Review: Death Cab for Cutie, "Codes and Keys"

Codes and Keys
Death Cab for Cutie
Atlantic
05.31.11

As Beck and Damon Albarn know all too well, your celebrity fantasy girlfriend only becomes a proper muse when she leaves you. Much cyberink has been spilled by Death Cab for Cutie fans in the months leading up to their latest album, Codes and Keys, especially since signing with Atlantic brought them perilously close to following Kings of Leon down the Grammy trail to hell with Plans -- a situation the band only saved itself from by taking a hard right turn into the darkness with the followup, 2008's Narrow Stairs. 

And then lead singer and songwriter Ben Gibbard goes and pledges his troth, whatever that means, to former indie It girl Zooey Deschanel. So we can go ahead and write off these post-indie Pacific Northwest sweethearts once and for all, right? Well, not exactly. Yes, Ben's lyrical edge has become dulled considerably -- nothing like falling in love to inspire a line like "When there's a burning in your heart / An endless yearning in your heart / Build it bigger than the sun", from Codes'  leadoff single, "You Are A Tourist." (This coming from the man who once sang "We'll pretend that it meant something / so much more / But it was vile, and it was cheap.")  And there's also something else to consider: a new and disturbingly severe adult-contemporary Pro Tools polish that distances Ben emotionally. Gone is the in-your-ear confessional of Transatlanticism, probably for good.

The good news is that the band's actual sound is more fascinating than ever, a coalescing of their various ideas about what it means to be a true pop romantic and yet have a bra in and a knack for atmosphere -- at this point, they're the Walkmen without angst, the Flaming Lips without affectation, Coldplay with songs. Much of the credit for that goes to the arrangements of My Bloody Valentine alumnus and alt-rock mainstay Alan Moulder, who airbrushes the sounds together into a new pop impressionism in the same way that the band synthesizes their influences. More importantly, he also keeps dragging in dark elements to keep Gibbard on his toes. So "Home Is A Fire" sounds nervous when Ben isn't, and "Doors Unlocked and Open" comes on with a deceptive attack much tougher than the sentiment behind it.

Death Cab for Cutie may be more mainstream by now than their old fans would ever care to admit -- there's an almost ominous twinge of '80s prog in the melody of "Unobstructed Views" -- but they still give great texture, and Ben remains genuine enough to make you wonder what's so bad about feeling good, especially since he's smart enough not to trust his new happiness completely. Most love songs don't have a hook like "night is gonna fall and the vultures will surround you."

Graded using the Third Eye Method:
Impact: 52. 
The production takes the focus off Ben, which is not good for a romantic. However, his approach has always been more universal than personal, so it's a minor setback.    
Innovation: 68.
They may be settling into graceful middle-age, but they're not becoming obvious. This could well be the future of MOR rock.
Integrity: 77.
Sunny and positive may not be what you want from Death Cab, but it's a convincing argument all the same.

In Defense Of: "Ice Ice Baby"

(This is the first installment of a sometime series in which I attempt to defend

 the culturally indefensible, inasmuch as I can. You're welcome.)

I know what you think of Vanilla Ice. You consider him a pampered, idiotic douchebag, a co-opter of black culture, a shameless opportunist refusing to acknowledge his own cultural nothingness, a one-hit blunder from the early '90s, the Pat Boone of rap. And you know what? You're absolutely right. Robert Matthew Van Winkle, a/k/a Vanilla Ice, absolutely deserves his place in the pantheon of pop-culture punchlines. 

This did not help.

Except that one hit song? It's actually pretty tight. And while that's not something I can prove, per se, I can show you that he came by that hit honestly; that even though he started smelling his own farts immediately after becoming a sensation, the song that got him there was good enough to set anyone's career off.

For one thing, Ice was already a local hero in Miami when he made "Ice Ice Baby." Mostly for dancing at local clubs, sure, and he was radiating doucheyness even back then, but he could rap. He did. On stage at a place called City Lights. And in 1989, a white rapper was still more or less a novelty; the Beastie Boys had moved three million units of Licensed to Ill three years earlier, but then they made the mistake of growing as artists, and Paul's Boutique didn't have that many guitars on it, leading a number of trend-chasing mouth-breathers to prematurely write them off as a novelty act.

No, seriously, that happened.

Anyway.

Ice got some notice at City Lights, opening for established hip-hop and R&B stars; he was no Rakim, or even LL Cool J, but he could rap better than some other black folks, like, say, MC Hammer, who'd just broken through big, winning the dance-rap sweepstakes with Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em, a monster that kicked off the dance-rap genre and, oh yeah, toppled Licensed to Ill as the best-selling rap album to that time. The stage was set for someone to follow up, although Van Winkle probably didn't think he'd be the one when he cut "Ice Ice Baby," a song he'd written with local black turntablist DJ Earthquake. Earthquake was the one who came up with the lyrical hook -- it was taken from a fraternity chant. A black frat.   

It was supposedly Ice himself who rifled through his brother's rock record collection to find the Queen/David Bowie collaboration "Under Pressure," the opening bass line of which drives "Ice Ice Baby." Most whites at the time weren't aware of the practice of sampling records for beats, and so when Ice (on the advice of his manager), held off crediting Queen/Bowie with the riff, denying them royalties until the song was already rocketing up the Top 10, the backlash was already beginning. It didn't help, when he was confronted with this fact, that he offered the lamest excuse ever.  

Neither did this.

