This past New Years’ Eve my friends and I were counting in the year to the soundtrack presented by BET’s “Top 50 of 2012.” Around count 10 I proposed a bet to my friends: we each picked a word we expected to hear in the next song on the countdown, whatever that song might be. I lost that bet.

BET’s list is not balanced genre-wise, skewing toward hip-hop and R&B. Fresh off hearing Nas’ “Daughters,” at number 10, which ends with the word “love” (its only mention of the same) I picked “love” as my word, knowing popular statistics were on my side. My two friends selected “niggas” and “pussy.”

The next song, Rick Ross’ “Stay Schemin’,” included plenty of “niggas” and even “pussy,” yet not one mention of “love.” Following songs were also heavy on the N and P words, and naked of the L word. My mistake, I admitted, may have been I was expecting to hear more R&B, the preferred form for love ballads, and gangster rap was a wholly different genre.

Yet both genres originated in the underground. Hip-hop originated as a genre of rebels and protesters looking for an alternate musical outlet, and while not yet homogenized, hip-hop as a culture has developed its own norms. One apparent norm today is not rapping about love.

On his 2008 album, I’m Innocent, rapper Murs drew attention to this problem in his song “Love and Appreciate 2.” In the song, Murs speaks as intro “we’ve been talking about how for our hip-hop generation it seems like there’s no more love songs—it’s like all the women are Bs and Hs, and it seems like nobody’s man enough to talk about love.” But is the problem really a lack of manhood in hip-hop, or is the problem a misunderstanding of manhood?

Despite that I am a woman, I recognize my genre of choice (hip-hop) is yet another place in the world where gender stereotypes predominate and male and female roles are far out of balance. Likely this is another contributing factor to hip-hop’s over-developed testosterone. To prove their manhood rappers too often assert their dominance over women. Note too that Murs, a vocal critic of his own genre’s direction, is considered an “indie” or “underground” rapper—not a rapper likely to be displayed on the Billboard’s top charts.

Back in the day, in old school hip-hop’s origins, with groups such as Public Enemy and Rum-DMC leading the development of a new sound, love was not yet a hip-hop taboo. To the contrary, Public Enemy’s early works included songs “MKLVFKWR (Make Love Fuck War)” and “Whole Lotta Love Goin On in the Middle of Hell.” Among Run-DMC’s originating works was the song “Let’s Stay Together (Together Forever).”

As this article goes to press, topping the Billboard charts are Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” and Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” Though these songs are considered perversions of the genre, they adhere to its norm—not a single love reference. On the other hand, the top R&B songs, by Bruno Mars and Justin Timberlake, are unafraid to drop the L word.

Maybe this explains hip-hop’s evolution: the “soft” in the culture are relegated to R&B, and those who want to keep their hip-hop label (and avoid becoming one of Dre’s “Bitch Niggaz”) develop a harder edge. Yet to avoid becoming a genre of anger and flash, and lose its substance, hip-hop artists need to step up, and remember the words of Run-DMC.

To quote “Let’s Stay Together,” on behalf of the relationship between hip-hop and love, may hip-hop remember with love the genre has “been down together since day one.” So hip-hop, this is love speaking—and let’s stay together.

I really want to know what you, yes you who is reading this, think and/or feel about these recent events and absurd happenings. The beginning of 2013 has not been the best, from Sandyhook to the President being sent a letter with poison in it.

What do you think? And how do you feel?

Deerhunter perform “Monomania” on Jimmy Fallon

“Monomania” – fixation on one single thing – is a funny title for a song by a man whose tortured inner workings have always seemed anything but unidirectional. But on this track, he’s resigned and defeated like he’s never been before, when he at least asked us to pray for him. “My only boy couldn’t even save me,” he laments at the song’s opening – he’s lost before even getting started.
“If you can’t send me an angel,” Cox cries, “send me something else instead.” Maybe he’s lowered his standards, but we haven’t. I don’t know about you, but I’m already more impatient for this album than I can remember being in a long time, and to complete the holy trinity begun with Microcastle and Halcyon Digest, nothing short of an angel will do. Deerhunter has always struck gold at the intersection of effort and accessibility, with songs that are just as fresh as they are immediately compelling. “Monomania” is raw and rough-edged, and it’s good – but I hope the album is better.

