Music | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Oct

no one lives forever, though; no one’s wise to try

Posted by Perich at 11:40 am

Sometimes my obsession with Ted Leo scares me¹.

I have either RJ or Marie to thank for introducing me to him, not sure which. Both of them made mix CDs for me within the same six month period, one with “Me and Mia” and the other with “Biomusicology.” Or maybe “Bridges, Squares” was on one of them. At some point the name Ted Leo and the Pharmacists cracked the caseyanthony barrier and I knew them as someone to look for. RJ burned me a few tracks and I buried myself in a dark cave², listening to Shake the Sheets until I had it memorized.

Last week, Meghan saw Julie Klausner record her podcast live. She tumbled about how much fun it was, and how Fred Armisen was there, and oh, Ted Leo played the opening song. Reading that, my first reaction was a a brief spasm of jealousy that a friend of mine had seen Ted Leo play more recently than I had.

I don’t feel this way about any other artist. There are plenty of writers, directors, actors, musicians, etc. whose work I love. There are a handful of artists whose work I examine obsessively for hidden meaning: Gene Wolfe, Jay-Z, and the like. But Ted Leo is the only artist at work right now who I can’t pretend to be cool about. I can’t sit in my comfy chair, glass of Scotch in one hand, and hold court on his merits. I can’t be a detached borderline hipster with pretensions to cultural criticism.

I hear his shit and I just need to rock the fuck out.

Trying to pin reasons on an obsession demeans both reason and passion. But this is a blog, so that’s my job³. So I’ve tried to untangle the reasons that I’m so unreasonably fixated on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and I’ve found four.

First, there’s the political content. TL/RX hit me at a point in my life where I was finally swinging from right-libertarian to left-libertarian to … whatever you want to call me now. I hadn’t pinned all my aspirations on Obama the way a lot of my friends had, but the fact that no one was taking him to task with the furor that Bush had been was frustrating. Along comes this punk from D.C. who, like me, can’t “deal with trying to process / pigeons acting like they’re doves.” I hear this for the first time, then the fifth, then the fifteenth, and I can’t get enough of it. Not only is it the frustration I’ve been feeling, but it’s so artfully expressed.

Which leads me to my second point, and that’s the political passion. It’s one thing to dismiss the inability of a two-party system to constrain the agglutination of power with a disillusioned wave and a bon mot. And I’ll never get tired of that. But it’s another thing to channel that sentiment into emotion. Disillusionment doesn’t mean deadening; your “good-bye to all that” doesn’t need to be a weary sigh. It can be angry. It can be joyful. It can be hopeful. It can be a lot of things, not all of them bitter. I’ve written before about the need to separate the anti-war movement from the hippies with which it’s traditionally linked, to give voice to “full-throated pacifism.” TL/RX run the gamut.

My third point: words. Lyrics and vocals matter more to me than almost any other part of a song, which probably explains why I like hip hop so much⁴. But if the musical composition is great as well, that’s a pearl without price. I’ve loved what little Elvis Costello I’ve been exposed to because of his gleeful blend of pop rock style and subversive lyrics. I loved the Hairspray musical for the same reason. Ted Leo plays in that same field. He can turn the passionate-but-doomed-but-inspiring struggle of an anorexic into a blaring rock anthem. He can get a crowd singing along to a cheery ditty about the sad tendency of radical movements to turn in on themselves. For someone who loves language as much as I do, every Ted Leo song is a feast.

And finally, the music is just really damn good.

The dispassionate critic I’ve been trying to be for thirty years is crying out for help. This is ridiculous. It’s like there’s a different person living in my head, a person with ripped jeans and a studded leather jacket and an encyclopedic knowledge of Operation Ivy. Some day Ted Leo’s going to die (everyone is) and I’m going to be bent out of shape for a week because, as far as I know, there’s no one else giving voice to the same issues with the same passion and skill in the form of awesome indie rock. I don’t know how to fix this. I’m not sure I want to.

________________
1. A value-add, for people who know us both, is to imagine this entry read in the voice of Kevin Quigley.

2. For which read “my apartment.”

3. It’s not.

4. The white suburban adolescent fascination with the authenticity of black urban poverty and anger explains the rest of it.

Jun

your former glories and all your stories

Posted by Perich at 11:03 am

Guys, I figured it out. One of the key dilemmas of human experience. The question of why the artists we discover in our youth – our turbulent adolescence, the college years where we develop our critical stance – seem so much better to us than the artists who start their careers when we’re old. “Today’s music is crap,” say the old, but when the old were young, the last generation’s elderly said the same. Whence this paradox? Why is it so hard for a mature audience to appreciate new sounds? Why do we look so fondly on the art of our past?

