Thomas Chatterton Williams: America's New Worst Music Critic

Let's start out with the obvious: The Wall Street Journal editorial page, like its partner in quo-maintaining The Washington Post, doesn't often feature unadulterated Obama praise (or even checkered praise, at this point). As well it shouldn't, I guess--a healthy skepticism of those in power was once a critical component of American journalism, a long, long time ago. But a funny thing happens after weeks of running one editorial after another poking away at our president's supposed character deficiencies and deeply-held radical views. Vibrant, legitimate criticism leads to slightly more suspect criticism, which leads further down the rabbit hole into articles like "President Obama's 'Rap Palate'" (note the "rap palate" in scare quotes--scary!) by Thomas Chatterton Williams. The points raised by Mr. Williams are about the opposite of what anyone would call a "reasoned, rational political argument." I would call it "bitching for the sake of bitching/traffic."

Williams is responding to Jann Wenner's latest long-form "interview" (this time the scare quotes are justified) with President Obama in Rolling Stone. Wenner's panegyric intimations lie more toward using RS as a soapbox to insist how hip Democratic politicians can be, and the results are at least as embarrassing as the John Kerry interview in 2004. The difference is that in addition to questions about what Obama thinks of Bono or Bob Dylan, the subject turns, temporarily, to hip-hop. Says the B-Boy-In-Chief:

Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president's personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.

Obama also mentioned being a big fan of Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones, and classical opera ("There are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need"), but his comments about rap being acceptable and even fun to listen to were what got the Fox Nation's goat (though Obama had noted even before he was president that he was a big Jay-Z fan). And then Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of the memoir Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, became so appalled by the mere mention of Lil Wayne in the Oval Office that he started his column thusly:

What's on President Obama's iPod? A wide range, he told Rolling Stone magazine last week, from the jazz of John Coltrane to the ballads of Maria Callas. And more: "My rap palate has greatly improved," Mr. Obama noted. "Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert."

Expert or not, that's the wrong message for the president to be sending black America.

The "wrong message": being passingly familiar with one of the dominant forms of African-American music, which is somehow insulting to the character of all African-Americans. The subtext: yes, Obama is indeed a Scary Black Man. Continue:

Does Mr. Obama like Lil Wayne's "Lil Duffle Bag Boy"? In that song, the rapper implores young black men to "go and get their money" through round-the-clock drug hustling. And with Lil Wayne, it's not just an act: The rapper is currently serving a one-year term on Rikers Island after being caught in New York with drugs and guns stashed in his Louis Vuitton overnighter.

Mr. Williams happens to be correct about Lil Wayne serving at Rikers, but I have no idea why he chose as his example a song that a) is by Playaz Circle, and only features Lil Wayne, b) is called "Duffle Bag Boy" (no "Lil") and c) being about drug-running, has no connection to the weapons charge that landed him in jail. Let's be clear: by "drugs and guns," Mr. Williams is trying to imply a great deal more than one (1) .40 caliber pistol that was registered to his manager and happened to be in a bag close to his person. Hell, let's be crystal: Mr. Williams is trying to imply that any black man who goes to jail is never to be trusted or admired again, even if he has served his time, even if he seems repentant about the issue, even if he's on suicide watch--never mind that. Jail! Drugs! Guns! Hippity-Hop!

Lil Wayne is emblematic of a hip-hop culture that is ignorant, misogynistic, casually criminal and often violent. A self-described gangster, he is a modern-day minstrel who embodies the most virulent racist stereotypes that generations of blacks have fought to overcome. His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass.

I understand and sympathize with the argument that hip-hop artists are given a free pass when it comes to issues of misogyny, casual homophobia, violence and general gangsta cliches. Modern pop radio is partially responsible for generally spurning lyrical and musical innovation in exchange for vacuous celebrity self-worship and lazy, repeatable innuendo. It remains in my mind of the utmost importance for music journalists to develop new modes of critical vocabulary when it comes to the discussion of hip-hop, to avoid endless valorization in terms of "flow" and "skill" when many popular rappers assert themselves as brands as opposed to musicians.

But calling Lil Wayne a "modern-day minstrel," with no qualifications, is beyond the pale. In order to believe something like that, you need to buy in, heavily, to these "virulent racist stereotypes," as if black hip-hop fans lack the agency to appreciate the music without buying into the lifestyle. A clue can be found in his last sentence: "His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass." This makes perfect sense, if you believe that these "pathologies" are inherent in black people and entirely the fault of a monolithic underclass. Never mind institutionalized racism and the pitiful job prospects of post-industrial America: if only popular musicians would stop talking about bitches and hos, all those nagging pathologies would stay nice and dormant.

Thus President Obama has conveyed his taste for the rapper behind lyrics like:

Put that white widow weed in the cigar and puff

look, ma, I'm trying to make a porno starring us

well not just us, a couple foreign sluts

Naming thuggish rappers might make Mr. Obama seem relatable and cool to a generation of Americans under the sway of hip-hop culture, but it sends a harmful message—especially when, in black America, some 70% of babies are born out of wedlock.

Why not stop there? Obama has also conveyed his taste for (and therefore must endorse everything ever said by) the artists behind the following:

White girls, they're pretty funny
Sometimes they drive me mad
Black girls just wanna get fucked all night
I just don't have that much jam
Chinese girls are so gentle
They're really such a tease
You never know what they're cockin'
Inside those silky sleeves.

