Christmas Meditations: Childhood Innocence in the Music Video Era

Christmas is a time to reflect on authenticity and obligation, especially when it comes to issues of maturity and disillusionment. It's an inescapable question... it's safe to say that anyone who knows the experience of the Christian holiday also knows how much it changes when you enter adulthood. Santa Clause leads the way for a loss of innocence, and over the course of a few landmark years, we stop seeing Christmas as a singular, mystical time and start to see it as a confusing mix of familial love and troublesome economic and social obligation. If any of you are like me, you probably spend a large part of the holiday searching within yourself for that excited, innocent child who could just enjoy the bright colors and ritualistic songs, and who could just indulge in attention and wish-fulfillment.

So here I am, looking into pop culture for some statements on the shifting winds of innocence and disillusionment. Interestingly, I've found the most salient themes during my diversion into the world of music video.

Sigur Ros's recent music video for the song Hoppipolla is a great example. Before you even think about the social statement it makes, try just watching it and feeling the spirit of the piece. It's simple and beautiful and thematically cryptic, but it represents something spontaneous and touching. It's a brilliant piece of short-form cinema, crafted around an excellent song.



Like I said, thematically cryptic: one of the beautiful aspects of this video is that it doesn't seem to be purveying a judgment or advocating any reform. If anything, it's an invitation to the viewer to imagine an entire life lived as a child, or at the very least, a final return to the joys of childhood at the twilight of old age.

Thus, there's something in this video calling us out of the severity of middle age, showing us the triumph of experience extracted from the prisons of ambition and self-consciousness. It's even making me ashamed to be writing about it this way... this essay is such a trite rationalization of a video that amounts to a siren's song of spontaneity and humanity. I have to write about the video, when I'd rather be creating it, or (better yet) simply living it.

But it leads me to consider another video that makes a complex statement on maturity and self-seriousness, but from a different direction. Take a look at B.I.G.'s video for Sky's the Limit:



Directed, of course, by the indomitable Spike Jones, it takes a simple casting quirk and turns it into a strange experience with traces of a complex statement on maturity within a music genre. Jonze's deadpan strangeness gives the video a different flavor than the Sigur Ros piece, and (as appropriate to the music) it's a less beautiful and more conflicted piece.

Jonze manages to bring a sense of tension to this video that makes it hard to read as message-bearing communication. We often envision rap as a posturing, inflationary cultural complex, proud but fraught with negativity. Granted, I'm speaking as a pretentious indie kid, the demographic that Jonze's videos normally appeal to, rather than as a street kid, the demographic that Biggie's music targets. Still, the very fact that Jonze directed this video... such a departure from his other source material, like Weezer and Fatboy Slim... opens up this contradiction in the first place.

Sky's the Limit is saying that beneath rap's posturing, there's something childlike. You can read this as a compliment or as a critique... are these children acting out this scenario because hip-hop is playful and spontaneous? This is a natural reading if you consider the tone of the music, which is generally reassuring. After all, [the] Sky is the limit and you know that you can have what you want, be what you want. Then again, if it makes you uncomfortable to see children in big bling, buying entirely into a decadent lifestyle of fast cars and easy women, you might see something different. Maybe the kids represent the immaturity of the rap scene, which (arguably) has spent the last ten years replacing defiance and strength of character with glamour and self-praise.

So is it about finding the past within the present? Or is it about losing the past through a painful process of disillusionment? It's hard to say... and that's what makes it a great video. Spike Jonze knows ambiguity, perhaps more than any other short-form director, and he's fully harnessed it here.

Whether you're grasping at the past or interrogating the present, whether you're searching for the sublime or for the naivety of your youth, this Christmas is probably a time to think about who you were and who you're becoming. These music videos offer one small take on an enormous question that we all have to keep asking... even knowing that we probably won't be finding an answer any time soon.

Music Video: A History of Absolute Essentials

I've been doing a lot of research on music videos lately. It's related to my master's thesis, but not in any direct line of correlated logic. Instead, it's become a little personal mission and obsession, because it's been a fascinating exercise, and because the first thing you have to do, when you're becoming a specialist in something, is to immerse yourself in that thing.

So here's what I've done: I hunted down all the recent(ish) "Top 100 Greatest Music Videos" lists I could find, all from authoritative sources in the video-music industry. I found ones from VH1 (2001), MTV (1999), Slant Magazine (2003), Pitchfork (2006) and Stylus Magazine (2007). I basically recorded every video that appears on any of these lists, and correlated the data about their places on the respective lists. I also gave them all cumulative scores, based on their positions in these lists. It provides a good cross-section of influence, and it has proven a massively interesting exercise.

I'll do a couple posts on my findings, but right now I just wanted to sum up some of the results.

By far the most highly-decorated video is A-Ha's masterpiece Take On Me. It came in within the top 10 videos on three lists (Slant, Stylus, and VH1) and within the top 20 on the fourth (MTV), and it was also recognized by Pitchfork, though Pitchfork didn't give its videos explicit rankings.

Don't tell me this is a surprise. The video was insanely advanced for its day, using the live-action/animation mix, and it combines all the most important aspects of the medium. In a sense, it represents the whole music video medium: it includes a loosely-defined plot, a highly stylized visual environment, and some solid performance footage. It's also a storyline to compete in any forum of short films, although, since it's created through the lens of pop music, it doesn't have the subtlety of the more experimental pieces.

Video number 2: Michael Jackson's Thriller. Also not a surprise... it rivals Take On Me in narrative and performance, and what it lacks in stylization, it makes up for with insane Jackson dance sequences. The walking dead... can you feel it? A world in Jacko's dance trance, unable to stop the rhythm flooding the barricades of our consciousness.

Others among those highly-decorated videos: Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, The Beastie Boys' Sabotage, REM's Losing My Religion, and Dre's Nuthin' But a G Thang. Before I took VH1's list into account, this last video... a bit of a misogynistic drunken blunder of a clip... was actually number 3 on the list. I guess it had a hell of an influence on the youth of the 90's. Otherwise, it's hella hard to figure out how it would have beaten Pearl Jam's Jeremy.

Most decorated artist? This one wasn't even a contest. Only one person could beat out Michael Jackson (#2) and Bjork (#3) for highest number of awesome videos on countdowns, and this person was Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie, the infamous and unbeatable queen of pop for the last thirty years. Never mind that her highest-rated video didn't come in until #11 (Like a Prayer)... she had a total of fifteen videos on the lists, most of them on more than one. Fifteen videos in four lists? Do the math. That's a lot of noteworthy music videos.

It helped that some people (VH1) liked Madonna's older stuff, like Vogue and Material Girl, whereas others (Stylus) liked her newer stuff, like Ray of Light and Frozen. I remember a surprising number of these videos myself, and I can definitely get behind her as the top video-producing musician in the history of the medium. She and her directors are goddamn geniuses.

And highest-rated director? Barron definitely had the highest average score per video (having produced Take On Me and Billie Jean, both in the cumulative top 10), but with his fourteen placements between the four lists, he couldn't possibly beat Spike Jonze, who had thirteen videos in the four lists (22 placements, one top-ten, two more top-twenties). Jonze has directed Sabotage, two award-winning Bjork videos, and two groundbreaking Fatboy Slim videos. His name will be forever inscribed upon the music video universe.


So before I write anything else on music videos, go -- go watch these award-winners, and rediscover the MTV of our collective youth, before reality shows and TRL, when music video was a respectable medium with a forum on broadcast television. I don't miss the early 90's, but there are some things I wouldn't mind making a comeback.

Anton Corbijn's Control: portrait of a monster

I saw the film Control, by Anton Corbijn, a couple weeks ago. I enjoyed it, if only because I like watching moving images and being immersed in the great media spectacle. I'd recommend it to anyone who's in the mood for a troubling, introspective drama that pulls you into an artist's personal web of tragedy. I know, this doesn't sell very well on paper.

Still, if you're like me and welcome the chance to think a lot about a movie and a public persona, you'll probably find Control worth the watch. It brings up an old question that I find myself recycling every so often: how do I react to narratives wherein the protagonist is really a deplorable bastard? Are they 1) personally enriching and/or educational? or 2) even enjoyable? and if the answer to (2) is "Yes," is it an enjoyment I should be indulging in, or is it just the kind of pathetic voyeurism we get from watching a train wreck or a celebrity breakdown?

Quick backstory: Control is about Ian Curtis, the front-man to the goth/punk band Joy Division. Joy has earned a special place in music history, being the hybrid seed of a whole underground movement. They're the type of band that has resonated through the critical and historical consciousness of pop music, even though they've never surfaced in mainstream memory. They were categorically narcissistic and depressed, but they managed to avoid being a cliche because they were so damn sincere. This was no Brand New self-pity... this was genuinely troubled, sincere disaffected personal turmoil, born out for the eye of a thousand teenage fans.

Part of the reason for this sincerity, and for the fame that attended it, was that Curtis was such a pitiful case. His voice, and his songwriting, are the assets that carried the band to greatness. He was one of the rare people who is vulnerable to crushing emotional pain, and who knows how to express it intelligently and sensitively. The pressure of young marriage, fast fame, and medical issues were the engine behind his voice, but they were also the catalysts for his depression and suicide.

(spoiler warning... arg, too late.)

Unfortunately, he was also a dick. If Sam Riley's portrayal is to be believed, Curtis lived at an unfortunate crossroad between cynicism and sensitivity. He was chronically insecure, and yet he was thirsty to prove himself, so he ended up emotionally numb and vulnerable to self-indulgence. The film doesn't skimp on this point, either. Throughout Control, there seems to be a shadow across the characters and their city (dying industrial Manchester), and the discerning audience might realize that this pall is emanating from Ian Curtis himself, who seems to poison the lives and interactions of his friends and family.

So in a sad, vaguely sympathetic, but also frustrating journey, we see Curtis overflow and collapse. Have we learned anything from him? Have we enjoyed his downfall? Why the fuck did we see this movie?

As always, there's enlightenment to be found in any honest portrayal of a foreign psyche and experience. Even Curtis's flaws are part of the world we live in, and we may recognize some of them in ourselves... the dangerous human impulses of hubris and narcissism may be repressed, but there's a trace of them in each of us. This is a film that sheds some light on them in order that we may face them.

In this sense, Corbijn's Ian Curtis reminds me of John Gardner's Grendel. Grendel was a protagonist of sorts... the reader is placed behind his eyes and forced to see his flawed reasoning and his failure. However, in John Gardner's (totally amazing) novel, Grendel is also a monster through and through, willingly blind to the world so that he can feel justified in ravaging it. As an audience, we're supposed to be along for the ride, and we're supposed to give Grendel some face time for a while, but (as Gardner himself has pointed out) we're ultimately supposed to hate him and reject his nihilism in favor of the awesome humanistic strength of Beowulf.

With Curtis, we're not given this kind of alternative. There's no Eddie Vedder (or whoever) to stand up and be the success that Curtis couldn't become. Still, Ian Curtis's role in Control is directly analogous to Grendel's role in Grendel. As a sophisticated viewer, you can stick with Curtis and feel a sense of tragedy for his misfortunes, not because you like or respect him, but simply because he's human, and because ever human being is in danger of losing control. We're free to be angry at Curtis's abuse of his wife, family, friendships, and of his own talent, but perhaps Corbijn has allowed us to ride the line between rejection and sympathy, so that we can arrive at the end of Control and feel the tragedy of a life that could never find its own rhythm.

The spectrum of an idea, from the RIAA to Radiohead and Lawrence Lessig

In recent days, two things have happened simultaneously, and they represent two important, but ambiguous, developments in a struggle that has been on the radar for quite a while. This is the battle for music distribution, fought between an enterprising public and a defensive, conservative media industry.

First of all, the first RIAA lawsuit to come to trial has been decided, in a far-reaching event that proves that our legal system has no scruples about deciding against individuals in favor of megacorporations. The defendant in question was fined $9,250 per song, for each of 24 songs she made available online that the record companies focused on. For those whose Windows calculators aren't handy, that's $222,000 she has to pay for allowing other people to download things from her computer.

The absurd verdict isn't actually justified by any real-world logic, and all that's left to explain it is the RIAA's emphasis on her as an example. I can't imagine a court that would allow this to happen, nor a legal precedent that would accommodate it. It's the newest in a series of verdicts symptomatic of a neurotic, punitive society, so scared of crime and disorder that it imposes sanctions far exceeding what's called for by the situation in question. Another recent example resulted in a national controversy that's still striking some racial nerves in the CNS of this country.

The other thing I was talking about... the converging happenstance that complicates a simple statement on corporate stupidity... is Radiohead's startling, progressive decision to publish their own new album, coming on September 10, and to offer it for whatever price the buyer wants to pay. This is a powerful statement in opposition to the music industry, showing the world that the corporate machine is no longer the only way to distribute music.

Here we have an obstacle, and we have an answer. When the RIAA and the constipated corporate assholes of America try to strangle the emergent technology that offers a new promise to their medium, they will be met: they will find themselves faced with artists and individuals with an active conscience, a critical consciousness, and the power to wiggle out of a crushing grip.

In my opinion, Radiohead is taking the first step in a journey we all have to undergo. My personal and philosophical arguments with the RIAA have compounded so much that I'm not interested in any form of compliance any longer, whether it's financial, legal, or journalistic. It's time for listeners to strangle those old channels and flood the new ones. When they demand $222,000 from Jammie Thomas, who makes $36,000 a year, to make an example out of a rather trivial offense, the record companies show themselves incapable of reason, and they lose all rights to compromise.

I'm never buying music from an RIAA-based label again. If I want to listen to new music from somebody worth listening to, and they happen to have RIAA distribution, I'll find a friend who has the CD and I'll borrow it. Meanwhile, I'll make a point of purchasing any good music that's being offered independently, or through an alternative label, or via nontraditional distribution scheme.

If anybody else wants to do the same, here are some sites to inspire you and get you moving.

For fighting the powers that be:
Boycott RIAA makes the case against the RIAA
RIAA Watch will tell you if your new CD is sponsoring intellectual terrorism

For getting non-RIAA music:
Radiohead is offering the new album, independent of the system.
Magnatune has some good bands, all licensed for easy distribution

For understanding creative freedom:
Lawrence Lessig is one of the masterminds of the Creative Commons

Free, legal raw material for use in your own work:
The Film Archive has free movie clips whose copyright terms have expired
StockXchange has hundreds of free stock photographs
Flickr supports Creative Commons and reasonable rights for use of images

Hipsters II: Operation NewYorki Freedom

Okay, so having articulated a theory on the non-presence of the hipster, I had to go back and tackle the Time Out article written with the hipster as its target. I don't feel the need to argue with it point-for-point, of course... the thing is more of a literary rant, rather than any kind of scholarship or journalism. Still, in terms of cultural mindsets, rants are some of the most illuminating documents available. This is especially true when they're published in high-profile rags associated with my very own city.

The very nature of the Time Out article is our first clue into the pathology of the hipster. Time Out is declaring a "War on the Hipster," and it goes on to describe the hipster in detail, and to create an interesting taxonomy: the Sweet and the Vicious. This seems to correspond to two commonly-cited hipster characteristics. The Sweet is the effeminate, academic, fumbling hipster who wears the "nerd" badge, however ironically. In The Sweet, Irony manifests as self-deprecation and self-consciousness. The Vicious is the snarky, rude hipster for whom rebellion and irony collide and create a raw, rather unpalatable postmodern salad.

This typology, painted in broad strokes, cradled in a long rhetorical passage filled with references that are supposed to prompt an eye-roll, doesn't really illuminate the character of the hipster. Christian Lorentzen points at a bank of fog and tells us to disapprove of it, even as he gives us a positive portrayal of certain jazz musicians and local personalities as the true representatives of "New York Cool." In this way, he establishes what amounts to an imaginary "other" a la Simeone de Beauvoir. Discrediting the imaginary hipster is a roundabout device for reaffirming Lorentzen's own credibility, and the credibility of the readers who rabidly agree with him. "The War on Hipsters."

Sounds to me like a pop-cultural War on Terrorism. Where are they? We must squash them, but where do we find them? How do we tell them apart from our noble brothers and sisters?

This second part becomes especially difficult when you read the meta-language of Lorentzen's article. He cites more names, bands, bars, and references than I could possibly come up with. Take his first paragraph:

"Has the hipster killed cool in New York? Did it die the day Wes Anderson proved too precious for his own good, or was it when Chloë Sevigny fellated Vincent Gallo onscreen? Did it vanish along with Kokie’s, International Bar and Tonic? Or when McSweeney’s moved shop to San Francisco and Bright Eyes signed a lease on the Lower East Side? Was it possible to be a hipster once a band that played Northsix one night was heard the next day on NPR’s Weekend Edition? Did it hurt to have American Apparel marketing soft-porn style to young bankers? Was something lost the day Ecstasy made the cover of the Times Magazine? Or was it the day Bloomberg banned smoking in bars? And how many times an hour could one check e-mail and still have an honest, or even ironic, claim on being cool?"

For a man who condemns the hipster, he certainly seems conscious of their cultural habits and obsessions. Is he a hipster field-anthropologist? Does he venture into the trees with the hipster, grooming it under its porkpie and eating the ironic bugs he discovers? Nay, indeed. Christian is up on the scene in New York, and he seems to appeal to a strikingly similar demographic. Jesus Christ, just look: his article is illustrated with a retro shirt that says "The Hipster Must Die." There's no escaping the tropes.

And this is the other indication that the hipster is a bugaboo par excellance. When people create adversaries to condemn, they're often modeling them after themselves. The psychological term is projection, I think. Most people who condemn hipsters are, in fact, doing so because it's a rather hip thing to do right now. The most culturally-elite are inventing a group of people who are even more culturally elite, and they're making that invented group an enemy.

Lorentzen mentions the term "narcissism"... the hipster's unreserved love for itself, to the point where it interferes with its life and relationships. He fails to bridge the jump between hipsters as a clique and the general culture that's so quick to blame them. In this case, narcissism has reversed into its compliment, which hipster-haters everywhere are turning into an art form: self-hatred.

That's it for my discussion of this topic... the cultural implications and psychological elements are widespread and worth observing under glass, but I can't fix it by blogging about it. I just have to let it run its course.

The Invisible Hipster: my futile search for a scapegoat

I've had a theory for a while, and it's generally unpopular... I'm almost the only one who holds it. Of course, popularity is not correlated with validity AT ALL (sometimes quite the opposite), but still, if you advance an unpopular theory, you should be sure you have something compelling to offer the opposition. So this is the first time this one's coming out.

This theory has to do with the general angst and disapproval of "hipsters" in popular culture. It's pretty ubiquitous at this point... "Fuckin' hipsters" is an alarm sounded all over New York, the Lower East Side, and (I assume) everywhere else. It's a stigma that can be applied to neighborhoods (Williamsburg), beers (PBR), articles of clothing (pork pies), filmmakers (Wes Anderson), musicians (Connor Oberst), and people (that dude who lives in the apartment above you). They get so much bad press, you'd they were EVERYWHERE, a plague of locusts on our Manhattan avenues. There are some powerful voices attacking the Hipster... Nothing Nice to Say, a generally amazing punk comic, has run a number of strips whose target was the Minneapolis hipster. More notably, Time Out New York just ran an article called "The Hipster Must Die."

But where are they? I can't fucking find them. I occasionally see a dude in a fedora, or a girl in eccentric post-hippie attire, or someone drinking a PBR, but none of them seem like the shallow bad-faith revolutionaries that are such a bugaboo of modern media. For a while, I figured they were specifically a plague on the streets of Willyburg and Minneapolis, and that I wasn't seeing them because I just wasn't in the right place.

But then, one day, someone called ME a hipster. Normally, I'd have just laughed and said, "Oh yeah, you bastard? YOU'RE the hipster, I'm just a kid who lives in Brooklyn" (kind of like in an article in The Onion). But instead I made the mistake of looking at my own life and tastes and noticing that I share a range of attributes with the stereotype. I genuinely like Wes Anderson, and I like bullshitting about Postmodern film. I have a philosophy degree. I like Bright Eyes. I used to be a punk, and now I listen to The Postal Service and Ted Leo (among many other things). Despite the reassurances of my friends ("hipsters are out there, but you're totally not a hipster!") I started to dwell on it: what's a hipster? Did I have the necessary or sufficient characteristics? Who is it I'm supposed to be differentiating myself from?

Hence my theory arose: there's no such thing as a "hipster." The hipster is an assemblage of half-hearted characterizations, designed as a sort of cultural "folk devil." These are characteristics that are benign, taken individually. Drink PBR? What's the problem? Listen to indie rock, talk about the politics of the bands? You may be a music snob, but who cares? Live in Williamsburg? Sure, it's a growing neighborhood. If you're a friend of mine, you can fit three, four, five of these characteristics and not be a hipster, cause it's all in good faith. But if I don't like you, and you exhibit even ONE of these qualifications, you're a damn hipster. I hate you people.

