The Jazz Face

“Living Without You” may be my favorite post Matt...

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:26:14 -0400

“Living Without You” may be my favorite post Matt Sharp Weezer track. Mike gets it.

BEST MALADROIT Mixtape // total running time = 35:33

01 Your Room (12/22/2001)
02 Living Without You (01/10/2002)
03 Keep Fishin’ (01/17/2002)
04 Listen Up (01/07/2002)
05 Death and Destruction (01/11/2002)
06 Slob (01/10/2002)
07 Slave (01/05/2002)
08 Possibilities (01/22/2002)
09 Seafaring Jamb (01/10/2002)
10 Acapulco (01/11/2002)
11 Space Rock (01/24/2002)
12 Love Explosion (01/10/2002)
13 Sandwiches Time (01/02/2002)

download ZIP of all 13 MP3s
For their fourth studio album, Weezer attempted to incorporate an innovative system in which they’d release demos in MP3 format on their weezer.com website every day while in the studio working on Maladroit. This resulted in dozens of different versions of over thirty different songs circulating on the Internet before the album was released. -Maladroit’s Wikipedia page

I recently unearthed the CD-R I made of what I saw as the ideal sequence of Weezer’s Maladroit, but it was scratched to shit. Luckily, I located these demos on the internet and actually took the effort to put this mix on the website. I remember enjoying this version of “Death and Destruction” because Rivers sings a less emotive melody in the chorus. “Space Rock” is still a great two minutes. “Your Room” would have made a great opener! That WTFalsetto on “Sandwiches Time”! OK, most of this doesn’t sound good in 2013.

Thundercat - Oh Sheit It’s X As much as I love...

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:48 -0400

Thundercat - Oh Sheit It’s X

As much as I love “#Beautiful” this Thundercat song is my early pick for Jam of the Summer 2013. But that’s no surprise. I love Thundercat. He’s one of my favorite guys making music these days, and even more so than Flying Lotus, I think, typifies what’s cool about the whole Brainfeeder LA thing. Yeah, sure, I say that ‘cause I like his music more than I like Fly Lo’s and it’s a matter of taste, but this is some out there shit. It’s off the wall, it’s “Off the Wall”, it contains the lyric “I don’t know where the bathroom is/ my friends saying/ ‘you should eat something,’” and Thundercat plays bass on it like a motherfuck. I’ll acquit myself of first hand knowledge regarding the ecstasy experience, but if it feels like this then the kids are on to something serious.

Colin Stetson - To See More Light I had the privilege of seeing...

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:52:00 -0400

Colin Stetson - To See More Light

I had the privilege of seeing Colin Stetson play some songs the other night at Le Poisson Rouge. Though I had been looking forward to seeing Colin play since I first heard “New History Warfare 2”, the appeal of this kind of show is somewhat oblique. The stage show (aside from the always amazing lighting at LPR) consists solely of Colin playing a saxophone while rocking back and forth at a moderate tempo, alternately puffing and un-puffing his cheeks, and, for most songs, fingering the same repeating pattern repeatedly. There’s not a lot of visual stimulation, and for the most part what you hear is quite similar to what you hear on his records. So why was I so excited about this show, and why did it live up to my lofty expectations so well?

There is something of the magician in Colin’s deal. Part of the attraction is the, I hesitate to say novelty, but the feat, the “is he actually doing this?” of the performance - a man rending as many as four or five different rhythmic, harmonic and melodic lines simultaneously from an instrument designed to produce, and usually only capable of producing one. In that respect there is something to be said for the “seeing is believing” aspect of the show, and yet nobody, myself included, at this particular show seemed overly concerned with the wow factor of the performance from that perspective. Could be that we all feel like we’re too cultured to appreciate something solely for the degree to which it seems to be physically difficult - that’s for fans of speed metal and hardcore, right? Well, it got me thinking about the way we think about physicality and technology when we think about it in a high culture sort of way these days, and maybe I’ll try and explain my thoughts on that for a minute.

