The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown in.

The second post is a 3000-word monster that looks at the fate of songs with political messages in recent Eurovision contests, Eurovision as a whole, InCulto’s song in comparison to the Lithuanian entry in 2006 (which coincidentally beat out InCulto’s offering that year), and the song’s relationship to funk and punk. Then I shift into high gear and talk about miscegenation, economic inequality and the egalitarian fantasy of democratic equality. Then I close with some complaints on the ghetto, particularized punk of Gogol Bordello. Oh, and there’s like four embedded videos and links to who knows how many other songs on YouTube.

The third post is a quick roundup of recent press on the song, which includes news that the European Broadcasting Union, the people behind Eurovision, is investigating InCulto’s song for the possible political content of the lyrics.

I heard one of the songs, Ottawan’s “Hands Up” twice this weekend while in Vilnius (at two different bars–311 and Mojito naktys).

The flashback of over 20 years made me finally decide to once and for all solve a different mystery of my childhood pertaining to Club Med. “Hands Up”‘s dance I found boring and not terribly fun, but the other two songs had more involved moves. One of them, “Agadou,” then became a bit of a claim to fame for me as I taught it, as a 12 year old, to 1000-odd Lithuanian scouts at the 1988 Jamboree. I didn’t know the words, but it didn’t matter–my gibberish proved to be useful enough, and everyone loved the ass-tapping (literal) aspects of the dance. And though people have asked me about the song, I haven’t been able to say anything other than “it’s a Club Med thing. I dunno.”

Here’s a recording of the song that’s similar to the version I learned:

Now here’s a video of some annihilated people doing a reasonable impression of the Club Med version of the dance, which is what I taught the scouts:

And then, as with everything at all catchy, the song has been turned into a techno disaster, to which these two young women in bikinis dance in what looks like a travel agent’s office. “Filles folles,” indeed.

Finally, here are the lyrics to the song, with my bastardized version underneath:

A-ga-dou dou dou pouss’ l’ananas et mouds l’café x2
Tap’ la pomm’ tap’ la poir’ pouss’ l’ananas et mouds l’café x2

L’an dernier à Tahiti une jolie vahiné
Avec son ukulélé ma vraiment ukulélé
Ell’ vendait de fort beaux fruits avec son ukulélé
Quand on les avait choisis
Y’avait plus qu’a les manger

The version I taught:

A-ga-dou-dou-dou pousterai mon café x2
Tap’ le (h)eau, tap’ le bum pousterai mon café x2

A-loua-lou couré-é, A-loua-lou couré-é
A-loua-lou couré-é, A-loua-wé-é-é-é

As an amusing sidenote: part of why it took me forever to find the details about “Agadou” online (I have tried in the past) was because I let my mom convince me 23 years ago that “dou” was actually “doux,” which broke any google efforts.

When Free came out in 1993, “The Gun and Bible” was instantly my favorite track. It’s  a funny and absurd song, funny and absurd in the way that genocide is funny and absurd, that manages, by twisting and repeating one bizarre sample (discounting the coda about drinking and shooting),  to efface the cold objectivity of the text read by the speaker. Negativland pulled off a similar perversion by inverting the intention of a speech with their classic “Christianity Is Stupid” (updated with video added as “The Mashin’ of the Christ“).

Hier, des soldats américains s’apprêtent à embarquer dans un hélicoptère pour une distribution des vivres. (click to enlarge)

Either way, I was reminded of this song when I saw how today’s Libération decided to portray American relief efforts in Haiti. Guns and water together make up the can’t miss combination of American disaster relief.

Past presenting this picture, I don’t have much to say about the earthquake, so I can just forward on how Greg Palast got suitably outraged over the U.S.’s militarized response, in which, as he says, concerns over security trump all. “Blackwater over drinking water.” Also, David Brooks got his (subconscious?) racist on for the New York Times, whereupon he was handily fleeced both by Aaron and by Taibbi.

Here’s another thing that the idea of a US ship waiting offshore until Haiti was secure reminded me of:

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives — he called them enemies! — hidden out of sight somewhere.

In the comments for my last post on this album (and, coincidentally, the last post before this one, though I have a more Serious post started already), I said that I would probably find a few four star songs on Kid A and that maybe, over time, one or two of the four stars might jump to five stars.¹ I stand by that. Basically the album reeled in three stars. Some songs, like the title track and “Treefingers” make me claw out my eyes in boredom. Others, like the alienation anthem set off my alienated by whininess control systems. Often, I found myself simply waiting for tracks to get off the ground. “Optimistic” gets interesting about 15 seconds before ending. “Morning Bell” has potential as a sort of Air/Krautrock hybrid, and it sensed my need for it to get a little derailed, but its idea of derailed is pretty darn tame. Too bad.

Gold from 2000.

Two songs, though, did net four stars: the opening track and “The National Anthem.” “Everything in its Right Place” is simply a ballsy way to start an album. The listener pretty much falls into the song along a tiny avalanche, and that’s pretty disorienting. “The National Anthem,” on the other hand, seems to be a crowd favorite, so I don’t need to do the virtue extolling thing. Needless to say, the Mingus horns make it. If there were more tracks like that, I’d be more excited about the album.

In a funny twist of a postscript, and just so everyone knows where I’m coming from, two nights ago I decided to listen to another album from the same year, the delayed US release of Sarah Cracknell’s Lipslide. That album is all four- and five-star songs.

1. My starring system: 0 = unrated; 1 = something wrong with the mp3; 2 = this is a skit or some short thing that should never be on my portable music device; 3 = this is a song that is anywhere from unlistenable to ok; 4 = this song is pretty good, and I would like to hear it more often; 5 = I will seldom fast forward through this song. In case it’s not obvious, I use iTunes’s starring system both to rate songs and to pass case variables to conditional playlists, culminating in a playlist that’s 2/3 five-star songs and 1/3 four-star songs that is, simply put, always fun to listen to when bopping around the city.

Martenot et ses ondes.

Fellow combattant Chris broke down with a few sentences the entirety of the Radiohead œuvre in a comment to my last post, in which I announced my new year’s resolution: to finally listen to some Radiohead and see what the fuss is all about. To figure out, in other words, what I’ve been missing.

What’s funny about Chris’s comment is that it more or less matches how I would’ve explained the course of the Radiohead career, having never really listened to them. Except I forgot about The Bends entirely, and I also forgot that Kid A and Amnesiac were two separate albums. But his take on In Rainbows matched mine, In Rainbows being the only Radiohead album I had bothered to acquire up to that point. Point is, Chris doesn’t offer some kind of groundbreaking or contrarian critique. It’s a rather cold assessment. This is this, and that is that.

In feeding the discography into iTunes, I listened to the opening seconds (and I mean like the first 3-4) of each song, and I figured I’d probably like Kid A the most, out of those opening seconds, so I put it on before going to sleep.¹ And it was ok. Relatively unpainful IDM derivative with a bit of a whiny streak. Maybe what a Coldplay IDM album would sound like. But, again, nothing too amazing. “Well,” I figured, before falling asleep, “I guess I shouldn’t have started with such a whatever album.”

Now this morning, I read Chris’s comment, and, for laughs, decide to look up Kid A on Wikipedia, to see how it fit in the Radiohead career course.

And I find out it’s the best album of the last ten years?!?!?

Obviously, Rolling Stone doesn’t know shit about music. There is no possible way that Bob Dylan had two of the 11 best albums of the past decade. It’s so implausible that I more or less stopped reading the list the second time I saw Dylan’s name. But why, then, why is Kid A the best? Sez RS:

The result was the weirdest hit album of that year, by a band poised to be the modern-rock Beatles, following the breakthrough of OK Computer. In fact, only 10 months into the century, Radiohead had made the decade’s best album — by rebuilding rock itself, with a new set of basics and a bleak but potent humanity. Yorke’s loathing of celebrity inspired the contrary beauty of “How to Disappear Completely,” with its watery orchestration and his voice flickering in and out of earshot. His electronically squished pleading in “Kid A” sounded like a baby kicking inside a hard drive.

Given Yorke’s willingness (as noted in the Wikipedia article) to straight up cite the Twin, Autechre, and Warp Records in general as influences, as well as the admission that it was attending an Underworld (!!!) concernt that brought the band back together, basically the reason Kid A is good is because it’s a sort of IDMusic for the Masses.

Is that right? I’m listening to Music Has the Right to Children as I type this, and, yes, it’s not caught up in “loathing of celebrity” or a “bleak but potent humanity” (I absolutely adore how the two are stitched together with Cobain-colored string). But the album is not only two years older than Kid A, it’s about as formally inventive.²

Was it important then, that it was Radiohead that released Kid A, and not a pair of Scottish dudes? Or in the case of, say, Mouse on Mars, a pair of dudes from the western edge of Germany? Did they make it ok to like this kind of music, or something? Were they to IDM what the Rolling Stones were to blues?

I have a suspicion that the answer to these questions is more or less “yes.” And that, after a fashion, that is the point. There’s something so huge about a rock band putting out an album like Kid A, that, despite the fact that it trades in a well-defined but non-mainstream genre, it shows some sort of dissatisfaction with rock, with guitars, etc. They “rebuilt rock itself,” as RS gushes. One friend suggested that in as many words: the testament to their genius is that Radiohead showed they could make an amazing rock album and follow it up with an (even more) amazing post-rock (or whatever) album.

And yet, the second best album of the decade, released only a year later, brought the bullshit post-VU New York rock yawns back to the forefront.³ So much for Kid A, then. Later, “bleak, but potent humanity.”

Strokes aside, this is why I think this resolution is going to be tough. Can I possibly now return to Kid A and listen to it without saying to myself, “this is the best album of the past decade”? Can I possibly buy into a hype machine of this caliber? I bought into the Wilco hype machine whole-heartedly, so it’s not like I’m against admitting that I missed the boat on a band. Hell, I was late to The Wire, even, and I don’t feel the need to poo-poo it as a result.

