( 1:31 PM )
Monday, February 24, 2PM. Music Currently Playing: Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Grammy Response:
The Shammies are over, and really the hour of it that I could stand to half-watch (while fiddling around with reinstalling the video drivers on my PC) didn't really merit any discussion. Award shows are allready irritating, they pre-empt normal television which, while generally targeted to the lowest common demoniator, is at least not two hours of canned jokes read from cue cards, cheek kissing, and gratitude expressed to God and gramma.
I am convinced that the Grammys are simply a two hour marketing scheme, they have nothing to do with musical quality. People like Avril Lavigne are nominated so that down at the Virgin Megastore they can go around with little stickers (probably allready shipped out and applied) and paste them to all of Avril's CD's that read "Nominated for 4 Grammys!" Grammy nods are just ways for record companies to boost sales and the actual awards are, as noted in Webb's Blogg rebuttal actually more damaging to real musicians. Poor Nora Jones. She just lost what little artistic credibility she had.
That said, I brought Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with me to work today and have been listening to it all morning trying to answer the question posed by by Dustin in his Shammys article. I think I have figured out why Wilco didn't even receive a nod, and I beleive that the reason is actually political.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot contains two songs that do not fit with the current political climate: "War On War" and "Ashes of American Flags." In an America where the majority of people are all post-9/11-fear-crazed war-mongering maniacs thirsting for the blood of innocent Iraqis, songs with titles such as these are just not going to sit well with the average consumer, the same lowest common demonitor that is out there buying Avril Lavigne albums and talking about who was the best and worst dressed. This strikes me as particularly sad since the actual lyrical content of "War On War" is relatively ambiguous, while the equally fuzzy "Ashes Of American Flags" turns out, between Tweedy's lament of his own success, to be relatively patriotic. Implicitly, it's a commentary about how corporations are undermining the qualities of freedom and democracy.
Anyhow, that's my take on the Grammys. Stay tuned this week for a review of the new Calexico album, Feast of Wire.
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( 3:00 PM )
Thursday, February 20, 3PM. Music Currently Playing: An Anthology of Klezmer
OH MY GAWD A BLOG ENTRY AFTER ALMOST 2 MONTHS!?!
Without going into the the sweating, fevered, weight-losing details: the long and short of it is that I was very (VERY) sick for a long time (several weeks) and that upon returning to work, the crap was piled high for me to catch up on. I was spending all my free time working on work and so the writing for 2walls was getting, to my shame, ignored.
So now I'll try to catch up on submissions and provide some much needed bloggertainment.
Where to start? how about with the mention of my discovery of an extremely weird indie death-metal band out of Seattle named "Bloodhag." These guys write songs that are short biographies of science fiction and fantasy authors. So, for example, they have a song called "Kurt Vonnegut" and another called "J.R.R. Tolkien" and still another called "Neal Stephenson." Musically they're... very hard core, harsh, reminiscent of GWAR, and the few mp3's I downloaded from their official website (here) where too fast and screaming to understand any actual lyrics. So, musically, not really my thing, but they get a big thumbs up from me for concept, especially since they sell t-shirts that say "THE FASTER YOU GO DEAF, THE MORE TIME YOU HAVE TO READ"
And what's this Anthology of Klezmer I'm listening to? Yup, it's this collection of Jewish big-band orchestra-type music from the 1930's - 1950's. Very eastern european sounding, but extremely wacky (reminiscent of Hypnotic Clambake if you are hip to the ska scene) and I have been addicted to it lately. It was a find the FPL booksale. Every year the local public libraries here pool their donated and discarded books, cd's, and videos and have a giant booksale. This sale consistently kicks large amounts of literary ass (at least for bookhounds like me) since you can find decent copies of good books for like a quarter each (I picked up a clean copy of Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume as well as another copy of Wind-up Bird so that I have a copy to make notes in.) Usually the music they are getting rid of is scratched beyond salvaging or covered in these weird security labels that make the disks wobble in my cd player (and therefore occasionally skip). But this year I scored a clean copy of Medeski, Martin & Wood's Combustication as well as the Klezmer.
Books I am currently digging through: Towing Jehova by James Morrow (weird sci-fi about God being found dead and floating in the Pacific Ocean) and a battered copy of Heroditus' Histories which is suprisingly interesting and humorous. Those wacky ancient Greeks.
Will post more as it occurs to me.
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