Up Your Game, Television Set Designers

Why is it that on otherwise brilliant television shows, the music posters up in the kids' bedrooms are always so sad and clueless? It's like they've got this amazing eye for detail in every other aspect of the human condition but this. AJ Soprano listens to Sugarcult? Really? Who the fuck listens to Sugarcult?

In Defense of the New Musical Express

There’s a certain strain of British music writing that’s incapable of criticism. The bylines belong to “music critics,” absolutely, but the criticism is only there as a phantom limb—they know the shape of a review, where the adjectives should go, how this band sounds like this band in an attic with that band’s mother. Except that the content lacks any teeth. It’s as if, before assigning writers to reviews, desk editors make sure they only use seventeen year-old fanboys, shabby, naïve kids who write their reviews out in notebooks with that band’s stickers on the cover.

The main offender of the bunch, or at least the most notorious, is NME, the New Musical Express. It’s the US Weekly of British music mags. Their reviews are famously positive, breathless, with a few sad contenders each week thrown to the wolves, shat upon for a show of objectivity.

The odd thing about them though, is that they’re still tastemakers in the UK. They break legitimate bands every few months. They put together great bills and send them out on tour across the country, university to university, and they sell out everywhere. The magazine is an international joke, and yet people still turn to them to find the next superstar quartet. Weird!

So maybe they’re incapable of criticism and lacking in credibility like a fox?

We’re all so proud of ourselves for being discerning, such informed consumers. We troll the blogs and pay out the nose for subscriptions, and we’re all just so pleased that we can’t be distracted by hype. We backlash, motherfucker! Don’t tell me something’s good, record companies, because I’ll tell the internets that it ain’t!

I don’t know about anybody else, but my own love of music these days feels a little bit hollow. It’s been a while since I’ve been the underage kid with the X’d out hand at the show. I wish I could hear a band without the fifteen filters, just listening for a new sound or a jumpy bassline, regardless of the thousand ooooooobvious influences. “I mean, seriously: Mark E. Smith called. He wants his vocal phrasing back!” (hears self; slits wrist with broken CD).

There’s nothing wrong with being a fanboy! It a pleasure! NME, in its weird, market-tested way, gets that. They cover music they way the kid with the X’d-out hand would, and even when they let a band shine that might not deserve it, they’re still giving us five more that we’ll soon love recklessly.

It’s not a perfect magazine by any stretch (even journalism necessarily), but I bought last week’s issue at the newsstand for way more than I should. The Libertines got back together, for one night, and the cover had Pete and Carl, sweaty and beaming. It was classic NME, and staring at that cover, I could swear to God I was fourteen.

Netflix is Killing Your Soul

I haven't watched a minute of Lost yet. I figure it'll take a Friday night, the next day, then maybe a few hours on Sunday. And I feel really OK about that.

The thing is, though, for all of those trend pieces about how great the lost weekend is, the lost weekend is killing the art of television. If you sit inside for an entire weekend, that's OK I guess. I like to veg as much as the next, and in the winter it gets cold out. My issue is the structure of the story, moving through a season, which (when done well) can be an art form. Not only are you scripting a single episode that needs its own arc, you're also thinking six or seven episodes down the road. That takes vision, and it needs to be appreciated.

When you're watching an entire season of a long-form narrative in one sitting, you deflate it. Obviously you deflate it in time, but by deflating it in time you deflate all of its suspense. When you have to wait a week to know if Laura Palmer's creepy dad really killed her, it takes stomach. It builds character. You have to be patient, and that wait is built into the storyline's tension.

When the theme music runs right after the last episode's credits, it doesn't matter so much. You'll have your answer immediately.

DVR does the same thing, on a smaller scale. Fast-forwarding through commercials kills the commercial tension. In the same way that advertisers are going to need new ways to find audiences, TV writers are going to change the way they do things. They've got a few very specific tricks up their sleeve, and if you take this one away from them, the shape of the storylines are going to suffer.