I guess, then, that if I could buy into the hype around an HBO cop drama and consiider it worthwhile (though I think its hype, along with, say, Slumdog Millionaire‘s, is earned but misplaced), then I ought to be able to weave through the Radiohead hype. But after day one, boy am I skeptical.

1. The équipe de ménage threw away my sleeping aids, so I had no doubt that I’d stay up for the whole album.
2. If not as bombastic, and certainly not as whiny. The horn work in Kid A I’m eager to return to, but that aspect of the album, at least to me, stands out nowhere near as much as the nods to IDM.
3. The recent BS Report between Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman where they discuss the RS list is brilliant for this. If they mentioned Kid A as the #1 album, I didn’t notice it; all I noticed was Simmons’s ludicrous hyping of the Strokes as the “saviors” of rock or some such. Like it took five dudes from NYC with leather painted on their bodies so tightly you could see the baggies of blow to rid the world of Limp Bizkit. Hey, Sports Guy, you can learn about new music, even back in 2000, from places other than MTV. Next, Simmons veered off into a borderline racist rant about how Stevie Wonder didn’t belong in the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, reminding me, again, how Simmons should stick to reality TV, the NBA, and occasionally baseball or football.

“Will someone turn down the Pink Floyd?”

It’s New Year’s resolution time. Last year’s resolution, to get hooked on coffee, was a runaway success to the degree that I’ve quit coffee for a week to see if I’ll sleep better (early reports: yes). The first helper in the process was the Bodum travel French press I bought from Amazon for like $12. Once I got to Paris, however, it was the unlimited access to a Lavazza machine that did me in. I was probably drinking about 6 espressos a day.

The year before, my resolution was to get hooked on cigarettes. I’m ambivalent about saying that it was a complete failure of a resolution.

For 2010, however, nothing really jumped out at me. There’s an informal hiatus on Kinder chocolates, but that’s not really a resolution; that’s just discipline. So I decided that this year, I’ll finally figure out what the hubub is over Radiohead.

It’s not that I’ve like never heard Radiohead. I listened to “Creep” on the radio like everyone. And I was working for an A&E section of a (college) newspaper when OK Computer came out, causing pretty much the whole editorial staff to blow up their heads. That album was, in fact, the only album ripped to the Sports Editor’s computer, and every production night we’d hear it over and over and over (and over). From my chair in the production office, it sounded like Pink Floyd. I suspect that it will sound like Pink Floyd from up close, too. In short, I’ve followed the band’s career. Hell, I even downloaded In Rainbows, since it was free.

But it never clicked. In the meantime, my friends are all rushing to see Radiohead in concert, going on about innovative this and genre-destroying that. Yet what I heard, musically, left me inert. But I had a long conversation about Radiohead last week, where my friend Ed explained why he liked them so much. And I just ran into my neighbor here, whom I’ve heard blasting parts of OK Computer from time to time. So I figure, you know what? Let’s see what it’s all about.

I’m probably not going to blog the adventure or anything, but I want it out there. When you see me (in Vilnius, probably) for new year’s next year, you can talk to me all you want about Kid A. Of course, if I hate it, I’ll also be able to explain why.

The PCF and the EEC. Near Porte d'Orléans.

This line from Terry Eagleton’s 2000 polemic The Idea of Culture has always struck me, because, after a fashion, the very idea of a European Union anthem is rather absurd. First, they already have one, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, but without Schiller’s An die Freude text. And this chosen anthem already has all the high cultural trappings that are contrary to many national anthems, being often more plebian affairs coming from the ground up instead of the top down.

Second, to me at least, the notion of a Europe unified by song (and not by a song from Eurovision) is treated almost like a farce (though perhaps unintentionally) in the idea of the simultaneous performances of the commissioned piece in Kieślowski’s Trois Couleurs : Bleu, complete with reference to everyone’s favorite chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.

Eagleton’s concern for embarrassment, Beethoven’s ascent to European glory, and the farce of a Franco(-Polish-Swiss) anthem chase each other recursively, all pointing to the same thing. There is no cultural EU anthem, and appropriating high culture (or religion) for one banalizes the culture or the religion. The EU’s anthem should pay proper respect to the EU’s economic roots. So, then, let’s go from the ground up and build an anthem out of the banal.

For years I’ve felt that, if the EU needed an anthem, Kraftwerk’s “Europa endlos” would be a fantastic candidate. The opening track of Trans-Europa Express, an antedated EU concept album if there ever was one, the song has all the pageantry of an anthem (choral vocal tracks, say), with seemingly inscrutably banal lyrics:

Europa endlos (endlos, endlos…)
Das Leben ist zeitlos (Europa endlos)
Parks, Paläste und Hotels (Europa endlos)
Flüsse, Berge, Wälder (Europa endlos)
Wirklichkeit und Postkarten Bilder (Europa endlos)
Eleganz und Dekadenz (Europa endlos)

Are they really inscrutably banal, though? The first two lines, “Europe, endless / Life is timeless” suggest an open space, a utopian dream (this will not be the first time utopia comes up here). But that endless Europe is made up of parks, palaces, and hotels; rivers, mountains, and forests. These images, at once idyllic and anti-idyllic (we have both man and nature, after all), are then treated as the same thing twice.¹ They are both reality and pictures from postcards. It’s a bit of a tease, then. This imagery exists both around us (we see it riding on the TEE in a later track, for example), but also in how we represent Europe back home, no matter where that home may be.

Those three man-made images, again, show a kind of capitalist control over the idylls that follow. The park is reforming nature, the palaces are the accumulation and defense of property (though from a pre-capitalist era), and finally there are the hotels. I’m not sure if there’s much trade in postcards of hotels, though the hotel here reminds us of the transient nature of a trip. Europe is endless, and life is ageless, so we keep moving on, displaced and moving free like trade. The bouncing octaves of the bass push us along, always just observing what is around us, without clearly stopping to act.

This is important, as far as a fantasy of the EU, because the EU is an observed artifact, seen out the window of a train. Kraftwerk give us no history, no account of battles that parks may commemorate or that led to the construction of palaces. The rivers of blood, mountains of corpses, and forests of spears that are millennia of European history get folded into images that are at the same time the world in which are living (hence, historical), and the contextless wish-you-were-here view of a postcard (somehow torn from history). And Kraftwerk keeps up the conflict of image and reality in the next two tracks, “Spiegelsaal” and “Schaufensterpuppen,” but the European center is a bit obscured.

As those two tracks demonstrate, though, this kind of human/(non-|anti-)human tension is present in lots of later Kraftwerk (“Die Roboter,” “Das Model”) to the point where the carnality of the heavy breathing in “Tour de France” jars the listener. But I’m getting ahead of myself.²

Travel and movement return to the center on the fourth, eponymous track of Trans-Europa Express. The rhythm chugs along like a steam engine, and the circling fourths sound like a train whistle. The band even uses a pitch bend to emulate the doppler effect of a train whizzing by. In any case, where “Europa endlos” is a bit paranoid lyrically, uncertain of how to manage reality and images, “Trans-Europa Express” crashes it all together into a European mishmash:

(Trans Europa Express)
Rendezvous auf den Champs-Élysées
Verlass Paris am Morgen mit dem TEE
In Wien sitzen wir im Nachtcafe
Direkt Verbindung TEE
Wir laufen ‘rein in Düsseldorf City
Und treffen Iggy Pop und David Bowie

That first couplet kills me every time, in its obliterated but unselfconscious mélange of French and German. It reveals the Franco-German axis that the utopian EU in Kraftwerk’s music rests on, but also sets a western edge for the utopia. No longer is Europe endless. The travel is endless, as TEE bounces from Paris to Vienna (the home of Franz Schubert, the namesake of the penultimate track of the album) and back.

But now it’s the travel itself and not the view that is banalized. Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf–it’s all the same. Hanging out with Bowie and Iggy is no different than waiting for a connection at a café. There’s a flattening going on here that’s enhanced by the sequenced nature of the music itself, feeling less composed/performed than simply programmed. And the variable control of programming is reflected lyrically, as Trans-Europa Express predates the internet in being a locale-sensitive object, translated into English and French.

The i18n of the album is a subtle move, since it’s transparent, just like an internationalized website. This is another approach to utopian flatness, as it’s anti-pluralistic. It takes for granted different linguistic approaches and adapts to them, without the listener being forced out of his or her comfort zone, so it doesn’t celebrate its availability. Unlike, say, a Stereolab album, where some songs are in French, some in English, and some in both, which keeps the pluralism central by reminding the listener of the polyglot nature of the project, this Kraftwerk album hides it. In Germany, you get the German version. In France, the French one. The lyrics can be understood by “all,” without extra work, thereby removing a cultural barrier for entry. If we compare a multi-versioned national anthem, like “O Canada,” its performance in public is self-consciously multi-lingual asynchronously.³ There is no flattening, there is no opening, no embracing done outside of a pluralism celebrating linguistic diversity. The linguistic diversity in “Trans-Europa Express” is toponymic (Paris and Champs-Élysées) and international (“Rendezvous” later matched by “treffen”). And the effect is clear.

My relationship that I’m drawing between rail and openness and flatness might not be entirely clear, so I’ll offer a visual aid. Kraftwerk are part of the donor pool that started the electronic popular music family tree, and it’s probably not a stretch to say that their influence can be felt in almost all electronic music today. Chrissy Murderbot, for example, recently put together a mix of songs that simply have direct lineage to Kraftwerk, in the form of samples and the like.⁴ But it’s sometimes easy to overlook that influence when listening to current music, and it was only seeing Michel Gondry‘s video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Star Guitar” that reminded me of the debt.

Consider capitalism. Near Place d'Italie.

Despite the numerous shots of endlessly reproduced polluting industrial parks, there’s a certain clean order to the video that works off the order of the programmed music. Gondry breaks up the patterns occasionally with natural images, but the plants are always planted, and the only non-human landscape, the mountain, is never reproduced with the music. But there’s a similarity (perhaps even a self-similarity) that Gondry creates. The “Star Guitar” video is the same as a Frenchman listening to “Trans-Europe Express” while a German listens to “Trans-Europa Express.” There’s local repetition (vocals, rhythms) and structure that’s reproduced on a larger scale (the localized albums, travelling on a train period).

