Playlist

Playlist:
Radiohead, Kid A

Knitting:
sooooo many christmas hats

rap

The history of rap music that the group did on the first day of the presentation was disjointed, but i really appreciated it being included especially since the group was unprepared. Megs presentation on the second day was impressive. I always enjoy her handouts, so it was nice to get two of hers for this one presentation.

What is funny to me as I am not much of a rap fan (the sort of causal white girl rap fan) but the first two tracks i knew the words to. Forgot about Dre was a prep school classic, everyone in my dorm knew that one, and Gin and Juice is just a classic. In this area at least the Gourds cover of Gin and Juice has usurped the popularity of the original, but that is because there is just not enough gansta rap with banjos.

I really enjoyed the Wu Tang presentation. I remeber people liking them in middle school, but I was never into them. I thought that the Wu Tang Clan and Bill Murray were funny in Coffee and Cigarettes but i didn't know much about them.
Hearing how they got together was very interesting, the entire concept seems very well thought out and i have never heard of it before, but now since the presentation i read an article from the DeCapo best music writing of 2oo3 that talks about the Dragon Family trying to do the same thing. The WuTang Clan is much better known and came first, but OutKast came out of the Dragon Family.

Ahh the Beastie Boys I liked both the handouts on the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys easrly punk rock stuff is ridiculous. it was released a couple of years ago i think its on Grand Royal Records but i am not sure, its called Aglio e Olio.
I think that it is funny that the Beastie Boys gained notority for "Fight for Your Right" and became every frat boy's favorite rappers with "Girls" both off License to Ill, and they have spent the last 16 or so years apologizing for it. The have time and time again said that they regret their treatment of women early on and how women are portrayed in their first album. Reading articles that the Beastie Boys have written, I think they would fit in well with the class. These four guys are first and foremost music fanatics. They could be classified as indie snobs but their music is so comercially available that most indie kids turn up their noses at the Beastie Boys and instead talk about Sage Francis and underground rappers. Rap like every modern genre has an underground and i am surprised that no one touched on it in the presentation.
This presentation had more of a feel of an informal conversation, albeit one that most of the class was left out of --- it just seemed like it was a conversation among the presenting group that we could witness but not participate in. It was an interesting setup and had there not been so much side conversation among the presenting group, it would have gone very well.

Books Books and More Books

Playlist:
Alices Restaraunt (what else, it is Thanksgiving)
The Weavers Greatest Hits

Knitting: Hot pink cable knit newsboy cap


I have gotten most of the books I will be using for my historiography of punk rock from the library. There are some gaps timewise in the way that literature comes out, but that is explained by the music itself and how much of punk lit is zine and diy published stuff. I do have enough to write the paper, or I will soon as some of my books are new eiditions of things that started as zines. I have had fun looking through the books and chosing which parts are typical of the time period, what is covered, what is left out et cetera. I should be writing the first half of my paper tomorrow, so if all goes well there will be another progress post going up soon.

