If You're Pulling While I'm Pushing, Then Why'd You Ask Me to Push?

or: Our Crew Could Be Your Life

So, like 2005(ish). John and I are listening to someone--maybe Aesop Rock--and marveling over how Def Jux owns the underground. Anyone worth talking about, if they aren't on Def Jux, they sound like they're on Def Jux. Building off the Company Flow framework, sparse beats are countered by incredibly dense lyrics and and stirred with a huge dose of self-righteousness. So what happened after that?

On Float, as in a lot of undie hip-hop at the time, Aesop finds himself the only guy who sees what's going on. He's just trying to get by, he's willing to accept things as long as they're reasonable, but some of this shit is just too fucking wrong for the man to just stand by and watch. He drops Company Flow's attacks on all the signed, big-label motherfuckers, but only because there are too many other, bigger problems to address.

Def Jux took post-punk moralizing and anti-commercialism and transposed it to hip-hop, because Corporate Shit Sucks. One of my favorite comparisons from the early 2000s pointed out that mainstream hip-hop then was like mainstream rock in the late 80s: all about showing off how much money you have and how hot the girls are that you're nailing. I like this, since it makes the Def Jux crew 80s indie rock--low budget and DIY, but serious about what they're doing and with more and better ideas.

This idea was presented, though, in a "the ground is being laid for a Nirvana" kind of way. Someone was going to come along and mainstream these incredibly intense things burbling under the surface of hip-hop. Looking back at it now, it looks like the hip-hop Kurt Cobain was Will.I.Am. Ouch. It would be tough to imagine a route for the genre to take that would be more opposed to Def Jux.

Jux is still around, but at least in my life doesn't hold the cachet it once did. Like everything else, it seems to me that the internet has helped the scene splinter a million times over, letting quasi-mainstream weirdos like Kool Keith, mainstream weirdos like Lil Wayne, and bedroom geniuses like Prefuse 73 and Edan exist in the same world. "Independent as Fuck" just isn't as confrontational or as meaningful as it once was.

Of course, I'm old too. Is someone now building off of what Jux did? Has a Matador taken over for Sub-Pop as "coolest label around"? Let me know.

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Next time: Afro-Cabbie & Aix Em Klemm

a quick one while i'm away

a favorite track.

kinda neat.

For the next few weeks I'll probably just be posting videos.

fuck'n a.

Not going to get to Aesop this week, since I'm deep in the shit and just not up for it at the moment. I've been listening to Bobby McFerrin's beautiful Circlesongs instead. There's a possibility of next week, but I make no promises. I'll be checking in, though--I'd like to make it a point not to let this blog lapse.

Get back to me when Season 3 starts.

Written in Nowhere, or Shades of Wilson Pickett

A few years ago, when I got into basketball, I noticed something about the way teams played on a given night. When someone looked good, they were ‘in rhythm.’ There was a rhythm in the way a hot player would dribble, drive and pull up for a shot, and a larger rhythm in the way a team would push or slow down tempo and would hold the ball or execute plays quickly. The way to beat a given team on a given night: to get them out of their rhythm.

On Charles Spearin’s neat album “The Happiness Project,” there’s a song based on an interview with a deaf woman. Speaking of the way she responded to her first perceptions of sound after receiving a cochlear implant, she says “all of a sudden, I felt my body moving inside.” Coming across sound for the first time as an adult, it struck her as a physical sensation.

Activities of Dust is a studio project of drummer Doug Scharin. He’ll show up a couple more times, including on what is probably my favorite album ever (June of 44’s Four Great Points, for those keeping score at home). According to the interwebs, Scharin had hours of feedback taped, and brought in Jeff Parker (of Tortoise), Bernie Worrell and Bill Laswell to help put the album together. There are four songs that span 45 minutes, and a short dvd.

Around that time I got into basketball, I developed what is still my functioning Theory of the Universe (which I know you’re really interested in, but fuck you, it’s my blog): that Everything Is Rhythm. The most obvious example is the human heart (beating, presumably, in 3/4). But almost by definition, anything that moves linearly through this 4^th dimension with the rest of us has to be operating on some sort of rhythm. Even in a block of lead, the atoms are dancing to a particular beat. It’s actually what that rhythm is that determines what something (or someone) is, and how it affects and interacts with other things.

Appropriately named, Activities of Dust is about the ghost in the amplification machine. Feedback pulses, ebbs and flows across the album while instruments support and dance across the top of it. Not unlike being underwater, washes of sound are supplemented by melodies that fade in and out.

It’s not a life-changing album, but every one of these contributors has been a part of at least one of those. It’s an album about finding the music inside a block of lead, about playing the right song at the dance of the atoms. The source material may be the result of machines interacting, but the final product finds the nature in it.

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Our Next Episode: Aesop Rock (“Float” and “Daylight EP”)

What Do You Do For Money, or Angus Meets the Superman

Way back in aught-six, Jesse Thorn posted on his Maximum Fun blog “A Manifesto for The New Sincerity.” The idea was, essentially, to move beyond not just irony, but the whole idea of an irony/sincerity dichotomy. To let the two mingle happily or, if easier, to think of them as wholly absent.

