Slumberlord
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Walk on by
A recent article in the Chicago Tribune celebrated – with reservations – the 25th anniversary of the Walkman.
Sony’s TPS-L2 cassette player, initially dubbed the Soundabout, debuted with two headphone jacks and something called a “Hotline” – an orange button that let the two listeners talk over the music.
“At (Sony Chairman Akio) Morita's insistence, the original Walkman wasn't an isolating machine. The Hotline let someone interrupt your music if necessary. A demonstration film showed a couple listening to a Walkman while riding a tandem bike. It was Sony's quaint notion of sharing music.
Executives had worried that their product would diminish the pleasure people got from listening to music together.
The orange button lasted all of two years. By the introduction of the 1981 model, the Hotline was history.”
The article goes on to quote an archeologist (well well!) who frowns on the matter.
“‘People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability.’”
I have a hard time imagining bus stops and laundromats were lyceums of public discourse before the advent of portable music. If people don’t have their own music to carry about, they’re stuck with the default music – traffic, crowds and (yes) cell phones. Those things can coalesce into beautiful music of their own, but I’ll take Laurent Garnier and Dean Parrish most of the time, thank you.
The recent popularity of the iPod begs another question: has the development of portable music helped young white people re-colonize urban America? It’s difficult to get on the El or the bus without seeing a skillfully coifed young rake with his shoulder bag and his patented Smiths/Cure mix set on his iPod. Could he have made the jump so easily without his portable, private world of sound?
On that note this blog will probably be quiet for a while as I make the move to my new digs. I’m thinking of signing on with Chicago Bloggers for my new home on the Western blue line stop. I like the way they organize blogs by Chicago’s diverse transportation systems and it’s about time I represent. “If you live on the west side of your town / Make the motherfuckers bow down.”
I don’t have any Westside Connection MP3s to share, but I do have a song by the Helms called “The Kindness of Automatic Doors” and it is about just that. If you like it, take a look at the rest of the Kimchee Records roster.
A recent article in the Chicago Tribune celebrated – with reservations – the 25th anniversary of the Walkman.
Sony’s TPS-L2 cassette player, initially dubbed the Soundabout, debuted with two headphone jacks and something called a “Hotline” – an orange button that let the two listeners talk over the music.
“At (Sony Chairman Akio) Morita's insistence, the original Walkman wasn't an isolating machine. The Hotline let someone interrupt your music if necessary. A demonstration film showed a couple listening to a Walkman while riding a tandem bike. It was Sony's quaint notion of sharing music.
Executives had worried that their product would diminish the pleasure people got from listening to music together.
The orange button lasted all of two years. By the introduction of the 1981 model, the Hotline was history.”
The article goes on to quote an archeologist (well well!) who frowns on the matter.
“‘People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability.’”
I have a hard time imagining bus stops and laundromats were lyceums of public discourse before the advent of portable music. If people don’t have their own music to carry about, they’re stuck with the default music – traffic, crowds and (yes) cell phones. Those things can coalesce into beautiful music of their own, but I’ll take Laurent Garnier and Dean Parrish most of the time, thank you.
The recent popularity of the iPod begs another question: has the development of portable music helped young white people re-colonize urban America? It’s difficult to get on the El or the bus without seeing a skillfully coifed young rake with his shoulder bag and his patented Smiths/Cure mix set on his iPod. Could he have made the jump so easily without his portable, private world of sound?
On that note this blog will probably be quiet for a while as I make the move to my new digs. I’m thinking of signing on with Chicago Bloggers for my new home on the Western blue line stop. I like the way they organize blogs by Chicago’s diverse transportation systems and it’s about time I represent. “If you live on the west side of your town / Make the motherfuckers bow down.”
I don’t have any Westside Connection MP3s to share, but I do have a song by the Helms called “The Kindness of Automatic Doors” and it is about just that. If you like it, take a look at the rest of the Kimchee Records roster.
