Since Crooked Timber is now a music blog …

I think of the Insect Surfers as a genre more than a band. Kind of like confusing “Kleenex” with tissue, or vice versa.

So, anyway, B52s, which they bring to mind.

The Cleveland Orchestra

I’m vaguely aware that people are responding some question that was asked in the post, but I just want to say I’m actually offended by how little Amoeba charged for that 2nd hand copy of Kamau Daaood’s Lemeirt Park album that I bought yesterday and I’m listening to again right now. Fuck you, Amoeba. Great great great great album.

I’m really getting into St. Louis-based Middle Class Fashion. They really take me back to–no, I just like the song. So:

I never heard this gem before a week ago! I just found Tandyn Almer’s song composition, “Shadows and Reflections”. This version was performed by Eddie Hodges in 1976 though there are other versions by the bands The Lownly Crowde (US) and The Action (UK).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV7chqS5kls
Almer wrote “Along Comes Mary” (arranged by The Association, memorably, eternally) and contributed lyrics to another thing I always hum every week, “Sail On Sail On, Sailor” (Beach Boys).

Also I really liked that song about “my best-pressed tweed” from the album with Ellington when I heard it on the radio recently, enough so that I’ll snatch that up if I ever happen upon a cheap copy, despite its mixed reputation and song choices that are even iffier than the one I just bought.

That is some rather more funky than surfy surf, yet awesome indeed. Everything about the way they look is highly likable. Napoleon Dynamite + young Jim Jarmusch moogist with Alan Thicke dance moves + denim rocker bassist with hideous blue sunburst Explorer knockoff. Excellent. I hope they get cool enough to date The Pandoras!

Al Kooper has just released a box set retrospective of Mike Bloomfield, a great and greatly under appreciated guitarist. It brought back memories of a night more than forty years ago when Bloomfield showed up at Theresa’s , took out his guitar, and made a bunch of very good players put theirs down so they could just listen.

@bob mcmanus:

Dude! You almost wrote my autobiography, there.

We must have gone to different schools together.

Staightwood, keeping the trollery ever on the straight and narrow. That planned post about my favorite Big Band songs from the 40s would apparently make no more sense than…wait, it would make exactly the same amount of sense as, say, a post by my grandfather on the same subject, apparently. Which is perfectly well plenty of sense, on acount of the excellence of so much Big Band and crooner music of the 40s and early 50s. So, no I shouldn’t write it because it is as if I had gone into my grandfather’s attic to…put on…motherfuck, when I found 1950s clothes up there they disappeared onto my body. So, then, it’s as silly as me wearing amazing vintage clothes. Ah, excellent.

Astral Weeks: I once had a mix tape with “Madam George” recorded 3x at the start so I wouldn’t have to rewind. And this was true even though it was my step-father’s favorite song. High barrier to cross, Van Morrison. HIGH barrier. Blotter acid and Schönberg I think I couldn’t fucking manage. Fuuuck. Too many notes. Too many the wrong notes. Too many not the right the wrong too many notes. Jesus. Put some fucking Van Morrison on the turntable.

Yeah, I’m definitely onboard with preventing “your mindset is too utopian” critiques in the music posts. I like this new direction for the blog.

OK there was good stuff at other times too.

Oh man, I just heard her like 2 weeks ago for the first time. Wonderful.