Or

She takes, just like a woman
She makes love, just like a woman
And she aches, just like a woman
But she breaks, just like a little girl

Racism. Misogyny. And how can he admire a woman who shacked up with Aristotle Onassis when so many black children are born out of wedlock? Miles Davis and John Coltrane were both addicted to heroin--does Obama believe casual drug use is okay for musicians? I'm just asking, yo! you decide.

(I would have loved to witness Mr. Williams' Google search for rap lyrics terrifying enough to alarm the boomers but also excerptable in a major newspaper).

The article goes on to quote similarly suspect lyrics from Jay-Z (Nas gets the shaft, due to space restrictions I guess), who is described by Mr. Williams as a "rapper and unrepentant ex-drug dealer" who has "been photographed sitting in Mr. Obama's chair in the White House Situation Room." This of course begs the question: "What president would ever let Marilyn Manson drop by the White House? Is Jay-Z any better?"

Good question. Would Mr. Williams be writing about it? Obviously not, because of course Marilyn Manson does not represent the pathologies of "white culture" in the way that Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, being official representatives of their race, do. Also, it's 2010.

I've known a few ex-drug dealers, some of whom remain unrepentant, and I can tell you that neither they nor Marilyn Manson have committed anything close to the sorts of heinous activities perpetrated by certain Washington lobbyists and Wall Street bankers in the last couple years. Not even close. These are the power players that are invited to the White House on a daily basis. In order to believe that Jay-Z's White House visit represents a lowering of Presidential standards, you must honestly be convinced that African-Americans who once dealt drugs aren't fit to grace the same halls as Jack Abramoff and Bernard Kerik, to say nothing of the actual war criminals who once occupied significant portions of our Executive branch. It requires turning a specific kind of blind eye--a kind that would have to be inured to all the horrors brought about by exporting American culture--with the exception of black people rhyming, over beats.

Williams, by the way, is black, not that such a fact would change my consideration of his essential cluelessness regarding rap music and race. Check out his absurd bio:

Like many young men in America, Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in awe of Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and the parade of bling-bedecked rap stars he saw on Black Entertainment Television. Williams emulated their lifestyle - sporting chains and expensive designer clothes purchased for him by his girlfriends, who were themselves little more than accessories to Williams.

Williams' bio is candid about the fact that he used to be a pretty big asshole. Judging by this description, I agree: he was a prick. Treating women like "accessories" is, yes, a bad thing. Young Mr. Williams really does sound emblematic of everything terrible in hip-hop culture. Myself, I generally stop paying attention whenever cultural conservatives start to say "I used to have so many girlfriends," before going on to lament modern sexual permissiveness, but let's continue.

In LOSING MY COOL: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (The Penguin Press; May 2010; $24.95), Williams describes how he managed to juggle these two disparate lifestyles--"keeping it real" in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage. Pappy grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato.

Being able to "keep it real" while simultaneously studying for one's SATS--it kind of is like the segregated South! Especially given Young Williams' father had to deal with the pernicious influence of Tupac's famous anthem "Plato and Aesop Iz Gay (Don't Ever Read That Shit)" or Biggie's "Make Sure To Treat Your Multiple Girlfriends Like Accessories (Make Them Buy Your Clothes Also)."

Well, I kid. Having not read Losing My Cool, I can't know for sure, but I'm sure the message is that if you're a young black man, if you manage to make it through high school without the demon Hip-Hop turning you to a life of drug-dealing and ho-abusing, you may one day use all the knowledge acquired from reading 15,000 books to selectively quote scary rap lyrics you've obviously never heard before, in the interest of making sure a public figure can never again exercise his or her aesthetic judgment when it comes to personal music preferences. Or alternately, I guess you can listen to all types of music, even if the subject matter is sometimes troubling, and focus on more important issues than whether or not a particular artist makes your race look clean and law-abiding. Maybe then you could be president, and not a tiresome moralizer who is obviously uncomfortable with how much of an asshole he used to be as a teenager. It isn't the demon Hip-Hop, Thomas: It's YOU.

YOU had a hard time treating women with respect. YOU were the one who decided the general takeaway message from hip-hop was wearing designer clothes and huge, ungainly chains. And then, when you must have realized what a ridiculous cliche your life had become, instead of choosing a more enlightened path YOU decided to latch onto another polarizing cliche, that rap music was the thing keeping you down all along. For every example you can bring up of lyrics that "diminish blacks," I can provide three or four counter-examples. Others could probably provide a lot more. Hell, I can show you stories of legit, card-carrying African-Americans who have indeed been empowered by a particular rap song, as have I to a certain degree.

