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Ice Cream and the Ice Creams ft. Ice Cream "Ice Cream" (Singles First Quarter 2015)
Missed most of February (and most of everything else). Ash-B is the great discovery here, a strong and throaty rapper like Choi Sam but with a tone that's more supple and subtle. Will say more when I post my 2014 albums list. "The Song Of Love" is a low-rent slow dance from Core Contents Media (yeah, it's not Core Contents Media anymore, but in my dark heart it always will be). "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina" scrunches together two acts I never really got and it's catchy. Azin's the sort of respectable-type well-controlled quality singer I always intend to be indifferent towards except every year there's another one who gets to me. I can't tell if Rihanna's goofing. I'd have called it "Bitch Betta Have My Ice Cream." Red Velvet take the cake. Christine and the Queens sing "Christine." ZZBEst kinda go soul horny in the early evening. Lizzy trots. GFriend are trying to sound like early SNSD and kinda do. They don't dance remotely as well, unfortunately. Jason Aldean does rote party roteness with good guitars. J'sais pas, I dunno.
Looking forward to Crayon Pop, Miss A, Blady, Exo. What'd I miss?
1. Ash-B "매일"
2. The Seeya "The Song Of Love"
3. Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina"
4. Azin "Delete"
5. Rihanna "Bitch Better Have My Money"
6. Red Velvet "Ice Cream Cake"
7. Christine and the Queens "Christine"
8. ZZBEst "랄랄라"
9. Lizzy "Not An Easy Girl"
10. GFriend "Glass Bead"
11. Jason Aldean "Just Gettin' Started"
12. Brigitte "J'sais pas"
[EDIT: Video not available; Ash-B's "매일" seems to no longer exist on the Internet.]
Looking forward to Crayon Pop, Miss A, Blady, Exo. What'd I miss?
1. Ash-B "매일"
2. The Seeya "The Song Of Love"
3. Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina"
4. Azin "Delete"
5. Rihanna "Bitch Better Have My Money"
6. Red Velvet "Ice Cream Cake"
7. Christine and the Queens "Christine"
8. ZZBEst "랄랄라"
9. Lizzy "Not An Easy Girl"
10. GFriend "Glass Bead"
11. Jason Aldean "Just Gettin' Started"
12. Brigitte "J'sais pas"
[EDIT: Video not available; Ash-B's "매일" seems to no longer exist on the Internet.]
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Albums-wise, I really want to write something about Kendrick Lamar and PBS -- PBSification in the DNA of the album, which is quite good, but it's unmistakably "good for you," too. Problem is, I don't actually want to write about the Kendrick Lamar album (yet? Maybe ever).
Everything else is just kind of a tasteful/pleasantish wash. The only things that are coming close to making me go "huh" are Kate Tempest (from 2014), whom for some reason I'm thinking of as Kate Nash as an overachiever brainiac, and Rae Sremmurd, which is delightfully obnoxious. And maybe the album from Heems, which is much more consciously in convo with PBS but is somewhat transparent about it and doesn't bug me like KL does.
Singles are all over the map, include in no particular order:
Ty Dolla $ign f. Charli XCX and Tinashe: Drop That Kitty
Maliibu N Helene: Figure 8
Aronchupa: I'm an Albatraoz
Rihanna: Bitch Better Have My Money
Daphne & Celeste & Max: You and I Alone
Kendrick Lamar: King Kunta
Hard to consider Jukebox faves from D'Angelo, Taylor Swift, and Miranda Lambert as 2015.
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(1) Postpunk (etc.) as a cultural corner (or something): so the metaphor "PBS" wasn't particularly saying that this band or that performer had broccoli-like "good for you" tendencies.* Rather, the metaphor vaguely referred to a whole constellation of opinions and interests and attitudes that turned a broad and contentious (towards each other as well as towards the outside) group of people into an "Us" that believed itself better than a mainstream "Them." But what made (and makes?) the metaphor potent and shocking isn't that it fingered Talking Heads for being tasteful or the Clash for being socially progressive but that it also included stuff that the real PBS would never ever touch with a 10-foot pole: the Mentors (believers in "peaceful rape"), Psycodrama, GG Allin, the whole Forced Exposure/Conflict vibe. (Don't have the exact quote with me, but my favorite Byron Coley contribution to Why Music Sucks was when he responded to "Isn't it time the Rolling Stones were put out to pasture?" by saying, "If by 'put out to pasture' we mean, 'Take them out to a field, pull their pants down, and fuck them from behind,' I'd have to say, 'No.'" And PBS included me. So it wasn't all nice stuff. But it all more-or-less constituted a loose nexus that rationalized and justified and made respectably "challenging" a whole bunch of "out" behavior some of which was unapologetically do-good (the Clash) and some of it almost the opposite, a lot of it viewed by postpunk without being part of postpunk or knowing it was being viewed, but all rendered lame in the context of our appreciation. If I were to try to locate a "PBS" today, again not the real one but a more "out" one, I'd certainly include "poptimists" (which is now focused on Freaky Trigger), and your Tumblr world, and the Singles Jukebox. Regarding the new Lamar, which I haven't yet heard, the way it would fit into this "PBS Part One" isn't by being "good for you" in itself but by being embraced by "Us" for being the sort of thing that appeals to us. —An album's being genuinely good for us can be, you know, good, but that's also what makes it eligible for being rendered lame by us. Note also that our genuinely worthy attempts to embrace and understand hip-hop as a whole, including Rick Ross and ilk, are also "PBS." And our having some PBS tendencies is better than having no PBS tendencies, but creating a PBS nexus is worse than having just some PBS tendencies.