Euro Trash Techno saved my life

I liked the overview of the presentation and the track that Ryan Kohler sampled. I wonder where Richard D. James got the idea to use a marble. The manipulation of the sound is amazing, for over a minute he makes music with just a marble. Then the ambient music comes in and the tone of the piece changes. I could see why he could be classified as industrial. There is a minimal, rough quality to the beginning and end of the pice . There is also a frantic and frenzied feeling in "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" that drops out when the melodic-electronic tones come in at the midpoint of the song.
VNV Nation: I would classify this as Eurotrash techno. This is not a kind name I know and it quite judgmental and bad of me, I know we should try to stay away from utterly dismissing music, but I hate VNV. Believe me I have spent hours listening to this. One of my closest friends in Russia, Luda loved dancing and VNV. The first track from Standing, I have definitely heard at every disco I went to wth her, and the ballad song played when I went skating at the municipal skating rink. Heres the deal, dancing is not an activity I generally indulge in, but in Russia the average student’s social life revolves around the disco. I also went to a few Dachas (like country cottages for weekends use, the Maine equivalent is the Northern Maine hunting camp,: water from an outside well, no indoor plumbing and the kids use it to drink with their friends). These Dacha gatherings turned invariably turned into impromptu disco with entire VNV albums played as people drank, danced and banyaed. It wasn’t that these were horrible times, they weren’t but I sometimes get bored of the repetition and the unchanging vocals. I know that repetition is omnipresent in popular music, but in most rock songs the music doesn’t last for 18 minutes. Also the thumping bass over such long periods give me a headache.
Electronic music did one aspect of my life in Russia better. Driving in Russia is terrifying. The ladas are clunk hunks of steel in all manner of disrepair, it is constantly snowing so they give up on plowing some of the roads in November hoping the small canyons in the road will fill in. Tailgating is de rigeur, I’ve never seen a posted speed limit, you’re not limited to a certain side of the road and you NEVER NEVER stop for pedestrians. Oh right, two more important things, Beer isn’t alcohol and there aren’t seatbelts (I decided this was for the best as it would spare me the horror that is Russian medical care. So anyway, there we were heading to Ajva from Syktyvkar and a friend of a friend is driving. It was a full on blizzard and we were careening down a half paved road at 110 km/h/ Luckily there was some Psy Trance playing, now of course after sitting through this presentation, I have to womder if there was more than just beer in this man's system). Anyway this Psy Tance helped me not to have a panic attack as the electronic music helped make the entire scene like a videogame. I was able to displace myself from the situation and try to calm down. That 20 minute ride would have been far worse without techno, which is why I am unable to hate it in all situations. I believe there is a time and a place for it, but I would just prefer not to hear it three times a week.

Shea creating music in front of the class: I thought this was inventive and I really had fun seeing how a composition came together. I also enjoyed when Steve Pane took over. With no familiarity to the machine, he was able to create loud, loud music in front of us.

So I just spent some time reading others blogs and they have inspired me at least to leave an outline to be finished tomorrow --- i really like this blog thing, but if i don't do it regularly then I forget.
so when i edit this tomorrow morning, i will add to:

composing serial music
playlist experience

okay since i went to the midnight show of harry potter, then decided to post, i think it is time for bed now.

Listening to:
Rilo Kiley from Takeoffs and Landings
Richard Thompson 1952 Vincent Black Lightening
Knitting: A pintsize scarf (yes the robot from QC www.questionablecontent.net)

The women in music project was so hard. I felt like it was so disjointed, but I hope what we were trying to do got accross to the class. I for one am sick of reading the Women in Rock books. The Year of the Girl/Year of the Woman connundrum is surely interesting, but very rarely do those music magazines even cover female artists I am interested. I don't care how prolific jewel is, or even how angry alanis is. These women are mainstream, they are watered down versions of fringe musicians that do it better. I think that that is really what the group wanted to do, not to tell the class that because either the class gets it (and doesn't need to be told it) or doesn't and will be insulted and incredulous if we tried to force the issue, but to try to document some women on the fringe. I had a great time doing this project. It made me listen to some things from my past (its been seven years since i was really into ani, but listening to her music it all came back) and evoked some great memories. Not to mention the books, I loved having an excuse to interlibrary some good women in music books (with 3 research papers this semester, my library card space is at a premium). Reading about how Riot grrrl was a feminist and even post modernist response to popular culture in the early 1990s was interesting. The feminist part I gathered, but the post modern I had never thought of before. There are so many more women I would have liked to have done, but just because the project has been presented does not mean the work and the research need to stop. I wonder if there are any more group projects for the group to do, and what our next topic would be.

paper progress

So the proposal went up more as a reminder to me (and also a backup in yet another place so that if my computer quits again this semester I’ll still be somewhat on track) I must admit this paper has taken a back seat to y other two research papers this semester. I am doing work on the paper now and have ordered more books to be used over Thanksgiving break.
So far I am definitely doing England's Dreaming a history of the sex pistols and early punk, and Break all the Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of a Style Those two books I own and have read numerous times, they are part of the reason I am writing this paper. I can't wait until a) my analysis of the Hungarian Revolution using the frameworks of three different Revolutionary Theorists is complete, and b) when the round of punk rock books comes in via interlibrary loan. It will be like Christmas.