Back to the backstory. Ice made the 12" of the song, but only as a b-side to a "cover" of Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music." Here's where the legitimacy kicks in: the single flopped until DJ Darrell Jaye of Columbus, GA accidentally flipped it over and started playing "Ice Ice Baby" for his listeners. The lines lit up, mostly with people who thought Ice was black. He was, it seemed, too good to be white. Ice responded by making his now-famous video for the song, costing a cool eight thousand dollars. But MTV didn't break it. The Box did.

The Box (out of Miami!) was the video channel that played videos too black for MTV. In the late Eighties, it broadcast itself into urban outlets using regular, old-school UHF signals, and made its money by flashing a pay 900 number that would let you make requests. It was purely democratic, and purely black: you had to live in the inner city and spend your money to hear the song. And they did. MTV took notice.

Ice's manager, City Lights owner Tommy Quon, noticed that the rapper's backstory was very similar to Elvis Presley's, and so the ad campaign was to market Vanilla as the "Elvis of Rap." Unlike the King, however, Ice had no range, nothing to say, no songwriters, zero street cred, and a smug personality that put people off almost immediately. The song itself was perfect -- a solid hook, a big beat, and lyrics that were above the norm for dance-rap -- and the accompanying album, To The Extreme, sold a cool seven million. (Mainly because the record label refused to issue a 45; if you wanted the single, you had to buy the whole album.) 

Unfortunately, Ice's asshole personality, the mountain of hype, and whites' ingrained resistance to rap meant he was doomed almost immediately; he wasn't street enough to be taken seriously as a hip-hop artist, didn't have the attitude to become an all-around mainstream entertainer, and didn't have the hooks to last on the dance floor. "Play That Funky Music" was the followup single, and it flopped yet again, proving just how superior "Ice Ice Baby" was to the rest of his material. Soon, he was out.

That didn't stop the execs who smelled blood, however. Vanilla had dropped his single six months after Hammer's juggernaut; that December, this was unleashed upon the world:

Now that is a bad one-hit wonder.

Despite the fact that he was clearly fucking awful, the music business wanted so badly to hit white-rap gold that they suckered George Clinton, of all people, into Gerardo's next video in order to give him funk cred. It didn't work. Six months later, the excellent Delicious Vinyl label, which had done more than its share to get pop into the mainstream, tried to hit the frat-rap jackpot with a white kid named Jesse Jaymes. The result, produced by the Dust Brothers, was almost as good as the brothers' Delicious Vinyl productions for Tone Loc ("Wild Thing," "Funky Cold Medina") and Young MC ("Bust A Move"): 

At the same time, however, Snow, a white kid from the projects of Toronto, made the charts with his one hit, which tried to sell him as the white Shabba Ranks:







It didn't work, even though he had a black Jamaican producer. Because white people didn't know there were projects in Toronto. Actually, what probably shut Snow's career down was a little record that dropped just as the hit, "Informer," was falling off the charts. That album was called The Chronic, and as you probably know, it changed everything forever. Suddenly, a black man (or men, rather) could sell real hip-hop to whites.

Available on eBay.

The douche-rap, frat-rap, dance-rap phenomenon was over. But rockers who had been listening to real hip-hop soon got into the game, leading to the milestone that was the Judgment Night soundtrack, and also leading to Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Papa Roach, and other things best not thought about. The white-rap phenomenon would have to wait a few years for someone with unassailable flow and cred, some kid from Detroit named Marshall Mathers. Whatever happend to him, anyway? He was pretty good.


I'll let Ice, or rather his handlers, have the final say and sum up the era with a quote from Ice Ice Ice, a paperback book rushed out to capitalize on his 15 minutes, and one which he obviously didn't have a thing to do with. Here is a culturally tone-deaf (paraphrased) excerpt from something called "Ice's Def Dictionary," in which the author explains those funny terms black folks use:

Word To Your Mother: A phrase meaning "that's cool" or "that's def."* 

Usually, it's said as "Word to the mother," but Ice always says 

"Word to your Mother," which means "Always listen to your mother."

*no. 

The Loaded Question: 5.27.11

How will we know when the world really is coming to an end?

The Third Eye Method

or, how to be a pretentious snot in your spare time

"It was Plato who first put words to the Theory of Forms... for example, there exists in the world of ideas a perfect chair. This is the ideal chair, the chair of which all chairs in our world are dilutions, imperfect variants, and lesser shades of. This is the chair which embodies absolute chairness; it is the reference chair." -- Simon Parkin

"The Blues are beautiful because it’s simpler and because it’s real. It’s not perverted or thought about: It’s not a concept, it is a chair; not a design for a chair but the first chair. The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music." -- John Lennon


As I posted previously, there is such a thing as good taste in music. It can be proven. But having beaten that particular dark horse to death, I'm going to put my lack of money where my mouthpiece is and give you my very own system for rating music. It's one I've been developing for a while, and the good news is that anyone can do it, professional or not -- but the success you have at rating music is, I have to warn you, proportional to just how much music you've heard.

So what do we look for in a musical piece -- a song or an album? Ratings systems are usually pretty haphazard; they're either unnecessarily complicated or shockingly arbitrary. I've come up with something called The Third Eye Method, which works as a nice metaphor for being able to see things more deeply than others, but is really just a mnemonic that reminds you we're talking about three qualities that begin with the letter I. Diamonds, for example, are judged by four Cs: Cut, Clarity, Carat, and Color. But songs take a lot less time to form than diamonds, so I'm doing it in three: Impact, Invention, Integrity. 