(2) A culture-wide "PBSification" that tends to support and romanticize fringes that move "out" but that also, once it perceives some phenomenon as "significant," turns the phenomenon into a symbol of its own significance and lets the symbol substitute for any actual significance. ("The symbol stands in for the event" is how I put it in WMS.) That "our" PBS renders things lame in the nexus of our appreciation etc. is an example of this cultural process whereby a symbol replaces the event it's supposed to symbolize.
—I wouldn't say, though, that out in the wide world symbols of "outness" always, without fail, neutralize what they symbolize. As I said, my metaphor is problematic. Among other problems, I manage to include a whole broad range of stuff in it, and the inclusion of this or that often seems arbitrary, even if it doesn't feel arbitrary. But the metaphor is important nonetheless because what it tries to describe does seem to actually happen, sometimes.**
*I like the taste of broccoli, by the way.
**I brought up "Symbol stands in for the event" in my convo with Josh yesterday. It's on my mind.
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In that version of PBS, YG (to use a recent example) and Kendrick Lamar, both of whom (e.g.) reference life experiences and culture that most people (not all) in the social circle of PBS know nothing of firsthand, created music those folks, or that circle, would rate pretty highly. But here Kendrick is sort of playing to and against that audience -- in playing against the audience he's playing into their hands -- he's closer to the circle himself even though he doesn't *need* to be for PBS to happen to him.
Anyway, I'm not sure the metaphor really works in this milieu anyway. Do I think the symbol is replacing the event in Kendrick Lamar's album? Not really, or not entirely. It's infected but it isn't dead yet. And I often think about the idea that some PBSification, of the second type, has a kind of preservative effect, and that one doesn't need to (oh lord forgive me for the pun I'm about to commit) kill the butterfly entirely in the context of one's appreciation (or, from the vantage of the artist, in the context of someone else's presumptive appreciation) to exploit it. (If there's no one "in" to hear something "out," does it make a sound, etc?)
There's something to the precariousness of this process, being right on the edge of *marking* as significant (no scare quotes) and *damning* as "significant" (maybe scare quotes AND no scare quotes?).
For some reason this evening I'm imagining it a bit like gentrification, where looking merely at its results paints too simplistic a picture of what's happening on the ground -- some features that seem "evils of gentrification-y" (let's say, upwardly-mobile artist types moving into vacant buildings in an area of working class people) don't *necessarily* end in the phonification (that's "the process of making phony," not "the process of inundating with telephones") of the neighborhood that once was -- a little bit of movement may even benefit the whole neighborhood. But in large doses, it essentially pushes what was once unique or special out entirely, sometimes, in the process, "keeping" the neighborhood's "charms" without any of the actual things (or people) who ostensibly made it charming.
Problem with THAT metaphor, though, is that it's too easy to point to "gentrifiers" and "authentic neighborhood people" -- which I would like to actually kind of be my point (i.e., gentrification itself doesn't really work this way, it's more complicated) -- but it still doesn't quite work, because in the case of PBSification who counts as "out" and who counts as "in" is less a form of colonization and more...I dunno, cannibalization? "We" are kind of out already, and we use "in" to broaden or legitimize it/us, and in doing so we replace this genuine thing (event) with a mere symbol of the thing. But there's not some "other people," some group of phonies, who did this process to the genuine people -- we did it to ourselves (is the claim, as I understand it).
