I Hate Year-End Lists--So Here's My Year-End List

2005 was a rough year for us all, with disasters both natural and manmade, but it ended on an upswing; perhaps by the end of 2006 the people of the US will be bracing for the impeachment hearings for GW Bush and Dick Cheney. There was some good music out there this year as always, and here are some releases from 2005 (in no particular order) that helped make a strange year more bearable:

Lightning Bolt Hypermagic Mountain (Load)--what can be said that has not been said before? Those looking for a new sound from this band can fuck off. When your sound sounds like their sound no new sound is needed.

Jack Rose Kensington Blues (VHF)--stately, elegant, and confident playing. Excellent composition. Despite this being a one-man acoustic guitar record it had the loudest mastering job out of any release I heard this year....

Coptic Light Coptic Light (No Quarter)--thunderous trio from Brooklyn with the monstrous Kevin Shea on drums. Loops and riffs and improv add up to dark ass-kicking psych rock.

Earth Hex, or Printing in the Infernal Method (Southern Lord)--Dylan Carlson's new take on his old band is a quiet rumination on American music. More big sky now than noddy drone, this disc is a soundtrack without a movie. Nice Wm. Blake reference in the title as well.

Ultralyd Chromosome Gun (Load)--Kjetil Brandsdal is a bad man. Not only does he destroy people with his bass in the punishing Noxagt, but he slams out the jams in this improvised 4-piece called Ultralyd. Equal parts free jazz and noisy rock, also featuring Frode Gjerstad on saxophone and clarinet. Pretty rocking and brutal stuff.

Nels Cline/Wally Shoup/Chris Corsano Immolation/Immersion (Strange Attractors)--searing free jazz/free rock improv from this nasty trio. Shoup is in fine form, but Nels Cline is magnificent--elastic in his style, his playing ranges from scorching noise, to fast, fat-toned riffing, to clear and fragile droning. Corsano plays his ass off on this too.

SunnO))) Black One (Southern Lord)--O'Malley and Anderson turn their drone directly towards the heart of the Father of Lies on this one, enlisting such black metal stalwarts as Malefic from Xasthur and Wrest from Leviathan to assist them. Oren Ambarchi and John Wiese also help the lads expand their palette a bit on this one, and the results are fantastic. A truly unsettling record, and the black metal vox are an unexpectedly successful addition to the SunnO))) sound.

Om Variations on a Theme (Holy Mountain)--the former rhythm section for Sleep returns from the wilderness with a bass and drums exercise in power. Monumentally heavy and repetitive and blissful all at once.

Orthrelm OV (Ipecac)--Mick Barr and Josh Blair confound and complicate for one mammoth 45-minute track. Incredible technique on full display along with a shifty sense of composition.

Circle Tulikoira (Ektro/No Quarter)--the New Wave of Finnish Heavy Metal has commenced. From this rockcrit joke on their insert, psychlords Circle establish their declared intention with 4 longish pieces. Though slightly more metallic than other efforts, their trademark Krautrock grooves are fully in evidence on this release.

and reissues:

the Ex Singles. Period. (Touch and Go)--singles collection dating back to the earliest releases from this Dutch punk rock band. Their musical development grows with each single. Arranged in chronological order for the true rock geek experience.

Thelonius Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note/EMI)--remastered live brilliance from Monk and Trane. The legendary and brief collaboration between the two jazz icons is finally given its proper due with this excellent release. The drums distort ever so slightly and ever so pleasantly due to the creaky fidelity of the source recordings.

And even though this is a list pertaining to music, I feel I must at least mention that I enjoyed Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture about as much as anything else on this list. And I also enjoyed HBO's Rome and Deadwood series. I think the only movie I saw in the theater this year was the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo. It was great, a must-see for any fan of the band or Mike Watt. So there it is. I hate year-end lists.

I Spy A Big Lie

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

On December 19th, GW Bush foamed at the mouth about how “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,” he said at a White House event. Is the shameful act in question related to fatuous bigmouth Karl Rove and his propensity for blowing the cover of CIA agents? Why, of course not. His outrage came from the seamy revelations of administration-sanctioned domestic spying activities in the NY Times last week.

Using language borrowed from Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Bush now expects people to believe that political oversight of his administration's conduct equals treason. He just does not get it--American governments cannot in any circumstance spy on its citizens without the prior approval of a judge. Once again Bush has clearly violated the law, and this violation is something that clearly impacts every citizen in this country. This incident is much more insidious than the politically-inspired outing of Valerie Plame, and is an indicator of what the Bush gang believe their administration is entitled to do in the good old US of A.

The law in question came into being in 1978 after the Church Committee's careful study of intelligence community misconduct was concluded. After the agency's wild, crazy, and unfettered days under Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon, a new sense of restraint was alleged at Langley headquarters. Of course, this new era at the CIA was wild and crazy in its own way, distorting Soviet missile production capabilities as well as the overall size of the USSR's nuclear arsenal during the massive military buildup under Ronald Reagan. The FBI had also become quite active on the domestic surveillance front during the 1950's and 1960's (as Dr. King's family can attest); the Church Committee's findings painted both agencies as almost completely out of control, and acronyms like COINTELPRO and MK ULTRA made their appearance in the American vernacular.

So despite Mr. Bush's assurances, there is a clear precedent for the misconduct and abuse of power engaged in by American intelligence services. The law that he has broken has been on the books in good standing for nearly thirty years. Bush's defense of his administration's activities in defiance of this law can be broken down logically like this:

1. I am GW Bush, President of the US.
2. I am not subject to the same rigor of the law code as the citizenry.
3. If I break a law, it is not broken--rather, I have appropriately discarded an outdated form of legislation (like the Geneva Convention; the Kyoto Treaty; the Plame affair; etc.) in the pursuit of defending our nation.

Further applications of this line of logic can be directed at the Bill of Rights and many other constitutional concepts. If public discussion of the government's right to spy on its citizens is equated with treason, then the entire Bill of Rights is also obviously suspect. Freedom of speech threatens this concept of the presidency, as does the right of lawful assembly--and such niceties as due process and trial by jury have already been defecated upon by the corpulent, shit-filled asses of the Executive Branch and their counsels.

After the disaster in New York City was allowed to occur on September 11th 2001, Bush and his gang began a quick assault on the basic rights of American citizens in the form of the noxious Patriot Act. Bush has repeatedly defended this nightmarish concept of the American democracy, insisting that the special circumstances of the horror of 9-11-01 required special measures to fight them. These claims make me think back to another instance of a politician who used the political scene of his day to secretly and illegally expand his base of power. A man, like George W. Bush, who received less than 30% of the vote from his country's eligible voters when he "won" the election for his office; a man who took advantage of a violent act in order to institute a bogus state of emergency in his nation which then devolved unlimited and extralegal power upon his office.

That man was Adolf Hitler, and the violent act that spurred his party to absolute power was the fire that destroyed the Berlin Reichstag. Within 12 years of the Reichstag fire Europe was in ruins and the hellish nuclear genie had been let loose from its bottle. Hitler's thousand-year Reich was supposed to be able to destroy its ideological antithesis--Stalinist Communism--but instead the sick racist violence unleashed by the Germans ended up making Stalin and Communism stronger. The Communist philosophy suddenly was not quite so abhorrent to the millions of people who experienced firsthand the horrific tortures of the Nazi regime. As we watch Iraq begin to turn into a Shi'a satellite state of Iran perhaps even the deaf idiots who populate this declining empire might hear echoes of the ghosts of Adolf and Hermann and Josef and Heinrich in the vacuous truth-stretching statements of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Of course, one of the biggest differences between the Nazis and the Bush gang is that the Nazis actually had some success in the ugly business of war before their hideous government was destroyed....

The quote that appears at the beginning of this post is from a report by the OSS. It is a description of Adolf Hitler's political psychology gleaned from Mein Kampf and from those Germans courageous enough to see the Little Corporal for what he really was. These words are also applicable to the disgraceful and disingenuous George W. Bush.

All This Useless Starfuckery

Patti Smith is back in the merchandising public's eye this week, as her Horses album has received the remastering and repricing treatment. Contained within is a recent live performance of the record's material, performed by the still-living remnants of her original band, augmented by fellow NYC original punker Tom Verlaine on guitar. The occasion has been marked by a surge of music rag coverage, all breathlessly overhyped and distressingly familiar to those who lived through the first incarnation of Patti in the 1970's.

I have never cared for Patti Smith's recorded work; but I do have lots of respect for her symbolic importance to the American side of the original punk movement. She was punk rock's first strong woman, one who made a good study of how to offer a righteous middle finger to the establishment of her era. Rockers from such diverse acts as Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon. X's Exene Cervenka, and DNA's Ikue Mori grew out of the tradition she helped establish, and I credit her influence on a younger generation of female musicians. But like so many forms of art that once seemed challenging and transgressive, the passing of time has not been kind to her body of work. With the distance of more than 25 years her music comes off as more hippie than punk, simple bar band rock leavened with an uncomfortable amount of pretense and morbid seriousness. She at least had the grace to know when it was time to get out of the business, unlike her contemporaries in bands like the Ramones and the reunited Television. With the reissue of Horses and other reissues looming in the near future, rock critics have picked up where they left off with her, confusing symbol with substance and in the process relentlessly overhyping her music. In an age where her dead lit-celebrity obsessiveness (particularly if it were offered up by a new, unheralded, and unconnected artist) would come off as an embarrassing form of hero-worship, critics steadfastly ignore this aspect of her music in an attempt to shore up the idea of her cultural relevance. I feel this is aesthetic revisionism of the highest order.

One of the most annoyingly un-punk things about Patti Smith was her very public adoration of such overrated cultural figures as Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. Such petulant heroes say much about those who worship at their altars; their fans are as impressed with the life legends surrounding them as they are with the work produced by the artists in their willfully short lifetimes. Rimbaud and Morrison also represent the hoariest of cliches about art and artists--too sensitive for the vagaries of human existence, their massive souls were too large for a world where conformity is more prized than insight; so they removed themselves from their respective fields in what should have been their creative prime to renounce the world in which we live. I prefer to think of them as pseudo-monastics with real publicists, or as transparently adolescent assholes, in love with the luxury and excess and privilege their talents bought them in their societies. Like them, Patti and the NYC punkers were rock stars first and foremost; and whether you speak of Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, or Tom Verlaine, they were careerists all, despite the lofty aesthetic ideals they publicly espoused.

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's history of the 1970's NYC scene, Please Kill Me, exemplifies the worst tendencies of "I was there" myth-making while simultaneously misunderstanding the fundamental significance of its subject. Representing themselves as ground-floor participants in an important artistic movement, they strike me more as clueless documentarians bragging about their proximity to genius rather than perceptive and skeptical critics cruising through a creatively fertile period of time. While entertaining, the book ultimately fails to see its own most important point--that the original punks of the 1970's in the US and the UK were not really that punk rock, but just regular old rock stars playing at smaller venues. Although nobody in the scene embodied the plain old rock god more than Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, Patti made her bones by attaining notice as a hanger-on at the Max's Kansas City scene and she began to climb the ladder by becoming friends with the famous and fabulous. Whether dating Sam Shepard and Robert Mapplethorpe, or chilling with William Burroughs, Patti's radar was finely attuned to the methodology of success and fame. She was not alone in this endeavor, and as the newspapers and magazines of New York City began to descend on the CBGBs crowd, bands like the Voidoids, the Dead Boys, and Television tried to outdo each other in terms of public intoxication and dissipation, safe in the knowledge that their excesses (though possibly damaging to overall life expectancy) would be widely reported by the trend-followers of the media. These actions of course helped establish "credibility" for the bands.

It's not really Patti Smith's fault, that all of these supposed aesthetes were little more than media whores with guitars and syringes, but I do find it ironic that the further one gets from the date of punk rock's birth in 1976/77, the more one finds artists whose lives were more fully in agreement with the demanding ideals of the punk movement. Anti-stars are still stars of some kind. This statement is lost on the hero-worshipping writers of books like Please Kill Me and the UK's The Boy Looked at Johnny. They prefer that their readers view musicians as tangential and insignificant as Stiv Bators and Poly Styrene as hugely important figures instead of the footnotes to history that they deserve to be. Bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Scratch Acid, Bad Brains, Mission of Burma, the Fall, the Ex, the Butthole Surfers, and Sonic Youth are the real punk rockers, artists who were committed to the performance and creation of their music despite economic hardships and being relatively ignored by the radio and print media in their countries. Patti Smith, on the other hand, was well known to a wealthy and sophisticated audience while she was active in the 1970's--as well as being someone who perfectly fit the prototype of the USA/UK music star. After all, she'd spent much of her life preparing to act out the tired stereotype of a really famous person--her only twist on this corniness was that she was a woman. If that is why she deserves to be celebrated, then so be it--I have no problem recognizing her as the first of a generation of women who decided that rock was no longer the property of men. But songs do not become more poignant or more significant if they are written about the musician's famous friends, unless of course the listener is a credulous and cautious rock critic.