Anyhow, I figured it out. It’s cool. No problem. Listen: we stay in love with the artists of our youth because they’re older than us, and it’s really hard to respect anyone who’s younger than us.

I was thinking about this through the lens of music, but it works for any representational, composed art: literature, film, etc. I fell in love with Pearl Jam, Led Zeppelin and The Who as a kid. While I’m no longer the obsessive fan I once was, the type of sound they produced – grungy, fuzzy rock full of passion – still resonates with me. That’s what I seek out. The sort of rock that’s popular today, like that yearning Doughtry crap, does nothing for me. But if I’m being honest with myself, I must admit that were I a teenager today, that’s probably the crap I’d like. And it’s not just rock music. I still like Republica and can’t stand Far East Movement, even though they’re the same act in all the ways that matter.

The reason is because Eddie Vedder et al are older than me. And they always will be.

This doesn’t mean I love every rock band that’s older than me. You’ll never see me at a Patti Smith concert. But it means I’m highly unlikely to love a rock band that’s made up of people younger than me. Those kids! What do they know?

This is weird because it works even for acts whom I’ve outlived. I’m older now than Biggie, Tupac, Cobain or Hendrix ever were, but they were older than me when I first started listening to them. So they will always be older than me, even though I’ve survived them, like Tommy Lee Jones’s father in No Country for Old Men.

Why is this? I’d guess because composed representational art (music, literature, film) is a way of experiencing something vicariously. As a species, we survive and adapt because we can share experience. We’re not limited to what we see or touch ourselves. We can also integrate the experience of others and, if we take it seriously, learn from it.

What makes us take someone else’s experience seriously? Age helps. It’s not a guarantee – the disrespect of the young for the old is documented better than lunar eclipses – but it helps. Even young punks look up to slightly older punks for social cues.

If composed representational art is another form of experience, then it makes sense that we find the art made by artists we consider “older” more respectable. We can still enjoy the art of the young, but it often lacks the emotional resonance we find in the artists we admired in our youth.

Of course, this is all half-baked evolutionary psychology, so it’s probably wrong. But it explains why I keep “discovering” artists from my childhood – Kate Bush, Siouxsie and the Banshees – and why contemporary pop is so much hollow ringing.

Sep

home is the place I want to be, but I guess I’m already there

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Every fall, the Hancock Tower starts bringing in live musicians to play during the afternoon. It’s someone with an electric keyboard, or a flautist, or a string quartet once we approach the Christmas season. It adds a touch of culture, the kind you’d get in a suburban mall or a clean hotel, to an otherwise utilitarian space. Plus, the lobby and mezzanine of the Hancock feature interesting acoustics. They’re divided by pillars, walls and elevator banks, but sound carries through the open spaces.

Walking to the gym this week, I passed a violinist in the lobby. She had a music stand in front of her while she worked some baroque air. I didn’t stay long enough to place it, but I doubt that I would have recognized it even with another hour. My ear for classical is limited. She had her case and her puffy coat in the corner, resting against a pillar. She must have set them there when she arrived; she’d retrieve them from there when she left. Not that anyone would think she teleported into the lobby out of the phlogiston. But something struck me about those little evidences of her arrival and her imminent departure. It’s like going to an art gallery and seeing a dolly leaning next to Water Lilies. Guy in coveralls with Latex gloves checking his wrist watch.

We don’t think much about music in transactional spaces. You listen to music in your home. You nod your head to the manager’s playlist in a cafe. Even when I’m in the car, I associate the music with being in the car, not with the act of transit. Music belongs to a destination: I’m here, so let’s crank up the stereo. Or it’s something you carry with you to retain that destinational sense of security: the iPod cocoon on the subway. The kind of music you hear in hallways, in food courts, in elevators, is always bland and forgettable. The day I’m browsing in a Target and I hear PJ Harvey’s “50 Foot Queenie,” I will buy a latte just so I have something to spit-take.

A few years back, there was an article in the Washington Post about a world-renowned violinist playing a Stradivarius in the D.C. subway. The article couched this as some sort of experiment: to see if “the masses” could recognize profound art. I saw this article shared several times among my circle. Everyone thought it was really deep, including me. Only one of my friends^* pointed out the obvious: no one noticed this really profound performance because people don’t go to the subway to look for art. People go to the subway to get some place in a hurry. There’s no subway station in D.C. where I’d want to loiter.