Check it out here

The Strokes have always been the epitome of cool, but on Comedown Machine, they’ve gotten too cool for their own good. The fifth album from rock and roll’s official New York darlings features an array of tense and sultry tunes, taut webs of guitar and drums that shift tonalities with Julian Casablancas’ trademark ease, but rather than erupt into garage-rock brilliance as is custom, most songs on the album simmer without ever boiling over. The muscular guitars that made fist-pumpers like “You Only Live Once” worthy additions to the modern rock canon are replaced on “Tap Out” and “Welcome to Japan” by brooding layers of guitar fuzz and krautrock spikes that are pleasant enough, and haunting at times, but not quite what you’d hoped for – after hearing Japandroids and Cloud Nothings turn their amps up to 11 and bathe in distortion, it would have been nice for the Strokes to come out guns blazing and prove that they’re still the band that made “Is This It?” and “Room on Fire.” Some of the album does sound like that band, if a somewhat uneven iteration. Lead single “All the Time” is an uptempo romp that would sound great live if the Strokes ever actually toured, and “Happy Ending” is all angled guitars and punchy syncopation, but for the most part, the more familiar sounding songs are uninspired. “50 50” opens with a promising guitar salvo but trips over itself in an attempt to replicate “Is This It?” replete with fuzzed-out vocals and an atomically accurate performance from drummer Fabrizio Moretti.

“We could be in trouble all night,” sings Casablancas on “Chances.” It’s a glum perspective for a frontman whose performances have always managed emotional propulsion without emotional overload, but a perspective fitting an album that’s moodier and more mature than the rest of the Strokes’ catalog, and not in a good way. Comedown Machine isn’t terrible, it’s just disappointing, and from a band as volatile and brilliant as the Strokes, that’s the ultimate letdown.

6.3/10

Top Tracks: “All the Time,” “Tap Out”

David Whipple

Once you put a music festival on top of that, things get cray.

SXSW isn’t necessarily a hipster festival. They have an extremely diverse music selection, from foreign rock bands to electronica to mariachi to Kendrick Lamar. Y’know, something for everyone! Yet, the hipsters were everywhere!

Now, I’m a simple man, with simple needs and simple style. Forget outrageous outfits; a simple t-shirt (no wild colors) and loose fitting blue jeans will suffice. I won’t judge a pair of colorful skinny jeans, but it’s not my thing. So, when I was told that I stand out by not looking hipster-y, I wasn’t surprised. Instead, I thought it would be fun to roam the city, hang out with hipster-looking people, and try something new. The results were interesting.

Spotify House:

Gave off a frat house vibe, except cooler (sorry Sigma Chi!). Free drinks and a ping pong table were accompanied by a DJ with a dancing duck outside of what looked like a house painted green (actually a restaurant/bar). The hipsters were out in full force, alone with some bros. I’m not quite sure if bros are less or more hipster than me, but I digress. The point is, it was laid back, and most people were chilling, drinks in hand. I didn’t feel too out of place, sitting on a beach chair.

Hipstamatic:

That’s right! I went to something called Hipstamatic! Upon walking in, we were greeted by a giant, stuffed bear with a rose in its mouth, because “why not?” Hipsters to the left, hipsters to the right, and even the DJ was a Mexican hipster! VEGA from Neon Indian was pretty awesome, with masterful control of the turntables. Throughout his set, the audience kept bringing “offerings” of Mexican sweet corn (which they were giving out for free), drinks, and napkins. It was kind of like a shrine. All the while, I just danced, and ended up with some free shades, which I wore for the hell of it. Keepin’ it indie!

Austin Welcomes the World:

This was probably the least hipster-y event that I found. Might’ve had something to do with all the parents here, because it was touted as an event for all ages, hosted at Austin City Hall. Not to say that it was kids’ music; it certainly wasn’t. But the event was much more tame (and drink-free). The acts weren’t very hipster either, with an upbeat Japanese, harder French, and an Italian rock bands keeping things foreign. Language barriers aside, both hipsters and non-hipsters alike seemed to enjoy the show, including the hipsters hula-hooping to the music.

Point of all this: non-hipsters stick out like a sore thumb, but not a single eff is given. Anyone can rock out (or thug out) and have fun, because few things unite people more than free music and booze. And tacos, definitely tacos.

I saw “National Geographic” and “80s” and knew I would be dragging the group to Antone’s to wait in line for the coveted 75 gold wristbands. I’ve been waiting for this moment all of my life. Our hearts fell when we got there at night and saw a line three blocks long, snaked around the alleyway of the venue, but we got the VIP treatment as a reward for our patience, and I freaked out like a kid on Christmas when we were escorted straight to the door.

And let me tell you…

 
 
Top 5 of #natgeo80s:
 
5. Pop photo booth. We unleashed our inner Max Headroom and ended up looking like the Breakfast Club, and it’s all digitally documented for posterity.
 
4. The Delorean parked out front. “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”
 
3. The amazing graphics, and meeting the designer who made them. He totally paid homage to the fantastic block pastels of the 80’s and to Girl Talk, who’s known for mixing visuals and sounds.
 