Here's one:

Critical Beatdown: Round Ten

Brian Eno, "2 Forms Of Anger"
AM: The increasingly busy first minutes of "2 Forms of Anger" sound like generic dystopian stuff--with a great drum sound, sure, but disconcertingly anonymous . The guitar at 2:08 lands with impact, but everything about "Anger" makes me wish for the joyfully experimental Eno of old, instead of this self-serious electro-gruel. 2.5/5

NS: In retrospect I should have tempered my enthusiasm for Eno first's Warp release, given that nothing that Eno had done lately, on Warp or otherwise, has interested me greatly. "2 Forms" has an exciting pulse and a number of enterprising new guitar sounds, but at its core it's basically a non-song, more in tune with the musician's ambient oeuvre. 2.5/5 

Pimp C feat. Bun B and Drake, "What Up"
AM: Essentially a Drake song featuring the members of UGK, albeit one where everybody holds their own. It's pretty awesome--the exuberant production of Drizzy acolyte Boi-1da recalls "International Player's Anthem"--I just wish Pimp C was more of a presence on his own jam. 4/5

NS: The Naked Soul In Sweet Jones may ultimately be an exercise in poor judgment, but there's no denying that tracks like this are a lot stronger than anything Bun B's recent album Trill OG. Drake's verse in particular is stronger than anything I've heard him do in a while, even as I'm guessing that Pimp C would have never heard of the guy, unless he happened to be a fan of Degrassi... 3.5/5

Mark Ronson feat. D'Angelo, "Glass Mountain Trust"
AM: D'Angelo sounds haunted--probably by that synth pipe organ--and increasingly determined, as he escapes, breaks out, and busts through the glass, only to find himself still trapped. Why he's warbling out of the side of his mouth, well, your guess is as good as mine, but it's nice to have him back for these four minutes. 4/5

NS: Ronson deserves credit for wresting a decent performance out of a man who seemingly Sly Stone'd his way out of the business a full decade ago. He deserves significantly less credit for electronically treating D'Angelo's (basically tuneful) bleatings. Or has D's voice just changed that much? Either way, vintage synths only count for so much with such a canned drum sound. 2.5/5

Willow Smith, "Whip My Hair"

AM: "Whip My Hair" stands as a testament to that most American of ideals: that we could all make a credible Rihanna song if our parents were rich enough. One need not know anything about haters and getting the party started to sing about them. 3.5/5

NS: On some level, it's fascinating. At ten years old, she represents the first American generation to have no institutional memory of 9/11--or, to put it another way, it's possible she was conceived at around the same time Voodoo came out. The song is otherwise screeching, repetitive junk, but at least the subject matter is blessedly ick-free. 1.5/5 

Neil Young, "Walk With Me"

AM: The 64 year-old rock god may be inconsistent these days, but that doesn't mean he can't still bring it. Lyrically, "Walk With Me" is Harvest material, but the sharp bite of Young's electric guitar has that Rust Never Sleeps crunch.  Good stuff, Lanois' production even gives the song a foreboding sense of atmosphere, though the outro could be trimmed. 4/5

NS: Unlike Brian Eno, I'll basically follow Neil's career wherever it goes, even as the prospect of a team-up with Daniel Lanois doesn't exactly excite this non-U2 fan. But with Lanois keeping his trademark electronic textures at a minimal level, Young's unadorned guitar-playing sounds as spirited as it would have in a different context 30 years ago. Would this be better with bass and drums? Maybe, but it's already a high-level Neil Young song. 4/5 

John Legend and The Roots feat. Common and Melanie Fiona, "Wake Up Everybody"
AM: John Legend one of those guys whose formal perfection as a vocalist makes him really boring, and his voice sounds too thin and passionless here to carry a wake the fuck up people-type R&B number. 2/5

NS: If this was 2008, "Wake Up Everybody" would have been a considerable step above what will.i.am accomplished in his Obama speech-in-single "Yes We Can." But now the 2010 midterms are upon us and "Wake Up Everybody" seems not only silly, but kind of sad. Common is a shot in the arm, but only in comparison to the sleepy-by-nature Legend. 2/5

Grinderman 2: A Real Cool Time?

Grinderman have a song called "No Pussy Blues." You probably know this if you've read a review of their debut, self-titled album, many of which were almost entirely given over to descriptions of the track. You may even have read about the song in the reviews of Grinderman 2, which does not feature "No Pussy Blues."

In an effort to dispel the myth that "No Pussy Blues" is the only Grinderman song, I'll take a look at the nine songs on the band's week-old sophomore effort. I also hope to debunk that other fiction, that the band, which includes Nick Cave, Martyn Casey, Warren Ellis, and Jim Sclavunos--four-sevenths of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds--hearken back to Cave's first group, the truly depraved Birthday Party. No ratings this time, since I don't feel like it.

1. Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man
Martyn Casey's strident bassline anchors Grinderman 2's fiery opener, with each note landing with the thud of a typewriter run through a stack of Marshalls (a typewriter can be heard at the start of...a certain song from the last album). The other Grindermen merely augment Casey. When the chorus hits, things explode outwards, in a mess of noise that would do Ron Asheton proud, while the verses are exercises in finely controlled tension. The lyrics--something about a just-awoken creep, his brother, and a "lupine child" who is literally aflame--are hardly Cave's finest moment, but his genius is as a performer, and this is a good performance.

2. Worm Tamer
Part of Grinderman's appeal is that such talented men have set their sights so low. "Worm Tamer" is a grimy song, with dirty lyrics that include the already-famous couplet "Well my baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster/Two great big humps and then I'm gone." All well and good, but Grinderman approach garage rock with nuance: the song rises and falls with its backing vocals, staggering along with the crunch of whatever strange instrument Ellis is playing, and generally sounding like the misplaced anger that consumes a man's head moments before he makes the sort of decision you cant un-make.

