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Anatomy of a derail
Friday, 4 May 2012, 11:34 PM (permalink).
Here's a how you lose the better part of a day:
You're about to settle down to work, but you glance at Twitter and see someone has approvingly retweeted a link to something called On Being a Happy Person. Being of a certain mental disposition, you are are naturally curious to find out the secret to happiness. So you click on the link and read a short post that begins: No irony. No satire. No subterfuge or illusion.
Accept. That’s the first thing. Accept all conditions as they are, or seek within reason to change them, being mindful of the outcome on yourself and others.
And you immediately bristle. Because this is sounding like the same kind of "inspirational" nonsense that the yoga instructor reads during shavasana, which always sets your teeth on edge (and is maybe one of the reasons why you've been finding excuses to skip class for the last couple of months). It's not so much that you disagree with the message in principle (you've read a little bit about Buddhism and you sort of get the bit about "grasping" and "attachment"); it's that in a world that is so demonstrably and monstrously unjust, in a culture in which there are large groups of people dedicated to demeaning and and dehumanizing other large groups of people, advocating a philosophy of "acceptance" seems at best naïve and at worst complicit. (Just to be clear, I am tracing a thought process—my thought process—here, not critiquing that particular blog post, which also says some things that I fully endorse. Love as much as possible is a good, if surprisingly challenging, edict. Anyway, back to the derail.)
The bit about No subterfuge tickles a memory: something you read, something about, maybe, "guile" being a defense or a weapon? You do a little googling, but it's not turning up anything. You pull out your well-thumbed Harper Perennial Library edition of The Crying of Lot 49, because you think you remember a bit about the Tristero that might fit the bill, and in any case, whenever you're trying to place a half-remembered quote about resistance and alienation, there's a better than even chance it'll be something of Pynchon's. Eventually, after the inevitable lingering over various other beloved but irrelevant passages, you stumble on something on page 174: Their [the Tristero's] entire emphasis now toward silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance .
Almost right. The phrase silence, impersonation, opposition captures some of the sentiment you were thinking of, but you can tell it's not the passage you were trying to remember. So you go back to Google using the Pynchon phrase as your starting point, and that leads you to, of all places, the Google Books edition of The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, specifically the essay American Plastic, in the midst of which, Vidal quotes the Pynchon passage and off-handedly remarks, Well, Joyce, also chose exile, cunning, silence, but eschewed allegiance's mask.
The Joyce reference rings a bell, but you can't recall the exact context, so you do a new search, using the terms exile, cunning, silence . That scores you multiple hits citing this passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.
(
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
)
Aha! That's what you were looking for. A statement in favor of resistance rather than acceptance, and an acknowledgement that sometimes the only tools of resistance available are refusal (silence), retreat (exile), and subterfuge (cunning). You congratulate yourself on your (hypothetical) rebuttal of a straw man argument you extrapolated from a blog post by someone you don't even know.
But you are not done yet because all this talk of exile and resistance to authority gets you thinking of Pynchon again. This time, it doesn't take long to find the passage; it's one that you come back to over and over (and which even shows up sometimes as a tagline on your blog), Oedipa musing on the invisible, WASTE-connected network of undergrounds and outcasts she finds (or imagines) during her nighttime wandering of San Francisco:
It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private.
(
Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
)
By now you've soaked up enough literary alienation to embitter even the happiest of mortals, so there's nothing left to do but vomit it all back into the world in a series of elliptical tweets, and then to spend the rest of your evening composing a meandering blog post about the whole experience. Congratulations, you've squandered yet another irreplaceable day of your finite existence!
File under: Ego, Grouses, Black bile.
This will only take a minute
Wednesday, 2 May 2012, 1:18 AM (permalink).
