This is the craziest thing I have ever done here.

The great Steve Mannion just spent a dog's age tabulating the results from the ILX/NYLPM music poll asking people to nominate their favorite albums and tracks from 2000 to 2004 so far. Below, I publish an annotated version of that list.

1. Radiohead - Kid A**
2. Daft Punk - Discovery~
3. The Streets - Original Pirate Material**
4. Dizzee Rascal - Boy In Da Corner~
5. The Avalanches - Since I Left You~
6. Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash**
7. The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free~
8. Jay-Z - The Blueprint~
9. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights@
10. Basement Jaxx - Rooty~
11. Radiohead - Amnesiac@
12. Radiohead - Hail To The Thief@
13. Kanye West - The College Dropout*
14. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot@
15. Boredoms - Vision Creation Newsun~
16. Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress+
17. Missy Elliott - Miss E...So Addictive*
18. Boards Of Canada - Geogaddi@
19. The Rapture - Echoes~
20. PJ Harvey - Stories From The City Stories From The Sea~
21. The Junior Boys - Last Exit~
22. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers LP+
23. The White Stripes - Elephant*
24. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun@
25. Ghostface Killah - Supreme Clientele~
26. N.E.R.D. - In Search Of...~
27. The Notwist - Neon Golden~
28. Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It In People+
29. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever To Tell~
30. Sleater-Kinney - One Beat~
31. The Fiery Furnaces - Gallowsbird Bark~ 32. Justin Timberlake - Justified~ 33. Le Tigre - Le Tigre~ 34. Fugazi - The Argument~ 35. Broadcast - Haha Sound~ 36. Lambchop - Nixon@ 37. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR** 38. Fennesz - Endless Summer~ 39. The Scissor Sisters - The Scissor Sisters~ 40. Cat Power - You Are Free~ 41. Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein* 42. The Clientele - Suburban Light+ 43. Low - Things We Lost In The Fire+ 44. Richard X presents - X-Factor Vol. 1~ 45. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven@ 46. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance* 47. Luomo - Vocalcity~ 48. Ladytron - Light And Magic* 49. Life Without Buildings - Any Other City+ 50. Felix Da Housecat - Kittenz And Thee Glitz~ 51. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Hearts Of Oak* 52. Lifter Puller - Fiestas & Fiascos~ 53. The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic+ 54. Mclusky - Mclusky Do Dallas+ 55. Andrew WK - I Get Wet+ 56. The Beta Band - Hot Shots II@ 57. Royksopp - Melody AM@ 58. Aaliyah - Aaliyah~ 59. The RZA/Various Artists - Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai (OST)~ 60. The Liars - They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top@ 61. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow~ 62. Sonic Youth - Murray Street+ 63. Madvillain - Madvillainy~ 64. Sufjan Stevens - Greetings From Michigan+ 65. Big & Rich - Horse Of A Different Colour* 66. Cornelius - Point** 67. Goldfrapp - Black Cherry+ 68. Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)+ 69. Ghostface - The Pretty Toney Album~ 70. The Fall - The Real New Fall LP~ 71. Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - How I Long To Feel The Summer In My Heart~ 72. Shellac - 1000 Hurts+ 73. Spoon - Kill The Moonlight+ 74. Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse+ 75. The New Pornographers - Electric Version@ 76. Michael Mayer presents - Immer~ 77. The Wrens - The Meadowlands~ 78. Junior Senior - D-d-don't Stop The Beat* 79. D'Angelo - Voodoo** 80. New Order - Get Ready~ 81. Atmosphere - Lucy Ford+ 82. Xiu Xiu - Knife Play+ 83. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Pig Lib+ 84. Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R@ 85. Stephen Malkmus - Stephen Malkmus@ 86. Calexico - Feast Of Wire~ 87. Hot Snakes - Automatic Midnight+ 88. The Exploding Hearts - Guitar Romantic+ 89. Mogwai - Rock Action+ 90. Johnny Greenwood - Bodysong (OST)* 91. The Microphones - The Glow (Part 2)~ 92. Low - Trust+ 93. The Delgados - Hate~ 94. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain+ 95. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album& 96. Emma Bunton - Free Me~ 97. Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker+ 98. Wiley - Treddin' On Thin Ice~ 99. Bob Dylan - Love And Theft@ 100. Max Tundra - Mastered By Guy At The Exchange+