(In fairness, the article makes the same point near the bottom)

The lobby of the Hancock Tower – and don’t get me wrong, I love working here – is a transactional space. It’s not a destination. No one goes there just to chill. You’re passing through there on your way to or from an office. Adding music makes the space feel a little more humane. But why bother making it good music? Why bring art to it? No one’s going to linger. No one’s going to be moved. I wonder about these things when I see a Berklee or Longy student, cradling the instrument she’s studied for years, playing to 30-second audiences in the lobby of an office building, standing for three hours with short breaks, then snapping her violin into its case, shrugging into her puffy jacket, and wondering who she talks to about her check.

____________
^*Probably Joel. I can count on him to be irreverent.

Jul

nothing is better than this

Posted by Perich at 7:50 am

There’s a bald guy with a scraggly beard who sits at the bus station outside the Boston Public Library most afternoons. He makes popping and clicking sounds with his mouth. He doesn’t appear to me making them at anyone – not the ck-ck of the cartoon wolf leering at a dame in a checkered skirt. He just sits there and makes sounds. It’s something we’ve all done as four-year-olds or in the privacy of our bathrooms: experimenting with the sounds that the human body can produce. But this guy does it every day. The man’s clearly mentally challenged in some way. You can tell because he spends all afternoon making noises that entertain him, instead of putting on a tie and going into and out of an office.

I thought of this when I saw David Byrne on the big screen in the Somerville Theater‘s showing of Stop Making Sense this past Wednesday. Byrne plays his music without the conscious affectation of other artists. The look on his face as he bounces and bops through his music straddles the line between religious ecstasy and animal terror. He’s continually amazed at what he sounds like. And what’s amazing is that the results aren’t garbage. They are, in fact, catchy and moving and good. How do you come up with a song like “Psycho Killer”? What musical tradition does that tap into? How do you convince yourself that “fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa” is a legitimate chorus? And how did you convince me of that?

That lack of self-consciousness translates to the rest of the band as well. Steve Scales sticks his tongue out at the camera. The backup singers jog in place. Tina Weymouth bops back and forth in tune with her bass rhythm. Everyone experiments with what feels right. Everything is weird and exploratory. Nothing seems to have a Grand, Implicit Purpose behind it. David Byrne doesn’t don an oversized suit as some deep metaphor about the hollowness of corporate America. He dons an oversized suit because a skinny guy in a big suit looks weird. The most casual movements become stylized.

Not all art needs to be this trippy. But I’m glad there is, or was, a place for it.

Feb

I swear to god, in this light and on this evening

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

If rock and roll’s about anything, it’s about fast cars, loose women and cheap intoxicants. Of those, the House of Blues’ Foundation Room seems equipped only for the lattermost. Step through a pair of unguarded yellow doors on Lansdowne Street in Boston, opposite Gate C at Fenway Park. You’re immediately intercepted by two nattily-dressed gentlemen who check your name off a list, affix sparkling red bracelets and offer to take your coats. Up two flights of stairs to a plush foyer that isn’t so much dimly lit as heavily darkened: concealed, indirect lighting pointing toward the crown molding. Overstuffed couches form a defensive perimeter around a roaring fireplace. The bartop is black marble and a Miller Lite is $6; rather cheap for a Boston club, and they’ll even pour it in a plastic cup so you can carry it onto the floor.

tom-smith-editors

Editors, who played the House of Blues this past Thursday, don’t fit the other two criteria of rock ‘n roll either. Tom Smith, lead warbler, has three microphones to choose from: one in front of each of two keyboards and a standing mic to lean into and twitch. Chris Urbanowicz, in addition to the guitar slung from his narrow shoulders, has both an autoharp and a step sequencer to choose from. The show starts with the lights dimming, the band emerging, and a few switches being flipped: the dominating tones of “In This Light and On This Evening” leap into the dark air. The set precedes with a technical precision that would make a stage manager nod with lips pursed. Victoria, who took my extra ticket, notes that she never saw Tom or Ed Lay (drums) check in to see when the next song should start. Why would they need to?

