by Gordon Campbell

- “How fortuitous Grampaw, that you turned 22 right when music peaked” – William Bowers, Pitchfork, August 2011

There’s a natural tendency to put the music of one’s glory days up on a pedestal. On rare occasions, nostalgia can even inspire fresh works of genius, as with the Rob Tyner clip below. That said, the angst over the retro state of popular music nowadays is fast becoming a pretty irritating meme. Supposedly, we’re living in a cultural moment where everything echoes what’s been done (better) before, and no-one consequently feels any emotional stake in the transient, totally hermetic experiences offered by their Ipod shuffle.

For starters…. when has popular music ever not been conceivable in retro terms? Not when the hallowed 1956 Elvis was being inspired by Hank Williams, Dean Martin, the Carter Family and Junior Parker…or when the Rolling Stones and every British bar band were echo-ing Muddy Waters and Elmore James, or when the Ramones were referencing Phil Spector’s heyday, or when 1980s hip hop was referencing Kraftwerk, or when J. Dilla was sampling Raymond Scott etc etc The only difference being that audiences in the past often didn’t recognise the tradition being tapped, and took the music as sui generis acts of genius.

Now we’re all on the same level playing field, access wise. It may seem cynical, but the loss of that prior sense of privilege seems to be a big part of what’s being lamented by critics like Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania. Oh for the days when punk was new and so were its best and brightest fans, and only a handful of people had the inside running on genius. Yet the fact everyone is now privy to history’s treasures is a really good thing isn’t it? Beforehand, access to the musical past called for fair lashings of fanaticism, the money to import the stuff, and/or the good fortune of being friends with someone who had a terrific record collection. Not many people would want to go back to those days.

Today’s abundance doesn’t mean the end of tragic musical geekery. Nor does it mean the past is always being ripped out of context and treated as mere curiosity or pastiche, as Carl Wilson suggested in his recent NYT blog post. Speaking personally, unlimited access to the past has enabled the discovery of rockabilly acts of genius like “The Raging Sea” by Gene Maltais, and I’m not sure that people would have been any more sensitive to the context for that sort of thing back in the day, either. Almost everyone in the 1950s would have written off rockabilly musicians as a bunch of redneck Elvis wannabes from a tragically limited gene pool – and they’d have been half right. (Wilson discounts such discoveries as mere search-and-rescue missions, carried out among the detritus of disposable capitalism.)

Nowadays. we can all be our own Pitchfork.. That’s good.

Still, as Carl Wilson says, the 1990s revival in particular does pose a few problems in retro style, given that a defining quality of Generation X was its bitter, sarcastic rejection of nostalgia. As usual, it is worth quoting Wilson at length on this :

Long before we had much life to look back on, North Americans my age knew that nostalgia was a sickness…..[Being] in our teens and 20s in the early 1990s, we had grown up in the penumbra of the great eclipsing nostalgia of the baby boomers, with their 1950s “Happy Days”; their 1960s (the Greatest Decade Ever Told); and their serial losses of innocence, via the Kennedys’ assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, etc. — a record of re-virginization to rival any evangelical chastity-pledge campaign…..

We bristled when we heard them wax self-congratulatory about ending segregation and war, even as they voted for politicians who would de-regulate banks and invade Iraq (the first time). We resented their monopoly on cultural space….And when they did briefly notice us, in the Generation X media frenzy of the mid-1990s, it was only to reduce diverse people and experiences to catchwords like “slackers” and “grunge” and dismiss paralyzing economic and ecological anxiety as privileged extended-adolescent angst….
Privileged angst certainly was part of it, as Wilson concedes. Ironically though, even those despised 1960s hippies had once faced the same dilemma. The boomers too, had initially resented having their own culture marketed back at them, via say, the Broadway musical Hair. How they sneered at the time at the CBS marketing campaign that claimed “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music !”…Some time afterwards though, the hippie survivors and fellow travelers underwent a conversion experience, and became the salesmen for their own cultural significance and all round generational awesomeness. To date, as Wilson explains, Gen X has only got as far as the resentment stage.

If my generation had anything in common as a group….I would say we were marked by two traits: our dislike of nostalgia and our irritation whenever our barely formed narratives were appropriated and marketed back at us. So it brings on something of an identity crisis to see Gen X’s formative years become part of the cycle of retro revivalism. How does an anti-nostalgic generation deal with the human reflex to sentimentalize its youth?

Wilson’s answer? First, he thinks that Gen X really should retain its reflexive, almost pathological sarcasm. Beyond that, Wilson and Simon Reynolds have been filtering the past through what they (and others) have chosen to describe as ‘hauntology’. Again, best to leave Wilson – easily the most perceptive person currently writing about popular music – to make the case for this so-called ‘hauntology’ himself, :

The melodies and rhythms are reminiscent of catchy pop songs of previous decades, but recorded in a way that simulates the effects of age — fuzzy and staticky — as if worn out or heard at a great distance through a grimy haze. It is music that’s discernible, but less than fully present.
Wilson doesn’t give any examples of what he’s talking about. Yet to my mind, hauntology’s most accomplished practitioner would have to be Tom Krell, who performs under the name How to Dress Well. (Ironically, Krell is only 23 years old, and is not some grizzled, bitter Gen-X veteran.) On his beautiful video for “Decisions” and on other tracks from the debut HTDW album Love Remains. Krell weaves his way from memory to desire, and back again. Here’s how I described it a few months ago :

The best way I can describe How To Dress Well is that it sounds like a lament for the ghost of Keith Sweat, or for mid 80s Michael Jackson. Krell hollow outs and gives spooky spatial resonance to old school r&b, his falsetto vocal rising and falling in distorted fragments throughout the [deliberately blown out] mix. In contrast to r&b’s usual lubricious celebration of the booty call, How To Dress Well seems more about the memory of desire, doing justice to beauty only after it has taken its leave.
Here’s the ‘ Decisions’ video, and – in a triple shot of retro-magnificence – a Boards of Canada soundtrack tribute to the French actor Jean Pierre-Leaud, who managed, in the 1973 film The Mother and the Whore to settle a few scores of his own with any easy nostalgia for the rebellious spirit of Paris 1968.

In his recent Kim Hill interview on RNZ – Simon Reynolds exemplified hauntology via Ariel Pink and those Brit bands (he cited Boards of Canada) who have been busily reworking the sound FX created by the BBC sonic workshop for old British children’s TV shows. To Carl Wilson, such use of the past provides a political escape route from Gen X ‘s moral dilemma – essentially, by enabling the past to be celebrated, while explicitly conceding it be a facsimile, distorted by current needs and knowledge :
There’s a model here for nostalgia that doesn’t wish away the distance between past and present; doesn’t romanticize the past as tragic and heroic; and doesn’t simply trivialize it (as so much 1980s nostalgia did) as trite and silly. Instead, it highlights our compulsion to interrogate our ghosts in search of meaning — and the inexorable way they slip our grasp. That seems like one way for a ’90s rewind to amount to more than a mess of pastel scrunchies and rock-rap reunions. As we know from remix culture, zombie movies and Heraclitus, what’s revived is never truly faithful to the original; it consists of the productive distortion the present permits. But it can remind us that memory is material and nostalgia is never transparent; the past doesn’t truly come back, and the future never really arrives.
Very occasionally, those boundaries between the past and the future can be dissolved altogether, as in this lovely [and subsequently hand coloured] piece of creative dance from 1897.

