Reconstruction of the Fables 

A Side

If you're of a certain age, then you maybe noticed the anniversary this week of Kurt Cobain's death. You may have put on an old Nirvana record, or thought about where you were, what car you were driving, that summer that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was playing on every radio station, nonstop.

If you did this, you were probably thinking of "Back Then" and comparing it, at least a little bit, to "Now."

Music, we all know, can induce a kind of time travel; and some music in particular—music that gets at you when you're still young and permeable—it gets in your bloodstream and it never leaves. It becomes somehow a part of you, so it's not even relevant to ask if this music is "good" or "bad"; and when you hear it, it's like a kind of regression hypnosis that carries you back to a more hopeful, more formative, more perfect time.

Another Side

R.E.M. released their third studio album, Fables of the Reconstruction, in 1985, when I was in ninth grade, and I swallowed it whole. I freebased that record and it went straight into my bloodstream. I don't know if it's good or bad.

R.E.M. hadn't quite become rock stars yet: lead singer Michael Stipe was still mumbling incoherent lyrics and dropping acid; Peter Buck only knew a couple chords; but the sound on this record was thick and lush and humid and magical, like the Deep South it invoked in its title. I remember feeling paralyzed by the opening guitar in the album's first track (appropriately named "Feeling Gravity's Pull"), looking for layers of hidden meaning in the quiet guitar intro of "Life and How to Live It," and just riding this whole record like it was a wave carrying me to a place I'd always belonged, but never known existed.

Playing this album earlier today, beginning to end, I disappeared: I time-traveled, replaced for an hour by the strange, inquisitive, awkward boy that I was back then.

"Back then," it turns out, isn't so different from "Now"....

Mixed Up 

Other, better writers have already waxed poetic on the making of the mix tape¹, so I'll keep my words here brief.

What I like most about making a mix tape is not the opportunity it provides to rediscover long lost (loved) songs; nor to marvel at how aptly pop music expresses my innermost feelings²; nor the process of trying to imagine which songs you will like, trying to imagine your reaction upon hearing them.

No, the best joy in making this mix tape is simply how I get to think of you, hour after hour—how I hold you in my mind, and how I'll continue to do so now, forever, every time I hear these songs...

1. Now mix CD, now mix playlist, now Muxtape, now just a file transfer—not even an object at all, except in our hearts, where it is and will always be, plain and simple, a "mix tape")

2. Am I so shallow? Yes, I am.

Kurt Cobain's Stomach 

If rock'n'roll is a menace to society, then maybe it's because we're all so ill-equipped to pick our own role models. We somehow spend our formative years idolizing long-haired, philandering men in ripped Spandex who have no greater skill than the ability to keep 4/4 time while drunk.1

How does this happen?

When Kurt Cobain died, they called him the spokesperson for my generation, without considering that this spokesperson was best known for lines like "Load up on guns " and "I have never failed to fail." I'm not sure that this is what one should seek in a spokesperson.2

What is the long-term lingering effect of a whole generation that admires and aspires to be a sickly, whiny, hyper-sensitive, drug-addled suicide?

I wonder this because lately I seem to have inherited Kurt Cobain's stomach—his famous stomach, the one which caused him so much hard-to-diagnose pain that he turned to heroin (or so the story goes)—and I'm proud of it as though it were a stigmata.

---

1. Which is not entirely unimpressive.

2. I took a makeup class once. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) After a few rudimentary lessons ("This is a pancake…"), we were each asked to clip a photo of a celebrity from a magazine, and then, using our makeup kit and whatever we could find in the nearby costume shop, make ourselves look like that celebrity. Become the celebrity. Be the celebrity. (If you've ever wondered what exactly people do in acting school, this is one such thing.) Most of the class walked in that day with photos of rock stars, and I had that famous Rolling Stone cover of Kurt Cobain.

 

Kurt Cobain Action Figure

Fables of the Deconstruction 

When I was younger, I used to drink to feel free—to shuck off my gentler shell in favor of a purer, simpler exuberance, to wander and dance, break things and howl at the moon. I used to drink because, in a way, the alcohol-induced haze offered me its own sort of clarity.

Now I drink to feel younger.

I notice this in the middle of a late-night download from iTunes, where I spent another $30 downloading music by mediocre bands of yesteryear. With my judgment worn down by the alcohol, I flail around trying to communicate my affection for these badly-aged bands: my iTunes downloads are the yuppie equivalent of drunk-dialing.