This "cultural folk devil" concept (which I am currently coining as a variation of the classic "folk devil") is actually fairly common. There are always large groups who have been stigmatized and blamed for culture's problems, from Jews to Teenagers to Fags. These days, this kind of stigmatization has gone from "evil" to "annoying"... we tend to label concepts as stupid, bothersome, played-out, and obnoxious. Admittedly, it's a step up, but it's still a bad social habit. Some of the cultural folk devils stigmatized in recent times have been "sXe (straight-edge)," "emo," "postmodernism," and "chavs." It's up for debate whether each of these deserves its widespread ire. However, all of these ideas and subcultures have at least existed on some level.

I repeat: the hipster doesn't exist. It's an imaginary scapegoat, a convenient target for our disapproval and ridicule. I know this because I've looked for a definition that was worthy of my own distrust, and I've found nothing of the kind. It's sort of a cultural stereotype, so my main avenue has been asking friends, but none of them seemed to have a good definition for me. Finally, looking for something comprehensive, if not exactly "precise," I consulted Wikipedia. Even if it's rarely well-written or accurate, it's at least a good representation of generally-held cultural beliefs on certain topics.

The article on hipster is here.

As you can see, there's NOTHING to go on. There's a vague mention of PBR, and a reference to metrosexuality, but there's really nothing else to reference.

Okay, wait, there's one thing... irony. And in a way, that redeems the definition. If a hipster is someone who adopts an aesthetic with no intention of buying into it or taking it seriously, then I can understand some of the pan-cultural ire they earn. Maybe that's what everybody is talking about? Williamsburg is a neighborhood where people tend to be ironic? PBR is an insincere choice for a favorite beer? Wes Anderson is an ironic filmmaker?

The definition has slipped through our fingers, folks. Even if Wes Anderson is ironic, or people tend to like Wolfmother just for the novelty value of self-deprecation, there's no worthy link between the far-flung accusations and the core complaint. Irony is too hard to pin down, and it's been used effectively in too much art, literature, and music for it to really make sense at the center of a stereotype. So we pile on these auxiliary characteristics, and build ourselves a specter that amounts to nothing.

If you want to make a stand against a culture of irony and excessive bad taste, then assert your own good taste. Become a fashion designer, play the ukulele, write for BlogCritics. Make a positive statement about what's awesome, whether you're speaking with your tongue in your cheek (hipster-style) or you're buying into it 100% (traditional nerd style). It's a worthy cause. Stop distracting yourself with random catharsis, dumped on a scapegoat represented by a term you can sling, but can't really define. No sterotype apparitions need to die for culture to be reborn. We just have to fucking DO IT.

Street Fighter II is still King

My roommate just drew my attention to this remarkably simple video, featuring a fully stationary female guitarist rocking a song from one of my favorite games of all time, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior:




She's pretty awesome. This is what glam-riff guitar rock was made for, and she does it right... standing still, not giving us anything but that gorgeous post-disco soundtrack riff from the American Military Base in all our 14-year-old imaginations. At that age, I could beat my Super Nintendo version with Guile, Chun-Li, Ryu, Ken, and Blanka, and along with a couple other exceptional games, it was one of the only ones I could play over and over and over again. SF II deserves every homage made for it.

The RIAA continues to cut off its own atrophied members

That's one of the nastier titles I've come up with for my blog posts...

For people into serious media analysis... stuff beyond the realm of content and editorial, and more on the level of changes in technology, attitudes, and forms... you might be interested in the RIAA seeking royalties from broadcast radio, and thus attempting to change a long-standing relationship between commercial enterprise, distribution, and music.

First impressions: this is just another sleazy move by the RIAA, which has been drifting down the dark hole of greed and desperation ever since Napster showed up on our monitors. There are much deeper implications here, though, because this change in policy reaches back through the history of broadcast and electronic media. If you dig into the current legal policies regarding royalties, you get a pretty complicated mess, established over the course of broadcast radio.

So for the sake of simplicity, let's look at some of the effects this will probably have.

1) The labels, and the artists, will most certainly get more money from the major distributors. Broadcast giants like ClearChannel will most certainly be able to pay these new royalties. Certain forces won't be threatened with dispersal, just because some new royalty requirements appear.

2) This will become a big, perhaps prohibitive, burden to some other radio stations, like the few remaining college radio stations. This has a multitude of further implications... online distribution, (what's left of) Internet Radio, and "sharing" (God no) might become one of the sole remaining forums for consumers to discover new artists.

These two, taken together, suggest a general narrowing of the musical market. This could be good for the RIAA in the short term (hey, they're the ones peddling the top-40 stuff that will stay in the fiscal filter), but something tells me it'll be bad for them in the long term, because it'll rip the diversity out of their market, and this is never good for the health of the media.

There's another effect this new arrangement will have:

3) The RIAA is going to damage a formerly positive relationship with radio stations and broadcasters. The broadcasters have probably been one of the last real allies of commercial record labels... now that relationship will be soured, and this could have any number of unpredictable effects on the music mass market.

Considering all these variables -- and I'd love to hear some more info, if anyone has it, because there are a LOT of variables here -- this push by the RIAA starts to look like a matter of short-sighted desperation. Both broadcast radio and the CD industry are dying slowly, drowning in the influence of new technologies, and as I see it, the RIAA, a bloated beast unable to adapt, is responding by cutting off its own atrophied appendages.

I don't think this is going to save it.

Like a cast shadow: Remind Me (Royksopp) and Agenda Suicide (The Faint)

Remember, not too long ago, I mentioned this term by Eco, “riding the same cultural wave?” It’s a concept I’ve appropriated and adapted more or less beyond recognition, but it continues to serve me well, because I’m always finding strange correlations between apparently unrelated art and entertainment design. Tonight, it’s music videos.

The videos: Agenda Suicide by The Faint and Remind Me byRoyksopp. Part of the point of the post: to draw attention to these two brilliant, beautiful music videos, so everyone can pause and appreciate the wonderful things you can do with an idea these days.

The similarities are rather obvious, but I’ll be happy to mention them real quick. One: an emphasis on lines and structure, and inspiration taken from geometric design… in Royksopp, it’s mostly schematic and instructional designs. There’s a schematic feeling to Agenda Suicide, too, but it’s mediated by the influence of Russian constructivism. Both focus on a single figure, simplified to an iconic rendering, moving through the weird personal environment that the video establishes.

The environment: that’s important. There’s an emphasis on everyday life, scenery, and especially transportation (“liminal space,” as my anthro professor called it). That has an important effect in these two videos: it sets up an enclosed life-world, networked by the subway and the elevators. This creates a sense of movement and circulation, but also of being embedded, even to the point of isolation (especially in The Faint). The stylizations contribute to this affect, too.

When I think back on my dreams, I notice that they never feel like a continuous environment to me. My dream-space is almost like a stage, or a movie set, artificially extended but essentially tiny and set aside from anything like a real world. Both of these videos make me feel that way, as well.

So they’re a lot alike… in stylization, in rhythm, in theme, in content, and in effect. But they end up with such different effects, it’s almost mind-boggling. Remind Me feels like a weird, sublime kind of inner fantasy, where the structure and the geometry of the world creates sort of a rupture. I think sublime is the right word: it’s so fast and over-stimulating that it overwhelms the stupid, brute physical emotions and creates a gap where the mind can just exist and appreciate everything.

In contrast, Agenda Suicide does an almost uncanny job of simulating a nightmare. Again, it’s because of the enclosed space and the uncontrollable dynamic (acoustic) movement of all the structural elements. In this case, though, it doesn’t have the continuous, rhythmic lull of Remind Me. Rather, it has a slow, ominous crescendo as the weird breaks and transgressions begin to multiply. First, it’s the obsessive repetition and textures. Then, at two minutes (exactly half-way through the song), an office-worker steps into the path of a train, and from there the visuals descend into chaos and fracture.

This moment is kind of important to the whole thing, actually… it’s conceivable that this is how nightmares actually work. At some point during a dream, something sets off the dreamer’s anxiety, and then the fear snowballs into the terror and confusion that drives the experience until we wake back up. That office worker jumping onto the tracks is treated as almost beneath notice, but it’s the first hint that the whole ominous fantasy is going to break open.You could see these videos as representing complimentary reactions to the post-industrial, post-social, post-human world. In both cases, there’s a sense of alienation, not only in the Marxist sense (neither of these videos give much positive press to the working world), but also in a way far beyond the Marxist “alienated from your labor” concept. In both cases, the world is so fast and interconnected that the individuals become alienated from their own ideas, bodies, and perceptions.

This loss of immediacy sends the videos to two different places: for the Faint, it’s self-destruction. For Royksopp, it’s transcendence.

END NOTES:

Remind Me: disconnection from personal experience, so you can reflect on pure experience, a la The Phenomenologists? The final restitution of the self with the universal, impersonal universe, a la nirvana (the state of mind, not the band)?

Agenda Suicide: A Western critique of Western culture… thus fatalist, a la Baudrillard (RIP)? Structure, mechanization, and alienation as tools of the hegemony, as a full mind/body realization of ideology (thus the propaganda imagery)? Self-destruction as the final goal of human institutions?

Grindhouse: More needle, more red

Okay, so in this last post, I discussed two musical acts, Samiam and The Go! Team, simulating lo-fi recording quality to various effects in recent albums. Well, I went and saw Grindhouse not too long ago, and guess what? It's related!

Grindhouse is a ton of mindless fun if you need something fast-paced and laughable to get you through a boring evening. If you want a review whose tone parallels the movie, check this one out. If you don't like the review, there's a good chance you won't like the double-feature. As for me, I liked them both. And for those who took an interest, Rodriguez is apparently making the Machete film whose mock-trailer appeared before Planet Terror. The awesomeness is propagating.

On to the (I guess) point of the post, though. To make this kitschy reference-fest really work, both Tarantino and Rodriguez had to emulate some old stylistic quirks that filmmakers haven't had to deal with in a long time. Pretty much all of Planet Terror was treated with film grain and strange color shifts, and Death Proof started out with a lot of strange cuts, bad editing, and sloppy production. Again, we're talking about the same stuff as we saw in The Go! Team and Samiam... the intentional emulation of production issues for the sake of a tone, stylization, or conceptual treatment.

A friend mentioned to me that Tarantino's editing flubs were less consistent than Rodriguez's. At first, Death Proof seemed to be a real editing mess, with certain scenes cut awkwardly or repeated. However, as it went on, it became fairly clean and well-produced, right up until the end when there was a five-minute beat down taken directly from one of my own 8-year old video game fantasies. Rodqiguez's color shifts and film grain were more consistent, applied throughout the whole movie. This could be construed as a couple points in favor of Rodriguez's style, and against Tarantino's.

But when I think back on it, the consistency and intensity of Rodriguez's treatment made it seem profoundly intentional, even to the point of being artificial. In this sense, because it was so evenly lo-fi, Planet Terror was thoroughly kitsch. Tarantino's bad editing, because it only intervened at a few key moments in the film, felt more cohesive and more believable. It's almost inconceivable that Rodriguez shot on really crappy film and that all his color shifts were natural and authentic. On the other hand, I could really believe Tarantino's editing screw-ups occurred because he didn't bother cleaning up the rough cut of his footage.

So according to my reading, Rodriguez's lo-fi was kitsch (a.k.a. reference, homage, in-joke). Tarantino's was a genuine aesthetic (i.e. a creative element, a theme).

We can look at the previous discussion in this light, too... Samiam's lo-fi could have been, and probably WAS, the result of a careful discussion and an authentically lo-fi recording session. The muddy sound was an aesthetic. The Go! Team's cracks and pops were more of a device, conspicuously left in the carefully remixed and reproduced music, to give homage, and as such, they were unnaturally conspicuous. For Samiam, lo-fi was a concept. For The Go! Team, it was a stylization.

Concept versus style, aesthetic versus homage... I'm such a goddamn graphic design nerd.

The Go! Team and Samiam with needles in the red

Just downloaded The Go! Team's album Thunder, Lightning, Strike, and I can't stop listening to it. Am I the last person to hear about this? Is this blog entry gonna date me, like, two years and twenty hipster credibility points? It's an unexpected, addictive little album, purely and painfully anthemic. This isn't music that makes you lock yourself up and contemplate... this is soundtrack music, stimulating enough that the stimulation seeps into the rest of your activities. Some music turns you inward -- The Go! Team, playing remixed superhero disco anthems with middle school chants, turns you outward and gets into the rest of the world through you.

The album has a nostalgia about it. Now, I personally have an aversion to things that are self-consciously nostalgic, just like I have issues with "retro" and "kitsch." It's a neophilic instinct, not wanting to assume that people used to do things better, or be better off, than we are today. I have a theory that such nostalgic assumptions are a bad mental habit that we've picked up as we've filled out our cultural memory, and I assert myself as an idealist and a progressivist who thinks things are getting better in the long run, or if they're not, at least they're not getting worse.

Still, there's something to be said for feeling like a part of a long history, even if I wasn't around to appreciate most of that history. Thunder, Lightning, Strike invokes a Brooklyn of the 70's, with afro-haired disco queens and kids in bell-bottoms on street corners. You get the same nostalgia when you see a fire hydrant broken open in Harlem... it still happens, but it's an icon of an earlier time. I'm telling you, I wasn't even there for any of this. I was born in '82. Still, media has turned us all into time-traveling immortals, and just as I've seen Colonial Williamsburg on school trips, I've also seen life in the '70s through movies like The Warriors.

One of the ways The Go! Team manages this kind of nostalgia -- besides using basically all the raw elements of music from the '70's, including melodies, riffs, samples, and instrumentation -- is to record and produce their album with a lo-fi texture. Pitchfork Magazine mentioned this in their review of the United States release... they called it "needle-in-the-red sensibilities." It's the mark of authenticity in lo-fi recording, the testament that somebody recorded on an 8-track and had to fiddle with Radio Shack wires, instead of paying tons of record company cash to waltz into an outfitted studio.