3. Heathen Child
Already written-up here. I've become more slightly fond of this song in the past six weeks. I still find the tension/release ratio, especially at the pivotal moment where tension becomes release, to be lacking, but the unsettling bounce gets me through. Love the part where Cave's rejoinder to our delusions is always "YOU ARE WRONG."

4. When My Baby Comes
Warren Ellis, who has come to be a dominant force in the Bad Seeds, plays throughout this album with an attention to texture rarely heard in rock music, on instruments like the bouzouki. The two halves of "When My Baby Comes" see him first painting a creeping disquiet, via knotted instrumentation and rude interjections, and then crafting a trance-like abandon (with a large assist from Casey's Mordor-ish bassline). It's no wonder he scores so many films.

The lyrics on "When My Baby Comes" are probably the most compelling on the album. Cave will recite two lines, sing the title, and then start again, picking up from a different point in space or time. Sung in the first-person, from an institution, they represent the fractured thoughts of a rape victim who dreads visiting hours and is linked to a mysterious, possibly fictional girl whose dealings on the narrator's carpet elicit great anxiety. The structure of the song, from the claustrophobic first half (which features nearly all the lyrics) to the molten ebbs and flows of the second part, mimic the the before and after of the narrator's tragic experience, but also an essentially disjointed mind.

5. What I Know
Consisting mostly of a simple, repeated thump and a quiet melange of stringed instruments, "What I Know" is a disarmingly beautiful track on an album that disavows Boatsman's Call-style gorgeousness. Cave, whose voice is far too loud in the mix, sounds intimate and resigned. The brief lines he spits out at the beginning work well, but he nearly ruins the track with his trademark tics near the end. Not the unequivocal success it might have been, but still mostly lovely.

6. Evil
There's a weird dynamic at work here, as Cave's foolish narrator declares his love for his baby in humiliating and desperate terms, while punkish backing vocals shout "evil!" and "evil rising!" Who's evil? The narrator? Nah, he's just a fool. Then his baby? Perhaps, but we know nothing about her. I suspect Cave is singing from some hellish place, where he feels compelled to pin all his miserable hopes on a woman with no distinguishing characteristics. Wherever the narrator sings, he sounds lost inside the howling noise. The vocals are probably too loud, again, but you don't really notice.

7. Kitchenette
The leering "Kichenette" supplies Grinderman 2's other moment of comedy: "What's this husband of yours ever given to you?/Oprah Winfrey on a plasma screen." Lyrically, this is the closest we get to a "No Pussy Blues" sequel, as Cave begs and pleads for the object of his desire to desert her husband and hideous children ("the ugliest kids I've ever seen") and allow him to make good on his single-entendres. The slowest song yet, all about the low-end, "Kitchenette" doesn't drag, but five minutes is a long time for a tune that exists to let Cave ham it up.

8. Palaces Of Montezuma
Perhaps the least Grinderman of all the tracks on Grinderman 2, "Palaces" wouldn't have sounded out of place among the careening rock and roll operettas of Abbatoir Blues and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! The presence of a piano may have something to do with that, as do the background vocals and complete absence of scuzz. Which is fine, since I think Abbatoir and Lazarus are unbelievable albums. Don't ask me what Miles Davis the black unicorn is supposed to be, though.

9. Bellringer Blues
"Bellringer" would also fit on Abbatoir Blues, which already had a bell-themed tune. For one, there's a more conscious literary bent here, with the talk of soul survivors a possible echo of Exile On Main Street's closer. It's a dense song--like most of the album, it sounds like the work of a much larger band--a T-storm's worth of thunder, lightning and screaming wind. In other words, a fitting end to an excellent album. Grinderman haven't yet put out anything to rival the Bad Seeds' very best, but nor do they sound like anybody's side project.

This Is Exactly What I Am Talking About

The Village Voice's Sound of the City blog just posted an interview with Animal Collective's Panda Bear (we reviewed his new single here), conducted by Stelios Phili (who must be new, I think), entitled "Q&A: Animal Collective's Panda Bear On How He Is Similar To Kanye West." The accompanying tweet, published minutes ago, makes sure to add the "@" in the "@kanyewest" part in. What is the nature of the conversation regarding Mr. West?

I can see how you'd view a solo album in that way, just being dependent on yourself and trusting your own judgment.

Does that mean I have a massive ego? Is there something wrong with that?

No! You're not Kanye, far from it.

I've never been to an award ceremony, so you never know. If you let me loose in that zone, I'm going to go crazy.

This is the sum total of references to how Mr. Bear is "similar to @kanyewest" in the entire article. It's a total aside that has more to do with the differences between Animal Collective and Panda Bear's solo career than it does with anything having to do with a popular rapper's preening, attention-whoring antics. Then Panda Bear makes a joke, and they move on to the subject of how guitar-heavy Tomboy will be. But, for some reason, there's the subject line for the whole article, in the vain fucking hope I suppose that maybe @kanyewest will retweet it to his thousands of followers.

And this is an article that otherwise allows Panda Bear to make interesting points, ranging from his various psychological approaches to writing music to his general response to negative reviews (from one Jim Derogatis). Sure, the tone is as kiss-assy as we have come to expect from the Voice (sample "question": "After living in Portugal with English as your main language, I imagine coming back here, where everyone wants to talk to you, is pretty jarring"), but it's not formless M.I.A. babble either, so that's a plus.