Part of the thinking has to do with something you could think of as body modification, of using technology to enhance musical capabilities. There was obviously a lot of talk about auto-tune as it relates to the mechanization of human musical performances, and in many cases, this is seen as in-authenticity. Running a voice through pitch correction software is a use of technology to alter a human performance through technology in a way that is new and disorienting to people, as is Colin’s use of multiple microphones on an instrument that is usually miced with only one, if it’s miced at all. Now, this isn’t a fair comparison in all ways - amplification is simply making a thing louder, and Antares is changing the nature of the sound itself, but let’s not give amplification short shrift here. The volume of a sound and the sound pressure it produces, this is a fundamental part of sound as well, and amplification is an extremely important aspect of how we hear music these days, and something that is also pretty recent as far as things go. By micing himself and his instrument the way he does, Colin is doing something as revolutionary and controversial as using autotune, but it goes beyond that.

Some of the criticism leveled at auto-tune as to do with the laziness of it all - you sing near the pitch and you don’t have to worry about being precise, the program will do the precision work for you. And I think that’s valid criticism of certain artists, though not of the technology itself. (this dovetails with a “guns don’t kill people” argument, I realize, but the stakes here are pretty different right? I don’t want to get into that right now.) So there’s a difference - Colin is anything but a lazy performer. It has been talked about elsewhere, but he goes crazy on that saxophone, not with his hands but with his breath. He does the circular breathing, and he does crazy voicing things with his throat and vocal chords that produce amazing sounds. These are very difficult physical techniques, wild things he has learned to do with his body, or things that he has taught his body to do, things that, partly because they involve interacting with a complex tool like the saxophone, and partly because they’re things that very few other people on Earth are capable of doing, I tend to think of as being technological themselves - body modifications that don’t involve simply improving a state of your body like building muscle so you can lift more weight or improving cardiovascular efficiency so you can run farther, but ones that involve teaching your body to perform actual new tasks.

It’s this combination of physical technology and the corresponding use of electronic technology that creates this otherworldly sound, and makes for such a compelling performance, partly. He’s doing something that’s in some ways a basic task - playing the saxophone - but by combining that act with other physical and electronic technologies, he’s shedding light on what that really means. He’s the rare performer who expands the concept of what it means to play a given instrument. I’d compare him to like, early feedback users like Hendrix, early beat boxers, whoever it was that first did bowed cymbals (I show my ignorance here), and, I dunno, Kraftwerk? I’m reminded of a thing I heard once on TV somewhere I think where David Bowie was talking about early synthesis, and how synth manufacturers in the 70s had often been focused on producing inorganic versions of organic tones, of reproducing say, strings or reed sounds, because that’s what they thought musicians - their customers - would want. And these early approximations of real instruments sounded like shit for the most part, but it was that shittiness, that odd dissonance and otherworldliness that was actually appealing in the end. It was only people like Bernie Worrell and a few others, I dunno, Eno and such, who contextualized these instruments, used them for real expression, and overcame their limitations. Now, the sax isn’t seen as an instrument with limitations by most people - Colin is just that good, that he’s like, “this thing can do more, this can express more,” and then he finds a way to do it. It’s so cool.

Let’s be clear - other sax players have used advanced techniques before, but never to produce the clarity of sounds Colin does, in service of such simply moving music, never in such ingenious collaboration with electronics, never (so far as I know) as well. Which takes us to the other aspect of this, that the songs are beautiful - beautifully composed, beautifully rendered, made up of strange and wonderful sounds, which is where the critique of “it sounds like the record” loses out. When someone writes and performs songs as well as Colin does, that’s kind of the ultimate compliment. Colin’s approach to the saxophone contains an element of deconstructing the instrument and the processes involved in playing it, breaking it all down into parts and playing them separately, and this is an apt way of considering things, because at times it sounds as though he actually is breaking the instrument. Particularly the semi vocalized wails that he does, which I think are picked up directly from his throat by way of a mic he wears on his neck, sound like he’s bending the instrument to the breaking point the way a guitar player might bend the neck of a guitar to change the pitch of his feedback.

And now I’m done talking about that.

Paramore - Still Into You There are vocal affectations, and...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:02:00 -0400

Paramore - Still Into You

There are vocal affectations, and then there are voices - voices that transcend personal expression and become a signpost or something resembling a formal genre convention. What starts as just the way some guy or girl sings eventually becomes a signifier of time, place, and politics. We have the alt rock voice (Cobain/Vedder through Stapp/Nickleback) the metal voice (obviously there’s lots of kinds of metal voices, but for all intents and purposes we’re talking about incoherent growling here, which I’ll trace back, not without serious factual error, here, to Slayer) and increasingly, we have the not-a-pop-star white girl voice.

