|
Archives
September 2008
August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 |
2007:11:30:21:25. Friday. 1996. At Muzzle of Bees, Ryan is talking about R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and it's got me thinking about the sudden and precipitous crash of "alternative rock" wave in 1996. It's one of many releases from that year to portend doom and disappearance for major bands of the era and the sounds they represented. Hi-Fi was the last R.E.M. record with Bill Berry, and by 1998 they'd moved onto the lusher, more mature, extra-boring sound of their current style. Weezer released Pinkerton, the critical reaction to which put Rivers Cuomo off being in a band for years. Soundgarden put out their most accessible pop record, and promptly broke up. Alice in Chains and Nirvana put out their (so far) last non-compilation releases, both live records. Presidents of the United States of America released a too-polished follow-up to their quirky debut and found themselves thinking being a full-time band was no longer worth it. Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots both, for the first time, released records that got ignored. I absolutely didn't see it at the time, but the upheaval that went on in my musical world that year was astonishing. Also, I'd like to note that OK Go's cover of "Gigantic" on the latest Pixies tribute album is oddly fascinating. It's not "good," per se, but there is a quality to it. Maybe I just can't not love that song. Please, come back to us, Kim Deal.
2007:11:21:23:39. Wednesday. GENRE 2.0. Adam Greenfield posts on what seems like a decline in blogging: No, my guess is this: in order for Technorati to retrieve content, content must be created in the first place. We’re into a period where the longer-form online writing that typefied the time that, it now seems clear, was High Blogging’s Golden Age is being eclipsed by the kind of microblogging afforded by Tumblr and Twittr and Shittr, to say nothing of del.icio.usness or the various social-networking platforms. And what people microblog is links to YouTubery, not dissections of talks they’ve just seen. At best you’ll get somebody noting that they’re “At a talk by Firstname Lastname.”
What he's really asking is not so much whether blogging is withering away, but rather, whether the expressive explosion of what some people still call "web 2.0" has faded. And it has, I suspect, for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, there was a bubble there, and it fooled a lot of people who said they weren't going to get fooled again. That bubble was borne out of novelty, and out of the adjustment period that comes when we start doing something new. Do we still need to post every single boring picture we take to Flickr? Are we, as bloggers, getting anything out of the treatises Greenfield's searching for? At some point it becomes noise and it stops being any fun. At that point, we're going to start seeing more traditional content in non-traditional venues, and less diarying and self-expression dumps. Given that, it would be nice if new media scholars would start taking genre into account a little more seriously. When Greenfield asks in his post's title if "blogging per se [is] a dying art," the blogging he's talking about isn't blogging "per se," it's a particular kind of blogging. For those of us interested in studying another kind -- like, say, political blogging -- the tendency to describe blogging as if it were one thing is a real pain. It's not something that would happen with other media -- nobody looks at "television" without at least some acknowledgment of genre differences. Yet, a colleague and I came up dry over the course of hour yesterday spent looking for literature that examines readers of political blogs specifically, rather than just of blogs generally -- as far as we can tell, the only such piece is another I and three co-authors wrote which will be published soon in Cyberpsychology & Behavior. I got into an interesting but frustrating conversation about this at a conference last weekend, in which basically every speaker brought different assumptions into the discussion based on their genre interests, and I really think it's a significant problem in the study of blogs.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:11:19:08:00. Monday. NO!: PALE YOUNG GENTLEMEN (#337, NOV 9 2007).
Despite various logistical and technical problems at the various Pop Fests, they've always had good line-ups and been fun shows to see, and this one appeared to continue in that vein. But after missing Baby Teeth due to falling asleep on Friday, we wound up missing everybody we wanted to see on Saturday due to the parking crunch caused by football, hockey and something at the Overture Center. Of the bands I'd penciled into the schedule, the Selfish Gene are local, and easily seeable later, but Montreal's Malajube probably won't be back in the immediate future. On top of that, there's a general lack of good shows coming up in Madison for the rest of the year -- the Box Social play Thanksgiving weekend at the King Club, and that's basically it. But if this was going to all we saw of the Pop Fest, and nearly the last show we saw in 2007, it was a nice one to see, and a good reminder of the solid construction of the PYG sound. The new songs they played were enjoyable, and the band's growth is clearly giving them new avenues to explore.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:11:18:17:12. Sunday. DETHKLOK, DETHKLOK, DETHKLOK, DETHKLOK! So we went to see what was billed as a live Dethklok show on Wednesday, but didn't really have any idea what it would actually be -- the promotion was unclear, and various claims found online all differed on key points. Still, the show was free, ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead were opening, so what's not to like? Well, the Majestic Theatre, for one thing. This was my first show there -- I'd been there for a dance club night years ago -- and I was really unimpressed. The acoustics are horrible. The only place in the balcony where you can see the stage is right on the railing. The fucking house lights were on throughout the Trail of Dead set and partially during the Dethklok set, despite the stunning lack of stage lights. From my perspective it's the worst venue in Madison, and it's not even close. The show itself was much different than the other sponsored free shows we've gone to lately. There wasn't much brand-pushing from the stage -- just a Guitar Hero III contest-winner thing at the intermission -- but there was a screen hanging down at the front of the stage with ads playing on it. This was fine, I thought -- totally ignorable, not a big deal, except they kept the screen in place during the Trail of Dead set, obscuring most of what little view we had from the balcony. It wasn't running ads, just cycling through Trail of Dead album art. That, plus the awful lighting, plus the muddy acoustics, plus the huge security presence, meant it made little sense to try to record anything. However, Trail of Dead were really great. I saw them two years ago on a frigid Party in the Park afternoon and they were really bad; it must have just been the weather, because they put on a tight, fun set and reminded me of why I liked Worlds Apart so much. So then, Dethklok. The music was played by Brendon Small and a live band, with an ongoing story -- essentially a new episode interspersed with music videos -- playing on the screen above them. It was pretty good stuff, and I'd expect it will get released on DVD at some point (there was a notice indicating as much when we walked in the door). The bit for "Murmaider" was probably the best of what we saw -- three gorey, hand-to-hand murderfests between mermaids and some other undersea creatures -- but we left probably halfway through because it was a touch repetitious and we were a touch tired. As much fun as the show is, even in DVD marathon form, it doesn't have the kind of stories that hold up for more than 10 minutes or so.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:11:14:08:00. Wednesday. NO!: PALE YOUNG GENTLEMEN (#336, NOV 9 2007).