I'm going to continue to document this nonsense, even if it doesn't fall under the strict purview of music criticism, particularly as I become more entrenched in New York's music scene and the trendy, otherwise musically-ignorant vampires that feed from it. I previously referred to the Brooklyn music journo establishment as "click-hungry starfuckers" and I stand by that assertion now more than ever. Play us off, Mick:

Goddamnit Morrissey

Morrissey is again courting charges of racism with his claim that the Chinese are a "subspecies." It’s hardly the first time he’s made such provocations (around the sixth, I believe), and further indication that his admirable sympathy for animals outweighs his respect for people with darker skin than himself. It’s extremely dispiriting that a man of Morrissey’s intellect has learned nothing from previous controversies.

So what now? Morrissey has already released this non-apology

If anyone has seen the horrific and unwatchable footage of the Chinese cat and dog trade – animals skinned alive – then they could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation. There are no animal protection laws in China and this results in the worst animal abuse and cruelty on the planet. It is indefensible.

About which he is largely correct. But his willingness to paint the situation in terms of racial inferiority is at issue, not the live skinning of animals. Even his statement, which deems--I'm moving his words around here, but I think the meaning is present--the Chinese to be uncaring and cruel. As someone who cares about human and animal rights, I'm aware that horrible abuses take place in that country, but I don't think these abuses are due to subhuman characteristics, or that all Chinese people are responsible for what was likely decided by a small coterie of Beijing bureaucrats.

The Guardian’s Tom Clark notes that, as a singer, we can hardly call on Morrissey to resign. As a fan, I don’t even want that; his trio of 00’s releases, Years Of Refusal, Ringleader of the Tormentors, and You Are the Quarry, were all good-to-great, his best album-length product since the 80’s. Questionable lyrics have cropped up throughout his career—why exhort us to anti-DJ violence in “Panic,” and why doesn’t the “Bengali In Platforms” belong “here”? Although I don't many detect nativist sympathies, many hear them in "The National Front Disco."

These lyrics, along with the public statements Morrissey has made, are difficult to square with his embrace of his Hispanic fanbase. He dedicated 1999's Oye Esteban! tour to these fans, and famously procalimed he wished he was born Mexican. His 2004 comeback single, “First Of The Gang To Die,” was about a charming latino gangster.

I find it extremely odd that Morrissey adores the ethnic group who personify immigration in the United States, where he lived for nearly a decade, while vilifying British immigrants, as he did in 2008. Perhaps, as is so often the case with those who loudly denounce immigration, Morrissey simply doesn’t know the Britons of Bengali descent or Chinese people that he denounces. Maybe if, as with Mexican-Americans, large groups of British minorities became Morrissey fans, he might question his prejudices.

Maybe. But if Chinese people--or anyone else--decide they never want to hear from Morrissey again, I can't say I'd blame them.

Google Maps Is Not Art (Or, I Don't Give A Fuck About My Childhood Home)

Hey, remember what it was like to be a kid, all those years ago? Remember how carefree and energetic you were, how close your circle of elementary school buddies used to be? And then how you all drifted apart? And your parents, they used to be younger too, but now they're significantly older, their minds and bodies succumbing to rot and old age, a few miserable decades left to them at most? Doesn't that realization make you think of your own impending mortality? Doesn't that also make you sad? Don't you want to be a kid again now? Huh? Huh?

If you're a discerning Rockaliser reader, chances are the above questions strike you as banal and trifling, at best. And yet it's likely that, as a discerning fan of indie rock, the Arcade Fire remains one of your favorite bands, even though they've been harping on this same juvenile nostalgia trip for three albums and one EP. Their latest, The Suburbs, manages to literalize this misbegotten homesickness even further: it focuses on Win Butler's early life growing up outside Houston, and while it has significantly more chaff than the previous two LPs, there are still several songs I like a lot, such as the title track (previously reviewed here) and the spirited rocker (!) "Month Of May" (dunno how I feel about songs where the repeated mantra is "rococo rococo" however). Basically, it's a good album, even if it probably isn't enough of my bag to make it on my year-end list. As is the case with a lot of albums.

However. (This is a big however.) I'd like to direct you to a recent video, directed by Chris Milk, for the song "We Used To Wait." Or it's not really a video--it's billed as an "Interactive Film" that utilizes a lot of new HTML5 techniques to make each individual's viewing of the video a bit different. Optimally synchronized with Google Chrome, there's a note at the beginning asking you to type the address of your childhood home. Then the video is basically as follows:

A widescreen browser window pops up in the center of your computer monitor, featuring a set of feet moving swiftly down a dark, empty street. The feet are revealed to belong to a hooded, faceless sprinter who runs in time with the accompanying tune. The camera pans out slowly to show that dawn is approaching, or something. Then, another pop-up appears in the top left corner of your screen, this one featuring a bunch of featureless black birds clustered near a lonely cloud. The guy keeps running as the birds swoop down, and then you notice you're looking at a topside Google view of your neighborhood. Except, digital birds have been added, enough to make you wonder if Tippi Hedren is making a house call. At this point different pop-ups featuring the nameless runner move from corner to corner on your screen; the overhead camera zooms closer toward your house. Then, most terrifyingly, the viewer is treated to a series of shots of your old neighbors' cribs. Following that, the money shot: the runner finally stops to cool down...right in front of your house (in my case, it looked to be about mid-autumn when Google came cruising through my 'hood). The bird's eye zooms out again, and inexplicably another pop-up, this one a blank white space, tells you to "Write a postcard of advice to the younger you that lived there." So I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to write "This is fucking bullshit" in florid, distractingly branching type (drawing anything recognizable, on the other hand, is almost impossible). Then the runner dude pops up again, this time hoofing through negative white space, which leads to the grand finale: those birds perch themselves on your drawing, then fly back into your neighborhood, and together the runner and his bird friends leave a trail of trees that explode out of the ground like mushroom clouds, right in the middle of what is now your ecologically devastated neighborhood. The worst thing is that I already have a perfectly beautiful giant tree in my front yard that is apparently uprooted to make room for Whispy Woods from Kirby 64.