Shania Twain was a big deal because she made country music that was palatable to people who didn’t like country music, and a lot of that had to do with her voice. She sang with enough twang to be country, enough country to never be fully pop, but enough city rigidity to appeal to the whatever part of the listening public it is that doesn’t like country music but liked Shania Twain (I see that my thesis has a hole here - who are these people, and what is it about country music that they don’t like? Questions for another time). She was also - and this is important - Canadian.

It is my belief that the country vocal style comes naturally to the Canadian voice. Part of Shania’s deal, I’d argue, came from the fact that she wasn’t a country girl singing country, she was a First Nations Canadian singing pop, which just came out sounding like country.

We now live in a world where I hear slivers of country in the vocals of most of pop’s leading female singers who sing primarily in front of traditional rock instrumentation. Taylor Swift is the obvious queen of this phenomenon, but while she goes out and embraces electronic Skrillex music, while maintaining at least some of the country in her voice, we have Avril and Hayley going the opposite way, and meeting somewhere in the middle.

In 2013 we are nearing the culmination of a process begun back in 1993 when, meeting Mutt Lange for the first time, Shania Twain unknowingly set in motion a series of events that would merge Canadian identity, pop punk, ties worn over t-shirts, country music, Mayer-shaming, and youthful exuberance into a single sound. In Avril Lavigne, Hayley Williams and Taylor Swift we have the holy trinity, the unholy triplet brood of Shania, and they’ve come to remake the world of popular music in her image, surreptitiously, covertly, from the inside. When their destinies are fulfilled, we will all be listening to country music and not even know it. We will hear distorted electric guitars, see an alt rock station on the dial, and bob our heads not realizing how at odds our love for Incubus is with the COUNTRY music that we’re listening to. It will be everywhere and it will not wear cowboy hats or fringe.

Though this time is still a ways off, it is closer than you may think. Listen to Paramore and Avril’s new singles closely, compare them with Red, think on it. Something is afoot, something even I can’t quite put my finger on. All I know for sure is that when I listen to Taylor, Avril and Hayley, I picture the same middle school hallway, and not just any middle school hallway: a middle school hallway in some unimportant backwater burg nobody every cared much about: a middle school hallway in a one stoplight town that most folks breezed through without noticing they’d ever been there, somewhere out on the plains of northern Alberta where the wind was cold in Winter, but bred real Canadians, with real Canadian voices: a middle school hallway where young girls fall in love, dye their hair, and grow up grasping acoustic guitars, wishing for something bigger, something more exciting, more dangerous. I call the middle school that contains this hallway “Shania Twain Middle School” for reasons that should be pretty obvious if you’ve been paying any attention.

Justin Timberlake - Mirrors The sort of song and video...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:00:20 -0400

Justin Timberlake - Mirrors

The sort of song and video combination you thank the pop gods for providing once in a blue moon. No matter how you feel about Mirrors, you should probably go ahead and admit that there’s a lot of shit to talk about here. So much so that I’m not sure I’m going to be able to put my thoughts into anything resembling cohesive paragraph form. To wit!

- Let’s get the negative stuff out of the way. First negative thing: the line “If I could, I would look at us all the time.” Not only does this really not roll off the tongue, it’s also extremely creepy, and narcissistic in a very real and literal sense. In the middle of what is in some other ways a quite romantic and genuine song, this line totally breaks the illusion like, “what did he say? If he could, he would look at the two of them all the time? Does he mean actually all the time?”

- Similarly, the video (for the first part of the song only, of course - more on that to come) is well done, and while a little odd at times, also oddly touching, up until the point where they pull out the Swarovski box as if to say - “This is what Love is! Swarovski!” then proceed to show gratuitous closeups of the ring for the rest of the video, even making it a crucial formal element when it serves as the (totally unnecessary) transition from part one to part two.