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The preservative effect: well, Shakespeare and Austen, Plato and Nietzsche, Mozart and Verdi all have a living presence in current culture, but for this to have happened there had to be people willing to preserve and in some cases go back and appreciate and resurrect them. Nietzsche might be the most relevant to this discussion, in that he gets to be broccoli by being "subversive," and academic "PBS" types who read him as such get to think of themselves as subversive — or at least as raising provocative questions. More penetrating but prosaic thinkers — Kuhn, Wittgenstein* — can't be twisted so easily into this role, though there've sure been attempts. In any event, Nietzsche's being used now for what he can do now ("he"), for what we can do now with him, by types who do what they think they want or need to do using him. Which is as it should be, the problem often being with the types, not Nietzsche.
We do it to ourselves: Well, remember, I'm thinking both of the whole culture ("PBSification") and a subset (the punkish or postpunk Musical Marginal Intelligentsia I fingered in my first Why Music Sucks essay), the subset perhaps doing work on behalf of the whole. But that's a big "We" (the culture-wide) and a smaller "We" both doing the doing, perhaps. In any event, back in the Sixties (and prior to being "postpunk," obv., though the attitudes aren't significantly different), the MMI is plumping for blues and r&b, and is much more ambivalent about rock-as-opposed-to-pop than the burgeoning mass rock audience is. But the retrospective "gentrification" (as opposed to PBSification) of Sixties r&b and soul probably comes from The Big Chill (which I've never seen) and oldies radio and VH-1 docs and Grammy accolades and whatever; anyway, pretty directly from the mainstream. Whereas, what the Rolling Stones did (nonretrospectively) with r&b was to make it more potent and furious and to highlight loads that was contradictory and problematic in it, and to basically invent a new music out of it. This in itself wasn't PBSification at all. But I did claim in my essay that nonetheless the Rolling Stones were the ones who set us on the PBS path, their being so potent ensuring that neither the culture as a whole nor the cultures whom the Stones helped create were able to categorize them as mere entertainment (in the way Elvis had been categorized), and so weren't able to trivialize and protect their own listening and fandom or revulsion (the Rolling Stones were probably the most hated band in the world**) as mere leisure time, either. Hence the capital-S significance, hence the vulnerability to the symbol standing in for the event, and so on. But the late Sixties/early Seventies punk critics tried to reverse this (what I later called) PBSification by plumping for garage rock and bubblegum, the Troggs, the Ohio Express, all this stuff that could even in late '60s/early '70s retrospect still be trash and dangerous and silly and not saddled with Significance. And it's this trashy, accidentally silly and accidentally potent and accidentally subversive music, "96 Tears" and "Pushing Too Hard" and "Yummy Yummy Yummy," that the punk/postpunk MMI effectively turned to spinach, like the profs did to Nietzsche. So anti-PBS becomes PBS one convolution later. Except "96 Tears" still kicks, when I hear it, and so does "Under My Thumb." (But without the profs, would Nietzsche have much of a presence? And without the punks, would "96 Tears" be anything but an oldie, or a lost classic? It would still kick, when I listen.)
*I actually find Wittgenstein more potently poetic than Nietzsche, but he's not as readily epigramizable. None of this is meant as a slam on Nietzsche.
**As some Fusion writer, a Stones fan, probably Les Daniels, said at the time.
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Broader culture gives impetus and support to the margins
*Or "musical marginal intelligentsia," depending on how I happen to type it at the moment.
Go For Broke
When because of the weather we have inside recess, some kids go to the gym and get to run amok while others go to the auditorium where a feature film is projected, always a kids' film like the Croods, and just like in the old days of double features you enter whether the film is beginning or in the middle, and when your recess is finished you leave even though the film isn't over.
Also, first thing in the day, there's an early "recess" which isn't literally a recess but it's when the kids arriving early or the kids who are already there for Extended Day go to the playground, but when early recess is inside they all go to the auditorium and what they usually see is Angry Bird Toons or excerpts from Despicable Me.
Let's classify the midday recess feature films as "Broader Culture," with lots of comedy but also broad positive social messages.
Whereas we'll classify Angry Bird Toons as "our kind of toon" meaning there's no message, just (as Manny Farber had said about termite art) "go for broke art," pure where's the next bit of mayhem, where's the next belly laugh, etc. And although it's just as much from the Broader Culture as the feature films are, it's exactly the sort of stuff that "we" in our marginal halfway-out MMI "PBS" go apeshit for, extolling it in just the way that we extol and preserve the old Fleischer Studio and Warner Bros. cartoons, and the Bill Gaines comic-book output in his Tales From The Crypt days, and so on. (Or at least I would so extol it.)
