Q: Are you there, Margaret? It's me, Blog

A: Sorry for my recent absence, and for any wailing or gnashing of teeth that might have resulted.

So yeah, I live in San Francisco now, where I took a job working for the Internets. My goal here is to change the very nature of how human beings perceive and interact with information architecture, hopefully by around January.

Going forward, T.A.M.S.Y. will probably be a little more about tech/Bay Area living than before and also probably a little more sporadic, but I promise always to make room for Dick Cheney jokes.

On to business, the business of surprise: Baltimore's Dan Deacon is some sort of performance artist/musician/balding hipster. His performance of the song "Ohio" on WSAV's local morning show in Savannah, Georgia is a delight for at least two of the senses.



Check out Scott C.'s LJ for the complete interview, which is also fairly entertaining.

Deacon will be playing San Francisco and L.A. next week, but it's sold out [sked]. Tix still available for his forthcoming shows in NYC, Ohio and various other places. Recommended, maybe!

Q: How soon is now? What difference does it make? Was it really nothing, William?

A: Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant are making a Broadway musical based on the music of Morrissey and the Smiths. Yes, Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant of The State and Reno 911. [via Marah]

Lennon & Garant: They were looking for a job and then they found a job, and heaven knows they're musical now.

Lennon and Garant also wrote Taxi and The Pacifier, but shhhhhh.

Hopefully this means my close personal friend David Wain will help me realize my lifelong dream of bringing my Kinks musical to Broadway. Call me, Davey.

Q: Why did no one mention Zach Galifinakis and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy made a video for Kanye West?

A: I should keep a better eye on my reading list. Whenever I take a few days off, I end up missing something like this:

[via Erin]

Better resolution version here. Commenters on Kanye West's official site seem to think this is an amateur video made by the Amish, but no, the protagonists are comedian Zach Galifinakis (one of America's famousest Greeks) and indie troubadour (and occasional actor) Will Oldham.

Here are a couple Will Oldham songs, because why not.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Love Comes to Me
The Letting Go [buy], 2006

Palace
New Partner
Viva Last Blues [buy], 1995

Oldham's also in R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet, Chapter 22, but I've not had the pleasure of seeing that one yet.

Q: Where's that old time summer?

A: I've looked around but I can't see it.

Blanche

Another Lost Summer
If We Can't Trust the Doctors... [buy], 2004

Q: Is our children properly hydrating?

A: Earlier this year, BET Animation and performer Bomani "D'Mite" Armah teamed up to produce this very entertaining mock PSA.



It's way popular (875,000+ views), but I hadn't seen it until Brian Romero posted it to his cartooning blog over the weekend.

The controversy surrounding its racial overtones made it all the way to CNN, according to a YouTube commenter. It's not racist, so much as it is just an effective satire of la vie de crunk — but I'd imagine CNN saw it differently.

Q: Did Steve Winwood sell the rights to "Bring Me a Higher Love" to the National Restaurant Association?

A: If you want to know whether a restaurant keeps its kitchen up to health code, they say you should check the restrooms. If a place bothers to clean its toilets on a regular basis, you probably won't get salmonella, or so the story goes.

Bring me a bloomin' onion, whoa oh.

I'd like to introduce a new rule for instamatic food-service evaluation: If you want to know whether your meal will be poisoned, check to see if Steve Winwood's "Bring Me a Higher Love" is playing.

The easy way to remember this rule is that "Bring Me a Higher Love" is the worst song of all time, and any establishment that allows it to be pumped in actively hates its patrons.

According to a recent Pew study, 65% of family restaurants in the Midwest are playing "Bring Me a Higher Love" right this second.

Q: What's blacker and whiter and listened to all overer? (or: Is our Kanyes graduating?)

LEAKED: Kanye West's Graduation, which you can preorder here. A shoddy rip of the clean release surfaced last night, with the explicit, "scene" version leaking this afternoon (as reported by Calico Jak).

Kanye discussed the album Tuesday at a listening party in New York (video here, via marah). Haven't watched the clip yet, but MTV's site says he "talks with the crowd... about how rappers are the new preachers and his new album is both 'whiter' and 'blacker.'" Hopefully he also apologizes for the hideous jacket art.

Q: Discomfitingest love song of 2007?

A: I'm nearly finished with Six Feet Under, and this Deerhoof song reminds me of most of the relationships portrayed therein.

