Imaginary SXSW (or, if you wish, ‘FOMO’)

I scrimped and saved for the plane tickets. I took night jobs. I barely made the cut-off date to register for press credentials. I got x-rayed at the airport (twice!), my flights were delayed, and the portly gentleman seated next to me had a snoring problem like I’ve never heard before. The shoulder strap on my duffel bag broke, but I am here, coming to you live from the Austin, Texas of my imagination! You see, dear friends, every spring this city is home to the biggest and most important annual confluence of music, film, interactive design, and business cards in the entire world ever! South! By! South! West!

I do have business cards, by the way. They’re really cool. I designed them myself because I really think I have a good eye for graphic design stuff and I don’t wanna just hand out something that people will go throw away as soon as I leave their eye line, y’know? Unfortunately, handing them out to people I meet here in Austin is my one and only strategy for ‘getting my name out there.’ See, I have this blog where I write about music. No, wait! Come back! Just hear me out! Okay. So. Like, I know that every hipster schmuck this side of Williamsburg has a music blog these days, but I swear mine is different. I like to think of myself more as a budding ‘critic’ than, like, some kind of Gorilla vs. Bear thing where I’m supposed to know about all the coolest new bands. I’m not into that stuff, y’know? I’m more about the music itself, like how it works and what it means and stuff. Like, I use Tumblr but not like everybody else uses Tumblr, y’know? I just like how many cool, genuine people who love music are on there. The internet’s really the future of all this stuff anyway, right?

So the thing you have to keep in mind about my imaginary SXSW is that it’s a giant freaking mess. Bands come from all over the country—even if they weren’t invited!—to find places to play this week just so they can say they ‘made a huge splash at this year’s SXSW.’ I’m not kidding. There are dudes with guitars (or, if you’re lucky, tambourines and 808s) on every street corner downtown singing their damn hearts out through portable PA systems. If you know someone here with a house, there are six bands playing there right now. If you know of a killer taco stand, they are having the best week of their lives. If you know where to get cheap beer and a seat in an air-conditioned room, you are everybody’s best friend. I mean, Austin during SXSW is this music industry, y’know? The next Animal Collective could be jamming out at the dive bar around the corner. You wouldn’t want to miss out on that, would you?

Oh wait, I think that dude walking down the sidewalk with the sunglasses is in The Strokes. Hang on, I’m gonna go try to talk to him. …Okay I guess he’s not, but he really does look like the bass player, doesn’t he? I mean I totally loved their first two albums even if the newer ones aren’t as good, y’know? Anyway, like I was saying, the bands that we’ll all be talking about a month from now are all here right now, playing to a crowd of twenty people. I mean, what if I’m just chilling at some random show and Bradford Cox or Ryan Schreiber happens to walk in? We could totally just hang out and talk music over some cheap beers. Careers are made that way, y’know? I’m not saying all I wanna do is schmooze with influential people while I’m out here in the Austin of my imagination, but how cool would it be to hang out with someone like that? Just to be there and be part of the action, y’know? I dunno, man, in my mind it was worth all the trouble.

Don’t Go Near the Water

Earlier this week, someone asked a question about my desert-island-favorite albums, the stuff I would consign my ears to for the rest of my life, gun to my head. In my answer, I tried to make a point about how the question is misleading and about how you can’t take these kinds of things at face value, but I also went ahead and listed out some of the records that came to mind when I thought about favorites. And you know what? Even before I’d finished typing I felt insecure about my answers. The list I made didn’t look like me so much as a me from two or three years ago. In that time it seems I’ve concocted some delusions about being more worldly and well-rounded, about seeing a bigger picture and appreciating things that aren’t just—pardon the expression—white boy rock music. I still stand by what I said about tastes changing and not being able to know our preferences as well as we think, but it was also a good reminder to get off my fabricated high horse. I decided that it might be a good idea every now and then to use one of these ‘casual Friday’ pieces to go back to those albums and see if they still have something to say.

There’s a great appeal to the post-SMiLE Beach Boys that I think grows directly out of the drain-circling, fading-away-rather-than-burning-out thing they were going through. Brian’s reclusion and the band’s successful early days losing their relevance in light of more serious rock music of the time (this was still a few years before the Endless Summer comp gave them a foothold as an oldies act) creates this very tangible air of having already peaked and being keenly aware of it. It’s easy to take the Brian-centric view, shell out for your collector’s edition Pet Sounds, and leave it at that, but there’s this whole other, much less noble saga of a band toiling away at the margins of a culture that had quite clearly passed them by. This was not a ‘noble underground’ story of geniuses that went unappreciated, but the fumblings of has-been teen idols testing their mettle and trying to stay afloat. Their 1971 effort Surf’s Up is a great album, but you can’t really get away with calling it that. It’s embarrassingly sincere, considerably jumbled, and deeply flawed. Even if you couldn’t just read the history on Wikipedia or scan the liner notes, it’s a record of obvious patchwork—about a dozen different songwriters, some of the material almost 6 years old—that forms this pathetic little quilt you can’t bring yourself to give away.

The Beach Boys were never the type of band to come right out and wallow in their ‘failure,’ but the album is replete with sharp twinges that paint a very clear picture. There’s the cover art, of course, a rendition of James Earle Fraser’s “End of The Trail” sculpture (Fraser never copyrighted the image, hence its knick-knack ubiquity in Western culture) that shows a Native American warrior slumped over on a horse, leaning against the wind and silhouetted by blue-green shadows in a pose of utter defeat. And they decided to call it Surf’s Up? Where once the Beach Boys were presented to the world as ambassadors of carefree California culture, here they throw some of their homeland slang against an icon of oppression and sadness on the American frontier. “You want California?” it seems to sneer, “Here’s California. Enjoy.” The opening track, Mike Love and Al Jardine’s ecologically finger-wagging “Don’t Go Near the Water,” follows suit, a warning to keep your distance from the same band that was inviting everyone on a “Surfin’ Safari” ten years earlier.

Love’s other contribution, “Student Demonstration Time” (co-written with Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, I might add), is a protest anthem that aims for a combination of blues-rock grind and social consciousness, but that grates to no end on sharp siren sounds and Love’s bullhorn vocals. It’s the album’s ugly little center (and not in a cool arty way), unpleasant for the ears and about as politically shallow as a protest song can be, yet against all odds it fits the record’s theme: things are a mess. I know that’s not exactly the most original concept for an album, but that’s why I take the careerist approach to it. You have to remember who you’re listening to. Jardine laments unemployment on his folky solo turn “Lookin’ at Tomorrow,” while Carl’s ornate tracks are about perseverance (and, uh, cocaine), and Brian’s closing triad focuses wholly on mortality. With a couple exceptions, the lyrics skew cheesy to the point that you wouldn’t want to throw a bunch of quotes up on a piece like this to defend it (as was often the case with them), especially when it comes to the environmental themes, manifested as they are with a quaint heavy-handedness.

Usually when you lay out some of the flaws of an album you love like this, you’re supposed to take a big turn at some point, to begin a paragraph with “But…” and then say why the good far outweighs the bad. That feels inappropriate here. Forty years is more than enough time for people to stop trying to see how the scales balance out on what is ultimately a pretty unimportant record. And besides, a scale that weighs good and bad traits is a fallacious image. Carl Wilson’s fragile psych pop production, which wraps all this music in the same shades of blue and green that envelope the exhausted figure on the cover, doesn’t do so in spite of Love’s lame excuse for ‘awareness’ or Bruce Johnston’s doe-eyed fantasies of privilege, but because of them. If Surf’s Up is about damaged people in a damaged world, it’s only because the music is damaged, right? The first is a picture of the second, not the other way around. It’s an album that tries its damnedest to be cool and still winds up sobbing through Disney movies and blowing its nose on your sleeve.