Yesterday, the immortal WPRB DJ Jon Solomon asked his Twitter followers for their favorite songs under 60 seconds, his own nominee being the Angry Samoans' Lights Out. That's a fine candidate, but for me, the indisputable champions of the sub-60 form were the (aptly named) Minutemen, the only question in my mind being which of their dozens of qualifying songs to declare as my favorite. It took some deliberation, but I finally went with Ain't Talkin' Bout Love, their 42-second distillation of the Van Halen "classic" (specifically, the live version included on their 1984 Tour Spiel 7-inch, which loomed large in the musical landscape of my freshman year of college). By that time, though, I had ultra-short songs on the brain. and sure enough, I found myself combing my library for good sub-60-second songs to turn into a playlist. In keeping with the spirit of the genre, this was slapped together quickly with little regard for the subtleties of sequencing. A few arguably deserving tracks had to be left off in order to comply with 8tracks' rule of having no more than two songs from any one band or album—the only one that caused me real pain was omitting Minutemen's Futurism Restated (it was narrowly edged out by Ack Ack Ack). I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the mix. Although it is predictably dominated by punk scorchers, hiphop, jazz, and even klezmer all manage to be represented as well.
So, with no further introduction, I present my Gone in 60 Seconds mix. in all its 24-songs-in-19-minutes glory:
File under: Music.
Favorite Albums of 2011
Sunday, 1 Apr 2012, 4:57 PM (permalink).
Maybe it is fitting that it has taken me until April Fool's Day to finally finish writing this. It certainly feels foolish to be going on about last year's albums a quarter of the way through the current one. But I am stubborn enough to post it anyway. I'd pretty much settled on my favorites back in February, but I needed to get that get that piece about what star ratings mean to me out of my system first (only partly to create some padding between this post and last year's favorite albums post), and then life intervened a little, and, well, here we are. All the usual caveats apply. These are the albums from 2011 that most impressed me out of the couple dozen I actually purchased and listened to. There are obviously many records, including some critically acclaimed ones, that I never got around to buying, whether out of prejudice, ignorance, or simply lack of time. Maybe three years from now I'll finally "discover" that Bon Iver album and wonder how the hell I managed to ignore it, but that's how things go. Even more than last year, I feel uncomfortable presenting these as a ranking. There was no one album that blew all the others away. Instead, there were several very strong albums, and distinguishing among them involved some pretty fine hair-splitting. It probably doesn't help that a number of them came out (or I only found) very late in the year, so it took some extra time to process them. Anyway, here's what I liked, divided into some rough clusters.
Photo finish
Try as I might, I couldn't settle on a single top album for the year. There were two excellent candidates, and I decided to just go ahead and call it a tie:
- Stephin Merritt, Obscurities: Technically (according to an arcane system the geekiness of which even I am ashamed to expose to the world) my top-ranked album for the year, but since it largely consists of older, uncollected songs, I feel like it's cheating a bit to give it sole possession of the top slot. On the other hand, where most bands' "rarities" albums are interesting primarily for novelty value, this collection of afterthoughts and cast-offs contains several great, "hit"-level songs: "Rats in the Garbage of the Western World" (a 1995 b-side); the "single version" of 1998's "I Don't Believe You"; the heart-wrenching acoustic Buffalo Rome version of "Plant White Roses"; and the previously unreleased tracks "The Sun and the Sky and the Sea" (an outtake from 69 Love Songs that's as lovely as almost any of the tracks that made the album) and "When You're Young and In Love." Of the rest of the album, I'd only really consider "The Song from Venus" expendable.
- The Coathangers, Larceny and Old Lace: I liked these Atlanta girl-punks' first two albums, but I'll admit they are a bit uneven. This record is leaner and meaner than its predecessors, better reflecting the intensity of their live shows, which can be best summarized with the single word "ferocious". There's no fluff on this album, but for top tracks, I'd single out "Hurricane", " Trailer Park Boneyard", "Johnny", and "Chicken:30".
In the running
These three albums come in just slightly behind my top finishers. All three are extremely solid, just maybe not quite as densely packed as those two. They are each pretty different in flavor, so may not appeal equally to all tastes.
- Girls, Father, Son, Holy Ghost: Building on their strong 2009 debut Album, and solid 2010 EP Broken Dreams Club, Girls' sophomore album mixes roughly equal parts jangly, sun-drenched pop and delicate, heart-tugging ballads, and then throws in a curveball like the hard-driving, distortion-heavy, "Die" for good measure. Maybe it's just a reflection of my mindset this past year, but all my favorites were weepers: "Just a Song", "Forgiveness", and "Jamie Marie".
