Today is Easter Sunday, and I went to church this morning. I am not a very familiar face in any church, which put me today in fine company with millions of Americans who go to church today to celebrate the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus, then mostly sleep in on Sundays until it's time to celebrate his birth in December. My visit, however, was largely diplomatic in nature. It was also the first church service I've attended in five years (weddings aside). It's amazing what people will do when they're in love.
Anyway, instead of paying attention to the service (or is it a mass? The Episcopal service is nearly identical to the Catholic masses I endured as a child, does it get the same name?), I was pondering why a person like myself, a fairly committed atheist, has no problem celebrating Christmas, but is annoyed by or would rather just ignore Easter altogether.
The answer I came up with was this: to celebrate Christmas, if you even choose to acknowledge it as a religious holiday at all (what with Santa Claus and all that crap), is a tacit admittal that Jesus existed, and that his birth is worth celebrating in some facet. You don't have to worship him as the son of God. I can just think of it as the birth of a good man who preached kindness and tolerance, and stood up for the poor and oppressed. Easter is a little different, an acknowledgement that Jesus was resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven to absolve the sins of all mankind. A little more serious from a theological point of view, you know?
That was the serious and thoughtful version of my Easter post. The original version was this:
Easter is all about how Jesus was betrayed by his best friend, given over to the local fascist government, brutally tortured, and executed. And also cute little bunny rabbits and pastel-colored eggs and candy, candy, candy!
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
moose
This is an email that found its way into my spam folder under the subject "moose":
Seriously.
translated back to his native language. Payment is not a problem
VlA rdg GRA $1. 28
hoarse cries of fannish enthusiasm.grim-faced-but winked when I glanced his way. Iron John and Svinjar A tiny but well-stocked bar unfolded from one wall; the dispenser Directly ahead. Lets just stay on this course and well track th
Seriously.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
feels so unnatural (Peter Gabriel too)
You know, I write a blog. Technically. I mean, most of these things that you see get updated several times a day. You can probably probably look at the second page of mine and see items from last June. But it's a blog. I'm a blogger. Almost entirely about music.
So I guess it's with some degree of hypocrisy that I have to say that blogs about music are some of the most irritating things ever.
Ok, we'll backtrack a bit here. We'll start by saying that the primary way I have of hearing bands I've never heard of is by reading reviews of them. Generally there are a couple websites that I scan periodically for reviews of new stuff, and if I see enthusiastic reviews pop up on more than one site, I'll check out a few songs, and then maybe the whole album (bless the internet), and then when I'm more familiar with the material in question, I may occasionally go back and read what I read before, or some other stuff about them, to see if people are generally having the same reaction that I am.
So this is more or less the cycle I went through with some fellas named Vampire Weekend. I wouldn't say it's really a "great" album, or groundbreaking in any way, but it's got enough good bouncy pop tunes to keep me interested. Depending on your rating system of choice, I'd give it a B or maybe B+, a 7/10, a thumbs up, or whatever.
Then I discovered that Vampire Weekend are apparently one of those "blog bands" that are around, that nobody would ever hear of without the internet, similar to... I don't know, Lily Allen or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
Then I did a google search for "Vampire Weekend and blog" and a couple similar phrases, which led me to where I'm at now, which is feeling like I'm never going to read a music blog again. People haven't made such a huge fuss over music this innocuous since The Strokes came along.
To me, Vampire Weekend is a perfect encapsulation of what it's like to be an indie-rock fan in the age of internet domination, and it runs in a cycle something like this: 1) Overenthusiastic hype is lauded upon a competent but unspectacular artist by bloggers who may hope to take credit for the discovery 2) Confused by the unwarranted hype, what would be ambivalence by naysayers turns into irrational hatred and vitriol (I have been guilty of this before, I will admit) 3) By the time the damn album actually comes out, battle lines have already been drawn, and casual listeners who find their blissful ignorance of the "controversy" shattered are forced to either buy into one side of the hype or find the whole thing off-putting.
The unabashed hyperbolic love (which is harder to find, but out there) is a little perplexing to me, but the hatred is just exasperating. Let's take a look at the general list of reasons cited (as listed in a post about the confusing controversy surrounding the band, of which there are also plenty, including the one I'm creating right now):
"The four kids in Vampire Weekend have certainly done plenty to make themselves hater-targets. They wear pastel sweaters. They flaunt Ivy League educations. They jam obscure vocabulary tunes into keenly felt and observant little indie-pop jams that would've worked just fine without the verbosity. They swipe individual sounds from Afropop without attempting to master the form. During interviews, they engage in obnoxious useless-knowledge one-upmanship games. One of them is Scott Baio's cousin. And it's already been preordained that they're about to be fucking huge, or at least as fucking huge as an indie-pop band can be in an era where everyone downloads music instead of buying it..."
