Token ignant genre dismissal of the week

I think reggaeton is kind of boring.

Probably I think this because I have only ever heard reggaeton (aside from "La Gasolina," which for me is the exception that proves the rule, and which doesn't count anyways because Lil' Jon's presence would make a concerto crunk) on KTU, and because I first heard about it from a really stupid person I worked with at a horrible wine shop last summer. All the reggaeton I've heard has the same loping, It's Carnivale So Show Us Your Ta-Ta's! oompah-oompah, and it has gotten old really fast.

I will regret this post.

I'm invisible

The other day my friend Colin sent me "Dirty Epic," which sent me on really a satisfying rediscovery of Underworld. They used to be one of my favorite bands, but they kind of fell off of my radar back in eleventh grade when my Case Logic full of techno got stolen out of my locker. In any case, it's been nice getting reacquainted.

In addition to being recording three of the electronica era's best records and being responsible for that "Lager Lager Lager" song from Trainspotting (which is sadly basically the only way to get most Americans to remember them), this recording of a medley of Rez and Cowgirl from their album Everything Everything proves that they were balls-crazy live.

Listening to it I can't help but imagine myself in a field, half-naked and high as a kite, slathered with mud and surrounded by 40,000 likeminded rabid British people. Beat that, LCD Soundsystem.

In which I attempt to mp3 blog

Even though I generally love Lil' Jon, I never really liked the original version of "Goodies." The beat was just a little off-putting in its wheezing minimalism, and I think it should be obvious to everyone that Ciara's appeal lies in her, ahem, goodies, and not in her delivery.

But I'll be gosh-durned if the Richard X remix featuring M.I.A. isn't just the hottest choon I've heard all year. Shit's gonna hold it down for two summers, ya'll.

Learning to Listen

Embarrassingly, I don't clearly remember what inspired my impulsive purchase of a set of turntables last year. Certainly, however, it is a question of impulse, as at the time I bought them I was living in near-complete ignorance of how such analog-age doohickeys functioned, and had not a moment of first-hand experience spinning.
In any case, the fact that I actually followed through on the impulse probably had as much to do with commodity fetishism and the feverishly competitive shopping environment of eBay ("I will NOT be defeated!") as it did with the desire to actually learn how to DJ. Not exactly the most auspicious way to start learning how to play an instrument.
Which is how I very quickly came to understand my shiny, lightly used set of Technics 1210s: as a very serious, very complicated instrument that I had exactly no idea how to operate.
I think I began to appreciate the hubris of my puddinheaded purchase when the guy I'd bought them from was unloading them out of his Golf. The gentleman seemed most distressed that his girlfriend had insisted on his selling his decks, and was fervently concerned that I understand what good condition they were in. "I haven't ever smoked around them, and they've never needed to be repaired," he said with an earnest look. "I would never disrespect a pair of 12s like that."
Now that I've sort of, kind of learned what they're capable of and how they work, I better understand both the religious intensity of his comment and the intimacy of his referent.
But at the time, I was blissfully ignorant. The mixer he sold me with the decks was busted as all hell, but I wasn't conscious enough of how it worked to know better for a good three months. I knew how to turn the tables on, and how to place records on them, and how to make them start spinning, but that was about it.
I thought I knew how to put the needles into the grooves, but as it turns out, I mostly didn't, and I ruined a bunch of records figuring it out.
Hilariously, at one point I became convinced that the sound produced by moving the needle across the groove of the record was actually interesting. I have since learned that it is in fact both incredibly grating and awful for the vinyl.
There's a rather simple generalization that can help explain my quite pronounced technical naivete on this matter: kids of my generation, who grew up in the digital age, have absolutely no intuitive feel for analog technologies. Unlike the most forward-thinking products, we aren't backwards-compatible. Handing me a turntable is analogous to handing my Dad an iPod. Actual quote: "I love my iPod, but I wish there was a way to navigate my music files without starting over at the beginning of the playlist every time." It's a cute thing for a Boomer to say, but his ignorance of digital tech and mine of analog tech are in a sense embarrassingly similar.
That said, the fact that a set of turntables are an instrument - one which has far fewer institutions set up for teaching it than, say, the piano - can help to explain some of the pathetic moments in my learning process, because "Oh, you mean I have to tune this guitar?" and "You mean that scratching actually involves keeping the needle in the groove?" are, fundamentally, the same stupid question.
But now that I've gotten past the majority of my technical naivete comes the more difficult part of learning how to play this instrument - namely, beatmatching. Listening to guys like the dreaded Paul Oakenfold or Felix da Housecat or NYU's own Tim Sweeney, you'd get the impression that getting two drum patterns to line up with each other and boogie is easy as pie.
Duh, it's not. But that doesn't mean that the process of learning how to do so isn't totally fascinating.
In fact, it has completely changed the way that I listen to music.
For starters, I'm listening to way more German techno than I used to.
And perhaps more importantly, I'm now coming to appreciate songs on the structural level of rhythm.
As my friend and colleague DJ Matty Balls says, "Since I started trying to beatmatch, all I listen to are hi-hats."
Since I'm a guy who both obsesses and writes about music, the fact that I'm only now coming to understand how it works is much less embarrassing than it is exciting. Learning how to hear only the structural rhythm of one song and using the tools at my disposal to manipulate it so that it lines up with the structural rhythm of another song is, at times, harder than picking a pope - but it's also a rush.
Thank god for eBay.

Greetings, Curbed readers!

Welcome! Set a spell. I too enjoy Curbed's intelligent mix of architecture criticism, apartment envy, and NYC swashbuckling, and I too obsess about the Astor Place Cube or lack thereof. I too read Planetizen and talk about Le Corbusier with my friends more than is rational. We have much in common.

Investing in Nostalgia

Any New Yorkers interested in checking out the HoJo's in Times Square before it goes the way of the fifties?

Hat tip: Sasha Frere-Jones, who is in mourning.

Respek to Mr Reynolds

Feeling:
The Soft Pink Truth - "Big Booty Bitches"
Ada - "Maps"
Juliet - "Avalon"
Boom Bip - "The Move"
The Bravery - "An Honest Mistake"
White Stripes - "Blue Orchid"
Beck - Guero
Jadakiss - "Checkmate"
Mike Jones - "Still Tippin"
Big Boi f. Bun B, Big Gee - "808"

Really Feeling:
Missy f. Pharrell - "On and On"
Missy f. Ciara + Fatman Scoop - "Lose Control"
Toby Keith - "I Love this Bar"
Big & Rich - "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)"
Rachel Stevens - "Negotiate With Love"
Kelly Clarkson - "Since U Been Gone" (Jason Nevins Club Mix)
Kylie - "Giving You Up"

Really Really Feeling:
Gorillaz - "Feel Good Inc."
Vitalic - "My Friend Dario"
Fischerspooner - "Just Let Go" (Jacques Lu Cont Thin White Duke Mix)
The Chemical Brothers - "Believe"
Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
M.I.A. - Arular

Not Feeling:
System of a Down - "BYOB"
Weezer - "Beverly Hills"
M83 - "Don't Save Us From the Flames"

Must Be Destroyed:
50 Cent - The Massacre
Daft Punk - Human After All

Consulting the Stars

I'm not one of Rob Breszny's biggest fans, but one must give credit where credit is due, and he really nailed my current psychic state three weeks ago:

The information produced in the world every year would fill 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Unfortunately, you haven't been keeping up very well. If you know what's good for you, you'll dramatically increase your uptake of raw data. Read more newspapers and magazines, please. Spend more time surfing the Web. Watch more TV. April Fool! 99.99 percent of all that raw data is ueless, meaningless, and corrupted with half-truth. Inf act, to best serve your mental health you should get a high-quality bullshit detector. Either that, or invite more silence into your life.

And yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio on the information streams I've been consuming has been getting a little low of late.

Death to Pollen

Back when I lived in the semi-arid desert climate of San Diego, where they don't really have seasons, I used to think that spring must be a wonderful time of year. I thought the season was all about beautiful flowers springing into bloom and young men and women getting frisky and bears coming out of hibernation. I must admit that, since coming to New York, my experience of spring as a phenomenon has not invalidated any of these stereotypes: the flowers are certainly blooming, and all of my friends seem to be getting nicely laid, and the bears are definitely out in full force on Sundays.