Sunday, July 18, 2004
Throw on somethin' funky
The San Francisco Bay Guardian (via Global Pop Conspiracy) says rockers are trying their hands on the 1s and 2s but generally not rocking crowds. Writer Ken Taylor says several ex-Smiths recently brought nothing more varied than the Cure, the Stone Roses and, um, the Smiths to the decks.
So are music makers in dance and rap better educated listeners than their counterparts in the rock world? Do they just have better taste?
It’s certainly not a flaw – the remarkable thing about a lot of great rock music (particularly in the early days of the genre) is how it was made in the absence of great inspiring sources, and how regional underground movements can spring up without help from, or even in defiance of, the prevailing pop trends.
Monday, July 12, 2004
Burn baby burn
On July 12, 1979, old Comiskey Park in Chicago hosted one of the most singular events in Chicago sports and music history – Disco Demolition. The idea was simple – bring a disco record to the ballpark and pay only $.98 to get in. In between the doubleheader against the Tigers, the records would be “blowed up real good” in the outfield. The event culminated in thousands storming the field, a pre-Cub Harry Caray begging for sanity and the Sox forfeiting the game to Detroit.
To mark the occasion 25 years later, Chicago’s WTTW assembled an impressive documentary, interviewing many of the key participants and revealing new footage from the event.
Then-24-year-old radio personality, master of affairs and anti-disco general Steve Dahl seems almost ambivalent about the whole affair in interviews, possibly because he has talked it to death in the years since. Dahl had only been in Chicago for a few months before the demolition, and the Detroit station Dahl had come from had recently switched to an all-disco format. “I really was just making fun of my bosses and the people I worked for,” he says.
Among the variety of intertwined motivations for the “Disco Sucks” movements were some legitimate complaints against a genre that had (like all genres that go pop) become oversaturated, overbearing and frequently irritating. Dahl suggests Disco Demolition was in part an anti-commercialization and anti-fad movement: “It wasn’t so much the music … it was the lifestyle,” he says.
Few disco fans today will fault Dahl for targeting bandwagon jumpers like Rod Stewart, whose “Do You Think I’m Sexy?” was probably a low for commercial disco (although, in all fairness, Dahl’s “Do You Think I’m Disco?” is just as bad – why would Fred Astaire teach disco steps? Is it that hard to find a word that rhymes with “hair”?)
There is some underlying tension that the documentary does not fully explore – clearly there were tens of thousands of people who hated disco, but why did they hate it so much? One commentator refers to rock bands like the Rolling Stones going over to “the dark side” – which is clearly open to interpretation. Several Demolition alumni explicitly say they “felt threatened” by disco, which is the closest the documentary comes to the dark underbelly of Demolition. What about disco culture could be so threatening? What did disco ever do to them? What makes people declare war on a form of art?
But the documentary examines the event in an athletic context, not a musical (or cultural) one. Demolition promoter and Chicago sports legend Mike Veeck admits parts of the event were miscalculated but defends the Demolition as a whole, saying he “should be knighted” for what he did for music lovers. He suggests the Tigers’ manager deserved an award as well, for his “performance” in refusing to field his players for the second game. Veeck’s “well, no one got hurt” response is the sort of adolescent excuse one would expect from the drunken revelers who fled the field when police (who were applauded by the baseball fans in the seats) came out in force to clear the field.
There’s a noticeable divide among the commentators – those interviewed who are purely interested in baseball and could care less about music or radio promotion are much more critical of the event. They knew that the people who really missed out were the Sox fans there to see the second game.
The event was not as terrible as it has sometimes been portrayed in the last 25 years. It’s true that no one got hurt. It was not equal in scope or intent, as some have suggested, to Nazi book burnings. It didn’t lead to racist or homophobic beatings or nightclub burnings or anything besides a lot of property damage and hangovers. And there is something undeniably impressive about the primeval white teenage caveman and the sense of collective will boiling over into ultimately meaningless spectacle.