Paper Proposal

I would like to write a historiography of punk rock.

Punk Rock was a product of its time, it emerged out of a special social, economic and political climate and history that was just ripe for a reaction. Punk rock sprung from the underside of two of the world’s largest cities, New York and London. The dissonant noise, frenzied, fast pace, hard to hear vocals and out of control attitude are all hallmarks of punk rock. Punk rock isn’t dead, its just different from the music of the mid seventies.
The way that people have written about punk has changed drastically over the years. From the first fanzines and reactionary writings aiming to protect gentle society from the bereaved, deranged madmen playing guitars on Kings Road and in the Bowery to something you can buy coffee table books, or detailed histories of.
In this paper I will have to discuss how music historians write about pop music in Britain and in the US. I will also write about the currents in culture that could shape the authors of punk histories, also some research on the authors themselves. In this work I will explore whether historical schools (groups of like minded scholars all writing on one subject) have surfaced in punk rock.
Although there has not been a group presentation on punk rock, but there have been several groups that have talked about punk and have talked about sub genres that have sprung from, or even become punk. Proto punk was the basis for punk, hardcore, thrash and many other types of metal came from punk, and popular ska is a punk/dub hybrid. The nature of historiography is really that it is a grand literature review. I can also try to compare it to the general historiography of Rock and Roll to see how it fits,

The musical genome

Listening: Things that are related to rebel girl by bikini kill
knitting: nothing, i am balling yarn for a hat

So here is a neat site I have really enjoyed. It has stolen hours of my life and as far as I can tell it is controlled by music loving gnomes.

http://www.pandora.com/

Ska

Okay so here are my comments on ska. I am sorry if I seem nitpicky, or overly critical. I guess I am just tired of being disappointed by presentations that I know a bit about. I am no ska expert, but if I didn't have a sense of what ska was going into the presentation, I think I wouldn't understand it better after. It cold be because I am a history major, but I find my bearings in a little background. Where did ska come from? From listening to the presentation it is as though ska has always been in the air and it took a group in Florida to harness the energy and bring it to the masses. I don't want to tear this apart. I like the focus on the individual bands, I just would have thought that the Specials, English Beat, the Toasters, Operation Ivy and Madness might have been mentioned. I also think that Jamaica should have played more of a role and been mentioned earlier, but at least it got mentioned. England was completely left out of the presentation. England where the Jamaican-English population of Notting hill meshed with the punks of Kings Road. Less than Jake may have combined ska and punk in '92 (Op Ivy did it in the US in the '80s) but the Clash did it 15 years earlier(the song "white riot" is the Clash speaking out against the Notting Hill Jamaican Market Riot in the 70s). Another thing that irked me was the treatment of fashion. The Bosstones didn't create the fashion. And from talking to Ska friends, two tone isn't just a fashion, it’s a lifestyle that has more to do than just your suit. Anyway I just saw the fashion segment as an opportunity again to talk about the roots of ska and possibly mention the teddys in England in the '70s. Although the treatment of each ska group was competent, I just thought that the project was constructed on shaky foundations.

Patti Smith, Proto Punk, Touring Albums

Playlist: The Capricorns
Bikini Kill

Knitting: Starting in on the Christmas knitting-- attempt one at an argyle sweater vest

I love Patti Smith. I have only seen her live once, but I hope to see her again one day. This is why I am jealous of everyone that got to attend Patti Smith’s Meltddown 2005. When I saw Patti Smith live a few years ago she did only a handful of songs from Horses, at the Meltdown she played the entire album track for track. I can’t even imagine the crowd as she opened with Gloria. It was not just a Patti Smith event, there were many guests and part of the night was a celebration of spoken word, there were readings done by Patti Smith herself of some Burroughs, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair also added readings of William S. Burroughs poetry. Another artist that is showcased is the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the longtime companion of Patti Smith. Cat Power performed, Television reunited and performed with the original lineup and Richard Hell was there too.

