Screw Rock 'n' Roll

"Get Lucky": The American Daft Punk song

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:00:26 -0700

One of the songs I’m hearing everywhere here in the US is Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” This is no surprise, since it is a top 20 hit and the most successful Daft Punk single to date in America.

It is also their most American single to date. Oh yes, it is unmistakably Daft Punk, in full French House vivant. But it also has Nile Rodgers’s real disco guitar instead of the reconstituted funk of prior Daft Punk euro-dance. And the lead vocal isn’t the faceless vocoderized sample of the duo’s previous singles, but Pharrell Williams’s familiar amateur soul croon. It would be misguided to pretend it isn’t a transatlantic tune, but with two of its most recognizable elements being distinctly American — at a time when America has wholeheartedly embraced electronic dance music — is it best understood as a primarily American song?

(On the other hand, this is the most successful Daft Punk single of all time pretty much everywhere — their first number one in a slew of markets and their second in France, following “One More Time.”)

I saw an American razor. It was in a Civil War museum.

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:14:00 -0700

andyhutchins said:

We have razors here.

No way am I going back to being clean shaven after more than three years. I will endure my ratchet facial hair for one more week.

As I have mentioned, I left the power cord for my beard trimming...

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:45:00 -0700

As I have mentioned, I left the power cord for my beard trimming device at home, which means I haven’t been properly groomed since April. It has reached the point where, whenever I look in the mirror, I am reminded of Bunyip Bluegum’s Uncle Wattleberry (on right), qua:

This is a frontways view of Bunyip Bluegum and his Uncle Wattleberry. At a glance you can see what a fine, round, splendid fellow Bunyip Bluegum is, without me telling you. At a second glance you can see that the Uncle is more square than round, and that his face has whiskers on it.

[…]

The plain truth was that Bunyip and his Uncle lived in a small house in a tree, and there was no room for the whiskers. What was worse, the whiskers were red, and they blew about in the wind, and Uncle Wattleberry would insist on bringing them to the dinner table with him, where they got in the soup.

Weaver D’s is not automatic for the people on...

Mon, 20 May 2013 06:14:00 -0700

Weaver D’s is not automatic for the people on Sundays.

This is part two of two in a series of me visiting soul food restaurants referenced by Southern musical acts.

Eat your lil ass up like a Chanterelle’s plate. This is...

Mon, 20 May 2013 06:13:00 -0700

Eat your lil ass up like a Chanterelle’s plate.

This is part one of two in a series of me visiting soul food restaurants referenced by Southern musical acts.

Top four little women in Little Women

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:53:32 -0700

Amy: what an amazing and pretentious brat.
Jo: bad bitch freal.
Beth: aww, Beth is nice: an endearing version of Mary Bennett.
Meg: Ugh you are boring please fuck off now.

Lost chicken opportunities

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:21:00 -0700

andyhutchins replied to your post: On a Greyhound, to Mobile, from Tallahassee, somewhere outside Panama City, Florida

You had chicken in Tally and it wasn’t Guthrie’s? Missing out.

Evidently I need to start informing the internets of my whereabouts before I leave these places instead of being told what I missed after I’ve left. In that spirit:

I’m currently in New Orleans, LA

I will be going, over the next two weeks, to:

Birmingham, AL
Montgomery, AL
Atlanta, GA
Charleston, SC
Somewhere in NC that I haven’t decided yet.
Charlottesville, VA
Washington, DC
Asbury Park, NJ

All advice welcome!

I have a very important announcement: As of right now, if every...

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:07:00 -0700

I have a very important announcement: As of right now, if every US state I have ever visited gave me its electoral college votes, I would win a presidential election*. (States in red are ones in which I have visited but not left the airport.)

——

* Well, if I were a natural born US citizen over the age of 35.

