Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn keeps it intimate and personal, debuting new FNL-inspired album at Frank →

This was a pretty under-the-radar show, for the first-ever performance of solo material by the guy from a still-popular indie rock band. (Also: Lot of hyphens in that sentence, huh?) Craig Finn did a warm-up set in advance of his solo tour behind his upcoming Clear Hearts Full Eyes at my favorite hot dog restaurant in Austin, because of course he did.

The show was pretty great, honestly — it’s usually both exciting and kinda weird to hear a set of all-new material for the first time, especially when it’s by someone whose other work you’re very familiar with, and my plaid shirt and thinning hair should confirm that I am very much in the Hold Steady’s demographic. Finn’s lyrics are usually more like short fiction, but the new stuff is largely personal essay, and it’s cool to hear how he adapts. Read the full review at CultureMap for early impressions on his new solo material.

Fun Fun Fun Fest in review →

At a time when trend-chasing (or even, if you want to be generous, attempts at trend-setting) is the only way anyone can think of to try to keep up with a music landscape that is ever-changing, uncertain and laden with an extremely short attention span, Slayer is a singular, iconic artist. It’s more appealing now than ever, to more people than ever, to hear a band that just does what they do without any of those other concerns. They like to play fast songs about death, destruction and Satan. They’ve been doing it for three decades. If you don’t like it, go watch Odd Future.

We live in uncertain times, but some things do not change. All hail Slayer.

I spent most of the weekend at Fun Fun Fun Fest, which lived up to its name. I was there, officially, to scout out some neat bits of music-culture weirdness for MTV Hive, which will start rolling out shortly, and did some moonlighting for my pals at CultureMap while I was there.

The above paragraphs come from the write-up I did for Slayer (duh), and there is more to be found in the links below.

I had a good time trying to contextualize all of the things I saw, because I think small festivals like Fun Fun Fun offer some interesting opportunities to get at the pulse of what people are into culturally in an increasingly fractured culture. The festival was huge, and absolutely packed with people, but it’s not an all-things-to-all-people event like Austin City Limits or Coachella — there’s a definite aesthetic here, and it’s designed to appeal to a few different types of people, finding what they have in common. How do Odd Future and Slayer and Major Lazer and Danzig and Passion Pit and Blonde Redhead and Public Enemy and Spoon all fit together? They all appeal to the nebulous beast known as the American Hipster, but there are people who feel passionate toward all of those artists who don’t fit that descriptor, if it means anything at all, in the slightest. What does the opportunity to see them all together offer?

I don’t know for sure that I found any answers, but I enjoyed very much trying to piece it together. Here are the CultureMap stories:

• FFF6 in review: Danzig Legacy an epic disappointment 
• FFF6 in review: Okkervil River eschews nostalgia for rock and roll 
• FFF6 in review: Wugazi proves itself worthy of the name 
• FFF6 in review: Childish Gambino owns the blue stage 
• FFF6 in review: Henry Rollins is your cool punk rock uncle now 
• FFF6 in review: All hail Slayer, deliverance from Danzig

Will the rest of the Red River clubs withstand Emo's downtown closure? →

Most of the people I know who were devastated this week when the news broke that Emo’s, the most iconic of Austin’s rock clubs, had been sold and would be closing at the end of the year, were ex-Austinites. People who are still actively interested in live music in Austin probably twigged on to the fact that the spirit of Emo’s circa the early-00’s had relocated along with Graham Williams over to the Mohawk, and stopped spending nearly as much time on 6th and Red River once the media goliath C3 took over the booking.

But there’s another concern, which is what does that mean for the delicate ecosystem that is a live music neighborhood in the midst of a deep recession? Over at CultureMap, I examined some of the issues at play. Give it a read, if you’re so inclined.

12 Best Moments of Austin City Limits →

1. Best Redux: Kanye West

Oh, so what if the set was virtually identical to the well-documented, on YouTube and elsewhere, performance that Kanye delivered at Coachella in May? Citizen Kane is the same every time you watch it, too, and nobody complains about that.

What Kanye offered was an airtight performance that silenced the skeptics (at least those whose friends refused to let them take their “Fuck Kanye” t-shirts over to the Coldplay stage) and rewarded the faithful, from the operatic opening of “H.A.M.” to the emotionally-charged third act of “Runaway,” “Lost In The World,” and “Hey Mama.” In between, Kanye kept the rambling to a minimum (“they got me on a curfew,” he offered by way of explanation) as he peeled off hit after hit.

In one rare instance of addressing the crowd directly, ‘Ye explained during “Runaway” that this would be the final time that he’d be performing the material in this way. It was a fitting way to retire it, with the dancers behind him and the stage utterly dominated by the emcee.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Kanye played the entire set with no surprise guests (even though recent collaborator Justin Vernon had ended a Bon Iver tour in town just a few days earlier). He didn’t need anyone else. The set was as sharp and polished as West’s brand demands. No one man should have all that power, indeed.

Over at Spin, they’re running my “12 Best Moments Of ACL” piece today. Soon, it’ll be full of comments from angry people who will insist that I’m overpaid* because I ignored their favorite band. But for the moment, you can count down numbers 12-1 in peace.

*Last year, a guy insisted that I probably got a $100K salary just to totally suck. Oh, buddy, let’s talk about music journalism….

Why should grown women be ashamed of holding onto their adolescent passions? →

The A.V. Club sometimes gets some flack for not giving much voice to women in its editorial spaces — I remember that coming up in the Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation series, where a dude writer explored what Exile In Guyville meant to him as a teenager, which was a sharply different experience than most women who loved the album had. I’ve always been impressed with the people who run the site, myself*, though I’ve found the criticism to often be valid, as well.

Today, though, they’ve got a pretty compelling piece up from Genevieve Koski that asks, basically — why is it okay for dudes to hold on to Star Wars and shit like that, but women are shamed if they want to attend a NKOTBSB concert? It’s nice to see questions like that being asked at the A.V. Club, and the comments aren’t even blindingly offensive, as a special bonus!

*Not just sucking up! I am fortunate to be in a position now where I can quit jobs run by people I do not respect.

What It’s Like To Watch People You Like Demean Women →

Over at Hay Ladies!, Andrea Grimes describes the experience of seeing some friendly acquaintances in a band rush to gendered attacks of a woman who writes about music for the Dallas Observer. The critic said that she wasn’t into the band’s live performances, and was quickly decried as a bitch/ugly/fat/whatever who just needs to get laid.

You know, I’ve received plenty of hostile, ad hominem comments in response to music reviews these past few years. I’ve been called stupid, and a douchebag, and an image-obsessed hipster (I totally am!), and had my ability to properly process the experience of watching some dudes playing four chords called into question, etc, etc. People get really offended when you have a different take from theirs on an experience that you’ve shared!

But I’ve never been called fat for having an opinion. Even when getting accused of Engaging In Rampant Hipsterism (fines up to $5,000 and 9 months in hipster jail!) for saying that I merely really enjoyed that Mumford & Sons concert that changed some other guy’s life, it’s still about what I wrote, and how stupid my opinions clearly are. It’s not about how if I weren’t too ugly to get laid, I’d probably not have written that mean review of the Pixies show.

But I get that this is a subtle distinction, which is why I am commenting on it, even though Andrea said her piece very well. They’re both ad hominem attacks that attempt to accuse the author — dude or lady — of being personally unworthy of reviewing music. But those ad hominem attacks toward me are about how I shouldn’t be writing about music because I’m stupid. The ones toward the critic at the Dallas Observer are about how she shouldn’t be writing about music because she’s a woman. (Note: “she’s a fat bitch needs to get laid” is the same as “she’s a woman,” for these purposes — no knowledge of her weight or sexual availability needed!)

And there’s already plenty of stigma against women who write about music. They already are operating in an extreme minority, they already have to prove an “of course that person knows everything there is to know about Joy Division”-ness that I’m able to convey just by wearing my plastic glasses and plaid shirt (which makes it harder for them to get work from male editors and taken seriously by dude bands), and they already get judged by their appearance when there’s an actual picture of them. So how about cutting a lady like Dembling a break and call her a hipster instead of a bitch?

From West Texas to the Billboard 200: An Explosions In The Sky oral history →

I spent an absurd amount of time and energy on this story, because I was just very excited to tell it. Explosions In The Sky’s music has always meant a lot to me, and there are certain Austin bands who were very much local bands around the time I first moved here — Okkervil River, Explosions In The Sky, even Spoon, to some extent — and their journey to world-famous rock stars has always really interested me. I mean, Will Sheff was my video store clerk for a really long time, you know? Now he’s an Important Figure In Contemporary Rock, and I’m delighted — I loved his songs when he would made snide remarks about the Parker Posey movie I was renting, and I love his music now — but it’s still fascinating to me.

Explosions In The Sky are a special case, because those dudes did things so much on their own terms. I mean, they got lucky, especially with Friday Night Lights (and they’re the first ones to acknowledge that), but there are so few artists who are able to really just shut up, ignore everything about the industry and the wider pop culture, write really powerful and moving music, and somehow still get famous for it.

In that context, Explosions In The Sky are one of the finest artistic success stories I know. So when I pushed this oral history, I was really just partly excited to get to know the guys in the band a little bit (as you might hope, they’re exceedingly down to earth and friendly) and partly interested in learning about that success story firsthand. There were people I wanted to talk to, in order to fill it in, who I couldn’t — Conrad Keely from Trail Of Dead was out of the country most of the time I was working on the story, and I couldn’t get a hold of him even though I’m pretty sure we live in the same neighborhood. Peter Berg, who directed Friday Night Lights, is busy preparing a new TV series, finishing the Battleship movie (with Tim Riggins, y’all), and probably opening a chain of organic sandwich shops in the Pacific Northwest or something.

On the other hand, I got WG Snuffy Walden, who composed the music for the Friday Night Lights TV series, to talk candidly about the experience of being a soundtrack guy brought in to work in the band’s style, which I was really excited about. And Graham Williams of Transmission Entertainment, who gave the guys their first-ever show, provided a lot of crucial background and color from the band’s longest-time fan.

But mostly, I’m just really proud of the fact that this band, whose music really has meant so much to me for so long, let me tell its story. I’ve never had the opportunity to write more than about 1,200 words for The A.V. Club before — this one clocks in over 3,500 words. I’m really pleased with how it came out.

A challenge for music writer friends!

Every time you file a story about Odd Future and whether we should take them seriously and the conflict you feel about the fact that Tyler is so good but so awful at the same time, and how great art can be destructive and reprehensible but probably still great — let’s also be sure to file a story about a woman or a gay person who makes music, too, cool?

Because if all of the energy we spent blogging about and contemplating Odd Future and the meaning of misogyny and homophobia in art was matched by energy championing the people who are marginalized by those things, then our hand-wringing has the potential to be about changing them, at least to some extent, instead of just growing this kid’s influence by making him the only thing people want to talk about.

I’ll play if you will. What do y’all say?