1. Impact.


Any teenager knows impact. In fact, it's most young people's introduction to music: that club beat or guitar riff or crazy vocal that hits you dead in the face, and maybe changes your life. The record industry, ever-mindful of that coveted 18-34 age group, wants you to rock out or get crunk or whatever. It's what drives the money. They know your hormones are caught up in such things like a cow stuck in a fence. It's why rock and roll came along in the first place. Same goes for soul, disco, metal, punk, and hip-hop. Loud, fast, hard, clean.

At the same time, there is such a thing as emotional impact, and this is where pop music rules -- the achingly tender ballad, the sweet love song, the catchy hook that earworms you at work all day. It's the crack, this impact, the drug that makes you come back. It has to move something: your head, your ass, your heart. And it must do so simply and, above all, efficiently. Boredom equals death.

Artists that score high on Impact: AC/DC. Ramones. The Mars Volta. The Sonics. Public Enemy. NWA. Andrew WK. Most hardcore punk and real metal. But Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes hold down the sensitive end.
Artists that don't: Coldplay, Bon Jovi, boy bands, any Kidz Bop song. Anything lame. You'd be surprised what a general consensus the "cool kids" always have on lameness.


2. Invention.

This one's also easy for most casual music listeners. Have you heard something that sounds like this before? If no one has, congratulations, you just scored high on I number two. This is the aspect of popular music that eventually drives the industry, but the changes happen much more slowly. More of a geological movement, really. But slow moving tectonic plates can cause earthquakes. 

Remember that band you heard when they first came out, and for years you went around telling all your friends about them, but no one cared? And then one day, they were all over the radio, or a band that sounded like them was all over the radio? That's the eventual power of invention: the new sound. It's the kind of thing that only real musicians can do, because they have to stitch seemingly disparate ideas together in their heads and make them work somehow. And that takes time. The good news is, if you invent it, you can suck on that tit forever. You are master of your domain.

Artists that score high on Invention: Velvet Underground. Zappa (no pun). Pere Ubu. Hendrix. Coltrane. Radiohead. Mindless Self-Indulgence. Outkast. TV on the Radio. Anything Mike Patton does.
Artists that don't: The bands that kind of sound like these bands, but not as good. The ones that showed up after they paved the way, and got on the radio. The copycats.


3. Integrity.   

This I is the hard one, the one that usually separates the pros from the bros. It has nothing to do with a moral interpretation of music: this is integrity the way it's used in structural engineering, the sturdiness of an object, the strength of it. What is the song trying to be? Does anyone do this kind of thing better? Is the song conveying a sentiment, or expressing it, rather than merely indicating it? Is the epic truly epic? Does the artist's grasp match his reach -- that is, can he/she/they pull off everything they're attempting? Is she making those tricky jumps or falling on her ass? Can he play the damn thing the way it needs to be played? Is this going somewhere? Is there a point? Is it for real? 

You usually have to log a lot of hours to answer these questions. The good news is that there's already a music critic/fan canon full of immortals who cannot be denied, who sink the shot just about every damn time. You don't have to try anything fancy or new, necessarily, but whatever you attempt, you must pull off.

Artists that score high on Integrity: The gods that walk as men. The Beatles. Led Zeppelin. Hank Sr. Metallica. Jay-Z. Beck. Prince. Pink Floyd. The Wu-Tang Clan.
Artists that don't: Pretty much anyone on American Idol. Black Eyed Peas. Any sellouts. Any posers. Michael fucking Bolton. Justin fucking Bieber.      


So you can see that any work of art serves a practical use, just as any work of commerce: it should create an immediate and intense connection with the ordinary man, it should do so in a way that has not been done before, and it should be able to maintain that connection through craftsmanship. In other words,  the chair must be comfortable, new, and sturdy.   


Now the rest is simple, at least the way I do it: Grade each of the Is on a scale of 1 to 100 (no sense in not being as exact as possible), then average the three scores out. Each 20 points is roughly equivalent to a star in a five-star rating system: 50 is 2 1/2 stars, 80 is a four-star album, anything above 90 can generally be considered an instant five-star classic. 

It's not easy, taking such a mercurial construct as music and attaching cold hard numbers to it, and there's no guarantee something which is technically excellent will push your buttons. But it's important to be able to articulate anything that has so much control over our emotions, hell, even our bodies.. Writing about music is not, as the saying goes, like dancing about architecture: architecture is rigid yet stylish, like writing. It's more like the other way around. So what you can do is take your knowledge of architecture -- and terpsichore -- and build a museum devoted to dancing. And there's no reason to let clumsy people determine what goes in there. 

Monopoly cards for the New Great Depression

Free Parking doesn't get you anything

Everyone around the world is familiar with the beloved game of Monopoly. You know Monopoly. It's the board game where you spend two hours (if you play it correctly) or three hours (if you don't) slowly tightening the financial noose around your friends until you're able to toss them out into the street to starve.

This is hilarious for at least three reasons:

1. Monopoly was based on The Landlord's Game, a teaching device meant to expose how landlords bled tenants dry.
2. That game was eventually stolen by one Charles Darrow, who'd lost his job after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
3. It made Darrow a millionaire. The inventor of the Landlord's Game wound up with a cool $500.

Monopoly taught generations to become ruthless capitalists, including me. (The secret to winning? Buy as much property as you can, as fast as possible, no matter what you have to do to get it.) But the original game became outdated, especially those pesky Chance and Community Chest cards. "Poor tax"? "Building and Loan"? "Life insurance"?