What Editors lack in spontaneity they make up for with intensity. You never get the sense that this will be a crazy rock show, one of those rare live occurrences where anything could happen. Tom Smith would never stop two verses through his first song, apologize to the audience and then launch into “Radio Radio” (not the least reason being it’s not his song). But total control of the musical experience, in the hands of talented artists, can create a thick curtain of sound that billows over you. Editors layer gutsy guitar hooks with baroque synthesizers and an anti-artillery barrage of percussion. Like the Foundation Room upstairs, it’s all plush textures and dark corners, something you almost feel vulnerable sharing. It’s that quiet moment before the storm.

editors

Feb

you don't know love like you used to

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

In This Light and On This Evening: So we’re cool with Tom Smith being this generation’s Ian Curtis? I wasn’t around when we took the vote; sorry. But it seems to be a done deal?

I’m cool with it, don’t get me wrong. But it seems like any claim Editors had to not being Joy Division all over again got chucked out the window with their latest. Combine their indie lyricism and their emo sentimentality with a full electronic symphony and you get this gem, In This Light and On This Evening. The effect may not be original, sure, but it is potent.

You get beautiful dance-hall hits like “Papillon.” You get songs that sound like dungeon music from Zelda II (“The Boxer”). And you get the occasional track that just cuts me down at the knees, like the hit single “You Don’t Know Love.”

Seeing these guys later in February; will report more in detail.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaH_S8wWf0c]

Jan

the memories will linger on; the good old days, they’re long gone

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

I still sit in dumb amazement, sometimes, at the power music has over me.

Standing in Johnny D’s on Saturday, watching the Ravens lose, Bobby pointed out a particular Beatles song that Beatlejuice was covering. It reminded him of the old shareware game Scorched Earth, which he used to play for hours with a friend while listening to Beatles albums. I saw his reminiscence and raised: one of the first CDs my parents got, when they upgraded to a CD player and a full stereo, was Revolver. I remember listening to it while playing my dad at Conquest of the Empire.

“It’s odd, the associations we make,” Bobby observed.

After the Ravens finished failing, I stumbled home. A sudden wave of nostalgia for Baltimore and childhood overtook me, and I turned to the surest remedy: The Band’s self-titled 1970 album.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHy_XeBMagU]

As a scientist, I have to discount the effect that nostalgia may have on me. I remember listening to Levon Helm’s crooning on summer road trips with the family: Baltimore, MD to Cape Hatteras, NC in eight hours or less. I’ve always had a facility for lyrics and rhythm: it only took a few times for the songs to be ingrained on my consciousness.

And yet Martin Scorsese agrees with me: there was something about The Band that made them uniquely talented. They displayed the same penchant for odd but touching harmonies that the Beach Boys had. Combine that with the folksy strains that resonate with half of the American continent and you have a factory for classics. Rolling Stone, always a tough audience, was amazed that “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” wasn’t a century-old spiritual. It wasn’t. It was written by a Canadian. That’s how fucking good The Band was.

Blend once-in-a-generation talent with the lure of nostalgia, and you get a powerful brew. I would learn to play the guitar just to cover half of these songs, and I could never do it as well as Robertson. As it stands, I could never see myself turning to drugs so long as music like this exists in the world.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODPH-3pofM]

Nov

play your part

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 8:54 am

I saw Girl Talk at House of Blues on Monday night.

I had nothing but good things to say about the venue before visiting on Monday; after, I had my doubts. When we got in line outside, one of the staff checked our tickets and sent Serpico, Kim and I to the upstairs mezzanine, RJ to the floor. We’d arrived early enough that there was still space on the floor, but our tickets dictated otherwise. Having to split up a party bugs me.

Serpico, Kim and I squeezed up to some space near the front of the upstairs mezzanine. Senior Discount, a punk band in that nasal style that the late 90s gave its sanction to, opened for Girl Talk. They rocked through a couple fast and loud covers and a few fast and loud original songs. I liked them better when they were called Lit, I texted.

After a long wait, the stage was cleared save for a long metal table with two rugged, plastic-wrapped laptops on it. Gregg Gillis danced out in a high-stepping jog, complete with cheap white sweatshirt and headband. He fired up one of the laptops. A horde of kids decked out in 80s gear, chosen in advance by the floor staff, swarmed him. Then the music started, and for ninety minutes straight it didn’t stop.

girl-talk

Even at the highest energy electronic shows (RJ and Kim later confirmed), you intersperse one or two downtempo songs just so the DJ can stop moving for two minutes. But Gillis kept up the pace of pop hits and fast beats throughout the entire set. I walked out of there aching, sweaty and exhausted.

Oct

there's a clock on the wall and it counts my time

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 9:37 am

Saw some live music at the House of Blues this weekend.