2. Nerds gone wild—one of the closing parties of SXSW Interactive, they were out in full force.
 
1. Girl Talk! It was my first live show, and definitely worth the combined waits. He had the entire packed venue bouncing like The Bangles, and really innovatively mashed up all of our 80’s favorites.

Bonus: the free vending machine, stocked with Bugles, Big League Chew, Fun Dip, and more. I think they were about a decade off, but I got to wear Bugles like witch’s nails for the first time since elementary school, so I won’t complain.

Jared & The Mill. The best part of SXSW is that there is literally music everywhere. On our way out of Mohawk, we passed by this band, an amazing string band out of Phoenix, picking up a crowd on the sidewalk. They’re worth checking out!

When in Austin, do as Austinians (?) do. I went rogue and headed over to the Austin Music Showcase, sponsored by the ATX Music Office. What I thought was going to be a quiet showcase of some local amateurs turned out to be the best show of my South By experience by leagues. The Parish is one of the best-known venues in Austin, and they are key in supporting up-and-coming local talent, even offering residencies to artists. The show opened with Wild Child, a band that featured banjos, tenor guitar, and accordion, but the standout was their lead singer, who rocked amazing vocals and the fiddle. They had a wide range, playing music to two-step to as well as songs that could have been lullabies, but they were always well integrated and maintained their unique sound. And, they threw a hell of an energetic show. Being the openers, they had to contend with the inflow of people and the bar, but they worked it. They’re a really young band, and definitely one to watch.
 
The next act stole everyone’s hearts. Shakey Graves, Alejandro Rose-Garcia (“I don’t speak Spanish though, even though my name’s Alejandro…”), is well known around town, and is just coming back home after a long tour. My SXSW experience would have been worth it just to hear this guy. He was a one-man band, but sounded like 4, playing the bass drum and the tambourine with his feet, as well as guitar, and using a looping pedal to round out his sound. He had a completely unassuming stage presence, wearing just a white ribbed tank and a cowboy hat, but he had the audience going wild. I’ve never heard so many inappropriate remarks directed toward a singer, but everyone in the audience was thinking the same thing.
 
He was an easy mixture of Johnny Cash, Tallest Man on Earth, and Townes, with finger-picked guitar lines, a smoky voice, and a cowboy swagger. He was by far the best musician I have heard down here. He played one song that moved so seamlessly between 5/4, 7/4, and 4/4 that I felt manipulated. Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep the beats straight between those, let alone when you’re playing guitar, singing, and using both your feet as drumsticks? His talent is not unrecognized; he completed a residency at The Parish last year, which did a lot to improve his vocal quality and stage presence, as well as the experience of his show. I was told he even designed the lighting scheme for his set. If you ever have the chance to hear this guy, you have to take it. I was looking for a show of a lifetime, and I got it.

Words by Julie Botnick.

7. This stack of many chairs: is this an art installation or storage logistics gone wrong? We’ll never know:

6. This really cool dog; Austin knows how to welcome a lady:

5. This picture of a snapchat; look closely: (I’m sorry Julie) 

4. These graphics: to be honest, I have no idea what’s going on here. I’d rather not even try to describe it. Just watch the video.

3. This chair from the future. 

2. This “roscoe’s” taco from Torchy’s. Inspired by my hometown Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles: a flour tortilla filled with a fried waffle, a fried egg, fried chicken, bacon, and maple syrup. I ate it, and was immediately filled with a mixture of pride/disgust that I have never felt before. 

1. Sad Guy at Mohawke (official artist rendering); I spent most of last night at Mohawk listening to Surfer Blood and Divine Fits. But I also spent most of last night staring at a man posted by the port-a-potties. He looked indescribably sad, and only moved once over a 5 hour period. I don’t know why the sad man was so sad, or why he was alone near the gross bathrooms staring like Jay Gatsby over the green light of the stage, but he was pretty weird/cool:

words and pictures by Demetra.

I first stumbled upon Youth Lagoon’s Wondrous Bughouse as a single, streaming, hour-long track. “Youth Lagoon must be jumping on the proverbial bandwagon of edginess with this album-song,” I thought, assuming that this time around, Trevor Powers (the young Idahoan behind Youth Lagoon) had decided to forgo individual tracks. I later discovered my error – Wondrous Bughouse boasts of ten songs – but the album still sounds like a unified piece: for those 51minutes, I was entranced by Powers’ sweeping dream pop tour-de-force.

Indeed, Powers already made use of such smooth, uninterrupted musicality in his 2011 debut album, The Year of Hibernation. I’ve listened and relistened to that album, and I still can’t tell where one dreamy ballad ends and another begins. On Wondrous Bughouse, Powers finds that same continuity, masterfully linking his songs until they’re part of something larger, grouping stars into constellations. After all, isn’t “Through Mind and Back” simply a prelude to “Mute?” Neither song could reach such echoing, emotive heights on its own.