Deerhoof
Matchbook Seeks Maniac
Friend Opportunity [buy], 2007

The song's been remixed for the soundtrack to Dedication, directed by Justin Theroux (who, incidentally, portrayed one of the few non-matchbook types on SFU).

I was never much of a Deerhoof fan before, but Friend Opportunity is among the best albums of 2007.

More Six Feet Under/Sopranos analysis forthcoming. I'm holding off, so as to be as irrelevant as possible.

Q: Does the YouTube artistic wonderment never stop?

A: I was a little slow to take to the YouTube revolution, given that it seemed to be a whole lot of grainy video of culturally meaningless camp. But I'm totally coming around to that shit!

(If you read Perez Hilton, you'll have already seen this, apparently. But then, if you read Perez Hilton, you have bigger problems to deal with than stale videos.)

[via Wesleying]

Hurray for vacuous post-pomo confection!

RELATED: It goes without saying but hurray also for the continued existence of Andre 3000. Last October, Dre did a highly enlighten-taining interview with Terry Gross. Break out the headphones and check it out.

Q: Does MGMT's "Kids" remind you of beer bongs and regular bongs and bonfires and yr halcyon collegiate days?

(And you can tell I'm speaking to The Kids now, because of how I say "yr" where people my age would say "thine." And when I say "The Kids," I of course mean anyone at least 18 months younger than me.)

A: Dear The Kids,

On Monday, I posted a video possibly made by Wesleyan students, or possibly just blogged about by Wesleyan students, hard to know. The backing song to the video was very catchy, but I'd never heard it before. I did a bit of Internet detectiving, and I discovered it to be "Kids" by a Brooklyn band, MGMT, the pride of Cantora Records.

The clown shoe-lookin' muhfuckers of MGMT.

Apparently this song's pretty popular with you, the future of America, perhaps because it's about you; says a commenter on its (totally inaccurate but whatever) SongMeanings lyrics page, "Why wasn't this an enormous hit? This was one of everyone's favorite 3 AM dance party songs freshman year in college." Curious, since I've never heard of it or them, and I'm the coolest cat in all the land.

Anyway, here's the song. If I were dancing high on peyote at 3AM, this would totally do the trick.

MGMT
Kids
Time to Pretend [EP], 2005

Oddly enough, MGMT is touring with Of Montreal and Grand Buffet, two of the only bands I've blogged in recent months. So perhaps MGMT + T.A.M.S.Y. is a match made in heaven 4RL.

(P.S.: If you're a member of MGMT, please say hello. I like the cut of your jib. Also please tell me what your song means, so I can tell The Kids who were asking about it. Unless you're like David Lynch or the Young Michael Stipe and you're disgusted by the very question, which is fine also. Also please don't sue me. In return I promise never to call you synth-pop.)

(P.P.S.: If you're the Josh or Sabrina who made that Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is video, I'd love to know you are. I like the cut of your jib also.)

Q: How do you sell soul to a soulless people that sold their soul???

A: Oh, I'm sorry, the question here was actually supposed to be, "What is the worst album title since Pork Soda?"

(For the record, I'd have gone with Fear of a Bland Comeback.)

Q: What do you get when you cross Vanity Fair with Maxim?

A: A stupid magazine that no one likes. Also, who knew they still publish Details?

---

Back in my gangly teenage days, Details was the epitome of cool. To me, anyway. Mostly that was thanks to a young-ish Rob Sheffield, who wrote every single music review in the magazine (before eventually being snatched up by Rolling Stone). Month after month, Sheffield's section introduced me to the music that made life bearable(Endtroducing..., The Great Escape, Moon Safari) and simultaneously to the writing style I would imitate poorly for the next several decades. As would, possibly, Sheffield himself.

Back then, though, he was in complete control, both stylistically and editorially (or so it seemed). And things were never the same after he moved to RS, either for him or for Details, which within a year had become total crap. All the enjoyable writers jumped ship; Glenn O'Brien took his Style Guy shtick elsewhere; and the relentlessly brilliant features writer Chris Heath ran off to write a biography of Robbie fucking Williams, thus becoming dead to me.

Granted, I was around 17 at the time, so I don't know whether the magazine was actually as great as I thought it was. It might have been I was just a dumb teenager, hard to say. But this was way before metrosexuality became associated with douchebags and Axe body spray, and I really liked reading a magazine that taught me to be as gay as possible without actually suggesting I should have sex with men. In retrospect, I may have missed the point there entirely; I think I was the only subscriber not having sex with men anyway.