- JEFF the Brotherhood, We Are the Champions: Their sound is big, heavy, and driving, fusing elements of psychedelia, metal, and garage rock into furious sonic whirlwind. But what makes this band amazing is that it's just two guys—Jake and Jamin Orrall—making all that racket. And having seen them play live, I can attest to the fact that their sound is not the product of studio magic. I saw them three times in the past year, in some of the most unlikely and inhospitable venues Philadelphia has to offer, and they never failed to bring the house down. I literally cannot comprehend how they are able to generate that much sound out of one guitar and one drumset. Top tracks: "Shredder", "Mellow Out", "Stay Up Late".
- Yuck, Yuck: Every year or two a band comes along that doesn't seem all that distinctive, has no remarkable backstory, but still manages to push all my buttons in precisely the right way. Tokyo Police Club was kind of like that for me last year. This year, it's Yuck. This record is pretty much straightforward, guitar-centric indie rock. If that sounds unenthusiastic, it's really just because I can't put my finger on why their songs appeal to me so much. But appeal they do. Critics seem to like comparing them to vintage Dinosaur Jr., and I can hear some similarities there, but I would venture that an apter comparison would be another band from that 90s New England indie scene, Small Factory. And if you knew about my intense love affair with that short-lived band, you'd understand that comparison as being high praise. Top tracks: "The Wall", "Georgia", and "Sunday."
Peloton
Though I am putting this next group behind the preceding ones, none of these records are slouches. Any of them could have cracked the top 5 with one more "loved" track. Like I said, it was a deep field this year.
- Those Darlins, Screws Get Loose: I only investigated this Nashville sorta-country band because Rhett Miller wouldn't shut up about them on Twitter while they were on tour with the Old 97's, but once I did, I almost immediately developed one of my imaginary rockstar crushes for all three of the Darlin ladies. I saw them live over the summer, which only made me like them more (and drummer Linwood Regensburg also charmed me with his encyclopedic knowledge of the '93 Phillies). This is their second album, and comparing it to their debut (which I only found after listening to this one) is instructive. Whereas Those Darlins (2009) leans heavily on their country-gal identity, Screws Get Loose has a punkier edge (all the more pronounced in their live show) that, for me, makes them much more interesting. Top Tracks: "Screws Get Loose", "Be Your Bro".
- The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck: I can't claim to have been hip to the Mountain Goats back when "they" were just John Darnielle and a cassette recorder. I only got on board in 2006, when I finally got around to listening to 2004's We Shall All Be Healed. But since then, they've become one of my very favorite bands, so much so that they are now neck and neck with Yo La Tengo (who are, as ever, my rock-n-roll heroes) for the top slot on my Last.fm most-listened list. So it pretty much goes without saying that I'm going to like whatever they put out. All Eternals Deck falls somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of my favorite tMG albums, but it's still an album I wholeheartedly endorse. Also, they put on a great show in Philly last April. Top Tracks: "Damn These Vampires", "Estate Sale Sign".
- Wye Oak, Civilian: This album was recommended to me by my most reliable informant (who also pointed me toward Yuck), and he once again justified my faith in him. My initial reaction was that it possessed "a bit of a Cat Power vibe, but without the sameyness that tends to make Cat Power tedious after a little while." That's probably unfair to both bands, but I do hear a similarity in Chan Marshall's and Jenn Wasner's the vocal styles. In any case, the album stood up to repeated listening and by year's end had gotten its hooks into me. Top tracks: "Civilian", "Holy Holy".
