The rock critic Simon Reynolds in his new blissblog on Wallowing Shamelessly in Technostalgia:

Yesterday the CD coming with the German Rolling Stone was a sampler on post-punk (which I know I like but don't know too well) including tracks by the Au Pairs, Modern Lovers, Teardrop Exploders, Fall, Slits, X-Ray Spex, Fat Gadget, Gene Loves Jezebel and someone I had never heard of called Reininger. I found this early new wave stuff so much more original, powerful and challenging than any of the bands hyped today which I won't mention again. It clicked with me immediately and now I am not sure if this is because of the quality of that music or a kind of diffuse nostalgia. I write diffuse here as I didn't know most of the tracks and even the ones I knew like It's Obvious by the Au Pairs had a complexity and diversity about them I hadn't noticed before.

I ask myself the question why this is so. Is it my age, I am approaching 40, and do I settle for calmer music now? Or is it the fact that I have listened to a lot of rock music of the last forty years and therefore only hear the rip-offs in the new music? Or could it be that my nostalgic feelings are hurt by bands who do more or less the same as bands 15 or 20 years ago? Don't I listen closely enough to the new stuff to detect the hidden qualities? Or aren't there any and are the new bands really bad pale copies of the past heroes? In one question: is it me or is it them?

Listening to Loveless in 1991 or Heaven or Las Vegas in 1992 (as so often I was late) were revelations which haven't been matched for a long time. I'd like to know if there are other people out there who feel the same.

By the way I am really happy that I do not have to live on writing about music I don't like.

My answer could be something like this:

I usually neither like music which is too mainstream nor too experimental. I don't like too pure a style as I usually find that too predictable and get bored soon.

If I had to choose between beat and tune I'd always go for the tune.

I like music which is

• challenging and does not necessarily sink in on the first listen
• calm and understated
• balancing between noise and melody
• rhythmically hypnotic and tune-wise addictive
• eclectic with fused styles and new takes on old genres
• made by artists who reinvent themselves from time to time
• full of new never heard sounds (not necessarily)
• lyrically interesting though the lyrics cannot save a musically bad record but bad lyrics can destroy good sounding music

To have a wider public I also started a discussion about this on I Love Music here though I would prefer you to comment in this blog.

Most American Bands Excerpt from a discussion on I Love Music from today, September, 11th, 2002:

The most Un-American band would probably be The Dead Kennedys, I guess. They used to be 15 years ago at least. (alex in mainhattan) How so? They sang almost exclusively about America, and their sound is based firmly on Garage Rock and Rockabilly, American music. Jello even made a C&W record. What you're thinking of is "anti American", which the DK's weren't, either (unless you think disapproving of Reaganomics is anti American, in which case Springsteen is anti-American, too.) -- Daniel_Rf (daniel@cul...), September 11th, 2002

All right then Daniel, but you must admit that they are not a band you would associate with American patriotism, American consumer society and American roots music. They stood apart. I always heard their music more as punk than as c&w. -- alex in mainhattan (alex63@big...), September 11th, 2002

"Patrotism" has become a really idiotic word after 9/11- it's now synonymous with "following your government blindly and beating everyone up who disagrees". The cynic in me would now say that this is, indeed, very American, but America also has a great history of protests and interest in social change. The DK's sang about what they thought was wrong with their country and tried to do their bit to change it. I think that's very patrotic indeed. As for the roots music, you're right that the Dead Kennedys stuff isn't C&W (I was talking about a Biafra solo album where he went Country), but: 1- Punk's roots lie in American roots music (Sex Pistols -> The Stooges -> ? & The Mysterions -> "I'm A Man" by The Yardbirds -> "I'm A Man" by Bo Diddley -> "Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters) 2- The DK's brand of Punk was a lot more brutal and less melodic than the classic UK Punk bands. The fact that the other members of the band have now sued Jello because he didn't want "Holidays In Cambodia" used in a Levi's ad also places them smack dab in American consumer society, but really, does one have to be a symbol for that to be "Most American"? I think you're selling your country short. -- Daniel_Rf (daniel@cul...), September 11th, 2002 ... All right then Daniel, but you must admit that they are not a band you would associate with American patriotism, American consumer society and American roots music. They stood apart. Bush's (and Reagan's) versions of American patriotism & consumer society -which I think are the versions that you're saying the Dead Kennedys are in opposition to- are not the only versions. Daniel's point is excellent about reading what "patriotism" means today. -- lyra (lyra63@spe...), September 11th, 2002