On a Greyhound, to Mobile, from Tallahassee, somewhere outside Panama City, Florida

Sat, 11 May 2013 22:34:00 -0700

[x-post]

I wondered in Tallahassee^[1] if I had yet properly reached the South. I was in the Florida panhandle, and the cosmopolitan Caribbean of Miami had long receded. The Floridian capital is one of tidy antebellum architecture and broad hanging Southern live oaks — photos of which fail to properly capture the way these vast trees droop over the avenues, as if the heat in the air were too much for them — and that other great American architectural triumph, and of the American South particularly — the strip mall.

Another part of town, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks, is less pretty: the strip malls here contain pawn shops and gun shops, and pawn-and-gun shops, and wig stores and auto repair shops and nail salons and car customising services. The product of the latter stands in one of the massive parking lots — the one filled with a continuous soundtrack of soul music emanating from one of the roadside car washes at its edge — a gleaming, salmon-pink sedan with matching oversized pink wheels elevating the car to well over twice its normal height above the ground. Next to this one is another automobile, less magnificent but equally pink. In a CD store selling bootleg copies of mixtapes by Boosie and Mouse and Webbie and Gucci Mane and other less well known Southern rappers, as well as classic albums from outside the South — Illmatic, Ready to Die, Reasonable Doubt, The Marshall Mathers LP — sits a silver haired man probably in his fifties, dressed tidily in clothes slightly too small for him. He strikes up conversation with me because, he says, he’s the only other white guy in the store. “I’m the manager,” he says, as if to explain his presence. He then clarifies that he hosts parties at clubs with one of the store’s proprietors. “When I first came around, they thought I was the bookie,” he continues. “Because I used to be a bookmaker.”

I’m in this part of town looking for a theatre; the official Tallahassee visitors’ website had advised that this evening would mark the first of three performances of A Raisin in the Sun, the story of a black family in 1950s Chicago who buy a house in an all-white neighbourhood. It was the first show written by an African American woman to play on Broadway. The theatre, when I found it, was in one of those Southside strip malls, in the concrete expanse of an empty store front. About thirty people attended. The performance was enjoyable, though its energy flagged from time to time — always a risk for plays as long as this one. I’m not sure if theatres are commonly found in strip malls in America, but either way, I don’t wish to suggest the production was an amateurish one; it was nothing of the sort. The stand out performance was probably that of Zakiya Jas, who played the long-suffering wife of the show’s hero-of-sorts, Walter Lee Younger, a man in his mid-thirties chafing at the limitations of his job as chauffeur for a rich white man. (Summer Hill Seven handled the lead role capably.)

Tallahassee was where I saw Confederate flags for the first time this visit — on the licence plate of a truck driven by a large and neatly-presented white woman — but I’d also seen Confederate flags in Charlottesville, Virginia^[2]. I imagine folks might argue that the home of the University of Virginia has more in common culturally with the suburbs of Washington, DC, than the rest of Dixie. I saw a sign outside a chicken restaurant advertising the “best liver and gizzards in town,” but can a town really be properly representative of the South if it hosts two universities and a state government — and which are the three biggest employers in town? Tallahassee does feel like a college town in many ways. And Tallahassee is unusually Democratic politically for a Southern town (though it probably isn’t meaningful in this regard that even the local paper is called The Democrat).

Outside Tallahassee and further along the panhandle, however, things get undeniably Southern. The vegetation turns thick and lush, the ground swampy. Little in the way of anything lines the narrow highway, save for lone, low, modestly-constructed houses, the odd trailer, and dirt roads disappearing rapidly into the woods. In the distance, the occasional water tower announces the name of a passing town. Churches — small, cheaply but neatly constructed, invariably white and marked by tall, prominent crosses — are a regular occurrence. A handmade poster posted on a telegraph pole reads “IMPERIALIST SOCIALIST BENGHAZI COVER UP.” I guess the author considered it unnecessary to explain the context or object of her complaint.

