The League Of Pop Week 11 NOMINATIONS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Quick thinking required this week as bank holidays mean there's only a four-day turnaround. In the Pop Prem dubdobdee is aiming for a play-off place at least, whereas in the Chart Championship epicharmus gets the chance to play kingmaker. And you get the chance to play Kingmaker at him.

: dubdobdee says: "hullo i am dubdobdee: i will soon be 47! i work in magazine production; i am a sub editor, proofing editor and now and then a writer and reviewer -- places i have written for lots include nme (in the 80s), sight and sound (early 90s to date) and the wire (which i edited 1992-94) -- also ilx hurrah boo! i am not sure if i actually LIKE music but i am endlessly fascinated by it -- i like the way it works differently from (in particular) writing; i like the way it slips out from under the utilitarian rationalisation of life-as-we-know-it, viz that it is VERY EXTREMELY HARD to explain why we "need" music, let alone why there is so INCREDIBLY MUCH OF IT in the world today; i like that it is so unremittingly, swirlingly social; i like perverse arguments and music seems to be good at stirring them up

in particular i like

-- music that gives me glee, in its energy or absurdity or sass (joan jett, dragonforce, kando bongo man)
-- music that surprises me, is strange or subtly unexpected, startling (chopin, john cage, pee-wee russell)
-- music with economy (bach, webern, aqua, television, jeff mills, derek bailey)
-- music that gives me something interesting to write about (louis armstrong, the beatles, the pistols, glam, amm, haha wagner)
-- music that in some key way evades being written about (or that has not yet found its writers): to me this includes a LOT of soul, R&B and jazz and funk and dance music -- some which have been written about a ton obv, but not (to my eyes) necessarily in a way that is "about" them; and anyway is strangely unrelated (in my mind anyway) to what is GOOD or BAD in these genres -- and of course there is loads of awesome "non-western" music (cf IRANIAN POP *mad cheering*) which may well have been written about brilliantly, but it's all in languages i don't understand :("

epicharmus sez: "My name is Michael Daddino. I was born in 1971, a year of magic and wonder. I grew up in Long Island, New York; while I now live in New York City, I am still suburban to the bone. I have been a music obsessive since January 26, 1984, the date of my first record purchases: Thriller, "Every Breath You Take," and some recording of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. (This is also the date Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. I will be celebrating my tenth anniversary as an online music criticker this summer. Joined ILx really really early on. I was also there at the birth of the blogger revolution: my first was Cultural Artifacts of the Moment, the 1,942nd blogger.com blog; also contributed to New York, London, Paris, Munich; and with The Pornography of Semiotics, I *may* have invented live-blogging. Used to write things for the Seattle Weekly. Now I review all the Billboard #1 singles since 1950 very very slowly at Land of a Thousand Dances. I have presented papers on Muzak and the National Review for the EMP Pop Conference (they're on my site, epicharmus.com, but don't read them, they suck). I don't contribute much to Poptimists because I am incorrigibly lazy.

Hmm. I didn't really want this to be a bunch of sad careerist resume padding but I'm not sure what else y'all *really* need to know.

Anyway...currently reading: Jon Savage's Teenage and Shakespeare's King Richard III. Last album purchased: Thomas Mapfumo, Spirits to Bite Our Ears. Last movie seen: The Music Box (didn't laugh once).

I like:

-- music that dissolves contradictions between man and culture, man and society, man and man, man and God.
-- science fiction emotions, imaginary pasts, prophecies of eclipsed futures, roads not taken.
-- music to fall asleep to (but don't send me any of that, it never registers in short-form).
-- weedy strings.
-- for further reference: www.myspace.com/epicharmus

I dislike:
-- moralizing.
-- tiny-voiced women and wimpy-voiced boys playing their instruments just well enough to get their ideas across and just poorly enough to provide that *frisson* of the cutes. The infantilization of indie rock is the fruit of such an over-complicated hydraulic system of desire and denial that it flat-out repulses me.
-- anything from the last twenty-five years with chiming piano chord intros or anthemic wordless choruses from the lead singer.
-- anything from the last thirty years that could be described as "Beatlesque," "Dylanesque," or "Stones-y."
-- music that (implicitly or explicitly) calls attention to the difficulty or ease of its construction (unless it's in an some kinda Brechtian/Godardian distancing way, and even then...)"

Chew on that, submit yr tracks, get them to me by Friday if poss, leagueofpop@gmail.com, erm that's it.

[Poll #980780]

Comments

[koganbot]

Ha! I will lose, as epicharmus and I are opposites. I like music that highlights and creates contradictions, e.g., music by the Rolling Stones. I like music that can be described by me as Stones-y owing to its highlighting and creating contradictions. I fall asleep to music I like (rather than liking music I fall asleep to). I like James Brown, who called attention to the simplicity and difficulty of his music's construction. I like Robyn and Cassie (those weren't the tiny-voiced women he had in mind, but still...). I like moralists who take aim at themselves.

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

I like the Beatles, etc. fine but what I don't like are revivalists or copyists or (and here's where I admit to resorting to something of a strawman) bands who are often described as Beatlesque, Dylanesque, Stones-y, etc. Bands who've got Beatles/Dylan/Stones form down pat yet, thanks to the changes in context, don't or can't accomplish whatever the Beatles/Dylan/Stones did back in the day. Actually, I've never been very hot for the Stones. From the vantage point of over twenty-plus years of music-listening, I'm not sure I can put a finger on exactly why. I don't think I ever perceived them as the enemy or as a threat (the way I definitely did towards punk, Kiss, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin as a kid), and I think I got over the seeming tyranny of their canonization a while ago. I forced myself to listen to whole bunch of their oeuvre for a project I was doing two years ago and found I still thought their pre-1965 stuff completely credible and thoroughly boring, that Between the Buttons (my fave of theirs) and Beggars Banquet and assorted singles were still pretty awesome, and as I was in a shitty mood at the time, to my amazement Exile on Main St. finally spoke to/at me rather at some invisible rock fan several yards away. And I still never play them out of compulsion or pleasure. (No, actually, I find some PUNK ROCKIN' ROCK & ROLL revivalism hideously attractive, received as it is, because it's so fucking butch. But as a nerdy gay man I can only enjoy it at arm's length.)

Argh, forget what I said about music that "calls attention to the difficulty or ease of its construction." I said that because I was temporarily enthralled with a comparison between music and plastic surgery that I don't really want to examine here because it doesn't stand up at all.

Moralists who take aim at themselves aren't to my mind moralizers. The sin of moralizing is the unwarranted confidence in one's rightness; a moralist who takes aim at himself by definition undermines this confidence.

[koganbot]

Yeah, I was being facetious in saying we were opposites: what you say about revivalists is close to what I'd say, though sometimes "revivalists" can actually or intentionally* do something interestingly new. (*E.g., guys in the early '60s who were taking off on country and blues from the '20s knew very well the difference in context and meaning between what the sources were doing and what they themselves were doing, and some of 'em (Dylan, the Holy Modal Rounders) were inspired to experimentation by the 1920s guys.)