- Wussy, Strawberry: If there's one album I'm going to look back on in another year and wonder how I didn't rank it higher, it's this one. Wussy is another of my favorite bands going (and Robert Christgau agrees with me), but it always seems to take me a while to fully appreciate each new album, and this one only came out in November. The two best tracks on the album—"Wrist Rocket" and "Waiting Room"—have "perfect song" potential, and I am probably still undervaluing a couple others. Since Christgau has extolled Wussy's virtues more eloquently than I ever could, I'll just express my dismay at the almost criminal lack of appreciation for this Cincinnati quartet. I understand how many of the bands I like might not be to everyone's taste, but I honestly don't understand how anyone who claims to like rock music can't fall in love with this band.
- Los Campesinos!, Hello Sadness: Another late-year release that I perhaps have not fully digested yet. A lot of my feelings about the album are filtered through having seen them play in Philly just after it was released. One observation from that show (besides the fact that reports of Gareth's abandonment of the glockenspiel have been greatly exaggerated) is that for a band that gets categorized as indiepop or even "twee", they inspired a surprisingly active mosh pit. And I think similar contradictions crop up throughout their music. They shift gears from ruminative elegies to driving rave-ups, occasionally—as in "Baby I Got the Death Rattle", one of my favorite songs from this album—in the course of a single song. Lyrically, they often affect an air of cynicism or grim humor that belies deeper longing and regret, as in my other favorite song from the album, "Songs About Your Girlfriend", in which the narrator boasts of his previous exploits with the titular girlfriend ("I always made her purr like a cat") only to confess his ultimate failure a moment later ("I never made her smile like that"). I think Los Campesinos! are at their best when all these tensions are in play, which is perhaps why I can't quite buy into a more straightforwardly "sincere" song like "To Tundra", however lovely it might be on its own.
- The Decembrists, The King Is Dead: My final endorsement for the year is also the most surprising, at least to me. Prior to 2006, I had managed to steer clear of The Decembrists, despite increasingly loud buzz surrounding them. Curiosity, however, finally got the best of me early that year. I bought 2005's Picaresque, quickly got hooked, and in short ordered gobbled up Castaways and Cutouts (2002) and Her Majesty the Decembrists (2003) as well. Then they signed with a major label and released The Crane Wife (2006, thought I didn't get it until 2007), and I hated it so thoroughly that I wrote them off completely (though I continued to enjoy those first three albums). I ignored The King Is Dead despite its chart-topping debut and continued to do so despite positive critical rumblings. But I finally broke down at the end of the year and grabbed it and was shocked to discover that I really liked it. Well, most of it. Even on those early albums, they would occasionally lapse into a certain earnest sentimentality that I find almost unbearably cloying, and there are a couple songs on this record that share that weakness. But the high points of this album, and there are several, more than make up for those. In particular, I love the addition of Gillian Welch's vocal harmonies on "Rox in the Box" and "Down By the Water", the peppy apocalypticism of "Calamity Song", and the towering defiance of "This Is Why We Fight." For those, I'm willing to forgive a couple clunkers.
And finally
Whew. We've finally reached the end. Once again, I've made an 8tracks playlist that includes most of the "Top Tracks" mentioned above, plus some additional songs I liked from albums that didn't make the cut for this already ridiculously verbose list (including The Baseball Project, Das Racist, PJ Harvey, Kidstreet, Me & Stupid [a Bettie Serveert side-project], The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Tapes 'n Tapes, Tom Waits, and wavves). Enjoy!
(Hey, lookit! 8tracks has gotten onboard with HTML5. It's still "beta", but I guess I'll be going through my old playlist posts and swapping out the Flash widgets for the new code.)
File under: Music, Ego.
Silly love songs
Thursday, 16 Feb 2012, 4:26 PM (permalink).
Well, another Valentine's Day has passed. For reasons I needn't repeat, it is not my favorite holiday on the calendar, but it is a good excuse for making up playlists. Lots of material to choose from. This year's mix, posted to 8tracks in the waning hours of V-Day, is titled Inamorati Anonymous, in honor of the fictional society of love-spurners from my favorite book. ( Yes, the 8tracks widget requires Flash. Sorry. Yay! 8tracks now has HTML5 widgets!) If that's too bleak for you, last year's Girlfriends & Boyfriends mix espouses (somewhat) cheerier views on the subject of love. And while we're on the subject of love songs, this seems like the perfect opportunity to bust out a Nick Hornby quote I've been dying to use since, I believe, the days when I was first contemplating starting this blog.