Connecting The Dots
So, in one of the midday recesses I saw approximately 35 minutes of Frozen, from Hans to up the mountain and Olaf and the storm, if you've seen it. It contained "Let It Go" in context, where it was kind of thrilling (hadn't previously liked it and still don't usually enjoy hearing it). A couple months later Amanda, the Kinder teacher I work for, read a short picture-book version of Frozen to the class, so the plot's been spoilerated for me. Since I haven't seen it whole, I can't say one way or another whether the flick would work for me. But I suspect it would. As I was watching it, I assumed Disney had seen its task as making a princess movie that was also at least somewhat feminist, about female self-actualization and self-empowerment. Turns out that this isn't how the plot came about — according to Wikipedia, Disney had first been interested in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" eighty years ago, originally as part of a projected Andersen biopic to be co-produced with Goldwyn. ("The Snow Queen" may have appeared as a short ballet sequence in the 1952 Goldwyn film sans Disney; Wikip is unclear about this.) According to Wikip, the problem for Disney was always how to make the plot work. (Btw, I STRONGLY recommend that you not click the Wikip link if you haven't yet seen Frozen.) From Wikip's synopsis of the Andersen story, the Snow Queen seems not to be central to it, is more a metaphor of some kind of tantalizing entrapment for the male love object. In any event, after various attempts and abandonments over the years to make "The Snow Queen" the basis of a feature film, the project was finally given serious development in 2008, though from the account I'm not sure if it got the actual, definitive green light prior to 2011; and even with production underway in 2012, Disney still hadn't figured out the character and role of the Snow Queen in relation to Anna, the heroine. Finally — perhaps in desperation? — the decision was made to make Anna her kid sister, to add family drama to what was now a protagonist-antagonist relationship between two princesses. That's how the princess thing entered the story. And shortly afterward, a new screenwriter, Jennifer Lee, was brought in to take over the script. But Elsa still hadn't gelled. It was a couple of songwriters, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, in having to come up with a song for her and trying to work out what it felt like to be her, who then in effect reinvented her. And once they'd played Disney the demo, Jennifer Lee said to herself, okay, we did it! we've got the movie! but now I have to rewrite the whole script. So instead of "Let It Go" being tailored to the movie, the song was taken whole, not a lyric changed, and the movie was re-worked around it.
And if you haven't seen Frozen you really need to before you look at my next comment. Though the comment won't reveal much, I don't want to reveal anything, not even the beginning.
Let It Go (SPOILERS)
Elsa's no punk, she's not a Mick Jagger or an Eminem. But like Jagger and Eminem, she's an artist who's afraid of her art, of its power. And in the world of the movie, she's slated to ascend to actual political (read "cultural") power but she's afraid to wield her power, that her various powers will sabotage and destroy everything. And, according to Jennifer Lee, there's at least something of a subtext that, in moving from princess to queen, Elsa is potentially moving to full-blown sexual expression. (I don't remember The Lion King very well, but there seem to be parallels.) Anyway, Anna still understands little of this, so her journey to find her sister is also a journey to discover who Elsa is. Meanwhile, Elsa has decided that the only way she can be her powerful self is to be alone, to divorce power from command. Which of course means it's not full power, since the condition of letting herself go is that she — it — her art, her power, her self, her authority — doesn't go anywhere real, doesn't make a difference. So Anna's quest is also to bring Elsa and Elsa's power back to society, back to people.*
In half paying attention to the picture-book version (at the same time as I was wiping down desks and sharpening pencils), I never learned if or how the movie actually resolves what Elsa is to do with her power. I gather that regarding the ending Disney's energy was concentrated on how to make the narrative configure the multiple meanings of love. Lee and Buck were instructed to make sure they earned the love ending. I fear that this left the power issue somewhat in the lurch. Someday I'll have to see the thing in its entirety. Here's a great interview with Jennifer Lee where she goes deep into the process of creating the story.**
http://johnaugust.com/2014/scriptnotes-ep-128-frozen-with-jennifer-lee-transcript
One thing I think I'm noticing in kid culture*** is that, despite Anna taking up way more screen time, it's Elsa the kids immediately think of when they think of the movie. This may be owing to the visuals as much as the conception, her light-blue and blondeness appearing more rarefied and enticing and princessy (perhaps this is me capitulating to a cultural stereotype, or Disney capitulating, or the kids).
*Anna's journey is a journey of self-discovery too, though I won't go into that here.
**A big part of Lee's struggle was to make sure the movie worked as comedy as well as drama; that struggle is one I'm not dealing with in this comment.
***Several weeks ago I was at a seder where a four-year-old who had yet to see the movie was nonetheless dressed in full Elsa costume, which she'd gotten with her parents at an Anna & Elsa boutique.
