Hocus Pocus by Focus

"doodle doo / doodle doo / doodle doo / doodle doo / doodle doodle oot doot doot doot doo"

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

Albini is predictably scathing in his disdain.

**********

Flash! Jessica Hopper is a reactionary idiot! Sasha Frere-Jones is a New Yorker critic!

Having had a distaste for hip hop since its earliest days, I have run afoul of this mentality for twenty-odd years. If you are involved in contemporary music, it is presumed that you appreciate hip-hop, or are at least deferential toward it as an arm of black culture.

Since I have no taste for this profoundly stupid genre I have been called a racist on occasion. I am not bothered by this. I know that as a white man in the US I am directly and inderectly benefitting from genuine racism both specific and institutional. I have done so all my life, and I am ashamed of it. There is no uglier part of our culture, and I believe it influences almost everything in the public sphere. It may have had some dilute influence on shaping my tastes unbeknownst to me. I am even ashamed of the possibility of that. This is an attempt by someone else in my position to express and distance himself from this shame, and I understand it.

I have equivalent genre distaste for almost all heavy metal (hip hop's culture-mirror equivalent), pastiche production pop music like Brintey Spears, Beyonce, Avril Lavigne et al, the REM-U2-Radiohead axis of millionaire dabbling, trash auteurs like Outkast, Beck and the Beastie Boys, teenager fake punk, and melismatic divas like Celine Dion. This is less in service of elitism than in making it possible for me to walk directly to the part of the record store where the good records are. I know what kinds of music speak to me the least, so I don't spend my energy combing through them looking for exceptions.

Does this mean I limit myself? Certainly. I don't listen to as much bullshit as other people do. I am happy to carry this limitation. The groaning of the shelves under my record collection indicates that I am not wanting for variety in my listening because I don't own have either a Garth Brooks album or a Kool Keith 12-inch sitting there unlistened-to.

Picking on a tiny Southern queer for his music tastes and calling him a "cracker" is about as stupid as criticism can get. _________________ steve albini

Since I'm cutting and pasting tonight, I'll note that the first couple Comsat Angels albums have been reissued. Corwood, I think they might interest you.

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Waiting for a Miracle is a sorcerous first album, at least once it sinks in, after short-to-long phases of puzzlement, bemusement, and fascination. Its songs of romantic ruin, paranoia, and doubt are spare, inelastic, and ceaselessly on edge. Even when the songs are at their bounciest and most alluring, they have an insular and alien quality. The instruments are played with intrepid simplicity, but when they're heard as one, they sound peculiar and complex -- the results aren't unlike slow, stern spins on Pere Ubu's "The Modern Dance" and "Street Waves" -- albeit with insidious lyrical hooks that are innocuous to the eye and startling to the ear, like "This is total war, girl," "Sometimes I feel out of control," and "I can't relax 'cause I haven't done a thing and I can't do a thing 'cause I can't relax." Acting as something like a minimalist garage band with one foot in the past and the other in the future, with Andy Peake's memory-triggering organ bleats offset by structural abnormalities and twists, the band does come across as a little timid from time to time, unsure of how far to take its uniqueness, but it's only another factor that fosters the album's insistent nerviness. "Total War," a razor-sharp examination of a relationship snapping under the pressure of buried mutual contempt, threatens to stop as often as it appears to be on the verge of taking off, carries a circular arrangement, and provides no release. It was the album's "other" single, nearly as conventions-stripped as PiL's more venomous "Flowers of Romance" (released the following year). "Independence Day," on the other hand, gave the band its greatest commercial success, wrapping all the band's strengths in one concise package, from the brilliantly paced shifts between the sparse and the dense to the balance between the direct and the indirect. Apart from the barren, ominous kiss-off that is "Postcard," each of the remaining songs sound like singles, even if they never had a chance at putting the band on Top of the Pops. (This is a band that called itself "doomsteady" with a hint of seriousness, after all.) While there are crucial differences that reveal themselves after deep listening, this album can be appreciated by anyone touched by other maverick post-punk albums released the same year, such as Joy Division's Closer, Associates' The Affectionate Punch, Magazine's The Correct Use of Soap, the Sound's Jeopardy, and Simple Minds' Empires and Dance. [Renascent's 2006 reissue comes in a sturdy paper sleeve with a layout different from RPM's 1995 edition. Eight bonus tracks are added, including non-album tracks, outtakes, and demos. "Home Is the Range," the best of them all, is a windstorm of assaultive guitar shots, jet-plane FX, and organ stabs, the most aggressive thing in the band's catalog.] - Andy Kellman, AMG

And just to show you that not all music writing is the hipster hash I've been slagging in the Voice:

"Its songs of romantic ruin, paranoia, and doubt are spare, inelastic, and ceaselessly on edge. Even when the songs are at their bounciest and most alluring, they have an insular and alien quality."

Now see, this writer is reaching for something, trying to tell you something about the music and what makes it distinctive. In fact, I think I need to change my tagline in honor...

Here he describes why Jilli might like them:

Erroneously regarded as a synth pop band -- and, every now and then -- as a band that peaked with a song placed in a scene of Real Genius, the Comsat Angels were one of the finest bands of the post-punk/new wave era. Often as moody if less dramatic than Joy Division, their first and best albums -- 1980's Waiting for a Miracle, 1981's Sleep No More, and 1982's Fiction -- featured abstract pop songs with spare instrumentation, many of which were bleak and filled with some form of heartache. The albums were almost unrelentingly sullen, but they were always transfixing. The band then fell prey to various commercial pressures for several years. In the '90s they resurfaced with a pair of powerful albums that resembled logical extensions of their earliest work, and then they vanished again.

Heh. "Unrelentingly sullen."

Corwood, I think they might interest you.

They sound interesting. Loved the Albini letter, too, but I'm always glad I don't know that guy in real life.

Picking on a tiny Southern queer for his music tastes and calling him a "cracker" is about as stupid as criticism can get. _________________ steve albini

"As" stupid as calling hip hop "profoundly stupid", and slagging Beck, Outkast and Radiohead in the same breath? Noting "I know what kinds of music speak to me the least, so I don't spend my energy [listening to it]"?

I'm always glad I don't know that guy in real life.

From all I've heard (Bob Weston is an old friend) he's quite pleasant.

Really? My impression is that he breathes fire and sticks needles in voodoo dolls all day.