I can't asleep again so I'll drag up the old remedy : writing. I think it's time that I recap the last few months, bag them up and put them aside so I can move on.

These have not been easy months. While my friends have been busy getting on with their lives I've been stuck in a kind of limbo, practicing and wondering if I should be doing something more. I haven't figured this out yet. These have also been lonely months, partly because I've isolated myself and partly because I haven't sought out what little company was available. I haven't really figured this out either. I don't know if my decisions have made me an irrevocably unlikable person, or if i'm just bad at it. And after all this time of trying to decide what to do with my life the only conclusion I can come to is a resounding I don't know.

I am excited to leave, but the reason I haven't been sleeping is that I know I'm going to lose my last few precious connections with the human world. I don't know why this is so unsettling, but it is keeping me up. On the other hand, I have much to be grateful for - my friends, my work, and the musicians who were magnanimous enough to help me on my way. I suppose it isn't a plan, but it's something.

Maybe I needed this slow dissolution. It's helped me sort out some priorities. Maybe I'll be able to really start afresh in New York.

I haven't figured this out yet.

Still, there are people who deserve a little recognition - friends (quek, lee, anna, d, and wang; bo and abby; rayner and zh; jon, ben and yizhe, nick) and musicians (andrew lim, andrew klein, weixiang, rick, aya, wen and nicky) - i really want out of this country, but I wish i didn't have you leave you all behind.

I need to write this all down so I don't forget it sometime. Artists i need to check out -

Black Star (Mos Def and Talib Kweli)

A Tribe Called Quest

David S. Ware

Roscoe Mitchell

Lee Konitz

James 'Blood' Ulmer

The Stooges

Jackie McLean

birthday girl

One of the saddest songs I've ever heard, by the Roots. Is this all we have to look forward to when we turn 18? Poor girl.

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I'm allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

Yo, She said she was a magazine editor named Janine
Backstage in high heels and painted on jeans
Probably had the most devious eyes I'd ever seen
Told me she was twenty-two she was only seventeen
She had sumthin' to hide she snuck in from outside
And got everybody gassed like the car I drive
With all that grown lady ass and my far out vibe
She said she came to see them roots boys fallout live
But listen,

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I'm allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

You see them girls look good but they brains not ready
I talk to a woman, her mind is more steady
Probably something in the way they designed that's more steady
I just let you inside cause the line so heavy
But I shoulda known better cause now I feel like America's underbelly
R. Kelly gutter smut peddlers, internet predators, chat-room irregulars
This not my twist you trying to send me to the therapist, miss

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I'm allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

Now she told me cheddar cheese grits
Two tomato fried fish
Cause she heard its my dish
Tryna be my sidekick
All the people all around thinking she was my chick
Saying DAMN the girl thick
But she aint no twenty-six
Looking at me like I'm up to sumthin' on the funny tip
Like I ever been the one to honey jib
Its your birthday so let me know the gift you wanna get
In fact blow out the candles on the cake and make a wish for me

They can't really seem to look away
So they tried asking her to stay
Fake I.D. you won't get turned away
You look lovely tonight
Now you'e old enough to buy a gun
So many better ways of having fun
Right now I can only think of one
You look lovely tonight.

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I'm allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

Oh, I needed to dance so badly. When you dance, your soul becomes free. We should all dance more often.

I took a trip on a train and I thought about you. I passed a shadowy lane and I thought about you. Two or three cars parked under the stars a winding stream. Moon shining down on some little town And with each beam the same old dream. And every stop that we made I thought about you. And when I pulled down the shade then I really felt blue. I peaked through the crack and looked at the track, The one going back to you and what did I do? I thought about you. There were two or three cars parked under the stars... a windin' stream. Moon shining down on some little town And with each beam the same old dream. And then I peaked through the crack and I looked at that track, The one going back to you, and what did I do... I thought about you.

jazz for punks

So I blew 28 bucks on a 5-cd Miles collection, this time of his earlier work - 'Round about Midnight, Milestones, Porgy and Bess et cetera.

For me that first Columbia record, 'Round about Midnight', has quickly become one of my favourite albums to listen to. This is jazz that a punk rocker can get behind - it's never afraid to usurp a couple of pop tunes, never afraid to play a simple progression, and it's driven by the sheer rhythmic energy of the chambers-philly jo rhythm section, who are the hardest swinging cats I've ever heard. The bare-bones aesthetic that Miles had here is the sort of thing I wish I heard more often. For an interesting comparison, put on Patti Smith's 'Horses' after this one.

adam

Keith Jarrett

ok first off, go here:

http://yourmusiceducation.blogspot.com

cos Yizhe's put up a little weekly music appreciation series of articles there and i think he's done a damn fine job and you'd be doing yourself a favour if you went over there and started reading from article 1.

Now, to business. This is a bit strange coming from me, because I'm right up there (or down there) in the noise-as-art camp as far as my preferred timbre goes, which means Hendrix over Clapton, Thurston Moore and Ira Kaplan and Kurt Cobain over Slash, and Coltrane's late 60s output over... well, just about anything at all. So it's a bit uncharacteristic to be plugging here somebody who puts out so much... well, pleasant music. His short stint with Miles aside, Jarrett is the sort of sensitive pianist I'd love to hate, and as you could expect I was pretty stunned to find out that I don't. But the Noise-as-art thing is pretty maligned anyway. I don't think just any noise qualifies as just any art. My underlying point (i say presumptuously) has been that I expect a player to play not just the pitches but the sonorities of the instrument at hand. All the great musicians of this century have. Think. Where would jazz be if Louis Armstrong hadn't reached for those ear-splitting high notes? They were great notes, better than if a piano player had merely reached his right arm a little and played the high G, because they strained the timbre of his instrument. In that moment, the urgency and the stress of holding that impossible embouchure became the urgency of the music. What about Monk? Nobody else in the world could make the piano sound like what it really looks like - an impossible, plinky contraption with far too many corners. And the great modern pianist Vijay Iyer says in this interview that each of his voicings was a sound rather than a collection of notes :

A close study of Monk’s playing reveals this spectral quality of his chords, this clear perception of higher harmonics in the sound of the piano. In order to activate these higher partials, he had to play with a little more force than the average pianist, to get the instrument ringing and shaking. In this sense harmony and tone were integrated concepts. This is why I call them “sounds” rather than “chords”; they are not theoretical constructs but vibratory experiences—actual, specific sensations—and they feel good.

And if we reach a little further into the late 60s, saxophonists like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler were establishing something that should've stayed with us to this date but sadly hasn't - the primacy of sound as the first fundamental of music. Taking a historical perspective, it makes sense - before the advent of tuned instruments, we must still have had music. Even in tonal music today, it irks me horribly to see a guitarist playing Bird licks. I mean, they're fine as harmonic studies, sure, but rarely on the stage. They worked for Charlie Parker partly because he was Charlie Parker and he wrote them, but also because he was playing a goddamn alto saxophone. The sort of things that work for an altoist don't work for a guitarist because the instruments are different! This is what Ornette was getting at when he talked for ages about how a Bb on the alto was different from a Bb on the piano.

Anyway, having taken the grand detour through the history of jazz, let's get back to Jarrett, and this clip. 'I loves you, Porgy' (spelt with the s!) is one of my favourite ballads of all time, and this is hands down my favourite version of it. It beats the Bill Evans and the Miles version. And you might be thinking that Keith Jarrett plays it awful straight for someone who's supposed to be a top notch jazz musician, aren't they supposed to make everything weird and substitute all the chords? (Here's Vijay Iyer playing a certain John Lennon song.) He doesn't. What he does do though is play it using the sonorities of the piano. That crystal clear, bell-tone he gets out of his fingers makes the joy of the melody a palpable feeling, like floating on air. And it's a sad song! That's the blues right there, the approach that makes joy out of sadness ... and in one act Jarrett has covered almost every historical aspect of jazz. The joy of listening to Jarrett isn't just the joy of hearing a wonderful tune interpreted well, it's the joy of listening to the sound of a piano. I think we're missing some of that today. In any case, you oughta check him out.

adam

p.s.

Check this out if you want to hear him getting seriously freaky. Nope, he's not all tame at all.

twenty one

i didn't want to have a party, initially, because this is such a terrifying year.

thanks to everybody who came.

and as much as it feels good to appreciated, i know this is going to be a lonely one, because I've chosen loneliness out of all the possibilities of turning 21.

