.

Update Update (Geaux Tigers, Go Habs Go, Who Dat Edition)

Quite a weekend for my sports teams: LSU won in convincing fashion, the Saints had a huge comeback against the Dolphins (despite three TDs from former Saint and Mater P protege Ricky Williams, no less), and the Canadiens even managed to put together an overtime win against the NY Rangers. Nice work, everyone!

I figured some sort of life-updated was in order. I’ve started grad school and am maybe kinda sorta becoming acquainted with the idea of reading 400 pages per week (per class, no less). I’m TA’ing a course in early British Literature, which essentially means that I’m a knowledge conduit between the prof and twenty-six undergrads who I fear rely way, way too much on me for help (I have to explain to them every week that they should take every single thing I say about literature with a grain of salt, and their essays seem to suggest that they’re wise enough to take that advice).

I’ve not had much time to write, ironically, because I’ve had to read like a madman, but I did get to take a class with George Saunders, who is among my two or three favorite writers in the world. He was gracious, humble, and funny as all get-out. Check out his story “Victory Lap”, which he read Friday night, here, and try to picture a middle-aged man with a goatee doing the voice of the fifteen year-old girl. All that aside, it was a blessing to get to spend some time with a man of such overwhelming brilliance who really doesn’t seem to think that intellectualism is all it’s cracked up to be. “When my first book of stories was reviewed,” he told us, “I had to look up the word dystopia.”

I also got to fly home two weeks ago to attend the abysmal LSU-Florida game (I haven’t seen us win in Tiger Stadium since the 2007 Louisiana Tech game) and, more importantly, to celebrate my upcoming wedding to the lovely Rachelle Sartini. We had a great party in Broussard, LA, near my mom’s house, and Rachelle’s mom and brother drove down from Michigan just to attend. Got to see tons of friends I hadn’t seen in way too long, which was a pleasure and a blessing and all good things.

Musically, I’ve been spinning the new Big Boi song, “Shine Blockas”, over and over and over. I’ve got no real clue what he’s rapping about, but the melody and flow is hypnotic; consider it this year’s “Whatever You Like,” though to compare TI to Big Boi is a bit like comparing Jordan Jefferson’s game against Auburn to, say, Brett Favre’s virtuoso performance the night after his dad passed away. It’s not even the same league.

I still think that the Constantines are the most underrated band of the decade.

I also ate at La Louisiane, which you may have noticed the picture of a couple of posts ago. It was decent–excellent hush puppies by anyone’s standards, but no Abita beer. The odd thing, though, was the gumbo: it was thick like mud with little rice and huge chunks of bell pepper floating in it, really more of a stew than anything else. Still, a gumbo’s a gumbo, even when it’s not, and I’ll take tastes of home wherever I can get ‘em.

Overall, Montreal is good, but it’s lonely, too, and I’m ready for November 7th to get here. Not soon enough. Well, maybe Soon Enough.

Why I’m About to Go Back Into the 50-degree rain

A man has to eat.

Montréal mini-post

Were it not for the fact that I have to sleep with four blankets in early October, Montréal would be just like Louisiana.

(Not sure what that Boudin one is about, but it sure makes me hungry.)

Allez les tigres !

I know, I know, it’s been like two months since I’ve had anything to say. Here’s quick rundown of why I haven’t been able to write on here more than three times this summer:

– Put 4,500 miles on my car before July 4th driving from Grand Rapids to Louisiana and back twice, including a trip to Bonnaroo and a jump-off to Texas, where I Best Manned Paul and Mary Jo’s wedding.
– At said, wedding, proposed to the most wonderful lady in the world, Rachelle Allegrina Marie Sartini
– Spent a week in Iowa at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, learning how to twist raw thoughts into the beginning of something bigger (I’m sorry, I can’t help my superstition, but I’m not gonna say any more for fear of jinxing it)
– Packed up everything I own and moved halfway across the continent to Montreal, where I will start grad school on Tuesday (we get off for Labor Day, though we have to call it Labour Day or Fête des Travaux)

I have never been more worn-out and hopeful in my life.

And I am now sitting in a bar in Montreal, patiently waiting for LSU to kick off against U-Dub. It will be two am by the time the game is over. Yes!

Anyway, once I have a bit more stability, I expect to be updating the blog, and reinstating Jolieblanche.com. Keep your eyes/ears peeled!

Hopefully, the world will listen

As a music journalist, I am bombarded with emails from bands and publicists of whom I’ve never heard. I’ll spare you the details of emails, but, as you can imagine, they’re mostly pretty standard ad-copy: our band is going to take over the world/the internet/Brooklyn; this band will change your life; this record will travel with you from apartment to apartment [still my favorite, and the only promo copy I've ever read that actually turned out to be true]. As you can imagine, I rarely even take the time to read the subject lines before I mark them as read and let them fester in my inbox.