- Which brings us to the main criticism - there should be no part two to this shit. While the effort on the part of everyone to make “The 20/20 Experience” as EPIC as possible by making sure none of the songs are of normal pop music lengths is to be somewhat respected, it’s mainly just wrongheaded and perplexing, especially here. In “Mirrors” (the first half) we have a wonderful pop song, the new JT classic we were all pining for. In “Mirrors” (the second half) we have nothing but some instrumental bloat built off of a poorly phrased vocal sample. In case you missed that point in the music alone, though, the visual folks make sure to emphasize it in the video, which is really nothing more than JT looking like he wished he had more space to dance in. Which brings us to:

- Does it make sense to bring up “Black or White” here? Obviously the second half of “Mirrors” doesn’t come close to reaching the amount of weird and misguided that MJ playing out a Street Fighter bonus level while holding his dick entailed, but it may be the first example since “Black or White” of a major video making a total misjudgement based primarily on length. Excess returned to the game with Gaga, but her excess was always one of content rather than volume. Here we have a re-emergence of the prog-rock school of excess, which I don’t think anyone was asking for. As an ex-boy band R&B maestro (really JT is the only person that legit falls into this category), if you’re making an eight minute song a single, those extra three to four minutes better be worth it, and if you’re making a video for said single which inexplicably is not edited to cover only the meat of said single, that extra three to four minutes better be compelling. So, JT fails a crucial test here, but at least he doesn’t transform into a panther, or whatever.

- What exactly is so bad about the second part of the song? Hopefully that will be made clear in examining what’s so good about the first part. First off, I hear “Mirrors” as the culmination of what I’m going to call “Ryan Tedder” after the guy, Ryan Tedder. Ryan Tedder made clompity, slompity pop songs for everyone a few years ago, and he’s recently kind of disappeared, which is nice, ‘cause he was pretty terrible. There was something appealing about his songs, but it wasn’t anything important or redeeming. Generally, what characterized “Ryan Tedder” was a martial, uncompromising, mid tempo pop rock drum beat with someone wailing in an emotive yet watered down R&B way over top. This description fits “Mirrors” pretty well (minus the watered down - JT kills this performance even when the song doesn’t call for it), and this fact initially turned me off to the song. As it turns out, though, Timbaland doing “Ryan Tedder” is way better than Ryan Tedder doing “Ryan Tedder”. If you think of Timbaland’s stuff sounding “alien”, part the meaning there is that it just sounds different, part of it is that it sounds futuristic, but the other aspect of it is that it sounds, perhaps to an unsettling degree, biological. He makes more frequent use of human beat boxing sounds than most producers, and there’s some element of that buried in the mix here, but even the basic drum sounds seem more alive than usual. There’s a bounciness to the bass drum and low tom sounds that is basically the diametric opposite of the sort of hollowed out thwack you get in most “Ryan Tedder” songs - the snares are mainly handclaps. Timbaland basically rescues a tired, and perhaps already dead, production and songwriting trend, and breathes some life into it. I didn’t think it was possible.

- Second, in the opening we get to hear Timbaland do epic and regal, which I can’t remember having ever heard him do, at least not this blatantly. It’s just the synths from the chorus naked out there without the vocal, but they sound really huge. JJ Abrams is gonna use this when Han and Leia get married.

- Third, it sounds a lot like “Cry Me a River.”

- Fourth, this chorus is the most undeniable pop earworm we’ve had in years. Melody seemed to take a backseat to rhythm for a minute, at least as far as R&B went, and it’s nice to see it’s back. PLUS! It’s two choruses on top of each other. That prechorus is a killer chorus in any other song. You get two of the best choruses you hear all year. You get JT singing them with the most opulent orchestration Timbaland has maybe ever done. It’s a good song! Ok, now maybe I’ll be able to go and digest the rest of the record. (I don’t really like Suit and Tie that much.)

Hey so here’s some songs I’ve liked which were released to the public during the first...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:53:00 -0400

Hey so here’s some songs I’ve liked which were released to the public during the first quarter of this fiscal year. Enjoy.

DJ Road Chief (ex Emeralds guy) - I Want To Be Your Man (Zapp...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:10:00 -0500

DJ Road Chief (ex Emeralds guy) - I Want To Be Your Man (Zapp Cover)

Happy Thursday.