And that similarity, then, is what I call flatness and openness above. The only way to run the EU is by flattening and opening it. Keeping every twist and nook in place leads to preening peacock moments from the like of Václav Klaus.

However, the problem with Trans-Europa Express is that it celebrates rail, and there’s something limited and not quite there in pursuing a banal, capitalist EU fantasy via rail travel. First, it’s determined. The track goes a certain way to a certain destination, usually on time. Second, it’s overdetermined, as the train becomes a bullet of positivism, and, at the same time, at least for me when I was younger, a bullet eager to puncture the German-Polish border in an act of war.

Can the automobile be equally flattening and opening? And can Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (I, II, III), which came two years before Trans-Europa Express, show a different way into how the band powers a banal fantasy of the EU? Well, of course. But how?

Even risking absurdity at over twenty minutes, “Autobahn” is kind of a brilliant song, so I need a few moments to bask in its glory. I’m not a historian of German music, or of Kraftwerk, but, from what I gather, “Autobahn” was surprising in that it was a postwar German-language song that wasn’t in the Schlager tradition. Further, its conceptual scope was very specifically post-war West Germany, that of high-speed interconnectivity by automobile.

If there’s a US analogue to the song, it might be the contemporaneous “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers, but the song itself, with its chorus, alludes to the fun, fun, fun car culture of the Beach Boys. The lyrics are as upbeat and full of promise as the (again) bouncing octaves of the Moog bass:

Wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn
Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal
Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl
Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band
Weisse Streifen, gruener Rand
Jetzt schalten wir ja das Radio an
Aus dem Lautsprecher klingt es dann:
Wir fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn

The car is rolling, rolling, rolling down the Autobahn, as a wide valley opens up below a shining sun. As with “Europa endlos,” nature is again reordered, but this time by late capitalism: the road is gray, the stripes are white, and our greenery is just the edge around the path forward. The passengers are called forward by the sounds they hear on the radio, which are the same sounds as they are creating by rolling down the Autobahn itself. The repitition of the railroad is now replaced by the feedback loop of listening to the same thing as one is creating.

Up, up, up to the sky!

But unlike the train, with its stops, Nachtcafes and meetings with Bowie, the feedback loop of the car emphasizes its being a closed system, a cell bopping down a vein. And this cell, unlike the train, has no fixed destination. Compare the lyrics. “Trans-Europa Express” gives us fixed cities with histories, but “Autobahn” points upward, to the future, like the UK cover of its album, based on the Autobahn sign.

Yet these cells move upward (or along) individually, like liberal subjects each transcending class at their own speed and their own time. The train, in contrast, even etymologically, is a puller. It pulls the people along with it, and these people all arrive at their destination at the same time (and it’s the same destination!). Oh, the places we’ll go once we liberalize this transportation metaphor!

It’s something of a cliché to discuss the dissolution of community that the automobile introduces. Lee Sandlin pretty much takes you everywhere you need to go, and whatever’s left over is vultured by Jonathan Richman and David Byrne, who says, as the narrator in True Stories, that “some” consider freeways the “cathedrals of our time,” a statement referring to the engineering prowess, public cost, and reverence with which the automobile has impressed itself on late 20th century society.⁵ There’s good and bad to it, but there’s also something rather American about it.

“Autobahn,” then, suggests a different path, but there’s more to it than just that it’s European (although that’s a large part of it). The car culture in the US is seen in parallel with the American Century’s apex after World War II. The fact that a car culture grew up in Europe at the same time, along similar axes, throws into doubt the exceptional Americanness of riding down the road on the interstate. Kraftwerk are being, as I mentioned, impishly allusive with their song, but they’re also making a bold, European statement by singing it in German. This is not “Fun, Fun, Fun,” after all, and those are German automobiles on the original cover of Autobahn. It’s a countermove, then. A reaction without the political overtones. Here is what late capitalism looks like in Europe: there are similarities, but the differences are important. Even so, the similarities get flattened out, TEE-style, at the end, as we’ll see.

But now I want to return quickly to human/(non-|anti-)human tension in the later Kraftwerk, captured clearly in Die Mensch-Maschine. Where I earlier praised Trans-Europa Express for being transparently multilingual (and, thereby, flat), Kraftwerk’s 1978 album announces its multi-lingual nature on the cover, which includes the album’s name in French and Russian in addition to English and German. Musically, “Die Roboter” features a bridge in Russian (in both the English and German versions).⁶ This bridge, “я — твой слуга; я — твой работник,” sets the stage for how the late Kraftwerk comes back to save the EU.

The bridge appears right before this verse:

Wir sind auf Alles programmiert
Und was du willst wird ausgeführt
Wir sind die Roboter

There’s a lot of coercion here. The robots are programmed to do everything, they explain, and that includes accomplishing whatever you wish. It’s alienating to watch that sung by humans, even humans pretending to be robots, but the Russian bridge further complicates the situation. A “слуга” is a servant. In the opening of the bridge, then, the speaker presents himself as your servant. A “работник,” on the other hand, is a worker. And despite its sharing an etymological root with “robot,” it is, importantly, not the Russian word for “robot,” which is, naturally, “робот.”⁷ So while Kraftwerk is playing a mechanical game of wilfull non-humanism in English and German, the Russian reasserts the non-mechanical nature of this source of labor. More clearly: what’s disposable mechanical labor in English and German is flesh-and-blood disposable labor in Russian. There’s a reading here that gifts a certain humanism to communism while critiquing its absence in capitalism, but I’ll put that aside. The point is that the listener cannot give over entirely to the fantasy of robots singing, so there must always be a certain unease over exploiting humans, over coercing them by convincing them that they’ve been programmed to fulfill your wishes.

The multi-lingual bridge also unsettles the flatness we had in Trans-Europa Express. The utopia of the EU we see going forward will look rather different. Kraftwerk are in the process of remastering and rereleasing their back catalog, and so doing has occasioned a new cover for Autobahn. The new cover is merely a more restrained version of the UK cover I included above. Gone, then, is the Mercedes and Volkswagen from the original German cover painting (gone, too, is the painting of the band). Instead, the cover is as sterile and as universal as the road sign it emulates. The German reaction to US car culture is replaced with a wider sense of a European car culture. After all, that sign is known all around the EU (but not in the US).

Let’s continue by watching a recent performance of “Autobahn”:

Note that the bandmembers have covered up their red shirts and dark pants, their servant uniforms, with bourgeois jackets. Class mobility! These are not robots singing and performing anymore, but, rather, people just like the happy families in their cars in the various pictures and film clips scrolling behind the band. The images, in fact, tell a story themselves, as they move from the irreality of the painted cover to historical footage of cars to modern images of traffic to stylized, idealized paintings of cars in the sky.⁸

“Autobahn,” then, reemerges as newly universalized in this, our Treaty of Lisbon Europe. It’s no longer a response to US car culture and a foundation of a European car culture. Now, instead, it’s an fantasy of the car as an amniotic sac moving cleanly through orderly, unified Europe, with national complaints and minority unrest brushed aside, or, at least, inaudible in the soundproofed chamber. The car becomes the delivery unit of hope and the future, as the closing image of the video, a smiling automobile, lets us know that we’re on the right path, even if we want to change it at any time. Nice and safe. And thus we have our banal anthem for the EU, an every nod to the late capitalism that got us to where we are, Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.”

1. In the English translation, the natural features are replaced by “Promenades and avenues,” which asserts a Haussmannian turn to the human reappropriation of nature that is somehow anti-utopian, in my reading. The change is apparently to set up the rhyme with “postcard views” in the next line, but it changes the dreamscape of the song brutally.
2. If one considers bicycling as the ultimate sport in terms of rendering the body to a machine, and with its reliance on cardiovascular measurement, a vehicle as a body extension, and pounding pace, it’s probably a good idea to do so, then Tour de France, despite claims made by Die Mensch-Maschine, might end up being the apex of Kraftwerk’s melding of human and machine.
3. When performing, as one can see on the live album Minimum-Maximum, Kraftwerk will mix languages, including a bravura performance of “Taschenrechner” in Japanese, recorded in Tokyo.
4. This video features my favorite recent appropriation of Kraftwerk.
5. A few minutes later into his freeway sketch, Byrne’s narrator promises to explain the difference between American and European cities, but adds that he’s forgotten it. It’s written down at home.
6. Kraftwerk keep up the multi-lingualism within the songs in later work. Sadly, the flat utopia of Trans-Europa Express does give way to some pluralistic gestures. At the same time, the work gets increasingly paranoid. But, then, these might be related responses to globalism.
7. “Работник” has etymological ties to “раб,” the Russian word for “serf,” as does the Czech source of the original word for machine robot.
8. A VW Beetle that seats five? This must be heaven!

In my earlier geospatial analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos, I decided that I was unsatisfied with my initial findings regarding the distribution of some data points within the United States.¹ This project attempts to refine the analysis, so that I may see if I can make bolder statements about how events in the text are distributed. To do this, I enhanced the “Average Nearest Neighbor” analysis built into ArcGIS and did a Monte Carlo simulation two different variables to see if I could get an expected value that was closer to the observed value that I get when running the analysis on my data.

The U.S.A. trilogy, published between 1930 and 1936, is astonishingly dense with geographical information. In addition to tracking the movements of 12 different characters across four different continents, the novels include news from around the world in the “Newsreel” sections, which are made up of pasted together snippets of newspapers from the first 30 years of the 20th Century, as well as biographical portraits of 27 different influential Americans, which includes spatial data. A simple random sample of 30 pages yielded an average of 2.7–6.6 geocodable observations per page, at 95% confidence.

For my analysis, however, I decided to focus on three thematically important sections: the “U. S. A.” section, which opens the trilogy in the form of a preface to the first novel, The 42nd Parallel; “The Body of an American,” which closes the second novel, 1919; and “Vag,” which closes the final novel of the trilogy, The Big Money. These three sections, though containing fewer than ten total pages, capture Dos Passos’s desire to create a work that captures the totality of the United States and include over 70 geocodable observations, of which 50 fall within the United States of the first three decades of the 20th Century (the time of the trilogy). At the end of the first section, in fact, he ends with a paragraph of statements about what the U.S. is, beginning with “U. S. A. is the slice of a continent.” Dos Passos, however, moves from the spatial to the linguistic by closing his list, and the section, with “But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people”:

U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.

An initial glance at the distribution on the map of the U.S. suggests that the points are dispersed rather widely. There seems to be some clustering near New York City, but otherwise the data is rather spread out. Zooming in on Manhattan, however, we can count three observations there, including two practically on top of each other—on opposite sides of Stuyvesant Square.

Points in the trilogy on the map. (click to enlarge)

A simple average nearest neighbor analysis of this data, however, gives a nearest neighbor ratio of .58 (114,000 m/196,000 m), for a Z score of -5.64. Despite what our eyes may suggest, this distribution shows intense clustering, with an immeasurably small p-value. The usual caveats about nearest neighbor analysis, however, apply, most notably edge effects.² Many of the points fall into metropolitan centers, which are often on the edge of the U.S., which shows a different problem.

The average nearest neighbor analysis compares the results of the dataset to a randomly distributed set of points, from which it calculates an “Expected mean distance.” But considering that my points correspond to Americans, who are not randomly distributed within the space of the U.S. (they tend to cluster in metropolitan areas and, especially in 1920, in the northeast), it makes sense that my results should show intense clustering. Might there be a way, then, I wondered, for me to change the expected mean distance and then measure my results against that?

I decided the answer would lie in weighting the distribution of the random points. If I could weight locations by their population in 1920, they would attract more points and create mini-clusters around New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles (cities in the largest counties of the time).³If I then ran this simulation a thousand times, it would create a dataset of expected mean distances that are more human-aware.

Downloading both state-level and county-level 1920 U.S. Census data from NHGIS, I started my simulations at the state level. For each state, I gave it a weight, the “Total White Population.” Weighted by this, I let the script pick a state 50 times—to correspond to the number of observations from the trilogy. Then I used ArcGIS’s “Create Random Points” function to place a point at random in each state that was chosen one of the 50 times. I then ran the average nearest neighbor analysis, recorded the observed mean distance, the expected mean distance, and the Z score. I repeated the simulation 1000 times. The results:

Nearest neighbor analysis on 1000 iterations of 50 points in the US. (click to enlarge)

                             Observed values (m)    Expected values (m)    Z score
Mean                                     182,000                196,000     -0.940
Std. Dev, (fraction of mean)      19,700 (0.108)         15,300 (0.078)       1.39
Median                                   183,000                198,100     -0.956

As we can see, on average, the points veered toward the clustered, but not significantly so. Perhaps, I reasoned, the states were simply too large an area in which to toss my random points. After all, most of my points from the U.S.A. trilogy are specific at the city level, so perhaps I should use smaller chunks of the U.S. population and toss my points at the county level. This time I used the Census’s “Total Population” data field and ran the simulation another 1000 times:

Nearest neighbor analysis on 1000 iterations of 50 points in the US. (click to enlarge)

                              Observed values (dd)    Expected values (dd)    Z score
Mean                                          1.70                    1.99      -1.91
Std. Dev, (fraction of mean)         0.214 (0.126)           0.178 (0.089)       1.49
Median                                        1.70                    2.01      -1.95

Using county-level population data, the clustering was much more intense, but still not significant at 95%. On average, the simulation gave a Z score of -1.91, just missing the threshold for 95% significance. Compare this result, again, to the -5.64 I received for the novel’s data. Also of note, however, are the larger standard deviations at the county-level, though I am not certain why that might be.

What these simulations give, however, are two sets of new expected values that I can compare to the data from U.S.A. That is, the “Observed values” above now become the “Expected values,” and I can calculate new Z scores for my trilogy’s data, based on these simulations:

Scale              Obs. U.S.A. Value    Exp. Value    Std. Dev.    New Z score
State-level                114,000 m     182,000 m       19,700          -3.45
County-level                 1.14 dd       1.70 dd        0.214         -2.616

The results are clear, although not astonishing: the trilogy’s points remain clustered, even in comparison to random points distributed with population weights, but they are far less clustered. And, more notably, the amount of clustering in comparison to the county level clustering almost pushes it outside of statistical significance.

Yet these results are still frustrating. A return to the novel’s data might serve useful here. Of the 50 points, three reference the Arlington National Cemetery, which means there are three points whose nearest neighbors are 0 away. That is intensely unlikely, even in a weighted distribution. Of the 50 points, eight are duplicates of some sort, which means that they, too, have nearest neighbors of 0. If I remove those from the stack and run the nearest neighbor analysis again with only 42 points, I get an observed value of 1.40 dd, which generates, using the same table above, a Z score of -1.40. In other words, with the duplicates removed, the points still trend toward the clustered, but they do not do so significantly at the 95% level. If I go one step further and remove one of the points referring to two places within Stuyvesant Square in New York City, the Z score falls to -1.21, getting increasingly more seemingly randomly distributed. Of course, there is a tradeoff to intentionally removing the duplicates: Dos Passos as a novelist consciously repeatedly referred to the Arlington National Cemetery (it is the focus of “The Body of an American”), but it is still interesting that he managed to create a distribution of points in these three sections that the computer suspects, when weighting for population distribution within the U.S., are randomly distributed.

There’s much more I could do with this analysis, including running the Create Random Points command with the matrix set to toss a number of points within each state and county that correspond to the states and counties mentioned (so each mention of the Cemetery would be scattered across all of Virginia, for example). I could then measure those results against the simulations. Furthermore, I could investigate the distributions created by my simulations and develop new scores for them that take into account the nature of their distributions (I did no tests to see how normal the distributions are). My suspicion is that this would only bring the Z score ever closer to 0, although I am not yet certain what the cost of that sort of analysis could be.

Alternatively, I could sample my 1000 iterations and run them through a more sophisticated bit of clustering software, like CrimeStat III. This would give me a sense of where the clusters of people are in the US (preliminary guess: NYC, Pennsylvania, New England, and the Rust Belt). I could then compare those second- and third-order clusters with the clusters I find with my data and see if there are deviations there (like, perhaps, the DC area is over-represented).

1. I showed that my points in question were more widely distributed than the population of the U.S., suggesting that Dos Passos encompassed a larger swath of the U.S. than one would have expected him to do if he was picking places to mention more attuned to the distribution of people within the U.S. in 1920.
2. Later in the analysis, I’ll address an even more remarkable effect, that of points on top of each other.
3. The script I used for weighted random choice I found on this Python discussion. I used David’s “compiling version of 2.”

1. Introduction / Why LaTeX?
2. Getting the software
3. Writing
4. Making a simple bibliography
5. Formatting, checking, and printing
6. What next?

1. Introduction / Why LaTeX?

If you are an English major or humanities student outside of Linguistics, you’ve probably never heard of LaTeX. There are tons of useful introductions and examples of its power (like this general pamphlet), but most of us don’t need to make graphs, complicated math equations, or anything else that makes LaTeX popular in the physical and social sciences.

LaTeX, simply put, is an “easier” way of writing in TeX. TeX is a way of generating super-precise, “professional” documents. But LaTeX itself is already rather complicated, so even more simplification is needed.

The use for humanities students presented by LaTeX is not obvious, since we typically write only words. Furthermore, a lot of the documentation about LaTeX immediately jumps into trumpeting its use for scientists (which prompts this post, of course!). But here are a few of my main reasons to use LaTeX:

Free and all over the place. Since LaTeX uses plain text files, nearly anything that makes text can be used as an environment in which to write. If Word is too slow on your machine, ditch it and use LaTeX. Constantly move between Windows, Mac, and other computers? LaTeX is cross-platform and compatible–and it has always been so.

Stable. The current version of LaTeX, LaTeX2e, came out over a decade ago, and it’s still running strong. There are no .doc/.docx problems in LaTeX like there are in Word, where new translators need to be installed, etc.

Intensely multi-lingual. LaTeX can handle hyphenation schemes for nearly any language, and typing text in various writing systems isn’t that tricky, either. This is in contrast to Word, which can’t even remember which keyboard layout it’s using from line to line (on the Mac). The extension to TeX, XeTeX, makes it even easier to write as a polyglot.

Keeps you organized and focused. LaTeX keeps track of references and the like for you, so all you have to do is focus on what the words say, not what they look like. By not being What-You-See-Is-What-You-(almost)-Get like Word, LaTeX separates the writing from the publishing, which lets you, the writer, focus on the the writing. That said, a term paper is a self-published affair, so this post is here to give the basics on publishing in LaTeX, of course!

CTAN, the main repository of TeX software, has a few other reasons in their short introduction to TeX, which you can (and should) read here. Additionally, this is a page that focuses on the specific aesthetic value of LaTeX. Finally, here’s a simple LaTeX vs. Word death match.

2. Getting the software

You can get a LaTeX distribution from CTAN, but I’m going to focus on writing on the Mac here, so for the mac, go ahead an download MacTeX (the Mac distribution of TeX-Live) and install it. It’s a huge download, but that’s since it pretty much puts everything you’d ever need to format any kind of documents into it.

3. Writing

The fundamental document in LaTeX is the .tex file. It is a simple text file. You can use any program you like that makes text files. TextEdit comes on every Mac. TextWrangler is a great text editor that is somehow available for free. Finally, MacTeX comes with a program, TeXShop, that lets you write .tex files in it. Eventually we’ll be using TeXShop anyway, so it’s not a terrible idea to do all your writing in it. Furthermore, TeXShop has a lot of shortcuts that let you insert the kinds of LaTeX commands we’ll be seeing later—so it’s worth considering using it as a primary editor. It really doesn’t matter which program you choose. You can even write in pico or vi on your terminal. Text is text.

