Hullabalooza: Day 3

"I thought I had an Appetite for Destruction. But all I really wanted was a club sandwich."

3:30 - Perry Farrell feat. Paul Green's School of Rock All-Stars & Slash





























We started off the last day of the festival right. For some reason Claire had elected to receive text message spam from the festival, which mostly served to inform us about worthless product promotions, but did let us know that this afternoon the greatest guitarist of the hair metal era is going to be performing on the kids stage with the most effeminate lead singer of the alternative rock era. The set only lasted about 20 minutes and they played all covers. Perry and Slash did their best (which is to say, very little) to tone down their rock star ways. If you look closely in these pictures, Slash has a cigarette in his mouth for the entire show, and Perry would go over to the side of the stage between songs to have a glass of champagne. Perry would also introduce each of the songs for the children in a tone that was really more patronizing that child-friendly (like, before playing "Jane Says", he would remark, "this is a song about a girl that's very confused"). But even when it was clear that they were just phoning in the performance, they still rocked pretty hard, so I can't really complain.

4:00 - Chromeo

After we left the kids' stage, we walked by the neighboring stage where Black Kids were playing. Claire and I had both heard their single and thought they might be fun. We were mistaken. They sucked. So we went over to the next stage to see Chromeo, who were pumping out the good-time party jams without any of the Black Kids' bullshit hipster posturing. And I believe science has proven definitively that nothing gets a party going like a fat Puerto Rican guy on a vocoder.

5:00 - Saul Williams






























Saul Williams is a bit of an aberration in the world of hip-hop. He's a rapper (of sorts) who started out as a poet, and borrows as much of his style from industrial rock as he does from hip-hop (and is indeed produced by Trent Reznor). He could write lyrical circles around Jay-Z, Lil' Wayne, or pretty much any commercial rapper in the game. He writes about empowerment and unity without soundin naive, and can get angry without seeming militant. His set was certainly one of the highlights of the festival, coming out looking like an afro-centric version of Aladdin Sane-era Bowie, with his band dressed up like something out of an early-seventies Funkadelic lineup. He assaulted his audience with a barrage of break beats, guitar noise, and angry slam poetry. He also brought his 12-year-old daughter on stage as his only backup singer, and she was totally adorable.

6:15 - Gnarls Barkley












On my way to the next stage, I happened to catch the end of Blues Traveler's set and see enough to lament the tragedy of John Popper staving off death by losing hundreds of pounds and at the same time, lose all of his stage presence (though their cover of "I Want You to Want Me" sounded surprisingly good).

Dangermouse and Cee-lo arrived on stage dressed in tweed jackets and bow ties like a pair of stuffy boarding school teachers, with their band of students in khakis and maroon sweater vests. And while I'm always a strong supporter of bands in uniform, I was expecting a higher level of pageantry from the Gnarls guys. They put on a decent enough show, playing though most of their most recent album (which is pretty much just a more fine-tuned, less-inspired version of their debut). I'm far enough removed from the summer of '06 that I was able to enjoy "Crazy" without feeling suffocated by its overexposure, but certainly the highlight of their set was a cover of Radiohead's "Reckoner" that was easily on par with the version that Radiohead had played themselves two nights previous. Following the song Cee-lo made a bashful appeal for Thom Yorke's approval, which seemed completely unnecessary, but was certainly endearing.

8:30 - Kanye West























































































Throughout the entire festival, rumors had been floating around that the Junior Senator from Illinois might be making an appearance sometime during the festival, possibly along fellow hometown heroes Wilco, or otherwise Kanye, and while Claire and I were staking out our spot for Kanye, it was all anybody was talking about. Of course, anybody following the news could see that it would me a monumental blunder for Obama to have appeared at a rock festival, given the recent attacks from the McCain camp on his celebrity status. And anyway, there's only room on Kanye West's stage for one oversized ego, which was very well represented. I was somewhat disappointed in his stage show, given how elaborate his set has been for his current tour and how elaborate Radiohead's light show was the night before. So with a stripped-down version on his full set, we had to settle for a mind-blowing light show clearly lifted from Daft Punk's show here last year. I'm still not sure if I would have been more impressed with Nine Inch Nails' set on the other end of the park, but I was still pleasantly surprised with Kanye's performance. For a brilliant producer that rarely ever gets any credit as an MC, Kanye totally owned that stage for the hour and a half that he was on. Of course, he was well supported by his arsenal of smoke machines and flood lights that kept the level of drama high and sent anybody with epilepsy straight to the hospital. Midway through the set, he went into a self-indulgent rant about his own place in history and the importance of progress in art, which would be easy to slag off as the crass narcissism of a man with a god complex, but it's hard to think of anybody else in hip-hop with as much appreciation for genuine creativity (even if he's often co-opting more than he is creating). Later he went to the side of the stage to take a breather while his band jammed on an abbreviated version of "Don't Stop Believing", and you could see him on the monitor smiling, not a smirk of self-satisfaction, but of a giddy child living out his dreams.