Footnote : Part of what I’ve been getting at here is that for better or worse, journalistic fashion is also as transient as any catwalk moment, or as the heyday of any musical genre that you care to name. ( How quaintly dated Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson already seem.) In the 1960s, it was Time magazine style that ruled the roost, and this hilarious cover story on Joan Baez (from November 23, 1962) manages to unwittingly convey a cultural cluelessness worthy of Don Draper himself :

Mercurial, subject to quickly shifting moods, gentle, suspicious, wild and frightened as a deer, worried about the bugs she kills….Actually, friends insist, she is honest and sincere to a fault, sensitive, kind and confused. She once worked to near exhaustion at the Perkins School for the Blind near Boston.

Like many folk singers, she is earnestly political. She has taken part in peace marches and ban-the-bomb campaigns. Once in Texas she broke off singing in the middle of a concert to tell the audience that even at the risk of embarrassing a few of them, she wanted to say that it made her feel good to see some colored people in the room. “They all clapped and cheered,” she says. “I was so surprised and happy.”

She is a lovely girl who has always attracted numerous boys, but her wardrobe would not fill a hatbox. She wears almost no jewelry, but she has one material bauble. When a Jaguar auto salesman looked down his nose at the scruffily dressed customer as she peered at a bucket-seat XKE sports model, she sat down, wrote a giant check, and bought it on the spot. Wildly, she dashes across the desert in her Jaguar, as unsecured as a grain of flying sand.

“I have no real roots,” she says. “Sometimes, when I walk through a suburb with all its tidy houses and lawns, I get a real feeling of nostalgia. I want to live there and hear the screen door slam. And when I’m in New York, it sometimes smells like when I was nine, and I love it. I look back with great nostalgia on every place I’ve ever lived. I’m a sentimental kind of a goof…”

Those kids! They’re confused and – underneath – every bit as materialistic as we are, and just as keen to own a nice house in the suburbs. No threat to the social order here, Middle America….

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

By the age of ten, it had dawned on me that there were an awful lot of songs about love and romance. After an anxious night of flicking around the radio dial though, the real bombshell realization sank in – every single song on the radio was about love! People were either falling excitedly in love, or feeling sad about not being in love anymore. Love was saturating the airwaves, and to my ten year old mind it was silly and creepy and had to stop. Was love really the only thing that adults felt was worth singing about? That, and sinking the Bismarck.

There are of course, a few songs that aren’t about romantic love, and this month’s column is dedicated to them – just in case there are any ten year olds out there still looking for refuge from the love epidemic. Quite a few of these songs are about disasters. Lets start with the mining songs.

1. Wilf Carter : “Moose River Gold Mine” / Merle Travis : “Dark as a Dungeon” The Moose River mining disaster of 1936 in Nova Scotia had a lot of the same ingredients as the copper mine rescue in Chile last year. (Apropos of Pike River, it also underlines there are no happy endings to coal mining disasters) At Moose River, the cave-in came without warning, desperate attempts were made to reach the trapped men, hope had been all but given up and then…Wilf Carter, Canada’s first major country music star, will tell you the whole story. Carter also performed under the name of Montana Slim and died in 1996, two weeks short of what would have been his 92nd birthday. You can find out the full Moose River story on its own webpage right here. Check out the photographs of the tiny borehole drilled through to the trapped men, referred to by Carter in his song.

IMO though, the most poetic mining song would still be “Dark As A Dungeon” by Merle Travis, and below is the original 1947 recording. The image of the dead miner peering down from his heavenly home and pitying the miners digging his bones says it all about the links between hard work and chronic poverty.

2. “Big Bad John” /”Cajun Queen” by Jimmy Dean. Miners tend to be larger than life figures, and this 1961 pop hit celebrated the biggest of them all. Big John stood six foot six and weighed 245, and generously gave his life to save his fellow miners. The lesser known follow up song (“Cajun Queen”) tells how Big John’s true love rescues him by going down into the pit – and planting a couple of kisses on his cold blue lips (yuk!) of such unimaginable hotness that Big John comes storming back to life. Let it be noted that the radio sensitivities of the early 1960s meant that Dean’s version, which originally ended “ At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man” had to be recalled, and replaced with: “At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man.”

3. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot/ “Wild Gilbert” by Lovindeer
Another Canadian disaster song. Gordon Lightfoot’s epic song about the iron ore freighter sunk on Lake Superior is hilariously awkward, yet kind of touching all the same. The lyric mimics the famous Longfellow poem about Hiawatha…. and for sheer awfulness, it is hard to beat those opening lines :

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called ‘Gitche Gumee’
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy

Like the weather, it only gets worse. Try for instance, to sing this :
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.

Or maybe this segment is the real killer, especially the first four awesomely clunky lines :
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship’s bell rang
Could it be the north wind they’d been feelin’?

Well, yes it could. Years later, the Butthole Surfers used to sing a fearsomely lugubrious version of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” as a way of clearing the room at the end of their sets. On the other hand, smiling broadly in the face of disaster calls for a different set of skills. Hurricane Gilbert was one of the worst natural calamities in Caribbean history and it caused major loss of life and property – yet inexplicably, Lovindeer’s huge hit song about the disaster is a wildly happy singalong that treats the whole thing as a hoot from start to finish. Very hard to imagine a similar song emerging in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake.

4. Working In the Plantation by Mr Lif /Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford Smiling bitterly in the face of havoc can be the only way to go. Luckily, most of us don’t get to confront epic storms and earthquakes, but the daily work routine can be almost as damaging to body and mind. Boston hip hop artist Mr Lif picks up from where the Office Space movie left off, with this funny-yet-extremely angry day dream about life on the minimum wage. The lyric is incredibly succinct..eg

Step into the work place with my work face

Wince at my time card cuz I’m scarred

Mad cuz I sacrifice my day and it gets me

A trifling hourly wage of six fifty, nifty

Now I’m off to slave quarters

With a whole bunch of other people’s sons and daughters

Working so they can be mothers and fathers

Laboring real hard, hoping the boss offers

More petty cash to his bums and paupers

Kissing his ass cuz they hoping they prosper

Here’s the math:
You work a thirty a day, away

The government takes a thirty a check, correct

You go home and drink cuz you don’t get

An ounce of respect, and your spirit is wrecked

Life is a gift to be enjoyed, every second every minute

It’s temporary, not infinite

Yet I find myself looking at the clock

Hoping for the day to fly by,
And I ask myself “Why?”

