ou think you know, but you have no idea. Or: a total cop-out. Maybe that’s what this is, after all—there’s no unifying theme to what I’m doing here, no matter how much I’d like to pretend there is (none of that Notes from Underground wretch-in-a-cave shit). But if I were much more ambitious, or at least affected far more by the occasional delusions of adequacy that seize me, strangely, I’d start with my acoustic environment, what I generally accept as silence (though, of course, with its humdrum gradations), the blank canvas upon which all this is imposed, if you will: to my left live two young women, we’ll say, old enough to have had a few jobs out of college but of the age group that uses “hooking up” (a set of phonemes I’ve never really understood contextually, the sort of thing I’m never really sure has happened to me, though I know it has to have) in three or four sequential sentences. To my right, I’m not sure. But there’s a voice that seizes the hallway every now and again, that of a stroke victim in a wheelchair (I saw him once when I was taking away a plastic bag full of semi-collapsed Diet Dr. Pepper cans. Yes, diet—if this is going to approach any relevancy of that okay-I’ll-be-honest-I-don’t-really-listen-to-jazz-at-all sort, we may as well start with the admission that I’m very conscious of my weight, of feeling like a fatass a lot of the time [the Little Debbie donut sticks, which I’m sure contain lard, but I don’t want to confirm this, surely aren’t helping]) who’s unable to say anything but “Dee dee daydee deedee daydee daydee!” in long, threnodic streams. He sounds like a passage from Finnegans Wake sprung to life, I’d like to think: his voice even has a bit of the pinched quality I’ve recognized on the few recordings I’ve heard of Joyce reading his own work. But I may as well stop here; I’m getting ahead of myself, and digging around in the bowels of something I can never fully can complete.


What I can document, however, is the music I choose (for the most part) to listen to this week and the “lifestyle” (which is begging for a you-call-this-living? joke) that contains it … I think Sarah Vowell has written a book that purports to be a diary of her radio-listening for the span of a year, and I’d like to dig into it, of course, but I’ll vow not to, for now, out of some sense of artistic purity. Anyhow, I imagine this book reveals a lot about who she is, intentionally or not, and I’d like this article to do the same. Maybe there will be, you know, glimpses of recognition among you readers, or what-have-you. There may also be a mixtape tracklist or two present, and who doesn’t like to peruse such things? Anyhow, right now it’s The Argument by Fugazi. This is an album I don’t listen to nearly enough, I know that much. But I remember the day I bought it, last fall. My hair was very dirty that day, and when I returned to my somewhat depressing dorm room (now replicated, in rather expanded from, in my slightly depressing, but cleaner, apartment), I remember washing my hair out in the communal sink, well, sort of washing it out: the water really made it greasier, and I was able to form what existed into, for some reason, a modified Ed Grimley cowlick which gradually wilted under my headphones while listening to the record. I think at the time I was amused at its resemblance to the sort of confused-attempt-at-punk hairstyle a youngster who is first exposed to Fugazi (usually on the same mixtape—mix-CD, nowadays? I admit I’m pretty much in the dark about the listening habits of the younger set, and how casually recorded media might be exchanged among them; therefore, my grouping of bands will surely be off-target: I was about to say they’d be on the same tape as the Dead Kennedys or even the Sex Pistols, but do kids today even know who either of these bands are? Maybe it’s because my friends and I seemed to discover punk and indie through cooler, slightly condescending older brothers who wore frayed Smashing Orange shirts. Even today I remember a time when Smashing Orange were bigger, at least in the Delaware Valley, than Smashing Pumpkins, when they even, I found out later, recorded a Peel Session. Their lead singer sat in front of me in Art History class the same semester I bought The Argument. I remember when I first started buying 7”s by semi-local bands like The Boils and Sleepasaurus (in fact, let’s call their split release the first punk rock record I ever purchased), when I thought punk entailed something like wearing a backwards wool newsboy cap and a plasatic banana on a metal chain around your neck. I also had a vest with patches sewn on the back, but let’s just stop this before I embarrass myself further. (Oh, but today I’m wearing a ¾-sleeved baseball jersey, however, with the word “COACH” on the front, foolishly tight jeans, and I’ve got a sort of really awful bowl-cut, so maybe things have actually not improved much sartorially in the past seven/eight years. Am I ever going to stop dressing like everyone did when I was four? When I mature emotionally, I guess. So don’t hold your breath, I’m saying.)


Of course, The Argument—in particular, “Epic Problem”—brings to mind two other things: massive GRE anxiety and a really weird, extremely thanatopsic period I went through around that time last year. Back then, my mind felt rather like a haunted house. You could live there, you know, but the lights flickered ominously from time to time, and you had to deal with the intrusions of some other world entirely. Actually, I still get like this fairly often, so maybe a later entry this week will treat you to some of the oddball out-of-body-ness my mind tends to produce (similarly, the GRE anxiety has now turned into full-blown what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-in-grad-school anxiety, a sort of no-self-esteem-at-all sense that I’ll fuck this enterprise up, that my life as we know it will be over. Which is maybe what the two forms of anxiety have, or had, in common). But I don’t want to think about this now, since The Argument is good, right? “Strangelight” has soundtracked all this queasy existential writing, and I could ask for no lovelier evocation of these perilous states. Nothing grows right anymore, indeed. Is the pounding piano, by the way, Beatlesque? I really don’t know, since I haven’t listened to them since the tenth or eleventh grade. (Old- girlfriend territory, that sort of thing.)


Before class (which I’m back from now, with a migraine and a downright cheerful sense of uselessness) I put on the Antioch Arrow/VSS CD-R I made a few weeks ago, containing the post-hardcore-equivalent-of-rare-groove albums Gems of Masochism and Nervous Circuits (the latter, especially, now that Honey Bear experienced a very unfortunate fire this summer), both of which I may have reviewed for the site (being, as it would seem, stuck in Gravity-Records-and-assorted-offshoots fetishism mode as of late, perhaps because I’ve gotten tired of writing about canonically “classic” records like Miles Davis’ electric work) by the time you read this. Both sounded appropriately wiry and nervous and on-edge, which I think I was as I ate my mushroom-and-rice pilaf (might I make this a food diary, as well?) at the computer screen before I headed out in the rain. Always rain. I’m surprised I’m not sick by now, really. It rained all day today, when the polling place in the lobby of my building was in full-swing, signs and snacks on paper plates everyhwere and so much overweening good cheer that it was all a little surreal. In the background of this scene I heard the same bizarre bits of classical-for-the-masses that DMX (not the rapper, naturally, the digitial audio service—I get it on my cable, too, or at least on one channel that proffers confusingly-titled “soul,” which, well, don’t get me started on) pipes into the lobby on a daily basis. Of course, it made me think of the oddball classical cut-and-paste borrowings of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s “Love Missile F1-11,” which I think I’m still trying to process in my mind. I know that my Windows Media Player playlist always follows it up with “Dancing With Myself,” which practically sounds like Delta blues in comparison.


Alright, time for Will & Grace. Rule #254 of indie-cred authenticity: pick a cultural touchstone that only someone extremely secure in their opposition to the mainstream could feel comfortable saying they watch. I’d have mentioned Six Feet Under if it was Sunday night, actually, but I think that show’s earnestness is actually a bit more of a guilty pleasure these days, you know. A while ago they had the nerve to end an episode with a Joni Mitchell song and one lonely character’s sudden burst into Magnolia-styled sing-along, about which, well, the less said, the better.


11.06.02, 12:16 a.m.


As I finish burning a copy of No New York and queue up tons of Napalm Death (the first two LPs, primarily; I had From Enslavement to Obliteration on CD during my senior year of high school—it was really big with me, along with Godflesh, during a holiday season I did little else but play the Ninja Gaiden games, purchased secondhand at FuncoLand—but I lost, traded, or eBayed it sometime in the last few years and have been feeling the acute pangs of nostalgia), I’m listening to Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings before I go to sleep, if only because I’d prefer to go to bed in a decent mood. Thankfully, and perhaps illogically, it seems to be working. And so I sit here in my boxers, rain punctuating the night, not really wanting to go to bed all of a sudden. Maybe I’ll turn out the lights and dance.


10:43 p.m.


This morning, after listening to some brief snippets of the Napalm Death I downloaded last night: Scum is, perhaps ironically in light of its title, a far more spacious and less muddy recording than Enslavement. As on the band’s Peel Sessions, you get the feeling that this music is, yes, being made in real time by actual, if demented, people interacting with each other; the band’s murkier work, however, manages to dull this terrifying edge somehow, making things seem at once more indistinct and cartoonish.


After getting dressed and not really eating, I realized I didn’t have to be on campus until the late afternoon, causing me to make the trip into Philadelphia to return one Melt Banana ticket richer (to avoid keeping you in suspense: I’ll tell you now, the trip was a success. I also managed to get a $4 pair of jeans [considerably more well-fitting than those mentioned in the last entry] from a Salvation Army located directly next door to an adult entertainment complex of some sort [neon sign: “LIVE NUDE GIRLS SEXY FUN”], which I briefly hesitated in front of, wondering if the semiotics of live peepshow music needed to be explored in this article. Needless to say, I found it a difficult endeavor to justify). Once I finished reading the books of Paradise Lost (mad Nick Cave references up in that shit) I had forced myself to get done before having fun today, I headed out of the train station and into the mall it’s rather bizarrely connected to. I stopped in an Asian-run sneaker store called Ubiq (Philip K. Dick’s presence looms) and was immediately struck by the fact that they were playing an instrumental of Cannibal Ox’s “Ridiculoid” therein. Have you ever, upon hearing a song that has some meaning to you in a public place, gotten larger-than-perhaps-viably-so goosebumps, wanting to jump up and start dancing or just yell, “Yeaaah! ” Well, that’s how I felt. But I kept at a deliberate pace, calmly inspecting some strange and pretty dope shoes—of course, I doubted that many of them could stake some claim to moderate vegan-ish-ness, plus the fact that I’d need to get a whole new wardrobe to go with most of them/the issue of their own cost-prohibitiveness—and getting to know the commodity fetishist within. Then I sat down in the mall to reread (for a class presentation) the part in Milton where Death and Sin have incestuous sex, with what I’ll now guess was some ’93-era underground-leaning hip-hop in the background coming from some store that might’ve been tuned into 98.9 FM’s “Old School Lunch Hour” (it was all in the play of chimes that took place, the perhaps self-conscious but affable signification of “soul” that perhaps Tribe and Black Sheep and the Native Tongues crew ushered in). Then Madonna’s “Into the Groove” came on and I was surprised at how awesome the production sounded to me. As an aside, I think Madonna is getting hotter as she gets older, sort of.


To the overstimulation of South Street, then, which was pretty desolate today. It was just before noon, and not many stores had opened. After buying my ticket (which is just a receipt with “MELT BANANA/VAZ/WHITE” circled on it; in Spaceboy, they were playing James, and it made no impression on me. I looked at a Cabaret Voltaire “Nag Nag Nag” remix 12” and tried to figure out how it could exactly be convincingly remixed. Meanwhile, a bearded and polite-looking middle-aged man was grabbing up the Cattle Decapitation back catalog), I headed to Retrospect, where the Strokes-looking dude behind the counter was playing Syd Barrett, which I suddenly found very depressing, in the sense that it made me think of the possibly fucked-up, possibly dead people who may have rocked some of these slightly (okay, extremely; don’t sue, guys) overpriced threads in the first place. The quotidian, warbly, despair-that-does-not-recognize-itself-as-such quality of Barrett’s voice left a bad taste in my mouth that was sufficient to curtail my survey of the LPs, though I did perk up for a moment at what I thought was an extremely anti-white MC Ren album someone on a messageboard had talked about yesterday. Alas, it was just a single. There were too many Tony Orlando and Christian folk-pop records afoot, I thought. White Stripes were blasting out of another store (“Aluminum,” I think), but I had nowhere near the same reaction as Cannibal Ox, which may have something to do say about how personal the music of each is to me (with the exception of perhaps “We’re Going to be Friends,” though something about its twee, out-of-focus angst seems too stylized for me to connect directly. The ambivalence that churns bitterly in the guts of a song like Can O’s “The F Word,” however, is another story). I went to Subway and drank Pepsi Blue, which is by far the worst soda I’ve ever had. Amidst some faceless stuff, Booker T and the MG’s “Green Onions” was playing in there, and it made me think of the time I walked by Johnny Rockets and saw the wait staff doing a joyless choreographed dance to “Love Shack”—the same day, I semi-schooled some 14-year-old crust punks about the epochal status of the first B-52s record upstairs in Spaceboy’s vinyl section, in between strands of drool I was surely dribbling out over the Soul Jazz compilations.


Before departing to another area of the city, I did manage to make it to the Philadelphia Record Exchange, which is a great store, but I felt too poor and out-of-it today to buy or investigate much of anything in depth, save a ton of mid-eighties indie with what I for some reason find to be incredibly depressing-looking cover art (I did, however, hold Pigmeat Markham’s Anything Goes With Pigmeat in my hands for a good while, and have given a few thoughts to returning and grabbing it for $3.99 soon). Inoffensive, crit-sanctioned-jazz was playing—Art Blakey?—and though I liked it well enough, I can’t be bothered to digress on how great it was, given that I was not feeling it today. Indeed, I’ve not had much of an urge to listen to the jazz I own as of late, except for something like Pharoah Sander’s “Izipho Zam” (which is more loose-limbed, prismatic guitar romp than anything honking and polyryhthmic). My record collection has been expanding, in fact, in just about every area but jazz, making the albums I have seem increasingly marginal and token-ish. Oh, well. Before leaving the store, I check for Slits and Pop Group 45s (specifically, a split release that I’ve heard is more common than you’d think), but find nothing. I do see that someone has ransacked the Fall releases fairly recently.


In the Salvation Army, they’re playing some none-too-great lite-jazz, quite possibly the Philadelphia station that the Newark, Delaware Salvation Army (or Sally Ann’s, if you like) was often tuned into (though there was an employee there, usually stationed in the back room near the vinyl section, who played some awesome reggae and what I once thought was Sun Ra, though he told me it was in fact Alice Coltrane). I’d be into hearing Herbie Hancock or even some Hubert Laws or Deodato—hip-hop production, again that of the early nineties, has given me a weakness for certain strains of fusion—but, well, no dice. If this is the station I think it is, it used to be Eagle 106, which soundtracked many a Nintendo session when I was twelve or so (this shortly before I decided to embark upon a sort of tabula rasa music-listening routine and start with Oldies 98, whose Marvellettes and Bobby Darin songs made me falter when trying to understand the vagaries of love I should by any accounts have begun to experience in junior high). I remember hearing that KLF song performed with a female country singer—unfortunately, I can’t remember who now, and I don’t want to cheat by looking it up (new rule for this mini-diary: no research, as my imperfections of memory make me who I am as much as anything else does)—back then, and thinking it was pretty cool. Oh, how pop juxtapositions go over our heads in youth. I always hated Vanessa Williams’ “Save the Best for Last,” though, which has made appearances in both Pitchfork and ILM discourse as of the past week.


Back at the mall, where I arrive literally as the train does, I hear David Gray’s “Babylon” and recall how some songs—usually ones I’d hear at work—would sound better on FM radio than on tinny ceiling-mounted speakers, but this one always seems ultra-thin and shitty to me. I will confess to a soft spot, or some delusory spot that think it’s necessarily soft, for Leann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance,” though. It has a fundamentally elegiac quality that I can’t get away from. But I saw the video and felt really queasy once; I’d have preferred to keep it anonymous.


On the train I’m next to a sort of cute young mother with a noisy baby. They’ve made the trip all the way from Boston, she explains. She keeps bouncing the baby (whose sex I cannot discern), blowing in its face, singing an off-key “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies” that keeps stalling mid-tune—has she forgotten how it goes, or is she just verbally rewinding a part the kid responds to especially well?—and doing all this other weird, embarrassing stuff that starts to make me crack up. I start to feel like she’s talking to me after a while. Her cell phone keeps ringing and she asks the baby, “What’s that noise?” After half an hour or so, I’m discharged onto my stormy, unpleasant campus to do a bit of work, then go to class. I have the amazing fortunate occurrence, while eating dinner, of hearing both Parliament and The Standells on what I’m going to assume is a student-hosted radio show.