Preamble

Now, to write a simple paper, it’s useful to use a package (the “MLA Package”) of styles and conventions already preprogrammed by Ryan Aycock. We’re not writing to specific MLA style guidelines, but what we’ll make will be close enough to satisfy your professor.

So at the top of your text document:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage{mla}

This is the beginning of the preamble, which tells LaTeX what conventions to use when formatting the document. As you can see from the first line, you are writing an article using 12pt text on letter-sized paper. The second line tells LaTeX that you will be using the MLA package. There are a few other packages (all installed by default in MacTeX) it would be prudent to declare here:

\usepackage{ifpdf}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

The first line is for pdfs (though see this comment below), the second lets you switch between single and double spacing, the third means that the text you are typing is Unicode text, and the fourth loads the English hyphenation, alphabetization, etc. rules via Babel. You can find more information on Unicode and Babel here, which also includes schemes by which you can write in East Asian languages.

To learn how to enable typing in any supported, non-English language on the Mac, read this document from Apple on enabling the input menu.

Still, let’s keep things simple for now. Luckily, you’re done with the preamble. You can save (let’s call it “essay.tex”), and then use this as the beginning of a template you reproduce over and over.

Title, name

Let’s now take care of the title stuff—all that stuff that goes before the body of the paper. Type:

\singlespacing
\begin{document}
\begin{mla}{your first name}{your last name}{Professor's name}{Class name}{\today}{Title of your cool paper}
\doublespacing

For the purposes of this exercise, let’s make up a paper:

\begin{mla}{Moacir P.}{de Sá Pereira}{W. Booth}{The 19th Century novel}{\today}{Being ``in want of a wife'' and Universal Sexualities}

Note a few things here right away: first, I typed the á instead of \'a, which is how normally in LaTeX one makes an “a” with an acute accent. Because I’m using the utf8 inputenc package, I can avoid those messy control sequences that litter older .tex files.

Next, note how I made the quotes. Instead of typing ", I typed ` (the “backtick” or the key just to the left of the “1″) twice and then ' twice to make the “6s” quotes and then the “9s” quotes. You can still use " instead, but it won’t look as nice. Word “automatically” changes ” to “ or ” depending on context, but sometimes you want the two ticks (like if you’re giving a measurement in inches). Furthermore, Word always messes up apostrophes in things like “Class of ’94.”

Finally, you’ll see the two lines regarding spacing. There are essentially two ways to invoke a command in LaTeX: \standalonecommand and \command{affected text}. The \standalonecommand means, “do this to the subsequent text until I stop it with a new command that changes this specific aspect.” So \singlespacing means “write in single space until I tell you to write in double space with \doublespacing.” The second format means, “do this command to all the text inside the {}.” We’ll see that that is how footnotes are made.

But basically, those are the three main things you need to know to start. Hit return twice (the way to signal “new paragraph”) in your text editor and start typing away!

Body

There are a few other quirks it is worth learning that Word has automated to the point where we don’t notice them. To make an em dash—this thing—type the hyphen key 3 times, not just twice. Typing it twice will produce the much shorter en dash (which is what you put between dates, like 1930 – 1940).

To italicize something, the easiest way is to just type \it. Then, when you’re done with the italics, type \rm to get back into Roman text. Alternatively, you can type \textit{} with the italicized text inside the {}. As for footnotes, type them inside braces of a \footnote{}. No numbering, no wasting time grabbing the mouse, going to the menu, choosing “Insert Footnote,” and clicking “OK.” Add the footnote as you type.

Bolding, striking through, etc., are all also easily done, but there are nearly no instances where, in writing a term paper for an English class, you would need any of those techniques.

So let’s add to the example with a paragraph from a paper and include italics and a footnote:

The opening lines of \textit{Pride \& Predjudice} are so often quoted that they have become almost a cliché.\footnote{Famouson even wrote that ``No article in the popular press about Jane Austen can manage to begin other than with a variation on `It is a truth universally acknowledged.'\ ''} Yet rarely are the first two full paragraphs of \it Pride \& Predjudice \rm considered, with what they might indicate for the role of the universal, essential ideal of a heteronormative sexuality.

You can see another thing I did here in the footnote: when presented with the single-quote and double-quote right next to each other, I put in a “\ ” (backslash-space) to signal “single close quote first, double close quote second.” Then you can also see that I italicized the title of the novel Pride & Prejudice in two different ways. The ampersand requires a \ before it since it is one of the “special characters” in LaTeX.

There are a few other quirks about typing in LaTeX that are covered in this swell introduction. The whole short document is worth a read!

The only other three things you will run into when writing a basic paper like this are periods that are abbreviations, blockquotes, and verse quotes. LaTeX automatically makes a slightly larger space after a period, assuming that a new sentence is starting. If the period is merely for an abbreviation, you need to use either \thinspace or \. to tell LaTeX how to react to whatever comes after the period.

So “Johnny, Billy, Mr. Jones, etc.—they were all here” in LaTeX is:

Johnny, Billy, Mr.\thinspace Jones, etc\.---they were all here.

This is pretty messy, I’ll grant. Luckily, it does not come up that often.

Further, blockquotes and verse quotes are super easy. To make them, simply tell LaTeX that you want to move to single-space mode, then put the quotation in a \begin{} ... \end{} environment. Yet also don’t forget that there is no indent after the block quote, so, continuing my fake paper:

Before moving too deeply into the subtleties of the text, it is useful to review the opening two paragraphs in full:

\singlespacing
\begin{quotation}
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
\end{quotation}

\doublespacing
\noindent As we can see, there is far more to be discussed regarding the universality of heterosexual marriage instead of the universality of truth…

For verse, you do the same, but the poem lies within a \begin{verse} ... \end{verse} environment, and line breaks are marked with a \\. So:

\singlespacing
\begin{verse}
N\textsc{ATURE} rarer uses yellow\\
Than another hue;\\
Saves she all of that for sunsets,—\\
Prodigal of blue,\\
\ \\
Spending scarlet like a woman,\\
Yellow she affords\\
Only scantly and selectly,\\
Like a lover’s words.
\end{verse}


I know this seems like a ton, but one gets used to it really quickly, I promise!

4. Making a simple bibliography

The MLA package for LaTeX includes a section for making a list of references. In seminar papers or dissertation chapters, it makes sense to use an external bilbiographic manager like BibTeX, which can generate nearly any sort of bibliography imaginable. But for a ten-pager, a hand written bibliography is plenty. You call it in the package like this:

\begin{workscited}
\bibent
Austen, Jane. \textit{Pride \& Prejudice}. New York: Grosset \& Dunlap, 1931.

\bibent
Dickinson, Emily. \textit{The Complete Poems}. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924.

\end{workscited}

5. Formatting, checking, and printing

Now you just need to finish the document by closing the remaining two \begin{}s:

\end{mla}
\end{document}


And that’s it. The .tex file is finished. Now you have to LaTeX it. If you’ve been writing in TeXShop, you’re ahead of the game. If not, open the .tex file in TeXShop now. It should look like the image here (click to enlarge).

If it does, then you’re in great shape, since the next step is simply clicking the “Typeset” button in the top left of the TexShop window. A Console window will popup, showing you the output of the LaTeXing. If you made mistakes, LaTeX would bug you here, but you should not be writing anything that complicated. Also, often just hitting return will make the error go away.

In the meantime, LaTeX will also be creating all sorts of extra files, like example.aux. You can delete all of them when you’re done. The only files that are ever important are the .tex file (that starts the process) and the .pdf file (the conclusion of the process).

So assuming everything is ok, after a few seconds, a third window will open: the pdf of the completed paper. Here is my pdf.

6. What next?

What I’ve covered here is, of course, just the basics. Though these basics should take an English Literature student through all her coursework up to writing her dissertation proposal. Anyone who wants to do anything more complicated should, first, read the Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. In it, you can learn about the more advanced math, image, and book-length project options that LaTeX has to offer.

In fact, the more complicated your project gets, the more it makes sense to use LaTeX. This is why I encourage people to start getting used to it at the simple, term paper level. So when it’s dissertation writing time, you’ll already have the basics down and aren’t stressing over how to make double quotes.

If you’re ready to spend money on LaTeX, the best book on it is written by the person who wrote the program, Leslie Lamport. Latex: A Document Preparation System is pretty expensive (not, however, on AbeBooks), but it’ll answer nearly any question you’ll ever have. If you want to make sure that every question you ever have is answered, then you’ll need the LaTeX Companion, which, sadly, no longer has a St. Bernard on the cover.

Then, you can go to CTAN and just mess around. Look at the hundreds of different packages or document classes. Pretty soon, you’ll be writing your résumé or CV in LaTeX (as I did), or even personal and business letters. Plus, LaTeX is maintained by a huge bunch of geeky people who love it dearly, and they’re always willing to help neophytes get their LaTeX-legs.

Finally, there’s Google, which is where I found this nifty way to make superscripts. Also, on google, I learned that in order to get both Russian (Cyrillic) and Roman characters to appear, you need to use the fontenc package to declare the T2A fonts, for example:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage{ifpdf}
\usepackage{mla}
\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\singlespacing
\begin{document}
\begin{mla}{Moacir P.}{de S\'{a} Pereira}{}{}{\today}{``Oсмеивают, чтобы забыть'': Comedy and Memory in Bakhtin}

\doublespacing
In his essay, “Эпос и роман,” Bakhtin distinguishes…

\end{mla}
\end{document}

Happy TeXing!!!

Getting ready for Turkey Dance, I made a mix CD of songs I thought would be successful or at least interesting on the dance floor. The songs were more or less grouped by genre, and I noted the genre beside each group. The penultimate group was the synth dance pop group (hi, Annie!), and the last song was “Michael,” all by itself. For genre, I wrote, “Crypto-Queer Abercrombie Rock Anthem.”