The Islands
The first opening act, The Islands combined the best aspects of Radiohead with the worst aspects of The Arcade Fire. Good stuff but I don’t feel compelled to buy it. I was really confused since I showed up long after doors had opened and the guys on stage had a drum kit with a Happy Mondays sticker on the bass. “Really?” I said. “None of these jokers looks old enough to have been in the Goo Goo Dolls.”

The Happy Mondays

Shawn Ryder

The Mondays actually showing up did not clarify matters much. The only reason they brought Shawn Ryder along was so they could actually call themselves the Happy Mondays; short of him, there were no original members on stage. And say what you will of his poetic lyrics, the man’s not much of a singer. Or not much of a stage presence, either. He stood crooked on stage with sunglasses on and a jacket zipped up full to the collar, one finger in his ear (right, because flatting those notes would disappoint all the Mondays fans), and didn’t move much. I danced, because it’s good house / rock music.

The Psychedelic Furs

Richard Butler

Phenomenal show. The stage felt spartan in comparison to the previous acts: the same number of musicians, but spread out to all corners of the vast space. Richard Butler, looking for all the world like a 57-year-old lesbian, swanned on to “Love My Way” and a house full of cougars roared. The band marched without pause through the rest of the Furs’ biggest hits and dearest fan favorites: “President Gas,” “Heartbeat,” “Heaven,” “Ghost in You,” “Pretty in Pink,” etc, etc. “Heartbreak Beat” is the only one I missed and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just sick of it.

Dan Butler

Sep

I've got that rock and roll; I've got that future flow

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

We’ve Got The Beat That Bounce
Watching the video for “Boom Boom Pow” this weekend – just because, okay? – raised the obvious question: what do the other two guys in the Black Eyed Peas do? Why are they there? You’ve got Will.i.am producing the songs – and as little as I like their songs, “Boom Boom Pow” has a really catchy beat to it. You’ve got Fergie on vocals and eye candy. While the latter trumps the former in most pop acts, she has a good voice in her own right.

But then there’s the other two guys: the ugly one and the guy with the samurai topknot. What do they add? They’re not very talented rappers. I can’t imagine they have a lot of female fans screaming over them. Now that the Black Eyed Peas have become world-class superstars, why are these guys around?

The world seems to have answered that question for me, in that Will.i.am has made tentative crossover steps (like his role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and Fergie has a solo career. Whereas no one cares about Taboo’s aborted solo projects, or his role as Vega in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. So, asked and answered.

Of course, it would be rather mercenary for a band to drop its less attractive / useful members once it achieved superstardom. And since pop music isn’t known for its mercenary attitude, I suppose we’re stuck with those two until the end of time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIK-U6ZfyYE]

Things Not To Say, Even At A Whisper, In A Conference Room Full of Coworkers When You Realize You’ll Have To Present First
“Balls.”

Have You Come Here For Forgiveness? Have You Come To Raise the Dead?
U2 played at Foxboro Stadium, south of Boston, this past Monday. I did not go to see them, though I had ample opportunity. At least three friends e-mailed me, forwarding along info from friends who were trying to offload tickets. One of them needed to get rid of a dozen club-level seats (private bathrooms, free snacks, etc) at $250 a pop.

I like U2 as a concept; I’m glad they still exist. But I have no real desire to ever see them live. Certain bands generate an energy when heard live that trumps any of their albums. I can’t imagine what hearing U2 live would add, other than “more fireworks” and “Bono’s face on a Jumbotron.”

Here’s some anecdotal data: I’ve gone to karaoke probably one hundred times in the last three years. My favorite haunts all have very extensive songbooks. But I have never heard anyone sing a U2 song from later than 1996. And if we exclude the one time somebody covered “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” (from the Batman Forever) soundtrack, no one goes more recent than Achtung Baby. That’s eighteen years of irrelevance.

I Guess I Thought You Had The Flavor
In conversation with a friend recently, I realized how much the question, “Why do I always want what I can’t have?” answers itself. You want what you can’t have because you don’t have it. If you had it, you wouldn’t want it any more – because you’d have it. This is true whether you’re talking about romantic partners, careers or a 42″ plasma TV. Wanting what you can’t have doesn’t make you weird or broken or hopeless – it’s part of the human condition.

“Why do I always want what I can’t afford?” is an interesting question. But wanting what you can’t have is normal. There’s a reason Buddhists say not wanting is such a big deal: because it’s really, really hard.