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.

my obsession with music criticism

Listening to:
The Thermals
The Decembrists
The Arcade Fire

Knitting Project: Still knitting the MWD No on One tote. *I found my second pink fingerless glove!!!!!!

I think I have a problem. I am obsessed with music criticism. I check pitchfork daily, I read bad main stream rock magazines, I am getting into Wired, But more than that I interlibrary loan so many books written by music journalists, or collected writings on music. Lately I have been rereading The Greil Marcus edited Lester Bangs greatest hits book. My favorite book of essays on music that I have read in the last year must be Nick Hornby’s Songbook. Reading the endnotes of the articles in Audio Culture gives me yet more distraction. Reading the Susan McClary article, “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture” I desperately want to read Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Because I spend too much time doing Subject and keyword searches in the Ursus and Infonet systems at the library I currently have a plethora of books that are loosely related to this class, Rock over the Edge and Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism, a scholarly collection of essays on music and modernism is at times dry and pedantic and at others fascinating are my two favorites right now.

The reading

Music:
Patti Smith Horses
The Pretenders

Knitting Project:
A Maine Won’t Discriminate Tote Bag

I love how many connections there are in the book between the arts. Using painting metaphors to help the reader understand minimalist music is quite smart. It is strange how common it is that a genre name starts out as a pejorative term. Impressionist is an example, so is suffragette, and now we can add minimalist music to the list.
The idea of tracing the genealogy of minimalist music is a good one. It seems remarkable that you could have such varied sources for minimalist music. It would be quite the project to trace the influence of worlds fairs and exhibition on music art and pop culture in general. I like Kyle Ganns idea that “Minimalism’s early mystique was to have no secrets, to hold the music’s structure right in the audience’s face” (audio culture p.303). I cannot wait for the class playlist with minimalist music on it.

Music:
Bratmobile
Julie Ruin

Knitting Project:
Catpuke-orange cabled newsboy cap.

Reaction to the metal presentation:
Wow that was long.
I really liked the Art Metal genre piece. I think part of this has to do with the fact that of all the presentations and all the metal we listened to, that was the one that I was most familiar with. I have never thought about art metal as a genre, I have always just thought slint was indie (and they really are), mogwai post rock, and the shining just plain awesome.

About the Scandinavian metal, I think another factor for the music is seasonal affective disorder. That may seem comical, but when there is only two hours of weak sun a day it affects you more than you would think.

This project made me question how my group did their presentation. After some contemplation and discussion with my group we decided not to make too many changes to our format. Perhaps we will be a little more high tech this time, but we are still committed to saving trees with one handout for the group. Sometimes a project has to be about what you choose not to cover. Protopunk is a much narrower topic than metal so it is easier to craft a shorter presentation, but I am pleased with the way the protopunk project is shaping up.