I wrote this thing for Unbest about getting married and...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:00:00 -0500

I wrote this thing for Unbest about getting married and Annie’s “Heartbeat”. Hope you like it.

unbest:

Doug Schrashun on Annie’s “Heartbeat” (from Anniemal, 2005)
(Rdio, Spotify, iTunes)

It could be said that I met my wife at a Yo La Tengo concert, after which we talked extensively on a bus about Radiohead. It could also be said that she was the director of our college radio station, where I did a radio show called “Frontier Psychiatry” where a friend and I would, in an attempt at humor, play mix CDs solicited from listeners while providing running psychoanalytic commentary based on their song selections. As is the case for any two musically inclined people who fall in love, it could be said that we learned about each other through music, like some Nick and Nora’s bullshit—”the music brought us together.”

Tegan and Sara - Closer Tegan and Sara got me thinking about the...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Tegan and Sara - Closer

Tegan and Sara got me thinking about the place of people who aren’t pop stars, maybe not even what you’d think of as pop musicians, making pop music. My thoughts go off in many directions: what does the image of an artist add to a piece of music? In what context is this useful, and where is it distracting? Is there such a thing as indie pop? These are all things I’d love to address, but maybe another time.

All I’d like to say in regards to Tegan and Sara, and their new record, I guess, is just that it doesn’t matter if they’re famous, and perhaps it works in their favor that they aren’t famous - that when someone makes a wonderful, beautifully crafted, unpretentious pop record, there’s actually very little to say about it. Pop music is so defined by a shared sense of values, a shared conception of musical history, at least subconsciously - an agreed upon response to certain stimuli - that anything you could say about a record like this, a great pop album from a relatively non famous artist, would be extra-musical and forced, or related primarily to the artist, their bio, their image, what they bring to the record from their public persona, all things that are essentially irrelevant. *

“Heartthrob” sounds like a major label pop record because it is - shit came out on Warner Brothers. But Tegan and Sara don’t exactly look or act like pop musicians because, on a certain, very meaningful level, they aren’t. Even though they’re a known quantity, enough for me that even though I never listened to any of their records all the way through before this one, I managed to see them back in 2003 opening for Ben Folds in a gym at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, they’re by no means famous. That has not stopped them from making an excellent pop, full stop, pop, by no means indie, record, which can be appreciated entirely on its own merits. It doesn’t matter who made this or when or why, it’s just great. Go listen to it.

*This is not to say that Tegan and Sara are not interesting and well known public figures, beloved by many to the same degree that Lady Gaga or Madonna is. It’s just to say that, in order to enjoy this record, pop star adulation is by no means necessary.

Jim James - A New Life (from Jimmy Fallon Show) So, I really...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:52:00 -0500

Jim James - A New Life (from Jimmy Fallon Show)

So, I really like this, I do.

I like the way it builds, the theatricality of it, I like basically everything about it.

But.

Honestly, by the end isn’t it just “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”?

Pretty sure that when I first heard “Bigmouth Strikes...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 01:33:00 -0500

Pretty sure that when I first heard “Bigmouth Strikes Again” I knew about Joan of Arc mostly from her appearance in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” I will forever link the Smiths with a period in my life where I was too young to grasp sexual innuendo, but was very, very afraid of being misunderstood or disbelieved.

A Meditation Inspired By, If Not Exactly on “The Four...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:50:00 -0500

A Meditation Inspired By, If Not Exactly on “The Four Aims”

I had the pleasure of spending last weekend combing New England - not for anything particular, just combing - on a rock and roll tour with the rock group Bunny’s a Swine. Enumerating the ways in which it was a pleasure would be tiresome since you can likely imagine, at this point, what the pleasures of a rock and roll tour generally entail, but among these many, unenumerated pleasures was that of listening to this song, “The Main Ingredient” from the Flower-Corsano Duo’s record “The Four Aims” on a real vinyl record. (A word of warning that I’m not really gonna talk much about this actual song here. I’ll do that another day, maybe. It is a world’s worth of music and worthy, in my estimation of a Ken Burns documentary or Steven King novel or something.)

As much as I love this record, I don’t own it. This is largely because I don’t make a point of buying records I really want but instead haphazardly and whimsically collect them, truly collect them, I think, picking them up based not on my desire to listen to them, or really to have them, but on some other impulse often related to an intersection of, at any point in time, how loose I feel with my cash and how excited I am about the idea of listening to records in general. For the most part I’m satisfied with Spotify, and low on dough.