I’ve seen plenty of country Australia, and this is nothing like country Australia. It’s much greener for a start. The heat is unfamiliar too: not more intense by any means, but perhaps damper? These are preliminary observations. And I’ve left out the parts that could be found anywhere in America: the chain “ale house” I at dinner at last night, for instance, that had hockey and basketball on the TVs that crowded into every possible point at which a person’s gaze might turn and a tantalising selection of craft beers behind the bar. Or the shopping mall that could have been anywhere if not for the quantity of Seminole and Gator merchandise on sale. Or how, now, between Panama City and Pensacola, along the Gulf Coast, Walmarts and hotels and half-constructed pre-fab townhomes are a more common occurrence than rundown shacks.

I have seen little of the South. I will see more.

——

1. To be precise, while eating a chicken sandwich in a Chick-Fil-A there. I’m sad to report that chicken sold by bigots is delicious.

2. And in California, too.

This has to be intentional, right?

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:31:50 -0700

This has to be intentional, right?

Calvin Harris ft. Florence Welch, “Sweet Nothing,”...

Mon, 06 May 2013 15:07:00 -0700

Calvin Harris ft. Florence Welch, “Sweet Nothing,” 18 Months (2012)

This song seems to be absolutely everywhere in America right now. (Also Drake. Sigh.) Yes, the sound of this US visit appears to be a dance tune by two Brits.

"This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base in the party,” a powerbroker told ABC TV’s Chris..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 14:14:40 -0700

““This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base in the party,” a powerbroker told ABC TV’s Chris Uhlmann. “Now that his only faction — Newspoll — has deserted him, he is gone.””

- Erik Jensen, “Kevin Rudd’s Unrelenting Campaign to Regain Power,” The Monthly, May 2013

If you ever wanted to see the problem with the Australian Labor Party — and Australian politics in general — encapsulated in a single quote, here it is. For our parties, the voters’ will (for that is precisely what Newspoll measures) is an afterthought: one mere faction among many.

In his authorial voice, Jensen seems to agree with the politicians’ consensus:

On 27 February 2012, the party rejected Rudd 71–31. The message was emphatic: caucus loathed Rudd for what he had done and was doing to the party. But there were some in the press who still couldn’t let go of Rudd. As Peter Hartcher wrote: “Labor has overwhelmingly endorsed the candidate of the unions and the party machine over the candidate of the people.”

Hartcher’s point about Rudd’s popularity amongst the public is, in Jensen’s conception, a trivial media fixation: Hartcher can’t “let go.” And Jensen goes on to adopt the dismissal of public opinion as the “Newspoll faction”:

Gillard’s circle suspected Rudd of timing media opportunities to coincide with Newspoll’s fortnightly phone surveys. The polls were, after all, his only faction.

And continued public dissatisfaction with Julia Gillard, for Jensen, cannot be legitimate, but the product of press magnate string-pulling:

Although the press gallery wrote off Rudd for good in the wake of the uncontested challenge, and the country’s economic indicators could hardly be better, leadership speculation will be back on the agenda when Murdoch’s editors want it to be — that is, when their pollsters resume asking the question: who is your preferred choice for PM, Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard?

Indeed, for Jensen, public approval of Rudd has not only been meaningless; it has illegitimate:

When Rudd seized the leadership from Kim Beazley in December 2006, already the public liked him a lot more than his party did. (Back in Queensland, as premier Wayne Goss’s right-hand man, his nickname had been Dr Death.) Voters bought his faux folksiness.

“Bought”? It’s impossible, apparently, that voters like him. They had to have been duped.

I’m not writing this to defend Rudd — though my thoughts on him are here, if you want to know where I’m coming from. And certainly I would not like to suggest there isn’t a problem with the ceaseless scrutiny of new polling figures as a dynamic force in Australian politics — and the responsibility the media bears for the problem. But Gillard’s unpopularity isn’t the invention of meddlesome survey-takers, and nor is the public per se wrong to come to a different conclusion about Rudd from that of the people who work with him.