The first time I heard the song, I was completely struck by the lyrical content—not, like, shocked, but startled. It was just so brazen, so obvious, and I really liked that Franz Ferdinand, whose members’ sexualities I didn’t know or particularly care about, had the balls to make one of the best songs of the album such a frankly gay track. Or maybe they didn’t need balls. Maybe it’s not that big a deal to have guys singing about wanting to dance with guys and stuff.

Then I saw the rather ambiguous video for the song. Franz Ferdinand have the early-80s/late-Weimar aesthetic down perfectly (well, that may be slightly redundant; I wonder how much all early-80s fashion was indebtted to Weimar Germany), and it returns in this video, in which the ambiguity is foregrounded by the degree to which everyone there is so weirdly uncomfortable about the whole thing, or at least that’s how I read all the copious personal space on the dance floor. Yet there’s still space for misreading. Here’s everyone, and the gaze is going strong, and then the object of the gaze starts dancing with everyone else, and then they all stop, and he’s, what, arrested? He’s grabbed, but violently, and what could be understood as an instant setup for some sort of sexual violence, instead becomes totally unclear—like readings of the video, the image itself fractures into two different directions after that grab, before collapsing into a flury of superimposed images.

The point here is that the lyrics are not at all ambiguous. The song is not at all ambiguous about being awesome. But the video is a little. And the fact that the song can be so unambiguous means that I must imagine that there was some sort of editorial crisis over Franz Ferdinand’s growing popularity. What I mean here is that whenever “Michael” is mentioned, it’s always not too far from a sentence swearing—swearing—that the lads in Franz Ferdinand are all straight. I think it was in Spin that I read Alex Kapranos’s insisting that the song is about something between underlying sexual tension to homosociality (like, you know, Top Gun), and being a fantasy piece about being, actually, a guy seriously lusting after another guy at a club. This may be, of course, my own overreading of what Kapranos said… But anyway,

No other song was given space in the article to be “explained.”

In the meantime, I’m liking “Michael” more and more—I’m starting to like it and “Darts of Pleasure” more than even “Take Me Out,” which I onced liked a lot. And I’m getting more and more excited about its totally bizarro subversive sensibility. Who knew that the best way to get a song hot like this out there would be to have Franz Ferdinand write it? So it goes on the Turkey Dance CD. I tell Sandy on the drive to the ‘burbs, as the song comes on, that if this song gets played, the house will come down. All the guys will get weirded out, since they’re idiots, and the girls will flip.

It so happened that my CD was the filler CD for the first hour of the dance, then. And, yes, “Michael” got dropped. And, yes, it was maybe the most popular song of the night (ahem). The girls (and, yes, they were all girls—teenagers) clapped their hands and had a riotous time. The DJ followed up with a Doors song, I think, and the dance didn’t recover, from what I could tell. I felt some small level of vindication, and thought that was that.

On Saturday, then, I’m talking about the song with two friends, and I call it “maybe the best crypto-queer anthem ever.” They look at me like I’m from Mars. “It’s not a gay song,” they tell me. “Franz Ferdinand are straight.” OK, I respond. I know that. But, still. “No,” they insist. “It’s not gay.” I’m starting to be sort of mind-boggled here. If my iPod had not been smashed by a car door, I would have immediately told them how foolish they were by playing the song. Lyrics like “Michael, you’re the boy with all the leather hips, / Sticky hair, sticky hips, stubble on my sticky lips” and they still insist no?

“Didn’t you see Euro-Trip?” one finally asks. “I heard in Europe, Michael is a name used for girls.”

The above-quoted line I couldn’t remember off the top of my head, so I just stuck to the one I could remember (“This is what I am, I am a man / So come and dance with me Michael / So strong now, its strong now / So come and dance with me Michael”), which wasn’t making the case well enough. They insisted on this “In Europe, ‘Michael’ is a girl’s name,” despite the lyrical evidence, despite the interviews, despite the fact that Kapranos is from Scotland, where Michael is most certainly only a boy’s name. They also insisted that it’s spelled “Michel” when it’s for a girl. This is, of course, “Michael” in French. When the French want “Michel” to be a girl’s name, it becomes “Michelle.”

Finally, the payoff came. I explained that no matter what, it was maybe the best song on the album. The guy (it was a guy and girl talking to me) then agreed, but added the caveat that it would be better if it were about a girl.

Luckily, I was destroyed enough not to immediately start yelling at the guy, but the politics here are, of course, covert and problematic. “Michael” is such a threatening song, apparently, that people will invent complete, wilful fabrications about onomastic conventions in Europe to justify its heteronormativity. Who the hell, upon listening to the song, thinks it’s about a girl in Europe? How is that even possible, unless you are really, really threatened by homosexuality?

Is the threat, maybe, that Franz Ferdinand have no problem about playing gay for the sake of the song (while always, of course, insisting, still, that they’re straight–and Kapranos’s camera-equipped mouth only kisses ostensibly female lips in the “Darts of Pleasure” video)? That, unlike regular straight guys, who should be out thanking god every day that they were born straight, Franz Ferdinand is willing to appreciate / understand / imagine / play in the lusty position of a gay dance club? Maybe. It might just be the bigger threat here.

Kapranos et al. aren’t totally faultless here, either. I’ve read one interiew where he, borrowing a page from T.A.T.U. (a group I fell on my sword defending…), just ambiguously explains away the song by saying it’s all just fantasy. All the questions, though, seem to suggest that some sort of better nuanced position is needed. I just don’t know what that could be without being patronising.

So on the subject of questions, why have I not read a single interview talking about the assassination motif in “Take Me Out”? No one cares about the pretty fucked up lyrics to that song—but “Michael”—that everyone is ready to explain.

The song was “Heartbeat,” by Norwegian disco diva Annie, off her recently released album Anniemal. And Pete was right, it built my camp. But he was more right than he knew.

I liked the song enough, though I felt the bass presence was a little soft, so I went and hunted down the rest of the album (not available in the US). And, well, the album is, simply, fantastic. It maybe hits on just about all of my dance-pop fetishes, veering from deep house to cheery pop—as a poster wrote on Barbelith, it’s a lot like Saint Etienne “back when they were exciting” (though I, of course, still find Saint Etienne interesting).

The first single, and what’s apparently the song all the kids are initially going crazy over (I already had the album, so this track didn’t jump out at me as well as others, but let’s pause on that), is “Chewing Gum,” which even has a weird/cute video, if you don’t mind the WM-needed proprietariness about it. I’m still not sure what the song is going for, but, lyrically, it seems to be a conversation between two women (both portrayed by Annie in the video) about how to get good guys without having to offer a commitment. Kind of a weird topic for a pop song to address, right? Still (my transcription, far better than this one):

Hey, Annie, well look at you,
Is that a new boy stuck on your shoe?
C’mon Annie, how is it so?
You’ve always got a new bubble to blow. (!)

I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna get done:
I’m just a girl that’s all (?) chewing for fun.
You spit it up when all the flavour has gone,
Wrapping around your finger like you’re playing with gum. (?)

Oh no, oh no,
You’ve got it all wrong;
You think you’re chocolate,
When you’re chewing gum!

Oh no, oh no,
A slip of the tongue. (later: No, you’re not the one.)
You think you’re chocolate,
But you’re chewing gum!

Annie veers into some serious ancestor acknowledgment later in the song when she channels former Page 3 girl Samantha Fox by coquettishly intoning, “I don’t want to settle down, I just wanna have fun. I don’t want to settle down, I just wanna chew gum.” The general production also calls to mind the Fox era, as there doesn’t seem to be anything resembling a real drum on this track—instead, the rhythm is carried by sweeps and a bouncing keyboard bass. Yes, though, the song does not lack for a cowbell.

Is “Chewing Gum” “obviously the great lost number 1 single of 2004,” as it’s called on Barbelith? I’m not sure. The video is slowly growing more addictive, however, and one of the lines in the last verse sounds like “I’m hooked up to a Turing machine,” but what gets me is that though the song is a good way to start the album, it’s not at all the strongest track on the album.

Before hopping ahead, though, I wanted to mention other strong results. “Heartbeat,” as mentioned, is a great, deep house classic to be, with a pedal eighth note bass part in the intro, before the real(-sounding) drums carry the rest of the song. “Don’t know your name, making me feel ashamed to feel the way that I do,” is also a great line. There is, however, an overwhelming sense of optimism about this “meet the hottie on the dancefloor” track that pushes aside the melancholic production.

Melancholy covers the oldest song on the album, the some four-year-old “The Greatest Hit,” which was produced by Annie’s partner, who died soon after the song was released, from the scuttlebutt I could pull from the internet. It samples Madonna’s “Everybody,” but sharpens the staccato keyboard flourishes to give an edge most recently seen, I suppose, in the Coup’s “Five Million Ways to Kill a CEO”—the flourish is what I call the “Bop Gun” flourish, since it sounds like the laser used by Star Child in the Parliament song of the same title. It’s fun to be told that “The Greatest Hit” is four years old, since you can sort of hear it. The skips in the polyrhythm as well as the flanged parts recall another disco anthem from the era, Spiller’s “Groovejet.” But in being dependent on a Madonna hook from 1983, it’s a lot less out-and-out disco than the Spiller track.

“The Greatest Hit” is followed by the longest song on the album, “Come Together,” which opens with 1:40 of Annie singing in her ethereal (yes overused but appropriate), breathy voice over an empty chill section. After announcing the the title of the song, the track collapses into an electric piano–fueled vamp which has contemporary comparisons in, um, Fiji Mariners, and, um, Jamiroquai, but which sounds more simply like early adult Stevie Wonder, except, you know, house. Still, listening to the track is a lot of fun, since if it wasn’t recorded with a live band, it sure as hell sounds like it. The drum track keeps shifting, and there are many different fills employed throughout. It’s great fun and keeps you guessing, and, well, I sort of like to imagine that it’s what the Allman Brothers would sound like if they started now and, like, Duane was reincarnated as a chanteuse, leaving Gregg to drive the sound from the keyboards. And boy is it driven.