I think I’ll put on Beaches and Canyons now, since it doesn’t seem I’ve given it enough attention as of late. I’m wondering how long it’ll be before I finally cave and download that Neptunes/Timberlake song. But first it’s time to listen to a Men’s Recovery Project track for the blog Todd and I share.


Actually, I changed my mind and Scum is coming first. I’m fascinated by “Multinational Corporations,” the opening track, which consists of some indecipherable but pissed shouting (note to self: seek out the lyrics online) over a crescendo of noise. It has a strange, incantatory quality, and is a fascinating otherworldly moment, I daresay, before the band lunges into the considerably more predictable thrash cataclysm of “Instinct of Survival.” It’s good and all, but seems to collapse into a template of by-numbers conservatism by the time we reach “The Kill,” a 23-second blast-beat atrocity, tape-hiss and all, that is by far the album standout (with apologies made to the, yes, one-second track “You Suffer, But Why?”). It’s the so-aggressive-it’s-scary drumming—you really need to work to achieve this level of simultaneous precision and intensity, whereas messy guitar and even vocal noise is far easier to scare up—from Mick Harris that truly distinguishes this from any other breed of metal or hardcore I’ve come across. Anyhow, I wanted to put on Black Dice because of the appeal of getting lost in the drift of some noise, but after a few songs this has a curiously similar effect.


11.07.02, 10:48 a.m.


I forgot how dense Black Dice are. Drowsy, late last night, I kept mentally paraphrasing Walt Whitman, thinking that Beaches and Canyons contained multitudes. One of the last things I did while I was awake was quickly toss together a CD-R mix for a friend who I somewhat regrettably found myself in the position of making one for; I say regrettably since I don’t think our musical taste overlaps at all. (I in fact received her tape in the mail yesterday evening, and haven’t listened to it yet—maybe I will soon, when I want to immerse myself in the totality of otherness.) So as a result I grabbed whatever I could find that I didn’t think was outright alienating or otherwise in some way offensive (which meant no Napalm Death or Men’s Recovery Project or anything off of No New York, obviously), and this was what I ended up with, after shuffling them in what was hopefully an acceptable order:


Generation X – “Dancing with Myself”


My plan was to start things off in an accessible, upbeat fashion. I think this song is a lot of fun, and I hope I can mentally elide its “OMG I <3 TEH 80Z!!!1” aspect by remembering it slips into late-seventies territory, and that, after all, Billy Idol sank far, far lower than this.


Interpol – “NYC”


The Pop Song, so to speak. Things will get less accessible than this pretty soon, so I figure I’m throwing the prospective listener a bone, of sorts. I’m not crazy about this song, but it’s grown on me. As a result, though, I’m none too anxious to buy their album.


The Fire Engines – “Get Up and Use Me”


As abrasive and shitty as this might sound after the previous track (I love the needly rasp of the guitars, which often approach Ex-as-recorded-by-Albini heights of clangor), I hope its fundamental New Wave silliness will redeem it in the eyes of a potentially hostile listener. Why am I so defensive about this already?


Teshome Meteku – “Gara Ser New”


I’m quite fond of the subdued dance-party-as-seen-through-a-foreign-haze feel that this has. It has a welcoming quality, too. The first of a few selections from the Ethiopiques series; I think I used Vol.1 and Vol. 8. (It’s debatable whether this is acceptable mixtape practice—like taping Nuggets and saying you compiled it, or something—but let’s not lay down any ground rules ex post facto.)


Vincent Gallo – “Honey Bunny”


Whether you enjoy this or simply find it creepy and dispiriting will depend on your familiarity with Prince Vince (as he was known on Graffiti Rock), I suppose. But it might make for a nice change of pace from the above. I pull this trick later on with the melancholy of Beat Happening and another Ethiopiques track.


The Slits – “Typical Girls”


Of course, I love this, but what will she think? The abrasive who-the-hell-listens-to-this-shit factor is tempered by a melodic reliance on pianos. I have never really met anyone who enjoys reggae, let alone fucked-up warbly British takes on same; let’s hope this squeezes through on lyrical content.


Plastic Bertrand – “Ca Plane Pour Moi”


Again, a somewhat desperate plea to get the listener to laugh. By now, nobody could think this tape (I can’t help but type that, reflexively) entirely serious. But is this wit or witless gimmickry I’m falling back on?


Muluqen Mellesse – “Hedetch Alu”


Smoky and unsettling, a nice counterpart to the previous track, I think. Though this point-counterpoint relationship was created by the hand of chance, as it were.


Rolling Stones – “Shattered”


I’ve by now worked into a silly New-Wave-or-someone-else’s-interpretation-of-same pattern; I’m also hoping this has something of the mildly-obscure-gem factor going for it, as might be the case if I put something mildly obscure from Neil Young (no, not off of Trans) in between the likes of My Morning Jacket and such. I wish I had something Erase Errata to put on this CD, but I think I’d deleted any mp3s I had lying around after burning them. I did include another disc of silliness (which I’d made for my own use, then abandoned) that contained a lot of them and ESG, I think, as a bonus-mystery-surprise thing. Which, in this case, might be rather like getting a coupon for a free case of Pepsi Blue after calling the Pepsi product hotline and complaining that it tastes like urine.


Cold Crush Brothers – “Punk Rock Rap”


Silliness, again. I genuinely enjoy this, but I think I’m taking the tactic of relying on old school rap (see below; see also “arty” rap) since the recipient of this tape might find, say, Noreaga or a track from Illmatic a bit off-putting.


Devo – “Uncontrollable Urge”


Anyone could have seen this one coming by now. I almost went with “Through Being Cool,” but I’ve got to wonder if anyone besides myself and my former radio show co-host fully appreciated that song.


cLOUDDEAD – “I Promise Never to Get Paint on My Glasses”


I forgot that this was actually one side of an EP of some sort. I think I fucked up by putting this on here. But maybe she’ll be entertained by it? The whispering section is neat.


Afrika Bambaataa – “Renegades of Funk”


So then I fucked up with this one, too, as I think anyone mildly interested in hip-hop might have had their quota met by the above. But there are some incredible synth and drum noises at the end of this. Unfortunately, it cuts off early. I suck at life.


Antioch Arrow – “Too Bad Yer Gonna Die”


I know she (to me, kind of surprisingly) likes Get Hustle, so this was something of a safe bet. It really is pretty strange and extreme, though. I love the campy organ antics, but will this make someone else want to hurl the tape (there I go again) across the room in disgust?


Billy Ball and the Upsetters – “Tighten Up Tighter”


I think this shit is more or less irresistable, but I might be wrong.


Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre – “Love on a Plate”


And I followed it up with the “something that you might not hate if you hated the last track” strategic move. Incidentally, I haven’t decided yet if I should try to see this band tonight or not. I have never heard such conflicting opinions regarding the musical merit of a band; I’m guessing that it’s love-it-or-hate-it stuff, especially in the live element. I enjoy this, though, off-kilter Bowie-esque clipped vocalizing and all. This might be a bit more straight-up in the “rockin’” department than their other work, however.


Beat Happening – “Indian Summer”


I saw Calvin Johnson give a slightly bewildering, intimate performance at a nearby women’s college last week, and have grown increasingly interested in his work ever since. Another Pop Song (if a crippled, mildly inept one) that might redeem the nihilistic flavor of at least half of what’s been going on in the confines of this mix.


Ayalew Mesfin – “Hasabe”


The fuzz guitars and horns are sick, I think. It seems pretty accessible to me for something so fundamentally ripe with significations of the Other. But maybe I should have put on the Monkees or Stereolab or something instead (did I mention the tape I got has the Get Up Kids on it?).


Adult. – “Nausea”


And so begins the Electro portion of the mix that serves as its coda. This has some great, chilly Game-Boy-esque synth sounds, I think. The vocals are a bit strident and uninviting, but I think that’s the point.


Tracy and the Plastics – “Bear (Attacking)”


Wow, what a horrible way to end the mix. But if its intended listener hates it by now, this won’t exactly do much to change her mind, right?