("Friends don't let friends drink and download.")

What am I going to do with these fifty songs by The Alarm and Guadalcanal Diary?

* * *

Dan Kois on Slate.com recently stirred up the twenty-year old question, "Who Was the Best Band of the 80s?" He describes the decade as a fierce battle between two forces, diametrically opposed: "Among certain floppy-haired music nerds in that era, you were either an R.E.M. person or a U2 person," and you knew which sort of person you were by how strongly you related to the bands' very different front men—the audacious, anthem-belting Bono, or the mumbly, reclusive and introspective Michael Stipe. These were the two demigod heroes of the "war"—a boastful Hector and a battle-reluctant Achilles.

It's probably easy to guess where I put my loyalties. But I've wondered lately, while trying to pull some meaning out of the indecipherable lyrics of R.E.M.'s Murmur: what is the long-term effect of choosing a childhood hero who shuns the spotlight—who writes lyrics he himself doesn't understand because he likes the way they "feel", who used the opportunity of his first appearance on "Late Night with David Letterman" to hide from the camera and avoid saying anything to the talk show host at all?

Maybe this idolatry wasn't setting me up to succeed. Maybe I could have found better pastimes than trying to draw meaning from lyrical nuggets like "Diminish, a carnival of sorts, chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel" or "Step up the sky is open-armed. When the light is mine, I felt gravity pull .... " With this as a formative influence, is it any wonder I spend all of my time by myself and find other people hard to understand?

* * *

One of my college roommates was from Athens, Georgia. Imagine the Koran is my favorite book and it turns out my roommate is from Mecca—that's what it was like, being a fan of Southern post-punk jangle pop and suddenly sharing record collections with someone from Athens. It's impossible for me to hear this music and not conflate it with youth, drunken disorderly optimism, and all of the things that made life then seem better than now (though my roommate's persistent loyalty to jam-band Widespread Panic made him, in the end, a disappointment...).

Which brings me back to my drunken downloads. If U2 and R.E.M. spent the 80s vying for the title of "Greatest Band of the 80s" among rock nerds, then you could consider The Alarm and Guadalcanal Diary their flyweight or farm-league divisions: the former, Welsh rockers with a sound not unlike early U2, belted out anthems without Bono's overt politics or love of the blues; the latter, from an Atlanta suburb, proved they could jangle with the best of them on their debut album, Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man—but spent the remainder of their short career living out that prophetic title, unable to escape the (apt) comparisons to R.E.M.

These are things I haven't thought about in fifteen years. Not while sober, anyway. Yet, invariable, when I raise a few too many drinks and the alcohol starts smudging my short-term memory, these farther-off memories come back, vivid as ever. If our music collections make up the soundtrack of our lives, then mine keeps getting stuck in a rehash of the first act. It's a Cameron Crowe movie, full of sincere intent and not very much actual action, at times too sentimental and at other times too clever for its own good. But it's a really good soundtrack....

i/Pod 

or, Soundtrack of My Life, pt. 1

When I worked for Apple Computer, people would come to me with their iPod and ask, "What does the 'i' stand for?"

People always wanted to know what the "i" stood for.

Silly people.

It stands for "I." ¹

* * *

The iPod puts "10,000 songs in your pocket" — and once they're in your pocket, you will never ever have to listen to anyone else's music, ever again. You won't have to compromise with your co-workers, you won't have to let some radio DJ expose you to something you haven't heard. You won't have to risk listening to anything new.

That the name of this device begins with the letter "I" should come as a surprise to no one.

It's the "pod" part I've only recently started to understand.

* * *

My "in-ear" headphones block out all ambient sound as I walk down the street; I'm completely immersed in my music, walking in time to what I imagine is the soundtrack of my life. My heart rises and falls with the highs and lows of the music, a dramatic arc playing itself out in the three-minute intervals of pop songs. As I walk down the street, I join the pantheon of well-scored movie heroes: Tony Manero, Lloyd Dobler, Maverick, and me. In the world of my beat, I have no need for the world. I am protagonist. I am invincible.

I am oblivious to oncoming traffic and step out in front of a van.

Maybe I should turn the volume down a notch.