What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejections and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don;t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.
(
Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)
)
I'm not sure how seriously Hornby means us to takes his character's speculations, but there are days when I can certainly sympathize with the sentiment. On the off chance there's something to it, consider this your warning. Listen to my musical recommendations—especially the love songs—at your own risk.
File under: Music, Ego, Books.
Oh my stars
Wednesday, 15 Feb 2012, 3:47 PM (permalink).
This is the post I was trying to write earlier this month before I realized that what was supposed to be a parenthetical explanation of my Mix-o-matic playlist was spiraling out of control and needed to be quarantined in its own post. If it wasn't already clear from that post, I spend an absolutely inordinate amount of time thinking about the star ratings I assign songs in iTunes. Partly that's because I rely on them to fuel things like the Mix-o-matic, and partly it's just because I am kind of obsessive that way. So obsessive, in fact, that I feel obliged to expose my thought process here. In my last post, I said I could boil the meaning of all my star ratings down to one or two words. To recap:
- ★: (Barely) Tolerable
- ★★: Indifferent
- ★★★: Good
- ★★★★: Very Good
- ★★★★★: Perfect
As I said, I like the simplicity of these definitions, but I also feel like they could bear with some additional elaboration. (As a side note: a couple years ago, I tweeted a somewhat different, but similarly terse, set of star definitions. That one's actually an abbreviated version of the rating system I espoused for my books on LibraryThing, and while it has much in common with my song ratings, there are enough differences between how I think about individual songs vs. entire books that I am going to stick to the above terminology here.) ★: Tolerable
One-star songs are songs I basically don't ever want to listen to (the first rule in almost any new smart playlist I create is "Rating>1"), but which don't merit permanent deletion from my library. Actually, many of these probably do merit deletion, but because I am a pack-rat at heart and increases in computer storage capacity have finally outpaced my ability to add new music, there's not much that I cannot find some excuse for keeping around. The most common reasons I give myself for keeping one-stars include:
- Historical interest: I have, for example, ripped a few compilations of recorded poetry, and there are a lot of tracks from those that I find pretty unbearable but keep on hand just in case I am suddenly press-ganged into guest teaching some literature class. Granted, the likelihood of this has become vanishingly small, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared.
- Interest to others: A fair number of these songs are ones that I am, in theory at least, "holding" on someone else's behalf. A few were puzzling favorites of my ex-wife (Partridge Family Christmas Album, I am looking at you); others are insipid children's songs that even my kids have outgrown. I guess I am really only keeping these out of nostalgia.
- Completism: Although I spend virtually all of my listening time in "shuffle" mode, I remain, at heart, a believer in the album as a musical form. I still mostly buy complete albums (albeit digitally), and when I do, I feel compelled to keep all the tracks from the album, so that I could (again, in theory) listen to it in its canonical form. While some of these are truly bad, a larger large segment of this category are actually non-songs: the intros, outros, interstitial skits, and other filler tracks that some artists seem to find irresistible.
In short, the one-star category is basically the junk-drawer of my iTunes library, a place to shove things I almost certainly do not need, but can't quite take the step of actually throwing away. It's of some consolation to me that it's a very small group (fewer than 500 tracks in a library of over 17,000).
★★: Indifferent
As I discussed at length in my previous post, two stars is my default rating for everything new that enters my library. Consequently, it has ended up being a rather large (4,490 tracks as I write this), eclectic, and ever-shifting category. For the new arrivals, the rating doesn't really mean anything except that I haven't listened to a song much. Of the songs that have remained twos for a while, some are pretty decent songs that for one reason or another haven't managed to catch my attention (it's to catch these that I've engineered the Mix-o-matic to continually cycle through the two-star category). Some are basically-OK songs that have that one little thing (a little too jokey, a little too screamy, a little too sappy, an unfortunate string arrangement, an ill-advised children's chorus) that finally gets on my nerves. Many are truly indifferent: I wouldn't go out of my way to listen to them, but I don't mind if they pop up once in a while. And some are teetering on the edge of being consigned to one-star oblivion.