Dahl sums it up well.
“It was just meant to be stupid,” he said. Mission accomplished.
Disco lost the battle in America, all but disappearing to Europe, but rhythm music won the war – or, arguably, is still fighting that war today. In many parts of the world, dance music has never stopped topping the charts and defining culture since the late ‘70s. America remains the exception, but rock instead lost the culture war to rap and R&B, a different kind of rhythm, but rhythm all the same.
Dahl’s anti-disco army couldn’t stop music from marching into the 1980s, rock’s dark ages by anyone’s estimation. Eddie Van Halen played on a Michael Jackson record and Aerosmith teamed with RUN-DMC. Of all the bands that received heavy rotation on the Loop in the past 25 years, Queen may be one of the station’s favorites, particularly in the years following the band’s “Wayne’s World”-aided resurgence. The ultimate irony of Disco Demolition may be that the hordes chanting “disco sucks” would soon after choose to listen to some “real music” – a flamboyantly gay man in a band with a feminine name playing a song with an explicitly disco bassline and beat – a song called “Another One Bites the Dust.”
On July 12, 1979, old Comiskey Park in Chicago hosted one of the most singular events in Chicago sports and music history – Disco Demolition. The idea was simple – bring a disco record to the ballpark and pay only $.98 to get in. In between the doubleheader against the Tigers, the records would be “blowed up real good” in the outfield. The event culminated in thousands storming the field, a pre-Cub Harry Caray begging for sanity and the Sox forfeiting the game to Detroit.
To mark the occasion 25 years later, Chicago’s WTTW assembled an impressive documentary, interviewing many of the key participants and revealing new footage from the event.
Then-24-year-old radio personality, master of affairs and anti-disco general Steve Dahl seems almost ambivalent about the whole affair in interviews, possibly because he has talked it to death in the years since. Dahl had only been in Chicago for a few months before the demolition, and the Detroit station Dahl had come from had recently switched to an all-disco format. “I really was just making fun of my bosses and the people I worked for,” he says.
Among the variety of intertwined motivations for the “Disco Sucks” movements were some legitimate complaints against a genre that had (like all genres that go pop) become oversaturated, overbearing and frequently irritating. Dahl suggests Disco Demolition was in part an anti-commercialization and anti-fad movement: “It wasn’t so much the music … it was the lifestyle,” he says.
Few disco fans today will fault Dahl for targeting bandwagon jumpers like Rod Stewart, whose “Do You Think I’m Sexy?” was probably a low for commercial disco (although, in all fairness, Dahl’s “Do You Think I’m Disco?” is just as bad – why would Fred Astaire teach disco steps? Is it that hard to find a word that rhymes with “hair”?)
There is some underlying tension that the documentary does not fully explore – clearly there were tens of thousands of people who hated disco, but why did they hate it so much? One commentator refers to rock bands like the Rolling Stones going over to “the dark side” – which is clearly open to interpretation. Several Demolition alumni explicitly say they “felt threatened” by disco, which is the closest the documentary comes to the dark underbelly of Demolition. What about disco culture could be so threatening? What did disco ever do to them? What makes people declare war on a form of art?
But the documentary examines the event in an athletic context, not a musical (or cultural) one. Demolition promoter and Chicago sports legend Mike Veeck admits parts of the event were miscalculated but defends the Demolition as a whole, saying he “should be knighted” for what he did for music lovers. He suggests the Tigers’ manager deserved an award as well, for his “performance” in refusing to field his players for the second game. Veeck’s “well, no one got hurt” response is the sort of adolescent excuse one would expect from the drunken revelers who fled the field when police (who were applauded by the baseball fans in the seats) came out in force to clear the field.
There’s a noticeable divide among the commentators – those interviewed who are purely interested in baseball and could care less about music or radio promotion are much more critical of the event. They knew that the people who really missed out were the Sox fans there to see the second game.