Anyhow, I’m off to mail this tape. I don’t know what will follow, but that’s the fun of this format, right?


12:23 p.m.


On the way back from the Post Office, I stop in Repo Records and the record store girl is there. Surely you know someone like her. Anyhow, she is listening to what I’m reasonably sure is John Fahey—who else could play with such intricacy?—which only makes me love her more. Is my hair okay? I mean, I, fuck. I am the only one in this tiny record store and I am suddenly very nervous. I wouldn’t even say she’s particularly hot (or hott or what-have-you), just cute. I mean, almost lethally so. (Lethal enough that she could harness these charms for some diabolical purpose, like getting poor pushing-30 indie schmucks to pay $47 for a scuffed-up GBV CD single in a slimlime case.) Cuteness is something I’ve long understimated, cast aside, and lately it’s coming back to haunt me with something of a vengeance. I would try to describe her appearance to you, but we run the risk of putting her on a pedestal, you know: “She’s like Meg White and Chan Marshall only, like, spliced together with some PJ Harvey thrown in! Like Serpentor or some shit!” Anyhow, I happen to find Teengenerate’s Get Action! in the used bin, and decide to purchase it, even if I don’t at all feel like listening to it right now.


11.08.02, 12:42 a.m.


Honestly, I dislike reading show reviews as much as you do (unless they feature amusing anecdotes, such as the Antioch Arrow one I read a few minutes ago wherein Aaron Montaigne walked up to the stage holding a steaming cup of coffee, announced the band’s name into the mic, then threw the coffee into the crowd), so I’ll render the account of the evening relatively terse. Here we go. (Being revved up on sugar, now’s as good a time as any to write it out.)


While ostensibly doing work in the library yesterday afternoon—I swear, I get stuff done; I mean, I even woke up at 7:00 today to read more Milton and related criticism—I found out, on a message board that probably takes up more of my waking hours than I’d care to relate, that Glass Candy were playing a house show in South Philly tonight. While I had some apprehensions about attending this, most notably concerning the three miles I had to traverse on foot to get there (never mind the trip back), I decided to do so. So after doing some more schoolwork (and, surprisingly, not listening to any music at all; I’m really not trying to cut down on what I listen to just to have less to write about here, honest) I took the train in again. There was an über-geeky college student who kept shouting Monty Python quotes and MacGyver references in an extremely loud faux-European accent, and singing occasional fragments of Journey and Elton John. That was interesting.


This time, in the station, it was the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat”—which I don’t think I’ve heard all the way through, so imagine my surprise coming in on an unrecognizable middle section and thinking, “Is this Le Tigre?”—that sounded far more fucking amazing than I could seemingly give it credit for. Soon enough I was back on South Street, and—being in a better frame of mind than I was yesterday—taking the opportunity to bug out over rare vinyl at Noise Pollution (which, incidentally, I’m told it’s a good idea to boycott since they have an album by legendarily awful racist punks Skrewdriver on the wall, among other vague reasons I can’t recall, though they’re enough to bring out further sinister implications behind the Beatles White Album songs I hear while I’m in there) and Cue. The former store, in particular, boasted an inspiring and dare I even say magical (laugh if you want, I was strangely a bit moved) collection of antique Philly show flyers—Wendy O. Williams! Flipper! A Billy Idol handbill displaying the phrase “(From England)”! I’m reminded of one I saw once that featured a now defunct club’s monthly schedule, which included Madonna and Swans gigs the same week. Cue, of course, featured some great funk vinyl, but it’s not the sort of thing I drool over as much these days. Maybe it has something to do with the seeming depletion of all the good records to sample; a few years ago, I was utterly fascinated with the Pete Rock and Large Professor school of rare-groove sampling (and don’t get me started on the Beatnuts; speaking of which, hang out with me sometime while the radio plays the new J.Lo track that jacks “Watch Out Now,” and witness several cringes of horror take place), while now it’s the dense, roiling neo-Bomb-Squad-isms of Fantastic Damage (its lyrics being the weakest spot, if you ask me) that have my ultimate admiration. I heard a Portishead-a-like band—no, not Denali—being played in the store, and like it, despite the level of derivativeness on display. Is this kind of thing going on a lot, still?


I walked about two miles through some unfamiliar territory (and at one point heard a car go by playing Big Daddy Kane’s “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’,” a landmark of 1988 rap. Who produced that, anyway? Did it start the jazz-sampling trend, before A Tribe Called Quest appeared?), after eating at Subway and regrettably ordering a large soda. This led to my ducking first into an unfamiliar subway (the literal one) and then, successfully, into a medical center’s lobby in search of a toilet. By the time I made my way back to the apartment, located above a law office, I saw an indie-looking guy approach. I asked if I was too early for the show (I did get there quicker than I’d anticipated), and he said to come on up. What followed was a highly unlikely successful random meeting between me and three other people; it turns out that we sort of bonded over The Fall (as unlikely a band to bond over as you’ll ever perhaps hear)—their band, Working Girl, was covering “Rowche Rumble” tonight, and I got to hear them run through it until we surmised the legal clerks downstairs working overtime might not have been too pleased at this—and so we discussed the merits of Grotesque (After the Gramme) and Hex Enduction Hour for a while, before I turned to the metal issue of Spin, intermittently letting people in whenever the doorbell emitted its curious tone. Strangely enough, I soon found myself sitting next to Alison Wolfe of Bratmobile fame and her ex-XBXRX bandmate, who currently comprised Da Hawnay Troof, as Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance (which I love and I think I’m going to listen to while I finish writing this shit; it’s one of my favorite late-night albums, with something to offer in every conceivable mood vicissitude. Whoa, fuckin’ rhyming and shit. Sorry, it’s late). They were reading a Spin of their own, and everyone in the room laughed at the latest antics of Juvenile, which I sadly can’t relate now. It could’ve been something about chasing a stripper with an axe after she spilled champagne on his carpet. Around this time, I learned that this house was called the Testosterzone, which I said I found evocative of something like a cable access show that caters to the extreme-sports crowd; this, I was told, was right on the money.


“What’s Glass Candy sound like?” someone asks.


“Oh, it’s, like, some chick screaming.” Laughter ensues at the possible aptness of this.


After some downtime that involved waiting for a drummer to get back from class, and a really loud girl talking about various unpleasant events that took place at Florida hardcore shows (another loud girl who I think she was friends with related her travails in the zine world, which made me think about how quick everyone is to abandon the ideals they trumpet and maybe burn out at 16), I ran into Adam and Heather, my mid-college friends. They were both a few years older than me; we get caught up on things—Heather’s in grad school now and working in a museum; Adam’s gotten tons of new tattoos and doesn’t seem to have changed too much—which I enjoyed, despite the occasional outside-the-couple third-wheel-ness I experienced. Heather is the sort of person who tells shy people how shy they are and how surprising it is that they were brave enough to venture out to this show, which I answered with something about how perhaps I’m a bit internally inconsistent. I remember thinking I must have weirded her out with my lack of eye contact, but was scanning the bookshelf across the room while hardcore kids laughed at Sealab 2021 lines: I espied Let It Blurt and Lipstick Traces and some Philip K. Dick, all good choices. The guitarist for Glass Candy, who was approximately six-foot-eight, with a sort of Spinal Tap haircut and a furry coat that looks like something cast off from Planet of the Apes, was reading one of the Spin issues now. Noise and 40-ounce-induced drunkenness accrued around us.