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In saying in 1987 that the supposed punk supposed alternative supposed indie supposed underground had become our own little "PBS," I was saying that in effect it had become a cultural niche, one that let the symbol of its own challenge to the culture substitute for any actual challenge, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that it — the subculture, the MMI — was generated by the overall culture and was part of the overall culture.
(And this claim of mine is ridiculously overbroad, but still somewhat right, and still necessary in its overbroadness.)
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The formation (and eventual abandonment) of the ice castle is so the heart of the movie that it's hard to care about much else going on. A few folks had mentioned how disturbing it was for their kids to see the "prince charming" scenario turn sour for Anna, but for me the real disturbing stuff -- the stuff that disturbed ME, that is, not sure how it would affect kids -- was just how *violent* Elsa became in her quest for a quiet, private place of her own. (Mick Jagger thought two's a crowd, but I don't think he flung literal ice daggers at anyone who got near him, aiming to murder them effortlessly and indiscriminately, even if that was what he was feeling.)
But like I said, kids clearly picked up on the fact that Elsa is the star and the heart and soul of the movie. "Let It Go" is the right song for the right moment there, and it reminds me that when I was a kid I often fantasized that I had a special power to stay young and invincible, and sharp claws might have been part of the deal too -- destined to brood and roam the earth quietly with the ability to beat up bad guys if absolutely necessary, which it would be, I imagined. But mostly I would just kind of *be there*, hanging around everyone, and they wouldn't notice me, would float in and out and around and I would be totally unremarked on. That this thought -- of being alone in a crowd (h/t Hilary Duff) -- became a source of constant anxiety in early adulthood is maybe ironic or else just the flipside of the same coin, I guess.
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[checks]
OK, right (spoilers!) Elsa is *kidnapped* from her castle -- this is after her attempted icicle murder -- and imprisoned in her frozen hometown, but she breaks free and hoofs it back to the castle, leading to a series of things I don't remember well even reading the Wiki description, yada yada, Anna expresses true love by offering herself in sacrifice, love is the key to controlling her powers.
I remember the ending (the "solution") being nearly as interesting or convincing as the set-up (the "problem").
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Btw, I gather that from the producer's and writer's(s') p.o.v., with Anna still in their mind as protagonist, the deliberate double misdirection and switchup as to what constitutes the act of true love that will save Anna was what they were fundamentally working towards, and was what motivated Del Vecho to make the movie in the first place: there's a kind of meta going on where the characters are searching (twice) for the man who will provide the act of true love that saves Anna — as the genre might make us expect — whereas what the story actually gives us is Anna sacrificing herself to save Elsa, this being the unexpected act of true love that ends up saving Anna as well as Elsa.
(If you haven't yet read the Jennifer Lee interview, I reiterate my recommendation.)
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Yes need to check out the interview. I get the switchup, and I *like* the switchup, both on paper and to a lesser extent on the screen, especially if the alternative is romantic love of the perfect guy. (I really like that we get to iterations of imperfection -- one the seemingly perfect guy who has sinister ulterior motives and the other the bumbling friend she grows to love even though it's not "save the kingdom" love).
But I guess what it doesn't answer for me is how Anna's action actually solves Elsa's alienation problem. We know that the sisters love each other and would do anything for the other (that isn't in doubt for a second) and Anna's display is touching in its own way, but Elsa has a lot of power and it seems a bit like the "solution" is very much outside of Elsa, who by the end just kind of has cool ice powers (no pun intended) that she can turn on and off like a faucet rather than being blessed/cursed with an all-powerful firehose. I'd be interested in a sequel where she has to come to grips with the fact that she can *still* kill a man with an icicle dagger if she wants to.
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I'm just addicted to the ice castle impulse, which to me isn't necessarily yoked to the sibling love. I just feel at the end like there's no reason Elsa shouldn't feel, in some way, like she wants to go back to her castle, maybe. That the castle is always there, even if you have lots of love to keep you away from it. Maybe not very Disney...
Brand new post
http://koganbot.livejournal.com/354108.html
Ctrl-f to "Isn't the fundamental reason Elsa isolated herself..." to pick up my response to your most recent comment, plus further PBSification thoughts.
The trot
The Rules Of The Game No. 24: The PBSification Of Rock
I don't think it altogether delivers: missing are the tumult, the mess, and the anguish of the original Why Music Sucks essays, the social life and social detail, as well as the twists and back-and-forth of my own thinking, which all belong;* but it does clarify several points, as well as throwing a couple of pointed questions at me at the end.
*If you'd like, you can find big hunks of the original essays in Reak Punks Don't Wear Black.
Fact Checking
To which Byron Coley answered in Why Music Still Sucks or Why "Why Music Sucks" Sucks (WMS #2), sometime in mid '87: