More new old posts!

Top 10 worst pop music trends

How to lie without lying

Rhythm & snooze

Dead beats, or the death of melodies and chords

Party like a mock star

"I don't know why we make art"

What not to watch

Some poetic licenses should probably be revoked

Indeed.

Google + ADD = ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

THIS IS HOW IT WORKS. You start out searching for info on the heart chakra -- which takes you to someone's MySpace, which triggers another Google search, and you end up watching "Young Cheezy: The Fred Fredburger Remix."

THE CINNAMON BEAR (that's a link)

YOU WILL GET hooked on this Wizard-of-Oz-like, wonderfully whacked-out Christmas-themed radio series from 1937. Enjoy the acid-trip-like adventures of Paddy O'Cinnamon and his foes such as Crazy Quilt Dragon, the Candy Pirates, the Wintergreen Witch, the Ikaboos, the Scissor Soldiers, and the Bad Dolls. And, oh yeah, Santa is involved somehow, too. I happened to hear a part of one episode when I stumbled upon WCSF 88.7 FM (St. Francis College of Joliet) while dial-surfing as I sat in my car, warming up my freezing feet during a break from work. Take a listen.

America's Circus Maximus

THIS MORNING I HEARD sportswriter Sal Paolantonio on the Dennis Miller show (yeah, I know, I listen to that glib, snickering-at-his-own--jokes Republican shill so you people won't have to) plugging his book How Football Explains America. The biggest revelations in that interview are no secrets to any thinking person conversant with history and with the ways of the power elite; but what knocked off my socks was that they exposed it on national radio for the masses to hear: America's preeminent national sport, football, is the "Circus Maximus" (Miller's words) of the American Empire; according to Paolantonio, it is about "violence," about "religion," about "manifest destiny," about war and conquest.

American elites wanted to form a national sport to replace the European sports of soccer and rugby, which most Americans hated. The "Founding Fathers of American sport" got together in two meetings in 1880 and 1882, at Harvard and Penn State respectively, to "fix" the game of soccer. Their first innovation was to add the first down, which enables the team to "capture territory, hold it and defend it" -- an allegory for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The next innovation was to add a general called the quarterback, the "cowboy outlaw figure" and "main protagonist" who "tells the story of the game as it marches across the field, just as we marched across the continent."

$tarbucks: Your Community Coffee Store!

STARBUCKS HAS CHUTZPAH. Fashioning a warm-and-cozy, earth-toned, earth-friendly, feel-good glow around itself is a Starbucks specialty. Its use of art is a case in point. You go into one of their stores and you see art on the walls that fits in with the rootsy, funky, artsy vibe they fervently try to create (and then replicate exactly across nine kajillion locations). You look at it, or perhaps just unconsciously take it in via peripheral vision, and it feels nice, it feels warm, it feels soothing.

It's also glibly self-promoting. As it turns out, the art is actually a subtle image ad for Starbucks itself. Take, for instance, the piece that pictures a tree of words -- words such as "coffee," "love," "passion," "place," "community," "people." And various inspirational sayings, or presumable comments from satisfied Starbucks customers. The piece is captioned: "The Deeper the ROOTS, the Higher the Reach." What is that supposed to mean? Nothing, really. Like an Obama campaign speech, it has no meaning; it's about how they'd like you to feel about the brand.

Generally, the faker and more uncaring and more remote a huge corporate business is, the more it has to advertise to us about how real and caring and community-focused it really is. While I don't know the hearts of the folks behind Starbucks, it's not really about their conscious intent; it's about the system, and system logic inevitably drives out diversity and individuality.

The irony is that one block away from the local Starbucks store where I first saw the "tree" piece was the former location of an actual community coffeehouse -- founded by a guy I went to high school with -- that this Starbucks had helped kill off. In a Starbucks world, "community" is marketing copy and corporate art emanating from a headquarters hundreds of miles away. The people you live with? Ha, screw 'em -- they're just a revenue stream.

New old posts!

THESE ARE POSTS I meant to finish up and add long ago but just recently got around to doing so.

Actually, I prefer nonduality : (skeptical take on Eastern mysticism and "enlightenment")

"When we're not on, we're not watching either": not-really-that-juicy gossip on local TV news folk

Bringing stars back down to earth: the one redeeming thing about celebreality TV

Siamese Band Names: I've added some new ones.

Jen, Jane -- whatever: A synchronicitous meetup with a onetime date who actually may be my cousin.

Bright, happy, and deadly : selling birth control pills like candy

Top 10 worst pop music trends of the last 10 years

LAST TIME I POSTED about the MTV Video Music Awards. More than any other force, the music video genre is responsible for turning pop music from an art in its own right into mere background material for dazzling imagery and fancy filmwork. Accordingly, the VMAs provide an annual snapshot of the decline of pop music, largely since the late '90s. Some of the worst trends in our video-driven pop culture, in my book:

10) Timbaland or Lil Jon producing everything

9) Reggaeton

8) Simpering whiny-boy vocals in R&B

7) Female artists obliged to sing angry-bitch man-dissing songs

6) Every R&B single using the same drum sounds and synths borrowed from trance music

5) Hip-hop replaced by snap rap

4) Abandonment of chords and chord progressions (this was actually deteriorating in the mid-90s but has really hit rock bottom in the last 10 years)

3) Abandonment of melody

2) The loudness wars, -- leading to fatiguing all-loud-all-the-time recordings, lacking space and dynamic and emotional range. *

1) Autotune


* I mean, have you listened to anything on vinyl lately? Check out anything from the '60s, '70s, '80s, even '90s, and compare with stuff released in the last decade. This digitally laser-polished, glossy-finished, over-compressed, up-in-your face, all-loud-all-the-way-through sound that's been going on in pop and rock music for the last several years is nice as an occasional effect to signal "this is some extreme shit -- check it out." But any extreme effect used all the time becomes fatiguing. Especially when it's on every fricking song.

The other day I was listening to Frankie Valli's "Grease" and some '70s Hall & Oates stuff, like "Bigger Than Both of Us." What a reminder of how refreshing it was when recordings allowed space -- space for loud and quiet, for surprises. You remember how good the sizzle of a high hat sounds against a mellow background that's not all up in your face. Oh yeah ... percussion ... you forgot about that, right?