A Braver, Newer World

Most of the time, when I sit down to write something for this ramshackle blog, I experience a lot of self-imposed pressure to be either really smart or occasionally really funny and, most of the time, the results are…well, they just are. At this particular moment, though, I don’t really feel like being smart or funny at all and don’t have the motivation to attempt to fake either one. Sorry.

Remember the scene from The Big Lebowski where John Goodman freaks out and pulls a gun in the bowling alley because their friend on another team—“Smokey”—slipped his toe over the line and refused to mark the frame a ‘0?’ The long-haired, “fragile pacifist” Smokey is played by a guy named Jimmie Dale Gilmore, who is not an actor by profession, but a country singer/songwriter. As far as I know, he hasn’t produced a ton of famous or memorable work, but has been slowly chugging along for several decades, which is admirable in its own way (if a bit tragic). He’s worked with Willie Nelson and spent most of the 70s in a Colorado ashram studying under a guru, just in case you were thinking he was the rough-and-tumble, young-Johnny-Cash kind of country singer. I honestly haven’t heard but a couple of his songs and, while his warm, warbly voice can have a pleasant quality in measured doses (like Neil Young in his softer moments), the songwriting can be sorta cheesy.

Ever see Kicking and Screaming, the 1996 post-collegiate directorial debut of Noah Baumbach (a.k.a. “that guy that works with Wes Anderson sometimes”)? There’s a flashback scene somewhere in the middle where our protagonist ‘Grover’ is at a “townie bar” with his new love interest ‘Jane’ (played by Olivia d’Abo), where they’re getting drunk and flirting and blah blah blah. At one point, Jane saunters over to the jukebox, starts pressing buttons, and tells Grover over her shoulder that “They only play country music in this bar.” I think it’s supposed to be some combination of coy, ironic, and earthy / ‘authentic’ (since the scene suggests country music at a working class bar has more to do with the ‘real world’ and ‘real feelings’ than college rock at a college bar). But as Jane and Grover go back to babbling and making eyes at each other, what should come wafting out of the background but the sonorous strains of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Braver Newer World.”

Frankly, the whole of the song is not great. There’s a lot of glassy jangle on the guitar, lots of harmonic minor scales that sound vaguely-yet-stereotypically ‘Eastern,’ and vague lyrics about love being all you need or something. But that part where Gilmore hits the chorus and sings the line containing the song’s title—“It’s a braver, newer world you’ve found!”—has a surprisingly strong melodic cadence, a sense of uplift that grows out of Gilmore loosening up his voice a little bit. It’s the part of the song that comes on as Jane and Grover meaningfully lock eyes and it’s the only hook from the track that really sticks. Now, in movie context, it’s pretty clear that the “braver, newer world” is supposed to be our collegiate heroes falling in love with each other, but there’s also the extra level of irony (this is a 90s movie, you see) in the way the film as a whole is meant to chronicle the lives of young people who have a hard time going out into the brave new world of adulthood. They’re sad and pathetic and self-destructive and don’t seem to care much about anything beyond their friendships.

This, I think, is something that hits uncomfortably close to home. I realize Kicking and Screaming is not without its flaws and that, in hindsight, it does seem to set the tone for lots more contemporary movies about neurotic man-children and the cute pixie dream girls who love them (though a key difference here is the fact that all the happy love stuff is in the past; Grover and Jane break up at the beginning and never reunite), but who among us does not occasionally find themselves bemused and discouraged by the long, blank road ahead? Someone once told me that going to college was a step toward real life in the same way that climbing a tree gets you closer to the moon, which seems apt when considering something like this movie. At times when you don’t feel like trying to be witty or intellectual (or any other ‘successful’ adjective), Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s melodramatic wail of a hook can sit like acerbic mockery, making you want to hit the existential ‘snooze’ button a few more times just to postpone growing up.