As I noted in the last clip, there was a flood of people out of the auditorium after the Pale Young Gentlemen set, and it was a crowd that was bigger than I expected. The band is certainly attracting a lot of attention these days, but they nearly filled the main floor of the room and had probably a third of the balcony full. As you can hear in this clip and in the others, things sounded a bit louder than a typical local indie rock show, and I think they may be on the verge of becoming Madison's Biggest Band (pending new Garbage material, natch).
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:11:12:08:00. Monday. NO!: PALE YOUNG GENTLEMEN (#335, NOV 9 2007).
After getting no footage of Tokyo Police Club due to my own foolishness, and then waiting out a drought of local shows, the Madison Pop Fest returned this weekend to quench my musical thirst. But oh, Pop Fest, my love-hate relationship with continues apace. There were four bands that I kind of wanted to see on the Pop Fest schedule, two on each night, and all in Music Hall's Carol Rennebohm Auditorium. The trouble is that I was on a huge project deadline all week and got almost no sleep Thursday night before a full day of Friday meetings. When we got to Music Hall for the scheduled 10:15 set by Pale Young Gentlemen and the previous set was just starting, I could already feel myself not making it all the way through. How a show like this can get an hour off schedule so quickly is a mystery for the ages, I suppose, as is the question of how backdrops and strung lights can come crashing down from the rigging so easily, but the upshot is that I simply could not stay awake past midnight and had to miss the Baby Teeth that followed the PYG's. This was unfortunate since I really wanted to see them again and had even indicated as such to their frontman, Abraham Levitan; also it's a pretty cool auditorium and I'd've liked to have stuck around just in general. But instead I had to half-consciously leave, along with all the other tools without the decency to stick around for the touring act that followed their friends on stage. Hopefully what looked like a mass exodus after the PYG set was just people going outside to smoke and Baby Teeth got a decent reception; listening to their new album a bunch last week reminded me of how really solid they are.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:11:06:21:17. Tuesday. IRAQ POLLING ROUND-UP (DECADE-LONG EDITION). My students read about the selling of the Iraq War last week, and I spent some time looking for old polling data so I could describe the public opinion context in which all this stuff was happening. In so doing, I found that the context of 2003 -- pretty strong support for the invasion, but only if the UN comes along for the ride -- was itself made more interesting by the context of 1998. Check this out: "Do you think the United States should use prolonged military force in response to Iraq's refusal to allow weapons inspections?" CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. Nov. 13-15, 1998. N=1,039 adults nationwide. "Which one of the following possible goals do you think should be the specific goal of any U.S. attack on Iraq at this time: to pressure Iraq into complying with United Nations weapons inspections, OR, to remove Saddam Hussein from power?" Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll. Dec. 16, 1998, 6-9 PM EST. N=543 adults nationwide. "Do you think this attack will or will not achieve significant goals for the United States?" CBS News Poll. Dec. 16, 1998. N=413 adults nationwide. "Do you think getting Saddam Hussein to comply with United Nations weapons inspectors is worth the potential loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?" It's also worth noting that there was a lot of polling relating this matter to the Clinton impeachment, and that majorities consistently did not buy the "Wag the Dog" line -- that Clinton was just trying to distract us -- and did want the impeachment put on hold. Shockingly, many of the same Republicans who are in power today had no problem with impeaching Bill Clinton while our troops were in the field. Anyway, while the rhetoric of the crazy days of 2002 was certainly different from that of 1998, I do find it interesting that public opinion wasn't really all that different.
2007:11:01:12:09. Thursday. B.C.IN' YA. Since I'm still not going to have any videos to post for another week, and I can't quite get my brain around the boneheaded moves happening in the Obama campaign, I thought I'd finally get around to posting some Vancouver trip round-up.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |
