Genuinely charmed by people trying to "out" me regarding stuff that had print runs in the tens of thousands, bands that toured the world, stuff that was already reported on by Pitchfork... whatever. I am not afforded the luxury of secret shame, guys. Knock yourselves out.
I certainly have some 'splainin to do, and am not shy about any of it. A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It's nobody's obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself...
A project I've undertaken piecemeal as I've matured, evolved and learned over time. I expect no grace, and honestly feel like I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behavior that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society.
For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.
If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit *mistaken* notion that things were getting better.
I'm overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring "edgelord" shit. Believe me, I've met my share of punishers at gigs and I sympathize with anybody who isn't me but still had to suffer them.
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I work in an arcane field where the job requires specific technical knowledge, built on a ladder of understanding and breakthroughs going back over 100 years. It's not immunology but it's not nothing.
A couple decades ago there was a christian panic about something the press started calling "backmasking," an outgrowth of the similarly absurd panic about subliminal messaging and advertising, about which I could also talk about for too long but will not now.
According to the panic, Satanists were hiding messages in music by recording secret messages, only audible if the music were played backwards, but somehow still perceivable and persuasive on listeners. Such messages were blamed for drug abuse, teen suicides and cult behavior.
I don't know about you, but if I could spend $100 to keep somebody from being strangled to death, I'd happily hand over $100. So if you see someone in distress in public, before you strangle them to death, consider just giving them $100.
And if you see someone strangling such a person to death, instead of watching, consider stopping the strangler long enough to give his victim $100, on the chance that that might improve their demeanor enough that the strangler won't feel compelled to continue murdering them.
I mean, $100 isn't nothing, I understand. But strangling a person to death isn't nothing either, and apparently this situation calls for a considerable remedy, on the scale of strangling someone to death. In that context, it's probably worth $100.
I will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan
Christ the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up.
"They spent three weeks on the guitar solo..." Three weeks of watching guitar players give it their all while doing bumps and hitting the talkback, "More *Egyptian* but keep it in the pocket..."
Beautifully lyrical guitarist, underrated vocalist. Television made a new kind of music and inspired new kinds of music. Marquee Moon is a perfect record. Requiescat.
🎈 variety.com/2023/music/obi…
My favorite thing about especially the more meandering parts of Television was the way the music held onto a tonal center without having to frame it in "changes" or "heads" or even a fucking riff. You could tell it was still going almost through telepathy...
As Verlaine and Richard Lloyd unfolded their ideas, wrapping around a kind of song that didn't need to be sung. Their music retained its identity without the crutch of structural scaffolding other bands relied on, giving us license to disregard it elsewhere in our lives.
I don't talk often about the band I'm in, Shellac of North America, because I don't like promotion or anything that feels like promotion. I'm making an exception because Lin Bremer has died, and the affection people felt for him was deserved. (thread) blockclubchicago.org/2023/01/22/lin…
This song uses an extemporaneous litany, phrases and tropes associated with broadcasting, to sketch out several parallel notions. The most important one, the one that makes me think of Lin Bremer, is the way radio personalities use their speaking voice. shellac.bandcamp.com/track/the-end-…
They're just talking to you, same way your friends do, and that's their profession, telling you things in a way that bypasses all conscious mechanism and labor on your part. You don't need to read it or parse meaning from symbol, it's talking and it goes straight in your earhole.
People are dunking on these absurdist demonstrations but I think they're kinda cool. The point they're making is that your most priceless shit is worthless on a dead planet, and while they're not going to change any minds it's a way to get that idea into the discourse.
There's going to be more of this shit happening with people putting themselves at legal risk (or worse) to make this point, and it's going to be great watching who is appalled, who laughs and who smirks and nods.
People who don't accept the tactic are hung up on the fact that it won't change any minds. So what, nothing does. Nobody changes anybody else's mind, ever. That's not a thing. People change their minds on their own. All anybody else can do is be right about something and say so.