Imaginary Bonnaroo

Man, I hadn’t planned on doing another ‘imaginary festival’ so soon, but then presto!: Bonnaroo announces their lineup this week and it’s time to load up the brain-van with our mental North Face vests and oatmeal-patchouli shampoo we won’t actually use and chug on up to Manchester, Tennessee for some sweltering, muddy…entertainment? While corporate sponsorship and Pacific-Northwest coffee culture collided to outline our fake Sasquatch! experience, Bonnaroo is a different beast altogether. It ends up being a good thing because, frankly, I’ve noticed the same 20 bands popping up at all of these summer festivals and am caught between the rock of repetition and the hard place of stubbornly not wanting to try anything new. Bonnaroo presents an ideal opportunity for novel experiences, since its very purpose is to serve as an anathema to everyday life.

Going to any festival out in the wilderness will feel like entering another world, but B-roo is the reigning champion of lost netherverses and you should consider carefully the various shades of surreality you will encounter. Given the festival’s deep ‘hippie’ roots, you can expect widespread drug use, but what the folks out rolling/singing in the mud pits don’t realize is that there’s no need for chemical alteration when one takes adequate stock of one’s surroundings. Despite the vehemence with which many will argue, camping is never fun for anyone, ever. You will not sleep well—if at all—and will certainly not bathe, so as the festival rages on and the fog in your brain grows thicker and more noxious, you should find yourself acclimating out of pure numbness to the mixture of dust and sweat (much of it belonging to other people—personal space at these things is a luxury not even the headliners can afford) caked on your skin. Nourishment will also be in short supply (“$8 for a bottle of water?! Screw that!!”), so make sure you over-eat the week before to accrue fat stores on which to survive.

As exhaustion causes your powers of discernment to drain from your ears and your inhibitions float out the top of your head and burst like bubbles of translucent cotton candy over the course of 4 days (oh Black Moth Super Rainbow, where have you gone?), take the opportunity to exchange the arms-folded yammering of Sasquatch! for some light, incoherent antagonism as a new method of performing your tastes (this tack will ultimately be more familiar to attendees well-versed in online conversations, so that’s a plus).

Join me at these, where we’ll throw stuff and yell:
- Arcade Fire (Bring a boombox and play Grammy Award acceptance speech music when Win Butler tries to talk between songs.)
- The Black Keys
- My Morning Jacket (Be the two people ruining the interminable jam for everyone else by shouting ‘Freebird!’ It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.)
- Lil Wayne (Find six other people and paint the letters F-R-E-E-W-E-E-Z-Y on our torsos—then make anagrams.)
- The Strokes
- The Decemberists (Stand near the few remaining washed, be-sweatered attendees and concentrate on smelling our worst.)
- Iron & Wine (“We were into this guy back when he was on Sub Pop! SUB-POP! SUB-POP!”)
- Gogol Bordello
- Beirut
- Girl Talk (“Actually, y’know what? Nevermind. Let’s just go listen to the real Big Boi.”)
- Big Boi
- Deerhunter
- Wiz Khalifa (“Packers! PA-CKERS! PA-CKERS!”)
- Mavis Staples
- Loretta Lynn
- The Walkmen
- Devotchka (“Boo! Bring on Steve Carrell!”)
- Sleigh Bells (We whip our hair back and forth! We whip our hair back and forth!)
- Dam-Funk (If you want to go try to talk to that attractive person you’ve been eyeing, perhaps this is the time.)
- Junip (When the attractive person you’re been eyeing rejects you, come find me snoring under a tree.)
- Sharon Van Etten
- Omar Souleyman
- Twin Shadow
- Smith Westerns
- Man Man (Fashion drums out of garbage and see how long we can play along before we get ejected by security.)

Imaginary Sasquatch!