I know that I'll never forgive myself should I give in to loneliness, and that I'll suffer if I don't give in. Sweet damnation I've chosen. But I think that choice is too much of an illusion here.

adam

' You know, sometimes we're not prepared for adversity. When it happens sometimes we're caught short. We don't know exactly how to handle it when it comes up. Sometimes we don't know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us. I got it from my pianist Joe Zawinul, who wrote this tune, and it sounds like what you're supposed to say when you have that kind of problem. It's called 'Mercy, Mercy, Mercy'. '

- Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley

Ami oh, le monde est ma maison
Et le ciel est mon toit
Viens avec moi
Ami oh, l'amour est ma raison
Et le bonheur ma loi
Viens avec moi

Ami oh, l'amour est ma raison
Et le bonheur ma loi
Viens avec moi
Ami oh, le monde est ma maison
Et le ciel est mon toit
Viens avec moi

Bizarrely, I could only get the french version.

Whatever you want from me

is what I wanna do for you

sweeter than a drop of blood on a sugarcube

Yo La Tengo makes a great case for songwriting: the lyric doesn't seem like much on the page, but it gains life when it's sung by Ira and James in half-whispered harmony. It gains a certain amount of conflictedness that isn't apparent just reading the text. Plus, Ira just knows how to rock out.

adam

Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus

This one took awhile. I ordered the album from Memphis Music sometime around last year and pretty much left it to rot on my mp3 player until just about recently. Sometimes developments in jazz just don't hit you until you've absorbed the prerequisite - in my case it was Mingus's language of gospel and spirituals. But don't mistake this for a spiritual music - in many ways it sounds to me like a sober but sympathetic take on the ins and outs of faith. The star of the album I'd say is 'Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul', some kind of speedy gospel rampage in 3/4, like a 30s shout chorus sans arrangements, and so much more exuberant for it. Mingus locks up with Walter Perkins like some terrifying lopsided locomotive and lets the saxophonists burn the upper registers.

When I say 'language of gospel and spirituals' I really do mean a whole paradigm that Mingus absorbed into the language of jazz - the call-and-response, first seen in the New Orleans bands but gradually lost to swing and bebop, and the open, improvised, multi-participatory nature of a church spiritual. The rest of the album trundles along, and I'm probably not doing it enough justice by just talking about this one fascinating aspect, because in every other facet Mingus is a composer of astounding sensitivity. 'Theme for Lester Young' or 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' is one of his enduring classics, and Eric Dolphy himself lets rip on the cunningly titled 'Hora Decubitus'. It's a bit too late to tell you it's an album worth listening to - that's been established by musicians and writers alike years ago. I'll tell you, however, that it's an album that could open your ears the way it did mine.

adam

polemic time

I've been feeling crappy for a whole day so now it's time to take it out on the internet.

This is something I've been getting for awhile. You see, I'm a bit of a guitarist, and I try to play jazz, and I like to think I can play the blues with some measure of ability. And I listen to this stuff, and I love it dearly - you know, Stevie Ray and Miles Davis and John Coltrane and the Marsalis Brothers and whatnot. It's the great music of our century. So when I tell people, usually musicians, that I kind of like Lady Gaga they usually give me a look of disbelief. Naturally most of my musician friends don't like that all her songs sound the same and have silly lyrics and they pretty much assume I'm rationalising some kind of primitive connection to the music that's beneath my intellectual heritage. I mean, having listened to the Coltrane, how can you - to take a line from Christgau - continue to push that second-rate shit?

And there goes pretty much all of the great pop music that's being released today, at this very moment. The Black Eyed Peas. Lady Gaga. Outkast (good god, Outkast. I love them). Make no mistake - I do not rationalise the irrational. My attraction to pop music is not a guilty pleasure. Sure it's not a Love Supreme - but why need it be? Pop has sociological complexity which comes of the form rather than of the music. It's like how Yoko Ono's room full of sawn furniture pretty much lacked any classical beauty, but still managed to say something. Good pop today transcends phoniness the same way the experimentalism of the no wave and noise movements transcended ugliness. We miss that, us Serious Musicians with our 20th-century theory and our heads full of Schoenberg and African music.

And them come the accusations that I'm over-analysing. Bullshit! My material comes from the artists themselves. Elton John : The best pop is disposable. Andy Warhol. Madonna. Michael Jackson. Sure nobody can accuse Britney or Hilary Duff (neither of which I really like) of having an intellectual justification, but the beauty of it is that (as Yizhe rightly pointed out) modern pop is a collaborative effort more than any music in the past. It's producer, artist, song-writer, marketing team, record label. They sell an image. Phony, yeah - but definitely self-aware. And we who spend all our time listening to so much great music have made the mistake of only hearing music. That's the prejudice John Cage talked about when he said we discriminate against non-musical sounds - only now our concept of 'musical' is loftier. But we've missed the forest for the trees. Art is the overarching aim, not music. Music exists in the service of art. Pop is a sociological construct and I think it qualifies for any definition of Art anybody cares to challenge me with. We listen to Poker Face's 4 chords and silly lyric and we think 'oh, that can't be good. it has no musical value'. And that's a damn shame.

EDIT: Here's a great one. 'Fire Burnin' on the Dance Floor' - Sean Kingston. Haven't been able to get it out of my head since last year.

mental note

i'm sure this proves somehow that I'm slowly losing it, but I need to write this down.

I have chased the ghost of the moment down the byroads of rationality. I know them like the lines on my palm now and he cannot hide there anymore.

adam

hypothesis #2

That Pirsig book is a good one.

Here's another one: art is a product of personhood, which means it's a product of genuine understanding. Pirsig writes : to paint a perfect painting - make yourself perfect, then just paint naturally. That's an interesting thought. And I doubt he means personhood in the wishy washy, let's donate to charity sort of sense, but personhood as in the genuine commitment to quality in all aspects and in understanding foremost. I don't mean just the nuts and bolts business - scales and harmony and structure and all that (which is important) but I'm really trying to get at that Nietzche thing, the assigning of value. That defines a person - the willingness and ability to assign value based on experience.

Additionally, a deficiency in art is not a deficiency in skill, although that is a factor. It's also a deficiency in understanding that nobody is exempt from. In that sense our modern worldview is a bit twisted in its arbitrary division of art from everything else. Life and Art are just two sides of the same coin, and living itself is an art. That's just something I should write down before I forget it.

hypothesis

Here's a thought, brought on by Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -

We always think of musicians as performers. A musician's work is validated by his performance on stage. It's a widely held opinion that the defining act of musicianship is the stage performance (in the case of jazz players, the improvisation) and that practice is just a necessary preparation for that one act.

I think though, hypothetically, that the defining act of musicianship includes practice and the act of searching for what Pirsig calls 'Quality'. In fact, it could just be more important than the performance itself. In that sense, practice is as much a component of the art as performance. I think the musician should be distinguished from the performer - a musician is a performer but a performer is not necessarily a musician.

Just musing, what do you all think?

adam

I only had hopes for achieving some sort of necessity with music. Or maybe i just want to play the fucking guitar. That's the best sort of guitar, you know? but why is it so difficult.

adam

Lionel Loueke

That was probably the best concert I've watched this Mosaic season. I don't really want to compare him to Branford, who's almost an institution in the intellectual landscape of today's jazz scene, but I enjoyed the concert thoroughly. The spirit displayed was something rarely seen nowadays - a sort of urgency - i think necessity is the word, of the music. The best music sounds inevitable rather than contrived - it sounds like it's been around forever and all the musician had to do was discover it.

It brought to mind something Ornette Coleman said in an interview (and this is the smartest man ever to be completely unable to explain himself, mind) - that a B flat on a saxophone or a trumpet is not the same as a B flat on a piano or a guitar. What he meant is that pitch is only one aspect of the note, and that sound must be considered in its entirety - timbre, rhythm and placement being equally important and (in his own music) equivalent. Jazz is notorious for putting emphasis on the pitch of the notes. The more modern jazz gets, the more interchangeable its instruments get. I've heard the Coltrane solo from 'Giant Steps' played on steel pans, of all things. So last night it was a new thing and indeed a relief to hear Lionel Loueke not just play jazz on the guitar but play the timbre of the guitar as well as the pitch of the strings. Everything fit into his sonic conception, which had the joy of the African pop musics (a language I must learn) as well as the sophistication of jazz.

A night to remember.

adam

branford

I'm listening to him do 'A Love Supreme' now - and naturally, to compare anything to the original is futile. I think he sounds much more...vernacular than Trane. I think he's probably incapable of the spirituality of the original (who IS?) but he's an excellent saxophonist nonetheless.