Other tracks hit the general wide swath of pop sensibility from various directions. “No Easy Love” is a sleazy, slippery bit with a guitar part ripped right out of Chic, but with a filtered bass more ripped right out of an ass (ouch). “Anniemal” is a silly, Erasure-esque (note the arpeggiated keyboard in the back providing the high end) bit that sounds like early Saint Etienne. “Helpless for Love” starts out whatever but picks up electro steam before toppling over its hurried, tumbling chorus. If Anniemal suffers, it’s from withholding on deadly bass parts too late–40 seconds is sort of pushing it, kids. “Always too Late” sounds too much like “Human Behaviour” out the door for me to get really into the whirrs and clicks that provide most of the actual meat of the song. Here, the vocal part is almost a little too rushed. The effect is of a song that’s way too fucking dark to be track three.

But I’m done horsing around. The best song on the album, and a current contender for “perfect pop song” is the fourth track, “Me Plus One.” Enthusiastic but Mediocre beat me to the punch on a lot of the fine points of the song, but I’ll re-echo them here. The song seems to be a sort of apotheosis of the tried and true formula of, when in doubt, writing a song about being (or trying to be) a pop-star. I never read “me plus one” as an invitation to a threesome, as Edward does, but I do see it as tied into the comp scene of networking in the biz. Annie offers to sing us a song about a girl she used to know, but the chorus jumps into the first person (again, my transcription):

This is B,
This is E,
This is A-U-T,
This is I,
This is F-U-L.
I’m gonna reach the top,
I ain’t ever gonna stop,
And I’m sure gonna ring your bell. [bell rings]
This is D,
This is I,
This is F-F-I,
This is C,
This is U-L-T.
If ever there’s a girl that can rock your world,
Then that I’m sure is me. (?)
Right!

Yes, that spelling beats out Len’s “I was lying on the bench slide in the park across the street / L-A-T-E-R that week” from “Steal My Sunshine” as cutest instance of spelling in a song, ever. But the track as whole is much, much more than a great chorus (the rest of which is too rushed for me to properly transcribe, and the internet ain’t helping). Sure, it’s “Kylie Times Ten,” but isn’t that, well, kind of a good thing? And, yes, the echoes of “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” are there, as others have noted, but it’s got a lighter feel to it that robs it of the certain overdone seriousness (the deep chorus, namely) I get from the Human League hit.

In any case, I really don’t want to say much more about this song other than that I listened to it over 20 times over the weekend. It’s absolutely fantastic. I’m bordering on demanding its getting dropped at Turkey Dance, and it’s damn, damn near guaranteed you’ll be getting this song on a CD if I like you and make you a CD any time soon.

I wish I could say more about the production of the album, but that’s not really my forte. I can just say that Anniemal is a ton of fun, and I can’t wait to buy it stateside. For how much I liked Fever, only a few tracks remained dear to me. Here we have a pile of instant classics, with maybe only two or three totally dismissable tracks. That’s some sort of serious effort there on behalf of Annie’s producers. I think the main difference is that Fever had fantastic dance tracks, but the generic pop tracks were kind of too canned and weak (oh, god, the intro to “Give It to Me” still hurts). Here it’s all strong. “Me Plus One” and “Chewing Gum” can be dropped on the floor with no trouble, but they’re not as murderous as “Heartbeat” or “The Greatest Hit.”

Yes, this is the best thing to come from Norway since First Band on the Moon. I Have Spoken.

It was impossible to avoid Phish if you went to a boarding school in the early 1990s, though I tried very hard, unsuccessfully. Any school where “Cavern” gets played routinely at dances will force you to like Phish. But I really only started listening to Phish Senior Year because my band (T-Bone Shuffle) (or, rather, the band I was in… that band was never mine) was playing Phish songs. We played “Runaway Jim” (a mixolydian classic with the great lyric: “Jim came home when he was 17 / That’s 119 to you and me”), “Horn” (with a chord progression so opaque that I taped it to the neck of my bass), “Sample in a Jar” (featuring my awful backing vocals), and “Divided Sky.” We actually never played “Divided Sky” live, but made the mistake of asserting in public that it would be our calling card song. We had no idea what the band was doing during the palindrome section right after the opening. We knew there were whole tones, but that was it. It’s truly sad, because we nailed the rest of the song pretty damned well, crazy meter changes and all. It also taught me to nail a low A perfectly with my voice.

Anyway, so I started listening to the band. Next thing I knew, I had bought Lawn Boy and was listening to “Run Like an Antelope” 20 times a day (on loop). Elliott even remarked at my acquiescence to boarding school normativity. So what was the deal? They were quirky and inventive, which I still prize highly. The music was formally rather complex (no one can listen to Junta or Lawn Boy and disagree), and, what totally blew my mind, they improvised! Next thing you know, I’m collecting tapes, etc.

After graduation, I had a mini reunion with my friends at Great Woods at a Phish show. It was great. I bought a t-shirt. A t-shirt which is obvious in my driver’s licence. It’s hilarious. But that same summer, I was introduced to the internet, which I used explicitly for phish-related stuff. I immediately signed up to the Phish.net (ah, back when I had an aol address). I made silly/stupid posts about reading Joyce into Phish songs. I arranged for trades of tapes. I printed out the whole of the Helping Phriendly Book back when it was just a text file and not a web page. I posed for my college facebook photo with my Phish cap (that is, sadly, now very probably lost). Here at school, I immediately tried to befriend like the two other Phish fans on campus. I also started ircing with Phish fans around the US. That led to trouble.

My second year, because the Halloween show was in Chicago, I even went on a mini-tour through Michigan and Kentucky to lead up to the show. I can’t believe it anymore, either. I met lots of friends from #phish face to face, and we had a ball. The following summer, I hit a few shows, but I was already starting to get sick of the scene. That was the post-Jerry’s death summer, and the scene was just too full of scrubby wookiees. It wasn’t as fun as the fall shows. I bought tickets for the next summer tour, but got lawn seats, so I sold ‘em to irc friends. There was no reason to go through the effort of arranging a ride, etc. to Deer Creek or Alpine Valley just to sit in the lawn. Hell, when I couldn’t arrange a ride to the New World Order Music Theater, I just ate the cost of the ticket. Then, many years later, Pete tore the souvenir of an unused Phish ticket.

By 1998, I was getting shut out of shows I lined up to buy tickets for, and I decided that Phish wasn’t worth the effort.

So community participated to a bit of my loss of interest in Phish. No one on campus liked them, and, in fact, my liking them was rather typically mocked. It was hard to live off the internet for a sense of community. But I was also worn down by the band itself. After Trey released the Surrender to the Air album, I was expecting the band to get more experimental, not less. The albums started getting worse and worse, and the tapes I was hearing were pretty boring. Phish got into this pornofunk thing that just seemed really dull.

Plus, I started getting grossed out by some of the personal behavior of members of the band.

I’ve still maintained a lot of connections with my friends from the good old phish.net days (though less so with my irc friends). I still listen to shows occasionally. And now, with the advent of the BitTorrent page at etree.org, I’ve started downloading lots of shows I’d wanted for a decade–like those 1990s shows where Phish would play jazz astandards. Also, if there are enough seeds and the setlist looks interesting enough, I’ll pull down a late 1990s show–but they’ve been mostly let downs. Sure, occasionally there’ll be a monster 12-minute “Taste” or something equally grand, but on the whole, it’s mostly well-worn, and the new songs couldn’t pick up the slack. I think that rather certainly I can say that the last inventive album was Billy Breathes, which is hilarious because of how derided it was when it came out (at least among Phish die-hards).

That said, the Hampton Comes Alive cd set is pretty fun and rather worth it, as it features few new songs, but among them is “Piper,” which I once asserted was the only good song Phish had written since the pile of songs that they débuted in fall of 1995 (and what would later make up Billy Breathes). The joke, of course, is that “Piper” is barely a song–more just a theme. But it, like the Dead’s “Slipknot!,” works well as a transitional song.

So Phish is breaking up, to finish up. That’s too bad, but I’m rather over it. If Trey thinks that he will have more fun playing tiny venues and dropping boring-ass songs on listeners, then more power to him. From my secret sources, the rest of the band is taking the news rather well. But when they say that they’re leaving at the top of their game, I encourage people to be a little skeptical. Who knows–maybe this summer run will be absolutely balls to the wall. It’s possible. But I suspect the band, as it got older and more popular, lost a lot of the quirky spunk they had nine, ten years ago. Oh well. The same will probably be said about me in 2014.

In any case, here are my lifetime Phish Statistics (sadly knocked out of whack by seeing the Quadrophenia set), from Zzyzx’s PhishStats page:

.: I have listened to “Such Great Hights” and “Nothing Better” at least 20 times apiece in the past 48 hours. I know this since iTunes tells me it is so.

This doesn’t mean that Give Up is a good album. It’s just ok. Nothing that special. But these two songs are, well, catchy–and in ways the rest of the album isn’t. This starts with the fact that I can’t tell if Ben Gibbard’s elocution (he’s the Jeff Gordon of indie supergroups?) is refreshing or annoying. Sure, it’s nice to know what the fellow is singing, but if the lyrics aren’t actually that good, it sure as hell shows (see, for the opposite effect, “Louie Louie” or anything off A Rush of Blood to the Head. COUNT IT!). “Such Great Hights” sure has a great opening verse, but the close of the song is boring and not as sweet/cute. Luckily, on that track, the music keeps it afloat.

The first thing I noticed about “Nothing Better” was that it reminded me of “Don’t You Want Me?” Now that I see that All Music noticed the same thing, I don’t feel as cool. But as that track is one of my canonical “fav. songs of my youth”-type songs, I feel that I can say that I came up with the comparison on my own. Not that it’s that cool a thing to notice. Recognising the sample in Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” as the bridge in Andrea True Connection’s “More, More, More” was much cooler, I think.