A few years back, Parker Brothers Hasbro finally updated the old cards for a modern audience, and as you might have guessed, the result looks like shit. So I've kept the stylish old look of the original cards, yet added some new ideas for what the kid of the 21st century will have to expect. This is the first set. Enjoy!

Douchebooking Like a Boss

No, person on my friends list, it's not about you

I don't need to tell you about Facebook. Facebook is God. It is the new drug of choice. Its many tentacles reach into our online experience like so many strangers' hands in our pants. To call it all-encompassing is to fail to fully encompass the hyphenate "all-encompassing." It touches everyone, like a Oscar-winning drama, or a Senator. And so it has come to revolutionize everything about our lives, even the time-honored, decade-old tradition of being a jackass on the internet.

Used to be, you'd get on the webs in little clumps of nerds and argue landmark rulings like Kirk v. Picard with no real fear of reprisal; since you didn't know these people sending out these little smoke signals, you could a) try and socialize, making new friends across the world, or b) vent all your pent-up frustration and alienate the shit out of everyone, for fun. The latter became known as "trolling," the former became "social networking."

Arrrr, beware of them what fly the flag.

Social Networking won that battle, and Facebook raped the prisoners of war. Look! There's your Aunt, talking to your ex-fiance and your high school crush and your co-worker about that thing you do with your finger! Ew. Except that in the process, all your leftover "friends" from Web 1.0 forgot to straighten up and fly right. The result is a community of very nice, more or less socially well-adjusted people plagued by a random smattering of asshats who can't understand why the internets didn't give them a lifetime pass for random douchery.

Hence, douchebooking.

Look, we've all slipped up. It's like saying something awkward at a cocktail party. It happens to the best of us. But the true douchebooker not only makes these mistakes on a constant, near-daily basis, they fail to understand that their glaring, outmoded personality flaws are as grating a blast from the past as the sound of a dialup modem.

Here's a field guide to douchebookers. Again, I've made about half of these mistakes myself. It's okay to find you've impersonated one of these people; just don't be one of them.

The "actual" asshole. Beginning most of your Facebook comments with "actually" is a great way to piss people off.  It sets you up, in your own mind, anyway, as the Sole Arbiter of Truth. This works especially well if the fact you're refuting is trivial and buried in a much larger point, or isn't a fact at all but an opinion. "Actually, 78.4 percent of Americans are Christians, not 76 percent. And actually, Jesus IS the son of God, which you'd know if you'd read the Bible."

The threadjacker. Loves to take over a thread, usually to make it all about them, specifically commenting with something no one could possibly want to start a thread about. "Cute shoes on that rape victim! I have a pair like that!"

You don't have to look like this to
douchebook, but it doesn't hurt.

The political zealot. Polite conversation is a great place to assault everyone with your detailed worldview on what should be done with everyone's money! It's not like it's religion or anything, just a very dogmatic and rigid position you hold on personal matters that affect everyone. "That Justin Bieber video is a perfect example of why the top marginal tax rate should be lowered to -3 percent."

The edgy idiot. This is the guy you used to only meet drunk in bars, the guy that decided long ago it was safer to just hurt people first. His "humor" is legendary, not for making people happy, but for putting him in the hospital. He thinks jokes are little balls of undisgested hate. He thinks casting aspersions on the sexuality of a rival sports team is the height of wit. He does not understand the phrase "too soon." "I guess those tsunami victims no so horny anymore!!!"

The cyberstalker. Despite what Nancy Grace tells your mom, there's not a whole hell of a lot the police can do about this guy. He wants to fuck you. He figures that you haven't given in because he hasn't told you enough times. The amount of attention he pays your posts is directly proportional to your relationship status. He systematically "likes" every photo and comment you've ever made. "You and ur friend are so hot!! We should hook up in a 3way j/k lol"

The self-involved artiste. In between inviting you, a stranger, to every event he organizes, this douchebooker must also drop references to his band/novel in every single comment. He has a pathological need to let you know he's on his way up, and that you will be glad you got in on the ground floor, wink wink. "Dude, we do a song like that! And Trent Reznor goes to the same bar as my bass player. You should come see us. Only a matter of time."

Somebody's into you!

The man of the future. Remember that post you made two hours ago? Totally useless. Johnny on the Spot here has the update. That's what you get for not existing in the moment, and also for having a job. "Ha! Perez Hilton says that TMZ is wrong about that!"

The time traveler. Has the ability to alter the space-time continuum in order to go back and see that band before you did. Also has special powers that allow him to have already known something for years once he sees it on Wikipedia. "Yeah, everyone knows  harold   Davies was first chosen to represent Wales in the 1922 Five Nations Championship game against France, but was replaced shortly before kick off, along with Swansea's Frank Palmer, by Cliff Richards and Islwyn Evans.^[3]"


The airport tarmac. Wandering around in a perpetual fog and being completely lost as to the nature of the conversation is no reason not to put your two cents in. After all, the internet belongs to everyone, especially you. "LOL! I have particle physics going on to. IN MY PANTS"

The superficial skimmer. Doesn't really care about you or what you're going through, just wants to drop a few likes before lunch so that they can feel like they care. Which is the most important thing. Drops in at the end of a thread that has long since moved on and confuses the shit out of everyone.
"And that's why you should always use brown sugar in the crust."
"I wonder what she'll look like in 20 years! LOL"

The Kevin Bacon. Knows everyone, or at least has met, or talked to, or made a latte for, someone famous. Must mention it. MUST MENTION IT. "Yeah, I love Oasis too! Well, not really. But Noel? He's kinda short."