I love not knowing who's going to die in a cliffhanger. I think about it endlessly all summer. Will Frank Pembleton die of his stroke? What's it going to be like now that Marissa's dead? Maggie shot Burns? Seriously?

When Nancy called the DEA guy "Agent Wonder Bread," I wondered if he was going to kill her all week. And then a few weeks later, that huge deal at the end of the season! We won't know how it comes out for another few months! (Sanjay's still in the closet, and there's a gun hidden in the microwave.) I love the fact that I'm watching this show in real time.

It's not always possible, but I'm going to try to do everything in real time from now on. It's stupidly Catholic of me, but it just feels right. Tease me with your commercial breaks. Break my heart with your season finales. Make me weep when you get pulled off the air. Let's do this fucking thing, TV.

Post-Humiliation

Before the Explosions in the Sky show on Monday, I had a thought.

"Wouldn't it be awesome if they came out and shouted, 'HELLO BROOKLYN! ARE YOU READY TO POST-ROCK AND ROLL?'"

My girlfriend started cackling. People started staring at us.

"You should totally post that on your blog!" she screamed. "See how many 'hits' you get! HA HA HA!"

Maybe I will, Caitlin. Maybe I will.

Enough is Enough

Dear Posts in the Form of a Letter,

We need to talk.

For a while now, I've thought of you as a clever way to make a point, a way to break up the monotony by pretending like I was actually speaking to somebody, and thus, could be more focused. Basically, I thought of you as the new friend you meet in the line for the bathroom, the one who keeps you from lurking around the liquor cabinet silently.

Now don't take this the wrong way, Posts in the Form of a Letter. I really thought we were going to go the distance, and I'd turn you into some kind of regular feature (which I've never done before, you know; you were my first!). But recently, you've become kind of hacky. I'm sorry, Posts, but it's the truth. Everybody in the world seems to want to use you to make their point, and through them, I've seen that maybe you weren't as clever as I thought you were.

I think too much of you to give you a "It's me, not you," because frankly? You've become worn-out. But the good news is that, given your huge popularity in the blogosphere, I just know you'll forget about me in no time. Best of luck in all your future endeavors.

Keep keeping your head up,
Rokken Roll

To Call a Spade a Spade

My name is Brian. I am a hipster.

I listen to a certain type of music; I wear a certain style of jean; I work a low-paying job in the media; I drink too much and spin miracles of logic to justify it; I have an artistic outlet that, while almost completely unnoticed, keeps me from feeling like a work-a-day; I’m nostalgic for my childhood without trying to re-create it; I try my best to keep to the unspoken social compact of the L.E.S.—I’ll look my alterna-finest if you’ll do the same, and then we can both revel in the myth that we live in a stylish utopia; I live in a cheap loft in an poor neighborhood in Brooklyn; and until today, I’ve never once said the words, “I am a hipster.”

Isn’t it amazing that we live in a city overrun by hipsters, and yet at the same time, no one is a hipster? Is there a subculture more filled with self-loathing than ours?

Of course, I never set out to become a hipster. Never did I wake up and say to myself, “This is how a hipster dresses, and so this is how I’ll dress. That is the kind of job he has, so that’s the one I’ll take.” It just slowly came together like that, in a far more abstract way, and now here I am, as a fully-formed specimen. Of course, you didn’t set out to become a hipster either. It just happened, and then one day you looked up and suddenly belonged to a group.

(And it goes without saying that anyone who actually does do this consciously, in an effort to fit the profile, is not a hipster and could never be one; they are livestock, each and every one.)

So why the self-negation? Why is it a crime to admit what we are?

One answer is that “hip” scares people off, sounds too congratulatory, excluding the unwashed masses in the ill-fitting jeans. Feh. Another is the Groucho Marx effect, that ideally we like to think of ourselves, each and every one, as individuals, and so announcing membership in our little group has always been, and always will be, a cardinal sin. A little closer, I think, but still not the essential truth:

It’s still that stupid, fearful, desperate need for ironic distance.