* * *

I used to think the "pod" in "iPod" was because it let each of us surround ourselves in a wall of our own music, and, enclosed in this wall, we were protected from any outside intrusion. But I was on the train the other day, and I noticed there were only three or four people in the car who weren't wearing iPods. Everyone else had white cables dangling out of their ears, and a vacant stare. They bobbed their heads up and down, dancing to music that only they could hear. That's when I realized the "pod" in "iPod" is more an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing.

* * *

"What's on your iPod?," asks the regular column in that magazine I read, and the celebrity of the month is supposed to list out five songs. "Well,thanks for asking: actually, I have 10,000 songs on my iPod, but you want me to list five, so I'll list the same five everyone else is listing this month. That way, you'll think I'm 'wired', and not 'tired' or 'expired'. This month, I'm listening to that Gnarls Barkley album, and the new Thom Yorke. I'm still trying to 'absorb' that album by The Editors, and I'm also listening to that Sun Kil Moon disc of Modest Mouse covers, even though I don't like Sun Kil Moon. And just so you don't think I'm completely stuck in the 'now', I've just put that old Matthew Sweet album on 'high-rotation.' Hey, did you know they're releasing a 15th anniversary cut of that album (maybe because it's been long enough now that we've all had a chance to forget that it's not very good?)."

Is it a coincidence that these are all new releases?

Do the publishers of my magazine actually distribute the CDs? Or do they just get kickbacks from the record labels?

"i" is for individuality.

"Random is the new order." "Enjoy uncertainty." "Choose to lose control."

"Welcome to the digital music revolution."

"What does the 'Pod' stand for?"

"Why is the 'i' so little?"

1. Now I work for a company called "iFactory," but iFactory is an agency that serves clients; when people ask me what the "i" stands for, I tell them it stands for "you."

---

Syncopation 

Damn Sofia Coppola.

I assumed there would be nothing in the world—even Sofia Coppola—that would make me want to see a high-budget Hollywood costume pageant about Marie Antoinette. When I heard that the new film was booed at Cannes, I (like so many other people who hadn't seen it) was sure she'd stumbled—that after two exquisite movies, she'd gotten caught up in her own hubris. Or whatever. What else would explain all of those horses and rapiers and wigs? Wigs! What was she thinking?

Oh, Sofia.

Poor Sofia.

Young geniuses rarely fare well. (Even the ones who aren't fighting against the unforgiving contempt of die-hard Godfather fans.)

All that changed for me yesterday when I saw the trailer, and Marie Antoinette became, for me, the most anticipated film of the year:

People hate this trailer. The juxtaposition of corsets with 80s synth pop is counter-intuitive, offensive, impossible, unprecedented.

In other words, it's everything art should be.

In one short spot with no words (and what films that aren't from China have trailers with no words?), Coppola establishes pre-revolutionary France as a Reagan-esque binge of decadence and fun. Fun! In corsets! Who'd have thought?

How many days till this is released?

* * *

That Sofia Coppola has had any success at all as a filmmaker has always amazed me, not because I think her films aren't good, but for the opposite reason: I love them so much that I assume they are made for me personally, or at least a very narrow demographic who happens to share her record collection (and yes, I mean records: I owned less than a dozen, but she uses all of them): My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain, and relatively obscure New Order—the difference being that Sofia remembers the songs the rest of us have forgotten, and gets the chance to remind us how much we love them.

Have you ever loved Roxy Music more than when, in Lost in Translation, Bill Murray sings his karaoke "More Than This" to Scarlet Johansen?

Have you ever loved life more than in that moment?

* * *

I've been high on this trailer for two days; it's the best thing that happened to me all weekend: I can't get that guitar and those galloping horses out of my mind. From the album Power, Corruption, and Lies. Marie Antoinette. It makes perfect sense. Sofia Coppola strikes again, reminding us that the clamor of life throws things together in unexpected ways—but that's okay: she's here to help us through it. With the right conductor, the clamor isn't noise; it's syncopation.

Aural Tradition 

Last week, I lost my entire music collection when the hard drive on which it is stored suddenly disappeared from my computer. Actually, "disappeared" isn't quite the word I'm looking for, since it's safe to assume the drive was still bolted onto the inside of the chassis. But since it was now invisible to the computer, for all practical purposes, the hard drive was gone, and along with it, my entire music collection.

That's 15,000 songs, by the way. Forty-two days of consecutive music without a repeat. Nearly eighty gigabytes of data. Gone.