Sadly, my appreciation of all of these wonderful things has been sharply curtailed by my mortal and sworn enemy, the scourge of everyone with allergies, ironically derived from the blooms that work to make this season so appealing from afar: pollen.

I can barely breathe. My head is so congested that I'm seriously considering putting a hole in it for drainage purposes. I can understand why people got so excited when Claritin came on the market, and I can see how the bland utopianism of its marketing campaign ("Blue skies smiling on me/Nothing but blue skies can I see." Sigh.) was so appealing.

Only one more hour before my next dose of Dayquil, sweet!

Amateur Hour

So we were supposed to DJ this big fancy party at the Soho Grand celebrating the end of the Fusion Film Festival, Matty Balls and I were. We were pretty excited because although we've played a fair amount of bumpin' parties (many of which were at our house) , we've never played a venue anywhere near as swanky and sophisticated and snooty as the Soho Grand, and it's also always nice to get hired to play to unfamiliar crowds. I spent a lot of last week practicing - which was a great thing, because I'm slowly but surely getting better - and also bought some new pies for the occasion.

Sadly, last night, after packing up three boxes of heavy-ass vinyl and all our gear (including the turntables, which weigh about 40-50 pounds) and schlepping it all down four flights of stairs and into a cab and down to Soho, we discovered that the people organizing the party had expected us to have our own fucking amplifers.

Three hours of hand-wringing and engineer-calling and open bar-abusing and computer speaker-trying later, we still didn't have any speakers and we decided to throw in the towel. It was pretty lame. Although the friends we invited seemed to enjoy themselves (open bars tend to spread the love around), it was nevertheless extremely embarrassing to stand next to a set of impotent turntables while errant partygoers, ticked off at the electro muzak the hotel was piping in from their super-hip lounge, came up and requested funk and soul that I would have loved to have played for them, only to be disappointed.

Since the main problem descended directly from a breakdown in communication between us and the party planners (who apparently didn't even confirm the Soho Grand until yesterday, although they had promoted the party as being there in the Washington Square News on Wednesday) it's impossible to hold anyone responsible for this. But it's definitely the sort of sobering, dues-paying experience that makes me want to be five times as professional in the future.

No Dancing

One of the amazing things about New York, one which I have noticed becomes more obvious as the rhythms and possibilities of the city become more familiar, is that a single phone call can send you careening through unexpected territories at very short notice.
For example, take the conversation I had with my friend Colin the night that Daylight Savings ended:
"Hey Dave, what's up?"
"Not too much, dude. I just got home from work."
"What are your plans tonight?"
"A friend of mine got me on the list to see fast-rising progressive house DJ Chad Jack at the Roxy, but that's a lot later. Maybe I'll eat some Teriyaki Boy."
"The Roxy? You are a gay homosexual."
"Yeah, pretty much."
"What would you say if I told you that I had come into some tickets for LCD Soundsystem tonight?"
"Can I call you right back? I have to clean some shit out of my pants."
And like that, I was off on a whirlwind trip through Manhattan at night that left me wondering what, exactly, it would take to get a Bowery Ballroom packed to the gills with hipsters to dance.
You can't say James Murphy and his Soundsystem weren't trying. The robotically tight drummer and cute Asian drum-machine chick conspicuously (both metaphorically and physically) upstaged the guitar players, offering a subliminal testament to the band's groove-centrism, and their set was an energetic run through their smashingest singles, starting by blending their version of "Beat Connection" with the song the opening DJ ended with, and ending with a blistering rendition of "Yeah (Stupid Version)."
But while the band proved itself technically adept enough to translate even Murphy's most complex rhythms with nary a misstep, and the enthusiastic audience got its rock on, on the whole very few booties were set a-shakin'.
The crowd's stubborn refusal to get down struck me as perverse.
After all, LCD Soundsystem makes dance music. Until their full-length was released last November, all of their releases were on vinyl 12'', a format that practically screams "dance to this."
The crowd's rockist response is all the more puzzling given the fact that the disco-punk zeitgeist moment with which Murphy's band (and the DFA production team and record label he formed with Tim Goldsworthy) is identified supposedly concerns itself with getting self-conscious indie kids to shake it.
Mind you, we are now almost two years out from Pitchforkmedia.com honcho Ryan Schrieber's infamous review of The Rapture's (DFA-produced) Echoes. You remember. It was the one that announced the beginning of the disco-punk era with "Finally, we are shaking off the coma of the stillborn slacker 90s and now there is movement," and ended with "You people at shows who don't dance, who don't know a good time, who can't have fun, who sneer and scoff at the supposed inferior - it's you this music strikes a blow against. We hope you die bored."
While it's possible that the great mass of burgeoning disco-punkers at the LCD show refused to dance purely to spite Schrieber's messianic revolutioneering - really, who wouldn't? - it didn't seem likely.
For a moment the idea that hipsters actually just don't like to dance seemed sadly plausible, but a post-concert stop by the aggressively filthy/gorgeous Nü-Wave club night Misshapes - where hordes of heavily pancaked pretty boys/girls/whatevers and their angularly hairstyled brethren and sistren danced like maniacs to a DJ who took the provocative tactic of not bothering to blend songs into each other at all - quickly cleared up that misconception.
Maybe the problem was the format of the concert itself. As music listeners and concert-goers, we're programmed to appreciate the experience in a certain way. Rock music from the last decade or so hasn't generally inspired much ass motion; now that some sub-genres do, perhaps the parts of our brain that command us to settle down and appreciate the authors of our enjoyment onstage with our respect and attention are jamming the signal.
Whatever it is, I don't plan on standing for it. When LCD Soundsystem rolls back through town on June 10th, I hope I won't be the only one in the front row sporting glowsticks and a pacifier.

Inverted Barometers

"Where do you live in Brooklyn?"
"Park Slope."
"Oh, cool. I was just out there on Saturday, visiting friends in Williamsburg and then going to the Brooklyn Museum. We went for a walk in Prospect Park, and I saw Jonathan Safran Foer."
"Who's that?"
"A new young It Writer. The New York Press is demonizing him on the cover this week, which - if you follow the Press - means that he's fantastic."

One day we'll have commitment ceremonies at car dealerships

This list detailing the profligate extravagance of the American suburban-industrial complex makes me want to be more of a communist. Key fact: if New York City were a state, it would rank 51st in energy consumption.

Peppermint is tasty

Even though the idea of a White Stripes album written on acoustic guitar, piano and marimba is a little bit terrifying, and despite the fact that Meg White ought to fill in the "Occupation" blank on her tax return with something like "inept drummer" or "stage prop," Get Behind Me Satan will probably be one of the better albums this year.

Also, beatmatching is harder than picking a pope.

Or else.

Rock stars, muscle cubs and records, oh my!

It's really pleasantly surprising when heroes turn out to be human-sized.

Tonight I had the honor of meeting this guy, who was in a little band called Husker Du and now does all sorts of awesome solo stuff including a party down in DC called Blowoff that I'm kind of dying to go to.

I knew Mr. Mould was in town because my boss at the Pig called me about five seconds after he left the premises to squeal about it. I was at the Eagle hanging out with some friends tonight, and was just about to leave when I saw him standing against the wall near the bar on the second floor. Boss Hog had told me that he'd told Mr. Mould about how upset I would be to learn that I'd missed his visit, so I used that as an opening line, and we had a very pleasant conversation about musclecubs with high'n'tights (apparently we'd both do GannonGuckert) and the scandalous excellence of Thin White Duke remixes.

As a moderate fan of the Huskers and as a major fan of Faggots Who Rock this was totally an OMIGODOMIGODOMIGOD! sort of moment for me. I'd like to take this moment to hope that at the time of this posting he's getting crazy laid, like he deserves.

These are some cinnamon rolls from my friend Matt's bakery. They taste even more buttery and delicious than they look.

This was in Brooklyn in a subway station.

I wonder if it has any effect on the lifestyles of the people who pass under it each day.

Beef is good for you

Given the recent trajectory of 50 Cent's career, from The Massacre's two wanksta-rap singles, to beefing with his protege The Game to the point of gunplay in an episode that smells suspiciously like a publicity stunt, he's on the road toward deserving quite a bit of hatred.
That said, the first time I ever heard a 50 Cent song was such a profound, only-in-New York experience that no matter how hard he works on deserving it, he'll never outlast my barest shred of goodwill.
Here's the background:
The first person I met when I moved to New York two years ago was the RA of the Penthouse floor of Lafayette residence hall.
For those of you unfamiliar with Lafayette, that job was like being paid by the university to live in Animal House even before Residence Life, in its infinite wisdom, decided to zone half of its cavernous apartments as Greek last fall.
Upon learning that I was alone in the city, the RA - let's call him Drunky McCloseted - invited me to visit him sometime.
I took him up on his offer the next day; since that was a Friday, it resulted in a crash course in nightlife at NYU.
Upon my arrival in his apartment, Drunky offered me a screwdriver. Then some of his RA pals came over, and we went to another apartment to do some shots of Belvedere.
It soon became obvious, to me at least, that since the plan for the evening involved a club in SoHo, poor little under-aged me would be left out of the festivities.
Luckily, since my new friends were resourceful university employees, they found me a passable fake ID in a jiffy, and we were off.
The club was small, the drinks were overpriced, and the music - a mix of hip-hop that was strangely lacking in West Coast flava to my California ears - was nevertheless bangin'.
The RAs and I danced like silly, drunken college students.
While much of the rest of the evening is a blur, one moment stands out crystal clear, even today:
As one, now-forgotten track ended, the DJ began to scratch in a malevolent, martial keyboard riff and intoned, "This is the hottest joint in the city, ya'll!" The beat dropped and everyone lost their shit. Of course, the song was 50 Cent's "In Da Club."
Lots has happened to 50 since then. Get Rich or Die Trying, surely one of the decade's defining gangsta rap records, dropped, and along the way to shifting beaucoup units he destroyed Ja Rule and launched the careers of like nine people.
But although 50 could out-rap Ja while gagged, The Massacre's profoundly short-sighted diss track "Piggy Bank" - wherein he takes on Fat Joe ("That fat nigga thought 'Lean Back' was 'In Da Club'/My shit sold 11 mil, his shit was a dud") and, more inadvisedly, two of hip-hop's pre-eminent lyricists, Jadakiss and Nas - may signal an act of narcissistic self-annihilation.
No one's disputing 50's fantastic voice and sometimes-hypnotic (though more often, on the stultifyingly boring The Massacre, narcotic) flow.
But he seems to think his record sales and his status as the reigning king of commercial hip-hop gives him not only the license but also the lyrical ability to take on the greats.
"Checkmate," Jadakiss' brutally incisive response to 50's rather ham-handed swipe, shows that Mr. Jackson is getting in way over his head. "You should just sell clothes and sneakers," Jada raps, "Cuz out of your whole camp your flow's the weakest." That's not even the best couplet in the song, and mind that this is all before Nas - who arguably outrapped Jay-Z - has even started talking.
Though critics, most recently and most unexpectedly Eminem, have decried modern popular rap's lyrical beefs and their potential to escalate into real-world violence, few have given them due credit as an element of hip-hop's evolutionary mechanism.
As unaccountably popular rappers, like Ja Rule, for example, get too big for their britches, hungry emcees like the 50 Cent of yore step in and make their own reputations by humbling them.
If Jada and Nas dice him like they ought to, perhaps soon the country will see that - aside from a pair of snow-white G-Unit sneakers - the emperor has no clothes.

Popjustice is the bees knees

If this blog were actually a blog, and not a column archive, and if I were British and much snarkier, I would hope that it would be at least somewhat like Popjustice.

They're totally nanners for introducing me to "My Friend Dario," by some band called Vitalic, who are apparently a group of space aliens genuflecting at the altar of "Whip It."