Despite the two albums’ similarities (including Youth Lagoon’s telltale slow and simple synth melodies), Wondrous Bughouse is a far richer album, one in which Powers toes the line between lo-fi and psychedelic pop. Whereas The Year of Hibernation offered catchy, sugary tunes, Wondrous Bughouse fleshes out those strains by exploring new textures while softening and blurring vocals. For example, in “The Bath,” Powers overlays computerized warbles with his own beautiful and unintelligible murmurings. When lyrics do cut through the echoing chords, they’re mystical, almost incantatory. Powers no longer sings of “a hoodless sweatshirt [and] black leggings” or “the campground out by the lake.” Instead, in “Dropla,” he chants and repeats “you’ll never die, you’ll never die, you’ll never die.” In the album’s penultimate track, “Raspberry Cane,” he begins with a quiet introduction – bereaving those who claim “love exists” – only to launch into a soaring 7-minute musical epic that rises and falls before petering out into a soft, mournful keyboard solo.

On Wondrous Bughouse, each song is both a part and a whole, at once essential to the album’s linear progression and self-contained. While Powers handed us a stack of pretty patterned paper in The Year of Hibernation, with Wondrous Bughouse he has folded and refolded these sheets into origami cranes and stars.

Jane Balkoski

Ume
Ume had the distinction of being our first show at SXSW 2013 in Austin, Texas. I
suspect they were the first show for many SXSW attendees this spring, opening for the
all-ages Mohawk show on Sunday night, two days before the SXSW music showcases
officially begin. In that respect and considering their position as an Austin band, Ume
had the tough gig of starting not only the night off right (after a lengthy ninety minute
wait between doors opening and their set) but also the entire festival. But this Austin trio
looked prepared and eager to introduce us to their city and their music and quickly move
us from exhausted to moshing in seconds. Ume has built a reputation around Austin the
past few years as one of the heaviest live bands around, and Sunday night’s performance
lived up to that reputation. Singer and guitarist Lauren Larson laid down gritty rhythms
and screeching tones while contorting her skinny arms and legs within her oversized
shirt. She was a hurricane of hair and distortion moving around the stage seemingly at
random. Bassist Eric Larson and drummer Jeff Barrera provided the foundation beneath
Larson’s guitar work, propelling the songs forward with a sense of urgency. While
consistency was Ume’s greatest strength Sunday night, it may have been their main
detriment as well –with nearly an hour long time slot to fill, a crowd largely unfamiliar
with their catalogue, and a set of songs that did not vary widely in tempo or style, it felt
like it difficult for Ume to maintain the momentum with the audience that they had in the first
ten minutes. As the set finished to great applause, no one song or hook stood out to me
from the performance, rather a general sense of power and control. I’m willing to bet that
is what Ume was shooting for.

Cloud Nothings
When you make a song like “Wasted Days,” a lengthy, twisting, eight minute, fifty-three
second anthem of guitar-driven rock and self-deprecation, you usually put it toward the
middle or close of your album. When your audience is calibrated to consume little three-minute
pop burners in the vein of Pavement or Guided by Voices, you sometimes have to
go out of your way to put your “epic” songs in an place to succeed. One need only look
at Sufjan Stevens or Deerhunter for examples; their latest albums have both featured an
epic anthem as the closing song for the album. Cloud Nothings, on the other hand, put
“Wasted Days” as the second song on their album Attack on Memory. And at the Mohawk Sunday night,
it wasthe first song they played, for over ten minutes. It’s a bold move, but it encapsulates the
ethos that Cloud Nothings has been portraying for the past year and a half. The members
of the band are surely nice guys, (Dylan Baldi kindly let us take a photo with him and let
us give him a WYBC t-shirt) but as a band, they aren’t here to play nice or make friends.
They are on a mission to wind the indie rock clock back about ten years, before chillwave
or For Emma, Forever Ago happened, to respect and rekindle the flame of forgotten rock
heroes. In that context, opening the show with “Wasted Days” makes sense. Still,
whether it was a good decision in the context of the live show may be up for debate. The
opening chords of the songs quickly energized the crowd into a frenzy, but some of the
energy felt lost during the song’s wandering middle section. The other possible
ramification of opening with the intense “Wasted Days” came in the form of a broken
string for bassist TJ Duke (albeit during a later song). Given the time constraints of the
showcase, it led to a number of songs, including their most well known song “Stay
Useless,” being played without bass, which had a noticeable impact upon the music and
the audience interaction. For all their merits, Cloud Nothings are not a two-piece guitar
and drums duo. If anything, the loss of bass highlighted how important the often-
overlooked rhythm section is for this style of rock, something we were reminded of once
TJ Duke came back in (with a different bass guitar) for closing song “No Sentiment.” It
was a short, fiery set that unfortunately fizzled a bit in the middle due to technical
difficulties.

