If I were to reproduce the artwork below on 4 x 8 sheets of plywood do you think people would buy them for window covering during hurricane season? How about if I send this to China and have it made into coordinated towel and bathmat sets, place mats, and doormats? Could I get volume sales in WalMart? How about if I just saw the plywood apart and sell each image for — I dunno — $600? This could transformate the entire art industry.
Yesterday I listened to (and blogged) Leslie Winer’s “5″ from Witch. She’s uploaded the whole album to YouTube. Toward the end of “5″ we hear a dramatic harmonic, dramatic to my generation, the simple progression from a high E up to the B above it. At least I think those are the notes I heard. It doesn’t matter really. What mattered to me at that moment was the brief echo, repeated, of the opening of the Buffalo Springfield tune, “For What It’s Worth.” Allusive.
Today I heard “John Says.” I loved it. Cinematic. Reggaelistic.
Blair Millen wrote about this album three or four years ago.
I wanted to like more of the rap here, but I became very tired. Everything was either about acquiring material goods (which includes women), or, alternately, about how all other rap is about acquiring material goods.
Wow, I thought, the rap he sampled is navel-gazing recursiveness like so much of blogging. I read on:
On hearing my nth predictable song about how hip-hop is predictable, it struck me that I was witnessing individuals engaged in a formalist exercise where the form itself is the only appropriate lyrical subject; thus rap is, in some ways, the blogging of music. (This is happening to “indie rock” in the Strokes/Killers/Libertines mold, as well.)
The best of it all is Akala, a grime artist from Britain, particularly when he delivers the line in his song “Electro Livin” (not included here, but from the same album) “We are sad for things we cannot have/But we are not sad for Baghdad.” It reads as political naivete but he performs it with redeeming authority.
David Isenberg had Howard Levy and Chris Seibold playing during breaks between speakers and panels at Freedom to Connect this week. I have a lot to share about my experience of this years gathering of “net heads” inside the beltway. Heath Row blogged most of it with almost verbatim transcriptive objectivity. Suw Charman did her bit for the live blogging cause as well. Over the next few weeks, as time permits, I’ll try to pull some of my thoughts into English and share them here.
