100 HUNDRED THOUSAND MILLION: Boy The Earth Used To Talk To →

the20000:

natepatrin:

iamdavidbrothers:

100hundredthousandmillion:

Hold on a minute— a white guy in his 30s is going to talk at length about how he prefers rap music from the ’90s to the rap music of today? GIVE ME A MINUTE TO CLEAR MY SCHEDULE IN PREPARATION FOR THIS MOST COMETLIKE OF RARE OCCURRENCES.

I say this as someone who cried during…

Pappademas spitting ether.

Speaking as another white Jewish thirty-something dude named Nathan, I am grateful that I grew less prone to Golden Age stick-up-ass isolationism the more I aged. Not that I don’t still get reactionary about some things sometimes, but I figure the “discovery” portion of my brain hasn’t entirely shut off yet.

“accidentally inventing horrorcore…” Ouch.

Also, wow @ ATCQ & Jungle Brothers’ legacies boiling down to “seduced a nation of college students and white kids”.

“trendy Afrocentric garb…” Yikes.

Not to keep piling on here, but when I read the intro column yesterday, the thing that occurred to me is that this is what happens to most people, eventually, no matter what kind of music they like. At some point — maybe from the time they graduated from college, or when they got a real job that kept them busy, or got married and stopped relating to every song about a shitty break-up, or just stopped having time to seek out new music — almost everybody you talk to can go on about how they just haven’t been able to keep up with what’s going on in music these days.

It’s the least novel thing that there is, and it has nothing to do with hip hop. Being in your 30’s and not relating viscerally to pop music the way that you did when you were younger is just a part of life. Your experiences are more varied, your understanding of your emotions is more nuanced, your struggles are more specific to you, and it’s really unlikely that you’re going to hear “Okay Cupid” or even “Runaway” and feel the way that you felt when you first heard “Fuck Tha Police” at fourteen. Or that you’ll hear 2:54 and feel like you did the first time you heard Disintegration, or whatever.

Now, there are ways to mitigate this. (Writing a 52-part series about how great the music you listened to when you gave more of a shit about music is not part of it.) Here’s what you do: listen to new records a lot. Like four or five times a day, play the same new record that you are interested in, and learn it the way that you learned about music the way that you did when you were 15.

Because that’s the other thing, especially if you’re 30-something now and got all of your music for free (from publicists, totally, definitely not from What.CD): it’s really easy to just take everything in once while you’re checking Facebook, ignore it mostly, and then be like, “New music just doesn’t do it for me!” Well, you’re not giving it the respect that you gave it when it actually did do something for you.

And maybe, you know, you’ll find something as you get older that does speak to you at whatever point you’re at in your life. I found “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” by Jeffrey Lewis when I was 28 and at the very first listen, it did for me what Heartbreaker did for me at 21. But there aren’t going to be a lot of songs that you can take for granted are made for you to relate to. It’s really the height of self-involvement to think that this is because music stopped innovating or evolving. What would you expect Tyler, The Creator or Waka Flocka Flame would have to say to a 36 year old?

And on a totally different note... →

Jimmy Buffett sings a lot of songs about wasted youth, feeling like you belong to another time, finding peace mostly in a bottle, being lost in a world that doesn’t understand you, and a contemporary world that makes you feel like you’ve drowned.

But his perspective on those things isn’t tragic, and he doesn’t romanticize them in the way that, say, Townes Van Zandt — who became a legend for writing about those same themes in a way that treats despair as glory — used to. Buffett’s songs about those things tend to lead to someplace that says, “But then I got drunk with some friends” or “at least I got a really good cheeseburger,” and celebrates those distractions from sadness, rather than plumbing the depths of despair.

Most Americans tend to do the same thing — but not the ones who pen paeans to the genius of tortured artists. Which helps explain both why Buffett’s flown under the critical radar for most of his career, and why there were so many people in Hawaiian shirts who just wanted to make fins with their hands and shout, “Salt! Salt! Salt!” during “Margaritaville.”

I took my mom to see Jimmy Buffett last night, and gave some thought to why I have always heard his hits as sad songs for CultureMap.

Austin City Limits Festival lineup talk →

KUT radio invited me to come on to talk about the lineup for the Austin City Limits Festival. We talk about a bunch of things, and I address the criticism that this is, like, “the whitest festival lineup ever.” Which, I mean,I get it— there are three rappers on the entire bill. (Four, if you count Die Antwoord, which I do not — I wouldn’t have counted Fred Durst if Limp Bizkit had been booked, either.)

At the same time, though, proclamations like that either dismiss the existence of Gary Clark Jr, The Weeknd (just added!), Esperanza Spalding, Brittany from Alabama Shakes, Michael Kiwanuka, Thundercat, Ruthie Foster, and all of the (numerous) other artists of color — or it re-assigns them as white just because they’re not doing hip-hop.

In either case, the use of “white” as an insult — as I’ve written about before — isn’t just an attack on the dominance of white people, it also actively erases people of color who don’t fit into the margins of what you mean by not-white.

Ultimately, what that implies is that if the festival had booked (say) Brother Ali, Atmosphere, Diplo, El-P, Action Bronson, Yelawolf, Paul Wall, Mac Miller, and Eminem, then it’d be a less white festival than the fact that it’s got all of the artists of color mentioned above.