Hullabalooza: Day 2

"I used to rock and roll all night and party every day. Then it was every other day... now I'm lucky to find half an hour a week in which to get funky. I've gotta get out of this rut and back into the groove."

After Radiohead's ridiculous performance the previous night (and having to stand in one place for 4 hours to get a decent spot for it), we decided to take it easy today. Luckily, it seemed like most of the bands we wanted to see were the least popular acts for their time slot, so we saw a ton of amazing bands and somehow never had to fight for a good spot spot to watch them.

3:30 - Devotchka















Last year, when Juno was released, and the Moldy Peaches were unexpectedly transformed into a household name (at least among teenage hipster girls), they also instantly became the world's most overrated band. This was remarkable, not because they don't write good songs (even though Beat Happening does that schtick much better), but because they're not really a great band (the music supervisors on Juno were smart to find the only 10 songs in their repertoire that don't sound embarrassingly awkward). Which is why I find it odd that the previous year, when Devotchka provided the soundtrack to that year's indie darling, Little Miss Sunshine, the exact opposite happened. Their involvement in the film allowed people to slag them off as "the Little Miss Sunshine band" and stop listening to them as soon as liking that film ceased to be cool. They occupy an odd musical niche of being too harsh and slavic for the Starbucks/Barnes&Noble set and too clean and professional-sounding for the Pitchfork crowd. So most of the Lollapalooza audience did themselves the disservice of seeing hipster wunderkinds MGMT instead, which allowed me to score a perfect spot to see one of the best performances of the weekend. They rocked out out on some of the most badass gypsy spaghetti western music you've ever heard, with singer Nick Urata shredding the guitar, bouzouki, and the theramin just as effortlessly as he belts out Spanish love ballads. I think I read somewhere that early in their career these guys used to do the music for Dita Von Teese's burlesque show, which seems like maybe a more appropriate setting than the Grant Park bandshell, but they pulled it off well, and strangely never looked out of place wearing a heavy tuxedo jackets and chugging red wine from the bottle in the mid-afternoon sun.

4:30 - Explosions in the Sky

















With the afternoon sun at it's peak, we decided to just grab some beers and sit back on the lawn for this one. At first listen, Explosions in the Sky don't sound like a band of country-fried Texans that do soundtracks for high school football melodramas, but really I think it makes sense. They have a violent aversion to lyrics, melodies, and really anything that doesn't involve giant swells of wailing guitar fuzz. They're all about making the largest, most dramatic crescendos they can and challenging you to devour it like a 72 oz. sirloin. There's also no real breaks in their performance, so there's no way of telling where one song ends on another begins, which would have been pretty boring if I didn't feel like I was drinking the most epic pint of Bud Light that has ever been consumed.

5:30 - Okkervil River















I'm convinced that Okkervil River is actually just the bizarro version of Spoon. Both bands are from Austin, both clearly have an unhealthy obsession with Brian Wilson, and Will Shef kind of looks like an adolescent version of Britt Daniel. But in contrast to Spoon's sense of understatement and minimalism, Okkervil River seems intent on cutting open their carotid arteries and bleeding their hearts all over your speakers. And while sometimes their naked sentimentality is often a bit uncomfortable to listen to, you have to admire the sheer energy they exert in the process. When they went into "Our Life is Not a Movie" the crowd went wild, and the band milked it for everything it was worth.