★★★: Good
Three stars is where songs start getting interesting. A three is my baseline "I like this" rating. Either I am fairly good at predicting whether I'll like an album before I buy it, or I am pretty generous with this rating, because it's by far the biggest category (currently 8,058 tracks, almost half my library). As in the two-star category, there is some upward and downward mobility here. New songs that I like right off the bat I won't hesitate to immediately bump to a three rating. Sometimes they won't stand up to repeated listening and wind up getting demoted back into the twos. On the other hand, it's not at all uncommon for a song to keep growing in my estimation and ascend to a higher rating. Obviously, though, a great many stay threes and that's a perfectly respectable grade in my book.
In the context of albums, I generally consider anything that is not mostly threes (or above) to be a disappointment. A couple "indifferent" tracks are acceptable, particularly if they are balanced by some really great songs, but if an album is approaching a 1:1 ratio of twos and threes, I am going to somewhat regret the purchase. More twos than threes is the kind of performance that will have me thinking long and hard before buying anything else by that artist.
★★★★: Very Good
Four-star songs are those that are more than just likable. These are the songs I remember by name, the ones I would put on a mix tape for someone, or select for a hypothetical Greatest Hits compilation for an artist (four stars is also, incidentally, the threshold I use for " loving" a song on last.fm). The paths to four-star status are varied. It's almost never given on first or second listen, although a strong first impression always helps. Still, it can take weeks, months, even years for a song to really grab hold of me. Many of these songs are what you might expect as "hits"—crowd-pleasing anthems, tear-jerking ballads, technical tours de force—but sometimes it will be a subtler touch that nudges a song over the edge from merely good to memorable. One of the oddest examples I can actually put my finger on is a single line in The Mountain Goats, "Slow West Vultures" (from We Shall All Be Healed, 2004): "Get in the god-damn car." Out of context, it doesn't seem like much, but at that precise moment in the song, delivered in the precise way it's delivered, I get a jolt from it every single time. It's that jolt, or something like it, that I am looking for. One commonality among four-star songs is that once the rating has been earned, it is very rarely lost. Even if a song doesn't always have quite the same impact on me as the day I gave it its fourth star, I tend to respect the original moment. For all this implied exclusivity, this category has grown quite populous: 2,688 songs, about 16% of my library. To bring this back to albums, I generally want to find at least one memorable song on any album I buy. A "pure" three-star album is OK, but not something I'm going to be talking about or recommending to others. it seems to take at least a couple four-star tracks to earn a mention in my year-end album wrap up and several to be in the running for my Album of the Year.
★★★★★: Perfect
And then there are the fives, the Perfect Songs, an exclusive club currently standing at 166 members. These are the songs that I know by heart, that have been objects of obsession, that I've listened to on repeat until they were burned into my psyche. Usually, a song will have to put in some time at four stars before I'll start considering a fifth, and even then, it's not an impulsive decision (about the only time a song can be fast-tracked to five-star status is when it's a beloved song from my vinyl past that's haunted me until I finally found it in digital format, which pretty much speaks for itself). Some of these are pretty recognizable "classics" (e.g., Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" or John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things"), but others are there for extremely personal, idiosyncratic reasons (Derrick & Patsy's "Housewives' Choice," which was "our song" when I still belonged to an "us"). I haven't done any comprehensive genre analysis, but my feeling is that this category is more diverse than my overall library. It's still dominated by indie and punk rock, but there are entries from all over the musical map: blues, country, folk, funk, jazz, pop, rap, reggae, soul, even opera.
