​One perk of being snowed in/too afraid for your life to venture anywhere on the icy roads? Hours and hours of reading time. I've spent the past three days devouring Alina Simone's collection of essays You Must Go And Win. Simone is a Ukraine-born, Brooklyn-based folk-rock singer; in 2008, after she released a tribute album of songs by the late Siberian female punk rocker Yanka Dyagileva, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux offered her a book deal; You Must Go And Win is the result. Throughout the book's ten essays, Simone weaves together stories of trying to make it as an indie-rock star with intimate recollections of her family roots--her parents were KGB-blacklisted from their hometown of Kharkov and subsequently relocated to Massachusetts, where Simone grew up.

Simone is a vivacious writer; through her sparkling wit and clarity, her stories come alive, warmly--stories of her visit to Dyagileva's Siberian grave with a punk-rock Russian Orthodox monk; her attempts to meet musical collaborators over Craigslist (one turns out to be a disgruntled, raving immigrant from Tbilisi named Georgi); her weeks driving around the country videotaping her childhood friend, a pre-Dresden Dolls Amanda Palmer, trying to stir up the attention needed to become a pop culture "icon" (Simone also grew up with the comedian Eugene Mirman, who remains one of her close friends); her gradual Kübler-Rossian shift from hatred to acceptance of Britney Spears after hearing "Toxic" on repeat 500 times on Siberian radio; her obsessive research into the Russian religious sect the Doukhobors, a group marked by two key practices--worshipping through choral music and self-castration.

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ride the wohl whip

​Weezer concerts, Retromania, one other obligatory thing to complete a list of three--seems like everybody is getting swept up by nostalgia these days! Add to that list the latest issue of Cometbus, the venerable punk zine that namesake Aaron Cometbus has been self-publishing for as long as I can remember knowing what either punk or zines were. Cometbus #54--out since February and priced at a Fugazi-incensing $4!!--follows Aaron as he tours Asia for two weeks with Green Day, which would be like some kind of modern-day Cameron Crowe Creem-dream, except that he's done it a few times before.

Aaron and Green Day are old friends going back to the band's earliest days--he roadied their first North American tours, briefly sat in on drums for a second (and played with Billie Joe Armstrong in Pinhead Gunpowder)--but they're also old friends who have grown massively apart in terms of lifestyles, economics, fame, and just about everything else you could think of. They've fallen out over the years about punk ethics and personal misunderstandings. They've just grown apart the way people do when their lives radically diverge. And so the whole issue becomes more than just a tour travelogue, it becomes a treatise on friendship, nostalgia, paths taken and not taken. You catch up with your old friends and they're exactly like you remember and/but everything is different. You size up Stadiums in Singapore against basement shows in shit-town California. Or, as Cometbus puts it:

What happens when friends grow up together but make choices that lead them down fundamentally different paths? Can they still travel together, despite their differences. That's what I wondered as I boarded the plane bound for Thailand, and, for the first time in my life, took a seat in first class... Because, you see, I hadn't changes that much. Not enough.

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​Today at Slate, author Simon Reynolds*, whose new book about pop's insatiable appetite for old culture Retromania is out now, turns his nostalgia-critical lens toward this fall's impending rehashing of grunge myths, with an eye towards Nirvana at the Reading Festival, the accumulated output of Pearl Jam, and Seattle in general. Setting things off is the Reading Festival's plan to screen archival footage of Nirvana's 1992 performance (Kurt rolled onto the stage in a wheelchair, exiting it via the drum kit) in the space that would usually be occupied by a living, breathing band. Reynolds:

This decision is perplexing on a number of levels. First, there's the obvious oddness of interrupting the schedule of live groups in favor of a dead group. Then there's the curious fact that Reading's promoters, aiming to capitalize on 2011's status as the Official Anniversary of Grunge, are showing the footage of the gig on its 19th anniversary, a year ahead of customary schedule. (Nirvana did actually appear at Reading in August 1991 but were still relatively unknown and played midway through the bill.) Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this exercise in time travel, though, is how it isn't really that surprising. It's exactly the sort of thing that you'd kinda expect from a pop culture increasingly characterized by a compulsion to revisit and reconsume its own past.

The whole essay is worth reading, as is the book. Reynolds reads from Retromania in Seattle Tuesday, Sept. 27 at the (appropriately retro) Rendezvous.

*Whose essential sociological history of rave, Energy Flash [UK]/Generation Ecstasy [U.S.], published 1998/99, I'm reading right now--so how's that for nostalgia?

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Y'all already know what it's about, but just in case you've been sleeping all week, here's a quick round-up of the best Watch the Throne reviews to hit since Monday, from ALL_CAPS satire to socio-economic analysis. Enjoy.

1. "Look At Me": An Oral History of Watch the Throne by Abe Beame for Passion of the Weiss:

Sean "Jay-Z" Carter: I remember it was like four o'clock in the morning. I was in Hawaii like a year ago and I get this wild text from Kanye, I still have it in my phone, hold up: "YO JAY, I WANT TO MAKE AN ALBUM ABOUT EXORBITANT WEALTH AND THE FALSE PROMISE THAT IS THE AMERICAN DREAM, COMBINING WORLD WEARY NAVEL GAZING WITH ATMOSPHERIC SHIT TALK, THE LIKES OF WHICH RAP MUSIC HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE."

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​Two more notable reactions to Fleet Foxes' new sophomore LP for Sub Pop, Helplessness Blues popped up over the weekend: Andrew Matson's lengthy profile in the Seattle Times, and Pitchfork's 8.8 "Best New Music"-awarded review of the album today. (Read the Seattle Weekly's exclusive Twitter interview here.)

