The other day I finally saw Paul Greengrass’s United 93, the story of the passenegers who attacked the 9/11 hijackers in the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. (Sixteen months after it came out, I know, but hey, whatever you people come here for, it isn’t timeliness, is it?) I found the picture amazing: beautifully shot, gripping & harrowing, sensitive but not sentimental, sad & moving, etc. etc. Yep, it’s one of those movies that compels you to just throw adjectives at it.But one thing really, really bothered me.In the movie, several passengers spearhead the revolt against the hijackers: Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Tom Burnett, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw. This is all based on the public record, of course, as derived from cellphone calls made from within the plane before it crashed. The movie presents most of the other passengers as more passive participants or observers. But one person in the film, a man with a clear German accent, repeatedly counsels the other passengers to co-operate with the hijackers instead of resisting. At one point, as the passengers are preparing to attack, the German panics and appears to try and warn the hijackers, before the Americans subdue him. This was startling in the context of the movie, but the filmmakers had made so much public noise about their fidelity to what we know of the day’s events, and their sensitivity to the victims and their families, that I just assumed there must have been some factual basis for these scenes.Nope. There was indeed a German passenger on flight 93, Christian Adams, but there’s no indication whatsoever that he tried to undermine the passenger revolt.I’m sorry, but WTF? This is gross and offensive on many levels. I supose you could argue that it’s highly unlikely that all passengers were, ahem, on board with the plan to rise up and retake the plane. So dramatically, it would make sense to have one or more of them behaving as the Adams character did. But why would Paul Greengrass et al pick the flight’s only German to be their token coward?There are really only two likely possibilities:1. It’s an attempt at some kind of political resonance, using the German to subtly make the point that unlike the U.S., Europe has been lamentably slow to grasp the geopolitical realities of the post-9/11 age. 2. It’s simply safer. The film was made for an American audience, so if you’re going to suggest that one of the passengers was in fact less than heroic, make him one of the furriners.Either of those rationales is pretty disgusting. Even more so when you consider that if the movie’s token coward had been one of the Americans, at least his indentity could have been slightly more “hidden.” But by making him instantly recognizable as Adams, Greengrass has completely smeared an actual person, with no basis for doing so. And this from a filmmaker who marched up and down for months proclaiming that the victims’ memories and their families were his primary concern. He didn’t specifically say the American victims, but I guess we now know that’s what he meant.I gotta tell you, I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I can’t think of another case where such a relatively little thing has so completely soured an otherwise amazing film for me.
Among music geek types, it’s de rigueur to float above the fray of Pitchfork. If you admit to reading the site at all, it seems, you must immediately pile on the qualifications so that everyone understands you’re not just one of the rubes. The anxiety even extends to contributors: when Carl Wilson announced on his own blog that he was now writing for Pfork, he did it with a distinct air of self-justification.But I’m not sure all the detractors have been reading the site much lately. Lately I often remark that the reviews seem to be the most informed, considered, and in-depth ones that any given record is going to get. And I think the actual writing’s improved markedly over the past few years – less showoffy & pretentious, less to prove, more attentive to the craft of words & sentences.A case in point would be Douglas Wolk’s review of the latest Young Marble Giants reissue, the classic album Colossal Youth plus two discs of demos, etc. (And the fact that Pfork is luring writers of Wolk’s caliber says a lot.) In just a few deft strokes he captures the essence of their sound and appeal:They weren't even all that quiet-- they were just in love with negative space, and their lyrics were so much about things unsaid that the space was formally appropriate. Stuart Moxham flicks at his guitar like a card-sharp snapping out an ace, amplifying the impact of his pick on the strings as much as the notes themselves; his brother Philip Moxham bangs at his bass, then lets the sound decay. Alison Statton's not an affectless singer, exactly, but her chief weapon is understatement.
He makes you see familiar songs in new ways:In theory, "Include Me Out" is a mighty garage-rocker, something the Stones or Count Five could've played with a sneer and a great big beat; the Giants strip it of virtually all its audible violence, reducing its rhythm to a muffled thump.
And when he gets more evocative, speculating on the band’s state of mind, it’s both convincing and wonderfully poetic:There's another space in the center of these songs, though: a pervasive sense of lost youth, toward which most of their fury is directed.… The five days when Colossal Youth was recorded, though, were the moment when they were sailing painfully and angrily into maturity, staring into a darkness illuminated a flicker at a time by a fire behind them that they knew couldn't last.
And then at the bottom of that great piece, Pfork has to go and link to its own 2003 review of a previous Giants reissue, by Chris Ott. And sure enough, this is the kind of thing that gave the site a bad name in the first place.Ott begins by clobbering us with context, from Beethoven to van Gogh to Artforum – we’re nearly 300 words in before the Giants are even mentioned. But it’s a weird kind of context, obsessed with the idea that we valorize the mediocre artists of the past because of our anxiety over having missed something. At least, I think that’s it. Except when we valorize the good artists, like the Vaselines. Or maybe the problem is just that we rely too much on received wisdom of critics or stars as to “what’s good,” an everyday phrase that Ott for some reason feels compelled to attribute to the irrelevant Lou Reed song, unless he’s referring to the Christgau rant on Take No Prisoners. In any case, the point is so obvious as to be hardly worth the pixels it took to make it. The writing is pretty frightening, too: word choices that are not at all apt (“crystallization”) or that are clunky & contradictory in their context (“flagellant, necrophiliac back-patting”); tortured metaphors (“their fingers coiled around a trigger labeled Shame”); and half-thought-out ideas (“such is the fate of self-supported, self-contained movements”). In that last bit, it’s unclear what Ott means – fanbases of individual artists? Genre and regional scenes? Rock and roll itself? What’s an example of a musical movement that’s not self-supported or self-contained, and how does that play out differently?It only gets worse when he does get to the band. Almost never does he actually describe the music itself, as Wolk does so effortlessly. Ott prefers airy metaphor – “an impossibly hollow, marooned, malaise that brings all the intellectual headiness of Prague, Paris, and your local café to bear” – and broods over the personalities of the artists, at least as they exist in his imagination. More than anything else he seems interested in digging up the bandmembers’ old soundbites from the British music press of the day, using them to bolster the (unconvincing, to me at least) assertion that the Giants’ ambition rendered Colossal Youth overmannered. And the writing continues to thrash. One song is described as the “bone of contention on that score,” which makes for an impressive two already-lying-around phrases in six words. There’s the fallback to lazy superlatives: “at no time in the history of pop music could turning down have been more deafening.” (Compare that to Wolk’s easygoing but more careful treatment of the same point: “In a year when everyone was trying to make a big noise – but isn’t that every year? – YMG switched tactics.”) Throughout, Ott’s tone is smug, pedantic, insiderish. Note the offhand, from-the-mount dismissals: “his widow ended up murdering it on Live Through This”; “digitized sounds so fatuous they simply have to have been ironic.” Talk about received wisdom.
I don’t mean to unduly pick on Ott; I’m sure he was pretty typical of the Pfork of old, and indeed there were doubtless worse offenders. We can just be glad that these days this kind of thing is getting rarer all the time.* * * And just for the record, Colossal Youth is one of my fave records ever. As Wolk says, there’s nothing quite like the Giants. - Young Marble Giants, “Include Me Out” (buy here)
“I’m generally in favor of reading a bit less and knowing it deeply.” – James Wood (here)
My mania lately has been an ongoing project to clean up my clogged & cluttered hard drive by burning mp3s onto CDRs, labeling them, and sticking them into a vinyl binder. In far too many cases, I’m archiving entire albums that I’ve never listened to and possibly never will. It’s a sickness of the post-Napster age, I guess. I can barely remember the concept of scarcity (whether of music or information), and the online smorgasbord of sound has made me gluttonous, wasteful, compulsively acquisitive, forever neurotically convinced that there’s something life-changing out there still awaiting my discovery. I hear things I otherwise wouldn’t have heard, but I also accumulate things I will never hear.
For what it’s worth, I’m conflicted about P2P downloading in general. Certainly I have no sympathy for major labels, which keep the bulk of the money – and the copyright – while recouping every conceivable expense out of the artist’s meager royalties. (The system’s so morally bankrupt that it was hard not to see Napster as “a real rain to wash all these scum off the streets,” as good old Travis Bickle would say.) But I don’t think I’m entitled to free music, either; I don’t show up for work as a favour to anyone, and there ain’t nothing in this world that’s free except love. In fact, over the past few years I’ve probably been laying down more cold cash for records than I ever have. I download like a coke-stoked magpie – I just can’t help it – but if I really like something, I’ll usually buy it, too.
Still, I’ve got to lose this urge to acquire. File-sharing evangelists like to present P2P as the communist ideal at work, but in fact the glut of material only encourages the ultimate corporate-capitalist mindset: growth and expansion over stability and sustainability, more more more, and the costs are shifted elsewhere so who cares? And if you’re always amassing, what you already have is perpetually declining in value.
There were a couple years in the mid-late 1990s when I had very little money, no access to review copies of records, and of course no Internet stream from which to fish. Which meant that I bought records rarely and carefully – The Monks’ Black Monk Time reissue, the new Yo La Tengo, a Faust oddments comp – and listened to them intensely. And I learned to my pleasant surprise that I could live quite happily without, say, the new Pavement record. Nowadays, I don’t have to live without any piece of music once some throwaway two-line description somewhere piques my interest. Curiosity is natural & laudable & necessary, of course. But lately it seems I’m always half-listening, nervously eyeing the pile of still-undigested music that awaits.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’m doing this blog, and I’ve been posting less, despite the clamour of my readership – both of you – begging for more. I’d like to write only when I have something worth writing, whether that’s a quick little shot or something longer, and time to do it properly. I started doing this because (a) I missed writing about music, and (b) I missed my campus-radio DJ days, the chance to mix up different kinds of music and hopefully turn people onto things. But (b) doesn’t always translate well to this format without a high noise-to-signal ratio, and (a) is really what forces you to be a careful and thoughtful listener, so I reckon I’m going to focus on that one. (I’d still love to DJ again as well, but judging by my repeated unanswered e-mail inquiries, the community radio stations here in Toronto are moated & gated. Oh well.)And even though 99.9% of the people who come here have been directed this way by Hype Machine and are just looking to scoop a specific mp3, I’ll still write the odd non-musical thing whenever something gets me exercised. And yes, by “something” I mean “usually some fluctuation in the contents of my navel.”
Coltrane Motion’s Songs About Music might be my fave record of the year so far. The lyric fragment above – from “Twenty-Seven,” the second song – goes a long way toward catching the appeal: they churn up a messy onrush of cracked keyboard sounds and simple, insistent rhythms, overlaid onto melodic pop and doot-doot vocals. Reminds me of the thrill of the very early Pavement records, the eureka of hearing those guys cover doo-wop syllables with Fall spasms.
The song titles are arch & jokey – “I Guess the Kids Are OK,” “Ex-Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Dozier-Holland-Dozier” – but the album title, it turns out, is straightup earnest: these songs are indeed about music, and this rock is metarock. Not that there’s any Grand Statement or anything here, and whew for that. Instead it’s just Let’s Put on a Show, mooning away, and hey, we’ve got ’60s pop stars, we’ve got the same chords, the same notes, we’ve got kick drums, snare drums, kick drums, snare drums.
The two songs below are probably my faves, the first for its ominous bassline steam (but a kind of ecstatically, theatrically ominous) and the second for its shamelessly ingratiating chirp (and, of course, for the “Be My Baby” drumbeat quote, which I guarantee I will fall for every single time some band uses it, ever).
Where they go from here I dunno; I suppose you might wonder if their giddy skewed-pop model is sustainable. But I suspect it is if they keep messing with the sounds. They overplay their hand with the “Louie Louie” / “Wild Thing” rip on the album closer “Summertime,” but the song still has some shrilly striking organ lines; it sounds like the keyboard’s painfully morphing into a flute.
Raw info: Coltrane Motion is just a twosome, Michael Bond and Matt Dennewitz, apparently pulling their tracks together out of a homemade-tape backlog. Located in Chicago by way of Ohio, I think, and self-releasing their stuff on their own Data Was Lost label. Some say their live show is what really kicks, so hopefully sometime I’ll be able to see for myself.
Buy the record here.
- Coltrane Motion, “Twenty-Seven”
- Coltrane Motion, “How to Be”