Today, though, I got a message from a Belgian group called Palomine. The longish email said very little about the record, which was a surprise in and of itself. The release date? Well–as soon as we can all make it happen. Palomine have vowed to not release Attention Alpha until someone in every single UN-backed country has had a chance to hear it.

That’s right. At least one representative from all 194 countries, including the Vatican (which, Palomine admits, may be a bit of a challenge.)

It works like this: make a video of yourself talking in your native tongue about Palomine–in any way, shape, or form, I suppose; the email doesn’t specify*–and upload it to www.theworldislistening.com. You’ll get a special download code and a copy of the record with artwork. If you don’t like it? That’s fine–you didn’t pay for it.

It’s a pretty great idea, but these guys don’t have a real publicist, so they’re counting on the thing to go viral. So, if you happen to be reading this from foreign environs–foreign to Belgium, Palomine’s home–do the group a favor and check them out.

*note: turns out you have to say, “Hi, I’m _________ from __________ and I listen to Palomine.” No biggie.

I’ve Got You and That’s All I Need

It’s the end of the decade, as far as music journalists are concerned. Word has it that Paste is already assembling its Best Of The Aughts list, and I’m sure that our friends in Atlanta aren’t the only ones. Mile-markers are a big deal in music, for some reason, and the only thing more exciting than an End of Year list is an End of Decade. Blame it on High Fidelity, but there’s nothing music journalists like more than making lists. We spend hours on them, sweating and grunting and agonizing over them, checking each bullet point, spellchecking words like “Devendra”, all in the name of producing something Definitive and Final. I once spent an entire weekend looking up and filling in ID3 tags on iTunes in order to easily recognize which of my CDs have been released in the last ten years.

Maybe I’m too much of a postmodernist, but I don’t know that I understand what the point is. Let’s say that each and every music outlet reaches a consensus as to the best release of the past ten years. For fun, let’s pretend that it’s My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (that’s the one with the legit “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” on it). So, all of the mags and all of the blogs have decided that MCR put out the very best record borne of this troubled decade (as it’s sure to be called by many, many journalists).

Okay.

What now?

Does this change the listening experience of someone approaching Three Cheers for the first time? Does it change it in a positive way? Or, does it only increase the pressure to like (or hate) something you may not actually like (or hate)? The thing with overhyped records or movies or politicians is that the weight of their hype forces people to have an opinion one way or the other, and someone forced to form an opinion is bound to bounce to one of the poles in an extreme way. (This is another problem with contemporary music journalism — too short of turnaround times). And so now I can’t listen to My Chemical Romance on my own and form a more fair and balanced opinion; I’m forced to consider whether or not this is actually the greatest (or, e.g., the third-greatest, or the 23rd greatest, etc) record I’ve ever heard. And though I can hear the younger folks in the audience chuckling and saying, “You see, this is the problem with modernity–you can’t ever come to a fully objective decision and it’s a foolish thing to wish for,” I’d like to submit that there’s such a thing as making too informed a decision.

I’ll give another example from the wide world of music. I spent Mardi Gras 2008 in my hometown of Lafayette, LA, with a pair of very close friends. After a day of rabblerousing and beadmongering, we wandered to the Blue Moon Saloon, where the cover was something like ten bones and we, who had spent our grubby dollars on really really bad fried chicken, were forced to watch from the literal fence. It’s a well-known fact that any band playing on Mardi Gras day is either a) a scrapped-together Cajun band of overwhelming ability or b) an extremely glossy cover band of dubious motives. But as Liz, Emily, and I hung on to the spiked pines of the Blue Moon, we watched a mysterious group of tubthumpers sing ghastly country songs into a microphone that looked to have been stolen from WSM Nashville. One guitar, one drum, one washboard, one bass made from a wash basin and a string. These were the Pine Hill Haints, and they played Hank Williams songs in the daytime on Mardi Gras and made it seem natural and joyous. Their short frontporch set was exhilarating, and as the day ended and we headed back to paradeless Baton Rouge, the Haints sealed themselves into our memories. And then, two days ago, I click around Pitchfork and find a review of To Win Or To Lose, which is something like the Haints’ ninth release, and this one on indie stalwart K Records no less. (Just try to talk bad about K Records in an indie rock rag. See what happens.) Sure, they’re not Animal Collective or Arcade Fire, but for all their Northern Alabama weirdery, the Haints still have a website and a label with velveteen cachet.

What’s the point with the Pine Hill Haints? Aside from the fact that To Win Or To Lose is a great record, it’s that my opinion of the group was shaped entirely by the way I was introduced to them. Had I read the review or listened to the album stream on Pitchfork, it would have made very little impression upon me–even though the record is great and Pitchfork seems to agree. And so I count the Haints as something like mine, a band whose music I’ve discovered to like entirely on my own, free from the panopticanonical thrust of pop music opinion-makers (myself excluded?).