He seems to be highly original within the context of that vernacular though. I watched his concert a few days back and was very impressed. He and his brother are capable of wielding the entire history of jazz as intellectual material. For example - listen to his treatment of the standard 'Cheek to Cheek' on the Contemporary Jazz album, where he dices the melody. It might sound like another bebop workout, but I prefer to see it as a reimagining of the concept of 'dancing' in the new era of music, and I think that intent was not lost on him when he was playing it.

I think my frustration with his 'A Love Supreme' is that it copies entirely the form of the original but misses the intent. Taken for what it is though, rather than what it tries to be - it's still by any form of reckoning a fine example of modern jazz. I'll listen to it any day.

adam

good ol' Neil

Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
and there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.

Love lost, such a cost,
Give me things
that don't get lost.
Like a coin that won't get tossed
Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Lullabies, look in your eyes,
Run around the same old town.
Doesn't mean that much to me
To mean that much to you.

I've been first and last
Look at how the time goes past.
But I'm all alone at last.
Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Even as I've dedicated the next few months to Jazz, it does me good to dust off some of the other records and have a listen. I love Neil Young dearly.

adam

Dear Joel

I just met you the night before you had to go, so it isn't up to me to put you at peace or to set the record straight or anything. But anyway epitaphs are written for the living. There is a kinship among musicians - I hope I don't presume too much - and any death in this tiny little community is a big one: It saddens me to think that now I'll never know you or hear you play.

Please give my love to Trane and Miles and the Duke. I don't really believe in the afterlife but who knows? For what it's worth, I hope you're somewhere jamming with them.

Rest in peace man.

adam

things i have learned from my friends

1. It is possible to listen to shitty music and still be in a loving, committed relationship.

2. people may, on occasion, when the season is due, in the fullness of time, have their uses.

adam

poker and evolutionary biology

Props to Mr. Dawkins here.

Behavioral evolution dictates that males invest less in offspring (males of this species, at any rate) because the creation of offspring costs them less than the female.

It's like a poker hand - the female is the big blind, and no matter what the cards are there is an investment of time and energy into the child, in the form of the pregnancy term. The male is the dealer - he may fold at any point for no loss in terms of resources expended. This dictates classic behaviour - men seek physical relationships because it is expedient to invest as little and spread the genes as wide as possible. Females seek commitment because they stand to lose in abandoning offspring, and they stand to lose if a partner should abandon them. Men invest nothing from a purely reproductive standpoint (or almost nothing beyond the energy used to create the sperm, which is nothing compared to the burden of carrying the child).

This might dictate societal standards, which are largely females' play at evening the playing field - males are expected to invest in relationships more so than females, from a societal standpoint. Time and resources are expected from men. They are expected to make the move. This is a form of investment demanded by society, and the penalty for disobedience is ostracism.

just a little thought. I'm sure any real biologists could put me right on any salient points I misrepresented.

4.03 am, acerbic

I hope this isn't construed as an attack, but it probably will be by people too timid to formulate a response. So what's there to lose?

I am always provoked to philosophising whenever I go clubbing (which is maybe why I do it). It is one of the most pointless and empty activities available to my generation, which in a world thatincludes WoW and Facebook, is saying a lot. It's a meaningless parade of skin and glitter and the stench of a hundred frustrated guys crowding the dance floor trying to get some action.

Yet I go back. Some days for the music (because I dearly love hip-hop) and some days just to engage in the games that are played. There is an energy at work that's bigger than the crowd. It's the aura of consensual (and sensual) futility, at once frustrated with the pointlessness of the world at large and society's fulfilment-seeking subtext. It says - if the world of work and study is empty and the world of relationships is doomed to caricatured gestures signifying meaning but devoid of weight - then let us play. We embrace futility, but it must be fun. I think this is the rallying cry of my generation. It is nihilistic but not solipsistic - it rejects meaning but embraces the masses, the popular, the social animal. It accepts that the give and take of relationships is little more than a game played for one's own profit, but denies that two players may not both gain in the struggle.

I think modern religion places too high a premium on fulfilment. It places too high a premium on peace, which is another word for wretched contentment. Why not live empty? I need no cosmic justification for my own pleasure, and in every moment wasted I revel in the struggle.

adam

Wayne Shorter

I blew my $30 bucks of HMV vouchers on two Wayne Shorter albums -

'Speak No Evil' from the (I believe) post-messengers-pre-miles period, and 'Beyond the Sound Barrier' with the excellent Footprints Live! quartet.

I've heard more of 'Beyond the Sound Barrier', and it is proving to be highly enjoyable. Modern jazz at its best - challenging yet eminently enjoyable. This album is a good starting place for anyone looking to get into jazz after the 80s (we're all trying to forget about that decade - Dave Weckl's band and Chick Corea's shirts).

adam

music

><. The amount of work ahead of me boggles the mind. I'll have to get to it.

miles davis '80s

Two conceptually important recordings here - his two pop covers, one of Michael Jackson's 'Human Nature' and one of Cyndi Lauper's 'Time after Time'.

These recordings are by no means jazz in the traditional sense, but it's good to note that by this point Miles had pretty much given up on jazz. 'Let the white boys have it,' he said. I am one of those Miles-for-lifers though, and I don't reject his fusion, funk and later pop oeuvre. I personally think he stuck to his musical guns until the day he died, and these records are only proof of his all-encompassing vision.

There are naysayers who complain that Miles abandoned jazz for commercial music of disputable quality. I believe no such thing occured - if anything, the sheer quality that he imparts to the commercial music he performed in the 80s is a testament to his musical imagination. 'Human Nature' is played with a joie de vivre that is almost infectious, and his talent for understated romanticism takes him places on 'Time after Time'. Sure, it ain't jazz, but who cares? It is a pop record of rare poise and sensibility. And I'm glad he made it.

I've come down with some kind of sickness, and I'm not referring to the metaphorical sort. Yuck.

adam

ORD

what's there to say. So many things I could've been doing, yet I feel little regret. The most important thing I learned is to wear suffering like a crown - not to be bitter or hateful but to seek it out, and as Nietzsche said, to exult in your strength.

I don't feel any regret, but there's a good deal of anger left which I hope will help me catch up with what I've missed - my music, my friends and my studies. Yes, it was a time of anger. I've learned to hate efficiently, a life skill no doubt.

whatever. there's no use pontificating anymore - I have a life to get on with.

adam

the joys of chameleon

I had another go at 'Head Hunters' recently. I think I can pretty safely reaffirm my appreciation of this album - the Herbie's first go at getting funky, and what a go.

I'd like to use a phrase Robert Christgau used to describe Joni Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now' - 'beguiling logic'. That's what comes to mind listening to Chameleon, which sounds as modern as any of the electronic dance tracks you hear in clubs, only twice as kicking, and with that something special - that logical progression. At first I only heard the repetition, and it does go on - it's probably the longest iteration of AABA songform in the history of popular music (the A goes on for 4 minutes) - then I heard the slow, incremental, but fabulously satisfying development. Herbie plays the band like a keyboard here, never varying the drum beat or the two-note Clavinet melody (that IS the melody. not the horns!) or the envelope-filtered bassline. He just adds and subtracts layers at will. It's the horns sometimes, playing riffs, or its his keyboards howling.

There's something fundamental that Herbie grasped about funk here that I think could be missing in the music scene in Singapore. Nothing here (save the keyboard solo) is any kind of showboating. In fact, it's the exact opposite - five musicians in service of the groove. Personalities are laid aside (find me a drummer who'll play the exact same beat for 12 minutes at a go and I'll show you Moe Tucker, who didn't play funk unfortunately). Even Herbie's solo tinkles along at a relaxed pace, almost gloating in its relaxation. And that's the point. This is music for dancing, not for blowing or beating or getting faster. And Herbie shows his mastery of composition with a piece that never devolves into histrionics but slowly unfolds like origami over 16 minutes. I want to see that live.

adam

all the things that made me happy today (5th Feb)

1. Joy Spring (With Clifford Brown and Max Roach)

2. Having an actual conversation. That makes two in two days, a new record for these two years. Thanks Nick and Bo.

3. Realising that the cute Westlifer is the gay one. Aww. I used to have a boy-crush on him.

4. Looking up girl names to amuse myself. I think i'll name my daughter Karen.

5. Discovering Aaron Goldberg and realising he's coming here this saturday.

6. Writing, even if I'm not very good at it. Look at this, I wrote it a few weeks back.

7. The mind-numbingly hot girl at the club with the same name as my mother.

what is the name of the rose?

something sad and something still

motionless until the day it dies

and then fodder for the flies.

what is the name of the sun?

a bonfire slowly burning out

the last refuge of virgin light

and then gone in the night.

what is the name of the city?

shadows and light in etched patterns

it is bright with the morning's breath

it is a dance and a death.

what is my name?