Brilliant. Of course, the real grandaddy of pop songs about work routines is still “Sixteen Tons “– co-written by Tennessee Ernie Ford and Merle Travis in 1946, and a huge hit for Ford some ten years later.

5. The Dying Soldier : Buell Kazee / “A More Perfect Union” by Titus Andronicus
War has inspired thousands of songs….Buell Kazee’s 1928 song “ The Dying Soldier” is a strange and haunting goodbye to life and its blessings, as the soldier prepares himself for the Heaven to which he hopes he’s bound. Given the way things have turned out on Earth though….the stoic sadness of Kazee’s singing and banjo accompaniment seem to anticipate that things may turn to crap in the afterlife as well.

A couple of years ago, the New Jersey punk band Titus Andronicus released a concept album called The Monitor, based on the Civil War sea battle between the two ironclad ships, the Monitor and the Virginia (aka the Merrimack) The album’s opening track ranges from 1860s jigs to Springsteen to punk in pretty diverting fashion :

6. “Chumming the Ocean” by the Archers of Loaf / “A Dream of the Sea” by the Renderers

The sea has always been a pretty good metaphor for love : ie, tidal, unpredictable and swept by the occasional monster wave that capsizes everything in its path. These two songs are different though – they’re more about the sea as a metaphor for free-floating dread and nightmare. Archers of Loaf and its lead singer/writer Eric Bachmann made some of the most distinctive post grunge albums of the 1990s, and have recently reformed. “Chumming the Ocean” is a piano solo piece by Bachmann, and it’s a spooky, wavering one-of-a-kind epic. Youtube contains only a live version – this is not the definitive original, which is on the All The Nations Airports album – but is still pretty terrific. “Dream of the Sea “ is like an insistent dream after-image. Brian and Maryrose Crook made this level of altered consciousness their specialty.

6. “Joshua Gone Barbados” by Eric von Schmidt /”Work Song” by Oscar Brown Jnr. Work songs again. The best version of “Joshua Gone Barbados” is by Tom Rush – not because of Rush’s singing, but because of the liquid guitar backing by Bruce Langhorne, who did similar service on Bob Dylan’s “Corinna Corinna” and was the flesh and blood inspiration for “Mr Tambourine Man” – but that’s another story. What makes Von Schmidt’s song so special is the sorry tale it tells – of a strike leader who inspires the sugar cane workers he leads, and then abandons them. “ They’re beating Sonny with a cutlass/they beat him to the ground…” Joshua, meanwhile, has gone Barbados – where he is staying in a big hotel, and thanking his lucky stars he survived the events he set in motion.

Oscar Brown Jnr’s “Work Song” was almost a genre to itself – a would-be hipster jazz piece that leaps backwards all the way to the work gangs. Hearing someone as cool and articulate as Brown singing the word “ gwine” is pretty amusing. The only similar jazz/country blues concoction I can think of is Mose Allison’s peppy 1957 track “Parchman Farm.”

7. “The Road Goes on Forever” by Robert Earl Keen / There’s a Love Knot in My Lariat” by Wilf Carter. Robert Earl Keen’s brilliant story-in-song is as taut and concise as a Raymond Carver short story – and while extremely romantic, it is about an even older virtue : gallantry. Sonny’s gallantry after all, is what initially gets him acquainted with his one true love Sherry the waitress, and the same quality finally sees Sonny make the ultimate sacrifice on her behalf. Offhand, “The Long Black Veil” is the only comparable “ He died, so that she would not be dis-honoured” song that comes to mind.
Yet in recognition of the pervasiveness of romantic love, lets finally go back to Wilf Carter, for a fairly weird love smetaphor. Namely : “There’s A Love Knot in My Lariat.” Lucky girl.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

For some inexplicable reason, a slew of instrumentals became hits a couple of years after the birth of rock’n’roll. The people who made most of them came and went without a trace : Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez, Preston Epps, Kokomo, Johnny and the Hurricanes …This column links to a few of them. It also features a similar array of acoustic guitar legends from Bayless Rose to Robbie Basho to modern guitar wizards like James Blackshaw, and onwards to uncategorisable non-vocal modern acts like Holy Fuck. This month is about emotions too immediate – or too diffuse – to put into words.

1. DJ Vitalic : ‘Poney Part Two’ Vitalic has played the Boiler Room at the Big Day Out in recent years, but this was his breakout track from his breakthrough 2005 album, OK Cowboy. It is also the most ridiculously mind-altering celebration of dogs (in slo-mo magnificence) ever committed to video.

2. Holy Fuck “Red Lights” / “They’re Going To Take My Thumbs” For balance, here are undeniably cute pictures of cats, though “Red Light” also qualifies by being a great driving song. Toronto’s Holy Fuck first toured New Zealand in late 2008 to even better effect than their Laneways effort this year. I’ve also included their terrific“ Thumbs” track that kicked off the second season of Breaking Bad.

3. Bayless Rose : Frisco Blues OK, this churningly mysterious track dates from about 1930. For decades, almost nothing has been known about Bayless Rose – who he was, or whether he was black, white, Creole or points in between. The few scraps known about him were pulled together late last year on Blindman’s Blues Forum.

IMO, “Frisco Blues” strikes the perfect balance between poignant sorrow and optimism – maybe the perfect expression of the Piedmont ragtime blues style commonly associated with Mississippi John Hurt.

4. Elizabeth Cotton : ‘Vastopol” Jorma Kaukonen “ Embryonic Journey” Talking of Piedmont style, here are a couple of wildly different examples. Elizabeth Cotton (who wrote “ Freight Train”) had one of those fluke careers only possible in the folk music revival of the late 1950s. After giving up her early musical interests to raise a family and join the church, Cotton was working in a department store when she found a lost child, little Peggy Seeger. Later, she accepted the offer of a housemaid job from the grateful Seeger family and years later, picked up one of their guitars and started playing – and to the consternation of this very musical family, she proved to have been a musical genius all along. A left hander, Cotton played her ordinarily strung guitar upside down. “Vastopol” is named after an open D tuning associated with Russian sailors from the Black Sea. Lastly, here is Jorma Kaukonen’s masterful take on Piedmont style, recorded at the height of Jefferson Airplane’s fame in 1967. Forgive me for the gratuitous hippie chick visuals, but this is the only version of the original track available on Youtube:

5. Bill Doggett : “ Honky Tonk” Reg Owen : “Manhattan Spiritual”
Hard to pick whether this Bill Doggett perennial or Booker T’s “Green Onions” is the most timeless instrumental hit of the past 50 years, but tonight, we’ll give this one the nod. British bandleader Reg Owen had an unlikely hit in 1959 with “Manhattan Spiritual” a great big city dance anthem from the other side of town.

