The Modern Lovers - "Old World"

Long Conversation: Life Online

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation. This month we were asked how our relation to the internet has changed. Here's what I wrote.

Before moving to Edmonton four years ago I didn’t use the internet for much beyond downloading music, reading articles and sending emails. This city gave me may first opportunity to live alone, without the comforting distractions of roommates. As I started my program, I realized most of my academic work and most of my leisure activities depended on the glowing screen sitting on my desk. As some friends of mine pointed out, my presence on Facebook had dramatically increased during my first semester of grad school. I was averaging five Facebook posts a day when I finally joined Twitter, a better home for all the stuff I felt I needed to share.

Work and Facebook consumed most of my days, while my lonelier evenings were filled by Megavideo. I streamed the entire series of The Wire in a few short months and got through most of Friday Night Lights just as quickly. Back then, Megavideo had a viewing time limit (around 58 minutes); once you hit that limit you were forced to wait for an hour or so. Eventually this limit began structuring my study routine. I would go through an entire day, watching 6 episodes of the Wire and reading Derrida for the remaining hours that I could muster the concentration. Each time Megavideo forced me back to work, I knew that after an hour of study, I’d earn the reward of another episode.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I wasn’t very good at living alone. I needed something (or, better, someone) to give my days structure and with only three seminars a week, the internet was the best option I had. I could watch shows when I was bored and when I was feeling isolated in my basement suite, I could relocate to social media. At it’s best, the internet gave me immediate access to all kinds of data, allowing me to share content and communicate with friends; I could adopt a grammar of sharing. At its worst, it was (and still is) a form of social control that it’s become hard to do without, a place where popularity and visibility are synonymous, not unlike the logic of high school.

Fortunately, I no longer live on my own, but I'm not sure how much my online activity has changed. That being said, my ambitions definitely have. It’s been two years since I humbly entered the world of graphic design, a world built on freelancing, a world that once looked entirely different without the web. I suppose I’m now much more aware of my identity on the internet, in part because I’ve been forced to see it as a place for self-promotion, a place where I can present my work and connect with clients. Over the next 6 months, I’ll be preparing for this to become more of a reality, as I set up a personal website (with my own domain name!) and assemble an online portfolio. The thought of this near future fills me with dread and a degree of excitement. At the same time, it means that I’ve also entered an increasingly precarious work environment. For every illustrator or designer who sees mild success there are twenty more equally talented people who have to pursue their work as a labour of love, or, more realistically, not at all. At least I have some sense of how to navigate the web. In fact, I’ve been thinking about my online identity much longer than I’ve been in Edmonton.

Back in 2008, I started a blog to share bits of writing I was working on and catalogue lists of my favourite things (mostly related to indie music and literary theory). I’ve averaged about 60 posts each year since, and the blog currently figures as an archive of my interests as they’ve emerged over the past six years. Even though writing has become less of a priority, I still make the occasional blog post for no other reason than to extend my archive into the future (and I’m slightly alarmed at how patriarchal that sounds). In many ways, my blogging has prepared me for the kind of online identity I’m now slowly building. It’s allowed me to track hits and views from across the world and see what kinds of posts attract visitors. Every once in a while I’ll find a comment on an old post and sometimes it’s not even spam! 

Last summer I decided the time was right to start two new blogs. One is used strictly as hosting site for mp3s from a radio show I’m part of. The other one is on Tumblr, which I’m finding to be one of the most interesting and surprising places on the internet right now. Part of its charm is the way it accommodates visual media. It also connects with what I do because of how many illustrators, photographers and designers use it to show off their work and process. The structure is more or less like that of Twitter or Instagram, where you have a stream of posts compiled for you on your home page (or “Dashboard”) that’s based on the users that you follow. As a fellow user, you have the option to “heart” or reblog any post you come across. There don’t seem to be many limitations on what you can post, and artists have been known to experience theft of their work or, at the very least, posting without proper attribution. When you visit someone else’s page you see the images they’ve posted or reblogged, arranged according to their page’s structure or theme.

This is what it looks like when you appear on the "Radar," which randomly happened to me just after I wrote this.

Tumblr works for a variety of media, but for me it’s a hub for illustration, photography, and design, both amateur and professional. Some use it for documenting process, others for web comics, and still others (like me) use it as a less discretionary portfolio of current work. Like Instagram, it’s a way of sharing the stuff I’m doing with whoever cares to see it. Unlike Instagram, your work can become incredibly popular if the right people reblog it. I have several images from a year ago that are still getting reblogged, and when I think about the network that exists between my computer and the many Tumblr pages where my image currently appears, my work feels infinitely far away. I don’t expect that anyone currently viewing it will try to trace it back to its proper origin, but at the same time I’m flattered that something of mine has resonated with so many strangers.

Suffice it to say that on Tumblr, you can see something of yours quickly spiral out of your control. You can see your work become part of someone else’s visual language. You can, for instance, see how your image fits into the mosaic of erotically charged pictures on the Tumblr page of a high school student who’s used Tumblr to build the visual ideal of her identity. This might, and often does, turn her followers into your followers. But much more effective for gaining loyal viewers is Tumblr’s built-in system of curation. Certain popular tags (“Artists on Tumblr” for example) that accompany your work can be highlighted and used to prioritize a post in relevant searches. Your page might also appear on the Tumblr “Radar” if you’re deemed worthy. It’s almost enough to convince you that all the labour of making your art is actually valued, but the only return is visibility in a system over-saturated with images. Every now and then I remember that, by all appearances, it’s followers like the high school student with a taste for the macabre that I’m really working for. The only real difference between her and I is that I did this kind of collaging before I had a life on the internet.

In junior high, I had a bulletin board in my room that I covered with photos and clippings from magazines. As I got older, I realized that the bulletin board was a sham and covered my walls with postcards and handbills from concerts. A Tumblr page projects that same kind of archive outward, where the gaze of others is more immediate. But both instances of self-fashioning are fundamentally discursive. They each assemble signs and symbols in a way that suggests an audience, even if that audience is, in the end, a reflexive self. Social media now facilitates this, but despite the possibility of updates, the options for individual users still remains frustratingly limited. Our online “selves” remain fixed in order to be recognizable, often skewed in favour of the privileged and popular. For all the possibilities of our projections, some of us can’t help but be consistent.

Long Conversation: Adulthood

I'm taking part in a cross-country writing group called Long Conversation.  This month we were asked to explore the idea of adulthood. Here's what I wrote.

Last week marked the ten year anniversary of the release of Arcade Fire’s Funeral. That record arrived just as I was beginning my first year at university and thus marks the beginning of life away from home. While certain rights of passage reinforce the fact that I’ve grown up—or at least that I should have by now—the truth is that I don’t feel much different now than I did at 18.

If you walk in to my current bedroom, you’ll notice a lot of posters and postcards filling up the walls. Most of them are relics acquired during my teenage years. I’ve never had a permanent bedroom (i.e., one that lasted more than three months) without most of them spread around the space. And until I arrive at a place in my life where my bedroom isn’t simply a personal space, I don’t expect this to change. This environment is full of residual signs of youth, now signs that I use, however unconsciously, to reflect my young identity back at me. Yet, as a young person, I certainly didn’t see it that way. The significance of this stuff used to be more aspirational. The images stood for a life that I imagined could exist beyond what I then saw as a dull, rural existence: a youth culture that I could only really glimpse (and sometimes even access) on trips to the city. Now that I’ve been emancipated from my hometown for 10 years, my room looks pretty much the same and I don’t really know what that means.

I’m tempted to draw a line from my bedroom decor to the ongoing condition of being a student; a condition that has persisted off and on for the 10 years since I moved away from home. Of course, I was also a student before I moved out. It’s been one of the biggest constants of my post-adolescent life, but it feels more like a continuation of teenage development than an early stage of adulthood.

Still, I can’t help being reminded of my age at every turn. I’m also aware, however, that many of these reminders are nothing more than projections of my own insecurities. I’m now roughly the age my parents were when they married and I occasionally find myself wondering about what kinds of alternatives might have been possible throughout my twenties. This worry about aging, more than fitting into a certain standard of adulthood, has become a more prominent part of my thinking as I’ve gotten older. In some ways, it’s a ridiculous worry. From early on, we’re trained to see age as a definitive social category, and when you’re young the visible difference between age categories seems to confirm their existence. But after finally leaving secondary school, I quickly realized that age actually matters very little when it comes to things like friendship and compatibility. Perhaps that realization corresponds to a level of maturity or approaches something like adulthood, but I’m skeptical of categories that demand such a linear approach. But there’s something contradictory going on as well: I want to think aging means less in terms of social organization but the weight of years seems to be getting heavier and more daunting as I grow older.

As I’ve considered my own anxieties around aging over the past few weeks, I’ve realized that many of them stem from a linear conception of time as progress or development, from the gap I see between where I am now and where I imagined myself in my younger aspirations. I don’t think I was overly ambitious. Rather, the future seemed open and I saw different possibilities as I imagined myself in different contexts. Like most young people I was pretty naive about my own limitations and my awareness of what came before me was characteristically shallow. Then again, there are plenty of people who fit into the “adult” category who haven’t outgrown this. It leads me to wonder whether the category of adulthood still has influence as an idea. I currently understand it as a way of grouping certain (Western) standards of living, but those standards seem increasingly out of sync with the precarious conditions many of us now experience as we gain independence from the structures of support we were lucky enough to have as kids.

Over the past month, I’ve encountered a wave of media that focuses on the transition we all supposedly make from youth to adulthood. I doubt whether this kind of navel-gazing is unique to my generation, but I am growing increasingly aware of how much speculation on aging and adulthood is regularly produced. A couple weeks ago, I saw Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. It was filmed over a 12-year period and follows a young boy’s passage through puberty and into adulthood, managing to compress it all into about two and half hours. I was struck by how the process of aging differs between the children and the adults. Emotional and physical development don’t necessarily work in tandem, and my own experiences seem to confirm that as well. Then there’s Seven Up, a recent discovery on Netflix. It follows a group of kids starting at the age of 7, and interviews each of them every seven years for as long as they’re still living (the most recent release finds them at age 56). I haven’t caught up with all the episodes, but the show’s argument, at least in part, is that there are certain continuities that stretch though a person’s life: characteristics and dispositions, structures and privileges, that are very hard for individuals to shake. Some glide along without much effort while others try to move against the grain and suffer the consequences. In the case of both Boyhood and Seven Up, we’re presented with a linear narrative of development that allows us to easily fill in the gaps between the moments we see caught on film. The form of documentation appears fairly neutral in capturing and ordering these sequences, but, especially in the case of Seven Up, it also invites the audience to measure each person against their past: to search for continuities which can then be identified as successes or failures.

Last week an article written by the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott went into high circulation on the internet. Its lofty, elegiac title, “The Death of the Adult in American Culture,” gives the reader a pretty good sense of what to expect: a survey of contemporary male archetypes in television and film (many of them baby boomer holdovers) alongside a growing number of examples that purportedly take a quite different approach to modern life and the expectations of the American adult. What all these new shows grasp, writes Scott, “is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable. It isn’t only that patriarchy in the strict, old-school Don Draper sense has fallen apart. It’s that it may never really have existed in the first place, at least in the way its avatars imagined.” Scott’s assessment misses its mark for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with his own fairly narrow, obviously privileged perspective; his view of culture takes little account of the social and economic conditions that allow it to exist in the first place.

Articles like A.O. Scott’s paranoid think-piece are part of a growing genre that speculates on millennials, hipsters, boomers, etc. These days, you can’t go far without seeing a headline, debate, or product that has to do with the idea (and in some cases, the “crisis”) of arrested development. It remains unclear whether the paradigm of adulthood has truly shifted or whether the concept was ever truly adequate to our cultural condition in the first place. Development, progress, growth. I find it hard not to see this ideology of aging as a reflection of late capitalism. It’s a relatively seamless fit. Yet those same social and economic forces are also responsible for hollowing out the sort of adulthood that used to inspire a more conventional, middle class way of life.

In my mind, “adulthood” remains remarkably abstract: unattainable but also undesirable, an ideal that used to make sense but now seems like it will be forever deferred. Based on my conversations with friends, I think this has become a common way to understand the category. Less common, however, is the relative security that allows me to welcome that deferral, even with all the uncertainties it brings.

The Work of Nostalgia in the Age of Instagram

Following the insights of the German critic Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag once observed that photographs acquire the aura of a work of art by their own visible deterioration. With the advent of mechanical reproduction, artistic images had broken free of the aesthetic regime which once made their value synonymous with their singularity as works of art. No longer context bound, any image can be cropped and made adjacent to any other image. For Sontag, writing in the 1970s, photographs and reproduced images had become so common that they had developed their own type of aura: that of the vintage photograph.

That same aura, the aestheticization of decay and deterioration, is perhaps even more recognizable in its current manifestation on Instagram. With its clear focus on the now, digital photo-sharing has had to evolve in order to accommodate the nostalgic desires of its users. Echoing Sontag’s observation about the acquired aura of the faded photograph, we select from a range of vintage-style filters before posting pictures for the eyes of our Instagram followers. Nathan Jurgensen, writing for The New Inquiry, argues that the filters are a way of coping with the overabundance of images that typifies social medial. It’s a way of convincing ourselves that our photographs are just as worthy of nostalgia as if they belonged to a finite archive from the past. As artificial memory storage becomes more efficient, we are producing more than most of us would deem worth remembering. But this overabundance has not curbed our appetite for images.

Instagram’s filters are meant to instil a sense of nostalgia for the present, a condition of scarcity that digital photography has long surpassed. But, as Jorgensen writes, “Merely making your photos evocative of photo scarcity doesn’t make them actually scarce or make others covet them.” Snapchat, by contrast, he argues, is built upon the idea of real scarcity, where images and videos, once the viewing has started, exist up to ten seconds before disappearing forever. No external memory, no archive. A singular aesthetic experience.

A year before Sontag’s first essay on photography was published in The New York Review of Books, John Berger’s influential documentary about the history of European Art, Ways of Seeing, aired on the BBC. Like Sontag, Berger was deeply indebted to Walter Benjamin’s writing on art and sought to provide his audience with the means to connect the art of the European tradition with contemporary media, advertising, and power structures. Equally impressed with the way images seemed to saturate modern life, Berger argued, “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.”

Not surprisingly, Berger’s work has also inspired some timely reflections on the aesthetic discourse of Instagram. In his article “Ways of Seeing Instagram” the art critic Ben Davis begins with a Google trend chart showing that “Instagram” has eclipsed “art” in terms of popular searches. Photosharing on Instagram (or, for that matter, Tumblr, Pintrest, even Flickr) has become a dominant way of seeing, and like all ways of seeing reflects certain social interests. The tradition of oil painting, observed Berger, could credit its subjects (nudes, fruit, and other commodities) to the presentation of a privileged, often opulent lifestyle. The continuities between advertising photos and still lifes, between classical nudes and pin-ups, are laid bare. Despite differences of social and historical context, Davis, like Berger, draws out the similarities between the art Berger works to demystify and the various genres of Instagram photos. Although current technologies have seemingly democratized the image-making that used to exist only at the behest of aristocrats, Davis argues, “images retain their function as game pieces in the competition for social status.”

But social status comes in many forms. It isn’t all just fine dining and selfies. Having a past worth sharing, and a past that’s accessible through other processes of archiving, is what many of us are now flaunting on Instagram. And we do so on a weekly basis. Nostalgia has finally been reconciled with Instagram’s presentism in the form of the hashtag, throwback Thursday (#tbt). The hashtag has existed for over a year, but it’s only recently become a constant in the feeds of our friends and followers. The #tbt image can come in any format, though the proper distance between the image and its posting date remains a mildly contentious topic. For me, and likely for most of my generation, the most enjoyable images tend to be those of old photographs rephotographed. The past returns again, and I don’t have to wait for someone’s wedding slideshow to see their pubescent class photos or an unself-conscious work of art from elementary school. For those who started snapping photos during the internet age, Throwback Thursday is another chance to mine the recent past for a flattering photo; for the rest of us, it’s an opportunity to reassert the aura of an old photo that hasn’t yet been digitized.

I can’t say I dislike seeing the young faces of my friends crop up on my Instagram feed. Bad haircuts, awkward family photos, and the like. And despite the well-publicized “rules” for how one should participate in #tbt, I was also sort of impressed when I saw Barack Obama tweeted, “Throwback to last week when a woman—not her boss—made her own decisions about her health care. #TBT”. The past has its uses. Even a form whose sole purpose is nostalgia can be a way of politicizing the past. More than anything, though, Throwback Thursday reflects a collective sense of nostalgia that runs deep enough to be ritualized, a way of remembering that isn’t likely to be forgotten, whatever the future brings.

Sontag, again

Since reading Susan Sontag's On Photography several months ago, I've had some opportunity to engage with more fully with a few of its ideas. One of the fruits of this engagement is a comic I drew for Whether, an online magazine that was launched earlier this summer by some friends of mine. I've also managed to read through Sontag's unofficial sequel to On Photography, which ended up being the last book she published during her lifetime.

In 2003, a year before she passed away, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others, a short book based on her 2001 Oxford Amnesty Lecture. The book's focus is on war photography, and Sontag moves through a familiar survey of images, taking up one of the major questions of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas: can images of suffering prevent war? Is war photography enough to inspire peace and activism, or does it insulate us from the real suffering of others by turning pain into a spectacle?

One of the things that makes this short survey worthwhile is that it allows Sontag to revisit some of the grand statements she made in her book on photography from the 1970s. Rather than building on her previous claims about the relationship between the ubiquity of the photograph and postmodern malaise, she ends up rejecting many of what used to be her central assumptions:

“As much as they create sympathy, I wrote, photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities?”  

“But what is really being asked here?  That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.” 

“The view proposed in On Photography —that our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images—might be called the conservative critique of such images. I call this argument conservative because it is the sense of reality that is eroded.” 

“To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment… it assumes that everyone is a spectator.”

Commemorating the late 90s

For those of us who were late to grunge party that was early 90s, albums like Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West (1997), The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin (1999), and Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister (1996), were a big deal. For me, they helped to lay the groundwork for the musical exploration of my late teens, and gave me a (loose) standard against which I could evaluate other albums.

The albums mentioned above are the first three entries of the Pitchfork Classic series. Each video is comprised of a series of interviews (what amounts to an oral history) with band members, producers, engineers, record label execs, and so on.

Pitchfork is known mostly for its overblown album reviews and so it's really refreshing to see them take a hands-off approach and let those involved speak for themselves.

It's 2012 and I'm going to my first Smashing Pumpkins concert

Tonight I will see the Smashing Pumpkins perform at Rexall Place in Edmonton, AB. They were my favourite band from grade 7 to the beginning of university. Over the last year I've been rediscovering their early material, thanks to a series of excellent reissues that collect rare b-sides, demos, and concert footage. It's the both the best and the worst time to be a loyal Pumpkins fan. While the band's legacy is being repackaged and canonized for a new generation of listeners, Billy Corgan's current version of the band has begun a cross-Canada tour to promote its new album Oceania. He's given some remarkably even-handed interviews lately, but shortly after Oceana's release, Billy had this to say about the whole reunion tour thing, which is decidedly not what he's doing:

There are those bands that are essentially coming back only to make money — playing their old albums, and maybe somewhere in the back of their minds they’re thinking there might be a future. I am not in that business, obviously. I condemn anybody who’s in that business but doesn’t admit [he's] in that business. When Soundgarden came back and they just played their old songs, great. I was a fan of Soundgarden, but call it for what it is. They’re just out there to have one more round at the till; same with Pavement and these other bands.

Soundgarden has just announced an album of new material, and the dudes in Pavement never pretended that they weren't coming back to make money. Never mind that. Billy will always find someone to resent. He's had a rough go of it. When he released his one and only official solo album TheFutureEmbrace back in 2005, he also bought full page ads in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, where he revealed his desire to "renew and revive" the Smashing Pumpkins. Unsurprisingly, most of his former bandmates didn't take the bait. Jimmy Chamberlin, his former drummer, was the only ex-Pumpkin to answer the call. The immediate fruits of their lame reunion were displayed with pomp and grandeur on the epically bad Zeitgeist (2007), an album so forgettable that I'm just leave it there. Since then, Jimmy has abandoned ship and the group currently touring as the Smashing Pumpkins is about as far from resembling my favourite band as it's ever been. 

I became a Pumpkins fan during the last years of the 90s, and I was 12 years old when I finally got my hands on a tarnished copy of 1995's Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Unfortunately, I was a few years too late to see the band peak (both in terms of coolness and commercial success). At the time of Melon Collie's release I was in grade 3 and thought that Sting's solo material was about as good as you could get. But I adapted quickly, and by 1998 I was ready for Adore (the album which, for most critics and fans, was the band's biggest misstep and the beginning of the end). Despite the fact that the Pumpkins quickly became my teenage obsession, I never managed to see the band perform live. Pretty tragic, I know. That's kind of how it goes when the closest city to your small town is Winnipeg (not exactly a regular stop for most arena rock tours) and all your friends have either moved on to nu-metal (see Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, etc.) or don't really listen to "secular" rock music in the first place.

So here I am at 26, finally able to see my favourite band in the flesh and, as to be expected, I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about it. Most serious Pumpkins fans who've stuck with the band this long recognize that it hasn't always been the Billy Corgan show. Meanwhile a lot of casual fans and critics consider the band's original lineup -- D'arcy Wretzky, James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlin -- to be fairly inconsequential. When reviews for the new Smashing Pumpkins album, Oceania, started rolling in, many were quick to point out how similar it sounds to the early Pumpkins. Such critics are, of course, completely wrong. While Oceania is not the heavy mess of guitar sludge that Zeitgeist proved to be, it's still overloaded with gaudy guitar layering and Billy's vocals are still too polished. For some reason, this is all that some critics need to draw a comparison between Oceania and Siamese Dream. Blasphemy, I say! Still, this kind of comparison to the band's glory days is probably what Billy was going for with Oceania (incidentally, it was also what he was going for with Zeitgeist, but we'll do him a favour and forget about it), so I'm glad he's been able to read some positive reviews. 

I'm of the opinion that the original lineup was actually quite unique and had a larger role in the band's sound than Billy has always claimed. Jimmy has often been compared to a gorilla behind a drum kit, but he has jazz training and probably more natural finesse than any of the other major drummers from the alt-rock era. James and D'arcy were also crucial pieces in the Pumpkin puzzle (even though, as Billy famously claimed, they rarely played their own instruments on Pumpkins recordings). D'arcy sang on Gish and Melon Collie and James wrote half a dozen quality songs that mostly appear as b-sides (if they appear at all); but, even if they didn't contribute directly to the music, their presence significantly improved the band's overall aesthetic. They were both unquestionably cool; cool in a way that Billy never could be. I'm also tempted to think that they had some editorial input. Billy may have called the shots -- he may have done it his way from start to finish -- but part of me thinks that their mere presence was enough to force Billy to rethink some of those first impulses. 

Presently, Billy is in complete control of his band, each of its highly skilled members handpicked (most notably, his current drummer won a try-out, despite being only 19 years old at the time) and the latest results aren't great. His guitarist Jeff Schroeder seems like a good fit, but he'll never stare you down like James, and I doubt that he ever really departs from Billy's artistic vision. No surprise, then, that Oceania is a heavily compressed mess of aimless riffing and spiritual platitudes: better than Zeitgeist, but still not as good as the Zwan's Mary Star of the Sea (2003). Billy may be embarrassed about Zwan (his attempt to form a cool indie rock band after the Pumpkins broke up), which had its own clash of egos, despite their initial appearance as a happy family (members included Paz Lenchantin, David Pajo, and Matt Sweeney). Presently, however, any strife on stage or in the studio is pure Billy, and I think his most recent material is all the worse for it. The Pumpkins in 2012 are a homogenous blob.

You can imagine my disappointment when I heard that the setlist for the Oceania tour would be made up of the entire album (this is the only reason I've been listening to Oceania) and would close with five or six classic songs from the band's golden era. Of course, these selections will probably be tracks that I don't much care for -- Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Disarm, XYU, Today, etc.  But I'm trying to keep an open mind and remember that this is probably the closest I will ever come to seeing my old, favourite band live, even if its members look and sound nothing like the band that I spent the better half of my life obsessing over. 

What I won't be expecting is anything from Adore. It polarized fans and drove casual listeners away. By the time Billy tried to advance his band's heavily textured sound on Machina: The Machines of God (2000), most people had stopped caring. But with Adore, the band was heading in the right direction. They were maturing. The claim may not be quite as contentious as I imagine, but I've always considered Adore as part of a near-perfect artistic progression that Billy ended up rejecting part-way through. The album remains consistent with what came before it: it showcases Billy's inward gaze, but this time, we see it at its most precarious and damaged; and unlike Siamese Dream it doesn't fall back on the booming electric guitars or the cheap irony that was everywhere in the early 90s. Aesthetically, it's the band's most cohesive release, with sparse arrangements and even sparser packaging. No colour, no egos. Just a bunch of acoustic/electronic meditations on Sex and Death. 

This is what I won't be expecting to see at Rexall Place tonight. Instead, it's going to be a working through of resentment and delusion (a few days ago, it was announced that Smashing Pumpkins show in Vancouver had been cancelled, probably due to a lack of ticket sales). But I will be there, basking in pale glow of Billy Corgan's newly energized ego, wearing my Smashing Pumpkins tshirt from the Adore era, gritting my teeth and hoping that someone else in the audience notices my hardcore loyalty to the old, fragile ideal of the band as I first knew them: pretentious as hell, but challenging and beautiful.

Thoughts arrive like butterflies

A lot of immediately "classic" albums came out in 1991. Not only has it become a touchstone year for grunge, it also marks a milestone for mainstream hip-hop. While most media outlets are obsessing over the deluxe anniversary boxset for Nirvana's Nevermind, some gripping documentaries like Pearl Jam 20  (by Cameron Crowe) and Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest (by Michael Rapaport) are hitting small screens across the country.

For now, here's a pair of music videos from twenty years back: a very dated but no less thrilling music video for Pearl Jam's "Even Flow" (skip ahead to 3:47 if you're getting impatient) and an outmoded video for A Tribe Called Quest's "Check the Rhyme." For me, both clips perfectly capture early nineties zeitgeist: the optimism, the over-the-top aesthetics, and the impulse towards innovation. Pearl Jam tapped into something that sounded primordial and at times universal, while ATCQ pushed the envelope in hip-hop production, with surprising samples and clever rhymes.

Albums, concerts, and '90s nostalgia

“This is the way that pop ends,” Simon Reynolds writes in the introduction to his new book Retromania, “not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university.”

Chances are that if you attended a major music festival in North America this summer, you witnessed a now canonical alt-rock artist playing through one of their seminal albums in its entirity. This past April I saw the Pixies perform their third (and best) album, Doolittle; and, more recently, I saw the Flaming Lips perform their 1999 album, The Soft Bulletin, at the Osheaga Music Festival in Montreal. Believe it or not, the "album concert" trend has been in full swing for a number of years. My best guess as to how it began involves Don't Look Back, an annual series of concerts that began in 2005, where London-based promoters All Tomorrow's Parties ask artists to play through their most celebrated albums in a live setting. The most well-known festivals with stages hosted by ATP are Barcelona's Primavera Sound festival and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

As a fan who holds some loyalty to the formal constraints of the LP, I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of artists who've taken up the idea and are currently using it as a touring strategy. In the case of the Pixies (a band I've now seen three times), seeing them perform their best album in its entirety was good enough incentive to see them again. There are always tracks that bands never (if rarely) perform live, and I was sure the Pixies wouldn't simply end their set after they were done playing through a forty-five minute album. I was right: not only did they play through a bunch of b-sides as a "warm-up" for the album, they followed Doolittle with an assortment of fan favourites. In the end, it was money well spent.

But it's worth asking why this trend in concerts continues to gather steam? Of course, such sentiments are pretty common among music fans from my generation. Not only does my demographic still have enough disposable income to pay for extraneous concerts, most of us gained an appreciation for popular music just as the LP format was on it's way out. For this reason, the British music critic Simon Reynolds is right to lament the current appetite for nostalgia in popular music. Reynold's new book, which I have not yet read, is full of insights into why music from a bygone era continues to take hold of popular imagination.



In a recent article for Slate, Reynolds offers a fair, if not overly grim, indictment of the pop music's current attachment to the '90s, arguing that we're witnessing an ever shortening gap between present trends in music and a detached, apolitical (i.e. nostalgic) appreciation of the past. It's become very apparent (from the growing numbers of new indie bands aspiring to the grungy sounds of bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, to the resurgence of plaid, baggy t-shirts, shows like Portlandia (above), and novels by David Foster Wallace) that the nineties are back in full force. But did they ever really go away? I know I can't speak for everyone who's currently lapping up nineties nostalgia, but ask any of my friends and they'll tell you that I've been loyal to early nineties zeitgeist since junior high (1999-2001). Still, I have to agree with Reynolds when he suggests that

an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media's and record industry's own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture. It was already crumbling in the early '90s, thanks to rap (the rebel music of black youth, obviously, but a lot of white kids had defected to hip-hop, too) and to the emergence of rave and electronic dance culture (in America destined always to be a minority subculture, but in Europe the dominant form of '90s pop). Grunge was the last blast of rock as a force at once central in popular culture yet also running counter to mainstream show biz values.

Reynolds would be the first to admit that nostalgia and popular music are inseparable--indeed, such retrospection is not only vital to the well-being of high-powered business execs, it usually works at a local level as well. It's also necessary to address the troubled relation to the past that defined gen-x culture: not simply a break from the past failures (whether they be associated with the music of babyboomers or their drawn-out depoliticization since the sixties), but a new sense of optimism and faith in the free market, dot-coms, and American expansion. I'm wondering, in other words, whether there's a certain kind of nostalgia that the nineties, in their burgeoning diversity (what Reynolds sees as a "crumbling rock monoculture") helped condition; how did particular cultural productions of the decade mediate the past, and why are such mediations now attracting a new audience? I suppose I'll just have to read Reynolds' book and see for myself.

Beirut revisited

Today it was announced that indie pop darlings Beirut (the Eastern-European-gypsy styled project of New Mexico native Zach Condon) will have a new LP on store shelves this August. Beirut emerged in the latter half of the 00s, as I was beginning my first degree; so I have a special attachment to Condon's work--one that I'd forgotten about until today. It's always struck me as rather odd that Beirut could emerge from the annals of indie pop and find such favour among kids who've been conditioned by punchy guitars, new wave synths and driving disco beats. Perhaps what makes Beirut's deeply anachronistic sound so refreshing is the fact that it's defiantly not a trendy revival of, say, eighties synth-pop or sixties psych-rock--instead, we hear a style of music that our generation never had a chance to forget.

One of the remarkable things about Beirut is how little things change from album to album; and how wonderfully simple Condon's songwriting remains throughout his discography. This isn't mere nostalgia: every one of Beirut's releases is irreducibly romantic, sure, but such romance is deeply self-aware. Even Condon's most recent pair of EPs, which are decidedly less straightforward than anything he's ever done (one of them flirts with electronica), hold the clues of a past that we never knew.



I suppose what I'm trying to get across is that describing the music of Beirut as nostalgic, anachronistic, or even romantic (as nearly all music critics do), seems to miss something. I prefer to think of Beirut's music as a utopian form of art, not unrelated to the way in which Victorians like William Morris reproduced medieval legends (or alternate histories) in a context of rapid industrialization and the ongoing erosion of social distinctions. Of course, Condon's music doesn't really lend itself to any real kind of social unification; personally, I find it makes me mopey and introspective, and I imagine that it provokes similar emotions in other listeners. But the utopian impulse is there all the same, and I can't help thinking that Beirut's "no place" of the past supplements my generation's collective hunger for a better history.

On his forthcoming album, The Rip Tide, Condon returns again to the whimsical folk music and the Balkan sound that initially inspired him. Take a listen to the album's debut single "East Harlem."

Beirut - East Harlem by Revolver USA

saxophones are finally cool again

Although I regularly enjoy paging through Exclaim, Canada's monthly music rag, it's rare that I'll actually read anything in it. This month I had to make an exception and it paid off. The October issue features a substantial interview with Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox. There are a number of particularly great moments and I can't resist posting a few of them here.

On the timeliness of his releases:

Every fall I want to put out a record because I like listening to records in the fall . . . I remember in high school and college, when records came out in the fall and I was really interested in checking them out. If someone in the band was having a baby or something [Halcyon Digest] would have been an Atlas Sound album, though I would have approached it a bit differently. The difference between Deerhunter and Atlas Sound has more to do with scheduling than anything else. There are songs that are just Atlas Sound songs and there are songs that are just Deerhunter songs, but Logos could have been a Deerhunter album. If I had to say this album was most like anything I'd say Weird Era Cont.

On the rising prominence of the saxophone in indie music:

I wanted that sax on there because I was listening to the Stones' Exile On Main Street reissue a lot . . . I began to see a pattern forming. Saxophones are becoming this thing. That's why we did it early. Next year everyone's gonna have a saxophone on their record because saxophones are just cool. This is gonna sound random and cutesy, but I've always had this fantasy of having a dog named Saxophone. Saxophone is one of my favourite words.

I can't help agreeing with Cox's point about the saxophone (all of TV on the Radio's albums are fine examples of this; and then, of course, there's Menomena), but I think it's growing popularity also has something to do with the fact that everyone's (finally!) re-embracing the early nineties. For me, this is a cause for celebration; indeed, it's not difficult to see why I'm such a fan of Deerhunter. The song Cox is referrencing (from Deerhunter's new album, Halcyon Digest), "Coronado," features a totally gratuitous sax solo that could have been lifted from just about any 90s sit-com (see below). Awesome.

 

internet wins

Last weekend's edition of the National Post featured an article by Dave Bidini that lists dominant cultural forms and their current successors: internet is the new tv; tv is the new cinema; cinema is the new literature; literature is the new theatre; theatre is the new poetry. Having just downloaded and viewed all five seasons of The Wire on my laptop (as well as various films), I can't resist qualifying Bidini's list. I realize that Bidini isn't only talking about forms of access; he's also describing popular reception in the midst of evolving cultural trends: i.e., the way people currently talk about and obsess over shows like Mad Men (not to mention the status of the actors, production value and all the careful cinematography) has reached a level that used to belong to the cinema; or, the reverence we once had for Great American Novelists has become a reverence for Great American Film Directors. But in my mind there's really no contest between television and cinema. In the end the internet wins at both. Now I just need to get my hands on a Kindle.

a soundtrack for the summer

I'd be lying if I said I had a great summer. There were certainly some great moments, but my departure from Winnipeg cast a large shadow over much of it. So, here I am in a new city with a new vocation and a familiar climate. I'm still working my way through some difficult transitions, but what I've been dreading most is now behind me. And the stage has been set for a whole new kind of anxiety.

Here, in typically cryptic fashion, is my summer narrated through seven noteworthy tracks that I've been listening to over past few months. The list could have been much longer, but you know how it goes.

1. The theme song for every cool guy who struts his stuff on a street where nobody notices:
Panda Bear - Slow Motion, from Tomboy 7" (Paw Tracks)

2. When you're so chill that the intense heat is the least of your worries, and the beach remains nothing more than a refreshing idea:
Gorillaz - Rhinestone Eyes, from Plastic Beach (EMI)

3. For the inevitable return to suburbia and all the strange feelings (nostalgia, self-consciousness, anxiety, and isolation) that follow:
Arcade Fire - Rococco, from The Suburbs (Merge)

4. A lackadaisical, nostalgic embrace of that which is out of your control:
Wild Nothing - Chinatown, from Gemini (Captured Tracks)

5. More of the same via surf-rock; this time with a pseudo-romantic twist :
Best Coast - Boyfriend, from Crazy for You (Mexican Summer)

6. Here, finally, is some motivation; that boost you thought you needed is really an invitation to get over yourself:
The Roots - Right On (ft. Joanna Newsom, STS), from How I Got Over (Mercury)

7. Through the confusion, the false stops and starts, and all the static of interfering frequencies, something emerges -- not quite what you expected but the beauty is there if you let yourself see it:
Baths - Hall, from Cerulean (Anticon)

New Music: Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Before that inevitable backlash begins and latest album from Arcade Fire gets written off as another mainstream indulgence, it should be said (indeed, it has already been said dozens of times) that The Suburbs is a good, if not great, album. A bit bloated? Sure. Heavy-handed? Of course! But at least Arcade Fire are willing to take those risks, and here, for better or worse, they do so without flinching. At least we can all agree on the obvious fact (obvious to me, at least) that the new Arcade Fire album isn't as good as Funeral, but is a good deal better than their overwrought sophomore album, Neon Bible.

I'll be the first to admit I was a disappointed when I heard that the new Arcade Fire album would be a concept album about the suburbs. The idea seems anachronistic and out of touch. Not only that, it's terribly obvious trope that's been done to death! But, then again, maybe that's the point.

The Suburbs is easily Arcade Fire's most nostalgic record and they're clearly aware of it. A good deal of the songs seem like they've been lifted from the 80s, particularly album's best moment (and only real idiosyncrasy -- The Suburbs is almost too cohesive), "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," an infectiously danceable anthem that sounds like Blondie beating up the Talking Heads. Another ear-worm, the dark and dizzying "Rococo" berates the "modern kids" who "seem so wild but . . . are so tame," and transforms what begins as an ominous chord progression into something that sounds almost liberating.

Some songs feel unnecessary, especially when you consider the album's length (16 songs, 64 minutes). But you can't blame the band for falling back on bombast. Nor can you really blame them for a self-serious exploration of nostalgia that at times feeds on the recesses of teen angst. This is what Arcade Fire do. This is why we like them. They don't demand much from their listeners, but somehow they seem terribly essential to the current musical landscape.

"Sometimes I can't believe it, I'm moving past the feeling," Win Butler sings on the title track (which opens and closes the album). Idea's have never been the band's strong suit, and lyrically Butler has always gone for the jugular. In the end, a grandiose feeling is all Arcade Fire have ever been able to conjure. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing; but perhaps this is why, for them, the Suburbs seem so inevitable.

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.

album of the decade

No alarms and no surprises...Kid A is my favourite album of the decade. I expound below. Here's what the rest of my list looks like. Follow the (highlighted) links to the write-ups. There are some recent additions here that I haven't had time to properly address. Oh well. Maybe next decade.

25. Chad VanGaalen - Infiniheart (Flemish Eye, 2004), Skelliconnection (Flemish Eye, 2006), Soft Airplane (Flemish Eye, 2008)
24. Micachu and the Shapes - Jewellery (Rough Trade, 2009)
23. PJ Harvey - Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (Island, 2000)
22. Beck - Sea Change (Geffen, 2002)
21. White Stripes - White Blood Cells (V2, 2001), Elephant (V2, 2003)
20. Akron/Family - Akron/Family (Young God, 2005)
19. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever to Tell (Interscope, 2003)
18. The Weakerthans - Left and Leaving (G7 Welcoming Committee, 2000)
17. Yo La Tengo - And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (Matador, 2000)
16. Constantines - Shine a Light (Three Gut Records, 2003)
15. Sleater-Kinney - One Beat (Kill Rock Stars, 2002), The Woods (Sub-Pop, 2006)
14. Menomena - Friend and Foe (Barsuk, 2007)
13. Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans (Sounds Familyre, 2004), Illinois (Asthmatic Kitty, 2005), Greetings From Michigan (Asthmatic Kitty, 2003)
12. Wild Beasts - Two Dancers (Domino, 2009)
11. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House (Warp, 2006)
10. The Books - The Lemon of Pink (Tomlab, 2003)
9. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City, 2004), Ys. (Drag City, 2006)
8. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Pig Lib (Matador, 2003)
7. Deerhunter - Microcastle (Kranky, 2008)
6. Sonic Youth - Murray Street (Geffen, 2002)
5. Cat Power - You Are Free (Matador, 2003)
4. Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights (Matador, 2002)
3. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope, 2006)
2. Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica (Epic, 2000)

1. Radiohead
- Kid A (Parlaphone/Capitol, 2000), Amnesiac (Parlaphone/Capitol, 2001), Hail to the Thief (Parlaphone/Capitol, 2003), In Rainbows (2007)

Here we are at the top (sort of). Kid A is my favourite album of the decade, but if I'm going take the decade seriously, I can't ignore the rest of their out put. Amnesiac, for example, followed quickly after Kid A and is a product of the same creative peak. Though a weaker album, Hail to the Thief was certainly a big event for me: for a while my entire universe seemed to revolve around that release date; and In Rainbows was a triumphant return to form and a revitalization of the band's sound, now inseparable from the minor stir it caused in the online music world.

Everybody's already pontificated on the significance of Kid A (both in terms of musical innovation and its relevance to the end of physical media). Oddly enough this was my first Radiohead album and so I didn't really have a prior relationship with the band's 90s output. I knew Radiohead were important for a variety of reasons, but as for "Radiohead trying not to sound like Radiohead" and the other postmodern claims that accompanied this album, they were over my head and, to be honest, I just wasn't interested at the time.

I loved Kid A not for the statement it was supposed to be making, not because of where it fit into the band's output, not because it represented the "death of rock 'n' roll" or because it nearly broke up the band; I loved it because it introduced me to a new world of sound and music, I loved it because of its sheer beauty, its ambient textures ("Treefingers"), the manufactured purity of Thom Yorke's vocals (especially on the title track), the urgency, energy, but also the simplicity of songs like of "Ideoteque" and "National Anthem." I identified with the dreams of solitude on "How to Disappear Completely," but also with the social/evolutionary angst of "Optimistic." How could an album be so many different things all at once?

Another bit of subtext: I bought this album right before departing for a trip to England. For the three weeks we were there, this cd did not leave my discman. What did I care if it was raining, if the sun refused to shine? I had Radiohead to keep me company. Listening to "In Limbo" while wandering through the crowds of Heathrow still stands out to me ("You're living in a fantasy. . . I'm lost at sea, don't bother me, I've lost my way"). I remember buying a magazine with the cover headline: "Cheer Up! Here Comes Radiohead."

A smaller part of Kid A's brilliance lies in the absence of any liner notes. The album booklet is made up of more art by Stanley Donwood, and so listening (for me) became a far more interesting process of interpretation; you can hear one line in a variety of ways. "Ideoteque," is a good example. At first, "Here I'm alive...everything all at a time," then I started to hear "Here I'm alone...everything all at a time" and finally it became clear that Yorke was probably singing "Here I'm allowed everything all of the time." Okay, so it's not that profound. But I love how disorienting Kid A makes the solitary listening experience. There's something comforting about it.

Kid A has plenty of cultural significance, but in the end, it's important and appealing because it's a beautiful work of art that asks difficult questions evades easy answers. It's simply an album that I'll never tire of.

albums of the decade (XIII)

We're nearing the end. I've only got a few more albums left. Just so we're clear: the following are my top 5 albums of the decade that are not by Radiohead. That post will come later. Yeah, it's gonna be a long one.

5. Sonic Youth - Murray Street (Geffen, 2002)
From one of my favourite summers. A family trip to Vancouver. At this point in my musical education I was relatively unfamiliar with Sonic Youth. Of course I knew of them. I'd heard "Teenage Riot," I think; I new they belonged to the alternative/underground scene in the 90s, but was largely unaware of their earlier achievements. We were at Vancouver's Virgin Megastore and I bought three or four albums: The White Stripes' White Blood Cells, the best of Bowie and Sonic Youth's Murray Street.

What led me to buy Murray Street had little to do with the music at that point. It was the mysterious aura of Sonic Youth, but also the absolutely beautiful album cover. I probably listened to it 20 times in my discman on the way home. Perfect for a summer drive on the transcanada highway. "The Empty Page" and "Rain on Tin" gave me a new appreciation for instrumental breaks and the mood-shifting possibilities of the electric guitar. It was the beginning of my relationship with Sonic Youth. Since then I've accumulated most of their catalogue, but Murray Street continues to standout as one of their best.

4. Cat Power - You Are Free (Matador, 2003)
I was proud of this album. I don't think there's another cd that I've managed to convince so many people to buy. Funny to recall that I came across it in a Rolling Stone magazine, reviewed and praised (I think Kurt Cobain was mentioned in a passing reference to the opener, "I Don't Blame You." This was, at that time, an easy way to grab my attention). I downloaded the neo-grungey "He War" and the understated "Fool" and was determined to find and buy this album. What a discovery! I'd found the perfect voice, and an equally brilliant songwriter. Since then, Chan Marshall hasn't come close to the depth of feeling ("Good Woman") or the inventiveness ("Free") of You Are Free. I'm probably too critical, but it's hard to over-emphasize how much I love this album.

You Are Free is inextricably linked to my last years in Winkler, those midnight bike rides, the isolation of life in a small town. The tragedy explored in a song like "Names" seemed so appropriate for growing through adolescence and watching kids you knew get into drugs, into unfair situations from which escape seemed impossible. I used the song "Shaking Paper" in a movie I made for my high school art class, playing overtop clips of a friend of mine riding my mom's ten speed down Park Street. The rest of the movie was brutal, but that combination seemed to work pretty well. Unlike the rest of this list, this is an album I think just about every (except my friend DeLayne) could like.

3. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights (Matador, 2002)
It's impossible to listen to this album and not feel like you're the shit. Everything about it exudes coolness and an overtly masculine type of confidence. The sort of confidence that's embodied in italian suits and expensive cigarettes (think Mad Men).

When Interpol arrived with this album, it seemed like every critic on the planet was buying into the hype. The dark style of Joy Division without the devastation. No, these songs went somewhere ("The New," for example, jumps all over the place; from a gritty guitar breakdown stolen from the Pixies, to spacey jazz scales that bring to mind early Modest Mouse). They were almost arena-ready, but back then the thought of these guys playing into something so vulgar was unthinkable. "Untitled" might be the opening track of the decade because its so instantly headturning, so absorbing and so undeniably poised to kick ass and take names; it prepares you for the post-punk epic that's about to unfold.

Interpol's more recent material has suffered in part because it the sinister atmosphere of Turn On the Bright Lights has all but disappeared. From the somber baritone of Paul Banks to intricate guitar work of Daniel Kessler and the rhytmic, almost frenzied bass playing of Carlos Dengler, Interpol made the most of every track on their nearly flawless debut.

2. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope, 2006)
The year should have belonged to TV on the Radio. They certainly released the most captivating album, an album full of conflict, with disparity built into very fabric of songs like "Wash The Day" and "Playhouses." Get ready for a big, generalizing statement: If there's a band, a sound, for this particular moment time, it has to be TV on the Radio.

I know this is all going to sound ridiculous, unnecessarily academic and a little bit arrogant, but I've always thought of TVOTR as a post-colonial band, not simply because of the diversity of their internal make-up, but because of how their music dialogues with the Afro-American music tradition, the way it brings old and new sounds together, and into conflict. Like the political criticism of the late Edward Said and Homi K. Bhaba, the music of TVOTR destabilizes dominant (musical) discourses, challenges our inherent assumptions about collective identity and the presumption about of war and peace; in short, it interrogates the ingrained legacies of colonialism. It's music that makes you think, even as you dance your way into its apocalyptic abandon. As David Bowie, who guests on "Province," well knows, few acts making music today are this vital and this provocative.

1. Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica (Epic, 2000)
I'm undecided as to whether this is Modest Mouse's best album. The Lonesome Crowded West (1997) is right up there, but The Moon & Antarctica was my first Modest Mouse album and, as we pop music obsessors well know, nostalgia always wins out in debates over artistic value. And besides, who among us can resist "Paper Thin Walls"?

I bought this album on a trip. I'm pretty sure it was for a baseball tournament. When I brought it to the counter at one of those hole in the wall record stores (the kind that used find their way into every single mall, the kind that are by now almost extinct), the clerk looked at me, appearing to be caught off guard, (I'm pretty sure I was in uniform) and said with a chuckle, "Whoa man, this is some good stuff." Back then, there wasn't much that made me happier than the validation of a record store clerk. It felt like I'd broken into a secret club. That baseball tournament was simply a means to an end.

The entire aesthetic of this album (from the artwork and its colour to the haunting atmospherics and Isaac Brock's existentialist lyrics) seemed of a piece. Another great response to suburban life in the midwest, the alienation of individuals amidst our society's love affair with technology, cheap entertainment and thoughtless consumption ("Different City," as well as "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes," are the best examples of this).

The Moon & Antarctica is an unflinching look at the darkest corners of Brock's consciousness: his tortured isolation and his skewed view of reality (see "Alone Down There"). "The Stars Are Projectors" is the album's centre-piece. At almost nine minutes, it seems to sum things up pretty well: it's disturbing and affecting, at once cosmic in scope and terribly personal ("It's built on findin' the easier ways through / God is a woman and the woman is / An animal that animals man, and that's you / Was there a need for creation?/ That was hidden in a math equation/ And that's this: where do the circles begin?" ). Intriguing, no?

albums of the decade (XI)

PJ Harvey - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (Island, 2000)

With her sixth album, Polly Jean Harvey came dangerously close to that refined musical wasteland called adult contemporary. This was her album to be "all grown up," to flirt with her maturity and the polished sounds of the studio. Even her more abrasive songs ("This is Love" and "Kamikazee") feel watered down and somewhat drained of their sexual energy. That said, Harvey has never sounded this confident in her ability as a musician, and it's unlikely that she ever will again. Ever the shape-shifter, Harvey's most cosmopolitan persona coincided nicely with the beginning of our new, self-consciously global millenium. It's no wonder the album was awarded the Mercury Prize the following year; it seems to capture some of the romance, the ambivalence of urban life at the beginning of the decade. I mean, I was only 12 at the time, but I sensed it. So mature for my age and all.

To be honest, it took me until 2004 to buy this album. By this point in time, I was well into my longstanding obsession with Peej; and even then, four years after its release, Stories... felt current. "Good Fortune" is one reason for this; it's quite simply a song to fall in love with. Another reason that Stories... still sounds so fresh is Harvey's almost timeless songwriting and her ability to inhabit characters from a wide historical spectrum (see 1995's To Bring You My Love or 2007's White Chalk). But as Harvey sings on "A Place Called Home," "Now is the time to follow through, to read the signs. Now the message is sent, let's bring it to its final end." She's still acting, of course, but this time she isn't playing a repressed Victorian or a prostitute from the deep South. This time round, it hits a bit closer home.

There are plenty more high points on Stories.... A stirring duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke ("This Mess We're In") is definitely one of them. Like many of the tracks on this album, Harvey's lyrics on "This Mess..." show an awareness of the cityscape and her place within it, taking care to frame her own point of view. "You Said Something" is probably the most cheerful love song Harvey's ever written (given that the vast majority of her songs about love are brutally violent and sexually perverse; it's her schtick). This one turns out to be about a couple of ex-pats on a romantic excursion in Manhatten. Pretty great! But the album ends two completely depressing songs: "Horses in My Dreams," which is a bit of a dirge, and "We Float," which advises us to "take life as it comes" because "one day, we'll float." Is she talking about escaping to heaven? Or about drowing in a massive flood? Either way, I think she covers the same ground as Modest Mouse's 2003 sing-along, "Float On." I always thought she was more of fighter. And I'm glad she's bounced back.

albums of the decade (VIII)

Akron/Family - Akron/Family (Young God, 2005)

It's not fair. When your debut is remarkably good, you shouldn't have to spend the rest of your career fighting off critics and naysayers, but it seems like that's what's happened to Akron/Family. I think it's safe to say that they'll never make another album like this. Drawing on British folk influences, mixing electric and analog, drugged out existentialism and natural inspiration, this Brooklyn band made a huge splash in 2005. All of a sudden they were joining folks like Devendra Banhart at the top of every other year end list. I found Akron/Family difficult to place, and it wasn't until I heard the album straight through that I finally understood why it was getting so much attention.

There's rarely a grand moment (except maybe "Running, Returning...", with it's heavy forward momentum, the surprise acoustic break and release into a sentimental ballad) on this fragmentary collection of experimental folk music. All I really can say is, it'll put you in a mood; it's heady, sonically interesting stuff that showcases some pretty sloppy moments. The lesser moments only bolster the band's material: it all feels very natural, very raw and unrefined. A song like "Afford" is a perfect example. It weaves a weepy acoustic melody through field recordings of birds, and when the reverb swells and the guitars start to alternate you know they've taken this melody as far as it can go. The prog-rock indulgences of the Akron/Family's most recent material isn't all that surprising. Those tendencies were there from the beginning. Perhaps that's what this is one of my favourite folk records of the past decade. By the end of each track, you'll be somewhere quite different than where you started.