Maybe.

The substitute teacher. Magically takes whatever it is you enjoy and replaces it with a link to something that's even better! Maybe. "I can think of about a half-dozen better Radiohead songs. Also, if you like these guys you should totally check out Kings of Leon."

The paranoid narcissist. Thinks your status update is about them, but won't confront you with it directly, because years of meth has wiped out the part of their brain that gauges reality. "Oh, I see. That's interesting. ;) I guess I see how it is. LOL"

The passive aggressor. Makes sure their status update is about you, or at least, someone definitely on their friends list. Otherwise, why vaguebook? And why issue threats with a smile? "I guess some people aren't the friends I thought they were. Guess I'll have to start getting rid of some people in my life. Too bad, fuckers :)"

Remember:

If you wouldn't say it at a party, don't say it on Facebook. 

We can see you.

Cake and Policy

There are four major schools of political thought in America: Liberals, Conservatives, Progressives, and Libertarians. Here’s how to tell them apart.

Liberals think everyone should get an equal slice of cake. Like, calibrated to within one micron. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, or how many people die of starvation from lack of cake, or how much money is spent, everyone will get an equal slice of cake. Even if they’re not actually hungry. Or they didn’t buy any of the ingredients. Or they don’t like cake.

An American.

Conservatives think the people who make the cake should get more than those just sitting at the table, which is why the cook weighs 500 pounds and is smeared with frosting. He also likes to take your cake away when you’re not looking, or buy your slice from you by giving you a coupon for two pieces of cake. Of which there is no more.

Progressives want everyone to pool all their ingredients to make a cake; that way, it’s fair for everyone to get a piece. Enjoy your slice made of lint and hair. Also, the cook is wondering when he’s getting paid.

Libertarians think this could all be resolved if everyone just made their own damn cake. Except the cook just loaded the oven into the back of a truck, and he sold the sugar to another cook. Fuck you, figure it out.

The Loaded Question: Legal weed?

Which of these things is most likely to happen when marijuana is finally legalized?

It's not Shakespeare!

why your taste in music might -- I said might -- actually suck


Critic
1 a : one who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter especially involving a judgment of its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique b : one who engages often professionally in the analysis, evaluation, or appreciation of works of art or artistic performances

2 : one given to harsh or captious judgment

If you really, really enjoy music -- if you are, in fact, geeked out about anything artistic, or in the entertainment field -- you've seen it before, this idea that one's taste in entertainment is completely subjective. Facebook lists at least two groups that attempt to explain: Stop Critcizing Peoples Taste In Music and the sedately titled I DON'T HAVE A S**T TASTE IN MUSIC.......IT'S JUST DIFFERENT TO YOURS!!! The fact that one of these groups has two posts total and the other is clogged with spam, and that both are long dead, tells us something further: everyone likes to assume they have great taste in music. They're usually pretty secure in what they like. Or maybe the Internet's just so wide now that dozens of Glee-hating groups exist somewhat peacefully alongside the show's 13 million (!) likers.

What's the word?
Thunderbird!

I'm not here to tell you Glee sucks. You've already made up your mind on that. You either want to take that L finger and shove it up the cast's collective ass, or you've already written me off as a hipster d-bag who hates the show because it's popular, or because it's "fun." And I've got good, close friends with great taste who admit to enjoying Glee, but are smart enough to know that it's not a quality show, just entertainment that expertly pushes some sunny, goofy button inside them. So I am neither here to praise Gleeks nor bury them.

But there is such a thing as good taste. It exists. It's not a religion you can choose to follow or not follow. It can be proven.

By what, you ask? Well, let's put it this way. You wouldn't go to a wine-tasting and knock a glass of '47 Cheval Blanc out of an expert's hand, screaming, "What racehorse pissed this out?! Where's the Night Train?" Okay, that would be funny. But it wouldn't prove you knew anything about wine.

In the same way, a music (or movie, or television, or whatever) critic has a great deal of experience with the genre in question. He's not smarter or better than you, and if he's a good critic, he doesn't pretend to be, but he has lived in the belly of the beast a long, long time. It's his neighborhood. He knows where the best places are. Critics compare what the song is trying to do to what it actually does, and then compare that to similar songs that have already done or attempted the same thing. See? Simple.

It's not personal, I promise. We don't hate you. Or your band. We don't know you. We're not laughing at you. We're not trying to ruin your career. (This is usually said by someone who's career consists of open mic night.) Also, I freely admit to not being smarter than you, you personally, about a lot of things. I had to Google the wine thing. I drink Beaujolais. But I don't confuse it with that other stuff.  

Science uses observation to determine whether something is factual or not, and so do critics. If we don't like something, it's almost always because we've heard it done better somewhere else. A good music critic, a quality one, realizes that this is not the same as personal taste. Like a doctor, he knows where those buttons are inside you, and knows how they need to be pushed. He or she often likes at least a few songs that most critics don't, while realizing that this is because of their own particular receptors and how they operate. He doesn't need to personally love a song to recognize its quality. And you can pick up a knife, but it doesn't make you a surgeon.

"It's a routine procedure,
nothing to worry about."

Yet we hate the music expert, and we don't hate the wine expert. Why? Because wine, as much as we might love it, doesn't push emotional buttons in most of us.

Music is an emotional delivery system, arguably the purest one. A novel is at least somewhat bordered by the limits of language, which has an ordered set of general values, while a film climbs directly into our imagination, gets it drunk, and has violent sex with it. (Which can be fun.) Music, on the other hand, is primal. It relies solely on elements which are difficult to articulate; it uses a series of vibrations, and nothing more, to reach us. Sting once said that telling someone they don't like their song is like telling them they have an ugly girlfriend. It's on that level.

Like scientists, critics don't always agree. I'd probably rather hear Metallica's ...And Justice for All over Ride the Lightning. I'm in the minority on that, which is fine. Most scientists are still arguing over how exactly the universe came to be. But none of them would tell you the Sun moves around the Earth (as ancients once believed), and I'll never try and convince you that Load is a great album (as ancients once believed). Critics' generalizations also change, as one, over time, just like those of scientific research do. Led Zeppelin were once reviled for not being properly respectful of the blues, but that cultural bias disappeared over time, as a new generation of critics found that stance unnecessary. So it was discarded, a natural product of journalistic evolution.      

Like literature, music also has a canon, and critics do, in general, agree on it. Usually when someone farts out some horrible disaster of an artistic abomination -- Black Eyed Peas, Uwe Boll, Stephanie Meyer -- those people whose buttons are easy to push leap to its defense with the cry, "Hey, it's not supposed to be Shakespeare." And every musician can't be, you know, the Beatles. But that doesn't excuse you from being Justin Bieber. Shakespeare, historians tell us, was actually the Quentin Tarantino of his time -- a popular entertainer who mixed high and low art, baiting us with murder and sex but actually delivering substance and style and even some life wisdom along with it. When you say "Hey, it's not supposed to be Shakespeare," all you're really saying is, "Hey, I don't understand Shakespeare."

Most people, critics or not, float along on a vast grey area in the middle of Shakespeare and Tyler Perry, of Beatles and Bieber, recognizing as we do that we don't need to demand total excellence from every single thing we encounter just to make it through another day. Most folks don't wonder how a burger was made while they eat it, but we usually agree that eating nothing but Whoppers isn't good for you. Just because they're delicious and fill you up doesn't make them Porterhouse steaks. You eat too much junk too often, you will get sick. And bad art will wear away at your metaphorical heart just as surely as BK will ruin your real one.

"Stinkin’ like fat ladies shittin’ out logs."

I mean, what's the first thing people do when they come into some real money? They hire people, people in the know, to tell them what's good, what's valuable, what's first-class. Vintage car dealers, home decorators, stockbrokers, goddamn life coaches. Your average Joe is more than willing to let other people consult him on matters of great importance, but don't tell him Nickelback blows or he'll kick you out of his newly-renovated den. This is why, instead of the now-pejorative critic, I prefer the term taste consultant. Let's be honest: Definition 2 up there is steadily overtaking Definition 1. Nation of whiners.

The hipster douches, now, they're the ones to really turn your fury on, the ones who think that music is a secret club that they alone were smart enough to be invited to. Hipsters are differentiated by their psychological need to hoard knowledge -- it fills a giant hole in their self-esteem to know something about a band that you don't, to have been at their gigs first, to have bought the album before anyone. It's what separates the nerd, tugging it sadly in an empty room, from the geek, giving it out like a whore. And, yes, occasionally getting paid.

(Next week I'll introduce this blog's music rating system, once which any non-pro music fiend with a solid depth of knowledge can use to define and explain the general, relative merits of any piece of art.)

  

Smells Like Middle-Aged Spirit

teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old 

On September 24, the Nirvana album Nevermind will celebrate its 20th anniversary. That's right, 20. Two zero.

This one goes out to all the Gen Xers who just assumed they'd burn out young, as well. How do you stick it to the man when you're the man?  

---
(Sung to the tune of "Smells Like Teen Spirit")

Load up the trunk of my new Benz
With groceries, school clothes, and Depends

feels bad man.

I run the light and flip the bird
The kids just heard a dirty word

Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no
Oh no, oh no, oh no

With the lights out, sex is ageless
Here we are now, medicate us
These gas prices are outrageous
Here we are now, medicate us

Pay my house note
Go to Costco
And Home Depot
Where'd my keys go?
Yeah

I settle more and rebel less
I never did at all, I guess
Our little group grew up and then
Stayed in denial till the end

Hell no, Hell no, Hell no, Hell no
Hell no, Hell no, Hell no, Hell no
Hell no, Hell no, Hell no, Hell no
Hell no, Hell no, Hell no

Check this deck out, it's so spacious
Here we are now, medicate us
I turned teabag, I turned racist
Here we are now, medicate us

Sarah Palin
Rick Santorum
Let's invade 'em
Let's deport 'em
Yeah

(guitar hero solo)

Don't you wish you were still
dating hot chicks like thi-
HOLY SHIT IT'S KURT AND
 COURTNEY'S BABY GIRL

The holes all closed up in my lobes
My only flannel's in my robe
I cybercheat when I'm online
I didn't say that, nevermind

LOLOLOLO
LOLOLOLO
LOLOLOLO
LOLOLO

Lost my job now, wife's a waitress
Here we are now, medicate us
See my car note? I can't pay this
Here we are now, medicate us

My Cymbalta
My Lunesta
My Avandia
My Allegra

MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA
MY VIAGRA

They're Not Actually Trying to Wash Us Away

The 2011 Mississippi Flood and the flood of bullshit

If there's one thing both sides of the new American Civil War can agree on, it's that old media no longer serves our needs. For the intelligent among us, anyway. The movie Network was prophetic in the extreme: once news became taken over by the profit motive, people spouting crazy shit has always proved more newsworthy than people spouting truth. So now what we have is a nation that goes to their anchors/pundits not to find out what has happened -- the internet does that in a much more direct and timely and cost-efficient manner -- but to ponder what might happen.