The event was not as terrible as it has sometimes been portrayed in the last 25 years. It’s true that no one got hurt. It was not equal in scope or intent, as some have suggested, to Nazi book burnings. It didn’t lead to racist or homophobic beatings or nightclub burnings or anything besides a lot of property damage and hangovers. And there is something undeniably impressive about the primeval white teenage caveman and the sense of collective will boiling over into ultimately meaningless spectacle.
Dahl sums it up well.
“It was just meant to be stupid,” he said. Mission accomplished.
Disco lost the battle in America, all but disappearing to Europe, but rhythm music won the war – or, arguably, is still fighting that war today. In many parts of the world, dance music has never stopped topping the charts and defining culture since the late ‘70s. America remains the exception, but rock instead lost the culture war to rap and R&B, a different kind of rhythm, but rhythm all the same.
Dahl’s anti-disco army couldn’t stop music from marching into the 1980s, rock’s dark ages by anyone’s estimation. Eddie Van Halen played on a Michael Jackson record and Aerosmith teamed with RUN-DMC. Of all the bands that received heavy rotation on the Loop in the past 25 years, Queen may be one of the station’s favorites, particularly in the years following the band’s “Wayne’s World”-aided resurgence. The ultimate irony of Disco Demolition may be that the hordes chanting “disco sucks” would soon after choose to listen to some “real music” – a flamboyantly gay man in a band with a feminine name playing a song with an explicitly disco bassline and beat – a song called “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Sunday, July 04, 2004
He Bangs!
While looking for classic electro and house trax I stumbled upon an interesting soundbite from famed rock critic Lester Bangs on the state of music when he turned in a blank 1981 Village Voice Pazz and Jop ballot:
“New Wave has terminated in thudding hollow Xeroxes of poses that aren't even annoying anymore. Rap is nothing, or not enough. Jazz does not exist as a musical form with anything new to say. And the rest of rock is recycling various formulae forever. I don't know what I'm going to write about - music is the only thing in the world I really care about - but I simply cannot pretend to find anything compelling in the choice between pap and mud.”
He would die just a few months later at the end of April in 1982, from illness and painkillers. But a comment like “music is the only thing in the world I really care about” begs later generations to wonder if he died because that one thing that kept him going just wasn’t doing it for him anymore.
And looking back today, it’s hard to understand why. It would be unfair to expect someone to hear Kurtis Blow and Trouble Funk and be able to peer into the future and predict Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan and Ludacris. It is, nonetheless, a surprisingly cynical statement from a writer who a few years earlier had praised DJ culture in reggae and dub and, as Sasha Frere-Jones suggested in a Slate article last year, was “hearing hip-hop a few months before it appears on the streets of New York.”
Some more poking around on the Internet yields this from Rocktober in an otherwise unrelated but very interesting article about black punk rock.
“When rock writer Lester Bangs first moved out to New York in the mid-seventies when punk rock was peaking, first thing he did was throw a party, inviting all his friends from the CBGB's scene. Bangs reflexively threw on an Otis Redding album, ostensibly so everybody could dance; right then he heard somebody yell, "Hey, Lester, what are you playing that nigger disco shit for?"
The anecdote casts an interesting light on Bangs, who is seen as a critic caught between the energy and vitality of punk and new wave and those genres’ (eglatarian positive and racist negative) destruction of the values (both good and bad) of the Beatles to Buzzcocks continuum Bangs was weaned on. Of course, Bangs himself didn’t hesitate to use racially charged language when it suited his reviews, as noted in an intriguing review of Kid 606’s “Down With the Scene”, which compares Bangs’ dangerous slalom through pop culture to the Kid’s post-ragga indie breakdowns.
But it was the clash of other values that seemed to irk Bangs more – particularly what he identified in a May 1980 interview as the commercial corruption of New York’s new wave:
“I mean a group that call themselves ‘Robin Lane and the Chartbusters? I don’t care how good their music is why don’t they call themselves ‘We Want Money’. Their [sic] just saying we want to sell records we want to be rock stars. I mean, where is this so different to anything that happened before. So the songs are short they don’t have 90 min guitar solos, so what? All I see is a lot of groups that are recycling a lot of 60’s stuff that has been recycled once too often anyway.”