*heard it, voted for it
**heard it, cannot remember if I voted for it or not
@heard it, didn't vote for it
~didn't hear it but want to and/or heard it but didn't remember it very well so didn't vote for it
+didn't hear it, no interest in doing so
&only heard screwed and chopped version

If I were to re-order this list, leaving out the ones I haven't heard and the ones I don't really care about, it would go like this:

Missy Elliott, Cannibal Ox, Big and Rich, David Banner, Bubba Sparxxx, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Junior Senior, D'Angelo, Radiohead (Kid A), White Stripes (Elephant), Ladytron, Kanye West, Cornelius, Jonny Greenwood, Basement Jaxx (Kish Kash) The Streets (Original Pirate Material), Godspeed You Black Emperor, Primal Scream, The Liars, zzzzzzzzzzzz

Things I learned about myself:

1. That I clearly am way out of the loop. I'd better start downloading or something.

2. That when my wife says I spend too much money on music, she's high. Well, okay, I do spend too much money on music. But it's not any of this stuff, and think what would happen if I actually had all these records!

3. That I am very not into the kinds of things that other critics are, but I'd like to be, but I probably wouldn't even love half the things on the list that I've marked as "I'd like to hear this." I pretty much like everything, though. I am quick to like and quick to love. I just don't flip for mumbling Mormons, even if they are pretty and all that, nor do I go gaga for indie hipsters. I am slowly drifting away from ILX, from the zeitmind, from everything.

4. That I am NOT the only person who's ever heard of Bersuit Vergabarat. I nominated Hijos del Culo (you could only nominate one album and one song) and it ended up at #109 on the list, which means that other people voted for it besides the likes of me! I am shocked and happily surprised.

5. That it's not any better if I go down to #s 101-200.

  ¶ 8/28/2004 0 comments

  Some Songs Seem to Make Sense Right Now

Allison Moorer, "One on the House" and "Louise Is in the Blue Moon"

I know we aren't supposed to be into alt.country, it's hella uncool, it's uncooler than anything right now, and mostly I agree. But although I love Big and Rich and Gretchen Wilson, they are not the only game in town, country means a lot of things, it isn't just about shininess and partiness, there's still room for someone who wants to walk away from Ellivhsan. there are a lot of things that I still have to say about Moorer's The Duel that I didn't say here, so I'll start by saying that among the really quite radical things she does on this record is kill off a character without us even knowing it, without us even thinking to look for it, we don't expect country songwriters to do intertextuality especially when they're women.

But check it out: on "Yessirree," from Miss Fortune, Moorer created a bar "called the Blue Moon Taproom" where the bartender laughs at your jokes and gives old alcoholics drinks if that's what makes them happy. It was clearly her vision of heaven, a very country heaven at that, and she sang it like she was already there, like it was the only afterlife she'd let herself believe. (Someday I'll write about Moorer's beef with heaven, something she does on every single album, a legacy to her murdered mom.)

But so here in 2004 she has two related songs that shed light on the story. In "One on the House," our protagonist is begging the bartender for a drink even though she doesn't have any scratch for it. She's lived a hard life: "Wasted my fortune on having a ball / Hit the bottle like a calf at a cow". She knows she doesn't deserve any handouts: "Can't say I'm proud of this life of mine / But begging is brand new to me." She's not anything more than a poor alcoholic at the end of the line: "I'm just a poor soul who wants to get soused / Give me one on the house." Clearly, she's talking to the bartender at the Blue Moon. Who is, obviously, St. Peter. She's begging for more than just a shooter; she's begging for admittance to the Blue Moon, that alco-heaven that her songwriter so meticulously laid out in "Yessirree." SHE IS DEAD.