Anyway, the introduction of the female vocals is probably the closest thing we have to a flash of brilliance on the album. And it’s really good. And, for full disclosure, yes, I did have a girl dump me once with a prepared statement she brought over and read for me. I bet she likes the Postal Service. If y’all want a deeper reading on the lyrics of the song, just let me know and the bombs can get dropped. For now, I’m just going to stick to “wow, they do that part really well. Maybe even better than Human League.”

And, to give some symmetry, Franz Ferdinand is borderlining some kind of possible leap making. I’ve listened to “Take Me Out” enough times to sort of eagerly want to know other songs totally by heart. Right now, I’m working on, I think, “Auf Achse.” Is that the one with the flanged break?

I wrote that the Flaming Lips are masters of the sound, and that’s still true. I think that they mic their drums to get maybe a bit of reverb or echo to them. Generally, the Lips have a really big sound on Yoshimi that’s maybe best shown by the echo on the two acoustic guitars and strings on “Do You Realize??” But you can also see it all over the album. The drums are flanged in “Approaching Pavonis…” to give a sense of space and size that the guitar can try to fill in (though it’s more the hum of the bass that fills in the holes present in
the expanding sound). Still, the size on this track comes in mostly with the introduction of the trumpet. The reverb is almost ludicrous. But the sound on Yoshimi (and maybe I’m channelling Andrew here…) is too processed to really get the “big” sound right, at least from the drums. This may be, in part, because many tracks don’t have proper, live drums. Or if they do, it sure doesn’t sound the part. The Soft Bulletin, however, gives a much better sense of size. Right at the start, the album opens whole and reverbed into the sky. But here you get the giant drums. Look at the bass and drum intros on “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton,” “Buggin’,” or, maybe most notably, on “What Is the Light?” The drums sound like they’re being played in an echo chamber. And it’s a cool sound. Or listen to the kick bass under the first verse of “The Spiderbite Song.” The reverb gives a size that is really majestic but in an engulfing way. You get lost in the echo, perhaps.

Maybe if I were a drummer, I could explain this better. But what something like “Buggin’” shows is that it’s not just the reverb, which is why I felt the need to say that it’s a big sound. And I think that the crucial addition is the use of the cymbals. In “Buggin’,” there’s always a cymbal ringing–one of the crash cymbals is being hit on practically every beat. “What Is the Light?” incoporates instead the kind of open beat commonly associated with hip-hop (“Paid in Full” is a great example). I tried to rebuild the “Paid in Full” rhythm in ReBirth, with reasonable success, but I couldn’t quite get the hi-hat to sound right. Perhaps that’s, then, why it doesn’t sound big, either.

Is big-sounding related to maybe specifically egregious hi-hat use? Perhaps. But “Paid in Full” doesn’t sound as big as, say, “What Is the Light?” Also, other songs on this mix with big-sounding drums include Café Tacuba’s “Mediodí

I’ve sort of suspected this (that rock sucks) for a long time. Save occasional sexplosions aimed at Iceland, I think I haven’t really downloaded or bought any good rock albums in the last two years. Actually, I can pretty much tell you here the four bands whom I would consider “rock” whose music I’ve consumed in a large quantity exclusively over the past two years: Sigur Rós, Super Furry Animals, Coldplay, and the Flaming Lips. That is, I think, it. Those are the only rock bands I’ve been introduced to in the past 24 months whom I like at all–or at least enough to buy albums of. Maybe, if we’re charitable, we can throw in bands like Biplan or die toten Hosen, but I think not–since it’s only America I care about, and neither of those bands have penetrated the US at all (sadly).

But now compare that to hip-hop, which is almost all new artists. OutKast? Didn’t particularly care for them pre-Stankonia. Missy? You’re a new find. Same goes for Jay-Z, Redman, the Coup, Justin Timberlake, Nelly, 50 Cent, Li’l Kim, Ludacris–the list is long and starts to get rather undistinguished, but the point remains: one can’t hope to like both new and interesting music and ignore hip-hop. If that’s the case, then one has to be sacrificed–either new or interesting.

This perspective is kind of important today because I’m still now reeling from the DJ debacle I’ve faced twice in the past week. First, there was a small gathering at the 1900 Club last Saturday. No big deal. But the music was damn near unlistenable. Now, I like my friends, and they like me too and have no problems calling me a music snob, but, seriously–I can only listen to so much Social D. Or U2. But underneath it all is a level of stagnation. It seems like my friends are not really getting into any new music at all (as in, finding simply unheard music–not necessarily recently-made music). In one example, a friend of mine, having bought the soundtrack to a movie with rather eclectic taste in music, asked me to download other songs by artists on the soundtrack–which was pretty tricky. So that counts, sort of. But it’s all regressive–they’re getting into music that predates them (Sinatra) or into music that they’re maybe too old for (Ween).

What made the situation funnier was that there was a crowd of younger people there–people who’ve grown up with hip-hop accepted in a mainstream way. (white people my age–and this is a very fine line that I think I’m just (by virtue of age, not opinion) on the reactionary side of–tend, I guess, not to like hip-hop in ways that people just three years younger wouldn’t understand. We sort of “grew out” of it, maybe, once the excitment of listening to dubbed copies of “Straight Outta Compton” got old. But, then again, we were in high school during the last gasp of rock, grunge. My friends who were in middle school at the apex of Nirvana needed their own rebel music in high school–and hip-hop probably was more than willing to play that role in contrast to the impotence of late-90s rock.)

So anyway, the younger people wanted to shake their booties (I’m conflating actual, real life events here a bit), but there was simply nothing in the iTunes liberry to satisfy. They wanted “Rock Your Body;” they wanted more Pharrell. My friends just had “Hey Ya!”

The same happened in reverse on New Year’s Eve, which I was supposed to “dj.” My music ran deep in the realms of contemporary hip-hop (well, not that deep, but deep enough) and french house. Neither were enjoyed. I guess I should have known better, but I’m bored with playing the same songs at dances that I played when I was 13. It’s not interesting, you can’t dance to it as well, and it’s really just, well, dumb. “Groove Is in the Heart” was a great song (and still is, actually), but I don’t know that that means I have to pack World Clique in my CaseLogic en route to a dance.

And that, I think, is the real problem. Salon isn’t being particularly groundbreaking here, as Thomas Bartlett demonstrates by using Grammy nominations as some sort of cultural touchstone. But what it is pointing out is that thin line I suggest above–the sort of simple historical fact that (white) people born before a certain date (let’s say 1979) have to do extra cultural work to really get into hip-hop, simply because when they first began to imagine themselves as discriminating cultural consumers, hip-hop was not good enough (or available enough) to provide a coherent field of cultural distinction. It would not surprise me at all to find out that Bartlett is my age or older, because of how he writes.

Take me as an example. I was born in 1976. I trace my discriminating taste to about 1987, which was when I started listening to music on my own. I had a deeply-felt relationship with pop for a while, before sort of walking away to listen to 95.5 WBRU–the cutting edge of rock. But the point is, what kind of options did I have for discriminating my taste? The pop was legitimately terrible (think MC Hammer, BBD, Bobby Brown, Hair Metal), and college rock was probably at its apex of quality (Daydream Nation had just come out, for example). Why would I turn to hip-hop? And what kind of hip-hop would it have been?

Now let’s take my friends who are four years younger. They were 11 in 1991. By the time they graduated from high school, in 1998, rock was already brutally stagnant. It never managed to recover itself from the promises of grunge, and the huge genre splits within rock also served to deny it of any sort of creative cohesion (which may still befall hip-hop). If they wanted interesting music, it did not take a lot of digging to find hip-hop. Hip-hop already probably was, within the realm of Top 40, more interesting than anything else (and this is Bartlett’s biggest problem–he implies that hip-hop’s being good was theoretical until this year, as though rock was still good). Sure, in 1998, I wasn’t tripping over myself buying hip-hop, but I was not ready to like it as such. In 1998, I was falling hard for techno and techno-pop (Squarepusher, Air, Saint Etienne, Stereolab) and free jazz.

And that’s what’s funny–the amount of effort it took to like/find good techno/techno-pop and/or free jazz can’t compare to how easy it was to find good hip-hop during the same time period. One glance at Top 40 charts would have set me straight. But I’d forsaken Top 40 a decade before, so I didn’t notice what was under my nose. But the people who’d forsaken Top 40 a mere four years later–they had the inroads to get involved with and interested in hip-hop. They had The Source. Hip-hop had an infrastructure and a support system by then.

And now old fogeys like me are realising what has been going on under our noses all this time. I can claim a small bit of superiority over the likes of Bartlett–my immersion in hip-hop culture was helped along by mp3s and friends who were considerably younger (as in, on the other side of the thin line) and not at all interested in free jazz or techno/techno-pop, and it started precisely around 1998. But I’m still a parvenu, and would imagine the need to write a similar disclaimer to his before dropping beatz science. But I’ve definitely known that rock is stultifyingly boring for a very, very long time–Josh Klein wanted to sell t-shirts back in ’97 that read something like, “Drum ‘n’ Bass is Destroying Rock.” I was proud of that destruction.

So where are we today, then? Doubtless, Top 40 is probably in the best shape it’s been, artistically/creatively, in 15 years. That part of Bartlett’s thesis is probably undeniable. That is largely because of the fact that people are buying more hip-hop than before (and/or because of SoundScan? As in, when it’s the sales that make the charts, white fogeys can’t ‘scriminate against hip-hop), I guess, and since Timbaland and the Neptunes are awesome, and they’re producing everything ever these days, that means that there is a whole lot of good stuff being bought. And yes, M Bartlett, that includes Justin Timberlake, you snob. And even so, I’d consider at least 30 percent of the current Top 40 list damn-near unlistenable. So we’re not out of the woods, yet.

But there is also another take-home message, here: Don’t be afraid of new music. And by this I don’t mean genre-jumping exclusively. I mean contemporary music. And, similarly, don’t assume that just because something is popular that it cannot be good. Back in 1989, that was a valid position to hold (go on, go look at the charts), but now it’s just a sign of snobbishness or stagnation.