music and i

For most of my life, I thought I was insane. At least a little.

Ever since I was a kid, I never knew anyone who listened to music the way I did. I would listen to bands no one else liked, take in huge amounts of strange music whenever I could, and never seemed to be able to connect with anybody when it came to the music I loved.

My idea of a fun afternoon was sitting in my living room surrounded by my mom and dad's CD collections, listening to hundreds of artists I'd never heard before, and building up a collection of random music knowledge that impressed no one beyond a few uncles who were amused that I knew Bono's real name.

Up until I decided to come to the Mount, I still thought I was crazy. I would occasionally find friends who would be able to tolerate some of my music, but even then I knew they were just humoring me. I was alone and crazy, and I had accepted it.

Then, the summer before my freshman year, a funny thing happened.

I attended Virgin Fest at the Pimlico Race Course in July, where I would see the Beastie Boys, LCD Soundsystem, Peter Bjorn & John, the Fratellis, Modest Mouse, and a handful of other bands. (Unfortunately I could only afford a ticket for the first day, so I missed an even better lineup on day two.)

I brought my friend Mandy with me because of one more band that was playing that day: Incubus, her favorite band in the world.

While we were in the crowd waiting for that band, she took off into the mass of people in front of us, weaving herself between impossibly small gaps to get closer to the stage, completely losing me in the process. So while she took off, I stood helplessly in the middle of the crowd.

The high point came not from the band itself, but from a remarkably small woman who pushed her way through the masses and found a spot directly in front of me.

After a few minutes, I noticed she was taking frantic notes on a small pad of paper, with a professional label on the top that said “Spin Magazine.” Which happened to be my favorite music magazine at the time, and still is to this day.

I was apparently staring pretty intently at this discovery, because she turned around and took notice. After a brief conversation, she too turned and headed up toward the stage.

At that point, I already knew that music journalism was what I wanted to do, without a doubt in my mind. So when I got back home later that night, I looked up the Spin writer who covered Incubus at the festival and sent her a sprawling email asking what I should do to basically get her job.

To my surprise, she wrote back, with a surprisingly extensive response. In her email, she recommended that I get a few anthologies by a guy named Lester Bangs, who I had only known at that point as a character from Almost Famous. Apparently he was a real guy.

So I bought the first two books I could find, but I never found time to read them until college. Three pages into the anthology “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” I realized I wasn't crazy.

It was as if someone had tapped into my manic relationship with music and put it down on paper.

“It's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record. Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.”

Those might as well have been my exact words. For once I wasn't alone. A chance encounter with a Spin writer in the crowd of an Incubus performance lead me to pure enlightenment.

From there my musical appetite became truly insatiable. And today I have a music library of 30,000+ songs, with an ever-expanding list of 250+ bands I still hope to listen to at some point before I die, and a music column that is completely indebted to those anthologies that random writer told me to buy.

The oddness of that whole experience hit me in full today as I sat down trying to figure out what to write about this week, so I decided to share it with you all. I hope you enjoyed it.

- 3/1/11

radiohead - the king of limbs

Radiohead really outdid themselves this time.

Thom Yorke and the gang emerged from four years of relative silence with a surprise statement last week, announcing the release of a new album, entitled “The King of Limbs.” A release date was set for February 19^th, and the Internet roared with rumors and speculation as to what the album would be like.

Then, out of nowhere, the band made the album available on their website a day early, with zero warning or advance notice. Everyone in the world—fans, journalists, critics, and friends—was delivered the album at the exact same time, an achievement that is simply unprecedented in the age of digital music.

Album releases are no longer tense, anticipatory events. Everything gets leaked before its release date—absolutely everything—except for Radiohead albums. A combination of a tight production team, near-immediate releases of digital copies, and the delayed production of easily-leaked physical copies ensured that King of Limbs was available to fans worldwide at the exact same time, an achievement that's nothing short of incredible.

And for all that hype surrounding the album, fans worldwide experienced the same disappointment at the exact same time: eight tracks, totaling just over thirty-seven minutes of music. It was the shortest Radiohead album in their career, by five minutes, and it felt even shorter. To even call it an album is an overstatement.

As I attempt to write about the King of Limbs, I'm struggling to find a real precedent for what happened over the last seven days. For Radiohead fans, it's been absolute joy, followed by incredible anticipation, followed by total shock, followed by immense disappointment, followed by complete denial. It's hard to remember the last time a piece of music garnered this much attention while delivering so little on the immense hype placed behind it.

It's a good album, possibly even a great one, but it doesn't rank up among Radiohead's best work. It can be best described as a more melodic version of Kid A, with the rampant experimental instrumentation from In Rainbows carried over—only without the songwriting. You reach the end of the album, and you can't help but want more. It feels empty, like someone over at Radiohead HQ only included half the album in the digital download by accident.

The cult-like Radiohead fanbase has been trying to fill that emptiness ever since. Rumors continue to swirl regarding a secret second-half of the album, or even a few bonus tracks, but so far nothing has emerged (as of press time). The signs are everywhere, however, and it's hard not to buy into the conspiracy theories at least a little.