But who is she? We find out a few songs later. Her name is Louise, and we learn from the title of the song that she's already in the Blue Moon. This is an early Springsteen style number, characters like Skinny and the Coolsville County Sheriff and Old Danny wander through the song, doing whatever they subversively do; Skinny, for example, is "off his rocker," which usually means one is crazy, but then Moorer goes one more and pulls an Edward Lear: "Skinny's off his rocker / He left it on the road / And even though he'll miss it / He had to let it go." This is an LSD trip cloaked in lazy dirty 1970's outlaw country, this is a Jessi Colter song more than it is Martina or Sara or Patti or Jo Dee or Fetchin' Gretchen, I expect to hear Tompall Glaser come squealin' round the corner in a tan El Dorado any time now.

And as for Louise? She's "in the Blue Room / Puttin' up her dukes / Walkin' on rocky socks / Punchin' numbers on the juke." Looks like her entreaties worked. Looks like she made it. Looks like Moorer and St. Peter let this little straggly rummy into the Pearly Gates after all. Looks like a work of compassion for someone whom none of the rest of us would look at twice. Looks like a safety net. Looks like a sneaky work of love by a songwriter whose reach and heart and soul are off the charts, and so therefore is she, but I don't care, I think she's probably written eleven of the year's top songs here and no one knows it. Allison Moorer's writing is like George Costanza's driving, she's doing things up there that we have NO IDEA about.
  ¶ 8/18/2004 0 comments