This is an early manifestation of the bitter rockist lament, particularly “I don’t care how good their music is,” that “process over results” attitude which is part of that limited school of thinking. And if only Bangs knew how prescient he was – just think what his reaction would have been a few years later to Sigue Sigue Sputnik or, lord forbid, the KLF.
But the transformation of an underground art genre to a mainstream commercial genre is hardly unique to new wave. Many of the same things had happened in the supposed golden age in the ‘60s, if on a smaller scale. From the tone of Bangs’ writing it almost sounds as if the real issue may have been what Mark Sinker called Bangs’ “ambivalent hate-shaped fascination with the synthetic in its myriad forms.”
In a fascinating, densely-packed article on noise that’s stuffed with so many $10 words the Feds are investigating Sinker for cooking his dictionary, he connects the points between French art films, Xena the Warrior Princess and Daphne and Celeste.. Oh, and also Lester Bangs:
“On 29 April 1982 his musician friend Nancy Stillman discovered Bangs dead in his apartment. On his record deck was the Human League’s Dare, LP hit of that winter, just bought, and actually still revolving, the needle crackling in the run-out groove. Just think — for a moment — of Bangs’s own ambivalent hate-shaped fascination with the synthetic in its myriad forms; just relish this bandname [sic], this LP title, this rich (daft, hideous, unlikely) coincidence.”
What many critics and listeners say about 2003 sounds a lot like what Bangs’ said about 1981. Something is wrong with music and it is not getting better. Bangs just had the energy and imagination to try to grapple with this perceived problem, whereas most would just shrink away from it. Ultimately, he went out with rock 'n' roll, but at least he was there for that golden age, which is more than can be said for modern-day followers like biographer Jim DeRogatis, who has lived out a rather curmudgeonly writing career in post-rock pop purgatory, trudging along with his pre-'77 musical values.
Most people can survive like that, because they can hate everything released after 1964/1977/1991 or whatever year it is and still go on with their lives. But for the musically obsessed, the idea that their will be no more music which they love leaves them with the horrible feeling that it’s all downhill from here. If they believe music really is simply getting worse, they can retreat further into the recesses of their own golden age – after all, there are hundreds and thousands of unknown and forgotten artists from the good old days waiting to be discovered in dusty crates of LPs and on classically-minded MP3 blogs. But underneath is always the sneaking suspicion that music isn’t getting worse – it has just moved on without them, and that is not simply some kind of hipster paranoia. It's true.
While looking for classic electro and house trax I stumbled upon an interesting soundbite from famed rock critic Lester Bangs on the state of music when he turned in a blank 1981 Village Voice Pazz and Jop ballot:
“New Wave has terminated in thudding hollow Xeroxes of poses that aren't even annoying anymore. Rap is nothing, or not enough. Jazz does not exist as a musical form with anything new to say. And the rest of rock is recycling various formulae forever. I don't know what I'm going to write about - music is the only thing in the world I really care about - but I simply cannot pretend to find anything compelling in the choice between pap and mud.”
He would die just a few months later at the end of April in 1982, from illness and painkillers. But a comment like “music is the only thing in the world I really care about” begs later generations to wonder if he died because that one thing that kept him going just wasn’t doing it for him anymore.
And looking back today, it’s hard to understand why. It would be unfair to expect someone to hear Kurtis Blow and Trouble Funk and be able to peer into the future and predict Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan and Ludacris. It is, nonetheless, a surprisingly cynical statement from a writer who a few years earlier had praised DJ culture in reggae and dub and, as Sasha Frere-Jones suggested in a Slate article last year, was “hearing hip-hop a few months before it appears on the streets of New York.”
