Music is Hate

Burn the records.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids, "Blank Generation" - Part One

"In a way, having oneself psychoanalyzed is like eating from the tree of knowledge. Knowledge acquired sets us (new) ethical problems; but contributes nothing to their solution."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was a genius

"For transference is already, in itself, an analysis of suggestion, insofar as transference places the subject, with regard to his demand, in a position he occupies only because of his desire."
- Jacques Lacan, who was an idiot


SCENE
Frank joins Jerry at a 24 hour diner called Einstein's Day.

FRANK: Quine's guitar... it's like if Thelonious Monk or Anthony Braxton had quit jazz and taken guitar lessons from James Burton and Cliff Gallup. You can hear the whole history of rock guitar in that Love Comes In Spurts solo. But it's a break with rock guitar at the same time because it's...
JERRY: A kind of fractured lyricism.
FRANK: Yeah! It's really revolutionary. What's funny is that, you know, Quine he said he knew a lot about jazz but couldn't play it.
JERRY: Sounds like me.
FRANK: Right, well, his approach to rock and roll guitar ended up influencing the development of jazz guitar. You know Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell right?
JERRY: Not personally.
FRANK: Oh fuck you, you know what I mean.
JERRY: Yeah, Ribot plays with Waits a lot.
FRANK: Well, his style descends straight from Quine. Frisell has a lot of Quine in his playing too. Except they use his stuff for break music on NPR.
JERRY: Hey man, fuck NPR.
FRANK: Amen.

The waitress approaches.

WAITRESS: Hi. You all ready to order?
JERRY: You first.
FRANK: All right, sure. I'll have the country fried steak and a Bud.
WAITRESS: What sides?
FRANK: Mashed potatoes. And uhm... how are the carrots cooked? Are they steamed?
WAITRESS: Oh, they're just sauteed with a little syrup.
FRANK: Oh fuck me, I haven't had that in years. Sure, that'll do me.
WAITRESS: Sir?
JERRY: Uh. Gimme eggs benedict. Side of Texas toast and home fries. And a Coke.
WAITRESS: Sorry, only have Pepsi products.
JERRY: Oh shit. Well, gimme a Dr. Pepper.
WAITRESS: Great. It'll be out here in just a little bit.

The waitress departs.

FRANK: So... what do you think?
JERRY: I'd do her.
FRANK: No, I mean about Blank Generation.
JERRY: Oh. I like it.
FRANK: It kinda sums up New York Punk, doesn't it? It's all there: art noise, the decadent-symbolist poetry, the Johnny Thunders sleaze rock—
JERRY: You know what else is all there? That waitress. Holy hell. You could hang your hat on that ass.
FRANK: Yeah, your intellectual caliber is why I hang out with you. Jesus fucking Christ, Jerry.
JERRY: Well, what fucking use is talking about music when there's that walking the earth?
FRANK: Fine. Let's spend an hour talking about her ass. Hey, maybe she'll overhear and think it's charming. Do you think that, Jerry?
JERRY: Hey man, I don't need to read Freud to know I'm all about dicking.
FRANK: Dicking your mother.
JERRY: Hey, speaking of incest, and I do often, how's about the Plan? Richard Hell is one fucked up fella.
FRANK: Topping it with that beautiful, Beatlesy lyrical solo too.
JERRY: Yeah. I remembered that solo one night at camp. Couldn't remember what it was from, though. Drove me crazy.
FRANK: "Camp"? You go to "camp"?
JERRY: Hey, fuck you, I'm rural. Look at these farmboy hands.

The waitress approaches with their drinks.

WAITRESS: Sorry for the wait. Food's almost up. I'll be back in a second.

She leaves.

FRANK: Okay, I see what you mean.
JERRY: See?!

She returns with their food. Frank is irritated.

FRANK: I didn't order this.
WAITRESS: Country fried steak with carrots and mashed potatoes? I wrote it down right here...
FRANK: Hey, I'm telling you, this isn't what I ordered.
JERRY: What the fuck is wrong with you, Frank? That's exactly what you ordered. I heard it myself.
FRANK: No. Look, that's not what I ordered. I don't care what you two say.
WAITRESS: Okay. I can get you something else if you like, sir.
FRANK: No, fuck it, forget it. Just fuck it!

The cook, your Gene, walks out.

GENE: Hey, what the fuck is going on here?
FRANK: You gave me the wrong food is what's going on.
GENE: Listen, if you motherfuckers want something else to eat, how's about I cut off your balls and stuff them in your soppy goddamn mouths?
JERRY: Hey boss, I got nothing to do with this, it's all him.
FRANK: I don't appreciate being bullied at a restaurant where I'm a customer.
GENE: Shut the fuck up and listen, you little piece of shit. Unless you want to be shitting out your own genitalia in a couple hours, you're going to eat that food, you're going to pay for it, and you're going to leave a nice tip for Marlene #4 here.
JERRY: #4?
GENE: Shut the fuck up and eat your goddamn eggs and ham, you kiddy-diddling motherfucker. Hey, what's this?