There's something funny about this device, though. These days, recording and remastering equipment is so cheap and available that there never needs to be a drop in recording quality. It's a form of fakery, making your sound buzzy so it fits into an older aesthetic. I'm tempted to say, though, that in the 70's and 80's, when this aesthetic was unavoidable, it wasn't harnessed or respected by these artists. It's made the transition from inevitability to novelty. So what is it contributing? Why did somebody make the creative decision to create an album with crappier fidelity?

There's another album I've listened to recently that harnessed the power of crappy recording. Samiam, a California post-hardcore band that was breaking emo ground back in the early '90's, has created a lot of very pretty, well-produced albums. They've been awesome, due purely to the band's talent and songwriting skills. You won't find a more profound dynamic anywhere in punk-influenced music.

But Samiam's last album, Whatever's Got You Down, wasn't studio-polished. The vocals were guttural and clumsy, and the instruments were muddy and loose. Some fans took offense at this. Why make your music sound like crap? You can make gorgeous sounds without stomping on it and running sandpaper over it.

Of course, I'm going to vigorously defend both of these stylistic choices. What I'd like to note is that these two bands both had reasons for their stylistic treatment, although these decisions were probably very different.

The Go! Team was definitely trying for nostalgia. The gritty texture is a way of turning CD's and digital audio back into magnetic tape, at least in some small way. The music isn't trying to break brand new innovative ground, or if it is, it's trying to do so through retreival of an aesthetic that's slipped out of style.

Samiam's situation is a little different... they come from an intersection of scene with a love-hate relationship with accessibility. Punk rock has always wanted to be "pop" in certain ways: simple, short, enjoyable, visceral, and driven by hooks and songwriting. In others, the DIY music scene has actively distanced itself from pop in favor of "artistry": they don't want to be mass-produced, limited by market concerns, or forced into legal and economic subservience to their merchandise and their distributors. Samiam has always been smart and independent, but like all good punks, their flirtation with "accessibility" has been intermittent. The lo-fi sound on Whatever's Got You Down was an assertion of the band's creative license in the face of pressures to post-produce, remix, and polish their sound for the hi-fi synthpop crowd.

In both cases, though, the sound quality was a statement, an active part of the sound rather than a passive barrier to be ignored or overcome. As with a lot of media phenomena, this goes back to Marshall McLuhan, the godfather of media studies. He noted that a medium tends to be transparent until it's replaced and made obselete, at which point it becomes an object of attention and a factor in the content. Digital audio and hi-fi recording has basically replaced the ticks and quirks of analog production, and finally, after fighting those crackles and pops since the days of the phonograph, we've finally come to a point where they're part of the language we have at our disposal.

Idlewild and Remix Narrative

Up until about ten minutes ago, I would have given a thoroughly mixed review of Idlewild. I came out of the movie satisfied with the excitement and the style, but a little skeptical about the narrative, whose first hour seemed a broken record of drama film clichés. But if there’s anything film studies has taught me, it’s that thinking about a movie can improve the overall experience, and that a film becomes a lot better when its themes have been identified, even retrospectively.

Idlewild featured the acting debuts of Outkast (“Andre 3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton), and it was the first big-screen endeavor of Outkast’s music video director, Bryan Barber. I was initially attracted to the movie because I love the word “Idlewild”… it’s a pair of syllables that affects my brain like a code word. The word “idle” suggests a sort of compulsive laziness and libertarian apathy, and the addition of the word “wild” makes me think of a maritime anti-hero whose fury is spontaneous, unreasonable, but perfectly appropriate to the way he lives his life. I also happen to love the band Idlewild, a Scottish rock outfit.

I also liked the stylistic decisions embodied in this movie, which were apparent in the trailer. I love the rogue spirit of hip-hop (especially when it subverts the urban thug paradigm), I appreciate the class and hustle of the prohibition-era underground, and I fully support their synthesis. Idlewild didn’t let me down… the crackling big-band aesthetic and the halting improvisation of vinyl found a compelling common ground, securing my admiration of Idlewild’s fresh-faced director.

Unfortunately, where Idlewild’s aesthetic was well-executed, its narrative was a little green around the ears. The conclusion worked fairly well, first in the speakeasy and then in the darkness of Percival’s living room, but the road was paved with tired filmic clichés that became comical at times. There was a slow-motion walk through the rain (a la The Shawshank Redemption, The Matrix), a bullet-stopping bible (a la Disney’s Three Musketeers), a timid performer empowered by the gaze of her True Love (a la Save the Last Dance), booze transported in a coffin (a la Some Like It Hot), and all sorts of smaller-scale film tropes. Every scene seemed to be a music video, building up to its own short-term conclusion.

So I liked the synthetic, derivative style of this film, but I was skeptical about the artificial, derivative plot. I’ve only just come to realize that this is a double-standard. If I’m content with music that samples and shuffles and remixes the climaxes of classic tunes, and I can accept the same aesthetic in Idlewild’s stylistic choices, then why am I so hesitant about accepting a patchwork plot of film trivia? Honestly, I kind of enjoy going back through this movie and figuring out why each narrative moment seems familiar.

Turns out I was looking for a film in a pure pastiche… a remix movie, plastered together from a series of tried-and-true ideas, musical, aesthetic, and narrative. Barber dropped the Shakespeare (slightly misquoted) in between beats of magical negro and Harold and Maude, stitching together a sharp-edged answer to Moulin Rouge’s ballad sentimentality. When I think too hard, I come to the erroneous conclusion that I dislike derivative media. Isn’t that ridiculous?

Through the Heart (Steve Irwin and Elliott Smith)

Steve Irwin died on September 4th, victim of a stingray barb through the heart. I wasn't one of the Crocodile Hunter's most devoted followers, but I class him in a group of people who have my respect, simply on the basis of their single-mindedness... with people like Bob Ross and Al Sharpton. He's one of a few strange public personalities, breaks in the mass-produced static of mediated culture, whose sheer force of identity and personality elevate them above the cesspool of the entertainment industry.

Irwin's death makes me think of another recently-deceased entertainer, who I would also place in the above category. This is Elliott Smith, who I associate with Irwin because he died in a similar way: pierced through the heart at the height of his career in a movingly tragic and surreally fitting spasm of mortality. Both Smith and Irwin died in the throes of their own passion, and the cardiac trauma seems almost a badge of their parallel tragedies.

Even as I write this, I ask myself: how can I talk about these deaths as though they have some sublime meaning? Is it possible for any death to be "fitting"? Is it deeply cynical to make such a tenuous connection between two unrelated entertainers, a connection based on the similar circumstances of their deaths? Am I being profoundly trite by making such a big deal out of "death by pierced heart"?

I hope not... what really characterizes these two, and ultimately connects them, was their passion and single-minded devotion to a way of life. Their deaths were the culmination of their lives, and these two individuals spent their prime years creating new meaning and diffusing ideas into the slipstream. I suppose it's only natural that I try, however artificially, to attach a meaning to Irwin's death in the fevers of nature, and to Elliott Smith's death in the tremors of his own epic emotional swings.