Straightwood: you know with dead certainty that I was not dancing up ‘in da club’ to Patrice Rushen and Con Funk Shun and Breakwater in 1976 (the music I lauded in a previous “all hail rare groove” post.) You have known this for ages. (It’s true my youngest child is 9 now and that’s freaking me out, but I didn’t use unethical IVF practices to create her.) This is why you are keeping the wood straight, and the trolling straighter, as ever. You have never, for a moment, believed I was old enough to be doing so (dancing in da… etc.), and no one at all will believe you even for a nanosecond if you claim that you did. Let’s see, maybe you’ll claim you weren’t reading all that carefully, and you thought that by ‘1976’ I meant ‘1996’? That you thought I said, and was correct in saying, that the smooth funk sampled in West Coast rap of the early 90s was originally released in the late 90s? That you think I am of an age to have been focused on rare 1976 releases by bands that never ever made it big, from Zion, Illinois? That you took my Ross “I Would Do Anything For Love But I Won’t” Douthat post with po-faced literalness, due to your straight-laced nature, and your entire lack of humor, and you believed me when I said that I had time-travel technology? And so, in your stern view–akin in many ways to a long stick that is extraordinarily stiff, I feel–I was re-living my glory days as a young person, spent using [non-canon] Culture time-travel tech to get crunk in da club in LA, listening to Faze-O, in 1978, in a particularly tight 3am set by a killer DJ, and then shaking my money-maker until daylight came and caught me up again (as in the song), and so, when I explained how awesome Faze-O, is I did so in a way that embarrassed you? Please elaborate.
Yours,
with warmest regards,
Belle “No, I Am Not Now Committed To Liking Every Form Of Music You Nitwit; Study Implicature And Troll Harder So That You May Merit Your Nym” Waring

Yum, yum!

No one can lay out a whole heaping, banquet table of troll-food like Ma Belle. Why, in view of all that delicious bounty, trolls will come flocking from nearby counties! That would keep troupes and troops of trolls well-nourished for weeks.

Strange thing to do, but I guess you know what you are about.

No one can lay out a whole heaping, banquet table of troll-food like Ma Belle.

You are without wit, or charm, or grace.

Belle,

Thank you for bestowing on me the rare honor of F -> M sexual harassment, which I take as the highest compliment because it demonstrates that true equality of the sexes can be attained only when they share fully in rudeness. I believe that I may have made a serious error in misconstruing your meticulous display of musical discernment with a shabby show of hipper-than-thou. But why would CT’s queen of hip need to show off? It is more likely that you are simply dipping into the restorative waters of pop music to gather strength for your next ferocious assault on sexist devils. Evidently your pure, joyous consumption of the pop music culture coexists happily with your righteous denunciation of sexists.

Crap, I probably shouldn’t have let you read that, Straightwood.

@38

Um, Belle, have you been reading the Liberal Surveillance State thread? I am in the mainstream there, and definitely in sympathy with Henry. I think you are just a troll magnet because the wild excesses of your writing style (which I do enjoy) awaken even the dullest mind to contentiousness. You could do this for money, you know. As Hunter Thompson observed, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

Sorry to go totally off-topic on your post, Holbo, but Henry’s post seems kind of too serious a place to ask:

Umm… was there a post on here by SHIA LEBOUF!, a post that, I might add, I was very much looking forward to read, being a connoisseur of all things Shia LeBeouf? (Ok, well, not really, but this seemed special?) Am I losing my fucking mind here?

(I fully predict that this comment will be forthwith deleted as part of the conspiracy to silence Shia LeBeouf and his prescient warnings!)

BelleW-
alicublog? Is that funny? Mean and funny? Nice but I don’t get it?
How many levels of inverted hermeneutical myopia did that require to it make?
I’m thinking a half or so.
My last landlady lived in a yurt. Up the hill from me, who lived in the bird house.
I was at the Last Waltz.
I saw and heard Janis Joplin before she’s in Big Brother.
Elizabeth Cotton I gave a flower bouquet fresh picked by me running around the neighborhood of the venue at night with a couple drinks in snatching fleurs hey-nonny outta people’s gardens because she said, before I took off, somewhat regally, her, where’s my flowers, no flowers?
I’ve been run out of town (attempted) by every wack-interest group with a membership greater than three, consistently, nigh on weekly, for pretty much everything except the true facts, since I was 14. Maybe before too I don’t remember.
But I have never, not even, no, except when misread by misreaders, so hey, been accused of collaborative frequencies viz. avec that place you said. That place. No.
You made me go there. Just to find out what. No.