Gene picks up the Blank Generation CD. Marlene #4 retreats.

GENE: Well, fuck a duck, it's my favorite punk album. You motherfuckers were listening to this.
FRANK (downcast): Yes, sir.
GENE: Looks like there's more to you than just an asshole where your mouth should be. What are a couple of pussies like you two doing with an album this good?
JERRY: We've got a music blog.
GENE: Well, what do you know, so do I. I bet you apes listen to the Decemberists.
FRANK: The Decemberists are brilliant—

Gene pulls a steak knife from his apron and drives it into Frank's hand, pinning it to the table. Frank screams and begins crying.

GENE: Whereof you cannot speak, thereof you must eat your fucking food and get the hell out of my restaurant, you goddamn pussies.
JERRY & FRANK (through tears): Yes, sir!

Wittgenstein's Day

"The moral can be generalized: conceptual truths are inherent in thinking, not discovered by it; but only in a universe conforming to such conceptual truths could there be thinking. (Example: only in a mathematical universe can there be counting.) Remember: we possess concepts only insofar as we are able to use them, and a universe where such concepts can be used is ipso facto a universe where these concepts are at home. We do not justify our forms of thought by showing that they correspond to reality; logic’s justification is internal to it. But we could not be here, operating with our forms of thought, unless the universe were as logic describes it. (Of course this latter judgment is made from within our forms of thought; but that should not discredit it. It is not as though some alternative standpoint from which to make the judgment is conceivable.) The logicality of thought does not reflect the logicality of reality, but it does presuppose it."
- Roderick Long

Thoughts on Philip Glass

The Richard Hell review is postponed for now. I will either do it this weekend or next week. I am busy with a literary project, and so music criticism, as that most knuckle-dragging of all genres of criticism and nearly so writing, must take the backseat. Instead, I bring you some thoughts on Philip Glass.

First of all, fuck that guy. There is a reason I named my inguinal hernia after Philip Glass: because it was repetitive and painful and painfully repetitive.

Beyond his primitivist repetition, his stagnation is perhaps most offensive to me. There are few things that anger me like a Philip Glass score. In film after film he recycles his ideas. There was a time when Glass's atavism was a revolutionary atavism. Now it is merely opportunistic. Glass is the sellout par excellence. His complacency sickens me.

Nevertheless, there is a certain brutish charm to his endless arpeggiated triads even in his dotage. While the rhythms, rudimentary scalar melodies, and triads are produced almost as automatism, Glass takes greater care in his dynamics and orchestrations. It might be the same old shit, but it rises and falls and is tonally colored.

Yet it is the early to middle Glass that I find worth the listen—everything up to, say, Akhnaten. Even that is overly generous as the Portrait Trilogy collapses under the weight of its pretense. Still, I cannot deny that on occasion I hanker to hear idiot sublimity of Einstein on the Beach.

In closing, I would like to pass the mic to MCA.

More Ubu for Baby

Enjoy:

http://www.furious.com/perfect/cleveland4.html

Pere Ubu, "The Modern Dance"

Eleven Theses on Pere Ubu

I.

Pere Ubu is like a cup. No, really:

David Thomas talks a lot of cubism about seeing the cup this way and that way. I don't think that's it.

II.

"Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory."
- Alfred Jarry

Pere Ubu is a band that laughs at its own jokes. The joke is so funny the closing song is about it.

III.

A sharp squall of synth accompanied by spare bass notes (later joined by a guitar riff and ignored by the other instruments at first) combines into Non-Alignment Pact, a frenetic song driven by David Thomas’s grotesque holler. It sets the stylistic tone for the rest of the record—garage punk detourned by musique concrète. It’s rather like Brion Gysin had joined the Damned. This is very funny and very empty, like a cup painted by a clown.

IV.

Over My Head—this isn't punk, it's Baxter/Denny exotica (c.f. "This ain't rocknroll, this is genocide"). Before the birth of a new ritual formula, the old one has to die. Most of "The Modern Dance" is a killing joke. This joke would be told again by other pranksters, the same synth squeal but set to a martial step, but more about them another time.

V.

Chinese Radiation is a Sonic Youth tune before its time. Some of Bowie's diamond dogs wander in and give Thomas a cheer. He really appreciates the support.

VI.