I am a coffin, wide but not so long

filled with empires and desires

and sealed with a song

all the things that made me happy today

1. 'Oh My Love' (John Lennon) in the car on the way to camp.

2. The receptionist's face at NUH when I told her my trooper was crazy and needed a brain scan.

3. The really pretty malay girl in the full-length kebaya on the mrt.

4. The really cute (and REALLY underaged. fml) girl on the bus. It is NOT pervy to appreciate a thing of beauty.

5. Finding zul's guitar in the mess during my COS duty.

6. Singing really loudly in the office.

7. Singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' to the empty battalion square in the middle of the night.

8. The conversation with Nick.

9. Talking to Bo.

wind down, buckle down, sit down, stay down, get down, feeling down, going down, fell down, look down, throw down.

In other news, it hasn't been a good week but it is looking up!

:D

More times than I know I've wished for the end of the day and the sunset and the moon and the quiet and it's not weakness, this - it's not anxiety. I just need to be alone for awhile and not let my feelings get the better of me.

It's not a punk that said it, it's not a poet, not a working man or upper-class like a prize poodle with my hair done up. Just trying to be myself, people talk like it's so easy, like you just let go of all the layers and there You Are. I tried that once and I disappeared.

Maybe I don't exist. That would be a conundrum.

Conundrum. Hmm. That would be problematic. For instance, who's writing this?

And - I wish I were Joni Mitchell, but for reasons of physics it seems that I'm not. That's a bummer but I'll live... I guess.

adam

agitation

mental static is parsed as punctuation by the word processor

. - ! ?

( . , , !)

and now that I've pressed the 'zen' button on the neural interface things seem a lot cleaner. If only they found a more comfortable way, cos everytime I turn my head to look at the door the 3.5 on my left temple threatens to fall out. And we all know what happens when that happens.

So the update today. Still waiting for army to finish, though that isn't a surprise, it is getting unbearable though, all these things I could be doing yet I need to sit around in the office and answer calls. I could be getting drunk! I could be playing! And the world will not spin backward, not for me.

I have made a commitment, and if there's one thing history has taught us it's that commitment is the instrument of suffering. (Or is suffering the instrument of commitment? Chicken and egg...) but seeing that woman was made before man, I'd say suffering came first. For the next few months I'll make a living as a musician, until I go to uni. I owe this much to myself.

brb. Jacking out.

Smiles!?

This is one of those posts in which I admit my utter despair at ever knowing anything at all about music.

1. Miles Smiles

I returned to the album after the almost two-year hiatus from any jazz that needed brainwork and found it almost as confounding as I did then. The liner note essayist (who's definitely on somebody's payroll) seems to think it was the jazz album of the 1960s, well poo on that. I don't understand it at all. The only reason I can think Miles would inexplicably be smiling is that he just shafted the remaining few of his loyal listeners (no left hand for herbie!) and just when you hear the familiar progression of the blues on the last track 'Gingerbread Boy' he pulls an awful stunt where he gets Ron Carter to make funny noises on his double bass for four additional bars, just to screw over those of you who dared to hope they could follow a 12 bar blues.

No, I'm sure it's great but what gives !? Why did he have to take away Herbie's left hand? Back on E.S.P. it was the tenuous thread connecting the band into a harmonic structure and without it it's just noise and strings. Maybe I'll get it someday.

2. Leonard Cohen

is some kind of awesome

but what kind I don't think I'll ever know.

adam

The New Canon of Great Guitar Solos

This is a list I officially cannot admit wanting to make, because it's a little bit stupid. But given the amount of literature about which doesn't take into account the fact that Satriani, Vai, and Slash are wankers, I thought I'd at least present an alternative list of the most important guitar solos in rock history - solos which should be studied by any prospective student for their poise, construction and effect.

1. Jimi Hendrix - Little Wing

This one's beyond question. It's one of the shortest on the list, and almost painful to listen to for that fact. One wishes it went on.

2. Eric Clapton - Crossroads

This one's textbook. It goes up, and it keeps going up. Going up is a good thing for solos to do in rock music.

3. Kurt Cobain - In Bloom

Oh yes, I did. Listen to it over and over and over again. This is the culmination of three decades of noise-guitar technique from Iggy and the Stooges and the VU down through Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo.

4. Neil Young - Down By the River

Neil's idiosyncracies carry this one. The one-note motif at the start is really nice.

5. Eric Clapton - Sunshine of Your Love

6. Stevie Ray Vaughan - Little Wing

It's many many times longer than the original. This is how a solo should develop and how it should maintain interest.

I should note that I missed out many important instrumental tracks simply because they don't count as guitar solos and I wish to examine the solo as an institution in rock music, because that's what it is. No doubt other aspects of playing are important - but as I said before, setting the record straight on this issue, especially for beginners needing someone to look up to, is something I consider important.

Garfunkel and Oates

'Things White People Like' had some informative comments on the subject of musical comedy - that you can combine not-very-good jokes and not-very-good music and get something that's a little bit entertaining. A justified viewpoint I think, considering how much crap out there gets passed for comedy. That said, I have a recommendation to make, and in the full knowledge that premature recommendations are like premature ejaculations in that they're always embarrassing afterward, let me just put in a plug for Garfunkel and Oates.

The folk-comedy duo (are there any other sort? besides Primus, the occasionally likeable funk-metal comedy band) consisting of Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome (of Million Dollar Baby fame) plumb the depths of domestic agony ('Present Face') and the ins and outs (well mostly outs) of working-class love with tunes that are much more than send-ups of some well-hated musical cliche. The vocal style invokes Blink-182, and the lyrical style is pure punk in its considered, rhythmic pedantry. These are pretty good jokes framed with actually-very-good music, making it a comedy band that's listenable as a bona-fide band, and to prove it they've written some serious tunes which are impressive in their scope and lyricism ('Silver Lining').

How about that, a comedy band transcends the tired send-ups of pop music with some actual skill. Props - and tell the Flight of the Conchords that their loser schtick is getting old - write some tunes, yo?

Also - that Kate Micucci is a real talent. One to watch.

adam

six sentences

My feet are unsurprisingly a little cracked after the month in the field.

There are two crickets mating on the wall above my bookshelf.

Outside the construction workers banter and play their loud music on an outdated radio.

Doorknobs, which stabilise our plane of existence like cosmic anchors, stretch across dimensions and yet are confined to a single quasi-spherical region with a keyhole.

What is the whiskey bottle but a third empty and trembling with the key-strokes like the portent of something dire, is it even a whiskey bottle at all or just a figment of my senses like the dream of an alcoholic butterfly?

Take me away from here, take me away, even if it kills, even if there's nothing left to take but take that anyway, there are tissues on the left if you need them but the door is on the right and keep walking once you're out and pretend that nothing happened, nonchalant.

faith in a manner of speaking

This is an issue which I for very long had no intention whatsoever of dealing with, because it is so complicated and (more importantly) because it is represented by people on either side who love to spend their precious time shin-kicking and name-calling. (Christopher Hitchens, you are guilty of this.)

What does faith in God require? I would say : the burden of proof is on the theists because they assert the larger number of required entities. I believe Occam's razor applies here because it is the only reasonable attitude an entity in our bewildering position can take - an existence we have no explanation for. We understand aspects of this existence, but know nothing of causes or explanations. Hence, it is one thing to assert that there must be a creator (which can reasonably be supposed to be the simplest explanation) and totally another to assert that it is a specific Creator who was specifically involved in our history. Christians especially have a lot to prove - specifically, they must prove that belief in their God is an attitude compatible with being a rational human being.

The clarifications for this discussion: First, that any theistic argument must prove that faith is compatible with rationality, because this is a rational discussion. If the discussion leads to the conclusion that faith and rationality are incompatible, then it shall follow that faith necessitates a non-rational world view and hence is outside the realm of discussion.

Second, that the argument here is specifically about the Christian God and not a creator-figure in general and hence to prove that a belief in a God that is all-powerful, all-good, and who came down to Earth as Jesus Christ is not incompatible with a rational world view i.e. principles for action derived from logical deduction and induction.