Have you guys been watching “Portlandia” on IFC-slash-the-internet? Lolz for days, I tell ya! It’s so great to finally have my own self-aware generational version of a suburban sitcom, which next week’s CPF column will argue is a fundamental human need right up there with water, shelter, and Angry Birds. The best part is the repressed sense of conflict and the twinge of tension that propels my laughter: the show is funny and well-written and makes all this stereotypically hip Pac-NW stuff look ridiculous, but I myself am way too familiar with bird art and fixed-gear bike jerks and unprofitable bookstores to point any kind of fingers. That joke in the “Dream of the 90s” song about Portland being “where young people go to retire?” I still, in all seriousness, consider that a viable option for the next five years of my life. Sigh.

Although ‘The Gorge’ where the Sasquatch! Festival takes place is geographically closer to Seattle, these Portland-inspired dynamics play heavily into what I imagine the experience to be (having never been much further north than San Luis Obispo). It’s important to keep in mind that the festival is being funded (‘presented’) by at least two giant commercial entities: Honda, who in spite of manufacturing Earth-gagging motorcars do their best to appeal to young people by having something called a ‘hybrid,’ and Live Nation. In case you’re not familiar, Live Nation is the event-planning equivalent of Ticketmaster, continually striving to prove that the music industry can still generate revenue for anonymous corporate executives. Since a truly ‘conscious’ and ‘alternative’ person would abstain from such an event, it’s important to deflect any potential questions about your own consumer ethics by walking around Sasquatch! openly acknowledging all the corporate sponsorship and lamenting the downfall of ‘artistic integrity’ while rolling your eyes at the Foo Fighters. I’ll be right there with you in my imagination, folding my arms and saying things like, “Yeah, man, the internet’s really revolutionized, like, everything about our lives, y’know?”

Here are the acts in proximity to which you may imagine finding me:
- Modest Mouse (near the back in case they start playing ‘new stuff’)
- The Flaming Lips (aaahhh confetti!)
- Death From Above 1979 (getting other people’s sweat incidentally flung in my eye)
- Robyn
- Ratatat (for two or three songs because, hey, they’re all the same)
- Wolf Parade (before it’s too late!)
- Yeasayer (again, near the back in case they start playing ‘new stuff’)
- Beach House (hopefully after the sun goes down; it’s just not the same without the light show)
- Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
- Deerhunter
- Sleigh Bells (shouting into my friend’s ear: “I’ve been waiting for this since 2009!”)
- Major Lazer (“Why is he climbing a ladder?…Oh, gross!”)
- !!! (more sweat in my eye, but a slightly different mix of body odors)
- CSS
- Surfer Blood (“Dude, I heard the new Weezer album totally sucks!”)
- Gayngs (hooray, nap time!)
- The Radio Dept.
- Smith Westerns
- Twin Shadow
- Das Racist (“Um, is it okay for me to be listening to this? I feel weirdly guilty.”)
- Wye Oak (while everyone else takes a nap!)
- Gold Panda
- Washed Out (“OMG it’s the ‘Portlandia’ song!”)

Clive Tanaka and Faking It as Making It

Late last summer, there appeared on a handful of mp3 blogs a track called “Neu Chicago” credited to Clive Tanaka y su orquesta, who had a cassette coming out called Jet Set Siempre 1º. The song was an upbeat slice of bedroom electro-pop indebted to 80s nostalgia and clearly obsessed with a certain air of luxurious, tropical vacationing. I heard it on Altered Zones and liked it enough to include it on a mix tape here one week, but didn’t give it a second thought until a few days later when I received an email from someone called Francis Hofstetler saying that Mr. Tanaka would like to send me a copy of his cassette and would I please reply with my coordinates. Offering free tapes will get you a lot of places with me (Mediafire links: not so much), so for better or worse Tanaka now had my attention and I started doing a little googling.