Since five-star ratings are so rare, an album containing even one of these is always notable, and multiple five-star tracks merit discussion as one of the All Time Greats (indeed, there are only a handful of artists whose careers [at least as represented in my library] have produced multiple perfect songs). There is one extraordinary outlier I can't help but mention: the 1976 folk album Have Moicy!, credited to Michael Hurley, The Unholy Modal Rounders, and Jeffrey Fredericks & The Clamtones, with an unprecedented ten (of thirteen) tracks in this list. (It is a record that defies explanation—although Robert Christgau gives it a try in his A+ rating. All I can say is that I listened the hell out of it my freshman year in college and it was so strange and wonderful that it utterly changed my conception of music. Sadly, no one I've played it for since has been nearly as impressed with it.) Have Moicy! is not, however, the highest-rated album in my collection. That distinction would have to go to the Firesign Theatre's magnum opus, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (1970), which, consisting of only two tracks ("This Side" and "The Other Side"), both rated at five stars, is technically the only "Perfect Album" I own (and, perhaps, ever made). So why should I care?
Good question, and one I don't really have an answer to. I care about this, I think, because I am fascinated by the process by which art commands our attention and insinuates itself into our lives. Music has been a big part of my life for almost as long as I can remember, and with iTunes I have a way of observing and recording my experience of it more closely than with other media. I don't really think aesthetics can or should be quantified, but this obsession with star ratings forces me to think a little harder about how I am responding to music and why. In observing myself handing out stars over the years, I have noticed a few patterns. Brand new music (bands I am listening to for the first time) usually needs to work a little harder to catch my attention. There are a lot of ways to do this—good riffs, clever lyrics, a distinctive vocal style, etc.—but without something, the songs will just fade into background sound. At the same time, I generally want to find new things to like, so if I a newcomer's song does have that hook, I may be quicker to give it a good rating than if it were by some more established band. Conversely, artists who have a proven track record with me get something of the opposite treatment. I am going to pay attention to them anyway and will generally give them the benefit of the doubt, but I also have higher expectations for them, and if I feel they are not living up to those, I may well be less generous than if they were some unknown band. Finally, in genres that are outside my core interest of indie, punk, and classic rock, I feel less competent to make finer distinctions in quality and tend to gravitate toward a "lazy three" unless it provokes a particularly strong or negative reaction. I'm not especially proud of that last point, but there you go.
Still, there is much about how music affects me that remains utterly mysterious to me. It certainly doesn't help that my understanding of music theory is limited to what I gleaned incidentally from eight years of high school and college marching band, but even with a better technical grounding, I am not sure I would be any closer to being able to explain what the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and Mozart's "La ci darem la mano" have in common that makes them both Perfect Songs. I find myself falling back on a to a conclusion I've stated before, " art is a fucking miracle." That may be something of a cop-out, but I suspect that part of what ultimately makes great art—be it music, literature, painting, or what have you—compelling is its ability to defy rational explanation. File under: Music, Ego.
Mix-o-matic redux
Sunday, 5 Feb 2012, 6:01 PM (permalink).
I first wrote about the Mix-o-matic, the iTunes smart playlist that serves up the vast majority of my music listening, back in 2007. It's still my go-to playlist, but it has evolved quite a bit in the past five years. It's hard to imagine a geekier topic than yet another exploration of the intricacies of my playlist system, but because the Mix-o-matic plays such a central role in my listening habits, it's hard for me to write about music without referencing it, and if I am going to do that, I figure I should at least be referencing the current incarnation of it and not its ancient ancestor. The original Mix-o-matic basically just combined the most recent additions to my library with a selection of "Good Songs I Have Neglected" (rated 3+ stars and not played recently). As detailed in that old post, a limitation of the Mix-o-matic was that it ignored unrated songs (of which I had many), and for a while I experimented with variant (Mix-o-matic Plus) that added a third source to the mix—Listen More, a selection of unrated songs with a low play count—the idea being to get those songs into the rotation so that I could actually form an opinion on them. There was also a Rate These Already! playlist that collected unrated songs with higher play counts, and I would occasionally force myself to listen that playlist and assign ratings.