The point of this video couldn't be more clear if the filmmakers added blazing neon signs to every piece of symbolism: it's about your childhood, which is barely even a memory anymore, see? The idea, I guess, is that the viewer should be emotionally floored seeing a relic of his or her childhood, and will therefore be able to finally understand what Win Butler means when he makes inscrutable, Dylanesque points like "Sometimes, we remember bedrooms. And, our parents' bedrooms. And the bedrooms of our FRIENDS!" Freud would love this shit.

But I came away from this video wondering if I'd ever want to listen to the Arcade Fire's music again. I know for a fact that I can never listen to "We Used To Wait" again, period. Whatever value that song used to have in my mind, it has been completely supplanted by a revulsion to the basest form of marketing gimmickry. Is anyone else bothered by how lackadaisical indie bands seem to be about their songs being used as tools for burgeoning technology products and companies? I know that this has been going back at least as long as when U2 was shilling iPods (for free, granted), but this strikes me as a new low. The song becomes just as useless a piece of petty technology as all the cool Canvas 3-D engines and choreographed windows that supposedly represent the future of music videos.

I know I'm probably not the audience for this. Everyone has a relatively different idea of when MTV really started to suck, but I've always held it was from the very beginning: there's something about the music video form that, even at its best, doesn't do much besides sell products and rob people of the ability to think hard on the ineffability of great art. I don't need to tell you that music is an intensely subjective experience, but it's becoming harder and harder for anyone to be convinced that that should continue to be the case. Now all of a sudden, a certain song that was once a conduit for all different sorts of creative impulses is relegated to a particular gimmick or a particular actor. Not many people who watch music videos, I believe, does so because they want to listen to the music. It's a tool for promoting celebrity.

Now you could argue that the Arcade Fire video is a response to that, that by personalizing each viewer's experience the band and the director are bringing a bit of that lost subjectivity back. I don't think it works like that, however: it's even a worse type of imagination-hijacking. Personalized gimmickry is the worst type of gimmickry. What is to be gained by seeing your childhood home in the midst of all this CGI goop? What experience is being evoked other than a generalized Thomas Wolfe-whoops-there-goes-your-childhood malaise? There couldn't be any other reason for having the viewer write a letter to his or her childhood self, an act which should be right there in the dictionary, in big fucking bold letters, under "self-indulgent."

But beyond the goopiness of the premise, there's a sinister, more immediately pressing chewy nougat center. Even a few years ago, I feel it would make anyone uncomfortable to know that their home was being monitored for the purpose of a worldwide interactive map. The only thing the "We Used To Wait" video does relatively successfully is illustrate in Orwellian terms how this country is slowly becoming the world's biggest surveillance state. This isn't a criticism meant to slight the band specifically, since they are from Canada (where the process of monitoring its citizens is a bit more lax, I imagine). But it does suggest uncomfortable facts about the secret surveillance tactics our Executive Branch has been utilizing, unchecked, since 9/11. And if you think that this is less of a concern now that Obama is president, I suggest you read a series of investigative articles entitled "Top Secret America," all published a few months ago in the Washington Post. We as citizens have virtually no say over where the federal government chooses to put video cameras or whom it chooses to wiretap. I've seen the effects of this firsthand: a few days ago, I went down to Harlem by Columbia University with a friend of mine. The immediate area around the heavily-fortified campus looked like a ghost town, and it didn't take me long to realize the reason: there were video cameras pointed at every sidewalk, on every block, even in the alleyways. This was not the case at all five years ago. As one of the articles notes, government officials have to utilize specifically eavesdrop-proof rooms to prevent federal leaks; meanwhile, children are now being taught in elementary school that privacy doesn't exist, and everything they do from a young age will be monitored and judged well into adulthood.

And since this is essentially a Google Chrome project, we can't leave out Google's role in forcibly extracting our search histories, monitoring our e-mails and phone calls, and deriving that knowledge as a means to target our needs and desires with money-directed advertising. And speaking of Orwellian, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently quoted as saying that "if you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Is this the man you want to be teaming up with your favorite band?

All this may sound like a far cry from an innocuous interactive video that utilizes a few cool map features. Then again, maybe not. The thing is, it's hard to find a major indie band today that won't whore itself out as long as the cause is benign enough, or as long as the song is shilling for some cool gadget or marketing scheme. The uncool thing, now, is to take artists to task for doing bullshit Converse ads because, after all, there's degrees to selling out, it's all relative, and what's wrong with getting paid if you're essentially allowed to write the same music you would anyway? It's hard to argue with that viewpoint on an aesthetic level. How long until we just do away with albums altogether, and we just download the Arcade Fire app and instead look at the tweets regarding all the incestuous dealings of your favorite bands, see which rapper from Young Money cameos in the new Vampire Weekend video? MTV showed that the logical extension of music videos was doing away with music altogether--how long until our most beloved indie bands start following that same route?

I really don't want to sound strident. For one thing, I don't plan on blaming the Arcade Fire when this country completes its slow slide towards North Korea-type dynastic statism. But they are from Canada--they come from the same country that gave us Neil Young. Could you imagine Mr. Young using one of his song as a vehicle for compartmentalized, dehumanized nostalgia? Has it come to the point where our childhood homes are used as a commodity, sold and resold to us decade by decade, as our memory of what actually made childhood so enjoyable is replaced by visions of intrusive digital trees? As I said before, I already have a perfectly good tree in my old front yard. It has a tunnel. Sometimes when I go back, I eat lunch on its steps. I don't imagine it will be going anywhere soon. But fuck a Google when they come to bulldoze it down.

Critical Beatdown: Round 9

Grinderman, "Heathen Child"

NS: Though I'm disappointed that the version of "Heathen Child" featuring Robert Fripp has yet to make the Internet rounds, there's enough to dig here in the meantime, most obviously Grinderman's patented lascivious groove. Not an immediate classic (it kind of meanders), but Cave sings and everyone else plays at the top of their game. 3.5/5

AM: There's something not quite right about "Heathen Child." On the one hand, if this evil boogie moved onto your block, you wouldn't let your children play near it. On the other, there's too much build up, not enough release. 3.5/5

Panda Bear, "Slow Motion"

NS: I like this more than "Bros," actually. Certainly, the beat is snappier than AC/Panda Bear fans are probably accustomed to (I predict a Kanye sample in 2011). And the timbre is as lush as we have come to expect from Mr. Bear. 4/5

AM: The stuttery, head-snapping rhythm recalls Madlib, of all people, while the reverb soaked, chant-y vocals do indeed achieve a state of suspended animation. A song like this doesn't go anywhere because it doesn't need to. 4/5

Bethany Cosentino, Kid Cudi and Rostam Batmanglij, "All Summer"

NS: This collabo between Best Coast's singer, Vampire Weekend's lead guitarist and the erstwhile Transformers soundtracker strikes me as a perfect summer jam to play on repeat in hell. Alternating between Cudi's awkward non-verses (which kind of linger without significant accompaniment) and Cosentino's vacuous chorus, it shouldn't surprise anyone that this travesty was written for a Converse commercial. 0.5/5

AM: Music so meaningless as to render any judgment of quality moot. 2.5/5

Marnie Stern "For Ash"

NS: Marnie's latest is as riff-tastic as ever, a mini-suite of furious strumming, chanting and fret-tapping (an area in which Stern really distinguishes herself--Battles aside, she's probably the best in the biz). While there's no reason to think this couldn't have been on her last album, the charm remains intact. 4.5/5

AM: She yelps like Avey Tare, and this song taps into the prismatic melodies of Animal Collective's best work. Marnie and her guitar get there in their own fashion, shelving the abrasive, metallic sound she usually favors for a fleetness that allows "For Ash" to sprint along in spasmodic bliss. 4.5/5

Eminem feat. Rihanna, "Love The Way You Lie"
NS: I don't want to accuse Rihanna of attempting to benefit from her won experiences with domestic abuse, but I wonder why she felt the need to lend her voice to yet another one of Eminem's hyperviolent, self-loathing rants, narrated by a repentant Chris Brown type. Even if the tone was different, the song is still junk: if this beat isn't another jack from Dido, it might as well be. 1.5/5

AM: I get that Eminem likes to rap in character, and I realize Rihanna is on an edginess offensive. But the moronic "twist" here makes my stomach churn for all the wrong reasons. Sonically, it offers nothing that that Plan B album didn't in 2006, when he was ripping off Eminem. 1.5/5

Estelle Feat. Nas, "Fall In Love"

NS: "American Boy" goodwill will only get you so far. This song is obviously meant to evoke that 2008 classic, down to the basic rhythm of the thing and the way her voice dips down when singing the title. What's weirder is that, in addition, Nas basically parrots Kanye's part. 3/5

AM: "American Boy" was better the first time around. Every aspect of this song is about 60% as infectious as it was on that one. 3/5

Fucked Up "Year Of The Ox"

NS: That a 13-minute punk track doesn't run out of ideas halfway through is, already, triumphant. That said track manages to throw in some lovely string passages and at least a half-dozen great guitar lines suggests overwhelming talent and ambition. This whopper of a rock tune might even top COCL's greatest moments. 5/5

AM: My original "Ox" write-up noted that the violin is too sugary, that the guitars never accumulate their pummeling sheen. Which is true. But then I listened to it five more times, and realized: with a sound this huge--and "Ox" sounds massive, even for Fucked Up--singling out one element misses the point. "Year Of The Ox" just keeps growing, oblivious to its own imperfections, until it encompasses a handful of moments as transcendent as any in the band's catalog. 4/5

Let's Wrestle "I'm So Lazy"

NS: Heavy shades of GBV here, which I cannot stress enough is not necessarily a good thing. The singer's voice seems distractingly off at times, and I probably wouldn't have noticed that if "I'm So Lazy" was two minutes shorter. It ain't exactly harmful, but still... 2.5/5