6. The Ventures “Wipe Out” The Rock a Teens “ Woo Hoo”
Sure, the best known version of “Wipe Out” was by the Surfaris, who remained one hit wonders – partly because their manager (whose manic laughter kicked off their hit recording) had placed their music with eight different labels at once. This live version of “Wipe Out” by the Ventures features some amazingly athletic drumming. Talking of which, “Woo Hoo” ( by one hit wonders The Rock-A Teens) not only featured a crazed 12 bar drum solo, but a rhythm guitar solo as well.

7. Robbie Basho “Rocky Mountain Raga” and “Orphans Lament”
Leo Kottke : “Train and the Gate/Vaseline Machine Gun”
Peter Walker : ‘ White Wind”
James Blackshaw : “Cross ( The Glass Bead Game) “

Acoustic guitar time. Fans of the current acoustic guitar master James Blackshaw will know the debt that he regularly concedes to Robbie Basho – who among other things, was the only major musician to die because his chiropractor tried a move on his neck that misfired. Some 25 years after Basho’s death his music has lost none of its wild, unearthly feeling. The raga track I’ve chosen has a few vocal moments, but the playing seethes with awe for Mother Nature in all her rocky mountain ways, more so than Joe Walsh never imagined.. “Orphans Lament” is an anomaly here – it being a vocal with piano number – but Basho’s singing is unearthly, and prefigures some of the best qualities of Antony and the Johnsons.

The tour de force piece by Leo Kottke is a live medley that fuses a track he wrote for Terrence Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven, alongside an even older superhands showcase called “Vaseline Machine Gun.” Moving right along, Peter Walker’s Rainy Day Raga album (and the track ‘White Wind” in particular ) made a huge impression on me when it was first released, and the Tompkins Square label have just released Walker’s first new record in 37 years. Lastly, there’s James Blackshaw himself in live performance tying all the above together.

8. Sandy Nelson “Let There Be Drums”
Nelson was a precocious session drummer – he played on the Phil Spector/Teddybears breakthrough hit “ To Know Him Is To Love Him” – before having a string of meticulously re-recorded instrumental hits starting with “Teen Beat” – which his manager decided to re-mix everytime he did another pressing, meaning there were about eight versions of the track available during its couple of months in the charts. This was Nelson’s other mega-hit, and benefits immeasurably by the guitar lines contributed by Richard Podolor, whose subsequently successful career as a record producer included Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”.

9. Link Wray : “ Rumble”
And here, finally, is where it started. If I could find a Youtube upload ,I’d go for Wray’s “New Studio Blues” but there is no escaping the giant shadow cast by this sullenly magnificent recording. According to legend, the track got its name because the daughter of Archie Bleyer (the record company boss who released it) thought that it sounded like those gangs in West Side Story –which is perfect, if you think of it as being equal parts juvenile delinquent menace on one hand, and swaggering theatrical bullshit on the other. Rock’n’roll!

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

Canada is so used to playing second fiddle, even its superlatives sound somewhat second rate. Like…it has the second biggest land mass of any country on earth. Plus there are Mounties, and the currency is commonly called the loonie. Canada also has a good deal in common with New Zealand in that both countries have developed an inferiority complex from living in the shadow of a bigger, brasher and far more successful neighbour. At the same time, both countries also have a superiority complex about their virtuous inferiority. Like New Zealanders, Canadians say ‘sorry’ a lot, and feel the gesture is often not appreciated.

Today though, we’re here to celebrate the fact that despite the existence of some evidence to the contrary, Canada is also one of the coolest places on earth. Home to great cities like Montreal, Vancouver and on a good day, Toronto. True, Canada was the birthplace of Celine Dion and William Shatner – but on the upside, there’s Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. Plus it has great film-makers like Guy Maddin, great writers like Margaret Atwood, William Gibson and Alice Munro, and excellent cartoonists like Kate Beaton of Hark, a Vagrant! fame. No one needs mention the ice hockey.

Even more so than New Zealand, Canada puts a considerable amount of state funding behind its musicians which helps them to record, and to tour. Here’s a list of some great (fairly recent) Canadian music.

1. Arcade Fire : “We Used to Wait”
Anthems and the people who sing them – Springsteen, Bono etc – get a critical hammering these days, mainly because the hope they’re peddling seems so cheap. So far, Arcade Fire has managed to anchor its soaring aspirations in songs that are good enough to seal the deal, and their Auckland show in 2008 remains a high water mark for the Big Day Out. This new track is taken from their The Suburbs album due out this month. For old time’s sake, here’s also a link to the live version of ‘Keep The Car Running’ that Win Butler, Regine Chassagne and the gang did for the Austin City Limits show in 2007.

2. Tegan and Sara : “Turnpike Ghost”
Tegan Quin and Sara Quin are twins, born in 1980. Six albums down the track, their success has been built on a gruelling touring schedule, and their knack for writing sharply melodic songs with earnest, conversational lyrics. They remain resolutely uncool with the indie crowd – but each T & S album since So Jealous in 2004 has had its share of killer tracks, from that album’s “Where Does the Good Go” to a swag of cuts on their breakthrough 2007 album The Con – “Hop a Plane” “Burn Your Life Down” “Soil Soil” and the title track were all pretty wonderful. Last year’s album Sainthood had one certifiable keeper in “Someday.”

“Turnpike Ghost” was released in June. For once, the song was not written by either Quin but is a cover of a song by Steel Train, the New Jersey band who have been opening for Tegan and Sara on tour this year.

3. Drake – “Karaoke”
Toronto rapper Aubrey Drake Graham aka Drake has had the blessing of Li’l Wayne. Drake’s Thank Me Later debut album certainly has had its critics – far too much whining in the lyrics about the downsides of stardom, for one thing – but it did debut at number one on the Billboard charts in June, on its first week of release. Drake has pedigree, too. His father used to play drums for Jerry Lee Lewis, and one uncle is Larry Graham, the groundbreaking bass player for Sly and the Family Stone, while another uncle is Teenie Hodges – formerly the right hand man for Willie Mitchell during his golden days in the 1970s with Al Green, and more recently the leader of Cat Power’s soul band.

4. Schomberg Fair : “Drunkard’s Prayer” These three guys named themselves after an agricultural fair held annually near Toronto since 1850, and they draw heavily on punk and bluegrass sources to play fast, really loud gospel songs. Personally, I think Schomberg Fair would eat alive their much touted British equivalents, Mumford and Sons. This great version of “Drunkards Prayer” was recorded live in a record shop in New Brunswick.

5. Cancer Bats : “Sabotage”
Canada (and Toronto in particular) has always had a healthy hardcore scene, dating all the way back to bands like Teenage Head in the 1980s. In this video, the four members of the sprightly Toronto group Cancer Bats try – in a fashion that has clearly been inspired by Rhys Darby and Flight of the Conchords – to track down the Beastie Boys and rope them into this cover version of the BB oldie “Sabotage” with pretty amusing results. The Cancer Bats gig last year in Auckland was also reportedly very, very good.

