Little Johnny Jewel

Family matters

2006-04-09T22:11:00.000-05:00

Caramanica brings hyphy to the Gray Lady.

I really had no idea Droop-E was 40's son, or that Turf Talk was his cousin, or that James Baldwin was his godfather.

Smithgau

2006-03-29T20:44:00.000-06:00

Better late than never!

Hip-hop comes to the Smithsonian.

Xgau confronts the many personæ of Slim Shady.

2 Gentlemen

2006-03-07T22:22:00.000-06:00

(1912-2006)

"Mr. Parks was the photographer and filmmaker who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience."

(1949-2006)

"The self-taught Malian guitarist and songwriter merged West African traditions with the blues."

Solid gold

2006-03-05T07:16:00.000-06:00

Goldie Gold from the Federation suffers the entrevista treatment over at WWS.

Tweed optional

2006-02-22T02:52:00.000-06:00

Taken from website of the Double Door, a dive-ish Windy City venue whither Large Professor will be bringing the timelessly old-school sonic wisdom on the night of Feb. 26:

Eric B & Rakim. Biz Markie's 'All Samples Cleared'. Pete Rock & CL Smooth's 'Mecca and the Soul Brother'. Nas's 'Illmatic' and 'Stillmatic'. Diamond D's 'Stunts, Blunts & Hip-hop'. Kool G Rap. Big Daddy Kane. A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders. Rob Swift. The Beastie Boys. Roxanne Shante. Gang Starr. Main Source.

[...] Since high school student William Paul Mitchell broke in with Main Source as MC and producer, Extra P's been in demand. Think Lil' Bow Wow or Chi Ali was a prodigy? Hell, the Prof taught the real Prodigy -- the one out of Mobb Deep -- his way around a studio. And that was after he taught DJ Premier how to use his SP1200. A grateful Primo reciprocated, introducing LP to his record collection and brought Main Source to the attention of Wild Pitch.

Not impressed yet? Try this: at seventeen, going to school by day, LP spent his nights programming beats for Eric B & Rakim's Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em. That led to a call to work on Kool G. Rap's Wanted Dead or Alive. And by that time his rep was already growing amongst those in the know: 15-year old Nasir Jones -- uh, NAS -- had already enrolled with the Professor.

LP has never betrayed hip-hop's early ideals. His career is nobly devoid of quests for celebrity and material wealth; he is content behind the scenes, twiddling and programming--the humble antithesis of today's superproducer.

Dogmatic slumber

2006-02-18T12:23:00.000-06:00

THE GREG TATE enlarges on CSWS: "And if hip-hop culture, more politically asleep now than ever before, can produce a few more active dreamers with the wit, realism and enthusiasm of Chang, Kitwana and Watkins, progressive politics might not have to seem as Jurassic as the Bushies have made it appear to America's vast, Twin Tower-traumatized daydream nation."

LJJ Roundup #1

2006-02-06T19:42:00.000-06:00

) What Mozart and Sid Vicious have in common: primitivism )) The vocal godfather of a dying school of death metal: the Cookie Monster ))) The glue holding together the social history of Western music: notation )))) Responding to Proust's ulterior-motivated Beethoven cheerleading, Stravinsky snarled: "I detest Beethoven"

Li'l Ann

2006-01-27T22:05:00.000-06:00

Q: Why was Aryan Coulter invited to speak at Philander Smith College?
A: Because of her resemblance to an "attractive and sexy, long-haired blonde" rapper.

On Li'l Kim: Raquel Cepeda vs. bell hooks

Dramatis personae

2006-01-20T22:42:00.000-06:00

Not sure when this was delivered, but I just stumbled on it: the invaluable Kelefa Sanneh shepherding us through the evolution of The Rapper's self-identity. The ten-minute presentation, streamed from KEXP, is called "I'm Not a Rapper: Pride, Professionalism, and Hip-Hop." Sanneh opens with a Beanie Siegel anecdote before dealing with hip-hop's first wave, a proudly reflexive lot given to rapping about rapping. They unabashedly styled themselves as rappers, vocal about their own vocal talent.

But the second-wave rappers, he notes, attached themselves to a variety of non-rapper archetypes: KRS-One (the Teacher), Slick Rick (the Storyteller), Too $hort (the Pimp), &c. Call this a crisis of self-identity, the start of rapping's exile from itself. Embodied in Tupac--a textbook case of "the character eclipsing the rapper"--was the young genre's growing distance from the Rapper persona.

Sanneh goes on to trace the triumph of the production-over-content esthetic, beginning with Dr. Dre, Master P (perhaps the first major artist to boast how bad a rapper he was; he writes checks, not rhymes), Sean Combs et al. The last decade belongs to the knob-twiddlers behind the scenes, marking a sea change that hasn't yet abated, as Timbaland & the Neptunes prove the existence of a superproducer caste. Profit is the driving force here: looking for the perfect beat, the key to a hit single, amounts to looking after the bottom line.

Rapping--that is, the particular style of delivery--started around this moment to lose ground to singing and half-singing, as the likes of 50 Cent and Nelly introduced melody to their flows. While they may have enriched hip-hop, all these developments slowly eroded the role of The Rapper amid the genre's dramatis personae.

Re doubt

2006-01-20T06:46:00.000-06:00

Over at the VV, Tricia Romano asks Diplo a few questions. Many of his answers were illuminating, especially:

TR: What record is your guilty pleasure?
MIABF: All of 'em these days; I can't take hip-hop that seriously. I doubt most artists do either.

So does that make the lion's share of his mix-and-match esthetic ironic?

Chicagophoto

2006-01-19T03:09:00.000-06:00

Photography in Chicago is verging on a renaissance. Proud displays of support, like the Art Institute’s new “On the Scene,” is the reason why: the Windy City's institutions recognize its abundant homegrown talent. This latest exhibition gathers the work of three local photographers—Jessica Rowe, Jason Salavon and Brian Ulrich—into their own solo shows. In an eerie excavation of red-state memories, Rowe reads interiors as family scrapbooks and clothes as ciphers that simultaneously cloak and illuminate their owner’s lives. Ulrich hollows out the Republican equation of patriotism with consumerism, offering a document of the self-annihilating monotony and gluttony behind the rituals of shopping. Chipping away at the medium's boundaries, Salavon’s “photographs” are Pythagorean at heart: they ground a visual reality in numbers, yielding ghostly images through intricate mathematical averaging, very literally abstracting beauty from mountains of everyday ephemera. So if you're in town over the next few days, here's a place to see three new ways the Midwest sees itself.

Citty upon a Hill

2006-01-18T23:37:00.000-06:00

From inside Harlem, Hillary Rodham said what we all already knew, that the House "has been run like a plantation"--"nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard." Barack Obama, our vaunted melting-pot democracy's one black senator, joined her in questioning the GOP's top-down structure, how it straitjackets ideas & enforces consensus. Information wants to be free; Republicans have other plans. Don't forget that real-life morality tale unearthed by the LAT:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. [...] “Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories,” said the senior military official who spent this year in Iraq.

And here our country's supposed to be as a "Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people upon us." Winthrop-via-Reagan: a poisonous irony of American history that still resonates, both here and abroad. (If Reaganomics and drugs saved rap, it's not unlikely we'll owe the neocons for the next leap in pop history.)

Once upon a time, the Dems offered an alternative. They still can, but the road forks: into the New Deal/Great Society path of social justice and the DLC's path to the Republican Party lite. It's a matter of worldview, not just Keynes vs. Hayek. (Some ideas here & here.)

No protocol

2006-01-18T13:23:00.000-06:00

I knew that if I ever gave it the chance, 24 would devour king-size chunks of my waking life. So, naturally, I waited until X-mas break to rent the DVDs. What surprised me was that the series is a gordian thicket of Philo 101 dilemmas & concepts. Viz.: the Director's office at CTU = Bentham's (later Foucault's) all-seeing, all-seen panopticon; torture = the common good vs. duty/rights; the real-time format = mimesis; Jack abandoning protocol = the positivism-natural law debate; industrial L.A. in the small hours = the state of nature; separating Jack & Nina for interrogation = the prisoner's dilemma.

But this is all highbrow filigree, when it comes down to it. 24 is above all good television: a simply addictive, serial thriller.

Sasha Lexis-Nexis

2006-01-18T13:11:00.000-06:00

Thanks to my school's obscene ten-figure endowment, inter alia, I have Lexis-Nexis at my fingertips, which means ready access to Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker pieces. Here's a handful of quotes, in appreciation of his elegantly brocaded formalism. ¶ Jeezy's voice is a serrated drawl, full of breath and usually ending in a rising whine, as if every line were a variation of one question: "What do you think of that?" ¶ ["Draped Up"] is marvellously sinuous and dark, a mix of low humming sounds and raspy digital melodies; it calls to mind a hovercraft covered with blinking Christmas lights. ¶ The track "Gone" begins with a sample of Otis Redding's voice, from his song "It's Too Late," and bleeds into a two-chord piano ostinato, followed by a trim funk beat. [...] As he raps, the string section breaks into an intricate counterpoint, following the rise and fall of his voice. The strings, pop's dullest default bid for respectability, here work as hard as the m.c. ¶ Then Wiley leaps in, chattering taunts at his imitators: "I know hungry-he said he don't know you. I know who's who, and who's who don't know you." The music Ping-Pongs between half time and a faster tempo, segueing into the next verse, which is performed by Kano, a young m.c. who enunciates calmly over the aggressive beat. The song-essentially a succession of boasts and threats to rivals-is a cab ride over piles of rebar, but Kano never spills his drink.

Pyramidical silence

2006-01-03T20:03:00.000-06:00

I.

What a gift: (a) my favorite critic reviews a book written by (b) one of my favorite scholars on (c) one of my favorite authors--even referencing (d) my favorite philosopher!

Answer key: a) James Wood; b) Andrew Delbanco; c) Herman Melville; d) Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religious history fascinates me, not merely for its own sake, but also as a facet of studying an artist's relationship with his/her historical moment. Clearly Melville's imagination was molded by his Calvinist upbringing, but not in an obvious fashion: the notion of original sin wasn't an aid to grasping the world. (The Decoder Ring model of theodicy?) On the contrary, original sin was for Melville more of a metaphysical palisade, shielding the riddles of existence from skirmishing philosophers. (The Rampart model of anti-theodicy??) Original sin, in short, hurt the case for God.

II.

It's perhaps too much to expect theological groping from a pop song, but rap's waist-deep in invocations of both Mammon and the Almighty. Is piety just another commodity? Another accessory for the genre's neverending catwalk of conspicuous consumption? After all the sacred nods nestled amid "profane" lyrics & awards-show podium litanies, I return to questions of hypocrisy, about the charge itself: is it accurate? does it miss the point? is it unfair? is it "relevant"? relevant to what?

As we rightly condemn Bush for his contradictions of faith--e.g., cowboy militarism + the Beatitudes? or the bellum omnium contra omnes ethos of unbridled capitalism + the whole Sermon on the Mount?--then shouldn't we condemn the hypocrisy of pairing the worship of Christ with the worship of blood, or the hatred of women, or the quest for riches? Some wave this off as a style vs. substance debate: it's the beat, stupid, they suggest. Some might find this a paternalistic, even racist, singling out of a genre. Some say this simply reflects a telling contradiction in the culture itself: inner-city conditions are an economic fact; religion is a spiritual response, a historical antecedent?

What do you think?

MMVI

2006-01-02T02:11:00.000-06:00

New Year's Resolution: under a glaze of anticipatory sweat, with digits throbbing & breaths held, LJJ will salute the reunion of UGK, dispense with the superfluities, recalibrate its laser-sightz & finally confront its fate: to become a rap blog.

R.I.P.

2005-11-19T23:53:00.000-06:00

Is Jazz Dead? asks Stuart Nicholson in a new book of the same name. The Nation's David Yaffe, a great music journalist also writing at The New Republic, reviews it. (Btw, Nicholson's solution: relocate to Europe, where the avant-garde is safe from the neocon likes of, say, Ken Burns & Wynton Marsalis.)

Late > never

2005-11-11T17:02:00.000-06:00

OK it's decided: I'm gonna take a swing at both NaNoWriMo (50,000 words) + NaSoAlMo (28 min. 22 sec.). Starting late (I forgot it was November), I'm giving myself 30 days, starting tomorrow. Thus, the projected completion date: 12/12.

Reverse the polarity

2005-11-11T06:17:00.000-06:00

// Kelley Polar, "In Time"

The Croatia-born Kelley Polar, the viola-toting Stravinsky of Juilliard, has clearly drunk from the wells of early IDM & Italian post-disco. Blame his überproducer, Environ's Morgan Geist. His forthcoming Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens is a frontrunner for the blogerati's collective year-end lists. Yearning in breathy harmonies for that perfect dance moment, "In Time" closes the album representatively: orchestral icing on an electro-house cake.

Recruiting film

2005-11-09T14:20:00.000-06:00

Samuel Fuller dismissed Full Metal Jacket as "just another fucking recruiting film." He felt the first half, the sadistic psychic crumpling of the warriors-to-be, would perversely activate its audience's latent testosterone/death-instinct. He'd likely feel the same way about Jarhead, which rips off this sequence. Another relevant auteur quote is François Truffaut's observation: that there can be no such thing as an anti-war film because films make war look exciting. That is, the very fabric of the medium, an audiovisual spectacle, glorifies violence. Commenting on soldiers' ironic reception of famous anti-war films, like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, Mendes' adaptation may pretend it's aware of the limits Truffaut pointed out & Fuller anticipated, but its self-consciousness doesn't help it succeed as an anti-war film. As better critics have said: Jarhead is hackneyed, lacquered, hermetic Oscar bait.

Undercover

2005-11-06T04:13:00.000-06:00

Spotlight on Alex Steinweiss, inventor of the album cover.

Less than human

2005-11-04T14:10:00.000-06:00

Charles Rosen, brilliant author of The Classical Style, applauds Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording for the NYRB. Philip's thrust: recording has driven performance style to seek cold precision, sacrificing warmth & spontaneity--its human traits. The performer's old resources of expression--"portamento," dislocation, arpeggiating chords & flexibility of tempo--are now verboten. Perhaps, Rosen thinks,

the best thing about his book is the way it makes us appreciate the heritage that recording has given us and forces us to recognize the limitations of our taste by an understanding of what has gone out of fashion. He allows us to estimate how much we have lost in our rejections.

Outside the classical realm, it seems that in much of today's music, both underground & above-, this sense of loss has permeated studios on both sides of the Atlantic. For retro-minded indie rockers, vintage amps are in demand. For electronic artists in search of (in a way) new sounds, recording software companies are straining to recreate the imperfections of analog recording. It all comes down to a fear of dehumanizing music.

The ID hoax?

2005-09-13T05:47:00.000-05:00

Three brilliant scientists tackle the wannabe controversy of intelligent design.

Coyne/Dawkins, Guardian: they argue that the daydream of a two-sided debate, evolution v. ID, is dangerous & distracts from echt scientific controversies w/r/t evolution--viz., the "Cambrian Explosion," the evolutionary basis of human behavior, sexual v. natural selection, the target of natural selection, & natural selection v. genetic drift.

Dennett, NYT: he asks whether ID is either a hoax or a legitimate school of scientific thought, noting that, without content, the ID "theory" is scientifically an insufficient rival to evolution.

Alan "10k" Watts

2005-09-07T18:06:00.000-05:00

Mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers.
Mountains are not mountains, rivers are not rivers.
Mountains are really mountains, rivers are really rivers.

// The Re-Up Gang, "Zen"

The Re-Up Records imprint, spearheaded by brothers Pusha T & Malice, is focusing on their namesake gang, which boasts The Clipse, Major Figgas' Ab-Liva & Sandman. With the Neptunes' superproducing, they've uncaged a banger equally appealing to the drank-sippin' Mike Watts crowd & the latte-sippin' Alan Watts crowd.

Themeless pudding

2005-09-07T05:50:00.000-05:00

The late Chief Justice Wm. Rehnquist left quite a legacy. In the words of Alan Dershowitz:

Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.

15 reasons not to half-mast yr Old Glory:

01) 1952: penned a memo backing the separate-but-equal illogic of Plessy v. Ferguson, arguing it "was right & should be reaffirmed"; he later perjured himself when, in the words of historian Mark Tushnet, he tried to "smear[] the reputation of a great justice" by pawning the views off as Jackson's

02) attacked Brown v. Board of Education

03) 1964: testified against a public ordinance ordering the desegregation of public accommodations

04) 1964: challenged the voting qualifications of African- & Hispanic-Americans as part of the Republicans' thuggish "Operation Eagle Eye" during the 1964 election

05) engineered an unprecedented widening of presidential power under Nixon, defending the Cambodian invasion, wiretapping, break-ins, & "preventative detention"

06) fought to limit the power of Congress & federal courts to enforce civil rts, desegregate schools, regulate business in the public interest

07) undercut Miranda's limits on search-and-seizure

08) added exceptions to the exclusionary rule & upheld pretrial detention

09) 1978: opposed gay rights, reasoning, more or less, "that gays were like people with a contagious disease, and that the government had every right to discriminate against them to protect the public"

10) 1972: dissented against the legalization of abortion (Roe v. Wade; again in Planned Parenthood v. Casey)

11) 1976: voted to restore capital punishment after its 4-yr abolition in the US

12) 1992: upheld the death penalty for minors & the mentally retarded (Herrera v. Collins)

13) 1983: only justice to say that Bob Jones University had a legal right to keep African-Americans off its campus

14) bought a home in Vermont with a restrictive covenant that barred sale of the property to ''any member of the Hebrew race"

15) outraged Jewish classmates at Stanford by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school’s few Jewish students

Bibliography: Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, The Nation's David Corn & Bruce Shapiro

Born-again

2005-09-05T08:50:00.000-05:00

London pop gets the Kompakt treatment ...

// Baxendale, "I Built This City (MM rmx)"

Southern rap gets the reggaetón treatment ...

// Rich Boy/Don Omar, "Get to Poppin' (KK rmx)"

Guitar heroism

2005-09-02T18:15:00.000-05:00

Racism in LA: As the cradle of our nation's musical history bleeds, burns, & rots, as women are raped in the Superdome, as meteorology midwifes Hobbesian dystopia, Nero & his spouse-in-crime fiddle: Bush playing guitar hero & Condi rescuing several-thousand-dollar shoes from certain oblivion. One of Mlle Hopper's e-mailers nails the reality: "were it an avalanche in aspen and not a hurricane in louisiana, everyone who could be saved would have been saved." Darnielle thanks Kanye for saying the same thing, in real time, on nat'l television.

Fascism in UT: Fuck those poor-black-targeting, culture-annihilating, levee-breaking floodwaters, the gov't knows its 1st priority: descending on raves. God knows that 90 "troops" employing dogs, tasers, tear gas, a helicopter & semi-automatic assault rifles is never overkill in the Global War on Electronic Dance Music (recently rechristened the Struggle Against Anti-rockism). Watch the video, fight back.

Oval in Kingston

2005-08-31T16:52:00.000-05:00

It's been far too long, hasn't it?

// DJ /rupture, "Rumbo Babylon"

A Brøklyn Beats 7" revived on DJ /rupture's Redux 12", "Rumbo Babylon" has been alternately limned as a track that "strands Oval in Kingston" (JH) & "[c]oiled, ready to jump / jungle cut-up as seething / action painting" (MM). Twisting together knots of warped urban noise, heavy jungle breaks, a chugging ragga two-punch beat, /rupture channels both Todd Edwards' "sample orchestra" & Transparent Records' Roots, Rock, Ravers EP.

Forced marriage

2005-08-30T05:39:00.000-05:00

Beyond mere annoyance, MoMA's new contribution to the endless summer of forced-marriage blockbusters, "Cézanne and Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Art," warrants wrath. Indeed, pace the Times' fawning, "C&P" is a letdown courting the enormity of its precursors (see "Matisse/Picasso") ... [more to be added]

Post-industrious

2005-08-19T18:48:00.000-05:00

Here're my last 2 movie reviews from Stylus.