Laughing—well, it is a funny joke. The reed playing approaches the lyrical moments of the NY Energy School or Brötzmann when he plays tarogato. Even this lyrical, rubato circumambulation around the idol of melody is too much for cookie cutter punk. The Ramones were busy shoring up the pedestal with old bricks, but the new buildings would inevitably collapse. Public Image Limited dispatched melody on the floor of the Senate. They later succumbed as all conspirators must.

There are two thoughts in punk. One is the creation of the new, the avant urge. The other is the return to the old, the restoration of a fallen line (intense compact melodic statements—punk as power pop). These are not always antithetical as such, and where they are in opposition, it sometimes leads to a valuable synthesis, but it's more common for a band to be a predominate mixture of one over the other—and generally becoming less first thought and more second thought as commercial pressures are exerted.

Much of proto-punk and the first wave of American punk followed the first thought. The British, being more aesthetically conservative, took second thought Americanisms (NY Dolls, Ramones) and used it to revive their native tradition of glam, Wire being the main exception. It did not take long for the adventurous to see that the first wave of British punk was essentially glam redux—Never Mind the Bollocks and Give Em Enough Rope are as clear statements of this fact as can be obtained—and to break with this. Thus began post-punk, a punk of the first thought. Meanwhile punk of the second thought developed into Oi!, pop punk, and sundries.

Back in America, the first thought continued on in New York, developing into no wave. There is a straight line from the Voidoids to the Contortions. This development, a sort of new fusion, was reincorporated not into the body of rock, but rather the body of jazz with the birth of the downtown genre of omni-idiomatic musicians and composers—John Lurie and John Zorn among others led this movement from punk into jazz. In other cities the line continued on into something resembling British post-punk. Mission of Burma is the most prominent example of this. This line was not in any position to join the jazz tradition. The elements needed for that alchemy were not present.

Simultaneously, British punk was imported and affected punk in its homeland. The most important development out of this was hardcore. Hardcore is essentially the child of Wire, probably the most remarkable British band to come out of '77. They were proto-hardcore, a post-punk band before punk had even gotten underway (proto-post-punk?). The song structures of hardcore were lifted almost without change from Wire. The main difference is that the hardcore bands stripped it of its self-consciously artsy lyrics and (most importantly) played it faster. That's the core that's so very hard—hard to play, hard on the ears, hardness-as-aesthetic: play it faster, play it meaner. That's not to say there weren't influences from melodic punk or that all bands took their cue from Wire. However, 1) Wire was the clearest antecedent to this music, and 2) hardcore punk was an avant-garde movement in punk. The hardcore bands pushed the music as far as it could go. What had started as a monologue, an intricate joke developed over the course of a routine, had become a punchline stripped of its setup.

VII.

Take the most conventional tune on the album, Street Waves, and give it a sololess white noise break. Wait, they already did.

This kind of trick has been played by several bands—Television, Cabaret Voltaire, etc. Not that this record doesn't have guitar solos, but like a good comic, Pere Ubu knows where to let the empty space do the talking.

VIII.

Accompanying the instrumental noise of the album are Thomas’s palsied sputterings, a vocal noise that anticipates Yamatsuka Eye and Mike Patton. The closest contemporary resemblance is Richard Hell, but Hell was never this spastic. David Thomas's is the thickest voice in punk. His voice is Dada.

IX.

This is one of the cleanest, clearest productions in all of punk. Great clarity, tone, and presence. You wouldn't want to drink out of a dirty cup or tell an ill-timed joke. This is a band that, when it makes noise, wants you to hear that noise very clearly.

X.

The point of a cup is to fill it.

XI.

The point of a cup is to empty it.

Introduction

Hello, peasants.

Welcome to Einstein's Day, a blog dedicated to examining a particular aesthetic vein in popular music: that place where the avant-garde, jazz, and punk overlap. I will accomplish this by means of pretentious music reviews. I will also put down indie rock like the yawping cur it is.

The primary line of discourse will focus on a series of albums I consider essential to the aesthetic. For starters, I will be reviewing these records:

• Pere Ubu, "The Modern Dance"
• Richard Hell and the Voidoids, "Blank Generation"
• This Heat, self-titled
• Mission of Burma, "VS."
• Wire, "Pink Flag"
• Killing Joke, self-titled
  
• Cabaret Voltaire, "Red Mecca"
• The Peter Brötzmann Octet, "Machine Gun"
• Naked City, self-titled
• Miles Davis, "On the Corner"
• Black Flag, "In My Head"
• The Stooges, "Fun House"
• Eric Dolphy, "Out to Lunch"
  

and many more albums by groups such as Television, the Pop Group, the Velvet Underground, etc.

Interspersed with the essentials series (which will be easy to track via the tag "essentials") will be rants, digressions, observations, and screeds. There is no set schedule, but I hope to review an album a week, barring illness.

You may now return to whatever it is you do.