  SPECIAL GUEST MENTALIST--JOHN WOJTOWICZ! Presenting "The Uncanny"(Andy's Robot Mix)
(The following is butt a grain of John's epic account of a Vienna vastness, mounted by Mike Kelley, rising artstar, minion of Deetroit urcore Destroy All Monsters, illustrator of Sonic Oldth's DIRTY, and, most importantly,a RECORD COLLECTOR. If you don't like this mix, blame me, not John. Geek love--D.)
I. The Main Exhibit (excerpt)
Sitting unobtrusively off in one corner is a robot model of Andy Warhol: when he was invited to a TV show to plug his book,THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL, he chose not to appear live and instead commissioned someone to construct this model, which was also equipped with a tape recording of him reading excerpts from this book. (And note that [i] he was thus hearkening back to his Czechoslovakian roots, since the word "robot" was first coined by Karel Capek in 1923; and [ii] this same idea would later be taken up by Kraftwerk, who have gone on entire concert tours by sending robots in place of themselves.) Ironically, in a gallery full of human figures, the only piece involving human language is a life-size Erector-set-style robot by Jonathan Borofsky, which continually pronounces the word "chatter" in a mechanical voice. And towering over the entire main room of the exhibition is "Ubermensch," a sculpture by Jake & Dinos Chapman, which consists of granite-grey plastic crags, on top of which is precariously perched a cartoonish life-size figure of Stephen Hawking.
II.The "Harems"(excerpt)
At the very end, after viewing the main room, a passageway, and a smaller gallery, one enters the chamber containing "The Harems," whose title is a term taken from classic psychological literature, where it is used to describe the fetishistic activity of the collector. In this room, Mike Kelley has gathered several of his own personal collections, including horror and monster bubblegum cards (several series), marbles, soup spoons, shot glasses, business cards, a half-dozen unbent wire hangers which had been used to break into cars, and the aforementioned squeeze toys. At the podium discussion, Kelley explained that "When you grow up in America, you're surrounded by things like this" and that this aspect might not come across to a European. Placed in the four corners of the room are video monitors which play back DVDs of Kelley's other collections: comic books (from back when they were still in the 12- and 15-cent price range), postcards (several thousand of them), pinups (with hardcore porn stills far outnumbered by fashion shots and cosmetic ads)and, best of all, HIS RECORD COLLECTION. The viewer not only gets to see the covers of all 3000-plus LPs of it, but hears a one-second sample from each one. Entire decades of your life will pass before your eyes. The added bonus, however, is that in addition to the historical and autobiographical, there's a hermeneutic level: when you hear 12 consecutive blasts of James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic samples, you're also hearing what amounts to a cut-up and condensed history of hiphop. Likewise, when 15 snippets of Donna Summer and/or Giorgio Moroder go by, it becomes a mini-survey of house and techno. My friend Joe Herter, a Friend of Dorothy who, like Kelley, grew up in Detroit and studied at the University of Michigan, insists that "In life, there are two kinds of people: those who are size queens, and those who wish they could be size queens!" If that's the case, Mike Kelley's is not much bigger than mine: he has more James Brown, I have more Parliament & Funkadelic; he has more Sun Ra on vinyl, I have more Ornette. Though with that said, props are due: he's got every record released on JCOA, along with most of Arista Freedom, not to mention all the 90s metal I never want to hear again (NiN, Ministry), exotica like Yma Sumac (are 5 really necessary?) and scads of African folk records from before the days of "world music," when they constituted a form of anthropological doumentation.
I myself propose the dichotomy that in life there are "listmakers," and there are those who consider listmaking to be an unfathomable mental aberration. And the various anti-listmakers and anti-collectionists will simply fume and froth at "the Harems" or, at best, view it with the condescension that a pathological condition deserves. Kelley openly states that he considers collecting art to be a form of compulsion, but I suggest that "the Harems" itself carries additional aspects of the Uncanny:
"The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them."(Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library")
"For what else is (a) collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?" (ibid.)
I would go one step further than Benjamin and propose that the uncanniness of a collection lies in its illusion of TOTALITY. This is the same principle by which the I Ching posits that there are only 64 possible situations in the universe; the tarot has it covered with 72 cards. To the mind of the 10-year-old collector, having the entire American League laid out in front of you is something greater than the Britannica and the O.E.D. put together.
Moreover, still another aspect of the Uncanny is that of infinity (for example, in the realization that in order to collect the entire set, theoretically you might have to buy an infinite number of packs of cards, or at least every single one ever manufactured), and likewise, of the process by which something is assigned an imputed economic value (the entire set seems to immediately take on a value at least one order of magnitude greater than the price of the packs of cards that make it up). And lastly, there is a kind of stochastic uncanniness here, in the illusion that assembling (any?) 3000 albums can somehow sum up an entire musical culture.
While the mania of the collector, within the context of the exhibition, is meant to suggest repetition compulsion, I think that Kelley is also unintentionally drawing on another aspect of the Detroit myth. After all, to a stoned Surrealist the assembled array of business cards suggests an aerial view of finished cars outside a Michigan factory. To quote Kodwo Eshum quoting Juan Atkins (one of the three Detroit bruthas responsible for creating techno):
"Berry Gordy built the Motown Sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt of Ford...today the plants don't work that way. They use computers and robots to build the cars...I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than Berry Gordy's music." So all at once, the Detroit auto industry suggests repetition AND robots AND the noise so beloved by not only the Stooges and MC5, but Mike Kelley's own noise band, Destroy All Monsters.
I myself experienced two different senses of the uncanny on separate viewings of "the Harems." One standing case displays a couple dozen announcement fliers of the sort that can be found in any college-town coffee shop or laundromat: "Apartment to Share," "Tutoring in Japanese," "Actor Needed To Play Pier Paul Pasolini"(yikes). The first time that I visited the show, I was struck by their collective uncanny quality, since one has to look very closely to spot any clues as to time or place. (All but two don't list any year whatsoever; only 2 or 3 indicate UCLA as a location.) Kelley cited Edward Hopper as an influence on the exhibition, and the fliers suggest an informational analogue to the visual nature of a Hopper painting: life somewhere in America, in some unspecified decade in some unspecified college town. On my second visit, however, I took a much closer look and discovered announcements for EVENTS THAT I HAD ACTUALLY ATTENDED: specifically, concerts by Sun Ra, James Newton, and Cassandra Wilson at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland (and to make it even weirder, I was wearing one of my Sun Ra T-shirts when I noticed this).
Most importantly, however, the inclusion of "the Harems" means that there are two very different ways of reading the exhibition. At the podium discussion I mentioned to Kelley that, since the visitor generally reaches "the Harems" only after he/she has seen the entire exhibtion, it seems to be a culmination of the entire thing, and is thereby a commentary on the processes of valorization and canonization with regard to the works on display elsewhere in the show. Kelley demurred, and apparently considers "the Harems" to be almost an afterthought. Nevertheless, one interpretation is that, in a show which is so concerned with representations of the human body, this final sanctum of fetishes and cultural memorabilia amounts to the "brain" of the whole operation.
III. Final Comments(complete)
After the opening I thought about the notable absence of camp at the exhibition (with the exception of Cindy Sherman, who is of course camp by defintion). Kelley's reason for this, given at the podium discussion, is that camp is simply not uncanny. But I maintain that a camp item always has quotes around it, whereas with the show's chockablock arrangement of artworks and non-artworks, EVERYTHING is in quotes vis-a-vis everything else. And there are no camp-style inside jokes here, because Kelley genuinely likes all this stuff; we all do.
And commendably, aside from the pinups of cosmetic ads, there are no brand names to be seen anywhere: given the trash-culture orientation of the show, this is an achievement in itself. Kelley explains: "Mass media has no psychology--it's [only] a psychology of money."
Lastly, there's the issue of where Uncle Sigmund fits in with all of this. For those of you outside Austria, I need to emphasize that, as I was once told, "Freud is not taken seriously here. He was FROM here," i.e. he had to go elsewhere in order to be taken seriously. A couple of years ago, the Sunday book section of the main Vienna newspaper published an article about Freud; the lead to the article basically read, "After nearly a century, Freud's ideas are being seriously contested, while in Austria they never achieved acceptance in the first place."(i. e. "See? we were right all along"). His concepts are not common currency here, and the entire psychotherapeutic culture in the U.S. which derives from Freud exists in a far different form, if at all (and believe me, living in Austria with no recourse to the term "passive-aggressive" is like living among a tribe of Eskimos who don't have any word for snow).
Nevertheless, I imagine that Kelley's exhibition would be utter catnip for a number of Central European writers who appeared around or just after Freud; e.g. Rilke, Musil (cf. "Torless"), Gombrowicz, and especially Bruno Schulz (cf. his "Treatise on Mannikins"). And meanwhile it's one trashy, trippy delight for the amateur semiotician in all of us.JW
 Very Special Comments Section ( instigated by template wuss)
 (((D.Buttinski on megaphone: Did yall ever see that video in which a scrotal-faced, pube-crowned Lou Reed robot stuck its finger in its mouth and deconstructed itself? That was the whole video, and MTV showed it a number of times, and not at 3 AM. But what *song* was that? Also,for the video of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," the person who contributed a clothes line chorus line of legs, rippling in tha breeze, plus revolving Rod Stewartoid bumpkinheads and dedicated home appliances, is said to be the same progenitor of rude-thang mechanicals to whom late-60s Fairport Convention once sang:"Whoh, Mr. Lacey, let me work your lovely machine. Why Mr. Lacey, why you do the things you do. It's true no one here understands you, but some day they'll catch up with you.")))
(Blast From The Futcha--Mike Kelley RIP, and in his honor, a robot vs cyborg bonus track. From the I Love Music message board thread Whitney Houston R.I.P.:
  ¶ 8/14/2004 0 comments

  Some Albums Will Not Be Denied

Big & Rich, Horse of a Different Color (Warner Bros.), 2004

I don't want to love this album but I kind of do but it doesn't matter, it's got momentum both commercial and critical that won't be helped by my big ups nor hurt by my approbation, and yet I feel I must weigh in on it somewhere, I wrote a preview of their concert for Audra down at the New Times BPB but I have more to say about it even though I don't really want to say it, or have to say it.

No, they're not changing country music as we know it; as I've been saying for a year or more, country music IS hip-hop these days. All those juicy lovely hard-ass drums! All the self-referentiality! All the recycling of better-known riffs in the service of "respecting tradition"! All the love of revenge, the way women get to speak their minds in both genres but only so much and not more, the radio-driven culture! And the way both genres have homes on the coasts but are completely South-driven right now! And the way they both respect God, guns, and personal glory in a way that rock and roll just don't do no more! And [repeat until someone finally offers me a fat book contract to write about this in a not-for-free-anymore-gotta-feed-my-family-dammit sort of way]----

But the two main ways that country and hip-hop mimic each other are the most relevant here: 1) Both musicks are proud of their hybrid status, and driven entirely in the short-term by faddishness about just exactly how those hybrid ingredients are mixed; and 2) Every great album in either genre is actively fighting for the soul of that music.

John Rich and Big Kenny understand this in a way that is not a new way but seems like a new way anyway. They know that everyone is frustrated, that everyone needs to feel the thrill of discovery, that Alan Jackson has had just one ballad #1 too many. They know that everyone else puts their pretty Nashville face on the cover of the record so they don't. They know that everyone else figures out a way to justify their capitulation to the machine, so they proclaim that they're four feet taller than the machine and suddenly it is so. Because that's the way it works.

They have two rap interludes on this record, courtesy of the old-school Cowboy Troy, but that's not the story--the story is that they even want to do this. Country's been sounding like rap periodically since forever, talking blues being what they are, but lately it's been a WHOLE LOT (viz Mark Wills' "And the Crowd Goes Wild"), but covertly, gently, all smooshed in like Reese's Pieces into Steve's Ice Cream. So Big and Rich go the other way with it: actually have a rapper. A black one, who says he's black, and then raps in Spanish too. (Apparently he can also do Mandarin but he doesn't do it on this album.) Is he "great"? No. Is he awesome? Yes.

They have rowdy drinking songs, spaced perfectly at track #4 ("Kick My Ass") and track #10 ("Drinkin' 'Bout You") because that's about when the beer kicks in hardest. They have saved by Jesus songs, which are less fun but kinda metal, like Stryper, except better because they brag about almost killing a man first. They have two boring-ass relationship metaphor songs: "Wild West Show," which I dislike so much with its corny faux-Indian schtik that I wrote them off when I heard this on the radio, and "Deadwood Mountain" which does the same for corny faux-cowboy schtik.

But the wild crazy stuff is so insane that it's undeniable. The speed-bluegrass break at the end of "Real World" is pretty amazing, sonically, but it is rendered classique when they start throwing out non-sequiturs in Marty Robbins voices: "No one knows the name for the brain of the Scarecrow" OMG WTF LOL "I'm a cowboy Stevie Wonder" BEST IDEA EVER "Pro-o-o-o-o-zac" turned into an operatic trope. The metal solo in the midst of the Leon Redbone funk of "Drinkin' 'Bout You"! The way they bring Guns N Roses and Rakim both into the approach on "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)," the part about "her interpretation of my cowboy reputation" is so Axl it hurts y'all...I'm in love.

But I would be, because I (like Gerald Manley Hopkins) love dappled things, all things counter, original, spare, strange, whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim. That's hip-hop, that's country, that's Big, that's Rich.

And, refer to part 2 above, this and the Gretchen Wilson album (and to a lesser extent the Montgomery Gentry album too) are the only things this year from c&w music that seem to want to fight for the soul of the music. They're reclaiming fun, it's a roots move but a roots move for fun is always a great roots move, they want everyone to smile, to laugh, to boogie, to get drunk and get laid. Jimmy Buffett claims he wants these things but he only wants affluent palefaces to do this in their repressed flat-ass way while buying his merchandise. Funk that. Big and Rich know that teenagers and 20-somethings care less about division and more about multiplication, they want someone to fight for the music they make, to not go gentle into that good night, to be willing to throw a TV out of a hotel window or to be buried eight feet under because they're ten feet tall in a six foot town.

The album as revolutionary statement is an outmoded trope that I will embrace until I die.

  ¶ 8/11/2004 1 comments