Now, a sentence about each band. X and Nevermind play while they set up. The first, whose name I can’t remember, were sloppy and more or less uninspired. Undistinguished garage rock. But Working Girl (this being their second show, and the first real show of any sort held at their house) were about twice as good as I was expecting, all snarl and nervous, wonderful sloppiness, equal parts post-punk and driving rock: the bassist (wearing a slightly unfortunate faux-hawk) had a cellphone that kept going off in his shirt pocket, glowing translucently through the fabric. Da Hawnay Troof were, well, something else, its members garbed in ultra-short running shorts, headbands, zebra-striped tops and hot-pants, rhyming haphazardly and in the most juvenile fashion (is there any other way?) over jarring home-brew laptop beats about humping; as the ex-XBXRX guy (also named Chris, I learned) leapt atop speakers and into the crowd, I got caught in a sweaty—and smelly!—mosh. This was only exacerbated by the time Glass Candy took the, well, “stage”: urging the crowd in closer, they proceeded to whip out one screechy, overenunciated blast of pins-and-needles disco-punk after the next, with the astonishingly coiffured Ida No lunging backwards into us, pingponging her emaciated body from one set of shoulders to the next, the craziness escalating until a tall amp was knocked over and a pile-on took place, everyone writhing on the floor and spanking each other, kicking their legs in the air, until the guitarist stood on this mound of bodies and was promptly knocked down among them, breaking his guitar and bringing the whole frenzy to a premature end. All this was, you may have gathered, off the damn chain, running in stark opposition to the accounts I’d heard of Glass Candy’s CMJ performance, et cetera. This level of energy is only attained, I guess, at house shows. (Heather voiced her slight distaste for this sort of thing earlier, saying she preferred places like The Khyber, which made me wonder if she’d merely burnt out on leaky-pipe basement-gig mania long before I did, or if I’m just emotionally stalled at fifteen or sixteen.)


Adam and Heather were nice enough to give me a lift me back to the station (unidentifiable but pleasant K-esque pop on the car stereo absorbed through ringing ears), after I’d shook hands with Working Girl and said my goodbyes; we talked about Troubleman bands during the ride back, and I was told that Erase Errata aren’t really that good live (my reaction one of stark disbelief), notable mainly for the ridiculous dances that are done while they play: I said I guessed that my earnest attempts at conventional dancing would be judged ridiculous by any disinterested third party. And soon I was headed homeward, body aching, disoriented. And so it is that now Pere Ubu comes with a residual sense of forward motion, “Over My Head”’s sepulchral backing vocals and distant siren of feedback forming some vanishing topography in my more-than-slightly-muddled mind.


Grrrrrr. Amy Poehler was on Conan and I missed it. Shite.


10:34 a.m.


I started the day far earlier than is perhaps healthy, with sit-ups and push-ups (which essentially just caused me some pain), as well as much hacking up of phlegm—perhaps I finally am getting sick after two straight weeks of being constantly exposed to people who are, as well as walking in the rain fairly often. Last night I dreamt about walking in the rain again, this time perhaps through some anonymous Philly block that’s begun to colonize my headspace; in my dream I had on a Discman, which is funny because I figure I already do enough in my life to isolate myself from other human beings without blocking out any incoming audio from them. Equally unusual: I seemed to be listening to some sort of house music, which I never do, unless we count a recent fascination with Cybotron’s “The Alleys of Your Mind,” a swooping mess of low-tech synths and ominous reverbed-to-death vocals. A Zapp-ified take on Ultravox? It’s allegedly the first house record. By the time I sit down at my computer to check e-mail and that sort of bullshit, I decide to put on John Fahey’s The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death. This is a great record, with a bit of something for everyone: purposely murky revenants of bluegrass, then avant-redux takes on the same territory, such as the frankly incredible twelve-string levitation of “I am the Resurrection.” I’ve written a bit about Fahey for Stylus, but with near-disastrous results: it’s very hard music to get a critical grasp on, I feel (though I certainly don’t echo his viewpoint on the music itself, I can here empathize with Simon Reynolds’ commentary on Fahey: “Sure, there are all these pretty bits, but so what?”). It feels good to be listening to something, well, sort of substantive after what’s seemed to be a tailspin into delight in what might be seen by many as bad music.


Upon learning that Glass Candy’s chillingly fucked-up “Metal Gods” (which they may have performed last night; I’m honestly unsure, but I do recognize the pulverizing chorus of “Love Love Love”) was a Screamers cover, I download the first track from them I can find, “Through the Flames.” It has a bizarre Wire-ish quality, permeated by a trebly sine-wave synth, but I’m guessing they were from Los Angeles, which can only mean that the Offspring-esque procedure of adopting a faux Brit accent is definitely nothing new. The song enters into a carnivalesque stomp midway through that I can’t say I care much for, but then things pulse back to life. Why is the sound of muffled, all-but-incompetent doop-chick-doop-chick drumming so appealing to me? You know a band hasn’t invested much in recording equipment when they can make the Fall’s “Rowche Rumble”—also downloaded anew, inspired from last night—take on a sort of clarity by default. I love the wall of buzz that blossoms out of nowhere; even Una Baines’ extremely dinky keyboard (my friend Ryan, who I did a radio show with for a while last year, somehow came into possession of a vintage Casiotone that features the same synth-drum pattern heard on “The Man Whose Head Expanded”) fits into this nightmarish jigsaw. I’m tempted to describe this song as something like precision disguised as sloppiness disguised as drug-induced stupor. Impelled by a sort of OCD-logic, of course now I’ve got to put on ESG’s “Dance,” which AllMusicGuide describes, and aptly so, as a sort of Supremes-meets-Public-Image-Limited hybrid. I saw The Flowers of Romance on vinyl at one of the record stores I’ve visited in the past two days, and wonder if I should swing back and pick it up. If I recall, the song I’ve heard (on Pil’s The Greatest Hits… So Far, one ne plus ultra of a parodic head-fuck [why am I copping all these moves from the pop-psych-as-learned-from-Meeting-People-is-Easy phrasebook today?] of a purposely shoddy bullshit compilation) from it is all Middle Eastern percussion and tortured threnody.


ESG has the greatest two-note basslines, dude. Or, at least I seem to think so. Maybe the uninitiated would think this is needlessly repetitious, however. Suddenly I want to hear that Liars track that samples/covers “UFO”—also recently sampled on a Jay-Z single, I’ve heard—but I think I deleted it some time ago. Or at least I think so. I need to organize my mp3s sometime in the near future. Now Napalm Death’s “Cock-Rock Alienation” comes on, and I happen to know some of the lyrics to this one: “We’ve got no brains / Give us tits and tools / We love it when you feed us shit.” Cute, guyz! Again, I’m amazed at just how staggeringly effective a simple bit of cymbal-smashing is for livening up straightforward thrash metal (is this the same formula that rough sex relies on?). Unfortunately, straightforward thrash is what I get with a bootleg live-in-Japan (I’m trying to figure out how the audience might respond to this; choreographed mosh moves? Polite silence? There is an accented “Yeaaarrahhh!” that comes from the crowd at the end, however) version of “From Enslavement to Obliteration.” It’s competent, but the new lineup that performs on this isn’t the same, I’m afraid (if there any Napalm Death fans out there who know the many, many vicissitudes the group went through throughout its existence, they’ll get the sort of understated joke here). “Hung,” a new track, is pretty awesome, though it’s strange to hear them go on past the three-minute mark. Actually, this sounds a bit like a Cookie Monster metal-core band that’s studied the Napalm Death back catalog quite extensively. Is this what Converge sounds like? I’ve never heard them. As I chow down on synthetic meat products, all this noise is giving me a strange appetite for some industrial of the Ministry sort, but I’m not about to download anything of theirs. Did you know that “Scarecrow” from Psalm 69 has the same chord progression as Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” though? Anyhow, I go with “Born Against are Fucking Dead!!” and soon decide that there’s only one band that could follow this up: Lightning Bolt. I love the mazelike effects that permeate those dizzying basslines; as “Forcefield” begins, I feel rather like I’m trying to pick the details out of scrambled porn. Then the drums come in, the whole thing sways from burst to burst, and it’s like listening to a DJ backspinning the same agony-inducing passage of drum-and-bass gone nuts. Then, y’know, things really get wild. After this, the eerie reverb of the Pretty Things’ “LSD” helps to calm me down a bit. I still need to check out the S.F. Sorrow era of their work; “Walking Through My Dreams” is an incredible bit of haunting pop-psych, especially its coda. Next up is Jurassic 5’s “A Day at the Races,” which I first downloaded an incomplete promo version of that looped a long section of Percee P’s verse for its four-minute-or-so duration: I should’ve kept that one, actually. The Cut Chemist production is great, however.


Alright, I could listen to Mantronix’s “Bassline (Stretched)” a few more times in a row, but I think I need to go to the library.


8:32 p.m.