By the way, I just realized that, as of 1996, I had never kissed a girl, spent every afternoon rehearsing for school plays, bought all my clothes at Structure, listened to a lot of Pet Shop Boys, sucked at sports, and received this magazine in the mail monthly:

It's a good thing I wasn't ever savagely beaten up in high school, because somebody would have been mistakenly convicted of a hate crime. Or I think it would have been "mistakenly." Honestly, at this point my heterosexuality looks like a sham even to me.

Q: Anybody seen a knight pass this way? I saw him playing chess with Death yesterday.

Ingmar Bergman: "You sunk my battleship."

A: Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman — the auteur behind many brilliant classic films you have not seen — has expired at 89. His daughter reports he died peacefully, presumably following a game of chess with an eerie hooded figure on a dark, austere landscape. From the obit:

In Europe, movie directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut helped break visual and narrative rules, but Mr. Bergman stood out for dreamy and often disturbingly psychological films that expressed emotional isolation and modern spiritual crisis.

Women were especially prominent in Mr. Bergman's films and not as cardboard heroines. Confused by their doubts and desires, sometimes entirely driven by their passions, Mr. Bergman's female characters usually stood on the brink of mental collapse. Meanwhile, his men were often hapless bystanders, incapable of understanding their own lives, much less those of anyone around them.

"The people in my films are exactly like myself -- creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Mr. Bergman once said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."

To Mr. Bergman, solace was only possible through erotic and intellectual connections, but this was complicated when people cloak their true emotions...

Intriguing. It entices me to take my Criterion Edition of The Seventh Seal out of its Gatsbyesque plastic wrap one of these days. Until now, I only owned it so artsy girls would think I possess a vast and mysterious intellect.

---

On a related note, I have recently discovered, and become totally obsessed with, Scott Walker's 1969 album Scott 4. One of the best tracks is the Bergman-inspired, Spanish-flavored opener.

Scott Walker
The Seventh Seal

Scott 4, 1969

Sonically, it makes a nice companion to another song I've been way into lately, the White Stripes' "Conquest". And of course I identify with the mysterious and intellectually vast lyrics.

Q: Oh Mary, can ah run ye hame? (or, What's the meaning of "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice"?)

A: Currently in constant rotation, between my iTunes and my brain, is "Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice," an ode to drunken hookups performed in 1966 by Scottish folk-revivalist Hamish Imlach. Between the Scot slang and Imlach's Glaswegian accent, I barely know what half the song means, and yet I find it entirely irresistible.

Hamish Imlach
Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice
Hamish Imlach [OOP], 1966

I'm still getting a bunch of hits for my post on the history and meaning of "For What It's Worth", so I thought it might be useful to do the same for "Cod Liver Oil..." But after Googling (and Urban Dictionary-ing) around for a while, I discovered that extensive annotations are already available. Thanks, the Internet!

According to those notes, the song evolved as a take-off of an American spiritual song, "Virgin Mary Had a Little Baby"; the Mary in "Cod Liver Oil" gets pregnant by entirely non-immaculate means in a slum basement. As may be obvious to Brits and/or old people, cod liver oil and orange juice was a concoction commonly served to promote the health of pregnant women and children during WWII. The cod-liver cocktail is still recommended for sufferers of arthritis, and still tastes terrible.


The song is one of many reasons to check out the wonderfully eclectic Transatlantic Story, a four-disc anthology compiling highlights from a British label, Transatlantic Records, that was a favorite of hippies and other drug addicts in the 60s and 70s. The set is apparently out of print, but it's available via Amazon Marketplace for a cool $20.88.

Q: Do you hate the Streets?

A: Then you may very well have trouble enjoying this goofy British video, by Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, in which the duo establishes the genre of grime-novelty (hereafter grovelty). The song: "Thou Shalt Always Kill".



I particularly agree with them vis-à-vis music and poetry, tragedies that occur in non-English-speaking countries, and Radiohead. [via Kevin]

Q: Cream, sugar or Mountain Goats?

A: Morning, yo. Can I interest you in the steamin' hottt new single from Aesop Rock, inexplicably featuring the Mountain Goats?

Aesop Rock
Coffee [ft. John Darnielle]
None Shall Pass, 2007

A-Rock's None Shall Pass hits stores August 28th. Preorder it today, etc. More info @ Definitive Jux.