Right now, that means the Great Southern Flood of 2011.

I'm going to go into detail here about what's actually going on in Louisiana, since I'm here on the scene and have been my whole life. But first, because I know you're busy, I'm gonna give you the bullet points on the bullshit media storyline, so that you can use this against your aunt in Illinois who thinks Anderson Cooper makes the world go round. I had to become a one-man disinformation cleanup service for about three years after Katrina, so I figure I'll get a jump start on this one.

Here's what you need to know:

• New Orleans is not about to flood, much less flood "worse than Katrina."
• The Morganza Spillway is not being opened to save New Orleans. 
• Poor people are not being drowned or losing their homes to save New Orleans or Baton Rouge.
• The people who live in the possible path of the floodways have always been aware that this could happen. It's happened before.
• This is not a controlled levee demolition, like the recent one in Missouri.
• The levees in question, the ones on the Mississippi River, are not the same levees that broke during Katrina. They're not even the same kind of levees.
• "Flood stage" does not mean a town is flooding, or even that a levee is leaking or being overtopped.

Okay, now the backstory.

The 1927 flood inspired some creativity in Memphis.

If you've ever heard Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks"* or Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," or read Faulkner's short story "Old Man," you know that there was a catastrophic flood in this region of the country in that year. My grandmother was five and never remembered much about it, but her family lost everything they owned, and were lucky to get away with their lives. The US government had an interesting method of Federal Disaster assistance back then: none. Or, as I like to call it, The Fuck You Method. Or as Randy put it in his famous song:

President Coolidge come down in a railroad train

With a little fat man with a note pad in his hand.

President say, "Little fat man, isn't it a shame

What the river has done to this poor cracker's land."**

The flooding was historic, to say the least. The rising river broke through the levees in spots, spilled out 50 miles wide and 30 feet deep on either side at some points, and claimed some 3,000 lives. Take a look.

The natural state of the river (left) and an approximation of how it looked after the 1927 flood (right).

It was decided to blow a levee in nearby St. Bernard Parish to save New Orleans, but it turned out to be unnecessary: nature had already, um, relieved itself all over the basin.

After this disaster, a massive federal infrastructure project was created -- you know, those bureaucratic thingies that waste taxpayer's money -- and the world's largest levee system was built. In addition, two spillways were created to a) keep the River from flooding anywhere in South Louisiana, and b) keep the River from shifting course, as it naturally would, and flowing directly down the left side of Louisiana's boot, bypassing the Port of New Orleans entirely.

This is the controlled demolition of 1927, much like the one in Illinois recently.

The first of these, the Morganza Spillway, was finished in 1954 and, before now, was only opened once, in 1973. The people who bought homes in those floodways were well aware of the project -- they couldn't not be, since they'd gotten the land cheap due to land grants. That is, the federal government knew there was a risk, informed the buyers of the risk, and helped lower prices accordingly. Why would anyone want to live in a floodway, you ask? Because the natural tendency of the areas to flood results in a rich "bottomland," or soil that grows just about anything. And farmers knew it. 

Only problem is, there are few small-time farmers any more, and not many in the area. So every year, the Corps of Engineers sends out a letter that essentially says, "Hey, don't forget, you're living in a floodway. Be prepared in case we need you to get your asses out of there." But a few of the people who live there, bolstered by the attitude and ignorance of the national media, bitch anyway, even though many of them were living in the area in 1973, when the last major flooding occurred. "I guess they're gonna flood us poor people to save New Orleans," said one elderly resident on the local news, apparently forgetting all this, as well as the fact that the Morganza sits 45 miles upriver from Baton Rouge. 

Even so, the Morganza does not exist merely to save Baton Rouge. The river doesn't know where cities are. It rises to a certain danger level, called a "flood stage," at which point measures are taken to prevent the next stage, "minor flooding," which means that some water starts to leak over the top of the levee. Opening the spillways reduces the level of the entire river, thus easing pressure on the levees up and down the entire corridor known locally as the "River Parishes." 

The Bonnet Carre Spillway is the spillway which saves New Orleans. It has been opened six times since 1973. It floods a small stretch of land with nothing on it, then quickly enters Lake Ponchartrain. It does disturb the ecosystem, introducing fresh water into a salt water environment, which is bad news for the oyster crop and good news for the crawfish harvest. And that's about it. Teenagers used to routinely go to "The Spillway" to cut donuts in the land with their pick-up trucks. That's how much nothing is there.   

Finally, all levees are not created equal. The levees that run along the river at New Orleans are some 23-25 feet high and some 60 feet wide in spots. They are giant piles of earth that are fortified with trees and, in some places, concrete, and the natural flow of the river compresses them, making them stronger. They were begun in 1879, and greatly reinforced after the '27 disaster. They are safe. 

Also a good place to make out, brah.

The infamous Katrina levees protected the city from canals, and were begun in 1965 after the worst 20th Century hurricane, Betsy, ravaged the city. These were simple concrete floodwalls, not really levees in the proper sense, and part of a federal project that was never completed -- several Presidential administrations passed the buck, refusing to commit the amount of money necessary to fortify them properly. When Katrina hit, the massive rush of water from the city's Gulf outlets simply overtopped them and washed out the supports that held them up.  

Very much not a place you want to be making out.