I had a bit of a scare this afternoon when I got a letter from my school’s financial aid department that made it appear as if my scholarship had been arbitrarily revoked (a touchy issue with me, given that I’ve felt I never deserved it in the first place). However, it had to do with the expiration period on a Guaranteed Stafford Loan (did you know that it provided the name for GSL records?) that I never needed to accept; I should’ve sent in the paperwork anyhow, declining it. But anyhow. Holy fuck, the new Kelly Rowland single is terrible, especially those anonymous high-pitched background vocals. “MTV Hits”—with which my cable company replaced MTV Jams, suddenly, a few weeks ago, to my extreme disdain (of course now I’m loving it along with the rest of us, even that new Kylie song which goes absolutely nowhere but somehow manages to work for me)—is on in the next room. I was jocking Destiny two years ago with the rest of us conspicuously pop-loving hipsters, but have they succumbed to shittiness now or are we all just more aware? (See also Beyonce’s pretty poor single with Jay-Z.) The video’s confusing, too: at first I thought it was all about the Harry-Potter-a-like kid, and I thought he killed the other characters. Or is that what it’s about? Awkward, at any rate.


Now I hear the new Timberlake song, beneath the hum of Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.” Earlier I was at Borders reading the new issue of The Wire and thinking Suicide were a pair of complete dicks, their wraparound-shades-on-saggy-faces schtick almost seeming genuinely evil if it wasn’t so silly. I think it was hearing about hip-hop elements in their new album that clued me in to the fact that it must be stupid and awful. (At the same time I noticed jazz was playing in the store, and though it was as tepid and anonymous as any other brand of hackwork, I suddenly felt an intense sadness, a feeling that I’ve forgotten how to enjoy jazz, abandoned it in the midst of other, less worthy pursuits. And I’m guessing I’m not the only one. Anyhow, I can’t make myself get back into it, but let’s hope it happens in due time.) But then I ended up coming home—after looking at the newly-published Cobain journals in the store, which also seemed senseless and inexplicable to me (both their appearance in bookstores across the nation and their general content, though some of the excessively cryptic notes on In Utero tracks I’d read about in Heavier Than Heaven were interesting)—and downloading this Suicide song, which I wanted to believe was more or less hokey and overrated, a total put-on, until the utterly chilling moment that takes place at the 3:34 mark. I can deconstruct its effect upon me now, even laugh it off to a certain extent, but there’s no doubt that it’s one of the most deeply unsettling moments of recorded sound I’ve ever laid ears upon.


On a slightly similar tip, I was listening to Clipse and digging the silly, loose horn spurts on “Young Man” at the same time I read an awful, sobering news story about eight drunken teenagers jumping a father on his way to pick up his child from a middle school in Philly and beating the shit out of him. They kept yelling at him to stay the fuck out of their neighborhood, but he was from their neighborhood. I was just thinking about how Pusha T and Malice’s monomaniacal schtick—sometime I’m going to count all the coke references on the record—seemed free of woeful sub-Tupac remorseful-thug melodrama, and I still do, but it definitely put a more than slightly unpleasant spin on things. But at the same time this music seemed to take on an entirely different sheen of evil. Evil, too, was all I could think of seeing Eminem on TRL; not his persona or the way he manipulated the in-studio audience, but the grimly idiotic facial expressions on his fans, mostly these shaven-skull chuckleheads. They seemed to remind me of everyone I’ve ever hated, everyone who’s ever harassed me or thrown beer bottle or drunkenly tried to fight with me because they thought it was hilarious that I’d have no idea how to fight back or yelled at me and called me a fag or said, perhaps jokingly, that they wanted to punch me in the face. Or any of my friends, for that matter: total dickbags, in other words. So it may sort of seem like I’m making some half-baked plea for social responsibility from America’s recording artists, or singling out rap in particular (whenever we start to examine rap misogyny, it’s helpful to take bell hooks’ credo in mind that the vast majority of rappers come off as misogynists and homophobes because the vast majority of Americans are) but I think I’m more interested in a modification and downsizing of the your-heroes-hate-you paradox: feeling like the musicians whose work I enjoy are really assholes, and I’m complicit in assholery for supporting them, even via oh-but-listen-to-the-production-first critical distance. So you might say I’m being too sensitive, but remember how much I seem to have invested in this shit, emotionally, and you’ll start to understand, if not without some pity.


I think I’m just in a bad mood. I walked into the other room and saw the horrible, bland new LL Cool J video and figured he’s probably an asshole too, but can’t even make good music anymore. So I guess the choice is obvious. I just put “Serve the Servants” on and it seems to fit this kind of timid disgust I feel. Maybe I just need to eat some more chips and salsa or something, dudes. I was doing so earlier, but managed to get salt in a few paper cuts. Shite.


11.09.02, 5:32 p.m.


My eye itches and at the same time it’s twitching awfully. I think this is not helping the severity of my migraine, and I’ve thrown up in the back of my throat at least six times today. This is where grad school gets one. Right now I’m trying to find the tracks I don’t have from Racebannon’s In the Grips of the Light album on Soulseek. Have you heard this shit? It’s brash and epic. When I saw them live I unfortunately arrived after their set started—I didn’t know what to expect, and got the hardcore crowd standing around more or less perplexed while someone in the band slowly spun pitch-shifted jungle records backwards on a portable turntable, the guitarist noodling all the while, the singer panting into the microphone and sweating, announcing that their next song was entitled “Satan’s Kickin’ Your Dick In.” When I later found out they covered Beefheart, I was pissed that I didn’t get to hear that live, but it turns out they never play it in concert.


Anyhow, I have not listened to much music today, except for some approximately 15-second clips of Lightning Bolt’s Ride the Skies (I was checking mp3 quality, hoping that the 128-192 bitrate discrepancy wouldn’t matter too much before I burned it to CD) and, much later in the day, as I was taking a break from reading and doing laundry, some of a mix I’d made not too long ago. It started off with Ghostface Killah’s “Nutmeg”—an amazingly prolix stream-of-altered-consciousness showcase for some decidedly oddball MC skills—then there was the Erase Errata side of their split release with Numbers, which got me dancin’ in a lexical array of spazzy movements. I must’ve looked like Claire Danes in the credits to My So-Called Life jumping on her mattress to the sounds of Evan Dando or something like that. I fell down two or three times, and kept dancing while T-La Rock’s “It’s Yours” and two or three Mantronix tracks followed, in brisk sequence. I appreciated several aesthetic qualities of this miniature electro set that could perhaps be summarized by drawing an analogy to the work of the draftsman: clean lines set at proper angles, etc. The arpeggiated sequencer lines and 808 hi-hats of a track like “Who Is It?” start to seem like a vast spiral staircase after a while. I’m willing to avoid MC Tee’s generally poor microphone duties if you are, but his voice does have a certain geeky enthusiasm. He looks just like the guy with a Kangol and glasses drawn on the cover of the “Needle to the Groove” 12” single, I’d wager.


While folding laundry I put MTV Hits on mute while Pharoah Sander’s “Izipho Zam”—it was too long to include on a “real” mix, which prompted the mixed-status compilation I put it on—played in the next room. The percussion and vocal ululations that comprise its midsection make a particularly striking passage, but I also find great beauty in its webs of guitar. Did I use that phrase earlier? I seem to be pretty consistent when it comes to repeating myself; I’m not going to back and check. I repeat myself when under stress, I repeat myself when under stress, I repeat … I think I’d download whatever King Crimson track that is in my mind right now, if I could remember the name and if my connection didn’t verge on the glacial side of things. Anyhow, when I turned the audio back on, I think it was Madonna doing a live version of “Music,” and her vocal performance was not so great. But she was on point in all other aspects, I’d say. Unfortunately, however, this has brought up a performance of the same song at a Grammy Awards a few years ago that involved Lil” Bow Wow in some capacity. It was pretty uncomfortable, but at least he didn’t get to shine on a guest verse or something. Maybe it was Lil’ Romeo? I switched over to VH1 Classic to see Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized”—a great song and wonderfully moronic and inept video, with some subpar lip-synching, highlighted also by the fact that the bandana’d singer looked about 26 (was his mother played by Mary Woronov of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School fame?). I enjoyed seeing Minor Threat’s Out of Step album cover in the background of one scene. I have a Minor Threat pin on my sweatshirt right now, by the way. Next up were a bunch of sad, anonymous circa-1987 alternative videos that all gave off a certain aura (unfunny appearances of guys in geeky glasses talking to the camera [the apogee of poorly-conceived, smug sub-Eraserhead video surrealism has to be the Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” though, again, I do sort of like the song (marimbas!)], jaded background go-go dancers, awful color schemes and oscillating camerawork) of Kids in the Hall musical sketches. Of course, I now realize that they were far better at mimicry than I gave them credit for, sort of like when I used to think Monty Python and the Holy Grail was hopelessly low-budget, until I saw actual BBC productions of the period and realized how spot-on it was. But where was I?