Matson (full Music Critic Illuminati disclosure: he's a friend) touches on a lot of points in his profile, including: what Fleet Foxes' success means for Sub Pop (basically, a few big, friendly acts have always funded a substrata of less commercially viable artists); where the band fits in the current "neo-folk" crop; their history and context in the local music scene, from early days at the Old Firehouse to shrugging off current folkie hub Conor Byrne; how Fleet Foxes is a Pecknold family affair, with each member of the clan playing a role from management to making music videos or guitars; Phil Ek's importance in crafting the album's wide-open sound; even Pecknold's reticence to give interviews, and how the local press (Seattle Weekly included) has worked around that.

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​The 2011 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, and winning the award for fiction is Jennifer Egan's outstanding, heartbreaking novel A Visit From the Goon Squad--a book which is also, sneakily, some of the best writing about music to come out of the past year. The book follows a group of characters loosely related through music scenes across multiple generations, but it does much more than that. Ann Powers, writing for NPR, compares Egan's sequencing of "interlocking tales" into a "slowly coalescing narrative" to the way "a DJ selects to make for a great night on the dance floor."*

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Note Bangs' prototypical use of the "chillwave triangle."

​You get the following, in which the similarities are almost as telling as the differences*. (Bangs' original essay "I Saw God and/or Tangerine Dream" can be found in the absolutely essential collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung):

I decided it would be a real fun idea to get fucked up on drugs and go see Beat Connection/USF with Laserium. So I drank two bottles of cough syrup and bussed up to the Pacific Science Center for a night I'll never forget. For one thing, emerging from the bus in this slick esthete's Elysium is like crawling out of a ditch into Jackie Onassis' iris--a mind-expanding experience in itself. A woman there told me that the management had quite soured on chillwave clientele, and it was easy to see why: here's this cornersteel of cultural corporations, and what staggers into it but the zit-pocked lumpen of Healthy Times Fun Club. And when worlds collide, someone has to take the slide.

What kind of person goes to see a Beat Connection/USF concert? Here's a group with three or maybe even four synthesizers, no vocals, no rhythm section; they sound like silt seeping on the ocean floor--and this place is sold out. Freebies are rife, yet I don't think that kid in front of me wiped out in his seat got in for nothing. So I ask some of the Beat Connection/USF's fans what they find in this music, and get a lot of cosmic, Todd Rundgren mulch-mouth. I tell one guy I think they're just a bunch of shit, a poor man's Fripp and Eno, and he looks me over and says: "Well, you gotta have imagination . . . "

*Also replaced:
Avery Fisher Hall = Pacific Science Center
rock = chillwave
Madison Square Garden = Healthy Times Fun Club
Zeit = Surf Noir
Alpha Centauri = Jamaica Plains
CBS = 230 Publicity
14th Street = Pine Street.
Everything else is as God/Bangs intended.

More after the jump!

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Have you heard the one about how the Beatles are dying in order of coolness, and Ringo's next? Yeah, not funny. But on December 8 every year, the canonization of John seems to be accompanied by glib sneers at Paul. Yes, there's the knighthood, the White House performance, the Kennedy Center Honors, etc. But as for artistic reputation, Paul cannot catch a break. Never has any human who's brought so much pleasure to the world been so widely reviled.

Leading the charge this year is Salon's Allen Barra, who turns his review of a new McCartney biography into a nastygram about the man himself. It's not that the book sucks, says Barra, it's that Paul sucks:

Another problem is how one can be a genuine biographer and, at the same time, an honest critic and pretend that virtually all of McCartney's music after splitting with the Beatles isn't sheer dreck.

Sure, maybe an honest and DEAF critic.

Is it absurd to argue about John and Paul? No, arguing about John and Paul is like arguing about good and evil, Isaac and Abraham, eggs and bacon, or any other basic elements of the universe. So on the anniversary of John's death, please consider just a few Paul facts that may contradict your received notions of who the cool Beatle really was:

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The other day my editor told me not to use a particular word in a story because he was "allergic to clichés." (The word was "magic.") After I finished crying and soaking my head in a warm bucket of Epsom salt, I started thinking about what else should be retired from music writing. This is my partial list of overused words and phrases that make everyone sound like everyone else:

"Sophomore effort"
This synonym for "second album" has become an irritating tic.

"Songwriting duties."
Also: Lead guitar duties, drumming duties, and weed procurement duties. Duties of all kinds are hereby banished.

"Drops"
As in, "The album drops this Tuesday." This expression has such a shrill air of inside information and clubbiness. So up-to-the-minute is the writer, so tuned in to the fast pace of dramatic music industry developments, that commonly understood expressions such as "goes on sale" or "is released" become impossibly mundane.

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Tags:

music writing, navel gazing, rants

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Here's an interesting conceit: a review of Keith Richards' new autobiography written in the voice of Mick Jagger's wounded reply. I read this, even knowing it was fake, with something akin to desperate longing for it to be real. To be a rock music fan is to keep hoping against hope that one of the great stars could ever be so candid, that McCartney would drop the act for once and just come clean without always protecting his sense of his own legend. Sometimes we get a taste--the Edge in It Might Get Loud for instance, or, surprisingly, Dylan in Chronicles Vol. 1--but mostly it's the same careful myth-maintenance from old rockers well past the point where their legend is assured, and where their timidity about it reveals what princesses they are.

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