ELSEWHERE IN HIP-HOP: Common's Finding Forever leaked last week, and it's fantastic, as expected. It could be the hip-hop album of the year — except it's produced by Kanye West, who probably hoarded the sticky-ickiest beats for his own forthcoming album. He is, after all, sort of a dick. Anyway, stay tuned.

EARLIER: Hip-hop sucks in '07? (Hint: No)

Q: Are labels just leaking things intentionally now? (or: How did the Fiery Furnaces' "Widow City" leak already?)

A: On Tuesday, the Fiery Furnaces revealed the tracklist of their forthcoming Widow City, due Oct. 9th from Thrill Jockey, to Pitchfork Media. And now Calico Jak tells me, two days later, the album leaked already. It's very exciting and everything, but WTF?

I would already find it hard to believe the timing here was coincidental — but it's not even the first time this year the exact same thing happened (tracklist released to Pitchfork, followed immediately by album leak). It also happened with [insert band name(s) here when I have time to look it up cuz I forget].

UPDATE BECAUSE OH I REMEMBERED ONE: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP' Is Is, which leaked literally the day after it was first announced (on Pitchfork). I swear there were others, but maybe I'm making things up. Anyway, update forthcoming, in which I turn out to be probably wrong about everything. -- 4:45PM

It could just be that the albums are leaking immediately after bands finalize the tracklists or the mastering process or whatever — e.g., maybe Widow City didn't technically exist until this week (it was recorded in Jan.-Feb.). But I do kind of wonder — if you know your band's album is going to leak eventually anyway (and it will), why not at least try to steer the buzz that's sure to follow?

The Fiery Furnaces: Striking while the iron's hot?

I wondered the same thing back when Voxtrot's debut LP leaked, directly prior to the band's high-profile sets at SXSW. (Are you there, Ramesh? It's me, t.a.m.s.y.)

---

Indie bands, and perhaps even their labels, seem to be coming around to the idea that leaks might not be so bad for business. Just this week, Stars very openly "leaked" Into the Bedroom After the War via purchasable (but delightfully DRM-free) mp3s. And a couple weeks ago, Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear) said in a Shoutmouth interview that he was "was psyched about the fact that [Person Pitch] leaked, that it was an Internet album."

The leak did amazing things for the album. The album has sold pretty well and I don’t think it would’ve…I was hoping that it would do a little bit better than Young Prayer and in the first two weeks it has sold more than Young Prayer had. So, I feel like the leak really helped out in that respect.

I should say, though, that Animal Collective is more my job, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. That’s more where my focus is, musically speaking. So this was just like…I had a really good time doing it. At first I would give live copies of my shows to my friends and people I had a lot of respect for as musicians. So, it was all about wanting people to hear the music. That’s another reason I was psyched on the leak. I was like, “The more people that want to listen to it, the better.” And it still sold pretty well, so I can’t complain about it.

New Pornographers' frontman Carl Newman joked about leak culture in an interview circa January, saying of the then-unfinished Challengers, "We're shooting for an end of August release, which means we'll have to get it completed by the end of April so that it can leak the first week of May."

(On the other hand, Matador Records, the band's label, was reportedly much less happy-go-lucky about Challengers leak. And our friends at Touch and Go were less than psyched about the Ted Leo leak in February.)

Another thing: If the Widow City leak were premeditated, would it have been put out there so many weeks prior to the actual release date? I don't know much about marketing, but my guess here is: Not so much.

So what's the deal? Anyone know anything?

Also, could someone at Thrill Jockey at least give me permission to say that, on first listen, Widow City is totally excellent and surpasses my already high expectations?

EARLIER: Is the new New Pornos' the album of the year?

Q: Best album of the year, so far, probably, off the top of your head?

A: The best album of the year, so far, probably, off the top of my head, is without question the New Pornographers' Challengers. Stereogum has some great behind-the-music coverage of the album, plus two kickass tracks (and a bunch of photos of the band's July 4th performance at NYC's Battery Park).

One of the songs offered is "Myriad Harbor," which has quickly become one of my favorite Daniel Bejar songs ever (GvsB is also a fan). I would link to the lyrics, but they don't seem to exist on the Internet yet, so whatever, here...