6:30 - Broken Social Scene















After seeing Okkervil River spend the last hour losing half their body weight in sweat, I have to admit that I found Broken Social Scene a little boring. I've always considered BSS to be a bit overrated, which is not to say that I think they aren't a solid band. They are. But that's all they are. They're like Ayn Rand's Canadian indie rock nightmare, with so many members that it's almost impossible for any single member to stand out and do anything truly great. And indeed all of the members of the band that actually want to do anything interesting have to break away to do it. They opened with "Pacific Theme" which seemed to match the mood of the lazy, slightly overcast summer evening, but mostly just made me sleepy. The show got a little more lively when they invited Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan from Stars onto the stage, but really I think I would have rather just seen them play a set of Stars songs. When I finally realized there was no chance that Leslie Feist was going to be joining them, I decided this would be a good time for me to get a jug of wine and meet back up with Claire and Joe for Sharon Jones.

7:30 - Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings















Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings might be the least original musical group of all time, and indeed probably make the strongest possible case against artistic innovation. They pretty much don't acknowledge the the existence of any pop music made after 1975, with Jones strutting about the stage, calling directions to the band with the attitude and intensity of a coked-out James Brown, and the Dap Kings laying down the groove so tightly you'd sware they all thought the Godfather himself was gonna rise from the grave and give them a beating if they didn't land on the one. The showmanship was remarkable, and Jones even found some time in her hour of nonstop funk to belt out a couple gospel tunes with enough soul to rival Aretha. If not the best, this was certainly the most dancable performance of the festival.

8:30 - Wilco















I would personally like to thank whoever planned the festival and decided to schedule Wilco at the same time as Rage Against the Machine. Like a lightning rod for macho douchebags, RATM drew all the most obnoxious members of the crowd away from this end of the park, allowing me to enjoy Wilco in peace, and with a pretty decent view of the stage. The band came out wearing suits that looked like some kind of cheeky Takashi Murakami interpretation of Glen Cambell's wardrobe, which, it goes without saying, was awesome. The band ran through a good mix of songs spanning their entire discography (they even played a song off A.M.). I was a little surprised at how little they played from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but the version of "Jesus, Etc." they played couldn't have complimented the glowing Chicago skyline more perfectly. I was also surprised that they played "Spiders", the 10-minute kraut-rock noise jam on A Ghost is Born, and I could go on about all the great songs I wish they had played, but really I was just mad that they had to get cut off after an hour and a half.

Hullabalooza: Day 1

"My kids think you're the greatest, and thanks to your gloomy music, they've finally stopped dreaming of a future I can't possibly provide."

Let me start by apologizing for my recent lack of updates. Let me further apologize to anyone who I've unwittingly convinced to enjoy or otherwise look forward to posts on this blog. This was not my intention. As a result of having a job I no longer despise, I've found myself working longer hours and often in good enough spirits to actually leave my apartment and interact with the outside world. Also, I bought Rock Band for my Wii. . .

At any rate, I spent this past weekend in Chicago, hanging out with my sister and enjoying some of the best, greasiest food this country has to offer. While I was there I caught a Cubs game that was delayed by thunder storms and a tornado warning, and, more importantly, I spent three days watching the world's greatest mainstream-alternative rock acts find new and innovative ways of selling out. . .

3:00

Claire, Joe, and I entered Grant Park alongside Buckingham Fountain (also known as the Married With Children fountain) and got the luxurious cloth wristbands that they've introduced for this year's festival, which we would be wearing for the next three days. We were hoping to start our day off with hipster cheerleading squad known as The Go! Team in order to hype ourselves up for the weekend. Unfortunately we only made it for the tail end of their last song promptly turned around and headed to the other end of the park since none of us had any interest in seeing the poor-man's-Amy-Winehouse playing at the adjoining stage.

3:20 - The Kills

We instead decided to see the Kills, which was probably a mistake (and if I was paying closer attention to the schedule we totally would have gone to the kids stage to see Tiny Masters of Today). The Kills are, of course, a solid band, and I might even have a slight crush on Alison Mosshart, but they are not band that looks good in direct sunlight. They are a band whose entire existence is dependent on their seeming cool (in this case, literally). So when I can see sweat dripping onto the scarf that Jamie Hince in inexplicably wearing in the 90-degree Chicago heat from 40 feet back, the facade is ruined and I have to actually start paying attention to the music, which doesn't have near enough energy to sustain the festival-sized crowd they're playing to, nor is it earnest enough for me not to feel ridiculous that I'm standing behind third base of what is normally used as a baseball diamond. Luckily, they ended a few minutes early to beat a hasty retreat to the chic Soho loft from whence they came, giving us some time to get a spot for Gogol Bordello.

4:15 - Gogol Bordello

At first listen, Gogol Bordello seems like some sort of bad joke, as if Yakov Smirnoff had reinvented himself as the lead singer of a hardcore band. But as you keep listening, you realize that the singer's broken English and dropped articles are 100% serious, and his handlebar mustache is 100% awesome. It would probably be a gross over-simplification to say that they're a gypsy punk band in the way Flogging Molly is an Irish folk-punk band, but it's probably the best comparison I can come up with. And true to their gypsy heritage, they are a band without nationality. With a Ukrainian singer, two homeless Russian guys playing violin and accordian, an Ecuadoran percussionist/rapper, two half-Asian cheerleaders, and a giant Ethiopian bass player holding the ensemble together, the band is indeed a multi-cultural cluster-fuck of the highest order. If Joe Strumer were still alive, he'd probably throw away all his old records and listen to them exclusively. Needless to say, these guys are extremely entertaining and also a bit obnoxious. For the finale of the show the lead singer threw a metal bucket over his mic stand and played a drum solo on it that drove the crowd nuts. That's showmanship. . .

5:15

We probably would have tried to go to the neighboring stage to see Mates of State at this point, though it was becoming clear that we would have to fortify our position here if we wanted to have even a halfway decent spot for Radiohead. So we killed an hour, and luckily the next band was someone we wanted to see.

6:15 - Bloc Party















I tend to agree with Noel Gallagher's argument that Bloc Party is just a pretentious college band that becomes less and less appealing the farther removed you are from any sort of academic institution, or as Noel puts it, "indie shit." But they do have at least a couple of songs that make me wish I was in an warehouse club in Manchester popping ecstasy tablets like tic tacs, and I have to admit that I was pretty impressed that they don't use drum machines at all for their show (though I'm not ruling out the possibility that Matt Tong is a robot). Also when they started playing "Hellicopter" it was funny seeing all the frat guys, who had clearly played the song dozens of times on Guitar Hero, light up as they watched Kele Okereke's play it for real.

7:15

In preparation for Radiohead, and in order to kill an hour, we sent Joe out to get some wine. Our anticipation grew as stagehands began deploying Radiohead's massive lighting array and Claire, Joe, and I collectively downed two bottles of the Blackstone Winery's most mediocre riesling and pinot grigio out of plastic jugs.















8:15 - Radiohead

I've seen Radiohead once before. It was at Red Rocks in Denver, where the band ditched their entire stage set in favor of the natural ambiance of the amphitheater, and it was possibly the greatest show I've ever seen. This time around, they went completely overboard with their lighting and video setup, and, with a little help from the Bears training camp, who were setting off fireworks behind the stage, blew my mind all across the grounds of Grant Park.

For all their slow droning and odd rhythms it's easy to forget how much Radiohead just fucking rocks. I remember watching Radiohead's tour documentary Meeting People Is Easy, in which Thom Yorke spends about an hour whining about how depressed and lonely America makes him feel, and wanting nothing more than to smack him upside the head and tell him to man up. So it was refreshing to see the band quit with all the politics and melodrama and just have a good time. It made my 8th grade self happy that Radiohead has somehow become the most important rock band in the world (even if the signicance of that title has been somewhat diminished over the last decade), though it made me feel totally old when I looked around and saw the crowd of college kids singing along to all of the In Rainbows songs and then looking dumbfounded when the band kicked into anything off The Bends or OK Computer.

An open letter to Stephen Spielberg

Dear Mr. Spielberg,

You've made a canon of films that stand up as some of the finest works in the history of cinema. You've redefined the expectations (for better or worse) of generations of filmmakers and moviegoers, and ensured that none of my time between Memorial Day and Labor Day will be spent in a movie theater watching some gay, artsy crap (I know, you're saving that for the Oscar season). You have more money than you can count, and a business empire that might actually rival your filmography. You had a good run there. We all had some laughs. But I saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this weekend, and it's clear to me that you've grown mad with power, and it's time to for you to be put out to pasture. . .

Exhibit A: The unnecessary sequels and special editions.















Maybe you' ve just been spending too much time around your friend Mr. Lucas, but this seems to be a problem that isn't going away. We looked the other way at two awful Jurassic Park sequels, but what's this I hear about another one in the works? I know that you have lots of new toys and gadgets that you wish you had when you were making movies that mattered. But, guess what? All of those movies that you made with those cheesy models and matte paintings still hold up. And War of the Worlds was shit. I don't know if that means you need to go back to using miniatures and optical mattes, but maybe it'll make you realize how bad of an idea it is to have a whole sequence of Shia LaBeouf swinging through the jungle on vines with a pack of monkeys when you see the whole thing rigged up in a studio. Like Mr. Lucas, you might think that you're introducing your stories to a whole new generation of moviegoers, but speaking from the standpoint of someone who was introduced to all your early films on home video and TV, as long as there are DVD players and parents who don't have time to raise their children themselves, your films will be watched and loved for generations to come. Not only does it destroy the cohesiveness of a film or series to interject material 20 years after the fact, it's more than a little patronizing to the people who grew up on your films to tell them that the essential experiences of their childhood were flawed and incomplete. So, just save your time, save your money, and work on putting all those classics on Blu-Ray with as little mediation as possible and we'll all pretend that ET was always a puppet and Indiana Jones never met aliens. Speaking of which. . .


Exhibit B: The aliens. What the fuck is up with all the aliens?















Now, don't get me wrong, I too had an unhealthy obsession with extraterrestrials when I was younger and fully appreciate the use of otherworldly beings as a means of exploring the meaning of human existence on Earth. I also realize that the use of aliens as a plot device is so lame that even daytime soaps avoid it like the plague. Here's a good rule of thumb, if the story of the film primarily involves aliens visiting or invading Earth, then you have full permission to geek out; but when the movie is about, I don't know, a mid-20th century archaeologist protecting biblical artifacts from fascist military leaders, it's probably best to play it safe and leave the big-eyed spacemen out. Which reminds me. . .

Exhibit C: The endings. Is it that fucking difficult to tactfully resolve a story?













I, like you, have the utmost respect for Stanley Kubrick as an artist and a filmmaker, and have often thought it would be a great tribute to the legendary master of understatement and subtlety to create an elaborate alternate ending sequence to A Clockwork Orange where aliens abduct Malcolm McDowell and show him the error of his ways, followed by a 10-minute shot (Kubrick loved long takes) of myself pissing on Kubrick's gravestone, but I think that would be somewhat redundant. While you're usually smart enough not to pen your own films, as a producer and director, you should really know better than to even sign off on any of this shit. You seem to think that the fantastical subject matter of your films gives you license to include situations that make genocidal aliens, genetically engineered dinosaurs, and self-aware robots seem totally plausible by comparison. I was totally ready to love your relentlessly dark interpretation of War of the Worlds until it ended in some fairy tale version of Boston, conveniently untouched by the swarms of bloodthirsty alien death machines that lay waste to the rest of the world, with Tom Cruise and his family miraculously all alive and intact. Which is not so different from the ridiculous coda to AI (see above), where a team of benevolent (but apparently very bored) aliens improbably arrive on Earth to give the lonely android boy the loving family he never had. Look dude. I get it. You still haven't gotten over your parents' divorce. But I don't want to pay 12 bucks a ticket to fund your 100 million-dollar therapy sessions.

So stop. Please stop. I know that legions of film critics, who are all just as deluded as you are, will continue praising all of these pathetic misfires, and small children will continue to marvel at all of the bright colors and CG fireworks, and I will long for the days when you didn't have your own studio, when you didn't have an army of visual effects artists, when you just had your ideas, and that was enough.

A little bit country. . .

So far it seems that 2008 is shaping up to be a pretty decent for music. I've been enjoying the new Hot Chip and Devotchka albums immensely, and even though the Vampire Weekend CD seemed played out before it was even released, it's still a pretty solid record. Still though, my favorite album so far this year has to be Brighter Than Creation's Dark by Drive-By Truckers. The songs are catchy, the lyrics are clever, and it's just depressing enough to get me through the last stretch of winter. But for some reason, when I try to explain this to people they look at me like I'm joking or just being ironic, as if I'm one step away from telling them that I've started voting Republican and giving a shit about NASCAR.

