It’s a shame, though. Listening to records has become a thing I’m supposed to do of late - living as I do in Brooklyn, being as I am a white dude in the right age range, playing as I do in a band, professing as I do to have a discerning ear when it comes to tunes - but I have difficulty getting into it. Part of it is the object itself, which people talk about fetishizing. I can see this, I can see the appeal, but most people I know who listen to records regularly aren’t the sort who obsessively catalog, preserve, and treat records as museum pieces, so while I may be expected to be a hipster, that doesn’t seem to mean that I’m expected to wash my hands before I touch a record. What we’re talking about then, is not my aversion to object worship, but just stuff in general, an aversion that is more theoretical and practical more than it is real. I have stuff, but in a perfect world, I tell myself, I wouldn’t. So that’s one thing. Another is that I’m lazy, and that my stylus seems to collect dust more intensely than any I have ever encountered elsewhere. To play vinyl is to disrupt the flow of whatever else I’m doing, while courting the anxiety that my tracking weight is too high, that I’m ruining my records by playing them too hard. I have records, and I do play them, but really only on special occasions.

What we have in this case, is a truly special occasion, then. Towards the end of a morning spent listening to records - George Harrison, Leonard Cohen, a cover of “Ram” - I find myself, in a house full of people, basically alone in the living room with a Califone record playing that nobody really cares about. I find “The Four Aims” and freak out a little to myself. Turning to the other soul in the room, I proclaim how awesome this is. He shows interest, but leaves the room a minute or two in, and I settle in to bask in the flow of notes.

It’s not about the act of putting on the record, it’s not about the object itself, but, of course, you stupid asshole, it’s about actually listening to the music. I may rant about how MP3 bloggers have perverted music discourse, turning a beautifully open medium into yet another shill, but in focusing on the effect on criticism caused by a valuation of pure dissemination over thought, I have long ignored or dismissed the fact that the medium is as much to blame, perhaps, as the method of using it. Not that I can totally disavow the MP3, or digital music in general, and not that I would even advocate that they be disavowed, but I would, upon reflection, urge myself and others to separate from them from time to time. The medium that supplies the material appreciated colors the experience, and changes at least slightly that which is appreciated. There is value in the rapid fire nature of streaming, the concision of digital collection, but the analog event is worth experiencing, maybe not for some crusty old “it sounds better” or even “it’s about the ritual”, but at least because it’s different from you what you do at your fucking office.

Music becomes a soundtrack, simple background noise too easily when it is treated as something to turn on and off at will, regardless of setting, so I’ll take a moralistic stand on wax from a position I have too rarely seen: to listen to vinyl is to fight the good fight against turning even our most profound music experiences into wallpaper. Of course, I’m still broke, so there’s that.

Jai Paul - Jasmine (Demo) Let’s talk about the name of...

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:50:00 -0500

Jai Paul - Jasmine (Demo)

Let’s talk about the name of this song. Not the Jasmine part - that part’s pretty obvious, since Jai Paul says “Jasmine” a lot in the song. Rather, what, other than the fact that the production on this song is the most original thing that happened in pop music in 2012, is so intriguing about “Jasmine” is that it’s, ostensibly, nominally, a demo.

It’s easy to say, “look, it’s up for sale on iTunes, it’s not part of some archival special features package, it sounds professional,” and draw the conclusion that no matter what it calls itself, it’s not a demo. Try as you might to get rid of that “(demo)” in the name of the song, though, it’s not gonna go anywhere. Jai Paul says this is a demo, so it’s a demo. But his intention here, I think, is not to suggest that a later, more finished draft of the song will ever surface. This sounds done, and despite that titular parenthetical, I’d wager that it is. So, yes, this actually is a demo, and no, that doesn’t mean that it’s not finished, which leaves us at, why? Based on the fact that Jai Paul has only released two songs in the two years and change since he started releasing stuff, I’m gonna bet that there was some indecision on the part of the artist as to the completion status of the work in question.