The Article talks about the trend afoot of touring classic albums and I am not sure how I feel about that. There are whole albums that I absolutely love and would love to hear all of, but I think that part of the joy of seeing a band perform live is the unpredictability of what they will play next. If The Pogues were to reunite with Shane MacGowan and tour the US (they reunited last Christmas for four shows in the UK, but they have not toured the US with MacGowan since 1990/1???? when they appeared on Saturday Night Live and MacGowan could barely stand) I would travel for hours to see them do If I should Fall From the Grace of God , but even then there is something missing if they don’t do songs off of Rum Sodomy and the Lash, or “Fairytale of New York”. While this did not seem to be much of an issue as Smith did not hold herself to just performing Horses, the spontaneity and variety of seeing an album done would be something I would miss. I suppose it would be an exception if you were to see an entire album done as a cover. Rove did this with John Coltrane’s Ascension this I could understand as Coltrane is dead and the only way one could hear this done is to see a cover of it. Halloween is approaching and when the jam band Phish was around they always did an entire album at their Halloween concert, the most widely bootlegged being the Phish cover of the Beatles’ The White Album. I just can’t resign myself to the idea of an entire album show. It would just take out the fun of so much of the concert going experience.
The Stooges are touring this fall. Along with front man Iggy, they are touring their album Funhouse. Funhouse is the seminal album that we discussed in our presentation, it’s the one about heroin. Since heroin ripped the band apart and nearly destroyed them all, it’s a wonder they want to tour it. It is their most successful album and would draw the largest crowds, but the thing about the Stooges was their youth, their raw energy and their newness. I hope they are energetic because they are neither young nor new any longer. I am not trying to make fun of older musicians touring, I don’t think that there is any age where someone has to stop playing rock and roll, but Iggy Pop was known for his ridiculous stage performances, rolling in glass, breaking things and generally wreaking havoc. Will he still do that? I mean I’m not asking for him to hurt himself, I just want to know if the energy will still be there. Proto punk was just so much about the live show, about the energy that one must wonder if it can be recreated here and now. The energy of proto punk was so intense--- it along with the raucous noise and the primitive musicianship attracted the punks. It is amazing how one subgenre that was so little noted in its time has changed the course of music. To have bands that so few people listened to be so influential--- Patti Smith is protopunk, who would have thought when she was performing at Max’s Kansas City or working in a factory in Jersey that she would be presiding over a festival devoted to her and her favorite artists.

Wire reviews

Listening to:
Rilo Kiley
The Bouncing Souls

Taking a knitting break for the day

On the wire as a whole:

An interesting magazine dedicated to all things obscure. I liked it although I won’t lie there are some articles that I didn’t get into. The articles are descriptive and offer just enough back-story to make the artist intriguing. What the wire doesn’t really do is give much description of the music that is being written about. This makes me more interested in hearing the music. Using terms like “punked up jazz” “veers unpredictably between a drunken lurch and a frenzied lunge” (both from the Review of Death Sentence: Panda! Puppy, Kitty or Both . . . in the August 2005 issue of Wire) does not tell me what kind of instruments they have or what band influences their sound, it makes me want to listen to their fast, vicious and loud music.
Another review that I enjoyed was the New Humans self titled album. It mentions that the New Humans straddle the line of art and rock. I can understand indie/art rock ish type music, but I don’t think this is the line they are talking about. We watched the movie from the worlds fair and also the film of from last class. I think that that is more the vein that the New Humans fall into. Their music, if the review is to be believed recalls the world of visual art. Talking about a “cacophony repeated with accelerating hysteria until it blurs into an abstract wall of sound” that music could be strong enough to evoke a visual reaction is not a new idea, we’ve encountered it in readings by Edgard Varese (“The Liberation of Sound”). They saw music as happening on more than one plane, in the future you could experience music when colors appeared with sounds. While the colors are not appearing, it seems as though the New Humans is creating in our minds what modernist/futurist composers in the early twentieth century wished to create on stage.