6. United Steel Workers of Montreal : “Emile Bertrand “
This six piece alt/country/punk /bluegrass hybrid started out in Montreal as a bunch of buskers, but they’ve evolved into a terrific live act. The track I’ve chosen starts out as a celebration of an old time restaurant in Montreal, but it ends up as a salute to working stiffs everywhere. Some lovely vocals too, by Felicity Hamer.

7. Fucked Up : “Twice Born”
Fucked Up’s Chemistry of Common Life was something of a rarity – a hardcore album loved by people who normally hate hardcore. The disc not only won awards all over the known world, but it landed its hefty lead singer (and left wing activist) Damian Abraham aka Pink Eyes with a regular guest slot gig on Fox News, one of the strangest cultural mismatches of 2009. “Twice Born” is a killer track from the Chemistry album, and I’ve linked to two versions. The official video is here.

And for extras, here is the infamously destructive live version of “Twice Born” recorded in the men’s room at MTV.Watching the mosh pit trying to push through the doorway to get at the band is not recommended for anyone prone to feelings of claustrophobia.

8. Veda Hille : “Lucklucky”
A couple of years ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made a terrific live recording of this song, with musician/theatre performer Veda Hille singing it solo, and playing piano. These days, we’re stuck with this slightly bombastic everything but the kitchen sink version (taken from Hille’s album This Riot Life) of the same remarkable song.

Basically, ‘Lucklucky’ is about how experience and memory get embedded in the city where you live…thereby turning the old hometown into a map to be read afresh, every day:

“There is the place you know
There is the place you don’t know
Curtain number 1, curtain number 1
(You are blind, blind, blind)
This is where I did this,
This is where I did that
It took 30 years to draw this map…
Now do you see
The city or the map of the city?
The city or your life in the city?”

I also like the fact Hille is so obviously pregnant in the video. Talk about what was, what is and what shall be…

9. Broken Social Scene – “World Sick”
Kevin Drew is, I suppose, the main unifying factor and – given his personality – the main dis-unifying factor in the Broken Social Scene collective. Love or hate him, it has been obvious that Drew and his cohorts are terrific songwriters and musicians, ever since their 2002 breakthrough album You Forgot It In People. Broken Social Scene played some great gigs in Auckland and Wellington a couple of years ago. The track I’ve chosen is “World Sick” from their latest album Forgiveness Rock Record.

And if you haven’t seen Drew’s sometime girlfriend and BSS bandmate Leslie Feist sing her “I,2,3,4″ hit on Sesame Street, it is utterly adorable.

10. The Besnard Lakes – “Albatross”
When they surfaced in 2007, The Besnard Lakes were late arrivals on Montreal’s already much-hyped music scene. Yet their The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse album was pretty impressive, regardless – offering a series of massive, momentous/portentous pop songs built up by the band’s core members (Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas) from a foundation of beloved Brian Wilson-type vocal harmonies. “Devastation” was the lynchpin of the Dark Horse album and can be checked out here, but this is the new single “Albatross” from the upcoming album The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night, due later this month.

11. Chad Vangaalen : “Willow Tree”
Chad Vangaalen, 32, comes from Calgary. After making a few lo-fi albums in his bedroom – “Clinically Dead” is a good track from that period – he gravitated to Sub Pop, and the music has gotten more expansive and experimental since the Soft Airplane album in 2007. Vangaalen also draws the terrific animation on many of his videos, and its worth checking out tracks like “Red Hot Drops” and “Rabid Pack of Lies” in particular. The track I’ve chosen is a live version of “Willow Tree.”

12. Wolf Parade : “I’ll Believe in Anything”
Even more so than Arcade Fire, it was Wolf Parade’s Apologies To The Queen Mary album that put the Montreal music scene on the map. The band has been an almost Biblically fertile part of the Canadian indie scene ever since. Wolf Parade supreme Spencer Krug has gone on to beget a more experimental band (Sunset Rubdown) and collaborate significantly with his former band Frog Eyes and with Swan Lake. Meanwhile, Dan Boeckner, the other leading WP figure, toured New Zealand last year with his own spinoff band Handsome Furs, behind their very successful Face Control album. Plus there are also significant family tree links to Dan Bejar of Destroyer and the New Pornographers. To complete the circle, Wolf Parade’s drummer also used to play with Arcade Fire.

The Wolf Parade mothership has just released its third album called Expo 86, but this is a personal favourite from the Queen Mary album. As someone once said, this is the score to flinging yourself ecstatically to pieces.

Plus here’s some hockey pictures to watch along with Handsome Furs “All I Want Is Everything” hit song, which manages to revitalize the old New Order’s war horse “Temptation” to extremely good effect.

13. Dan Mangan : ” Robots”
Again, it may be the Conchords influence, but a lot of singer songwriter stuff these days carries an air of faux sincerity and self parody. Vancouver-based 27 year old Dan Mangan has some terrific solo stuff available elsewhere on the Web, including a collaboration with Veda Hille – and this video is a pretty funny spoof of those heavily stylized The Warriors gang rumbles. Arguably, only a Canadian could have made something that was quite this deliberately dorky:

Finally, the striking visual treatment given to Mangan’s more recent “Road Regrets” track also makes it well worth checking out.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

The music of Connie Converse is right in sync with the strangeness of her life story. For most of her professional career, Converse edited a magazine called The Journal of Conflict Resolution but by the early 1970s, she was feeling burned out and depressed. In the summer of 1974, she loaded her possessions into her Volkswagen Beetle, wrote goodbye notes to her friends and drove away. She was never seen again.

What she left behind was a collection of songs recorded in 1954, at the kitchen table of the children’s book and film animator Gene Deitch. They are spare, unsentimental and haunting. Last year, the tracks were finally collected together on an album (with the terrible title of How Sad, How Lovely) and have begun to find an audience.

Has anyone ever written a quieter and more telling song about loneliness than this?

We go walking in the dark.
We go walking out at night.
And it’s not as others go,
two-by-two, to and fro,
But it’s one by one.

One by one in the dark,
We go walking out at night.
As we wander through the grass
We can hear each other pass,
But we are far apart.

Far apart in the dark,
We go walking out at night.
With the grass so dark and tall
We are lost, past recall
If the moon is down.
And the moon is down.

We are walking in the dark.
If I had your hand in mine
I could shine, I could shine,
Like the rising sun,
Like the sun…

For about a year and a half, Converse continued to record at Deitch’s home. As Deitch said in an interview last year, she wasn’t the greatest singer, technically speaking. ‘But there was poignancy in her voice. In the 1950s, I didn’t know of anyone commercially who sang as personally as she did. Especially not a woman. But there was also this undertone of sadness. She didn’t overtly show it, but you could certainly sense it.” As the same article explains:

In 1955 [ when the recording sessions ended] Converse would have been 31… She never spoke of a boyfriend or hinted at any romantic relationship. “Connie was naturally pretty but on a grayish scale,” says [her friend] Bronte Bernal, who got to know Converse between recording sessions at Deitch’s New York home. “She was so low-key, she could walk through a crowd and be invisible – which I guess was what she wanted. Not to be noticed. Except she did want her music to be outed.”