According to the blogosphere, Clive Tanaka is from Hokkaido, Japan and suffers from Hikikomori, a vague kind of social anxiety disorder that affects young Japanese boys who choose to withdraw from all social interactions and seek weird extremes of isolation. Francis Hofstetler is his Chicago-based medium, sending emails and promotional merchandise to anyone who ever blogged Tanaka’s name under the guise of ‘Tanaka Heavy Industries.’ The return address on my cassette package was indeed a warehouse space in Chicago, but pretty much everything else about this mysterious entity still seemed fishy. There’s a long history of artists shrouding their identities to try to cast people’s attention strictly toward the music, but it almost always backfires. Taking steps to conceal yourself creates visible layers of disguise (and talking points for press/blogs/your friends) that pique people’s curiosity, actually making it that much harder to not attract attention to yourself as the performer. Besides, Tanaka’s debilitating social condition is way too convenient, a perfect excuse not to have live shows, photos, or much in the way of a press bio, and to remain exotic and ‘foreign’ (I have not seen any Japanese blogs featuring his work). I was already suspicious when I reviewed Siempre, but a couple comments on that post erased any lingering doubts: ‘Francis Hofstetler’ was the name of a recurring character on the 80s detective show Magnum P.I., as was Lt. Yoshi Tanaka.

So Clive Tanaka is a fabrication and Francis Hofstetler is a pseudonym for whoever’s actually making and distributing this music. No doubt catching the attention of blogs is a major motivation here, especially since he goes to such great lengths to engender their favor. In the months since my initial tape-earning post, I’ve also received a packaged fortune cookie announcing the early January vinyl release of Siempre and a subsequent copy of the album on wax. Once again, some light blog searching reveals I’m far from alone on this. But is getting a little internet attention really worth the time and money it would take to send out all these packages (for free!)? What kind of underground musician has all these resources readily at his disposal? I can’t deny that it worked: I gave the album careful listening, wrote a long review, and am now writing another long piece about it months later. But I also can’t escape the feeling that there’s something else at work here, that there’s more to be gained from this elaborate ruse.

Lately I’ve tended to think the generated persona of Clive Tanaka integrates vitally into how the music itself functions, that one side needs the other to work. Like I said, this sound owes a sizable debt to the 80s, but it goes beyond a specific nostalgia to a holistic, transportive fantasy. The conjured images are of picturesque beaches and lavish private planes—a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous vibe that was as unattainable for 99.9% of people back then as it is today. I’m trying not to use the word ‘chillwave’ here, but it’s a helpful starting place. If we say that acts like, oh, early Toro Y Moi or Washed Out represent a longing for dead technology and listless, romantic days at the beach in the face of post-collegiate recessional directionlessness, we eventually have to face the fact that there’s something adolescent and self-pitying about it. Though not usually enough to ruin the music, it can still feel like a very small and limited projection (and perhaps by extension a small and limited sound, which seems to fit with a lot of the criticisms of the genre).

The story of Clive Tanaka expands the scope on both sides: a person incapable of going out into the world and experiencing much of anything (especially the ‘Dance’ and ‘Romance’ for which he labels the two sides of his album) fantasizing about living the life of an ultimate social elite. Like The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, Siempre sounds like someone perpetually jetting from paradise to paradise with the luxury of experiencing emotions and desires in the frank and uncomplicated ways he pens in his lyrics (“I want you so bad,” “You need someone tonight…that someone is me”). If you take it at face value, the Tanaka fantasy is far more poignant in its hopeless impossibility than almost any other artist currently working in these transportive environs. He even cloaks his voice in old vocoder sounds to emphasize both the imagined glitzy perfection and his own dehumanized removal from it. Without the pretense of this persona creating those implied dynamics, I don’t think the musical experience would be as vivid. In the end, maybe all this intense blog courting is a way of ensuring that big imaginative scope remains intact, since those outlets thrive on interesting backstories and the energy of the new. The genius of whoever’s actually behind all this lies in finding new ways to dictate context and evade scrutiny in an era that demands instant access.