#1, on Jia Zhangke's The World: "a tranquil vision of a tranquilized society."

#2, on Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know: "a wistful parade of extreme gestures, a document of innocence lost and recovered, of vulgarly loveless sex, and awakenings stripped of romanticizing."

Kosher nostra

2005-08-06T02:33:00.000-05:00

Edward Said (R.I.P.) has been a hero of mine since my only partially regretted Foucaultian salad days. It was thru him (& later thru Jackie du Pre's Elgar) that I came across Daniel Barenboim, with whom he conceived the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. From a recent piece in the Telegraph: "Their idea was to demonstrate that, through music, it is possible for people from warring factions to co-exist peacefully." Why isn't this idea--music as instrument of reconciliation--being taken outside Jerusalem?

Unsafe betz

2005-08-04T18:15:00.000-05:00

I don't even pretend to proffer bleeding-edge, up-to-the-microsecond grime knowledge/trax. But for those who slept on 'em, or have day jobs & a gather-ye-rosebuds worldview with no room for Slsk, & simply prefer to be shepherded to the tried-and-true, well, I'm here to help. Here're a few easy swallows, thought by many to be grime's last hope for puncturing the mainstream. To anyone docking Roll Deep for, God forbid, making catchy songs: zip yr lips & relish the effin' music (q.v. Reynolds on "typical UK undergroundism self-sabotage"). The C₁₉H₂₈O₂, the homegrown, hungry, hardscrabble grit hasn't gone anywhere.

// Roll Deep Crew, "When I'm 'Ere"

Sans Dizzee, the 241-member Roll Deep crew gallops out of the gates riding revved-up horror-flick accordions (aka, Danny Weed's "Shank Riddim"), spraying cockneyfied threats in stilted Uzi rhythms, each line capped by the menacing titular condition: Thanatos a Damoclean blade, slung over the track like a thundercloud, Eros curiously AWOL. Here they're churning tribal war cries into bleak urban anthems. And tell me that tuff square-wave low end's not tuff enough. (Tell me, moreover, if I should post the Wiley rmx.) Bonus video, c/o the BBC.

// Kano, "Reload It"

Bulletproof nonchalance, starched-crisp enunciation, hooks--there's a formula to Kano's very-young-Turk crossover charisma. On "Reload It" Kano crumples up this formula & with Diplo's deck wizardry, drags grime forward, meanwhile sacrificing zero cred. We board this wobbly brass rollercoaster of noise, snaking frenziedly through a DnB forest. Our fellow passengers: Kano, solo, unflinching in the front seat, the picture of street sangfroid; Diplo right behind him, telekinetically preventing the car from derailing; Demon & D Double E, backseat, bouncing barbs in a state-of-nature staccato. Fitting that the track fades into squeals of delight.

O & an extra treat:

// Hive, "Krush"

For fans of fine turkish tobacco & dance music, some rhapsodizing (my italics):

From those opening oooh, skycraping synths with orgasmic (in the "touched by a variety of religious experience" sense not the sexual one) male "ohhhh"s to the squealing trumpet spiraling upwards to the Organized Konfusion sample to the grinding mentasm breakdown and deftly (but not overly) chopped roll-out, this is worthy of anything in the Source Direct/Hidden Agenda era, but beefed up on the post-Bad Company workout plan. The drums really slam, but they also shake, rattle, and stop on a dime. And admit it, when those same nape-licking synths come in at the bridge, you love it, none--more-expected-none-more-effective. It's, for whatever it's worth, my fave d&b single of the year so far. I seriously don't think anyone can fuck with the Violence crew right now.

Anti-valedixion

2005-08-02T09:48:00.000-05:00

I only know you three through yr. glittering prose, but congrats to ...

i.) M. Harvell, whose Baltimore regime will soon be installed. ii.) Mlle. Phillips, who will return PFM news to its former glory. iii.) M. Breihan, who will literally loom over a whole village.

Best of luck to all of you; pretty pls. don't slow the bloggin' down too much.

Evacuation artist

2005-08-02T08:02:00.000-05:00

Still reeling from a recent trip to the revamped MoMA. If anyone's work stuck with me, it's Thomas Demand's. At once photography's number-one asset & number-one liability is the realism hardwired into the medium's technical DNA: chemically aping the human eye's sensitivity to light. Demand, now enjoying a mid-career retrospective, tapes & glues calculatedly inexact paper sculptures of documentary photos, connecting him, for better/worse, to Richter & Gursky. Peeling the detail & affect off his appropriated subjects, he outs himself as a mere counterfeiter of reality. Demand is an evacuation artist, shouting Fire! in the crowded cinemas of history & mass media, diminishing once-real, once-dirty milieus into pristine impersonality: serene, banal, unpopulated.

Throughout his corpus, the blitzkrieg on photography's mimetic ambitions is the constant. The subject is the variable, where Demand nests allusions within allusions, Chinese box-style. Each photo drops us down startlingly slippery tunnels of reference. Take the drab-at-a-glance "Staircase":

Attempting a carbon copy of his high-school stairway, Demand channels Bauhaus, & with it both 1) the Third Reich’s rejection of the movement & 2) the fairy tale, rife in postwar Germany, of a virtuous architecture yielding a virtuous democracy. Kimmelman OTM:

A patch of grass that he photographed turns out to be a laborious paper reproduction of a patch of grass, made blade by blade, which brings to mind a photograph by Mr. Gursky of a gray patch of carpet, itself devised as an ironic riff on Gerhard Richter's all-gray paintings, which harked yet further back to Jackson Pollock's drips.

Demand's rabbit-hole worms through the earth's core. Conceptualism & craftsmanship mix impressively, each work a self-reflexive ars poetica that avoids dipping into the murk of pomo onanism.

R v. r II

2005-07-15T15:22:00.000-05:00

My fattening, unfashionable Robert Lowell hang-up has drawn me to his recently published correspondence, which I learned of in the New York Review of Books. Perusing the NYRB archives, I dug up an old essay, & found a passage that struck me as (vaguely) relevant to my last post. "It seems plain," to Irving Ehrenpreis

that "The Nihilist as Hero" through its eloquent coarseness conveys one-half of the poet's ambition, while "Reading Myself" conveys the other, and that Lowell illustrates by his technique a yearning to reconcile art as process with art as product.

Hmmm; I'm already pondering a nightmarish Hegelian vision of music history after reading this ...

Record v. recombinant

2005-07-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

In the July issue of Wired, sci-fi author William Gibson traces sampling back to Burroughs, who was "interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all." This collage esthetic--which worked wonders for Picasso, Duchamp, & Godard--found sonic manifestation in 1970s Jamaica, with King Tubby/Lee "Scratch" Perry's analog deconstructions, or "versions." (I'm reminded of American poetry's tradition of free translation, pioneered by Pound, burnished in Lowell's Imitations.) From them DJs in New York & London cribbed their production approaches. It's a fin de siecle, music-historical agon: "the recombinant," associated by Gibson with the bootleg & the remix & the mash-up, will finally supplant the static physicality of "the record." In Gibson's democratic vision of music, viz. the favor given to process over product, I see us sliding away from rockism. What, after all, embodies the static physicality of the record better than rock? That is, what is less amenable to street-corner bootlegging, DIY remixes & polygeneric mash-ups than rock?

Niche-wagon

2005-07-08T00:34:00.000-05:00

LJJ's raison d'etre is pretty straightforward: to balance against the fitfully closeted, overly rockist esthetic conservatism of the indie press/scene. The margins--breakcore, screw tapes, dancehall, neo-drum & bass, even "New Weird America"/avant-folk, &c.--should be pulled toward the center, if not out of a sense of esthetic preference, then of esthetic diversity & experiment. And the best older music, from Kiwi pop to No Wave to kosmische, should be kept fresh in our minds. With any luck, LJJ will help preserve exciting music from the dustbin, & in the process introduce a few people to new sounds & ideas. Warning, warning: I'll probably digress now & then into armchair art crit, political philosophy, & Robert Lowell worship.