-Steven Zwick

Doors were slated to open at 6:30, but we arrived early. So did about two hundred others, and we found ourselves in a line which stretched up and around the block. We were there for a party and free concert thrown by Tumblr, the social bloggery platform. The venue, a bar called Mohawk, had drawn our attention primarily for the setlist they had lined up. The hours spent in line were interspersed with card games, trips to nearby food truck Barbeque Heaven, and conversation with the other concertgoers. As the sun began to go down and the air started to cool off, we felt a shift, as the line began to shuffle forth into Mohawk.

The venue: a bar and concert space. Indoors, a heart-of-Texas bar setup and a small stage and dance floor for DJ sets and rock performances. For the pixellated folks who tend to populate SXSW Interactive, a couple video games were set up for perusal, including Street Fighter and this gem. Casual gaming stations are one solution to the pre-concert malaise which threatens to creep in during the three hours between doors and the performance itself. We played a few rounds of each game to the laid-back tunes of Friendly Ghost, DJing the first set.

Outdoors there was a larger stage, and a set of elevated wood-and-rust audience platforms connected by narrow stairways. The staggered platforms created a hierarchy of partiers: at ground level, a down-and-dirty mosh pit; midway up, standing room for more relaxed and stable viewers; and at the very top, a suave VIP lounge reserved for heavyweights in tech, music and marketing.

WYBC’s Max Weinreich and Pat Reed slipped into the VIP lounge to take a closer look. While there, we met tech god Jake Lodwick. While he is best known for creating the video-streaming platform Vimeo, Lodwick has also worked with CollegeHumor and is a partner at Mast Brothers Chocolate. At 31, Lodwick is feeling entrepreneurial as ever. His latest venture is Elepath, a software design studio which is hard at work constructing what product designer Pasquale D’Silva calls “weird software” ­– apps which satisfy some sort of creative curiosity. We were treated to a sneak peek of Keezy, a music-mixing app for found sounds. Lodwick even used the app to record a quick promo for WYBC (listen here).

Lodwick is the Kanye West of the software community – and we mean that in the best of ways. He got his start young, dropped out of college, and made a zillion dollars and a name for himself. He’s the subject of several art projects, including this photograph and this short film. He has a knack for raising money, even when he doesn’t have any ideas for what to do with it yet. Elepath was not created to sell a particular product—in fact, it’s unclear what exactly it was created for at all. In one interview, Lodwick commented, “It was fun raising money with no cofounders or product ideas.” Based on his internet persona, one might expect Lodwick to be abrasive; in person, however, Lodwick is relaxed and talkative. He chatted with us amiably in line for the restroom and offered his advice for the next generation of programmers: don’t get boxed in by mastering only one programming language; people are more valuable than products; and of course, enjoy youth for all that it’s worth. We stuck around the lounge for a bit longer and met a few other notables—CollegeHumor’s Michael Schaubach and Josh Ruben, Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd, and Peter Berkman, the frontman of the NYC-based band Anamanaguchi.  All in all, it was a downright nifty event.

Later in the evening, we returned down to the indoor stage to hear Pete and the rest of his chiptune rock band. Anamanaguchi’s sound is what would happen if a Pikachu mated with a strobelight and a guitar: an orgy of electric awesome. Anyone who has ever played a Game Boy or an NES has heard 8-bit music before, the voltaic soundtrack to countless battle sequences, boss fights, and heartbreaking defeats. But Anamanaguchi repurposes the limited sounds of the game machine as a headbanging, sugar-coated, pop/rock hybrid. The music stands on its own sans gaming nostalgia, but I couldn’t help reliving a few choice Pokémon battles.

Anamanaguchi use guitars over fairly elaborate tracks produced with an NES and a Game Boy, and their recorded work has gained street cred, especially through Scott Pilgrim: the Video Game. But the live show is incredible. They are masters of acceleration; they build, build, build and explode into raging guitar badassery. The crowd went from zero to mosh in a matter of seconds—a transformation no doubt due to the musicians’ stage presence. The between-song chatter was worth the trip in its own right. Frontman Peter Berkman introduced Anamanaguchi as a “Spiderman cover band—we’re called Nickelback.” Naturally, we had to nab Anamanaguchi ‘n’ friends for a WYBC soundbite.

All in all, the evening was a success: good music, good people, good vibes, and a great SXSW kick-off for the WYBC delegation. Stay tuned for daily updates!

-Max Weinrich

My best friend from home recently resolved to “get into beatmaking.”  Naturally, I fired a few technical questions at him.  In essence, I asked him how he planned to accomplish such a mammoth task.  He declared that first of all, he would never use samples in his beats.  Avoiding samples is a matter of integrity, he said.  Surely making music from scratch is “artistic” in a purer sense than rehashing existing material.

I admit that my friend’s hesitance to sample is understandable.  For example, Ghostface Killah’s self-produced song “Holla” may be cited as problematic.  In “Holla” Ghostface rhymes over the entirety of The Delfonics’ 1968 classic “La La Means I Love You.”  One may begin to wonder whether Ghostface’s choice constitutes musicianship or outright stealing.

This tension is an essential aspect of hip-hop culture.  Here, I take hip-hop culture to encompass a range of practices that have developed alongside the music including break dancing, graffiti, and even some styles of skateboarding.  Ghostface’s virtuosic verses on “Holla” are analogous to Saber’s famously large graffiti piece on the banks of the Los Angeles River.  In both cases, the artists chose to treat someone else’s property as if it were a blank canvas.  (If minor issues of legality are your concern, then you should probably stay away from hip-hop.)

In more the more typical examples of sampling, wherein a producer manipulates one or more samples, the analogy only runs deeper.  The untouched sample—bear with me here—is akin to a block of marble waiting to take on a new form.

If sampling is essential to hip-hop culture, it is equally essential to how we create and consume music.  With hip-hop came a revolutionary paradigm for making popular music.  Homemade, clumsily wired turntables, mixers and samplers replaced centuries-old instruments as the tools of music making. Think about it, how many pop icons from the 1960s and 70s played instruments?  Now, how many do today?

These innovations arose from practicality: young people who couldn’t afford instruments turned to their home stereo systems to help them make music.  They raided their parents’ record collections, seeking out the snippets they could dance to.  Early hip-hop partygoers recognized a distinct new style of music despite the fact that they had heard the original records before.  Today’s obsession with remixes and mash-ups mirrors this phenomenon.

Like many things that probably shouldn’t be lifestyles, sampling is a lifestyle.  Hip-hop heads call this lifestyle Crate Diggin’, a term immortalized by The Lootpack’s song of the same name.  The term evokes images of a solitary beatsmith digging through dusty vinyl treasure troves haphazardly stored in milk crates, looking for rare and exotic sounds to sample.  As a veteran crate digger, I aim to use this column as a space to examine the art of sampling, and reveal the overlaps between the music of today and the music of the past.

Samuel Frampton

There are few things in life that I like better than British artists who sing in their native accents. As a Brit myself, I might be slightly biased, but the accent is such a great one that it would seem silly to waste its obvious allure by swapping it in for a generic American one. The Beatles immediately come to mind, they who were never afraid to warble away in their fantastic Liverpuddlian accents. For me, the accent adds a charm and character like no other. On top of a magnificent accent, clever lyrics that have me contemplating their awesomeness provide me with an almost unparalleled joy. But more than any of these, what gets me going every time is a melody that I can’t help but sing for hours afterwards, often to the vague amusement (and occasional aggravation) of my friends and family.

So it’s no surprise that when artists like King Charles come along with their distinctive voices, inter-referencing lyrics, and catchy tunes, my heart is filled with elation and a kind of musical ecstasy. King Charles walks the fine line between too cool and uncool, and does it with mastery. Not only is his music some of the most exceptional stuff coming out of the UK, his style is unique and truly fabulous. Think beehive, waxed mustache, and edgy vest/floral-print jacket combinations. To add to this larger-than-life character, he also plays the cello. It’s casual.

Listening to his 2012 album LoveBlood is a refreshing, glorious experience. This is because unlike many artists in this day and age, King Charles has not fallen prey to the ever-present only-one-actually-good-song-on-the-album trap. Every song has a life-blood of its own (durrhurrhurr), each with it’s own witty turns of phrase and tunes that will have nodding your head (un)conspicuously no matter where you are (trust me – it’s unavoidable). No two songs are the same, but each always manages to maintain that psychedelic folk-pop feeling that is so characteristic of King Charles.

Choosing a favorite song from this album would almost be like choosing a favorite child, but if I had to pick a couple particularly sparkly gems, I’d probably go with Ivory Road – probably my favorite lyrics in any song ever – and Mississippi Isabel, a song so catchy you’ll never sing anything else again. I challenge you to listen to either of these songs and not have them stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Allie Krause

But what makes Radiohead so great is their division of labor. It’s up in the air as to who’s the real brains behind the outfit, and this is the whole point: Radiohead are far more than the sum of their parts. It’s the seamless symbiosis and the rotation of leading roles throughout the band, that are responsible for their indelible legacy.

“Amok,” though, is a Thom Yorke album. It doesn’t come right out and say it, and the presence of Flea on bass might suggest that Atoms for Peace are more than Yorke’s backing band, but this is his project. Even the band’s name is an appropriated song title from Yorke’s first solo effort, The Eraser. That said, “Amok” is more fully realized than its predecessor, something no doubt owing to Yorke’s posse of Flea, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, drummer Joey Waronker (R.E.M, Beck) and percussionist Mauro Refosco. It’s far more consistent, even to a fault, and does indeed sound like a full band rather than an enigmatic rock star interrogating a sequencer in his basement.

“Atoms for Peace,” the Eraser song (and Dwight Eisenhower atomic energy program) from which this band takes its name, is actually a fairly accurate predictor of the album’s sound. That song’s bassline bounces between your ears while skittishly avoiding synchrony with the neat percussion loops spinning underneath it. Yorke’s trademark falsetto wanders through the song’s open spaces, never really going anywhere and never really trying to. “Amok” features many of those same elements, albeit tightened up and injected with an energy somewhere in between amphetamines and paranoid schizophrenia – in short, injected with a little bit of Radiohead, somehow supplied by a non-Radiohead band.  To some degree, “Amok” is what “King of Limbs” could have sounded like.

Opening track “Before Your Very Eyes” begins with a choked spiral of guitar riff that endures for the length of the song. Yorke treats his axe as electronic, looping arpeggios over a thicket of percussion as – surprise – he croons over the frenetic, rhythmic chaos that would engulf a lesser singer. The song’s components are a familiar cocktail by the end of the album: rattling but precise percussion, a buzzy synthesizer, and Flea’s bass thrumming along underneath. Yorke seems to have purposefully limited his palette this time around. Almost every track features a similar texture of snappy percussion, warm bass, and some iteration of the sweeping, ionized synthesizer which appears so often that one cant help but wonder if it’s just Yorke’s natural frequency.

Sometimes, this cocktail works brilliantly. “Judge, Jury and Executioner” is demented, slide-guitar Americana built on a shifting foundation of elusive bass and handclaps. “I went for my usual walk,” Yorke mourns in a perfect ghost town falsetto, and that’s really all we ask of him: more of the same. “Default,” the album’s second track, opens with a stuttering, breathless hip-hop groove before swelling to a wide-open crescendo.  “It slipped my mind, and for a time,” Yorke sings, “I felt completely free.”

But at times, one wishes that Yorke’s mind had remained empty. The album is incredibly busy, hardly any sunlight filtering through the dense layers of percussion and sound effects. If Phil Spector pioneered the wall of sound, this is a maze of sound, and there’s almost no time to catch your breath. On frenzied electro-fests like “Dropped,” Yorke succumbs to the desire to fill in every crack with a new sound. The highlights are those moments that “slipped his mind.”

Most of the sounds that Yorke inserts so obsessively are percussion, making for unusually rhythmic results. Rather than traditional drums, an army of mysterious and frantic beats drives songs forward. This precise, propulsive groove lends itself to a genre entirely foreign to Radiohead, yet Yorke obliges with his own hazy interpretation of funk on “Stuck Together Pieces.” Flea’s bass makes the song, but it’s Yorke who offers self-deprecation: “I stuck together pieces,” he sings. “The joke is, I don’t need it.”

“Stuck together pieces” sometimes feels like an adequate description for Amok. Yorke’s singing is the glue, but absent the compositional brilliance of Radiohead, the album is more about sounds than songs, intriguing rather than enthralling.  Some tracks run in place without ever getting anywhere. Fittingly enough, “Reverse Running” ruminates on its opening groove for far too long before finally swelling to a close amidst synthesizers that sound like swarms of locusts. “Ingenue” and “Unless” meander on for close to five minutes each before leaving us right where we began; with only one song under 4 minutes and most far longer, dull tracks can feel like a treadmill.

For all this, Thom is still a genius. Even if his songs don’t go anywhere, wherever they happen to settle down is usually quite pleasant. He’s a master of spatial arrangement, if not sequential; despite the incessant riot of electronic components, each seems to make sense. That is Yorke’s tortured genius, the need to expand, explore, push and even obliterate the envelope, and yet have it all come together like Martian stained glass. Yorke can’t possibly mean it when he sings, “Penny for your thoughts now” on the title track; he’s got more thoughts than he knows what to do with. But  ”Amok” makes clear that there’s more to Radiohead than the multidimensional calculus going on inside Thom Yorke’s brain. Someone has to play the foil. Yorke is the head, but someone else has to be the radio.

7.3/10

Top Tracks: “Default,” “Stuck Together Pieces,” “Judge Jury and Executioner”

David Whipple

Television: not punk rockers

But “the genre formerly known as ‘post-punk’” is less an extension of punk than a radical re-interpretation of its underlying elements. Angst? Check. Guitars (loud)? Check. Charismatic frontman? Often, check. But  there seems to be more nuance and less brute force behind post-punk. You hear more complex guitar lines and harmonies, enunciated vocals rather than screamed ones. Post-punk seems to have more in common with modern indie rock’s restrained self-awareness than punk’s balls-to-the-wall ethos (not that Sonic Youth didn’t shred, of course). Maybe this is why we might call it “post-punk,” humoring a sophisticated superiority complex by emphasizing how far we’ve come from our philistine roots. But this again is faulty – like I said, the natural environments of the two parallel genres are fairly similar. So the label of “post-punk” either subjugates that agitated, Stratocaster-driven music to punk, or it distances it from punk, neither of which is really fair.

This obviously pent-up diatribe popped into my mind today when a friend told me he’d been listening to some “post rock.” Now first of all, rock ain’t dead, at least I sure hope not. I’m not sure if you can turn the relationship between punk and “T.G.F.K.A.P-P.” into a linear-algebra like series of transformations, but if you did, I found myself wondering whether they would have any bearing on the relationship between rock and whatever the fuck “post-rock” is (I’m not yet convinced it’s anything). If there’s any point to this, and I’m certainly not sure that there is, then it’s that you can’t really describe music only in relation to its contemporaries or predecessors. Shared inspiration, or even direct inspiration — as I sit here listening to Television, I can’t deny that elements of punk show up unaltered in post-punk — doesn’t imply subjugation.

David Whipple

How do we talk about music, and can it be talked about? Doing violence to the “text” and the language of music as anti-language. 

A Historical Orientation

“Logocentrism” is a favorite word of mine, because it sums up the main thing that the projects of modernity and post-modernity are ultimately up against. Logocentrism means the positive evaluation and centering of the logos. The logos is a Greek word for which we have no English translation and yet it is a concept that is unparalleled in historical significance.  The Logos is basically a mixture of language (as in spoken and written language) and rationality, especially as a kind of ground for culture or being as a whole.  The decline of logocentrism is the beginning of modernity as well as the beginning of music in the way we understand it today.  Before the end of the logos (around the beginning of the 20^th century) music is basically a bourgeois luxury, a certain activity associated with leisure, and conditioned by the logos. These two aspects – bourgeois luxury and being related to the logos – are not unrelated.  It is often said in modernism that the logos is “anti-life,” in other words, that the logos categorizes, cuts things up, and tries to organize things into their separate spheres.  This means that the way music was understood was conditioned by relegating it to a certain sphere of life: what the bourgeois understood as “purely aesthetic.” All that means is that music becomes separate from the active and practical modes of life, such as work. It is in this sense that it becomes “anti-life” in that life itself is primarily work, suffering, and struggle.

Not only did the logos relegate music socially but it was conditioned the way it was understood. Classical pieces of music are all about order. Like the visual art of pre-modernity, the goal of music is to imitate a peacefully and rationally structured universe.  The foundation of this universe and the ordering principle happens to be “The Word” (‘in the beginning there was the Word” John:1:1) which is an English translation of the logos. So, in both music’s social role and its ontological structure there is a hidden concession to the logos. In other words, a faith in language and its primacy conditions music.

Modernism wants to invert this relationship between language and music, and this relationship is what this column wants to explore. With modernity comes the realization that reality cannot be reduced to what is thought or said and that “life” or “existence” comes first.  Music is taken as something that taps into existence itself rather than talking, speaking, and writing, which merely gloss over the surface of things.  This is the reason why rock n’ roll and blues music (and thus most of the music of the 20^th century) comes to have the character that they have. Both genres were about the man who faces the world, who struggles with the world, and what this man thinks or says is largely irrelevant (although obviously not what he sings).  This is the power of music in the 20^th century and why it becomes such a major and important art form. Music in the 20^th century understands the truth of existence itself over and above thought and it glories in this roll.

I feel as though musical culture in our digital age has in some sense forgotten this role.  The mass proliferation of music blogs and music reviews means that music once again is up against language. The fact that “knowing obscure bands” or “having hip music taste” has become a sign of sophistication indicates that the bourgeois understanding of music is threatening to come back.  Music threatens to be something we engage with merely for the sake of demonstrating our leisure and our ability to talk.  In the internet age, where text (and image) is everything, music needs to maintain its role as that which speaks to truth of existence itself. What we cannot do, however, is stop talking about music, because we talk about things we love. What we do need to do is rethink how we talk about music, and with that how we think of music.  We need a way to spread “the word” of music’s ineffability (a paradox that has to be surmounted) such that we can avoid the pitfalls of a bourgeois “hipster culture” and a marginalization of music’s power for truth.

Adam Klein