Nostalgia For Nostalgia For a Time That Never Was

Occasionally I get incredibly nostalgic for the early '90s J-Pop subgenre called Shibuya-kei. It was some of the prettiest, most playful music ever created, and we'll probably never hear anything like it again.

The Most Beautiful Song in the World

"Pink Orange Red" is the first song on the Cocteau Twins' EP "Tiny Dynamine." I've never heard anything more beautiful, and don't expect to.

Does Not Liking Hip-Hop Make Me a Racist?

A few months ago, I replied to a friend on Facebook who was asking people to list their 10 favorite albums. I didn't think my list was particularly controversial, especially to people who know me. Most of my favorite bands were operating in the late '80s to mid '90 in the UK. Most were part of the shoegaze movement that took off around that time. Like others who responded, most of the albums on my list landed in one or two closely related genres. It never entered my mind that my love of fey British alternative bands would surprise anyone.

It did, though, and soon the "whiteness" of my list was being mocked--exclusively by other white people. I wasn't offended, since the mockery was good natured and pretty funny. But after yesterday's post, in which I might have implied that mainstream music critics spend so much time talking about hip-hop because they don't want to be perceived as racists, I thought about the Facebook incident again. Specifically, I thought (as I did at the time) about why it was acceptable for me to be mocked for listening to so much "white" music when I would never have considered firing back that others' lists were too "black."

These are hardly profound thoughts. We're all aware of concepts like "reverse" racism, white guilt and tokenism. While I don't think that white people who love hip-hop are necessarily guilty of engaging in any of the above, I have to admit that my comments yesterday were intended to make readers question whether any are present when white hipsters heap praise on "Kanye." Of course it's completely possible for someone to genuinely  love both hip-hop and indie rock, but one wonders whether it's really possible to connect with both in the way some critics want claim to.

While I don't think there's a genre of music out there that I inherently dislike, I have to admit that very little hip-hop appeals to me. When it does, it's generally in the vein of early '90s Public Enemy and Ice Cube records, and the appeal is almost entirely technical. Those were some of the best-produced records of their time, but that's as far as my interest goes. I don't--and, thanks to my socio-economic background, can't--identify with the sentiments being expressed in the lyrics. As much as I appreciate the craftsmanship of the beats and the significance of the chaotic soundscapes, it's an intellectual appreciation. My favorite Ice Cube track doesn't move me the way even my least favorite Cocteau Twins track does.

I've always felt like this is a pretty honest assessment of the situation, and not one that leaves me open to charges of racism. I've always rejected the claim, often made by hip-hop's detractors, that it's an inherently inferior form of music since it is often based on samples and allusions rather than completely original musicianship. The same complaint has been lodged against musical styles that I love, like electronic and industrial, for years, and it has always rung just as hollow. I don't have a grudge against hip-hop, but that doesn't change the fact that none of it has ever spoken to me at a level that made me cherish it the same way I cherish records by Slowdive, The Cure, The Pet Shop Boys, and so on.

I don't think my taste in music is "too white," nor do I think that others' taste is "too black." You should listen to the music that moves you, makes you feel sorry for all those poor bastards who didn't live long enough to hear it. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time.

Music Journalists Are Incom--Oh, Never Mind

'I give props to Bruno Mars' Doo-Wops & Hooligans, but I'd rather get lost in Ariel Pink's trippy Before Today, which sounds like an album made by an alien who visited Earth in 1976, listened to a ton of AM gold, then tried to replicate the sounds he heard, from very imperfect memory, some 30 years later—check out "Can't Hear My Eyes" and "Menopause Man."'


This snippet of an article from Slate's Jonah Weiner encapsulates why I don't read much music journalism anymore. I like the idea that the purpose of criticism is ultimately to tell the audience about one's own subjective experience of a work, but there's no lazier way to do that than with tortured similes like the one quoted here. The only thing that can push me away from an article faster is when some cheeky writer decides to invent a new genre to describe a not-particularly-original artist, as when Pitchfork described Melissa Nadler's sound as "narco-folk."

Even when I do manage to get all the way to the end of a piece of music writing these days, I usually find that
every critic has pretty much the same tastes: mostly indie darlings like Vampire Weekend, as well as a few hip-hop superstars (usually Kanye West, or just Kanye as he's invariably called) thrown in to prove that they're not snobbish racists.

Weiner goes on in the same article to praise records that "[burst] with ideas and references and signifiers that can be like oxygen to people whose jobs necessitate that they find interesting, involved things to say about music all day." But is it really interesting and involved to play a public game of spot the allusion with every album you listen to? I submit that Weiner's need to point out that he got it when Vampire Weekend referenced The Source and Wire demonstrates that it is not.