I feel almost overwhelmed by cliche at this point, so I'm going to draw this meditation to a close. I'll just throw my last thought out there: an individual can face death as the final spark in a long chain of circumstance, or they can face it as a part of a life fully-lived, built around a broadly-constructed personal experience of the world. Steve Irwin managed the latter, and when my time comes, I hope I'll do the same.

Off the music video main drag (OkGo and Gnarles Barkley offer alternatives)

The music video is a universally abused form... directors throw visual gimmicks, old tropes, and intense special effects together and shake them, and if they have enough studio backing, they throw the resulting masturbatory vomit onto MTV, where that sort of thing belongs. The ubiquitous tendency of music videos to supernova has overshadowed a little-known fact: music videos can be beautiful and delicate, just like any other developed art form. It's left up to a few thoughtful bands, like Gnarles Barkley and OkGo, to keep proving this by offering alternatives to the overwhelming onslaught of hyperproduced MTV tripe.

Barkley's video, Crazy, and OkGo's music video for Here We Go Again are very different, but I contend that they're both aiming at the same target. By way of very different paths, both videos are stepping off the freight train of music video excess and showcasing a sort of visual minimalism, mobilizing simplicity, symmetry, and continuity to emphasize the strengths of the respective songs.

I mentioned the sweeping differences between these two videos, and I'll examine them from that direction first. The primary difference is production value... Crazy's brilliant, elaborate Rorschach inkblots must have taken hundreds of hours (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to tweak and rotoscope on a high-end graphics machine. This kind of work is painfully detailed and time-consuming... I've tried it. I could hardly make the computer spell my damn name. Whatever the time investment, this production value adds up to a smooth, meditative visual effect with a subliminal edge, something that unfolds the same way Cee-Lo's voice unfolds from Danger Mouse's bassy beats.

OkGo's production value, on the other hand, is basement-dwelling. It looks like the guys spent a few hours messing around with treadmills and a video camera, and that their bizarre, choreographed stroke of genius was the child of their meagerly-funded free time. Note the contrast in the music, and how it reflects in the contrast in production quality... Gnarles Barkley's music is smooth and polished, so the video is the result of a marathon of tinkering and beautification, whereas OkGo's music is freewheeling and spontaneous, so the video is a back-room jaunt of power-pop tomfoolery. In both cases, though, the effect of the minimalism is to distill the essential effect from the visuals so the music is complimented on the most effective level.

Consider some simple similarities, though... both videos are one long cut, with no breaks or interruptions in the cinematic rhythm. Compare that to videos like The Perfect Drug, which jump around madly with no apparent regard for continuity. In the Barkley and the OkGo videos, the image stands on its own, and its pace is enough to keep the watcher's attenion for the whole song. Reznor's video depends entirely on the novelty of each separate image, because no matter how gorgeous your set, you can only watch Trent stand on a statue of a hand for so long.

Another similarity is each video's dependence on symmetry. This one is pretty incidental, but it makes the experience of a video seem more careful, more calculated, and more focused. The unflinching, uncomplicated camera action, designed to emphasize the visual effect of gorgeous symmetrical images, is a welcome change from the flying camera monkey paradigm that we get in videos like Creed's Matrix-obsessed Higher.

Finally (the points are getting less and less interesting) there's the simple fact of sytlistic cohesion in my featured videos. OkGo: one long low-budget camera shot of guys jumping around on treadmills. Gnarles: nothing but shifting monochromatic shapes, drifting in and out according to a surreally intuitive visual logic. These days everybody wants to mix CGI and animation and live shots, which is awesome, sure, like, totally, but it exposes a serious conceptual deficiency in music videos like Freak On a Leash. Korn uses a ton of styles and cinematic gimmicks because they're incapable of developing a visual idea to the point where it makes the overstimulated fans happy.

Now, don't get me wrong... I need my share of aesthetic excess. After all, I'm the guy whose favorite movies include The Rundown and Wild Zero (haven't seen that one? You HAVE to check it out). Still, I want my experience of music to penetrate deeper than my experience of bad film, and music video effects extravaganzas usually make me want to get up and get another soda.

I'm profoundly relieved that there are still innovators, thinking through their aesthetic approaches, making my music video consumption just a little more satisfying.

Balboa versus Meat Loaf: Who Rocks Harder?

It's gonna be the season of brute force nostalgia. Two classic favorites are rolling back in and showing us what made them so awesome in the first place. The fact that they're working in two different media? Irrelevant. Ass gets kicked either way.

In the red corner, we have Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in a final installment of the famous boxing series that I was too young to appreciate. I grew up in Philly, though, so I knew about Rocky. I knew every time I wanted to visit an art museum.

In the blue corner, we have Marvin Lee Aday, returning as Meat Loaf for Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose. I keep accidentally typing his name as Meat Load, but it's kind of appropriate, because Aday is gonna bring us a killer new load of theatrical rock and roll.

In a world of shit-faced remakes and bad song covers, this might seem painfully typical. A resurrection of content we're happier to leave in the cradle of nostalgia, to sing along with on the radio and quote to other people our age (or older)... we don't need anyone dragging BOOH and Rocky's I - V out of their resplendent pop culture crypts, right? Is it going to be any better than it was seeing Jessica Simpson blaspheming Daisy Duke?

The answer is YES, people, because there's a critical principle at work here. These may reference our collective childhood, but they're not remakes or revitalizations. The classics always pale in comparison to their imitations, and nothing's gonna change that. But these aren't imitations. There are the original artists, coming back to defend their titles.

If Vin Diesel was to play a new Rocky, I'd be pissed, and the last thing I could ever want to see is a cover of "Life is a Lemon" by some jackasses like Linkin Park. But instead, we have two classic acts coming back, working under new conditions, to show us what they're made of. Agreed, the guitars in BOOH III are marginally updated (as per this demo song), and Rocky is now fighting a young punk who's grown up in the hip-hop generation.

But that's really the essence of the thing. It's not actually Meat Loaf versus Rocky... it's The Originals (aka RockyLoaf) versus The Imitators. That's right, neuvo metal heads and young punk action stars, it's time to pay dues to the people who inspired you. The Rock versus Rocky Balboa. Nickelback versus Meat Loaf himself.

Somebody thought to dig up the roots. And this Fall, they've got me in their corner.

Rock for easy digestion (Head Automatica's Popaganda)

Here's a common case in the current music world. Head Automatica's new album, Popaganda, is getting good press from critics, who understand the relationship between a project and its product, but it's getting complaints from those niche listeners who tend to post album reviews on web sites... probably because those listeners only know how to judge an album based on their own understanding of genre and artist loyalty.

Head Automatica is essentially the pet band of Glassjaw's vocalist Daryl Palumbo. Glassjaw was an insane hardcore band, one of those rare acts that I respected but had trouble listening to. In this, Palumbo's more recent work, he's taking a new direction. Head Automatica's first album, Decadence, was a disco-inspired punk album ripe for dancing and club nights, and this flavor was influenced strongly by Dan the Automator, Head Automatica's DJ collaborator. For Popaganda, Head Automatica's second album, the band spins further off on its tangent, dropping the angst and soothing the digestion. It's an extremely, unabashadly pop album, sugar coated on every side, and considering the title, I can assume that this was intentional. And guess what? It works.