AM: The charm and hooks that colored Let's Wrestle's debut are blessedly present, albeit in somewhat shorter supply. The sloth extends to the tempo, but churning power-pop is always a good thing, even when it's sluggish. 3.5/5

Public School Teachers Have Opinions About Music, Too

You know something that the Washington press corps and the Brooklyn music-crit cognoscenti have in common? They both get bugs up their respective asses whenever non-professionals decide to try out what they (Washington/Brooklyners) do. If you've been following this whole story about the backlash against Andrew Breitbart's recent hit piece on Shirley Sherrod, for instance, you've probably seen a few articles or newscasts to the tune of "disrespectful bloggers and anonymous commenters attempting journalism HARUMPH!" Or, to put it another way, you get a lot of tsk-tsking about the state of our current (admittedly mindless) political discourse from the type of people who assiduously avoid asking politically harmful questions in the face of two mounting wars, the type of people who furthermore have no trouble quoting anonymous hearsay from a few former journo pals.

Music critics are a similarly cagey bunch (in the sense of "this is my cage it is for me only get the fuck out"), especially in Brooklyn. Some strike me as little more than click-hungry starfuckers, as a matter of fact. And they seem to be more in the business than ever of mocking the opinions of average New Yorkers. This post isn't meant to name names (maybe someday I'll compile a list), but I'd like to point to a recent (admittedly jokey) example of this sort of tribalism here.

What we have here is a piece posted on Sound of the City, a Village Voice blog, written by critic Rob Harvilla, entitled "New York Magazine's 'Jukebox' Feature Returns To Mercilessly Antagonize Us Once Again." It's an insider-y thing about the return of a running feature in New York magazine in which three New York denizens/music fans are asked to rate recent releases on a ten-point scale. Needless to say, Harvilla finds the opinions of Mike the Lawyer, 31, James the Literary Agent, 60, and Nicole the Public School Teacher, 30, to be hopelessly banal:

Your answers are "Big Boi is probably the best M.C. in the game," "The whole album gets you up on your feet," and "I know that if I heard some of these songs in a club, it would put me in a good mood, ready to dance, because the melodies and beats are great," respectively. Further indignities are visited upon Francis and the Lights ("It put me in a let's-go-out-and-have-frozen-yogurt-and-figure-out-what- we-are-going-to-do-tonight mood"), Sheryl Crow ("The record made me feel introspective and positive about life"), and you, oh lover of half-literate rock writing, left with no recourse but to invent future very probably apocryphal New Yorker stereotypes: The Surly Hot Dog Vendor, the Gurgling Baby in a Park Slope Stroller, the Guy From the Bronx We Were Too Scared to Actually Talk To, The Otherwise Exemplary NYC Publication That Needs An Actual Full-Time Music Critic, Like, Five Years Ago.

Let's be fair: Harvilla isn't actually trying to imply that only those with proper training are allowed to discuss or write about music (no professional critic would argue something that pompous and self-aggrandizing! [wait never mind]). His problem would be, at least I hope, that New York Magazine has a New York Times-like problem of soliciting only the opinions and views of upper-class Manhattanites. On one level he could be arguing something important: that maybe the Features editors of metropolitan newspapers or magazines could look a little beyond their own communities, perhaps interview a 24-year old meat packer from Harlem, say, rather than another 60-year old literary agent. If this feature was more than a day old (and I know it used to exist in a different form), and that's the kind of thing New York kept doing, then there would be an excellent idea for a blog piece.

But that doesn't seem to be his main beef. His problem is with the opinions of the citizen journalists themselves. Voice critics may disagree with Plebeian #1's assertion that "Big Boi is probably the best in the game," and that might not be the kind of thing that would make it through the copy desk (and how could it be true, after all, if Drake's album just went platinum?), but it's not that absurd of a statement, and in truth he could probably make as good a case in the affirmative as any Rob Harvilla could in the negative. This is exactly the type of Armond White behavior that paints criticism as a whole in a self-satisfied, bitchy light. Mike the Lawyer might be a lawyer, perhaps even a rich, evil lawyer, but it says in the article that he got his ass beat for defending Pet Sounds, and in my mind that affords him more legit rock cred than writing for the Voice. More importantly, Mike, James and Nicole all seem to like entirely different kinds of music, which again puts it ahead, diversity-wise, of the Voice (certainly, Harvilla and co. would never describe themselves as mainly fans of "classic and indie rock").

They could be regular-ass white people with boring lives and boring jobs, but you can be surprised by how genuine and affecting boring white people's love for music can be, how life-changing it may have been in certain situations, even if otherwise they don't have the time or the compunction to constantly go to shows or decode the latest nonsense spouted by MIA.

In other words, Rob the Music Critic, 27*: I have no beef with you or the types of artists you like to listen to. And in truth I don't know much about "apocryphal New York stereotypes," nor am I much interested in finding out (when I go to NYU, I plan to cover my ears and scream loudly whenever the subject is mentioned). But I don't see how you can find Jukebox to be a bad idea in chrysalis. Citizen criticism is all over the Web: it's what you're reading right now. Some of it's getting to be pretty good. Some of it (gasp) could be written by lawyers.

*I made up Harvilla's age so I could put that writerly bullshit above. Sorry.