If Elizabeth Eaton Converse is still out there somewhere, she would be 86 years old by now.

These days, the Fritz Lang film Metropolis is known for its grand, city-of-tomorrow visuals, which managed to be futuristic and yet quaintly Art Deco Gothic at the same time. On release in 1927, the film was considered to be far too long for the movie chains (who jibbed at the overt political content as well) and Metropolis got cut and hacked about in every country in which it was screened. That has been a blessing in disguise for film historians trying to assemble a definitive, restored version. There were stray bits of it everywhere, including in New Zealand.

On the downside, Metropolis has also inspired a raft of really bad album covers. The worst being the 1984 Eurodisco version featuring Adam Ant, Pat Benatar, Bonnie Tyler and Freddie Mercury. Yikes. Well, Metropolis is now back again – in the shape of The ArchAndroid, the breakthrough album for a tiny 25 year old diva called Janelle Monae.

She looks like Grace Jones, sings like Prince and dances like James Brown. On the album’s main single “ Tightrope” Monae duets with Big Boi from the Atlanta hip hop duo Outkast (with whom she started her career) and collaborates on “Make The Bus” with the indie band Of Montreal. As well, there are neo-Broadway torch songs and on “57821’ she does something that sounds like a 1960s folk pop madrigal. At the conceptual level – and thanks to Lady Gaga, we’re all conceptualists now – The ArchAndroid ransacks Metropolis for its imagery, and political subtext. Supposedly, this music is about the role technology plays under capitalism, in mediating the struggle between workers and their political masters. Yet in a fun way, OK ?

In interviews, Monae has stressed that this political dimensjon is meant to be read into the character she plays on it, an android from the year 2719 called Cyndi Mayweather. “ The android represents the other to me. I can personally relate to the other by just my gender and race….She finds out that she is the ArchAndroid, who is the mediator between the haves and the have-nots. This album deals with self-realization, embracing the things that make you unique. I write it from the perspective of the have-nots, people who are not necessarily victims, but who are out there working every day, dealing with life’s problems. This music is motivational, and is meant to be inspirational.”:

Right, got it. This is The Matrix told from Trinity’s viewpoint – if Trinity had been black, and an android. Monae is no dummy, though. In 2008, she campaigned for Barack Obama, and for affordable healthcare and education. Her brief and arresting “Get Out The Vote” message can be seen here. From the outset, her role model has been Lauryn Hill. “You just got a sense that she knew as an artist that she was a leader, and she led me to a place that no other artist had been able to do, no female artist,” Monae says. “She was an inspiration for me because she showed me that I didn’t have to take the same safe, sexy route. I could bring all of me with me, when I’m performing.

In May, Monae appeared on the Letterman show, doing a pretty electrifying version of “Tightrope.” Ultimately, she plans on making 18 videos of all of the Metropolis songs, which will then be released as a parallel movie to the original film. Clearly, ambition doesn’t much grander than this. Judging by the Letterman performance, Monae might be able to pull it off.

Janelle Monae Robinson was born in Kansas City, and made her way to Atlanta after completing a course in dance and theatrical tuition in New York City. Outkast were the biggest game in town, and Monae hooked up with the Big Boi part of the team and appeared on a couple of numbers on the Ildewild album. In return, Big Boi contributes a memorable verse on the “Tightrope” single.

By 2007, Monae had begun to record her Metropolis music – the first part came out on an EP – and she signed up with Sean “ Diddy” Combs and his Bad Boy label, in Combs’ first signing of any consequence since The Notorious B.I.G. Last year, Monae opened for No Doubt, and last month was touring with Erykah Badu – probably the last time she will be in a support act role for anyone.

One bizarre aspect of Metropolis is that, in outline, it sounds like a classic Marxist tale, of workers rising in revolt against the technocrats who control their lives. In fact, the script was written by Lang in tandem with his then-wife, a Nazi apologist called Thea von Harbou. Lang reportedly hated the final film. Soon afterwards, his wife went off to join the Nazi Party, and one of the film’s biggest fans during the 1930s was the Nazi propaganda chieftain Josef Goebbels, who even offered Lang a job as head of his film unit. Instead, Lang fled to America. Much of what Lang hated – the way the conflict was resolved between the dying old bourgeois society and the virile New Society bursting through to replace it, was exactly what had appealed to the Nazis.

For many years it was assumed the original version of the film had been lost entirely. In 2008 however, archivists in Argentina found a version containing many of the missing sequences, though in quite poor condition. In 2005 though, the Australian Green Party politician Michael Organ had come across a copy of Metropolis in the National Film Archive in Wellington that contained eleven missing scenes – and when the existence of the Argentine print came to light, Organ made his own discovery known.

Some of the New Zealand footage was then used to restore some of the poorer sections of the Argentine print, while also adding a few extra seconds of otherwise completely unknown footage. The fully restored version was finally screened last month in New York.

(The discovery of the Metropolis footage has born further fruit, including the recent discovery here of a nitrate version of an early John Ford silent film, plus an early Clara Bow film as well, among other finds.)

Like any good myth, Metropolis still re-invent itself in the people it inspires. In her version, Monae has reversed the role of the android. In Lang’s film the android Maria is a major villain, entirely separate from the real Maria in whose beautiful image she has been created. The machine Maria ultimately drives the sons of the ruling class into murderous bouts of sexual frenzy, and incites the workers to bouts of destructive rebellion that seemingly, result in the deaths of their own children. In Monae’s version though, the android is an entirely positive being.

Obviously, it could also be more of the same old sci-fi bullshit if Monae didn’t have the musical chops to bring it off. She does – and especially in the first half of the album, on cuts like “ Tightrope” and “ Cold War.” If not exactly The One, this is definitely one worth checking out.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

CD reviews tend to be consumer guides, a few paragraphs that boil the music down to a buy/don’t buy advisory note. At The Complicatist, we’re pointed in the opposite direction. Each month, this column will be featuring a song or artist or genre that’s as complicated as anyone cares to make it be.

In the 1950s, cover versions enabled white people (I’m talking about you, Pat Boone) to cash in on black music without scaring the public. These days though, an artfully chosen cover version can usefully demonstrate the depth of your musical knowledge, and your sense of flair. By general agreement, the Jimi Hendrix version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is the greatest cover version of all time, partly because it so completely topped the Bob Dylan original, a feat the composer has generously acknowledged. “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this.” Dylan wrote in the booklet for his Biograph album, “ and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.”