"Our greeting: a double thumbs-up. Our credo: 'Be More Awesome.' Our lifestyle: 'Maximum Fun.' Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity."

The übermensch in Thorn’s philosophy is Evel Knievel. A man simultaneously completely bitchen and utterly absurd, Knievel made a career out of jumping over things in a red-white-and-blue jumpsuit. Not dissimilarly, AC/DC made a career out of re-using the same drumbeat and making up names for genitals. And they couldn't possibly be more awesome.



It took me until adulthood to get AC/DC. I hit my teens in the post-Nirvana 90s, and Beck and Tarantino taught me that the smartest guy in the room is also the coolest. My teenage energy was spent on punk, and I was actively opposed to anything that sounded like dumb 80s rock. And for all that AC/DC is, they sure as hell aren’t the smartest guys in any room. They actually might be the dumbest.

But AC/DC aren't an intellectual band, they're a workingman's band. Bon Scott and Brian Johnson sound like whiskey and cigarettes. Angus probably has calluses on his fingers as thick as the sole of a shoe. If they weren't doing this I don't know what they'd be doing, but there are a lot of things I'd put my money on before college professor. Throw away your fancy clothes, get up off your ass, and start getting shit done. Fuck, they'll do it for free. Nike tapped into this with that great, great commercial from a couple years ago. If ever a commercial could inspire me to spend money on overpriced athletic wear made by child labor, this is that commercial.

It doesn't matter how well Malcolm and Angus did on their college entrance exams, because they've figured something out about humanity. Look at the cover of Dirty Deeds. Everyone’s complicit: the cop, the businessman, your grandmother. This doesn't come out of nowhere. On some level, everyone wants to turn their amp up to 10, slam back a shot and start kicking ass. Wine, women and song is hardly a new combination, but that doesn't make it any less powerful.

There’s going to be a lot of inaccessible shit on this iPod. There are going to be 12-minute drones, and snarky meta-pop songs. And as important as I think it can be to intellectualize, to think things through and understand context and how this is a reaction to that and was later commented on by this, carried to an extreme that kind of existence can start to drain your soul, your humanity. It’s important not to lose that. My father once told me that one measure of a man is his ability to empathize. Even though we're probably nothing alike in real life, AC/DC's music might be the easiest thing to relate to in the world. It ain't rocket science, it's rock and roll.

I’m so fucking glad I got to start with this band. This is Maximum Fun. There should be a rule that they're the first name listed on every iPod (sorry, ABBA). And, obviously, I have to close with:

For those about to rock, we salute you.

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Next Week's Episode: Activities of Dust

Delusions of Grandeur

So I have a plan.

Given my inaptitude for the postin', and my way distinct lack of time, I've decided to bite off more than I can chew.

So let's talk rock. And, uh, some other stuff too. But probably mainly rock. We'll see, won't we? Here's the deal:

I'ma go one by one through les artistes in my iPod. Which by current iTunes standards means that the number bands are at the end, with !!! bringing up the rear. It also means that Andrew Bird is under A and not B. Thankfully, The Clash are under C and not T, but DJ Shadow is under D and not S. So the D's will be fun. It ALSO means that if I get a new album by a band that I already passed, I'll probably throw it in there next or something.

Every so often, but hopefully like once a week, I'm gonna listen to and post a post about one of these bands. The next one on the list. Sometimes it might be more than one band or more than one post in a week, because maybe I don't want to listen to Reel Big Fish for seven days. Sometimes it'll be out of order, because maybe I was jonesin' for some Le Tigre even though I was only on the Ds. And sometimes I'll miss a week. You're just gonna have to deal with that shit. But I'll try to do one band per week.

Sometimes I'll fully rip off freedarko and whip up awesome diagrams to help explain what I'm saying. They'll look like this:

Sometimes, I'll use google image search and find awesome and appropriate pictures to put up, like this:

Most of these won't be my pictures.

And if anyone can walk me through how to do it, I'll rip off every music blog ever and post occasional MP3s.

It's gonna be awesome. And what makes it awesomer:

After I post about a band, you're gonna leave comments about why they're your favorite band ever and you were so stoked you got to see them that one time at the forum and oh em gee they are so sexieeeeeeeeee!!!!!1

OR! You'll comment about how everything I say is wrong and Deerhoof would totally be huge without Pizzicato 5 and Steve Albini wouldn't know a good guitar sound if it bit him in the ass and System of a Down is way underrated and The Beatles sucked and this is why.

Deal? Deal.

There's a lot of shit on my iPod. Some 60 gigs worth, apparently. One thing that I'm looking forward to about this is listening to all the stuff I've gotten from people and never heard. There are also plenty of albums and bands that I gave a once-over to but never got into very deeply or put enough effort into to let define themselves. So some stuff will be new to me as well. Yay!

In closing, my initial question to you, the reader: do you want me to cover bands I was in? There's no way I could be objective, obviously, and I'm proud of even the really bad stuff I've been involved with. But are you interested, or does that push the blog over the edge from pointlessly wanky to disgustingly super-wanky? I will take a silence on this issue as a "no, let's don't talk about that stuff."

FIRST FIVE!
AC/DC
Activities of Dust
Aesop Rock
Afro-Cabbie
Aix Em Klemm

sheeeeit.