I agree with this, more or less. And this, while beau­ti­ful in the way that expen­sive mar­ket­ing often is, does­n’t help mat­ters much.

Am I alone in think­ing that when an artist says that noth­ing good has come of the last twen­ty-five years, they real­ly mean the last forty-five? That said, I may be out to catch this on Sat­ur­day. [Not fire. Oak­ley Hall.]

Rhys Chatham’s Essen­tial­ist @ CEC 9/8/2006

It was actu­al­ly a lit­tle quaint. And Mr. Smith overde­ter­mines the influ­ence of South­ern Lord on Chatham’s set; run­ning through a few rehashed Slay­er and Black Album-era Metal­li­ca riffs is nei­ther avant-garde nor met­al. No. It’s “high cul­ture” slum­ming as “low cul­ture”, which is both pedan­tic and patron­iz­ing. As John Darnielle put it in Deci­bel’s now infa­mous hip­ster met­al round­table:

They start lis­ten­ing to a lit­tle met­al, but they sort of want to describe the met­al in terms that makes it part of their shtick instead of its own uni­verse. Their mode is sort of the gate­way drug to that. It seems a lit­tle intel­lec­tu­al sometimes.

Addi­tion­al­ly, this. And, while I’m at it, this. Oh, the guilt! Is it impos­si­ble to judge met­al on its own mer­its, “art­ful” or oth­er­wise, rather than false­ly ele­vate it in the name of good taste? Sure, it’s a cheap polemic and the eas­i­est way to approach extreme music in a spe­cious man­ner, but it does such a dis­ser­vice to artists who don’t find them­selves adorn­ing the pages of The Times, The New York­er and Art­fo­rum before being accord­ed the respectabil­i­ty they deserve as artists in and of themselves.

That sort of crit­i­cism is bet­ter left to cagey A&R per­son­nel and twitchy PR attachés, hired to devise mar­ket­ing strate­gies for crossover appeal, etc.

I’m not com­plete­ly cer­tain that this will have its intend­ed effect, but the video illus­trates, to me at least, Amer­i­ca’s ongo­ing love affair with plutocracy.

Yes­ter­day marked the last sum­mer broad­cast of Mari­a’s Her Jazz pro­gram on WPRB. It was only my sec­ond time vis­it­ing the sta­tion and, man, was it ever a great expe­ri­ence. She has the set list here, with my songs list­ed in italics.

I con­cen­trat­ed in the will­ful­ly obscure to share weird, hard to find and out of print music with as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. Giv­en the chance I’d absolute­ly do it again, and I’d bring along more music!

After­wards, we stopped at Prince­ton Record Exchange and I unloaded all the pro­mos that Philly shops won’t buy. I picked up used lp copies of Robert Frip­p’s Expo­sure [recent­ly reis­sued on cd] and James Chance and the Con­tor­tions’ Live aux Bains Douch­es.

Tune in to WPRB 103.3 tomor­row between 2 and 5 PM to hear Black­mail Is My Life broad­cast on Her Jazz!

What’s on tap? Fri­da Hyvo­nen, Rhys Chatham, The Drones and many more. Be sure to tune in and eat up your office’s band­width! Feel the wrath of the IT department!