what's up?

There's a lot of music to talk about right now, local and otherwise. Winnipeg's Jazz festival brought in indie-rock darlings Deerhoof on for a energetic and entertaining show on Monday (it was awesome!). Following the concert, we were all treated to a DJ set by ?uestlove, who rushed over to the Pyramid Cabaret after The Roots played the Pantages Theatre. It was a late night, but ?uestlove's set was worth staying for, sort of. It's the closest I've ever come to the "club" experience. Now I know for certain that clubbing is not for me.


Next week the Winnipeg Folk Festival gets underway, featuring Andrew Bird, The Dodos, Emmylou Harris, the Avett Brothers, Levon Helm, Etran Finitawa (who have the best promo pictures I've ever seen - above), Rock Plaza Central, Konono No 1, the Rural Alberta Advantage, and others.

Matador has just announced the line-up for its 21st birthday bash, and it looks better than most of the festival line-ups I've seen so far this year. Basically all my favourite indie bands from the 90s are playing it (with a few major exceptions): Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Cat Power, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Belle & Sebastian, Chavez, and Liz Phair (who, I'm sure, will be under strict supervision in case she makes the mistake of playing anything from the last 10 years). It's in October, by which time I'll be well into my MA program. And it's in Las Vegas. Probably for the best that I can't go. I wouldn't know what to do with myself and I'd probably blow a huge wad of cash on merch just out of sheer nostalgia for the late 90s. Just think of all the cool band t-shirts I never had access to, suddenly at my fingertips.

I should probably also mention that this Saturday I'll be joining a friend for an acoustic set of favourite rock/pop songs from the 90s. We've been talking about doing this for a long time and I'm pretty excited that it's going ahead, if for no other reason than that I can break out my XL band t-shirts that haven't gotten much use in the last few years. Here's a link to the event.

old media nostalgia

A couple months ago, I was walking down an back alley in Wolseley and something familiar caught my eye. Sitting atop a mound of garbage was the video companion to 1997's What's Up Matador?, a compilation of various artists on Matador Records during the mid 90s. A number of years earlier I bought the compilation on cd and, among standard favourites like Cat Power, Spoon, Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Liz Phair (well, pre-Space Egg) found some new/old bands that I took to right away (Helium, Chavez, etc.). Last weekend, I finally got a chance to watch the video on an old VCR. It all looks incredibly dated: the grainy resolution, the washed out images, the bold, over-the-top aesthetic, the heavy-handed video concepts, the leering irony/sarcasm, the concsious attempts to produce a hit. What's Up Matador? made me a bit nostalgic for indie rock before "indie rock" became a mainstream genre: before the internet took hold, before small record companies started withering away. Even fifteen years ago, independent music meant something else: it's not that it was more purely independent or more DIY (probably less, actually); rather, it was thought about very differently. It's been fascinating to watch this shift in popular culture take place over the better part of my adolescence.

I was reminded of this again when I visited Pitchfork yesterday and noticed that the website had halted regular reviews to accommodate for the first of many lists and features that will help conclude the past decade in music. P2K: The Decade in Music begins with the Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s, which is a broad smattering of singles with a handful predictably obsure songs thrown into the mix to remind amateurs like me that they're the experts. Above the title is the image of a shattered compact disc. We've come through a period of transition and there's no going back - unless its vinyl we're talking about. The cd encapsulates the best and worst aspects of the music industry through the 90s: overpriced, cheaply made, overproduced, soon-to-be-out-dated pieces of plastic. It's really surprising they lasted as long as they did. Remember mini-discs? In retrospect it seems like we were always trying to anticipate the next medium and now, all of a sudden, here we are with ipods and illegal downloads; here we are with less centralization and further atomization (we all know albums will soon be a thing of the past), which all serves to provide even more consumer information to the entertainment industry.

I've always bought cds, and I have over 350 sitting in my bedroom - when I'm moving in two weeks, 75% of my packing will be takien up by cds, lps, and books. Things used to be relatively finite, but we've fallen prey to the illusion that information is infinitely accessible, infinitely available, and can be infinitely reproduced. Digital media may be practical, but just think how empty our rooms would be had we not been such massive consumers during the 90s and 2000s.

Here's an old favorite, featured on What's Up Matador? (VHS), by Yo La Tengo from their (best) album, 1993's Painful.