For a long time I thought that it didn’t matter if the people around Rudd in Canberra didn’t like working with him — as a voter, it’s not my job to care if staffers and MPs feel nice about any one politician. But I have become persuaded that part of the job of being prime minister is to manage your relationships effectively so that you do the job effectively. Rudd clearly failed on that count. But the idea that, in politics, public will is a mere afterthought, something to be managed while one undertakes the real game of aligning factional power to one’s best interest, is the underpinning of the deep malaise in both parties in Australian politics now.

Thanks B.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:58:00 -0700

Thanks B.

Your shadow weighs a ton, driving down the 101

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:14:52 -0700

Ten things about America. Only ten things because I could go on all day and want to go out and look around San Francisco.

America, I love the way you have the countdown until red at crosswalks, but can you please institute the beeping signals for the visually impaired/people like me who don’t spend every second as a pedestrian staring at the little man until he changes but don’t want to look like an idiot because we’re standing at a crosswalk with a green light and staring into space. (Like this.)
I’d forgotten that in America, nothing costs what it costs. There’s always sales tax or tips or something.
Other things that I’d forgotten: the lights are upside down, Americans drive on the wrong side of the road (this only happened once — and when I was a pedestrian, not a driver), there are commercials for prescription drugs on TV, Americans are all so amazingly ridiculously friendly and I love you all.
I also forgot the power cord for my electric shaver, and I’m going to a wedding on Saturday, so I’d like to preserve my charge for that. My normally well-trimmed beard has lengthened into legit douchebag territory and I may well have crossed the line into authentic hobo by the end of the trip.
People in LA seem to love this Eric Garcetti dude who wants to be mayor, if their yard signs are anything to go by.
I really wish you guys would get rid of the penny. Or keep the penny but just don’t bother giving me one cent change when I’ve paid five dollars for something that’s four ninety nine.
In California, there are three types of FM radio stations you can get anywhere, listed in order of universal accessibility: Spanish-language, Christian, and country. Also, something that I’m guessing was NPR because it had a monologist/stand-up comic telling a San Francisco audience a story about being in band in high school in Montana. She sounded exactly like Kristen Schaal, but it was recorded in 1998 according to the back-announcer, so it couldn’t have been. Anyway, the Spanish language stations seem to play much more traditional Mexican music than contemporary Latin pop, which is a shame.
I drove over the Bixby Bridge, which, according to the sign there, is not the “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” yes I’m talking to you Death Cab. (This is the worst Ben Gibbard screw-up since he tried to use a hockey metaphor and revealed he didn’t know how the game worked.)
California at sunset really is beautiful, but driving on Highway 1 north of Santa Cruz as the sun falls into the ocean really does feel apocalyptic. I’ve never had this feeling in Washington — perhaps because of the mountains — but the end of the day on the Pacific coast looks like the end of the world. The sun rises on the east coast, but the day ends in California.
I went to the Hearst Castle, which Jeff Weiss told me was like the American Versailles. He was right.

On the way to America...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:38:00 -0700

…I finished reading Great Expectations. (It was the first time I’d read Charles Dickens.)

What this book seems to be about: An Australian who turns himself around after a life of crime, makes loads of legal money, sends it all to some English kid, and then when he decides to go see how the boy is doing, gets killed by the British government. Which then keeps the rest of his money for itself.

This is September 16, 2004, the first time I ever saw America. I...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:56:00 -0700

This is September 16, 2004, the first time I ever saw America. I have been and gone and returned and left again since then, and many of the things I think about the country have changed, but I still love it. I will leave Sydney tomorrow, arriving in Los Angeles Friday morning, and it will be like seeing an old friend again. (I will also see actual old friends again, which is good too.)