And it's not the first time it's happened. The first time was only two weeks after I decided to do away with my CDs in the first place. I was moving from Los Angeles (to parts unknown) and didn't want all those pesky pieces of plastic weighing me down. I spent a few days committing hundreds of CDs to a hard drive, put the CDs in a box, and shipped them to my parents' house for storage.

I sent the box regular mail, uninsured, and it never arrived.

What can I say? Insurance is legalized gambling and I lost.

A few days later, the hard drive on which I'd copied the music made some ugly chunking sounds, spat out some actual smoke, and before I knew it, I'd managed to lose the same music collection twice in a single week.

Call it a Buddhist lesson in detachment.

[I did manage to recover a few songs from that hard drive, though a lot of them had gotten mashed together, so that now a single track plays equal parts Hamza El Din and Madonna's "Borderline."]

Music has always been communal—drum circles, call-and-response, Homeric epics, folk songs—and even now, while it is being mass-produced onto little pieces of shiny plastic and broadcast via pre-programmed robo-DJs on Clear Channel. Hearing of my loss, my friends were more than happy to share their music with me. They passed on music I'd previously "owned", music I'd never heard, even music of their very own. Before long, again, I'd built up a "Tower of Song."

When God smites your tower a second time, can you really pretend to be surprised? When I lost my music last week, you could say I took it like a monk. "Life is ephemeral. There's always more music. Om."

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected."

Which might explain the almost equal nonchalance I felt at the end of that same week, when the music reappeared as suddenly as it had gone. Everything was in its right place.

*     *     *

When you have forty-two consecutive days of songs, there are bound to be some you haven't heard in a while. There are probably some you haven't heard at all. Until it came up on "shuffle," I'd completely forgotten the Trik Turner song from a couple years back, "Friends and Family." The song borrows its main guitar riff from another, fairly different song, one which at first I couldn't quite place. (I won't tell you what it is, in case you want to play "Name That Tune.")

What I love about the Trik Turner song: they don't sample the riff, but instead actually play it, copycat, on their own guitars. It reminds me that once upon a time, someone in this band (is his name Trik?) heard the song on the radio, liked it, shared it with his friends, learned to play it, and then changed it so that he could use it to tell his own story. Like a call-and-response. Like a folk song. Bringing communities together.

Sharing, it's worth remembering, is part of the aural tradition. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

Pandora's (Boom) Box 

There was a short spell where I wasted some time (and blog bandwidth) trying to write music reviews. (I'd offer a link, but I've utterly destroyed all trace of this section of The Urban Sherpa.) To say I found it "difficult" to write about music misses the larger point, which is that I sucked at it: no matter how long or elaborate, these little pieces never added up to anything more than, "I, uh, like this band."

Since I don't think I have a problem asserting my opinion about other subjects, and since I listen to a lot of music, I struggled with the idea that I wasn't up to the challenge of writing about this thing I care about so much. I read a collection of old essays by Lester Bangs, but really, they're of another time, and I didn't know exactly what to do with them. I also combed through the seemingly-sempiternal entries at AllMusic.com, where the writing may be uneven, but there's no shortage of it—whereas I just couldn't think of anything to say, except, "This album is, uh, cool."

[What I enjoy about good critics is how, though they seem to be writing about a movie, play, restaurant, or record, really they're leveling an opinion about the world we live in: they're writing about us. And I suppose it's that much harder to bring such a broad opinion to bear, in the context of a three-minute pop song. Or, for that matter, a restaurant meal, or even a vacation...]

Point being, I don't much bother writing about music these days, though I still consume it like crazy, and though I still have this constant urge to recommend titles to people. Which brings me to ... Pandora, the high-tech offspring of the "Music Genome Project," an attempt to catalog and cross-reference SO much music. The idea behind Pandora is simple: express a few preferences, and the software taps into its giant database to find other music that you will like.

It does this (at least for me) with remarkable accuracy.

Once it's figured out what my tastes are, it offers me a steady stream of music I'll like, as a web-based "radio station." And then it allows me to recommend my radio station to others—saving them the trouble of reading my heinous music reviews. So there's hope, after all.

Scotland is the New Manchester 

Franz Ferdinand. The Blue Nile. Travis. Dogs Die in Hot Cars. Snow Patrol. And the kids are doing single malt instead of Ecstasy.

Just kidding about the last part. Really I have no idea.

There's an iMix of this on iTunes but those darn Apple people haven't sent me the link...

OK, they just sent the link.