What I’ll guess was one of the American Ninja films was on WGTW-48, on which I used to rely for bad Shaw-Brothers-era Kung Fu films. Unfortunately, it seemed to have presented the bizarre kickboxing-and-musical-interludes program I found on the channel last week, which featured a faintly sluggish performance from none other than Kool Moe Dee, acting as if nothing at all had changed in the world of hip-hop music in the past twelve years or so. I guess that’s better than trying to maintain credibility by changing one’s style, though. (I also saw Willie Nelson onstage with Ryan Adams … no comment will be made there, but I’m unqualified to talk about country music, anyhow.)


I’ve only downloaded half of Bill Laswell and Peter Brotzmann’s “Death Rattle,” but I think the marriage of blistering bass saxophone (?) skronk and what sounds like the incidental music from Over the Top is not by no means a harmonious one, at least by my standards.


11.10.02, 2:11 p.m.


Rise earlier than you think you should, use this faint pride to gain the momentum to dick around for a few hours, read thirty-three pages on Adorno and try to kid yourself into thinking your incomprehension is something else, maybe the comprehension of an extremely elusive concept, et cetera. Give up and download songs for a while.


I spent an embarrassingly long time last night and this morning trying to piece together the mostly untitled forty-five tracks of Men’s Recovery Project’s Frank Talk About Humans record; I’d already downloaded a bunch of untitled ones and there were a bunch of duplicates (shades of collecting Marvel Universe cards back in sixth grade). I’m still missing three, but I think I’ve got then in sequence, though AllMusicGuide infuriatingly refuses to discern which order the four remixes of “All Music is Shit to God” appear in (or did McPheeters et al. merely put the same track on the record four times, in a typical move? Remember, this is an album with four extended fart jokes, answering machine messages, and enough cheeky synthesizer belch and guitar efflatus to distribute evenly among all the unreleased Faust stuff with some left over). At some point I overdosed on the craziness—though the “Half Time Remix” of “Slap On Some Pants,” which basically sounds like a Yamaha keyboard on marching-band demo mode, has to be one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a long time—and decided to put on a dancehall compilation my friend found at her college paper’s free-shit-we-couldn’t-be-bothered-to-review box. For some time, dancehall has reminded me of the one frat party I ever went to, which I have one good and about fifteen bad memories regarding, but I can overlook that long enough to realize the greatness of Elephant Man’s “Warn Dem” (I want to hear his appearance on the “Work It” remix now), especially his sporadic shrieks during what I’ll guess is the chorus. Its synth backdrop reminded me unintentionally of the on-the-cheap surrealist sound-paintings I’d just immersed myself in, but, if anything, that just made me like it more. I stole some reggae 45s once at my high school radio station, and I’ve always liked how Jamaican record labels continue to use the same fonts and label art that they did in the sixties or seventies. As far as the aesthetics of vinyl itself is concerned, some of my favorite cover art ever can be found in the genre, i.e. Lee Perry’s Super Ape. But, curiously, I don’t listen to the music very often.


While standing in the supermarket express line holding my 10-for-$4.00 yogurts, I realized some awful Billy Joel song I couldn’t name was playing. Billy Joel reminds me of being six or seven, in my parents’ slightly mildewed basement putting together jigsaw puzzles by the stereo: the only LPs they owned, besides that live-in-Russia one and what I think was a Joel greatest hits, were White Winds (which I hated), the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, and a Monkees best-of (which I loved, of course, along with the then-syndicated TV show, right down to my wearing a knit hat indoors in hopes of emulating Michael Nesmith). Of course I didn’t understand the mysteries of the lyrics—the bloody noses, the woman in the Halston dress who’ll laugh while you’re bleeding, the mircophone that smells like beer, the factories closing down, the pleas for teen Catholic sex, the pressure, pressure, pressure. I think they just made me sad. The pacing, in particular, killed me, especially when I knew what was coming up next. I usually wanted my parents to put something else on, and maybe even burst out crying a few times. Anyway, Billy Joel still makes me sad, or sometimes angry, but I’m no closer to giving you an answer why.


9:55 p.m.


I’ve been slouched in front of my laptop, barefoot and hair in my face, listening to the same songs on my playlist over and over, too lazy to get up and get a CD or even my headphones. This is probably not a good sign. Okay, I couldn’t stand how awful City of Caterpillar sounded whilst muted via tinny speaker, and am now pleased. One thing, at least, that may be positive about listening to so much music in such a shitty medium (it’s not as though my stereo—a tiny Sony—is much better, however) is that it makes me appreciate good production when I hear it, especially in headphones. A bit earlier, I was listening to Born Against’s Nine Patriotic Hymns for Children and Battle Hymns for the Race War and was pleasantly surprised to hear some nicely recorded drum sounds for a change, plus an overall degree of (this is going to sound asinine since I will now probably misuse technical terms with completely different meanings) brightness and space (vastness?) in the arrangements, though there was of course a corrosive, wild aspect to the way the mixes attacked the listener, so to speak. (I’ll shut up soon, I promise.) Now I’m thinking the same thing about City of Caterpillar, though it doesn’t hit me in “A Little Change Could Go a Long Ways” until it really kicks into full-throttle mode. That’s got to be one of my favorite moments of recorded sound, recently: it and “Born Against are Fucking Dead!!” are the only songs to actively give me goosebumps today and perhaps all week. When was the last time I felt that, I now wonder? It’s hard for me to locate in memory.


Holy fuck. It just kicked in. 5:31. I want to go back and hear it over again, but it’d ruin the sanctity of the moment, or something. And it just keeps getting better. It’s like I can hear chunks of my record collection being rendered irrelevant.


And I forgot about the last forty-one seconds. I’m not listening to anything else tonight; I want to preserve this feeling. I’m not trying to say that this is the best record of its kind ever made, or any other absurd claim, just that seems like the reason, quite simply, that I listen to music.


10:52 p.m.


Okay, I lied. But Devo’s “Gut Feeling” and Napalm Death’s “Morbid Deceiver” are two other perfectly valid arguments for listening to music as well.


11.11.02, 6:51 p.m.


I’m playing that incredible Sharon Jones record again. I think vintage microphones must’ve been employed extensively; it’s fascinating how just about everything, even the brief live-from-Milwaukee introduction, sounds so flawlessly of the era.


I haven’t listened to much of anything today. I rose far earlier than I should’ve, once again, only this time I forced myself to kick out the note-card jams. I might have more of an idea of what I’m doing now, but I still fear my papers will be pleonasm-riddled and more or less inert.


Once I returned from campus, I had to play City of Caterpillar’s LP in its entirety on headphones, since I’d been thinking about and/or trying unsuccessfully to analyze various moments on it throughout the day. Then I downloaded a live Minor Threat song, “Filler” from a 1982 show. It’s good, but the crowd singalong all but drowns out the music. I wonder, was this pace of audience-participation maintained for the whole show? Then I downloaded a few songs from the new Orchid record, which were not so good at all, which is sort of inexplicable, given that their first LP presents a band that you wouldn’t think would mess with the formula they’d achieved. Unfortunately, they seemed to. Or maybe it’s just recorded poorly; sadly, I don’t seem to care enough to find out. The band’s broken up now, anyhow. (A far-past-capacity show on their last tour is rumored to have resulted in the shutdown of the First Unitarian Church in Philly.)


I sent Todd Napalm Death’s “You Suffer (But Why?)” and he seemed to be amused. Then we talked a bit about being attracted to female comedians, I think, while I made a burrito and felt sleepy. Which is where we are right now. I think I’m going to wash my face and watch television.