The one common thread through all of that: it has nothing to do with the band's music. The complaint that seems to come up so often is their borrowing of sounds from Afro-Pop (and let's be real here, we all know it sounds more like Graceland than King Sunny Ade), and I'm trying to figure out why that's such a problem. The most hilarious phrasing of the problem is found in the above paragraph (oh no, they haven't attempted to "master the form" before being influenced by it!), but usually it's lumped in with a mention of their Columbia University educations, which makes it sound more to me like the problem is that rich white kids aren't supposed to have things to say with their music, and rich white kids CERTAINLY aren't supposed to incorporate affectations of African music in their music. Perhaps if they'd met and formed their band in a coal mine instead of in their Columbia dorms, it would be ok. ("Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" would also have to be changed to something like "Pittsburgh Kwassa Kwassa.")
I also wonder if the people who are bashing them for their upper-middle-class backgrounds and borrowing of African influences also steer clear of, say, Talking Heads, who are guilty of pretty much the same exact thing. That's more of an extreme example, because Talking Heads are one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and people probably aren't going to remember Vampire Weekend by this time in 2009, but you get my point.
Anyway, to wrap up sort of where I started, I think from now on I'm going to stay clear of the blogs (except for mine and my friends'... probably) and just listen to the damn music. And if you're surfing across the blogosphere on a search engine and you find this page, just remember that I'm just as full of shit as everybody else out there.
So I guess it's with some degree of hypocrisy that I have to say that blogs about music are some of the most irritating things ever.
Ok, we'll backtrack a bit here. We'll start by saying that the primary way I have of hearing bands I've never heard of is by reading reviews of them. Generally there are a couple websites that I scan periodically for reviews of new stuff, and if I see enthusiastic reviews pop up on more than one site, I'll check out a few songs, and then maybe the whole album (bless the internet), and then when I'm more familiar with the material in question, I may occasionally go back and read what I read before, or some other stuff about them, to see if people are generally having the same reaction that I am.
So this is more or less the cycle I went through with some fellas named Vampire Weekend. I wouldn't say it's really a "great" album, or groundbreaking in any way, but it's got enough good bouncy pop tunes to keep me interested. Depending on your rating system of choice, I'd give it a B or maybe B+, a 7/10, a thumbs up, or whatever.
Then I discovered that Vampire Weekend are apparently one of those "blog bands" that are around, that nobody would ever hear of without the internet, similar to... I don't know, Lily Allen or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
Then I did a google search for "Vampire Weekend and blog" and a couple similar phrases, which led me to where I'm at now, which is feeling like I'm never going to read a music blog again. People haven't made such a huge fuss over music this innocuous since The Strokes came along.
To me, Vampire Weekend is a perfect encapsulation of what it's like to be an indie-rock fan in the age of internet domination, and it runs in a cycle something like this: 1) Overenthusiastic hype is lauded upon a competent but unspectacular artist by bloggers who may hope to take credit for the discovery 2) Confused by the unwarranted hype, what would be ambivalence by naysayers turns into irrational hatred and vitriol (I have been guilty of this before, I will admit) 3) By the time the damn album actually comes out, battle lines have already been drawn, and casual listeners who find their blissful ignorance of the "controversy" shattered are forced to either buy into one side of the hype or find the whole thing off-putting.
The unabashed hyperbolic love (which is harder to find, but out there) is a little perplexing to me, but the hatred is just exasperating. Let's take a look at the general list of reasons cited (as listed in a post about the confusing controversy surrounding the band, of which there are also plenty, including the one I'm creating right now):
"The four kids in Vampire Weekend have certainly done plenty to make themselves hater-targets. They wear pastel sweaters. They flaunt Ivy League educations. They jam obscure vocabulary tunes into keenly felt and observant little indie-pop jams that would've worked just fine without the verbosity. They swipe individual sounds from Afropop without attempting to master the form. During interviews, they engage in obnoxious useless-knowledge one-upmanship games. One of them is Scott Baio's cousin. And it's already been preordained that they're about to be fucking huge, or at least as fucking huge as an indie-pop band can be in an era where everyone downloads music instead of buying it..."
The one common thread through all of that: it has nothing to do with the band's music. The complaint that seems to come up so often is their borrowing of sounds from Afro-Pop (and let's be real here, we all know it sounds more like Graceland than King Sunny Ade), and I'm trying to figure out why that's such a problem. The most hilarious phrasing of the problem is found in the above paragraph (oh no, they haven't attempted to "master the form" before being influenced by it!), but usually it's lumped in with a mention of their Columbia University educations, which makes it sound more to me like the problem is that rich white kids aren't supposed to have things to say with their music, and rich white kids CERTAINLY aren't supposed to incorporate affectations of African music in their music. Perhaps if they'd met and formed their band in a coal mine instead of in their Columbia dorms, it would be ok. ("Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" would also have to be changed to something like "Pittsburgh Kwassa Kwassa.")
I also wonder if the people who are bashing them for their upper-middle-class backgrounds and borrowing of African influences also steer clear of, say, Talking Heads, who are guilty of pretty much the same exact thing. That's more of an extreme example, because Talking Heads are one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and people probably aren't going to remember Vampire Weekend by this time in 2009, but you get my point.
Anyway, to wrap up sort of where I started, I think from now on I'm going to stay clear of the blogs (except for mine and my friends'... probably) and just listen to the damn music. And if you're surfing across the blogosphere on a search engine and you find this page, just remember that I'm just as full of shit as everybody else out there.
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