The first subject of discussion is the problem of pain. There is an agreed-upon standard for good (1)- including but not limited to health, absence of needless pain, presence of pleasure, and the presence of such conditions for as many people as possible. This view is utilitarian but seems to be the underlying assumption many people make when discussing the problem of pain. It means that actions which cause pain without ensuing benefit are to be judged as not Good, and any situation in which people are in needless suffering is to be judged as not Good. There is another standard for Good often propounded by Christians which is to be defined as spiritual well-being - closeness to God, absence of sin, presence of virtue, and perhaps importantly in theology, the presence of free will which chooses the above mentioned qualities. (2) Evil is to be defined as the lack of these characteristics. (3)

The problem of pain goes as such: The hypothesis of a benevolent creator who is all-powerful cannot be accepted due to the prevalence of pain and suffering in the world. A creator who is benevolent would do all in his power to alleviate suffering and hence cause Good by definition (1). Hence, the existence of suffering (not Good) means the creator cannot be all-powerful or cannot be benevolent.

The rebuttal to this argument takes a few forms. First, that suffering in the present may be justified by future Good that we are unaware of or incapable of understanding. Hence, the supposed Evil in the world does not exist.

Second, that Good cannot be experienced without the possibility for the opposite, and that the possibility of evil was created along with Good. Third, that suffering (not Good by definition (1)) exists to create Good by definition (2), which is to lead people to repent and to lead virtuous lives.

My first point is that accepting definition (2) of Good invalidates the premise, or at least compromises it. If we accept that only definiton (2) of Good is true, then the Evil accepted in the premise does not exist because disasters, starvation and suffering are not considered Evil - a person may be starving but still be close to God, for example. Which is not to say that the lack of Good does not exist at all, for there are surely plenty of spiritually poor people. A quibble - on to the argument.

My second point is is that the second rebuttal is incompatible with an all-powerful God. It supposes constraint on his Creation - that he had to create the possibility for evil in order to accomodate Good, even if he did not create evil. I actually agree that it is logical for a creator to have done this if what he wanted was human beings capable of Good. But this creates difficulty with the Christian God because it supposes Him subordinate to logic. The Christian God must be all-powerful and unknowable by human reason - and if He is subordinate to our logic then we must know, by virtue of knowing His constraints, Him.

My third point deals with the third rebuttal. In this case I believe the Christians are guilty of inexcusable definition-switching. Either Good exists or it doesn't, and either definition (1) or definition (2) are true, but not both, since it is a logical impossibility for a starving person who is nonetheless devout to be in a state of both Good and Evil. Either his devoutness and closeness to God confirms his situation is Good, or his suffering confirms his situation is Evil by our definition (3).

Their argument goes like this: If Evil exists to ensure Good (2) then the overall situation is Good because it results in Good and hence our God can be all-good and all-powerful and yet allow Evil.

Yet the premise 'Evil exists' is predicated on definition (1), which I have proven is incompatible with definition (2). So either we take definition (2) consistently, which raises the issue 'why are there un-devout, unholy people?' and also makes the argument sound like this:

'Un-devout, sinful people exist to make other people repent and become closer to God'. Which may be logical in some way but is hardly what the Christians seem to be arguing since all people, by their doctrine, exist to be close to God.

If we take definition (1) consistently, which means there is no Good done by suffering and hence the Christian God is rendered yet again incompatible.

Another thing which is problematic is that accepting rebuttal (3) in any form means that we no longer have any moral impetus to alleviate physical suffering, as it is no longer considered an Evil by definition (2). As most Christians accept the view that it is Good to help the suffering, this is an inconsistency that must be addressed.

Not finished but maybe i'll continue this sometime!

in a startling change of direction

Blogging in the daytime! Which shall be this week's adventure. I'm off exxon mobil duty for now (the crushing despair posts will ensue next week, for those awaiting the latest instalment)

Things:

1. Firefly. I watched 'Train Job' and 'Bushwhacked' and turns out the series only gets better after that. Am now judiciously pirating it.

2. Apps. Need to get the forms to my teachers. NYU submitted - must finish Stanford and Columbia.

Fingers crossed for Brown!

3. Borderlands. Good fun. It's like diablo with guns, which always make things better, except maybe Lebanon.

4. Two months to ORD. My disgust with the army has transcended complaint.

adam

Two Thoughts

1. Songwriting - it's only so difficult because we insist it should be easy.

2. I need a new bike. I borrowed JX's to make a trip to Serene Centre. On the way, a motorist honked at me and drove past - I caught up to him, gave him the finger and shouted something rude before pulling away. Best bike ride ever.

Joni Mitchell - Chelsea Morning

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I heard
Was a song outside my window, and the traffic wrote the words
It came ringing up like Christmas bells, and rapping up like pipes and drums

Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll wear it till the night comes

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I saw
Was the sun through yellow curtain, and a rainbow on the wall
Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you, crimson crystal beads to beckon

Oh, won't you stay,
We'll put on the day
There's a sun show every second

Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today
And the streets are paved with passers-by
And pigeons fly
And papers lie
Waiting to blow away

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I knew
there was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too
And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses

Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll talk in present tenses

When the curtain closes and the rainbow runs away
I will bring you incense owls by night, by candlelight
By jewel-light
If only you will stay
Pretty baby, won't you wake up, it's a Chelsea morning!

Nirvana - Nevermind

I think something that the music world needs to know is the reason why Nirvana was a great band. Not just a good band, or even a talented band. A great band - and after hearing this album there is no doubt that Cobain, Grohl and Novoselic belong in the company of the Beatles.

Part of the reason is Pop, because Nirvana is a pop band. Their appeal is firstly melodic, then visceral, then formal, and it is satisfying on all three levels.

Part of the reason must be cultural, because the subject matter was groundbreaking. Not that Kurt was much of a lyricist in the formal sense - but he had a knack for refrains that were revealing if not technically facile. But nobody had written music about how little they cared before. If anything, the history of rock n' roll was a series of ever-more-violent ways of caring. And of course the mere novelty of Cobain's lyrics wouldn't have carried if it didn't signify to a generation of jaded youths.

Part of the reason is Cobain himself, who was a personality as well as a frontman, like any proper rock star. He especially reminds us of John Lennon, whose life was submitted to the media as the ultimate art project. And Cobain the man greatly informs the music, which is self-deprecating, often darkly funny, and never cares as little as it claims because it always sounds so good.

Cobain's myth was compelling, and Nirvana's myth was compelling because it gave the new generation an ideal free of self-importance. But perhaps his cultural importance is overstated.

The main thing here is the music, which is pop at its best - tuneful, uncultured, uncluttered, and playful.

EDIT: shall I presume to define pop? Let me put forward a hypothesis. Pop is non-idiomatic, audience-oriented music. Non idiomatic as in free of a unifying aesthetic (radiohead, for example, is Not Pop. )

adam

The key to poaching an egg is to keep the water at the correct temperature throughout the cooking process - a light simmer but never too hot. Then the egg, cooked for slightly over a minute and a half, should get the right consistency. I will practice!

adam

Plastic Ono Band Redux

Our dear John has lost something and needs to spend an album screaming in order to find out - the premise of his first post-Beatles album. What's he lost? Paul McCartney (and his insipid talent for cuteness). George Harrison (and his parse-able guitar parts). Cynthia Lennon (and any remaining semblance of normalcy). What's he found? Yoko Ono. Rage.

The rage is important. This is an album in which John gets naked, gets rid of the multi part harmonies, the multi-part songs and the intricate arrangements of the late Beatles albums. Track one is telling - There are three instruments on it (four if you count the gong at the start). But where the tunes are stripped of filigree they are still tuneful, still solid where Paul was fluffy, serious where Ringo was playful, real where George was trippy.

Plastic Ono band is an album in which John stops hiding behind his wit (and McCartney's wit) and his irrepressible talent and writes an album with Songs about Things. The result? We like John less now that we know him. But we love him more because he bothered.

Also of merit : the two bonus tracks in the remastered edition. 'Power to the People' - meh, socialist claptrap by a well meaning talent. 'Do the Oz' - the creepiest invitation to dance I've ever heard. And is that Yoko howling in the background?

adam

Plastic Ono Band

I bought 5 albums while on R&R in Australia. Let's check them out:

1. Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon

2. Imagine - John Lennon

3. Greatest Hits - Neil Young

4. Greatest Hits - Joni Mitchell

5. Nevermind - Nirvana

I've only had the time for 1. and 2., but 3-5 will come soon enough.