Like self esteem, originality can be an over-rated virtue. In the great French movie The Mother and the Whore, one character makes the case that cover versions are actually better than the original, because their fakeness is more genuine. I’ve decided to kick off this column with three of the better cover versions in recent memory

1. This Must be the Place (Naïve Melody) by Miles Fisher This has been out for over a year now, but in case you haven’t come across it, Fisher pulls off two cover versions at once here. He sings the Talking Heads classic while acting out some of Christian Bale’s nastier moments from the movie American Psycho…and in the process, puts a new spin on David Byrne’s wacky old “Psycho Killer’ persona. At the same time, he manages to insert a self-referential plug for this “Miles Fisher” guy’s great new EP. Who said guys can’t multi-task?

2. Dream Lover by the Dust Bunnies Down the years, dozens of people have liked Bobby Darin’s 1950s hit well enough to have a crack at recording it, but this version succeeds by focusing on the ‘Dream’ side of the lyric… In doing so, it treats the lover not as a teenage burst of wishful thinking, but as something out of a David Lynch nightmare, howling through the night after the singer …”I want a dream lover/so I don’t have to dream alone..” Not alone, never again and not entirely in a good way.

The Dust Bunnies are essentially a few pals of long time Atlanta scene-maker Adam Bruneau, who has made videos for Deerhunter. Bruneau numbers among his side projects a band called Kiwis, aka Kiwis of the South Pacific. The referential traffic on this track is also pretty dense. Yes, this Dust Bunnies version begins with the thunderclap drumbeat opening to “ Be My Baby” by the Ronettes, itself recycled famously as the intro to “ Just Like Honey” by Jesus and Mary Chain. To complete the circle, the closest similarity to this arrangement of ‘Dream Lover’ is this one from 1964 by the Paris Sisters…..which was produced by Phil Spector, and featured in the Kustom Kar Kommandos experimental film by Kenneth Anger, which can be seen in all of its refreshingly brief buffed cars/buffed boys entirety right here.

Finally, the Dust Bunnies have turned their hand to a few other versions of this same trick. Their droning, narcoticised take on Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ can be found here.

For a similarly strung out, string-laden version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ the link is here.

3. ‘Gloria’ by Robb London This deserves a mention for doing a reasonable job of the virtually impossible. At this late stage, I wouldn’t have thought anyone could take Van Morrison’s r & b chestnut ‘Gloria’ ( G-L-O-R-I-A) and re-imagine it. Yet this version enable us to hear the song in a new and (mostly) welcome light. Hurrah.

Live by the anthem, die by the anthem. As bands from U2 to Arcade Fire have found to their cost, it does get difficult to keep on delivering inspirational arena-sized anthems without becoming a self parody. The challenge for the new Arcade Fire album due mid year will be to resolve the anthem issue without being bombastic, and committing all the other busily self-important sins of U2-ness.

Talking of which…while Regine Chassagne’s charity work for her homeland Haiti has been admirable, the point in her recent editorial in the British Observer newspaper where she used earthquake metaphors to describe her own anguish (“Since Haiti shook and crumbled, I feel as if something has collapsed over my head, too. Miles away, somehow, I’m trapped in this nightmare. My heart is crushed..) was worthy of Bono himself.

Kurt Vile, whose Childish Prodigy was one of the more celebrated albums of 2009, is not an anthem guy at all. True, he gives props to older anthem-mongers like Tom Petty and Bob Seger, but Vile’s music is so swathed in reverb and slap delay that it doesn’t seem to be playing in the same room, let alone urging anyone to wave their lighters. Vile’s songs circle and repeat and echo like introspective ideas racketing around inside your head for a while, before they just peter out, and stop. Like Beck in the mid 1990s –who had a similar command of blues//folk/ soul tropes – he seems to have ended up in the spotlight somehow, by taking a wrong turn at the bar. Like Will Oldham, Vile projects a conscious form of primitive artlessness, and that’s a good thing. None of us wandered in from Appalachia, either.

Kurt Vile (his real name) is a 29 year old former skatepunk, one of ten siblings. He comes from Philadelphia, where his dad Charlie Vile still drives trains for the local metro system. Apparently, neither of his parents had heard of that Kurt Weill guy from the 1930s, who wrote ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘Pirate Jenny.’

This time last year, the New York Times usefully contrasted Vile with the strand of current music known for cranking up the artifice and orchestration. Grizzly Bear, Vampire Weekend, and Of Montreal have all gone down that self conscious route, mostly with good results. Vile has more in common with the punkier likes of No Age, the late Jay Reatard and ultimately ( to go right back to the drone source) with Velvet Underground. Vile has his VU moments, but he also taps into even older music traditions – much of them learned from his father’s large collection of bluegrass, country and blues recordings.

Not that he’s really a neo-folkie thumbing through his Harry Smith Anthology and looking for a direction home. The songs go round in circles, but keep adding layers as they go. From the NYT article :

“I don’t use computers at all,” he said, adding that music made on hard drives “loses all character whatsoever, all these nuances, slight mistakes you realize weren’t mistakes at all. You’re sitting at a keyboard editing out anything beautiful that happens.”

But…Vile is an exacting tinkerer. “I like adding layers to a song,” he said, “putting the mike a certain way, putting some weird delay or some weird phaser on the guitar. It’s kind of like Brian Eno, on a much less skilled scale.” After [recording] a song, typically using a digital 8-track at home or a 16-track reel-to-reel at a friend’s studio, he will drive around blasting it in his wife’s Toyota Echo, making mental notes about what to tweak. “I’ve pretty much blown out the speakers in there,” he said, grinning.

In other words, a lot of effort goes into sounding so effortless. “What I like about artists like Kurt is that they work with a four-track or whatever, but they think about the production of their songs in really ambitious ways, figuring out how to produce as if there weren’t those boundaries,” said Brian [Geologist] Weitz, of Animal Collective. Several years ago, Weitz said, he weeded a Kurt Vile CD-R from a pile of demos sent to his band by hopeful young musicians: “It was one of two CDs I didn’t throw out. I remember thinking it sounded really unique and personal.”

The Childish Prodigy album on Matador is Vile’s first widely available album, but his two earlier albums Constant Hitmaker and God Is Saying This to You are also well worth checking out. One of those early songs called “Red Apples” consists pretty much of the same repeated phrase “ Two packs of red apples, for the long ride home/ that’ll be just fine..’ Here’s a link to a downloadable January 16, 2010 concert by Vile at the Bowery in New York: http://www.nyctaper.com/?p=2318.

Previously, Vile drove a forklift for a air-freight company in Boston, to help support through college the woman now his wife, while she studied for a graduate degree in English. Until last July, he drove another forklift, for a brewing company in his old home town. He’s genuine blue collar, with the work ethic to match.

‘I’m not a slacker,” Vile saud in one interview.“I’ve worked hard my whole life. But I’m not going to be a total sucker, and put all my energy into someone else’s job.’ To quote another much cover-versioned song, that just gets you another day older, and deeper in debt.