Clearly, we’re hurtling towards an anticlimax.


8:19 p.m.


After Will & Grace I briefly switched over to M2 and swore I saw Mike Watt in a Good Charlotte video. Really odd. They gave him a speaking part, too. Then Queen Latifah’s “Dance 4 Me” came on VH1 Soul, which I was prepared to laugh at until I recognized a beat that was partially reconstructed on DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s Brainfreeze; she mentioned during a verse that she was backed up by DJ Mark the 45 King (perhaps best known for “The 900 Number,” a.k.a. the Ed Lover Dance beat) who I suppose has laid low as of late, despite producting “Stan.” (Was it his idea to hook up the Dido sample? Whether he did or not, he’s certainly established his place in hip-hop history.) Then a Style Council video came on VH1 Classic and I was not impressed at all (but then I never really liked The Jam, except for the obvious hit single); after that I think I saw part of a Jennifer Love Hewitt video that featured the same synth horn stabs as every Huey Lewis single I can remember. Huey Lewis also depresses the shit out of me, but in something of a different manner than Billy Joel. I was angry at myself for watching it when I discovered the most recent Queens of the Stone Age clip had been on M2, which was followed by a horrible Vines song and video that was essentially unmemorable, but full of extremely lame faux-punk sass and dumb-looking models of both sexes fake-moshing and sneering for the camera. On MTV, Suchin Pak was interviewing the surviving members of TLC, and I was quite surprised to see T-Boz rocking a pink lace-up shirt emblazoned with the cover art of Miles Davis’ On the Corner. I wonder if she’s heard the album.


11:30 p.m.


As I realize this diary’s gone on long enough and that it’s time to wrap shit up and put things to bed, I’m listening to some Roxy Music, who I haven’t heard before. “Virginia Plain” is pretty awesome, laced with bizarre synth fanfares and all manner of other gently psychedelic effects; it’s easy to imagine this group as the testing ground for some of Eno’s later departures. Perhaps even more ahead of its time is “Editions of You,” a mannered glam-stomper with baroque coils of organ highlighting its contorted neon riffs, then a parodic saxophone solo. I can’t help but wonder if the Blood Brothers heard this track before adding an electric piano to the “Piano Song” on Burn, Piano Island, Burn (how’s that for redundancy?), their upcoming major-label debut, which I don’t think I’ve yet properly digested (I’m a bit tempted, actually, to write it off as something of an interesting failure, but that might be because I find it hard to listen to in its entirety). Putting it on now, we’ve got a distorted caricature of pounding drums, line noise, and a voluptuous roll of keys over which their dual-vocal assault soars. Even more over-the-top and decadent than most of March On Electric Children, it features some bizarrely tuneful harmonies amid passages of what just might be uncategorizable post-post-hardcore insanity. Truthfully, there’s really a bit too much going on here for me, and by the time we reach a whispered noir verse and a descending jazz-inflected passage that sounds like Get Hustle covering a moment from The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, I’m simply worn out. Is this shit for real? I feel rather like it’s an imagining from an unusually music-savvy fiction writer. After this, their bewildering cover of Queen’s “Pressure” from the much-maligned Dynamite with a Laserbeam compilation sounds downright, well, calming. I’m glad they left some sections of the song relatively unmolested, but the mounting bridge actually sounds a bit better given a charred, fucked-up-as-all-get-out treatment.


And now it’s Pigmeat Markham’s “Who Got the Number.” I’m amazed that what are essentially rudimentary skits have such world-class musicianship backing them up, but then I remember that the Pigmeat album I almost bought last week was on Chess Records, so there could be grizzled blues session veterans providing the walloping beat and flickers of organ that ended up, along with some of the vocal, in DJ Shadow’s “The Number Song.” I believe it remains unpublished, but Todd and I once did an IM review of the album that likened that track to an old-school party jam as seen through a dusty window. Black Eyes’ “Black Plastic” offers an oddball, lurching two-drummer assault and a refreshing synth tone that’s outmoded in a sense that revivalism hasn’t yet soured me on. So things go on in an oddly funky fashion for several minutes, with choppy bursts of distorted bass providing some undertow, until what sound like two vocalists growl and shriek their way to the surface; it’s another amazing moment, one that ends up turning the song into a hybridization of just about every neglected punk offshoot to appear in the past ten years or so. Only, this time, they’re back with something of a vengeance. Things collapse into an Antioch-Arrow-like spasm and suddenly I’m listening to the Screamers’ “I’m a Mensch,” an absymally-recorded demo (?) that seems to be coming at me from a clock radio speaker, all puzzling, snaky keyboard lines and pulsing, rudimentary drumbeat. A demented, shrill-to-the-point-of-hilarity vocalist taunts the listener, eventually collapsing in spasms of laughter. This seems like the epitome of early L.A. art-punk, and the sort of thing that would never quite appear on the other coast. “I’m a difficult customer! I’m evil! I’m evil! ” he yelps in a campier-than-Orgy-of-the-Dead nightmare tone, and I’m getting fantastically irritated until a halfway melodic bridge takes things in a new direction. Now, however, I’m even more confused than I was when I’d only heard one song of theirs. Then Glass Candy are back with “Hurt,” complete with chirps of subdued synth (one thing the past few songs I’ve been listening to have in common is a unique tendency to integrate synths into the sound instead of the swooping-garnish approach), drums, and, of course, Ida No’s theatre-of-the-absurd hysterics. I’m guessing that they’ve since abandoned this sound, however, but I find myself wishing they—or someone brave enough—would take it up once more.


Lightning Bolt’s “The Faire Folk” takes things in a direction I wasn’t much prepared for, undistorted bass playing freely with drums in a hypnotic and almost-laid-back fashion. This is downright psychedelic, really, but I’m sure I’d think the same of the rest of their output if there wasn’t such a surplus of rampaging noise laid over everything. This is definitely the sort of band you’ve got to be in the right mood to fully appreciate, but I’d say I’m in the mood for this particular strain of their assault at the moment; when things pass into stormier waters, however, I become less enthralled than I am by this curious, near-Don-Caballero-ish detour on Ride the Skies. The VSS’ “What Kind of Ticks” returns to the keyboards-and-congested-vocal-paranoia formula their earlier singles gradually teased out, but by this time the synthetics are brought much further to the forefront than usual. It’s often hard to tell what’s an overloading Korg and what’s a guitar here, though (just as it’s all-but-impossible to guess what Sonny Kay is going on about, except for the recognizably drawled word “masturbation”), until things split into further discord as the song ends and segues into “Chemical in Chemistry,” which perhaps best encapsulates the band’s brand of sleek malevolence. I need something different now, though, which is why I abandon the randomized playlist and go for Blackalicious “Lyric Fathom,” an early-nineties track that finds Gift of Gab bridging the gap between Jungle Brothers, Tribe, and the post-Freestyle-Fellowship West Coast underground. There’s a recognizable snatch of “Get Out of My Life, Woman” (don’t ask me which version of that old standard, which even Bill Cosby covered) in here, but the rest of the producer’s (Chief Xcel’s?) sampling choices are wholly mysterious to me, but familiar-sounding: upright bass and a short section of croaking synth noises, which some charmingly off-kilter horn hits during the madhouse of a call-and-response chorus. The rampaging stagger of the whole affair, combined with an insousciant quality to Gab’s verses which at this point is wholly absent from their sound, makes this pretty interesting. And what’s this? Iannis Xenakis’ “Kraanerg,” and now it’s 12:05 a.m., which means I can stop writing soon, very soon indeed. I’m not sure what to make of this. I thought it’d be more experimental or electronic or something, but that doesn’t really develop until forty-five or so seconds in, with a treated string section that floats from speaker to speaker, amid bewildering chirps and stutters of melancholy brass. This floating goes on for a good while, but it’s all handled in a relatively organic fashion, compared to the juxtaposed galaxy of zaps and wows that comprise a work like Stockhausen’s Kontakte. Then we’re back to scribbling, hurried strings that soon expire in the midst of more quick-cut varispeed hum.


Maybe this is the sound of deep space, or … a topography of the region within? Is this what music sounds like once it enters our brain, after snaking its labyrinthine way along our auditory nerves? Tonight I’ll say yes.