Plastic Ono Band is as good as everyone seems to say it is. Good case for John Lennon as the father of punk rock, if you ask me. It's scary that he doesn't need motherloads of distortion or screechy feedback noises to be scarily primal about music.

adam

Journal Entries : Australia

20th Oct

Last night was freezing. The sleeping bag was ok - but my colleagues are worried as I am how we'll survive in the field. We manage in our fashion, I think. Cigarettes and sheer bull-headedness. Am Looking forward to going home - but the training stretches out like a desolate track ahead of me with no end in sight. I guess I'll have to wait.

So far things have been pretty relaxed which is great for settling in - I've never lived in a place like this before. The roof of my tent is letting through ominous spots of sunlight - that won't be good when it rains.

Tonight's the 8km 'prep' march. The first of many sufferings. I'm as ready as I've ever been to eat shit but good intentions never make it into the field. By tonight I'll be collapsed somewhere wishing I'd had the good sense to report sick.

So yeah - hope is on the horizon. Until tonight at least I can stay strong, and then it's up to my body and the weather god.

25th Oct

Came back from the first mission last night. I was right about the weather - once you stop moving it's freezing. Oh well. I managed not to cock anything up for once.

I also finished Haruki Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood' while I was at Sam Hill with the planning team. I think it's a great story - a love story, but it has all the quiet subtlety a love story deserves. I think the best part is at the end where Reiko and Toru hold an impromptu funeral by getting drunk and playing every Beatles song they know. I want that done when I die.

Surprisingly, my spirits are pretty up now, despite living in this hole of a camp. I'm thriving on little happinesses, cool air at night, a hot bath, a good book and the Beatles.

Sweet Loretta Martin, thought she was a woman, but she was another man. Eat your heart out, Lou Reed! I guess now we just wait for the end. The final mission will suck but we're expecting it.

When I get back I'll buy a good bottle of whisky and drink it with my friends and sing some songs. Nobody else here appreciates the 60s like I do. Nobody back there does, but at least they play along.

Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner, but he knew it couldn't last.

Get back

Get back

Get back to where you once belonged!

Rock and roll.

26th Oct

There was an attack of boredom in the morning. I had breakfast, brushed my teeth, had two smokes and decided it wasn't working. I wish I had a guitar here. Or, for that matter, someone to talk to about anything other than cars, boobs and cigarettes.

I decided to tackle the spell of ennui with a calculated dose of music.

Here's my playlist of 4 songs:

1. Desafinado - Ana Caram

2. Free City Rhymes - Sonic Youth

3. Move - Miles Davis

4. Help! - The Beatles

1. didn't quite work. Bossa doesn't do it for me all the time.

2. Did. It's the most beautiful musical construction ever created under the banner of Rock. But SY always left a strange aftertaste, as if in reaching for the cosmic their feet had left the ground.

3. From 'Birth of the Cool'. Skin-tight arrangements, solos tumbling through the changes perfect in pitch and poise. There can be no formal complaints - but in my distracted state I couldn't summon the concentration.

4. 60s rock and roll in the middle of a dusty army camp reminded me of FMJ. And if anything is the antidote to SY's 90s cosmic freakout, it's the earthy simplicity of a Beatles song.

I feel much better. Gonna have a smoke, then see what's up.

27th Oct

There's been a stunning array of cock-ups. I'm almost beyond caring. It's so pathetic that I can barely bring myself to think about it. I'm just waiting for the end.

That was from the morning. I was too pissed for words - the men really push me over the edge some days.

Every day's pretty much the same otherwise - eating, sleeping, training, smoking. The routine grates but it has its own advantages, like enough time to write this entry. I still miss my guitar, but I'm dealing with it. My bunk mates are gambling or blackjack but I've declined to play - I suspect that makes me unforgivably antisocial but oh well.

I listen to music when the urge strikes me. It's not always easy to enjoy in this dusty little hole, but it's a welcome relief.

Speaking of relief, there was a drizzle last night - first rain in a week. I seriously thought of getting out in it and bathing - but it didn't get heavy enough. The clouds are filling up the sky though - there may be hope yet. As long as it doesn't rain while I'm on exercise! Nothing like being miserable -and- wet.

In all honesty, this is a beautiful country. The bare trees, the lone kangaroos, the dust, the endless expanse of dried foliage. It's austere in a way no rainforest is. And at night it's so quiet! I could never find a place like that in Singapore.

It's just a pity I have to do all this abominable army stuff here.

Whoops. Spoke to soon - there's a storm coming.

7th Nov

The heat is murderous at 1 o'clock. I'm writing this just to keep things off my mind. Let the night come I say! I am now officially tired of this country, trees and all, stars and sunsets and all, and the whole of Oz can jolly well fuck off and let me go home to my air conditioning.

Sinatra is doing his part to take my mind off the crippling heat rash and the sand. Good ol' Blue Eyes. I've meanwhile written a few more songs of dubious import (I don't know if I'll ever get good at it) and I hope to put them to music when I get back. Meanwhile (I've said this twice now) the sound of trumpets and piano is edifying. It occurs to me that music nowadays may require less leftist hippiedom (and I mean as an approach, not as a politic) and more rightist formalism. It is becoming dangerously neither here nor there.

I'm afraid no amount of 'inspiration' will excuse terrible lyrics and noodly melodies. Even those icons of hippiedom, the Beatles, wrote with a terrifying mastery of the fundamentals, passed off as simple good-naturedness.

Choon Ping was right. Academic rigour is needed. And not Wynton Marsalis and gang's backward-facing history worship. I mean genuine intellectual commitment, and not just warm fuzzy feelings, however the two may be related.

I am doing my best to live up to this standard but like in any art rules without that special confluence of mental states known as inspiration produces no results. I will try harder.

Frustrating that my entries always end up about music. I swear I have other interests! Aloy has taken my book now though, so I am temporarily deprived of them. I'll write another song, here:

Sing a song to let me know

you'll never go anywhere

or do anything to make me sad

and live in this house of bricks and clay

Sing a song to let me know

that you won't die to-morrow

or the day after, or the rest of my life

and you'll never fly away

Sing a song to show me

that you'll never leave the ground

that you'll fold your wings around me

and never spread them wide

Sing a song while you hold me

So I know that you are there

So I know that I'm not tying you

but you've chosen not to fly

-adam

I am not afraid of you and I will beat your ass

Yo La Tengo - I am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

Sorry about the last post - that was for WB. I picked this album up at HMV - I'd wanted to get I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One but they only had this one and Popular Songs and faced with the decision I went for the one with the (infinitely) cooler title. It was also the last copy, so those hypothetical readers who hypothetically listen to my recommendations may face trouble if there isn't a restock.

And that's exactly what this is: a recommendation. This is rock for people who don't need leather and a ten foot tall haircut; it's happy, and full of Georgia and Ira whisper-singing their little melodies all over and their left-of-centre lyrics. It certainly comes across as an album by a long married (and 20 years is a long time) couple, full of affectionate humour and reminiscence.

Yo La Tengo don't have a style per se - they have a number of set pieces that appear in every album with new lyrics and new variations. There's always the long noise jam - that's the first track here ("Pass the Hatchet..."). There's the speedy punk number with the whispered melody. There's always the trance-y electro tune. There's always a clever ballad. There's always some stripped-down rock and roll.

And considering how great every one of the songs appears, it's stunning to note how modest the arrangements are. What they are is settled, stable, confident, and they need no flash-and-bang to impress - they have enough songwriting chops to cover that and hopefully many albums in the years to come.

adam

A letter to Joni Mitchell Re: Tree Museum

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/popsong/17moe18.html

Terror

I was paid a visit by an old friend tonight. I call him terror who used to visit me at night when I was barely a teenager. He brought pictures with him, many of death and disease and old age, but one fascinated me like no other. He showed me a picture of an eternity of oblivion. I remember because for many weeks I was like a shell but for that thought, that I would die forever. I was not even sure then, because I had my faith.

Now I have no faith. I am sure that I will die forever. But I met my old friend with open arms tonight, because I know why I was afraid. I was not afraid of oblivion - death is not fearful, the greek philosopher once said. I was afraid that an eternity of oblivion would devalue everything in my pitifully finite life.

I am no longer afraid. Eternity will not drain the meaning of my life, because I have created it, and as a creator I am greater than all fear. Do you hear that, old friend? I have friends. I have work. I have music. I have hope. You cannot rob them from me.

adam

New York Dolls

I've had a cd sitting unopened on my shelf for almost a year now - Private Worlds, a double album of demo tapes by the New York Dolls. I like these guys a lot.

adam

Laughter

is an evolutionary mechanism developed to rid ourselves of that most deadly of vices - significance.