Another, shorter example. I’m currently reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer last year and has received novaic reviews from seemingly everyone. And so before I even opened the book, I was consumed with expectation for Oscar Wao, and it took almost two hundred pages for me to realize that all of my skeptical scrutinizing of whether or not this book is worth its lauds has gotten in the way of what Junot Díaz is trying to do: tell a story.

But–this essay is supposed to be about End of Decade Lists. I guess my whole point here is to say that I don’t think that music needs to be quantified, or that art needs to be quantified. As I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I don’t have to be constantly considering whether or not it’s the best book I’ve ever read, and even if I come to the decision that it’s not, that doesn’t mean that I don’t get to enjoy it any more or less than I would otherwise. We don’t need to be constantly searching for The Best Record, The Best Book. That search literally does not end. Maybe this is something that people who don’t take pop culture as gospelic already understand, but most things really don’t need to be in competition with one another, and, perhaps more than anything, that includes the arts. As Grizzly Bear will gladly tell you, they don’t set out trying to make The Best of anything; they just want to make records that make you happy. But as soon as they become fodder for lists, and as soon as those lists are made and those opinions are put into print and thereby lend themselves a weird air of authority, records and books and all that lose their ability to delight, to frighten, to challenge. They become something we argue over, something we listen to with what we fancy to be trained ears–and while they are trained, they’re trained not to pick up on and enjoy nuance, but to pick apart what exactly makes something good/bad/whatever.

This is something like you letting your intellect teach you about phrenology.

And, yes, at the end of the year, I will probably spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what my favorite fifty records of the past ten years are, and I will try to ignore the fact that I have trouble naming fifty records that were even released this decade, and I will be furious when someone in the comments section disagrees with my choices and, most likely, I will stop listening to those records the moment that list is uploaded, because they will never ever be able to achieve that number one ranking again.

T’es trop canaille!

Poo-yi, mais every time I get sad cuz I miss ma home, I’m gonna watch dis video, me, an’ I think I’m gonna feel better. Mais, da best part is at 1:10. I wonder if that man live by the Scott Goodwill.

(And if you think you better than me, you bess get down offa dat ladduh, cher)

Oh, Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson has a new video. It’s for a song that has two (two!) curse words in the title. You can watch it here. He stole the beat from Shania Twain and the stage-dressing from, er, himself. Twelve years ago.*

I just watched Manson’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in 97, which I loved when I was in seventh grade (I had a bootleg), and, I have to hand it to him–I’m retroactively shocked. I don’t know that I’m shocked so much at his comment about being free from the “fascism of Christianity” (that was nothing new, not even back in 97) as I am with how purposefully uncomfortable his stage presence is. Manson’s always been a pretty talented showman, and he sells the point of “The Beautiful People” by making himself as ugly as possible, particularly in the chorus when he bends his body into an awkward slumping scarecrow.

Of course, Manson also promised to free us from “the fascism of beauty” and subsequently dated Rose McGowan, Dita VonTeese, and that one girl who was like seven back when Manson was famous.

Not sure how they fit into Manson’s aesthetic, but let’s hope he keeps fighting the good fight against hypocrisy.

All that aside, I appreciate some of Manson’s music from a musical standpoint, and he’s a fairly bright and reasonable human being–dig his appearance in Bowling for Columbine, where he makes several interesting points, and it’s particularly nice to hear that he thinks it’s disturbing that he has more influence over young people than then-President Clinton. Manson tries to play it off and act like Clinton enjoyed more influence over America’s depressed teenagers in 1998, which is a pretty weak argument, but it does make me wonder how such things happen. Marilyn Manson certainly didn’t begin his career with the intention of shaping the thoughts and hearts of teenagers, no matter what certain fearmongerers may have tried to sell you.

If I remember correctly, what attracted me to Marilyn Manson was the vague aura of evil and rebellion that he and his record label surrounded him with. It was a sort-of ambiguous thing, though, a darkness based mostly on used medical equipment, skinny androgyny, and the colors black and red. I remember being very, very disappointed in Mechanical Animals when it came out–eighth grade–because it seemed “soft” at the time, particularly compared to the stuff that Limp Bizkit were doing (I’m not trying to be funny). Watching the video for “The Dope Show” now, though, and soft isn’t really the right word for what all’s going on–cops in pink uniforms making out with each other; a naked, unisexual Manson; that weird rigor mortis dance he’s always done; red sequins and white face masks and Manson looking more like Jar Jar Binks than Bowie as he approaches the mic. It’s more of a thrown-together, meaningless assortment of creepy/offensive images that kinda/sorta relate to one another but mostly just fire nervous neurons when they pop up. It’s the right kind of offensive for MTV: quick, flashy, shallow, and meant to provoke a knee-jerk reaction. It’s not surprising that it didn’t last.

*Holy crap, Shania Twain stole the outfit from Manson! Seriously, nice leather corsets, everyone.

You Don’t Have to Rock Alone

Stop sorting everything and listen to Wilco (The Album) on the band’s website.