Some more poking around on the Internet yields this from Rocktober in an otherwise unrelated but very interesting article about black punk rock.
“When rock writer Lester Bangs first moved out to New York in the mid-seventies when punk rock was peaking, first thing he did was throw a party, inviting all his friends from the CBGB's scene. Bangs reflexively threw on an Otis Redding album, ostensibly so everybody could dance; right then he heard somebody yell, "Hey, Lester, what are you playing that nigger disco shit for?"
The anecdote casts an interesting light on Bangs, who is seen as a critic caught between the energy and vitality of punk and new wave and those genres’ (eglatarian positive and racist negative) destruction of the values (both good and bad) of the Beatles to Buzzcocks continuum Bangs was weaned on. Of course, Bangs himself didn’t hesitate to use racially charged language when it suited his reviews, as noted in an intriguing review of Kid 606’s “Down With the Scene”, which compares Bangs’ dangerous slalom through pop culture to the Kid’s post-ragga indie breakdowns.
But it was the clash of other values that seemed to irk Bangs more – particularly what he identified in a May 1980 interview as the commercial corruption of New York’s new wave:
“I mean a group that call themselves ‘Robin Lane and the Chartbusters? I don’t care how good their music is why don’t they call themselves ‘We Want Money’. Their [sic] just saying we want to sell records we want to be rock stars. I mean, where is this so different to anything that happened before. So the songs are short they don’t have 90 min guitar solos, so what? All I see is a lot of groups that are recycling a lot of 60’s stuff that has been recycled once too often anyway.”
This is an early manifestation of the bitter rockist lament, particularly “I don’t care how good their music is,” that “process over results” attitude which is part of that limited school of thinking. And if only Bangs knew how prescient he was – just think what his reaction would have been a few years later to Sigue Sigue Sputnik or, lord forbid, the KLF.
But the transformation of an underground art genre to a mainstream commercial genre is hardly unique to new wave. Many of the same things had happened in the supposed golden age in the ‘60s, if on a smaller scale. From the tone of Bangs’ writing it almost sounds as if the real issue may have been what Mark Sinker called Bangs’ “ambivalent hate-shaped fascination with the synthetic in its myriad forms.”
In a fascinating, densely-packed article on noise that’s stuffed with so many $10 words the Feds are investigating Sinker for cooking his dictionary, he connects the points between French art films, Xena the Warrior Princess and Daphne and Celeste.. Oh, and also Lester Bangs:
“On 29 April 1982 his musician friend Nancy Stillman discovered Bangs dead in his apartment. On his record deck was the Human League’s Dare, LP hit of that winter, just bought, and actually still revolving, the needle crackling in the run-out groove. Just think — for a moment — of Bangs’s own ambivalent hate-shaped fascination with the synthetic in its myriad forms; just relish this bandname [sic], this LP title, this rich (daft, hideous, unlikely) coincidence.”
What many critics and listeners say about 2003 sounds a lot like what Bangs’ said about 1981. Something is wrong with music and it is not getting better. Bangs just had the energy and imagination to try to grapple with this perceived problem, whereas most would just shrink away from it. Ultimately, he went out with rock 'n' roll, but at least he was there for that golden age, which is more than can be said for modern-day followers like biographer Jim DeRogatis, who has lived out a rather curmudgeonly writing career in post-rock pop purgatory, trudging along with his pre-'77 musical values.
Most people can survive like that, because they can hate everything released after 1964/1977/1991 or whatever year it is and still go on with their lives. But for the musically obsessed, the idea that their will be no more music which they love leaves them with the horrible feeling that it’s all downhill from here. If they believe music really is simply getting worse, they can retreat further into the recesses of their own golden age – after all, there are hundreds and thousands of unknown and forgotten artists from the good old days waiting to be discovered in dusty crates of LPs and on classically-minded MP3 blogs. But underneath is always the sneaking suspicion that music isn’t getting worse – it has just moved on without them, and that is not simply some kind of hipster paranoia. It's true.