Late night

Sleepless. I don't think I'll ever renounce feeling confessional at 2am, even if it's only my blog that will listen to my insomniac ravings. I had a good jam session today. I haven't felt this alive for awhile - maybe it's that feeling alive requires copious amounts of amplified noise. At least I can make some on my own. I wonder how people without guitars get by.

I've got 'someday my prince will come' on. It's a nice tune - and to have Miles put his inchoate siren over the changes is almost too much of a good thing.

I'm flying to australia in a week. I need to get my strength together. Goal here is not to come back in a box.

I wonder where all my friends are.

Maybe I need to stop practicing and get out of my room once in awhile. I am starting to feel the effects of social awkwardness acutely. It will be too late soon.

:(

adam

Twilight

It's not the Absolutely Terrible Novel I was hoping it'd be.

Yes, I must note - I have read it. And it's not that I've gone over to the dark side or anything - I accredit the reading to boredom, which shall become the excuse for all evil deeds great and petty.

And this will no doubt void my membership of the Singapore chapter of Auteurs Anonymous. But for what it tries to be, which isn't much, it's not a bad novel at all. It's not Ishiguro for sure, but nobody wants it to be - and Meyer manages somehow to make a vampire story that's well sort of interesting and skips lightly past all the unnecessary emo that the genre's often burdened with.

So there, all you Writers and Poets and Critics and people who Know About Literature, poo on you all. I liked Twilight.

adam

Yo La Tengo!

They've been a bit hit-or-miss with my tastes but the hits are solid ones, and certainly rank pretty high up there in my pantheon of Great Songs. Of slightly more import : They're married. And they're good enough to wield that singularly un-hip social institution like the great electrified warhammer of Rock, smashing aside assiduously, snidely single doubters.

Read: Sugarcube ("Whatever you want from me, that's what I wanna do for you, sweeter than a drop of blood on a sugarcube") What's more married than that? And what is more rock and roll?

Read: Mr. Tough (Hey Mr. Tough, don't you think we've suffered enough?) ("We'll leave our worries in the corner, leave them in a big big pile")

Really, the pile doesn't go away for people living together. But the way they deal with it is rock and roll in every way that matters.

Georgia and Ira Kaplan seem to have incorporated a uniquely scathing form of domestic bliss in their personal myth, and I find it extremely compelling. If I ever get married, my kids are going to be named after them.

adam

Revolver

The Beatles - Revolver

I will not make pronouncements or judgements because I am not worthy. I am less than the dust on the soles of his sandals, I am not fit even to listen and I am only allowed because of his magnanimous grace. In times to come they will say he was only human but in the glory of the spectacle I can only see majesty, purity and perfection.

adam

ONCE AND FOR ALL: THE SECRET TO WRITING

Distance, indifference, dispassion. Writing and music may portray emotions but may not contain: emotions in the writing process should only be accessible as a product not as an ingredient because they shut down the multi level process that art requires. To give way to emotions is to lose coherence, structure, and above all true appreciation - it is the mind that stores the details, not the heart, and the mind must recreate the details to recreate the response in the heart.

adam

Horehound

The Dead Weather - Horehound

Yes, I did actually go out and buy it and I don't regret it at all. The first thing I thought was 'I've never heard anything like this before' and the second thing I thought was 'I've heard this all before, somewhere'. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in between - Horehound is a kind of recombinant album, country/western meets blues meets hard rock meets rap metal. Individually the parts don't sound particularly new - blues licks, banjo sounds, feedback noise, Led Zep, reggae-style delay. But we've never really heard them put together like this, with such facility and with such attitude.

'Treat me like your mother' is probably the best (and cleverest) song on the album, and sounds a bit like Rage Against the Machine grown a sense of humour. 'I Cut Like a Buffalo' has Jack White singing some of the evilest reggae ever made by human beings. 'So far from your weapon' - a sort of far out blues written by Alison Mosshart, but it hits home, which is more than can be said for Frank Black and his parade of weirdness. So Jack White and co have a bit more of a handle on weirdness than perhaps any band that capitalises on the aesthetic have had. And it's good. The rest of the album is just gravy - Bob Dylan cover, instrumental which wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to starcraft 2 (which is a compliment), 12 bar blues, the works.

The truth is the re-tread nature of this album may cause non-discerning individuals to dismiss it as 'jock-rock', or a bunch of over the hill rockers trying to be Limp Bizkit (which it certainly -may- sound like). But give them credit for a sense of irony, which is draped over the album like a good sauce. Jack White never falls victim to his macho constructions - although he never distances himself to the point of outright tongue-in-cheek. There is a sense of revelry in the over-the-top riffs and aggression and macho posture (especially on Mosshart's part) - and this ironic distance gives the album the depth it needs, proving once again that white is a genius and that it is possible to make some headbangin' hard rock without being stupid. Applause.

adam

all the bloody time

http://xkcd.com/642

all the bloody time.

I am in love with Alison Mossheart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Goi2YcW2To

Not many vocalists can actually send chills down my spine.

adam

Dear Friend

I've seen the way she looks at you

very ugly - that comingling of familiarity

and expectation

very unbecoming (like something out of a movie scene)

as if her eyes could wrench

your sordid emotions from your chest

still throbbing; bleeding.

I've seen your smile (ecstatic/bovine)

your little jokes (asinine)

and a thousand little sins against Man

Please.

I know they are masks for happiness.

I know you are only hateful because

you hate how joyful

how unnecessary

how sublime your happiness is

You can't take it

but if you give it away it'll break my heart fuck you

Premature

I will not fall into the trap of making Pronouncements this time. As far as I'm concerned, the greatness or lack thereof, and the success or lack thereof, of this new band called the Dead Weather can be bloody well left to fate, or market forces, or Jeebus or whoever's miserable job it is to decide these things. But for now, I kind of like them. Normally I'd be a bit suspicious of the new, almost painfully hip indie posturing of which Jack White is almost certainly guilty of. But the music is redeeming - loud, difficult but firmy attached to the ground via the blues, which is one of Jack's few redeeming qualities. Alison Mossheart is charming, the other two kind of blend in but the organ is wicked, all in all it's a good time and I sincerely hope they go somewhere rather than become another White Stripes side project.

adam

I believe in the market

I consider it a (partial) vindication of the modern audience's taste that a band as abrasive, avant-garde, noisy and melody-less as the White Stripes can make it big. Of course after shout-fests like 'seven nation army' they shored up the leaky bits with plenty of melodies on 'Get Behind me Satan' but the fact is that they are in no way a feel good pop band, and Jack White as a frontman is antiquely unhip, what with his strange tricolor fixation, blues playing and fascination with electronic noise and Bob Dylan (who's to say which is less marketable?). Still, they sell. There is hope for humanity after all.

adam

Albums pt 2

With less hype this time -

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Chronicle

Sonny Rollins - A Night at the Village Vanguard

I did go to the shop one of my main purposes being leaving with some country rock (because I've been into this country phase) - probably the Allman Brothers, but instead my mum wanted CCR and I figured it was worth a try. It's not totally off the wall Redneck Rock 'n Roll like the Allman Brothers, complete with hat and moustache, but it's pretty Southern, and John Fogerty ain't half bad.

adam

Albums!

Cream - Disraeli Gears

The Beatles - Revolver

The Classic Albums, Best of '67, whatever. I wanted to see what the hype was. So far I've only put Disraeli Gears on - it's as psychedelic as the cover suggests, plenty of high falsetto shrieking and reverb guitars riffing on middle eastern modes - the works. Also, fairly playfully put together (see mother's lament O.o what? psychedelic rock album plus cockney filler music?), fairly well written, Eric Clapton's guitar like a liquid orgasm laid on top of the rest of the music. Graphic.

adam

Waterloo Sunset - the Kinks

Robert Christgau: 'The most beautiful song in the english language'

Personally I wanted to give that to 'Sunday Girl' by blondie but to each his own I guess - and Christgau deserves props for being the Critic With a Brain, and stunningly astute on many things unrelated to music, which informs and credibilises his criticism. I do actually read his reviews for sheer entertainment value and informativeness.

Also, I love this tune.

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I dont need no friends
As long as I gaze on waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunsets fine

Terry meets julie, waterloo station
Every friday night
But I am so lazy, dont want to wander
I stay at home at night
But I dont feel afraid
As long as I gaze on waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunsets fine

Millions of people swarming like flies round waterloo underground
But terry and julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound
And the dont need no friends
As long as they gaze on waterloo sunset
They are in paradise

Waterloo sunsets fine

Kim

At the suggestion of my dear friend, I have christened my new guitar Kimberley, after my heroes Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, and the Pink Ranger.

adam

Kudos

go out to Lady Gaga, whose aesthetic coherence is nothing short of stunning. I can't say I'm a huge fan of electro-pop et cetera, but this woman will be something big, just you wait and see.

adam

Robert Christgau:

"...it ought to demonstrate once and for all that the function of avant-garde art is to inspire other artists, not the public."


adam

Led Zeppelin - the stupidest band ever to make Great Music.