I don’t think that’s a fair critique at all, and while I’m a little worried that it came out wrong on the radio (talking about race as it relates to Austin, music, and Austin music culture hasn’t always made me popular), it’s something I think is worth addressing. This is a bill that definitely dismissed hip hop, which is absurd and disappointing, but let’s not declare it too white.

Putting this out there.

Somebody pay me to write a 4,000 word essay on what we could have/should have learned from the Lana Del Rey debacle, the collective decision we all apparently made to forget she ever existed or that we cared SO MUCH about her for a few months, and how fucking good her album is when it’s just a bunch of songs without heavy cultural semiotic meaning draped all over it, please.

Our “white people problems” problem: Why it’s time to stop using “white” as a pejorative →

[T]hat’s the big problem with the eruption of “too white” as a putdown: It turns real complaints that deserve a fair hearing into part of the nagging buzz of self-satisfied snark that pervades our culture today. There are too many people who disingenuously gripe about how “white” something is when they’re really trying to say that it’s not brassy or badass enough for their taste—that it’s salmon, not a buffalo wing.

So here’s the challenge to all you people who toss around “white” as a synonym for “lame” on the Internet: Suggest alternatives. Name a movie, a TV show, a book, a piece of music, or anything that meets your standards for non-“whiteness.” I’m not baiting you here; I’m asking sincerely. If you’re really interested in encouraging diversity, do so in a positive way, by calling attention to some valuable work that’s flying below the radar. Tell us to listen to Charles Bradley, or seek out the films of Ramin Bahrani, or read the comics of Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim, or appreciate the nuanced depiction of the black middle-class on the much-missed TNT drama Men Of A Certain Age. Light the way instead of huffily trying to snuff others’ enthusiasm.

Unless of course you’re only race-baiting to score points and make yourself look cool. But you wouldn’t do that, would you? I mean, only a terrible human being would exploit centuries of struggle against oppression and marginalization just to get out of seeing a Wes Anderson movie.

This A.V. Club essay about dismissals of “white” art is definitely clumsy at times, but it gets to something really important by its conclusion. There’s absolutely appropriation at work when white folks invoke the criticism of something that it’s “too white” and thus, like, crappy or boring or whatever.

A term used by people of color to say, roughly, that there’s little for them to relate to in a particular work sounds very different when it’s used by white people to say that something they likely can relate to just doesn’t give ‘em the countercultural thrill they want. (I hear and read white people calling various things “too white” a lot, and it’s almost always a haughty dismissal of, I dunno, Norah Jones and, at least until Girls debuted, never a genuine critique of the work’s attitudes about race.)

In short, it co-opts a legitimate complaint, as Murray says in his piece, in order to snark at something. And, sure — Wes Anderson movies, or Mumford And Sons albums, or whatever are made by white people, but nobody would declare, like, Jim Jarmusch or Mark Ronson to be “white people” shit. Which means you’re saying, basically, that “white people” art is uncool, but white people can make not-white art, which seems to further marginalize actual people of color and the things they make.

You’re also, of course, saying that you’re such a Cool White Person that you don’t even get into stuff that all those less-cool white people do, which is classic appropriation. Just by rejecting Zooey Deschanel for her whiteness, you can enjoy a little bit of the outsider cool of being not-white, while still enjoying all of the cultural privileges that white people get — and doing nothing at all to change that.

Record Store Day 2012: The Do’s and Don’ts →

The Best chance to revisit the glory days of this past January: Lana Del Rey, Born To Die (Damon Albarn Remix) / Blue Jeans (Penguin Prison Remix)

It was a simpler time. Youth was in the air, and the promise of a new day blossomed before us like a beautiful field of wildflowers. Then Lana Del Rey was kinda mediocre on SNL, and a thousand bloggers wrote a thousand blog posts about how they hated her, or loved her, or hated that you loved her, or hated that you hated her, or loved that you hated her, and it all got so overwhelming that by February, an unspoken agreement had been brokered that we would all forget that Lana Del Rey had even existed until at least this summer. But here is a quick reminder: her first two singles have been remixed by a Grand Ol’ Mensch of indie rock and an Up-And-Comer who can help you revisit Lana Del Rey in a way that will hopefully not require nearly as much blogging.

This year’s Record Store Day exclusives are kind of not so great*! (Who hasn’t wanted the chance to own a 7” copy of Jimmy Fallon’s already-expired “Tebowie” joke?) Still, I sifted through the list for the gems and the trash and made fun of them all for MTV Hive.

*”Not so great” meaning I only have 16 things on my list. Including the Empire Recordssoundtrack, the Lana Del Rey single, and, sure, “Tebowie.”

Notes From the First At the Drive-In Show in 11 Years →

There’s an old line about the Velvet Underground, about how only 500 people bought their first album when it came out, but every one of them started a band. With At the Drive-In, there were only a handful of people who got to see them before their heartbreaking “make-a-genre-defining-record/start-to-blow-up/break-up-almost-immediately” cycle began. But you can’t overstate the band’s importance, especially in its home state: As a multiracial group of five guys from the depressed border town of El Paso, they inspired an entire generation of kids in hopeless-seeming places like Laredo, McAllen, Abilene – they were living proof that their rock and roll dreams could come true, that it wasn’t just for white dudes in big cities. For Latino and Latina kids in shitty Texas towns, they weren’t just the Velvet Underground – they were Jackie Robinson.

My write-up from the At The Drive-In show at Red 7 last night is up now at MTV Hive.

KUT looks at the Unsung secret history of women in Texas music for new audio documentary →