I think you're selling your country short. ??? I am German, so this doesn't really apply. I am using the word American in a very lazy way. It is more the image America gives to the outside world I was thinking of. But I 100% agree, Daniel, that this is only a part of America and that there is a tradition of protest, free speech and social movement. Unfortunately it doesn't show too much nowadays. Especially for the Europeans. Maybe we are a little blind on one eye concerning America. -- alex in mainhattan (alex63@big...), September 11th, 2002 ... I am German, so this doesn't really apply. You are?? So am I (albeit living in Portugal)! Sorry, I misread your user name for "Alex in Manhattan". Mea culpa. I insisted on this point because 20th/21st century popular music has always represented to me everything that's good and righteous about America, and I think that it's tragic how Americans are led to believe that being proud of their country must always go hand-in-hand with a jinogiostic, right-wing nut attitude. -- Daniel_Rf (daniel@cul...), September 11th, 2002

2 germans (one in portugal) good-naturedly arguing over who the most american band is! the ILM global village rulez! -- Fritz Wollner Tue Sep 10, 03:15:05 PM . Alexander F***

(from old blog)

Question I ask myself more and more which is more rewarding: to listen more closely to old classic songs of which I know that they are important and meaningful for me or to check out what is going on now, to listen to the latest trends. And the answer becomes more and more evident to me. A lot of the old songs I know and like I don't REALLY know. I have never understood the lyrics (in most cases I just didn't try), I have never tried to dig deeper. They appealed to me on a superficial level but not more (because of my laziness). Concerning new music: though I am a sucker (a terrible but succinct American word) for new sounds I feel I either have reached a saturation point or there is simply nothing exciting happening in music today anymore. The only genre of popular music where there seems to be a little something going on is electronic music. But that doesn't (and never did) bear a lot of interest to me. Purely electronic music for me is in the last consequence robot music, music which could be made by machines, non-human music. And my love for music refers to the human imprint on music. A certain intelligence and emotion which I hardly find anymore today. But there are exceptions and I would like to write about them here. A song like Time (The Revelator), the opening track of Gilian Welch's last album with the same name. Gilian Welch's music has been described as bluegrass, a modern songwriter-oriented version of it which is nevertheless rooted a lot in the past. In this song like on most of the album there is only Welch's voice (which I like a lot) and two acoustic guitars. I won't write anything more on this tonight as words fail me for the moment. But this song (from last year) is my favourite song I have discovered this year.

I would really love someone to prove me wrong on my conclusion. Please tell me how great new music is and why!

Feedback would be nice I am still there and I had planned not to write before I get a comment to my last post but as you see my plans never work. Sorry if the following seems like a little bath in self-pity but sometimes I feel like that (I made a similar post a while ago). By the way the music which fits quite well to my current mood is Down Colourful Hill by the Red House Painters. When I started this weblog it was intended as a therapy, a daily exercise to put into words what I hear in music and what moves me in general. I also wanted to practice my English a little which I forget more and more. During my seven year stay in Luxembourg I spoke English every day but now I only read and write. After a while I gave up the discipline of daily posts, I have always hated routines, my work is full of them and I don't need too many of them in my free time. After a while some people started to read this blog and I got some feedback via e-mail and comments. I really appreciated that. Since then the aim of writing this blog has significantly changed. Now I write not only for myself anymore as my main intention was in the beginning but for others who have a similar music taste or similar thoughts. And with whom I would like to discuss, to exchange ideas. Somehow it doesn't seem to happen. I know that I will never get as many comments as not.so.soft for example (link is in the sidebar) as I don't write too much about personal, everyday stuff and I don't write well, but still I am a little depressed about the current situation. So instead of blogging which does not seem very interactive in my case I just posted an answer to the music forum I Love Music concerning a question by Tom Ewing on "profound music". And guess what happened? Shortly after the ILM site stopped working. Is this a conspiracy or what? In any case I repost the question and my attempt of an answer here. Maybe we can discuss here, who knows?

Q: Andrew's search for profundity on ILE inspires me to ask this - tell me about some records you think are profound. It's common for people to dig at bands and songs for not being 'deep' but an actual claim of psychological or philosophical depth is much rarer - and yet surely that's what's being implied in any criticism of bands for being shallow or meaningless. (Some ILM writers - Marcello most notably, but also Anthony and I think Sterling - aren't afraid to invoke ideas of profundity and claim that the music they're talking about is meaningful, others shy away from the notion.)

A: I am very ambivalent towards the use of the word profound to describe music. The word profound in itself is rather problematic I find. Somehow profound seems to imply meaning but something meaningful is not yet profound. Concerning music the most obvious thing which could be meaningful are the lyrics. Concise lyrics which describe universal truths or situations could be profound. Like maybe the lyrics of Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. The lyrics of New Order would mostly not qualify to be profound in this sense and probably neither in the other sense mentioned in the next paragraph. But their music could well be profound.

On the other hand profundity seems to suggest something difficult to grasp, a meaning which we don't get immediately but which we think is hidden behind. Something almost mystic, rather unclear. This connotation of profound can be applied both to the lyrics and the music itself.

The first band which came to my mind when I read the word profound in your post, Tom, was already mentioned before: Joy Division. Their dark, powerful music seems to hide a secret. The same is true for their lugubrious lyrics. Of course Ian Curtis suicide adds to this. Another band which I occasionally find profound are Godspeed YBE!. Their last double album Lift Up Your Skinny... as most their music had this apocalyptic, foreboding feel both in the music and in the few spoken word samples.

Profound and shallow are often not very far apart. The Flaming Lips have been mentioned upthread. When reading what Wayne Coyne wrote about his last two albums on his (or the record company's site, I don't remember) it gave me the impression that his music and lyrics (or the story they tell) are very well thought out. On the other hand when I recently listened to The Soft Bulletin I had the impression that this is really the most bland and empty record on earth. Grateful Dead, Yes and other progrock bands also walk on the edge of both extremes. It seems profound in the beginning but then it is just noodling, bombast and kitsch.

People have said before that their relation to certain music is profound and they hesitated to call the music itself profound. That shows that this term is problematic when used outside our direct experience.

I'd prefer to use the terms complicated or difficult instead of profound as they are more easily measurable and less subjective.

P.S. I know that my blog often loads slowly and that is another reason I plan a move.

Why is rock so shite today? No answer here, this is a question for all of you. Today's rock music seems to me so uninspired and dull. No innovation at all, just stealing from the history of rock music. Or is it just me who is getting too old for rock music? Who has already heard so much of it that he now always hears the influences first and finds that the originals have been so much better. Is rock music at a dead-end or is it my relation to it? I am 100% sure that I will always find an unreleased bootleg version of Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale much more exciting than anything of the three bands I mention below. Today I listened to a live mp3 of The Strokes When It Started in my car hifi. And I must admit that I have listened to a lot of bad music in the 38 years I have been going but this is my personal candidate for the worst song ever. The garage guitar sound and the raucuous voice of the singer do not help. The repeated guitar line is the most annoying I have ever heard. Só mediocre that it is almost original. The song goes nowhere as none of the Strokes songs. How could this band ever be signed by any label? And how could anyone buy their records? It will always be a mystery to me. They are even worse than Oasis. And Oasis have been the spearhead of bad ripped-off rock music for quite some years. Slightly less hyped are The White Stripes. They are only two, a man playing the guitar and singing and his (ex-?)wife playing the drums. Their good tracks sound like hard psychedelic blues rock a little like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Very energetic and played and sung with a devil's soul. Unfortunately many of their songs are softer and more conventional. And the speed blues ones sound all the same so that one song of theirs is actually enough. The great Fell in Love with a Girl for example. There they had their 109 seconds of fame. Last band to mention here in today's triumvirate of rock newcomers are B.R.M.C. Their record is called Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. I am curious if they will reveal another meaning of the band name's abbreviation for their next album. They are obviously copying The Jesus & Mary Chain who in the beginning have been copying The Velvet Underground period second album. But where J&MC had their own distorted guitar sound and restrained vocal delivery BRMC just sound like very good copycats. Apparently they also steal from other bands. Check the 30 second windows media snippet of Rifle from this page. First I thougt, hey this is great. Ride are back. The slower songs of BRMC are nevertheless uninteresting to say the least. So in the end the only one of today's rock scene who is worth it is Ryan Adams as I have said before. He has digested so much different music from the 60s-80s that he could create something refreshingly new out of it. And he is a beast on stage.

reading my ramblings
on music i feel like a
deaf listening to it

I know that this is not a haiku. Not only has the last line six syllables instead of five (maybe not, as it depends on how you pronounce "listening") but it resembles more a koan. And of course haikus should not be (I read that somewhere) reflective and abstract. But I have my problems right now with the concrete. I will try to do better next time.

Changing my mind
I get more and more the impression that I am very prejudiced towards certain things and people. Before I always thought I was extremely open and tolerant.
A semi-long digression about tolerance here: Yesterday we went to see a satirical political revue (Kabarett in German) by a Turk named Sinasi. The main theme of his show was the Greek-Turkish relation. Basically the non-relation. The Turks are quite jealous of the Greeks as Greece was the native country of civilisation, democracy, philosophy etc. And today the main foreign nationality is Turkish in Germany and those Turks are doing all the work the Germans do not want to do. Whereas most of the few Greeks in Germany own restaurants and make good money. Anyways Sinasi was speaking about being a Toleranzterrorist (terrorist of tolerance). That is a terrorist who does not kill, a terrorist who just practices openly tolerance. A little bit like a mixture of Gandhi (for the non-violent terrorist part) and Buddha (for the tolerance part). An interesting concept. That makes me think of (oh my God, a digression in a digression) Pat Metheny, the guitar hero of fusion and late jazz rock. A couple of years ago he recorded Zero Tolerance for Silence. A beautiful album title (actually it would be perfect for my blog) for a record which can compete with Neil Young's Weld or Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Basically noise at full volume. Sometimes you need it. End of digression.
So back to my prejudices. I never liked Radiohead (we had this theme before). An acquaintance gave me The Bends from 1995 to listen to which he considers their best. And a strange thing happened. I listened to the album in its entirety and I liked it. The only track I did not like was the one I knew (nice dream). Must have been the single or something. And what I really found repulsive about Radiohead before, the voice of Thom Yorke was ok. Maybe it will be the same with Radiohead as with Neil Young. I used to hate Heart of Gold when I was in my teens because of his thin, non-masculine, high-pitch voice. Later on he became one of my favourite songwriters. Especially when being lovesick listening to his music has always been a big consolation for me.
[amended 29th July]

The biggest torture
At I Love Music a thread titled Used to love it, had to kill it gets going. It is about a theme I already touched before when writing about best of lists and the last REM. It concerns the problem that certain albums one used to love in the past can become unlistenable one day.
It happened to me with many albums e.g. Out of Time by REM, Grace by Jeff Buckley, most albums by King Crimson, Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, Freedom by Neil Young etc. I think the problem is quite easy. If you love a record in the beginning you listen to it as many times as possibles. One day the record is exhausted. Your feeling towards the music changes from love and veneration to hate and contempt. So it is much better not to love a record too much in the beginning and let it grow slowly. But this is a kind of paradoxon. Who would buy a record he does not like from the start? So actually you should try to find records you think you might love in the future. That is a little bit like buying shares on the stock market. You have to forecast the future. But instead of prophesying what other people will do as on the stock market you have to forecast your own future taste which seems to be much more difficult I guess.
When thinking about this from another angle I can think of an almost devilish idea how to torment people. You ask them what their all-time favourite piece of music is (some answers are here) and then you play it to them 24 hours a day. After a short while they will suffer as you will have destroyed their favourite music and they will become crazy listening to it again and again. This works not only with music but with everything people love. If you force them to do what they like, be it eating sweets, having sex, drinking cocktails or/and lying in the sun they will quickly start to hate what they considered a pleasure before and will feel oppressed. So I finish this with a nice ending. The most valuable good for a man is his liberty to do what he wants without others dictating him what to do. But it is also his fate when it comes to buying records...

Best of lists, music and wine
There are some problems with best of lists (some rules). First there is the time frame. A best of list usually covers a time period, e.g. a year.
Trivium #1: You cannot make a serious best of list before the end of the period covered. Actually this is not as simple as it sounds. Speaking of records, release dates are different in different countries. Which one to choose? For the sake of simplicity you could take the release date in the home country of the artist. But this is maybe irrelevant to you as you discover the record later which brings us to the next point.
Trivium #2: You can only include items which you know. Seems to be really stupid, but this determines the contents of the best of list decisively. So actually you can only make a serious best of list when you know all let’s say records which have been released in the said year.
Therefore once you have established your best of list it is not definite. As it could be that you discover new albums you did not know before. Even subtler it could be that you have known a specific album but you did not recognise it as a great album, it is a grower and you did not have enough time to listen to it. Especially probable for albums which are released the 30th December.
But there is also the other way round. You put a record in your best of list but when you listen to it a couple of months later it has lost its charm. Happens quite frequently to me. Using wine terminology we could say the said record has exceeded its apogee. In the first case when you did not listen enough it has not yet reached its apogee (like the Mouton Rothschild 2000). This leads me to the idea of the perfect album which would be a record which reaches its apogee at the end of your life. It grows every time you listen to it. Does something like this exist? Maybe the soundtrack of nature, e.g. the birds singing!
Conclusion: Best of lists are never final. They should be revised regularly as Parker revises his wine notations every year. Having said that I will post my revised Best of 2000 list as from July, 11th 2001 tomorrow.

Parallels between wine and music: Wine has three main properties. Colour, bouquet (smell) and taste (on the tongue). These properties could be compared to genre (e.g. white=pop, rose=jazz and red=classical), introduction and melody in music. Even better analogies can be found for grape in the sense of cépage (=style, e.g. shoegazing within pop), winery (=artist) and certain vintage of one winery (=record). The grapes are the instruments. The wine dresser is the musician. The sommelier is the deejay. The wine consumers are the audience. The alcohol is the beat. A corky wine is like a false note. The structure (or maybe the body) of a wine could be compared to the musical rhythm. The water in the wine could be the air. The water transports the alcohol into our body, the air conveys the sound to our ears. A live concert is like a wine we drink in the region where it comes from. Talking when drinking socially is like dancing to music. The vintage year is not equal to the release year. It is the year when you heard a record for the first time. Etc. etc.
In giving notes to music we have the same problem as with wines. How can we compare techno with baroque on the same scale? This is why they only compare wines within an appellation (smaller than a region, geographical term which is purely wine derived) in the Guide Hachette. A wine with three stars is a representative wine of the appellation and nothing more. A coup de coeur Vin de Pays de l’Aude is not necessarily better than a two star Chateau Latour.

P.S. Calexico's tour CD Aerocalexico I mentioned yesterday is phantastic. No mariachi at all, quite experimental. Doug McCombs from Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day participates and there are many very short but interesting slightly dissonant tracks. Definitely a grower. Calexico are following in Giant Sand's footsteps. Very DIY like Howe's recent album Confluence (amg). The record sounds like a homegrown cannabis (a strange crop anyway) plant. Actually Joey Burns almost looked like Howe on Sunday. He was wearing the same kind of baseball cap.