The levees at New Orleans, the real ones, can handle 20 feet of water. This historic flood has caused the river to potentially crest at a safe 19.5. Opening the Morganza allows it to rise only to a even safer 17 ft. There is no second Katrina here. 

That's not to say tens of thousands of people have not been displaced by this flood so far along the Mississippi River from Missouri on down, or that the 14 who have already died from it should be written off. But 1927 this is not. Despite the media's worst intentions.

* Originally written by Memphis Minnie, a native of the New Orleans suburb of Algiers. Zep's added line "If you're going down South and there's no work to do, then you don't know 'bout Chicago" refers to the disintegrating race relations after the flood that started many blacks on their Midwestern diaspora. 

** Aaron Neville's version replaces "cracker" with the more politically correct "farmer." Which sort of undercuts the point.

The Age Of Epic

a mission statement

"I tell you this. I don't know what's gonna happen, man, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames." -- Jim Morrison

Fig. 1: Lunch.

Welcome to the Age of Epic.

No, not this blog. Not anything as ultimately unimportant as a blog. The age itself.

Time alone will tell whether the word "epic" will stick around as a general expression of approval, like "cool" or "awesome" or "amazing," and not fade away into bell-bottomed obscurity like "gear" or "hip." But the age we are living in does not care, and has decided to be epic anyway.

Note that epic, in the classic sense, doesn't necessarily mean good. Just big. Unprecedented big. Big that has left human memory, and is boomeranging back. We are living in, as the Chinese curse says, interesting times. You don't need to be told about 9/11 or Katrina or tsunamis or Goldman Sachs or other major disasters occurring with a frequency or on a scale that hasn't been seen in a hundred years, if then. And you certainly don't need another self-important asshole telling you the world's about to end. Worlds end all the time. The earth just adjusts. And so does humanity.

What I'm talking about is the individual human epicness we all strive for. The freedom to throw off the chains of age and gender and race and sexuality -- and, for that matter, nutrition and comportment and taste and good breeding -- and just embrace our potential to be bigger than ourselves. To make ourselves whatever we want to be. We are living in an age where everyone wants to be famous, where the lowest rung on the social ladder is filled with people yearning to be not just somewhat upwardly mobile, which was the dream of our fathers, or to live comfortably, as our grandparents strove to do, or just to stay alive, which is what our great-grandparents had no choice but to settle for. We all want to be President Rock Star Thug CEOs. And we want it now.

The lines are blurring, and at a rate that is itself blurry to watch. The future of man will be a 55-year-old Brazilian-Paki Super Bowl quarterback who is also a respected authority on anarchist thought, who has a prosthetic foot and a chip that controls his type 2 diabetes, and who directs gay porn on the side. Yes.

Fig. 2: An Athlete.

The American Dream, as Eddie Izzard once lovingly described it, was "to be born in the gutter and have nothing. Then to raise up and have all the money in the world, and stick it in your ears and go PLBTLBTLBLTLBTLBLT!! That's a pretty good dream." Yet today's privileged snotnose, against all evidence of human history, wants more. Every generation wants something better, and for us that means, at its best, finally and once and for all mattering as individuals. (At worst, it means, you know, Snooki. Reading this in the future? Don't know who or what a Snooki is? My point.)

Innovation may have left America, but our greatest gift has always been in inventing ourselves. All else follows. This was America's last great gift to the world.

That this is happening in a world gone to hell is not as ironic as you might think. WWII was a literal battlefield that created the Greatest Generation; the idealists of the Sixties, beaten down with clubs and firehosed onto the pavement (and worse), mostly survived to see those ideals become law; bitter Gen X cynics somehow wound up with a wife and two kids any damn way. The fact that the powers that be are currently attempting to undo the past century of human accomplishment, are indeed dismantling America and selling it to the rest of the world for junk, is not an indication that all is lost. This is merely your battlefield. Without Darth Vader, after all, Luke Skywalker is just a whiny blond farm boy in a tunic.

Oh, and the planet's decided to pitch in, too. It wants to kill you worse than ever. To be fair, it's revenge. Americans respect revenge, too.

Said dying planet is now filled with eight billion people, quite a number of whom actually believe they have the right to be famous for being who they are. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Like evolution, the social network weeds out the slackers with no real individuality or purpose. Mediocrity rules Old Media; the rest of us know epic when we see it. No Snookis.

What's left is the sideshow. This blog will attempt to celebrate the former and mercilessly mock the latter. You don't have to agree, or even care. I get to say whatever I like here; I've already won.

As human beings get closer and closer towards merging with the great Singularity, developing into a new form of cyberlife entirely, and as knowledge gets passed on at a rate and in a scope unheard of in human history, the potential for greatness becomes exponential. Like the generations before you, all you have to do is take the playtoys created to pacify smaller minds, and the technology created to further the corporate hegemony, and use it to find your destiny. These tools are more powerful than ever, which means you can be, too.

Fig. 3: A Song. 

Of course, they'll be trying to push back this tide of change, too. But you and I actually have less to fear from The Industry, that mindless, bloated, terrifyingly adaptable human millipede, than ever before. It fucks up, frankly, It always has. If Jews can escape Nazis, you can beat the mortgage crisis.

You don't have to have money or fame to be someone anymore. You can be a true individual, a self-made man or woman, or as my friends and I used to call them, Exotics. And there are only two rules:

1) You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.

2) You do have to do everything you want to do.

Believe it or not, the second part is much harder. I, personally, will be starting here.