@44
i mean, when you are named Straightwood on a blog called Crooked Timber…. right? ;)

js., others: my thought processes are random, and ridiculous, and described in an over-wrought fashion, but they are by no means as opaque as you make them out to be. Since you seem to like making moderately humorous things not-funny, shall we?
1) Hector and Mao get hit with the banhammer of justice.
2) I am accused of laying out a suspiciously well-laid banquet for trolls. Suspiciously so, mind. There are tiny fluted shells of puff pastry filled with beef Wellington. There is a cheese table. This is no ordinary troll banquet. But why? WHY?
3) I use my IMAGINATION to IMAGINE a scenario which is ONLY PRETEND in which bloggers, when they ban trolls, do not merely cause them to cease to exist on the blogs in question, but cease to exist altogether, and so, kill them, of necessity, due to logic.
4) I further imagine that, like the ancient Scythians described in Herodotus, liberal bloggers can only gather and drink in the yurt of their king if they have slain an enemy (a troll in this case if you are having difficulty keeping up for some reason) in the previous year. Further, that, like said Scythians, when they do drink, they drink out of a cup made from the skull of said slain enemy (or in this case, troll, viz supra.)
5) As Lunar New Year is fast approaching it is clear I will be able to drink out of Hector and Mao’s skulls soon, so no worries there, but out of whose skull will I drink next year? It cannot be a “pill for men that rhymes with famous falls in New York State/Canada” spammer. No. It must be a real, a true, an excellent, even a splendid troll. For who will equal Hector? Thus we will need to nurture a new troll. That’s why I’m trolling my own blog so hard in these comments, was the implication there.
6) But do liberal bloggers have a single king in whose tent these ceremonies would always, continuously take place? Atrios? No, so it probably travels around, by lot, and I was merely suggesting that it might be alicublog because hey why not, it’s an excellent blog after all?
7) Likewise, why should we host next year? Just cuz it’s funny? Also, what the hell, it’s my comment, nu?
8) “It’s not funny to joke about burning would be NRO-cruisers alive in a wicker model of Jonah Goldberg!” Is too.
9) “The year after next isn’t Snake, it’s water Snake now moron, it’s about to become Horse, and then–” Look, liberal blogger Lunar Years are different. Right now it’s earth Imaginary Iraqi. Last year was special since it was metal Glenn Reynolds (it was fire Glenn Reynolds 12 years prior.)
I hope this has cleared everything up.

Yeah, really needed to read the post I guess. But it was gone so soon! I must say I was hoping for something along the lines of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Libertarian FARC! On Twin-Earth! Or something.

(It is meanwhile so depressing that my attempts at humor make funny things unfunny, that I am just going to stop.)

No way—really?

I hope this has cleared everything up.
Yeah, you know, it did. I went back there at that place and they didn’t have a picture of Canada’s Own Ted Cruz first thing up anymore so I actually read some actual stuff instead of also having aesthetic distress on the blueness of it and yeah it is.
So self-criticism and watch that over-reacting on nothing substantial at all to go on, plus it’s okay and good even. Calm down, me.
3) …of necessity, due to logic…
It may soon be possible to cause people to cease to exist without killing them. Conceptual removal. The idea of who that was is now no longer an idea, ffffft.
Including eventually back-dating so they aren’t even ever having been there to begin with. Which means working out stuff falling down from suddenly having no nails that they put in etc. But it is nicer for everyone. Though not as much fun. Spiritually more mature, but not very exciting.
My dad raised me on tales of the Irish et al being Scythians to start who were, in his version not the Greek one, more crafty traders and cool nomads than ferocity raiding champions, driven by others more nastily inclined into already (tribally) populated Europe, and then pushed north and west to where they became themselves.
But we never drank anything stronger than beer together. Out of bottles and cans.

Roy, alicublog features the wordsmithing of the one and only Roy Edroso, also able author of the mnemonic mordancy that goes under the rubric Morgue for Whores; a man good for quote harvesting in most everything he writes, but—in especial— his weekly Right Rage collation for the Village Voice.

js. sorry–if I was stepping on an actual Shia LeBeouf joke from you then it is I who need to look in in the mirror of not-funny.

Only because there’s no where else to put this:
Kenneth Patchen wrote a poem about a very little man with wooden hair, who, whenever he needed a haircut, would get on a city bus and start insulting people and saying obnoxious things generally, until someone picked him up and threw him through a window.
Mao was abb1.

So, getting back to topic a bit late, this is quite good! (Only checked out the older stuff.) Made me go back and listen to the Cramps again, who I didn’t really like when I was first getting into this stuff (they seemed a bit gimmicky? I wanted more “Holiday in Cambodia”). (This in my life is all way after any of this shit was being produced.) Anyway, cheers, maybe time for a rethink of poppy surf-rock inspired Cali-punk.

(And re Kiwanda, Rain Parade is way awesome. Second best band to come out of the Paisley Undergound?)

I hope to God straightwoods nonsense hasn’t put an end to this series?
My radio tells me that yesterday was Sam Cookes birthday ..

Straightwood, My God, I hope I didn’t sound like you in that other thread, though this does give me a chance to clarify myself.

The idea people seem to have now is that you get imprinted with some currently-popular style in adolescence and bond to it for the rest of your life. As you age, you expect to disengage from current music, and, if you remain engaged with music, it will be the music you listened to as a teenager, or at most, other records in the same vein. Music is part of adolescence, and its primary function, aside from accompanying sex or dancing, is to help define identity, a central concern of adolescence: you listen to music to make a statement to yourself and others about who you are. Which I don’t like, actually, because I think it distorts the reaction to the music itself.

This has become so normal that people seem to think it is an intrinsic part of life.
There is nothing wrong with adults listening to youth-oriented music, including for nostalgic reasons, though those are not the only possible reasons. After all, I listen to some recent youth music, and, although I won’t be telling people when I was a teenager, suffice to say it wasn’t last year. But having adolescents dominate popular music was a marketing strategy of the 50s that stuck; it is not an eternal truth of music. That is why what people were bemoaning in the other thread – why can’t anybody write good pop tunes past a certain age – has only been true since rock and roll (and not entirely so now, but there is truth to it).

Prior to rock, popular music was mostly aimed at adults. The economic basis was less records than sheet music – people play music at all ages – and music for musical theatre, which, though the audience was not always so geriatric as lately, was never a form specifically for teenagers. The one partial exception to this is dance music. Although people of all ages dance, most people of high ages don’t do it very long. So putting the kids in charge of the music market has increased the emphasis on driving rhythms, not that such were absent before, but they are more ubiquitous now.

Turning the musical culture over to adolescents has led to a great deal of stylistic innovation. A key question of adolescence is “who am I”, so new styles keep emerging because each generation wants their own answer. Not that styles were static before, but there was a reason Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, Kern, etc. could write hits for decades without changing their styles much.

And since all ages have adopted rock and subsequent styles, they are not purely adolescent anymore, though adolescents still have a disproportionate voice, largely because adults grant it to them.

that you get imprinted with some currently-popular style in adolescence
“Get imprinted”.
Turning the musical culture over to adolescents
By what? Or by whom? The air around us? The value-neutral vending machines of sound?
Or the industrial marketing, the monetizing of something that’s legally defined as pure luxury, entertainment?
Music’s integral to every rite of passage I can think of – graduations weddings funerals inaugurations church hot dates movies background of shopping – everything except birth itself, and even there, now…

But it’s an extra, legally, mere entertainment, a snack almost, by definition.
The severing of continuity that makes each wave of the “generations” a coherent distinct whole, what is that? Besides marketing ploy. Riding on the carving up of an organic whole, the human community locked into age-specific sub-groups.

Oh it’s a natural thing, always been like that.
But the commodification of music’s less than 150 years old now, max, more like 80 years. Just enough to drop below the generational horizon and seem like it’s always been that way.

Songs that used to pass from singer to singer got sliced and diced and packaged and made next-generationally obsolete.
This turning of the young against the old, through language, fashion, and musical styles, where’s that coming from? It sure works to the advantage of the merchandizers.
Like running shoes for kids. Got to have the new ones, ma. Because popularity.
“We like this” so you can’t, without being weird. Like wearing youth stylee clothes when you’re too old to qualify. Eww.

Music as cultural signifier, okay, but the dividing of the culture into tightly bounded age-groups means people are either kind of ashamed to like music outside their assigned group, or it’s seen as a sophisticated and cool “knowing”, but never as commonly experienced, never as a unifying thread across time and generations.
Until we break through that artificial crap.