ENDS

by Gordon Campbell

According to legend, it was the bland, conservative nature of mainstream culture during the 1950s that made rock’n’roll’s response ( loud, angry, out of control etc ) the right one…Okay then, so what form should that response take when it is mainstream culture itself that is loud, angry and out of control ? That’s the question asked by Michael Azzerad in the recent end of year Village Voice music poll, and a hat tip to Carl Wilson on Zoilus for bringing Azzerad’s comments to the fore.

One can quibble. As Wilson points out, a lot of people in earlier mainstreams have been angry and out of control too – like Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and the members of Nixon’s Silent Majority. Still, Azzerad’s point remains valid enough. He was actually using this tone reversal in mainstream culture to justify what a lot of people find wimpish about a lot of modern indie rock. In his view, a controlled formalism should be seen not as wimphood – but as a sane reaction to a mainstream that shows every sign of having gone barking mad. What he’s saying is that it may no longer be useful to expect rock music to function in the way it used to, as a form of hedonistic escape from a buttoned up culture – maybe now, as Azzerad argues, it serves best as an oasis of sanity. Formalism is freedom.

I think Azzerad is onto something, even if I still hate Fleet Foxes and their audience. The problem is, his essay came out at exactly the same time as Animal Collective had just been anointed as the other crucial band-of-the decade besides Radiohead, who owned the first half of the 2000s just as surely as Animal Collective have owned the second half. Yet speaking as someone who loves AC and Merriweather Post Pavilion – and the Feels album as well – this band has never offered much that anyone would call a quiet oasis of reassurance. Half the world hate this band, and want you to turn that annoying, trebly shit off. Some people might well think of AC as wimps – Panda Bear drives up the wimp response, while Avey Tare rachets up the annoyance response – but they’re certainly not indie formalists in any way. They make a joyful racket, in their own very cerebral, pre-sexual kind of way.

I think Carl Wilson himself came up with a better rationale for the prevailing spirit and style of so called ‘indie” music – whatever that now means – in his landmark 2007 essay “The Trouble With Indie Rock” on Slate.

Even the kind of people who lament the death of the monoculture ( when everyone knew the Beatles, even people who didn’t like them ) can recognize what Wilson is talking about here. It was the rise of cultural authenticity imperatives, he argues, that caused punk and hip hop to polarize, and inadvertedly mirror the politics of cultural separatism that defined the Reagan era. As Wilson says, it wasn’t as if Dre and Snoop Dogg were any better than Coltrane, Hendrix, Muddy Waters and a zillion other black artists that white musicians were happy to imitate for decades, It was more that from the mid 1980s onwards, the act of imitation came to be seen as a capital cultural crime. Thus, the music branched off – at least the folkier part of indie rock did – and post-Pavement in particular, it has evolved into the White Citadel of the thirty-ish eternal student that we know and love/hate today. Wilson, again :

Ultimately, though, the “trouble with indie rock” may have far more to do with another post-Reagan social shift, one with even less upside than the black-white story, and that’s the widening gap between rich and poor. There is no question on which side most indie rock falls. It’s a cliché to picture indie musicians and fans as well-off “hipsters” busily gentrifying neighborhoods, but compared to previous post-punk generations, this particular kind of indie rock….is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it.

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded “creative” college towns such as Portland, Oregon, this is the music of young “knowledge workers” in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire. (Many rap MCs juggle symbologies just as deftly, but it’s seldom their main point.)

This doesn’t make coffeehouse-indie shallow, but it can result in something more akin to the 1960s folk revival, with fretful collegiate intellectuals in a Cuban Missile Crisis mood, seeking purity and depth in antiquarian music and escapist spirituality. Not exactly a recipe for a booty-shaking party. While this scene can embrace some fascinating hermetic weirdos such as Joanna Newsom or Panda Bear, it’s also prone to producing fine-arts-grad poseurs such as the Decemberists and poor-little-rich-boy-or-girl singer songwriters who might as well be James Taylor.

And according to Michael Azzerad, we should be proud of it, Because the alternative – rock as rebellious noise – is a cliché that is now completely played out, and is currently owned by the foam flecked ‘rebels’ lined up wall to wall on Fox News.

Bradford Cox, cultural avatar

One final thing about ‘end of year’ lists. Most of them tragically try to impose an order – MY tastes, man, RULE – on a brutal and uncaring world. That’s why my favourite ‘best of’ recommendation this time around was provided by Bradford Cox of Deerhunter. In his other guise as Atlas Sound, Cox also made the single “Walkabout” with Panda Bear, one of the great songs of 2009, but that’s another story. During 2009, Cox emerged as an emotionally transparent fixture on the cultural landscape. This interview shot for Fader TV last November for instance, could easily qualify as the most awkward interview of the decade, no problem.

Like, while the interviewer is terrible, Bradford doesn’t turn a hair, even during the long and painful interlude when nothing, but absolutely nothing is happening on either side of the microphone. It’s a funny, revealing interview despite itself.

On his Deerhunter blog, Cox also regularly compiles a series of mixes – we’re up to Micromix 24 or so by now – that provide free downloads of some amazing discoveries and genre segues. The cover for the latest Micromix even features a colour drawing of the Moomins by Tove Jansson and month by month, the contents will typically include ….a range of doowop, 50s pop, Elizabeth Cotton, the Alan Parsons Project, Bill Fay, Ligeti, Moondog, old gospel field music, some guys playing thumb piano…I can’t recommend these mixes too highly. Cox’s own choice of album of the decade was the Bobby Conn album The Golden Age. For him anyway, the choice was partly to do with issues of sexual identity.

If you’ve never heard of Bobby Conn before, he’s a real one-off – a hilarious, disturbing mixture of avant garde musician and performance artist. His parody/enactments are sharper than The Flight of the Conchords, and came out ten years ahead of them. This 1997/98 Jackson 5-ish clip called ‘Never Get Ahead’ for instance, is one of the strangest, most loveable things on the Net. You can check it out here. Don’t miss the guy in the sportscoat, Conn’s friend Emily in the blue dress, or the guy dancing with his baby. On his Myspace blog a couple of years ago, Conn explained just how the clip came to be made, in this link here.

There are lots and lots of Conn videos on the web, but I recommend the one called “Passover in Puppet-town” which tells the Bible story of Moses and the Passover, as it might have been done on some alternative universe version of Sesame Street. Conn turns up to sing a pretty funny song – “ Angel of Death ! Passover ! ” – at about the five minute mark. Finally, in a head to head Conchords smackdown, try Conn’s 2007 Bowie-ish parody, called ‘King for a Day’

All of which just goes to show that this “Best of the Decade” stuff does have its rewards. Mainly, it offers me the opportunity to impose Bobby Conn on a brutal and uncaring world.

ENDS