Let's face it - Plant was no Lennon, Page was no Hendrix and JPJ sure as hell wasn't McCartney. Hendrix's medievalism was at least more colourful. McCartney's love songs were playful, not creepy. Simon and Garfunkel managed real folk by leaving out the machismo, something which Plant shamefully neglected to do on tracks like 'Going to California' which really reads like a mid life crisis for guys who like both Bob Dylan and shooting things.

No, Led was not a lyrics band at all. They failed in the lyrics department - and the closest they got to greatness in that department was a sophomoric dance track 'Rock and Roll' which unfortunately predates our modern club music in its subject matter. 'Stairway to Heaven' is another great failure of lyrics - it's pseudo medievalistic pagan claptrap that doesn't have the sense to be clever. In many ways they predated the regrettable trends in what was later called 'prog' and then 'neo-classical whatever' - medievalism, paganism, classism (all the isms, they're causing schisms).

And despite all the bashing I've been doing, I truly feel that they were one of the seminal acts in rock and roll after the 60s. No band today is without a deeply fundamental debt to everything they did - and though they didn't do many things well, what they did they did bloody well. And what they did well was this: a ham-fisted talent for making noise in the lower frequencies, and an clumsy (but entirely accurate) understanding of the blues. In fact, 'clumsy' is probably the best word to describe their style of ponderously repeating riffs and thundering drum beats. It was clumsy, but shockingly effective, and for this I credit that second thing, the blues, which gave Jimmy Page all the songwriting chops he needed. The blues gave them the simplicity needed to deliver the heaviness, and the result is satisfying in the gut the way the blues should be.

As the case study I pick 'When the Levee Breaks', a track in which Plant abandons his medievalism, Page abandons his progressive tendencies, and John Bonham abandons any remaining vestiges of subtlety. He opens the track here with what would become (I think) an iconic beat with the anticipated first beat of the second bar on the bass drum. As with all Led Zeppelin music, the key to heaviness (which I define as the 'insistence' that we so prize in rock music) is repetition. He does not vary the hi hat pattern, and plays sparsely so the reverb is audible. He sets a slow moving but unshakeable tempo for the song to begin, and it begins on a note of steadiness, steadiness that soon develops into inevitability. Inevitability is the real theme here - 'If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break/ If it keeps on raining, the levee's gonna break/ If the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay'. Notice how even after the the first line is repeated a la traditional blues, the words 'levee breaks' happen one more time in the third line, as if the first two times didn't make it clear enough. This slow build of paranoia is one of the rare successes of their songwriting. The guitar intro is played with a slide, like the real bluesmen did - only he plays the same thing over and again, only three notes - the root (and harmonised fifth, making it the 'heaviest' chord playable on a guitar at any pitch), the flattened major third or 'blue note', again harmonised, and the fifth. Aside from the blue note, these notes are colourless, being the fundamentals of the harmony. The nature of the notes is not lost on the listener - he only hears the blue note, the 'colour', the root which is the resolution, and the fifth which is tension. The slow ululation of tension-resolution over the steady drum beat, always with exactly the same notes, is another element that adds to the growing paranoia prevalent in the intro.

The next part of interest is the sudden instrumental refrain, which modulates to the major key. The tone here is almost triumphant - I say almost because the blues is never triumphant, and Page proves his facility with the idiom here - but the resolution from the 7th chord makes it uneasy, almost terrifying in a Gothic sort of way rather than satisfying. The chorus of multi-tracked guitar parts adds to this cathedral-like atmosphere, hinting infinitesimally at the sound of a wind orchestra, and the associated grandeur. It is a terrifying grandeur.
The second half of the refrain is a motif played distorted with slide guitar. Again, the three phrases are variations of the same melodic motif, and the repetition serves to create a feeling of insistence and intensity. It should be noted that this part of the refrain is not played in the intro, only after the first verse. Again, Page plays only simple chords. The accompaniment plays a root and a fifth, which reminds us of the band's perennial medieval obsession - certainly, it sounds like a drone note music, tonally resembling bagpipes or violin, both of which are often used to play drone notes in traditional scottish, irish, and indian musics. The medievalism here is subtle at least, and they get away with it - it only adds a not unwelcome colour to their straight-ahead blues.

TBC soon!

adam

I know you, you know me

One thing I can tell you is you got to be free!

A bit late for Beatlemania

This would've been so much cooler if I could've done it 40 years ago when the whole world was doing it too. Now I just get ridiculous looks on the MRT because i'm headbanging to 'Drive my Car' instead of oh, Akon or something. At least, I think they're ridiculous looks because I feel silly inside. But the music will not let go!

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting

Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun

and I say it's alright.

adam

New Guitar

On track with the New Things trend we've been seeing, I finally caved and bought another guitar - partly cos my crappy cheap strat is starting to fall apart, and partly just for the heck of it. I managed to find a red Gibson '61 reissue SG at guitar connection, and immediately fell in love.

I won't gush about it here because only two people probably in my entirely hypothetical readership (i'm not quite convinced any of you exist anymore - my blog is an exercise in solipsism) would understand what I mean by 'the pickups are just the right temperature' and I DON'T mean they were toasted for eight and a half minutes before installation.

So - quite a bit poorer now, have to figure out how to use this thing (it's NOT the same...) and I'm accepting bids for names. Although I'll probably ignore all suggestions anyway. Hypothetical names are okay too.

adam

I'm (mostly) back from my temporary brush with insanity, with the help of a few friends and four englishmen who happened to be called the Beatles. I guess this is a bit (very) late to be realising, but having listened to some(not enough) of the canon of popular music in this century, this must be the most sacred music ever to grace the realms of human creation. It isn't perfect music, but it is hallowed in every sense of the word that means anything to human beings.

adam

Sparrow

Desdemona brought me a dead sparrow this morning - at some level I deeply enjoy being the recipient of these animal sacrifices.

adam

Stupidity

I have become the connoisseur of stupidity. I have seen it in every possible form, and naked in its Platonic manifestation. The stupidity of others has confounded, frustrated, awed and bewildered me. But no stupidity is ever as all-encompassing, as immense, as brilliant and diaphanous and unstained as my own. This particular time I have outdone myself by leagues by the simplicity, the humility, the selflessness... the sheer purity of the act. For a few minutes there I was a man transmogrified like Jesus on the hilltop into the very incarnation of stupidity, made beautiful by surrendering my entire soul to its all-consuming force.

adam

Loneliness

is not a philosophical problem - it's a biological reaction. I feel like my responses have been hijacked by chemicals - but that's an illusion - my responses aren't much more than chemicals. I just wish there was something I could do about it.

adam

Sanctuary

After the week of non-commitments and half-eaten fantasies, it's nice to be back in the real world. I put on 'Sanctuary' from Miles's Bitches Brew album, and realiset that that was what I'd been needing all week.

adam

Hey ho, let's go.

This is going to be one of those intractable posts about my continuing inability to be at peace with the world. Incidentally, I'm at the mess computer in camp and it's been a long week.

My capacity for responsibility has worn thin. I've pretty much stopped caring about anything that happens in the army, for the good reason that it's mind-crushingly pointless. But I used to be able to do my job... and I consider that one of the attributes a non-useless person must have in this world. I am slowly losing my grip on non-uselessness. Don't get me wrong, I love my men, but it's a different sort of relationship with them, mostly based on trading insults and comparing penis sizes - not all in all a fulfilling existence. I miss having a real conversation. I miss talking for hours about pointless (but interesting) philosophical quibbles. I miss not having to walk around in a protective shell made out of belligerence. And I've resorted to more and more outlandish (and often destructive) ways of coping with this.

I mean, this is truly pathetic, that I can't seem to handle a little thing like this without becoming self-destructive. It was alright when I was just content with destroying my body. But that barely seems like enough now - I fear I've started to play games with my mind and my heart that no sane person would attempt. It is worrying.

On the dubious upside, I know I should make it through alive. My family is composed some of the most arrogant, stubborn people on this planet. And I won't give up even if (and especially if) it kills me. I just hope I don't drag too many people down on the way.

So - bring it on, motherfuckers.

adam