Now obviously, I’m not saying anything new here—hipsters love irony???? Whaaa?—but while it’s our most recognizable quality, it’s also our most obnoxious. And now it’s become so pervasive that it’s turned us against ourselves. We’re a generation divided against itself, terrified to admit what’s obvious, that we happen to exist as a collective. And that each member of that collective, whether he likes it or not, has been given the name “hipster.” It doesn’t change the fact of our existence, that name, so why is everyone so terrified of it?

In the same way that liberals have allowed “liberal” to become a dirty word, we have thrown the word “hipster” under the bus. And the only way out of that is to reclaim the word.

There’s actually a lot to love about hipsters. We love loud color and loud gestures. We create things. We can be jaded and boring, yes, but we balance that out with moments of pure joy. Sometimes we’ll even admit that a lot is still good with the world, and that we’re all doing OK within it, thus far.

We value culture, read great books, go to museums, take trips, keep informed about the world, but at the same time we do it without becoming effete assholes. We love reality television and US Weekly, not because it gives us some ironic pleasure, but because it allows us to see exactly where things stand, and where they’re headed. We refuse to plug our ears up to what’s going on simply because it’s distasteful.

Our problem is that we still haven’t found our voice, collectively. We haven’t found a way to say the things that we see are plainly obvious. Maybe Jon Stewart will say them occasionally, or Springsteen will hit a nerve every now and then, but they aren’t part of our generation. We’re still not saying anything loud enough, resoundingly enough, without sounding shrill or over-privileged. When we speak to the world, we still speak as children, and we need to get past that. That’ll come in time, I hope. Otherwise we’ll continue to be defined by our silence, and by the generation in power, or even by our own worst image of ourselves.

So say it along with me: I am a hipster. Try it. I am a hipster. Don’t be scared, no one will laugh. I am a hipster. Yes, actually say it out loud. Exactly. Again, all together now. We are hipsters. It’s about time.

I Thought I Knew How to Do Hyper-Links, But I Guess I Was Wrong

I don't even deserve a blog.

I Have Nothing to Give But Miscellany

1) In an ongoing attempt to clear the skeletons out of my closet, I find it good to cop to some guilty pleasures every now and then. It's almost like making myself your blood brother, showing you I mean it and am both stupid and unafraid, giving you good dirt should you ever need it down the road. That said, the new Fergie song is disgustingly catchy. Her verses are questionable (obviously), but if you can just ignore that and get to the chorus, you'll start to feel it in the pelvis. It's kind of an M.I.A. rip, but at least she's stealing from the right people.

Also, I had this enormous, technicolor crush on her when she was on Kids, Incorporated, BTW. Stacey!

UPDATE: Looks like I somehow missed Pitchfork trashing it yesterday, which is actually a relief. It means this is an actual guilty pleasure, and not a bullshit one (see "Since U Been Gone," "Promiscuous," "Ain't No Other Man," et al).

Next, Evanescence. The new song is a thunderbolt. It's rhythmically complex, not as glossy as most nu-metal but still a clean production, and the video looks gauzy and rich. Even the lyrics are kind of good, with a great modern rock title, "Call Me When You're Sober." (Side note, however: can we call a moratorium on dramatic, choreographed dancing in rock videos? Yes it looks pretty but now it’s been done, so let My Chemical Romance have their thing. Unless of course you dance on treadmills.)

2) Has a song ever been made worse by the addition of a horn section? I would say, for the record, no. Never. Therefore, if logic follows, horns ALWAYS make songs better. Can't we just add horns to every song we ever loved? Couldn't somebody pay Danger Mouse to do that?

I'll put it to you then, dear reader: I dare you to name a song that would have been better without the horns. It's music's version of naming a sequel that was better than the original movie (actually that answer's easy: Back to the Future and Ghostbusters). Still, I defy you to name one song that should have been stripped down.