This arrangement was alright for listening purposes, but I wasn't really making much progress in reducing the number of unrated songs in my library. There were still a couple thousand, or about 20% of my total library, in late 2007. (Yes, I have—sporadically!—kept records on this sort of thing. Shut up.) Eventually, I concluded that one of my core assumptions—that I shouldn't rate a song until I felt like I had a reasonably firm opinion about it—was at the heart of the problem. That approach worked well enough on the extreme ends (songs I clearly loved or hated), but it led to a lot of hesitation in the middle range. Specifically, I was reluctant to give anything a two stars because that would permanently exclude it from the all-important Mix-o-matic rotation. Since there was no practical difference between a two- a one-star rating, I largely ignored the former as a category, opting instead to be a little over-generous with my threes or to just leave songs unrated forever (hence the need for the Listen More/Rate These Already playlists). The system was inelegant, and that irked me.
(At this point, it may come as no surprise if confess that the part of teaching I found almost unbearable was grading, and for much the same reason. It is easy enough to recognize excellent and poor work and to assign grades accordingly, but the whole middle range is rather fuzzily defined and mostly seen as punitive to varying degrees. But that's another story.)
My breakthrough came somewhere around the middle of 2008 when it occurred to me that I could give two stars meaning by using it as my "default" rating. I had previously thought of a two-star rating as being a definitive statement that something was "not good." With this new approach, it would be more of a neutral rating: not good, not bad, just there. If all songs began as twos, any other rating would represent a conscious decision. Downgrading a song to one star would remain, as it always had been, an active statement of "I don't like this, and I don't want it popping up unexpected when I'm on shuffle" (one-star songs still have some redeeming value, though; if they were truly terrible I would just delete them entirely). Conversely, an upgrade to to three (or more) stars would be an affirmation: "This is good, let's make sure I hear it again." And if a song didn't particularly move me one way or the other, it would just stay a two, which seemed fair.
Using two stars in this way appealed to my sense of elegance. I could sum up each rating in a one or two words:
- ★: (Barely) Tolerable
- ★★: Indifferent
- ★★★: Good
- ★★★★: Very Good
- ★★★★★: Perfect
I must admit, though, the idea of suddenly moving a couple thousand songs from "Unrated" to "Two Star" status kind of terrified me. I recall carefully backing up my whole library—not just Music folder but also the big XML file that holds all the playlists and such—just before the Big Change. I was half-convinced I would decide it was a horrible mistake and would have to try and revert my whole library to its pre-change state.
As it turns out, I've never second-guessed that decision, but the change did require some further rejiggering of my playlists. The Mix-o-matic list still only kept three-star and higher songs in rotation, so all these new (and any future) to-star songs were were still effectively in limbo. I didn't want to put them on equal footing with higher-rated songs. These weren't "good" songs after all, but neither were they necessarily "bad" songs, so I didn't want them to be completely excluded like one-star songs. The solution was, naturally, yet another smart play list: "Reconsider":
This playlist looks at all the two-star songs, excludes a few oddball genres, and then grabs the fifty I've listened to least recently. (The Skips criterion is in there, in theory, to weed out songs that I have really decided are thoroughly mediocre, but not actually bad enough to warrant a one-star rating. In practice, though, I almost never skip songs—only a few songs in my library have even three skips—so this filter really has no effect.) The master Mix-o-matic list then shuffles the "Reconsider" group in alongside the "New Arrivals" (everything added in the last, usually, six weeks) and 100 assorted "Good Songs" (the playlist is still called Good Songs I Have Neglected, but somewhere along the way—probably because my library was getting so big—I changed its selection criterion from least recently played to simply random). And that's it, the new and improved Mix-o-matic.
The relative proportions obviously depend on the size of the New Arrivals group, but usually it works out to about equal parts "new stuff" and "old stuff," with the latter part always being two-thirds "good songs" and one-third songs being given another chance to make an impression on me (sometimes they do and get bumped up to the Good Songs pool or consigned to one-star oblivion; often they don't and get sent back to the end of the Reconsider queue). If I've gone on some buying spree (like when I run across a used CD shop) or through an especially dry spell, the proportions can get thrown out of whack, and I will sometimes make temporary changes to one or more of the feeder lists. By and large, though, the Mix-o-matic continues to serve me well as an all-purpose source of musical variety.
File under: Geekery, Music.
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