Erin and I are playing Bookshelf Roulette. I’ll let her...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:35:00 -0700

Erin and I are playing Bookshelf Roulette. I’ll let her explain:

(for those who are uninitiated, the Bookshelf Routlette concept comes from the brilliant Literary Disco podcast, which you should all listen to. The three hosts get three numbers from twitter, which indicated which bookshelf corner they count from, which shelf, and which book along, and they then discuss that book. It’s just one part of the podcast, but it’s always fun).

I gave Erin some numbers and she returned Melina Marchetta’s Saving Francesca, which I have not read. (I’ve read Looking for Alibrandi of course.)

And now it’s your turn. Your numbers are 3, 3, 26.

Counting clockwise from the top left corner of my bookcase returns the third shelf from the bottom, twenty-sixth book from the right, which, as you can see above, is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

I don’t remember when I bought this, though I imagine I did because it was a Penguin classic and at ten dollars I would have thought why not? I haven’t read it, partly because I’ve had a bad habit of taking it on flights with me and then, once aboard the plane, realizing that the last thing I want to read when stuck in a metal tube ten thousand feet above the ground is Lolita. I will be sure to not make this mistake when I fly SYD-LAX tomorrow.

Another reason I am yet to read this is the opening:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee Ta.

The first sentence is a bit worn through overexposure to have much effect, but the rest is so remarkable in its use of language — the mastery Nabakov exhibits over the sounds and rhythm of his syllables — that I can’t read on. When Humbert announces “I was born in 1910, in Paris,” I don’t continue; I go back and read the opening again to admire anew what Nabakov does, apparently effortlessly, with his words. I wish I could do it too.

You too can play Bookshelf Roulette! Leave me some numbers and I’ll talk about another book. Or request some numbers and you can do the same!

I heard you and Erin were talking about writing an analysis of Taylor’s career and were looking for submissions. What happened to that?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:10:32 -0700

This is a true and real thing! Erin and I were indeed editing a collection of essays about Taylor Swift. And we still are!

It was originally to be a summer project, and then we woke up to find that summer gone and the project not completed, and so it got put on the backburner a bit. But we were discussing it this week and we’re both definitely committed to seeing it through to completion.

We’ve had some great pitches for essays so far, but we’re open to some more, so if you would like to write something about Taylor for our collection, look over here for more details.

magnificentruin: manifesto Ugh at 7.

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:18:00 -0700

magnificentruin:

manifesto

Ugh at 7.

For me the key line in that is "Even more telling than the artists who get this cosign are the talented artists in the same ballpark who don’t - who tend to be the ones without influential PRs, canny positioning or contacts."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:26:00 -0700

This line of argument really seems of limited use to me. There are thousands — millions — of great unheard artists out there that would benefit if they had a record deal, or a nicely shot video, or a smart PR rep working them, and theoretically every bad artist who has those resources is denying them to the unheard ones who don’t. But the music business isn’t a meritocracy and pointing out that you consider Jai Paul’s marketing to be gauche doesn’t re-apportion those resources. And Lex wasn’t, say, using the space at The Quietus to shine a light on those “talented artists in the same ballpark.”[*] He was trying to make media criticism do the work of musical criticism (note his original Tumblr post: “I go in on worthless hypescam Jai Paul,” with the unnamed poorly performing journalists only an afterthought).

I mean, I get the what about the artists you aren’t paying attention to? line when a writer is failing to tell a story properly due to such omission — for instance, articles about gay-positive rap that start and end with Macklemore — but there are untold quantities of new music out there. The idea that if only people would stop writing about Jai Paul they would select their subjects on the basis of merit seems extremely dubious.

*EDIT: Katherine responds

I mean, accusing Lex of “not shining a light on those talented artists in the same ballpark” is kind of ridiculous. I can’t think of many writers who do this more.

Yeah, that’s a fair point. And Lex has previously done exactly the thing I said he didn’t do here — I recall during the period where indie R&B was a hyped thing he wrote a “here are R&B acts you should check out” article that was well-written and valuable, for instance.