MYRIAD HARBOR
written by Daniel Bejar

I took a plane / I took a train
(Who cares? You always end up in the city)
I said to Carl / Look up for once
(See just how the sun sets in the sky)
I said to John / "Do you think the girls here
(...ever wonder how they got so pretty?")
Oh well, I do
Look out upon the myriad harbor (x3)

All the boys with their homemade microphones
(...have very interesting sounds)
All the girls fall into ruin, droppin' out of school, breakin' Daddy's heart
(...just to hang around)
I walked into the local record store and asked for
An American music anthology / It sounds fun
They tore off my skirt (?) and stuck it on the walls at P.S. 1

I took a plane / I took a train
(Who cares? You always end up in the city)
Stranded at Bleecker and Broadway / Looking for something to do
Someone somewhere asked me, "Is there anything in particular I can help you with?"
All I ever wanted help with was you
Look out upon the myriad harbor (x4)

I'd wondered why he was hitting those New York references so hard, since the New Pornographers are Canadian; Scott Stereogum notes the album was recorded partly in Brooklyn, and...

...Well, this is also the NP's New York album. Carl Newman's a Brooklynite now, feels okay talking about the West Village in flames in "Challengers," and even Bejar gets in on the action with the best song on the album, "Myriad Harbour" and its strutting, sexy P.S.1 and Bleeker Avenue namedrops. He's peppered songs with New York in the past -- see "Jackie, Dressed In Cobras," etc. -- but this is the clearest and most addictive...

Newman's biggest New York song, "Unguided," is his longest composition to date. He notes, "It is all about August 2005, everything up in the air, it was very hot, and I was camping out in New York for a week."

(Hey, that sounds eerily like my August '05. Incidentally, the best memory I have from that summer is the day of the Mermaid Parade, which concluded with seeing the New Pornographers play in Prospect Park. Come to think of it, "in turmoil, hot, and semi-homeless" describes pretty much all my experiences with NYC in summer, including last week.)

Wow, I'm really terrible at writing concise blog posts.

One other thing: Of Bejar, Stereogum writes he "always sounds great in this setup, but remains more excellent when given a mile to roam in his solo work." Now, I do love Bejar's Destroyer stuff, but to me, his best work is in these collaborations with Newman, whose predilection for sharp poppy hooks keeps Bejar from drifting too far into art-rock pretension. Newman is sort of the Big Boi to Bejar's Andre 3000 —the Coxon to his Albarn, if you will. The McCartney on weed to his Lennon on acid. DISCUSS. Or just buy the album.

ELSEWHERE: Bryan Ferry reveals bold stance vis a vis the Jews; he is pro-Dylan, anti-Nazi.

Ferry was briefly sort of the Coxon to Brian Eno's Albarn, wasn't he?

Q: Are you looking for the White Stripes' "Icky Thump" leak?

A: I only ask because there are 40 billion google million people googling it right now for some reason. As far as I know, only four tracks have leaked, and I'm not hosting any of 'em at the moment (I think maybe that's what actually caused my GooglePages to self-destruct).

Anyway, if you want to find out when the full album leaks, sign up for Calico Jak's Leaked Album Alert, etc etc.

UPDATE: Okay, now it leaked. But it comes out in two weeks, so you could also just, like, buy it. --6/6/7 8:26PM


(By the way, I need to come up with a new name for Caliko Jak. Apparently it's already taken.)

Q: Hip-hop sucks in '07?

A: Hip-hop sales are down. Some will say it's because hip-hop in '07 sucks, and while they may have a point there, hip-hop sucking is nothing new, as DJ Shadow can tell you:



(Ironically, after DJ Shadow got famous and made a bunch of money, he went on to make a hip-hop album that sucked.)

Anyway, Aaron Pressman at Business Week has an insight into why sales are down beyond suckage — and here too, it's the money.

Regardless, and also irregardless, there's plenty of good hip-hop out there, if you're willing to look for it. Here are two recent favorites, from two very different rap duos, Seattle's socially conscious Blue Scholars, and Pittsburgh's stream-of-consciousness Grand Buffet.

Blue Scholars
Back Home
Bayani, 2007

Grand Buffet
Dark Autumn
The Haunted Fucking Gazebo, 2007

Or if you don't want to download the files, you can hear 'em via this fancy new Box.net widget I got going:



Grand Buffet gets bonus points for naming their EP The Haunted Fucking Gazebo, and for featuring Columbus indie-rockers Gil Mantera's Party Dream on the second track. Blue Scholars just get bonus points for putting out one of the best rap albums of the year.

In other news, the new Kanye West mix tape is totally sweet.