From the outside, looking at a piece of art, there is a clean line between something that’s finished and something that isn’t. Unless you’re looking at a friend or colleague’s work in progress, you’re looking at an exhibit, or attending a concert the focus of which is specifically incomplete work, or, these days, listening to a leak of demo material or even demos specifically released by an artist during the course of his or her work, you’re probably looking at something that someone decided was complete. Even taking into account the vague nature of the line between finished and unfinished work, the imperceptibility of the moment at which a work crosses that line (with a few fewer brush strokes, would this painting be any less finished? does a record need to be professionally mastered before it’s ready for public consumption?), there’s usually some consensus on this status. In some cases, like when an artist dies, this becomes difficult, which is why people get pissed off about besmirching legacies (hey, dyou hear the new Aaliyah track), and also why things like the Mozart requiem is something people care so much about. But barring that, it’s rare for an artist to be like, “nope, that wasn’t done,” in a case where work makes its way to the public in the name of a completed thing.

What we’re seeing with “Jasmine” might be one of those rare cases. Could be a meticulous producer didn’t think that his song had crossed that line into the realm of things that are done, and could be a well meaning manager, friend or A&R guy pried it off his hard drive with the ID3 tag indicating it’s status as a work in progress still intact, leveraged an agreement out of him, and sent it out into the world. Maybe that title is a fuck you to an industry and a culture that increasingly demands that things be done quickly, repeatedly and disposably. Jai Paul may be one of this era’s last torch bearers for the idea that truly good things must be lived for, lived over, until they are released into reality, even in pop music. Or, it could be that in his mind that line between done and not done, established as entirely theoretical in any case, doesn’t exist at all. Maybe he’s still got “Jasmine” loaded up in his Protools, tweaking it towards the asymptote of perfection.

So that’s the deal with the title. Maybe someday I’ll write something about the song, how amazing it is that the pulse is hidden in a low bass guitar type instrument, pumping away on sixteenth notes for the whole track, how magnificent the handclaps are, how the track is packed with rhythmic details, absolutely none of which are unnecessary or wasted. Maybe someday, but not today I guess.

Just checking in for a quick minute ‘cause this was too...

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:48:39 -0500

Just checking in for a quick minute ‘cause this was too good to not post. I made a new year’s resolution (yes really. and yes I know “don’t you do that every year?”) to pick up writing about stuff here. While pizza and JT are as substantial as it gets, I mean to do even more substance soon.

That real shit. I imagine that Robin doing the prima donna...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:59:00 -0400

That real shit.

I imagine that Robin doing the prima donna “I’m holding my ear so I can make sure I stay in tune” thing back in ‘75 was more novel than pretentious, so I’ll let it slide. Things I’ll also let slide:

there’s like 8 keyboards on stage
the gold piping on Maurice’s pants
the short shrift given to the non-Gibb members of the band in this video

Best song by Austrailians about New York? Nick Cave, the Drones, AC/DC, INXS, have you done better? This is a real question.

BigBang - Monster Trying to come up with something intelligent...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 23:14:28 -0400

BigBang - Monster

Trying to come up with something intelligent to say about this and not doing a very good job. I will let myself off the hook (this is fucking Tumblr after all) and simply urge you to watch more k-pop music videos. You will not be disappointed with how you spent your time.

My favorite Belgian (?)

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 22:48:07 -0400

My favorite Belgian (?)

Say what you will about a gif, but this is truly illuminating to...

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 23:48:41 -0400

Say what you will about a gif, but this is truly illuminating to me. Breaking down what is already a brief moment in the long and illustrious careers of these famous dudes even further into about, what, five to ten frames of motion, it’s the distillation of a cool that 50 years later has been painted over with so much nostalgia, jumpsuits, rape cover ups, mafia UFO theories, Las Vegas, Michael Buble, Jimmy Ray, drugs, Eminem, death, rhinestones, alcoholism, the New York Jets, Snus, Seth McFarlane, the Oscars, electric guitars, the pop music industry (and I truly mean that in the least respectful way imagineable) and the California Raisins, or a curry boiled to perfection, charisma incarnate, that even though I never liked either of these guys, you have to take notice, as someone who cares something about American culture, and stand up, and pay homage.

alwaysprettyinblack:

Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley together on May 12, 1960.

RIP Stay High 149. Never did my street art homework, but this is...

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 16:36:22 -0400

RIP Stay High 149. Never did my street art homework, but this is one hell of an image. Courtesy of “Crosstown” by Helen Levitt.

This has nothing to do with anything, but I love...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 09:48:11 -0400

This has nothing to do with anything, but I love it.

awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:

Michael Caine, Pelé and Sylvester Stallone