Of course, Drive-By Truckers are officially more alt country than they are country, which is another way of saying that they actually sell records north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I think in their case the designation doesn't really make sense. When bands like Uncle Tupelo started writing songs about the quiet dignity of Appalachian miners and mill-workers, they got categorized as "alt" country because apparently the only people in America that care about the plight of the Appalachian miners and mill-workers are rock critics and college students. Drive-By Truckers, on the other hand, are remarkable for playing music that borrows as much from traditionalist country as it does from early Skynard-era southern rock, while still writing lyrics that are consistently current and relevant. Their most recent album lacks the high-concept hard rock of their 2000 rock opera, Southers Rock Opera, or the lo-fi grittiness of 2004's The Dirty South, but it maintains most of their themes. Brighter Than Creation's Dark is comprised mostly of 3-minute song-as-character-studies about the frustrations of life on the margins of the American South, with subjects ranging from meth addicts to soldiers stuck in Iraq to a washed-up band begrudgingly playing the opening slot on tour with an equally washed-up headlining act.

Indeed, what has always made country music so popular (and why all you white-collar blue-bloods despise it) is that it panders to and even celebrates the least-common-denominator of American society. Country music speaks to the sadness and pathos of white America in a way that whiny rock ballads just can't. The old joke about what happens when you play a country song backwards (you get your house/dog/wife back - ha ha, very funny) is sort of true, but misses the point of what this music is really about. The fact is that at some point in your life you're gonna lose your house, your dog, your wife, or something equivalent. Country music is about the tragedy of life. It's not about sex and drugs, and rock star fantasies. It's about working for a living, getting shit on by the world, and drowning your blues away in a bottle of whiskey. It's about trying your best and still coming up short. In intellectual terns, it's a whole genre devoted to commiseration and catharsis.

So why is it that whenever I ask somebody to categorize the sort of music the listen to, it seems that the most common answer I seem to get is "everything but country," or "everything but rap," or "everything but rap or country." I mean, it's no mystery that the people I hang out with are a bunch of closet racists, so it probably makes sense that they wouldn't listen to a lot of hip-hop (even if their white guilt obligates them to pretend to), but what about country music is so unappealing to urbane, college-educated white folk? Every awful one hit-wonders of the eighties is retroactively transformed into a masterpiece for its tacky earnestness, and yet anything sung with a drawl and a twang is like hipster kryptonite. I mean, why is it that everyone at the bar lights up as soon as they hear "Don't Stop Believing" come on the jukebox but nobody knows the fucking words to "Friends In Low Places"?

Before I go any further, let me first point out that I'm NOT talking about Johnny Cash. I know you probably think that because you saw Walk the Line and you've got that one album where he does the Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode covers, that you have a healthy appreciation for country music. But really that's not much different from a stoner college kid that picks up a Bob Marley album and decides that it's okay to grow dreadlocks and wear a dumb-ass knit cap. Johnny Cash is a great artist, and undoubtedly one of the coolest motherfuckers to ever pick up a guitar, but I feel like people have this idea that Johnny Cash is somehow better than or different from the rest of country music. I mean, Hank Williams was infinitely more self-destructive, and Merle Haggard actually did most of the outlaw shit that everybody thinks Johnny Cash is so cool for just singing about. Johnny Cash just knew what made for a great country song and knew how to execute it without letting any high-minded Nashville production get in his way.

Now, anybody that's known me for a while probably knows that I haven't always held my current appreciation for twang and honky-tonk, and I still think that most of the country music that gets played on the radio is pretty awful (but certainly no worse than any of the other crap on the top 40). It probably helps that I live in a city where people don't actually listen to country (at least publicly), so I can freely dissociate the music from its typical listeners, who I tend to disagree with on pretty much every major social or political issue. But living in a place like New York has given me an appreciation for just how little people actually pay attention to the lyrics of the music they listen to. Rock music listeners (and indie rock fans in particular) seem to be so desperate for their music to be deep and meaningful that they're willing to disregard lyrics that are, at best, nonsensical, and, at worst, trite, melodramatic crap. Though metaphor has always been a strong part of country songwriting, it's always essential that any country song still works on the most literal possible level. Kenny Rogers might have been using gambling as a metaphor for life, but it's also possible that he was just talking to a guy on a train about how to screw his buddies out of their money next time poker night rolls around. Country is also the only genre (give or take hip-hop) where there's still a premium on wordplay. And while this has certainly led to numerous songwriting travesties ("Save a Horse / Ride a Cowbow" comes to mind most immediately), Roger Miller's "King of the Road" contains about as perfect a combination of wit, irony, self-deprecation, and understatement as anyone could have conceived, and Willie Nelson's "Sad Songs and Waltzes" is not only one of the funniest songs ever written (again, understatement is key), but also a modernist work on par with Fellini's 8 1/2 or Magritte's "This Is Not a Pipe". With all of his clever turns of phrase, you get the sense that if Willie Neson wasn't playing music (and maybe layed off the bong every now and then), he would have been the best copywriter on Madison Avenue.



Now, I'm not suggesting that anybody run out tomorrow and buy Toby Keith's Shock'n Y'all (though really there are much worse music purchases you can make), but for all of his ignorant right-wing jingoism, even Toby understands that a broken heart and a busted liver with just the right amount of lazy slide guitar droning in the background is a recipe for pop music gold that's scarcely been improved upon.

Wrong turn. . .

In terms of it's pop cultural significance, my home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has very few and very odd claims to fame. For instance, Mike Judge was so inspired by the ineptitude of Albuquerque's public education system that he named the high school in Beavis and Butthead after our very own Highland High. For Nicholas Roeg's cult classic film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie plays a space alien sent to Earth on a mission to find a way to send water back to his dying planet, he chose to set the film in Albuquerque because of the surreal, otherworldly quality of the downtown and university area, as well as the state's notoriously lax labor laws. In addition to being the place where rapper/automobile enthusiast Xzibit spent most of his formative years, Albuquerque is also the birthplace of a bevy of B- and C-list actors including Freddie Prinz Jr., French Stewart, Annabeth Gish, and Neil Patrick Harris. However, the city is probably most famous for being the place where Bugs Bunny consistently makes wrong turns as he traverses the globe via his endless network of burrowed tunnels. And while this probably had less to do with the geography or culture of the city and more to do with the inherent humor of Mel Blanc making that "koykee" sound at the end, it always made sense to me that Albuquerque was always the stopping-off point and not the destination for the wascally wabbit.








Recently though, the city has found its own little pop cultural niche in a new show on AMC called Breaking Bad, set and shot on location almost entirely in Albuquerque. In the past year AMC has set about reinventing itself as a sort of cable version of HBO, and given how unequivocally awesome Mad Men is and how terrible HBO's recent crop of original series have been, it should maybe be the other way around. Breaking Bad is their second original series, which they wedge in between extended marathons of forgettable action movie of the 80s, and the show is, in most regards, just a darker, grittier, more macho version of Weeds, following the story of a high school chemistry teacher (played by the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) that decides to start selling crystal meth to support his family after he finds out he's been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. But whereas Weeds works from the idea that its titular drug is basically benign and primarily serves to illustrate the squareness and hypocrisy of the community's uptight, conservative residents, Breaking Bad goes to lengths to illustrate the most abject features of meth culture in Central New Mexico. The show feels a little gimmicky at times (I mean, how often can you use some clever chemistry trick make stuff blow up before it just becomes schtick), but it's surprisingly well done. It's edgy without being obnoxious, it's grim without being bleak, and Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are like an original dark-comic, meth-cooking odd couple. But more than anything I just enjoy seeing my hometown rendered on-screen with such frightening accuracy.














I've certainly watched enough episodes of Cops: In Albuquerque to know that the city has no shortage of ridiculous stories involving the meth trade, but I have to give the show's creators credit for never turning the city into a cartoon, like the fictitious community in Weeds, or making it seem like just some generic drug-addled Southwestern city. Though it's difficult to understate the poverty and dark underbelly of the city of Albuquerque and the state of New Mexico as a whole, it's not without its whitewashed suburbs, and everything in between. In addition to being the city where most of the mechanical components of our nation's nuclear stockpile were made, Albuquerque is also notably the city where Bill Gates chose to start Microsoft (who, like Bugs Bunny, felt no need to stick around). And what better metaphor for the duality of the city than a brilliant chemist coming together with an enterprising tweaker to cook batches ultra-pure crystal meth.

Still though, my favorite part of the show is the way it uses the minute details of the city that probably go unnoticed by anyone that didn't grow up there, but, at least for me, add a whole other level of humor to the show. Indeed one of the strongest memories I have of the city is the lower-middle-class 70s-era houses with washed-out color-schemes, shag carpeting, and wood paneling on the walls, like the houses that I grew up in, that Breaking Bad uses in much the same way Little Miss Sunshine (also set in Albuquerque) does, as a way of illustrating the stagnation and downward social mobility of the family. In the first episode of the show, when the main character is working at a car wash after school to make ends meet, it should just be sad and pathetic, but the fact that he's working at that one weird car wash on Eubank and Menaul with wood-chip siding that kind of looks like an airplane hangar actually makes it funny. Also, I don't think I've seen a more perfect once-scene description of the city of Albuquerque than a middle-aged white guy buying crystal meth out in front of the Dog House (mmmm. . . Dog House). Of course, the scene in one of the more recent episodes where the main character has sex with his wife in his car outside of his high school's science building (which is, in fact, the Eldorado High School science building, built during my freshman year there) is nothing short of surreal.

Who gives a fuck about an oxford comma?

I remember it was last May sometime, and I was gorging myself on free mp3s from various indie music blogs, as I often do, when I stumbled across two songs on the Stereogum home page called "Oxford Comma" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" from an obscure band of ex-Columbia students called Vampire Weekend. Before I heard one note of the music, the first thing I noticed about this band was simply that their name is fucking terrible, and how could any decent, self-respecting band give themselves a name that bad. I mean, even if they were a second-rate local goth band, as the name clearly suggests, it would still be an awful name. But then I thought about it some more, and I figured a band with a name this awful had to have something else going for them to gain any kind of cred on a music elitist mainstay like Stereogum. So I gave it a listen. There was no doubt that this band was a bit unseasoned (the mp3s I downloaded had "Blue CD-R" listed as the album title), but I had to give it up to them. This was some seriously catchy shit.

Of course, classifying this band gets a little hairy. The band plays what essentially amounts to a hipstered-out version of the world-beat adult-contemporary that Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel made baby-boomers swoon over in the mid-80s. The singer, and principal song-writer for the band, Ezra Koenig, even inflects a faux-Afro-English patois in the same way Sting used to do on early Police records (but in a notably less obnoxious way). Though the bands use of afro-pop sounds and rhythms indicate an earnest appreciation and broad understanding of the genre, this is still the white man's blues. They're still primarily singing songs about the lives of prepped-out, over-privileged college students in the Northeast, and their lyrics are loaded with the kinds of references that speak to an obscene overabundance of multi-cultural exposure (though I do totally enjoy the Khyber Pass/Man Who Who Would Be King reference in "M79" - my favorite of their songs by far).

In a lot of ways they're exactly the kind of band critics love to buzz and blog about. Like Interpol and the Strokes before them, they've got a style that seems fresh and unique, but also catchy and familiar, and, more importantly, also very easy to break down into its component musical influences. On the other hand, they're a band that's distinctly uncool. There's no disaffected posturing, no vintage Italian leather boots, no hundred-dollar-haircuts. Even in their cover-photo for Spin they don't look like much more than four nerdy college kids that spent a little too much time digging through their parents closets and record collections. On some level, their style of music makes sense, blending the makeshift, DIY ethos of Third World pop music with the makeshift, DIY eithos of American indie rock. Vampire Weekend gives us the spirit of Paul Simon's Graceland without all the fancy, over-priced productions or cadre of multi-national studio musicians - which is to say, brought down to the level of the blogging and blog-reading public.



They've certainly come a long way way since I saw them last summer at a sparsely-populated free gig at East River Park, coming off a tour of house parties and holes-in-the-wall across the East Coast. While most of the songs on their just-released album were available as free mp3s or on an iTunes-released EP, they've definitely cleaned up their sound a bit, and probably gotten a little extra money money with which to hire a real studio engineer and insert the thumping bass and soaring string sections that were notably missing from their previous efforts. Aside from the obvious attention from bloggers, they made the cover of Spin this month, and their album is slated to debut at #17 on the Billboard chart next week. Hell, I even saw a little blurb on them the other day in OK! magazine (along with Goldfrapp and Hot Chip??). Which, if nothing else, just further serves to point out the slowness and inefficiency of the record industry and mainstream print media. So if record companies want to know why they're doomed to die a slow, painful death, buried in a mountain of unsold Herbie Hancock albums, it's because bands of scrappy college kids with awful names and mediocre lyrics are now doing a better job promoting themselves and giving the music-buying public what they want than any record company could possibly hope, and I couldn't be happier.