I used to devour music magazines in order to discover new artists, but these days I'd vastly prefer to let Last FM or Pandora serve that purpose. I still love music, but I've found that I don't much care what artists have to say about their own work, much less what most music critics have to say about it. I imagine this has something to do with my taste for ethereal and shoegaze bands, who put sound above message. I've never wanted to hear Kevin Sheilds or Liz Fraser say what their songs are really about, because I suspect the truth couldn't possibly live up to my experiences.

Maybe if I listened to more music in which lyrics are of central importance, I'd feel differently, but then again maybe not. A few years ago when I was obsessed with Joanna Newsom's Ys, I intentionally avoided any discussion of the songs' meanings. I knew what they meant to me, and that was good enough.

I'm sure a lot of artists and critics would be appalled by this, but at least I know I'm not a hypocrite. I've written music for most of my life, and one of the most thrilling moments I ever had as a songwriter was when a friend told me what she thought one of my songs meant. She was completely wrong, but I didn't care. I was happier that she had imposed her own subjective meaning on my lyrics than I would have been if she had known exactly what I was singing about.

By now I've completely lost the plot of what I was even writing about at the beginning of this post, so I'm not going to sum up. I'm just going to implore music journalists to be more concerned with passion than the need to make sure everyone knows that they get it.

Snow!

Here's the weather I woke up to this morning:

And here's Lovesliescrushing, my favorite band to listen to when it's snowing:

Momus - Hypnoprism

The fact that I only discovered yesterday that Momus, once one of the top figures in my list of musical heroes, had put out a new album last year. Hypnoprism isn't a bad record--it's certainly better than his last, JoeMus--but it has me wondering again why he won't just write the songs he seems to want to write.

For the last few years, I've felt like Momus was losing his way. JoeMus was the culmination of that, unbearably self-indulgent and self-sabotaging. After three increasingly absurd and experimental albums (Oskar Tennis Champion, Otto Spooky, and Ocky Milk), JoeMus felt like it wanted to be a catchy, frivolous pop record, but couldn't escape its curator's desire to remain a part of the experimental scene in which he had worked so hard to be accepted. Almost every song found a way to destroy itself just when it was getting good.

Hypnoprism may be a light at the end of a long tunnel, or it may just be a sign that Momus has run out of ideas. On one hand, it eschews the excessive use of pitch shifting and time-stretching that made JoeMus so tedious. On the other, it sounds a little like a greatest hits collection populated with songs that were never actually released before. There are distinct echoes of Momus's heyday, with several songs recalling the 1996 album Ping-Pong, and others going even farther back than that. It's nice to hear that Currie can still write a (relatively) straightforward pop tune, but it's also a little worrying to hear him going back to the same old themes yet again. "Evil Genius" and "Death Ruins Everything" are songs he's already written several times over, and "Datapanik" (a eulogy for a crashed hard drive) might have been witty in 1999, but now, it's a little too universal.

At least Hypnoprism ends on a high note, back-loaded as it is with the two best songs on the album. The first, a cover of Josef K's unrecorded "Adoration," is the most successful realization of Afropop yet in Momus's catalog (and surely inspired by his recent collaboration with Vampire Weekend). The second, "Strawberry Hill" is a brilliant pastiche of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Herbie Hancock. It's both the freshest and most refreshing track on the album--if only more of it could have sounded like that!

Two things still appear certain: Momus will continue to make records, possibly until the day he dies; and he will continue to be equal parts fascinating and frustrating.

A-Z Songs

I have other things I need to work on tonight, so here's a list of 26 songs I love, starting with each letter of the alphabet.

"Alcoholiday" - Teenage Fanclub
"Boys Say Go!" - Depeche Mode
"Club Country" - The Associates
"Digital Solace" - The Depreciation Guild
"Eating Noddermix" - Young Marble Giants
"Flute Song" - The Cranes
"Glittering Clouds" - Imogen Heap
"How It All Went Wrong" - Les Incompetents
"I Have Forgiven Jesus" - Morrissey
"Jimmy" - M.I.A.
"Kill Your Television" - Ned's Atomic Dustbin
"Life Being What It Is" - Kaki King
"Merman" - Max Tundra
"The Night You Can't Remember" - The Magnetic Fields
"Opening" - Philip Glass
"Pilot Can At the Queer Of God" - The Flaming Lips
"Queen of Heaven" - The Razor Syline
"Roche Limit" - Star Pimp
"She's a Lady" - Pulp
"Tonight the Streets Are Ours" - Richard Hawley
"Unfortunate Age" - Trash Can Sinatras
"Ventriloquists and Dolls" - Momus
"Wonderlust King" - Gogol Bordello
"XXX" - Helium
"You Can Work It Out" - Hideki Kaji avec Yugostar
"Zelzah" - Medicine