Now, I've noticed some confusion among fellow listeners as to the definition of "pop." If you're not clear on this, you might have real trouble appreciating Popaganda. Thus, this post: I'm going to explore "pop" as a genre, rather than as an economic distinction or as a deragatory word, and I'm going to cite definitive moments from Popaganda to demonstrate my points.

Okay, so most people know that "pop" comes from popular. This can be a useful starting point if it's not taken too literally... after all, there are a million subgenres that use "pop" as a modifier (power-pop, synth pop, electropop, pop punk, indie pop, and apparently "dream pop" is one, now, too) and most of these hardly get five seconds of airplay every decade. So if they're not popular, what makes these genres "poppy"?

The answer is that pop music, including tons of lesser-known artists like Head Automatica, derive a lot of their musical techniques from popular sensibility. Mass consumption has given birth to a number of musical devices and tendencies, and if you're playing pop, it means you're using these devices out of concern for the mass digestibility of your music. Contrast this with "experimental," which is when you push your boundaries beyond the public appetite for the music, or "traditional," which is drawn from a certain musical heritage and is designed to speak directly to that niche.

These pop music devices are, generally speaking, oriented toward the following characteristics of the music:

1 - Grab: Pop music is best if it's immediately recognizable. The faster you can filter, understand, and appreciate a melody, the more it qualifies to be in a pop song. Certain songs are awesome after a few listens (consider, for example, the Rx Bandits' album The Resignation, or anything by The Mars Volta), and this may make them brilliant, but it doesn't make them pop. You should have a sense of a pop song after the first verse and chorus, or earlier, if possible.

2 - Cling: This is what makes commentators call something "catchy." There's a strange deep-deated motive in pop music to get the chorus stuck in your head, so you can't stop fucking singing "Oh Baby Baby" on the subway, no matter how much you hate Britney and/or Kevin Federline.

3 - Buzz: A pop song should make you feel better for listening to it. Whether it does this by making you happy (a la The Beach Boys) or by sympathizing with your sadness (a la the book/film High Fidelity), pop should be there for you. It's your best friend. You can never let it go.

Those are the abstract goals... grab, buzz, and stickiness. I've got a copyright on that terminology. Those goals have, in turn, given rise to some devices that can be found, in various forms and sequences, throughout the history of pop. As much as this might sound like it limits pop to a few neat tricks, that's not the direction I'm trying to go. I'm sure we haven't even seen the beginning of the thousands of ways a band can pick up with a hook and climax with a big moment, and we, the listeners, have an infinite appetite for all the variations of a simple three- or four-chord riff.

So here are those devices, which I feel are at the core of pop music:

1 - The Hook:

You may notice a certain affinity between the word "Hook" and the word "catchy." It's TOTALLY not a coincidence. A hook is a singular moment in a song that is designed to catch the listener's attention so that the riffs (see below) can get stuck in their head.

For some of the best hooks in recent songwriting, check out Ultimate Fakebook. In their song When I'm With You I'm Okay, there's a moment when the instruments drop out, there's a pause, and then the singer kicks in all alone with the title line, followed by the full-force chorus. It's a singular moment in hook-writing history.

Compare the hook at the heart of "Nowhere Fast," whose chorus comes in with the line "I got away with murder last night in the parking lot..." This is a little darker than Ultimate Fakebook's sunny day shit, but it works the same way, as a sick, sick, hyper-simple minor-key chorus that kept replaying in my head while I was walking to get lunch. A good hook should be there to grab your attention after it's slipped during the verse, and "Nowhere Fast" does it with style.

2 - The Riff

A riff is a simple, repeatable musical fragment, often at the heart of a good pop song. The point is that it can be repeated, elaborated upon, it can ground the vocal progressions, and you can hear it just below conscious level enough times that it gets impossibly stuck in your head. Michael Jackson's classic "Smooth Criminal" is profoundly riff-laden... the opening chord progression, leading up to the phrase "Annie, are you okay?" keeps repeating, and every time we hear it, we want to hear it again. It's perfect modular songwriting, broken into simple, repeatable fragments that are predictable without being monotonous. He is the king of pop, after all.

Riffs perform myriad functions, often as the root and baseline of a more fully-fleshed song. That's where Head Automatica ws going with "Lying Through Your Teeth," which has a nice 3-chord riff at the opening, and bridging practically every gap. It does its job, acting as a strong root for the song and an anchor point for listener recognition.

3 - Major Chord Progression

Despite some notable exceptions, the major key prejudice is one of the undeniable elements of pop music. The major key is the one that sounds... you know, nice. Happy. C - E - G. All the old pop musicians, like the Beatles at their earliest and sugariest, Elvis Costello, and the founders of pure pop relied on major scales and harmonies to give their songs a perfectly unhealthy deliciousness. Moving on down through pop history, pop punk never escapes from this major chord tendency, from Green Day to Blink-182. One of the things that marks "What's My Age Again?" as painfully poppy punk is the fact that the chorus puts 150% of its emphasis on a three-note major key melody.

Enter Graduation Day, the opening, and perhaps the most impossibly pop melody on Popaganda, the epicenter of its flavor. That chord progression that keeps getting repeated in the chorus is exactly what pop sugar has always been about.

4 - The "Money Note"

I heard this term in some music article, and I've decided to adapt it. There's a moment in a lot of songs, especially ballads, where there's a sudden jump from one key to another, or a sudden turn from minor to major.

Popaganda has subtle moments like this littered all through it. Most are subtle pick-ups that borrow from the money note formula... Daryl Palumbo is good at twisting his voice at important moments, like at the breakdown in "Million Dollar Decision," around 2:40 into the song. The cut in Palumbo's voice does something that alternative balladists (Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey) should be familiar with... it grabs the listener and yanks them back into the song just before the resolution.

5 - Sharp Edges

Come on, if you want music to get its teeth into people, it has to be razor sharp. A sad but pertinent example: the modulations in New Found Glory's second recording of "Hit Or Miss," which were surreally (artifically) on key. Palumbo himself is the master of the sharp edge... it was blunted a bit when he was in Glassjaw and all he had were crunchy guitars and gut-wrenching screams. It came out a lot better in Decadence, where he had a good opportunity in "Beating Heart Baby" and other vocal-weighted tracks.

In Popaganda, Palumbo's single-note sharpness comes across perfectly, complimented by crystal clear guitar work in almost every track. She's Not It is a fine example, but it's just because that's the one I happen to be listening to right now. Palumbo holds all his notes and his voice modulates all over the place, but it always keeps its tone.

Pop shouldn't be limited by these devices... if there's anothing the history of popular music has taught us, it's that a pop sensibility can be overlaid on any serious sound. Sometimes such experiments can fail miserably (for instance, 7 Seconds' The Music, the Message). Still, these devices work in country and techno just as well as they work for Hanson and NOFX. Popaganda borrows its sick, greasy melodies and its molasses hooks from every point in a shifting genre, and it results in a record that's hard to put down if you really appreciate a simple, clean, slick piece of power/pop/punk. That was the project... Popaganda. And that's what happened.