The digital downloads for the King of Limbs were given order numbers, all of which start with “TKOL-1,” leading many fans to believe that a second release—presumably “TKOL-2”—is waiting to be unleashed upon the world. Further evidence for this lies in the fact that the last Radiohead album, In Rainbows, was released in 2007 with a bonus disc of ten additional songs.

The final track on the album is entitled “Separator,” and contains the lyric “If you think this is over, you're wrong,” both leading fans to believe the album is incomplete. Even more interestingly, the track was titled “Mouse Dog Bird” in its live form, with the name changed just for the album. (The lyric in question was also included in the live version, however.)

The main problem fans have with the King of Limbs, however, is the fact that Radiohead has a lot of music leftover. And I mean a lot.

A good friend of mine who eats, sleeps, and breathes Radiohead estimates that the band has fourteenunreleased songs that are complete or nearly complete, yet they're nowhere to be seen. And that's just what we've heard. After four years of recording, there has to be more.

He also claims to have inside sources of his own who have been vaguely hinting at bigger things to come, and adds that the fact that Radiohead has yet to give interviews regarding the album means they're probably not done yet.

I'm still cautiously optimistic that we'll hear more from Radiohead in the coming weeks. Until then, I'm hesitant to pass full judgment on the King of Limbs. If this is really all we're getting, then at the very least it's impossible not to be disappointed. But I'm still patiently waiting.

- 2/21/11

Note: This may look ridiculous now, given the fact that the mystical TKOL-2 never showed up, but I still think this remains a fairly accurate description of the initial reactions to the album.

arcade fire wins a grammy; eminem fans shocked, confused

It's very rare that Rosie O'Donnell says anything that connects even remotely with mainstream society. Her career can be effectively divided between being the crazy lady with a talk show and being the crazy lady who got kicked off a crazy lady daytime talk-show for being too crazy. But her post-Grammy's tweet regarding the Album of the Year award effectively summarized the reactions of much of the viewing public:

“album of the year? ummm never heard of them ever” [sic].

The recipient of the Album of the Year Grammy was Arcade Fire, an indie rock band from Montreal.

From my perspective, these guys are seasoned veterans of the modern music scene. They started out as a solo act, headed by current lead songwriter Win Butler, and slowly grew over time into a sprawling seven-piece band, not counting whoever they decided to bring with them on tour.

They retain their “indie” moniker due to their placement on the (sort of) independent label Mirge Records, but their last two albums have debuted at number one and number two on the Billboard 200, respectively, which is not very “indie.” These guys have sold millions of albums, toured the world countless times, headlined dozens of music festivals, and effectively become a household name among music fans.

Yet for some reason, the backlash against them winning that award was so huge, it prompted the creation of its own Tumblr account to document it—whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com. Here are some of the better entries, largely taken from Twitter and Facebook, all reprinted verbatim from public accounts:

“It's a weird world we live in where someone called Arcade Fire can win a Grammy n Justin Beiber doesn't!”

“The Grammy's are fixed, like straight up; how are all these nobody's winning? And why is everyone from Arcade Fire hideously ugly? #appalled”

“THE 80'S ARE OVER PPL ROCK IS NOT COOL ANYMORE!!!!!!! Eminem so shuda won! None of this band's songs even got on the top 100 and eminem was #1 for like two months! I wudda been happy with lady gaga or Katy Perry cuz they DESERVE IT!”

These entries go on and on, with many containing a simple misunderstanding among Justin Beiber, Lady Gaga, and Eminem fans that I'd like to clear up here: Arcade Fire is not a hipster band.

They used to be. I mean their hipsterdom used to be off the charts.

For the recording of their second album, “Neon Bible,” they took an abandoned church that was being used as a café and turned it into a studio. They were that level of hipster.

But then they had the number two album in the country, and other people started to listen to them, and they played live with David Bowie, and they used their best song to promote “Where the Wild Things Are”—just a string of events that made them completely not hip.

I haven't even heard their new album yet, “The Suburbs.” That's how unhip they are right now. I considered reviewing it for the column this week, but then I remembered that it went number one in seven different countries and won a Grammy for Album of the Year, so...ew, no.

The term “indie rock” implies that they are signed to an independent label, which is a big no-no right there. If you aren't recording your music through a cheap laptop or your dad's old beat-up eight-track, you're not a hipster band.

No one actually produces their music officially anymore. If it's not on CD-R or cassette without the band name on the front, I don't even bother listening to it. These guys actually have covers on their albums—how retro!

All the good hipster acts these days are nothing but drugged-up surf punk rock played way too loud with tons of feedback. If you can actually hear the individual instruments in your recordings—not to mention if you use instruments that aren't drums, guitars or synths—you don't stand a chance.

So for everybody claiming that this is a “hipster band,” or that “Pitchfork followers needs to find a new idol now,” don't worry: we've had our replacement for Arcade Fire for years. You'll probably hear about them when the public catches up in a few years and starts giving them awards too, but for now...it's probably too deep for you to really get, so don't bother.

- 2/15/11