Category: blog

Spirals 1

Posted on by jackhenrie

Our concept of the spiral in recorded music is that it is a literal diagram of the material medium of the vinyl record. Theodore Adorno writes that music literally becomes writing with the invention of the phonograph record: this writing is inscribed as a spiral on the vinyl platter. The spiral inscription on a shellac disc or whatever the material happens to be, literally is writing. It follows (like a curve unfolding from a central point) that the seemingly decorative appearance of spirals on album cover art, or spinning as record label logos, or in lyrics (and also in musical structures like Coltrane solos) is a figure (an illustration but not only that; it is also the internal diagram) of that musical material medium-machine that is the vinyl record (and maybe the cd?). This is what is so intense and fascinating about the spiral form when one starts to think about it and see its multi-dimensional instances in the commodity world of recorded music. 

Junkie Psych

Posted on by jackhenrie

New genre alert: Junkie Psych is that style of music deploying psychedelic shine to portray darker, strung-out realities. Known also as Skeleton Psych or Bad Trip Psych, it contains a destabilizing punch that’s maybe missing in its sunnier sibling because on top of the mindfucks psych rock songs normally convey, it also gives us the dissonance that comes from the savage collage of fantasy elements (the psych) with gritty realism. Experiencing this contradiction creates a new breed of mindblow.

More B-Sides

Posted on by jackhenrie

Rock Critic Laziness Dept.: We are officially over the tendency in record reviews to, instead of actually talking about music, explain what a song sounds like by likening it to another band’s sound. This citational reflex is de rigueur in the prison house of rock, where everything has a meaning only in relation to something already recorded. There’s an especially pernicious version of this floating around these days in which the reviewer says a song by some band sounds like it could have been a long-lost b-side by some other band. Every part of this shortcut writing is frustrating, moreso now that we’ve collected enough examples of it to clearly establish it as a trend.

Side 2’s

Posted on by jackhenrie

Records where side 2 has been forgotten. The paradigms for this are Glass Houses [3-10-80] (Joel put all the singles on side 1 and the chaff at the rear), shockingly, 2112 [4-1-76] (think about it — even though Tears may be one of their all-time greatest numbers, do you know anything after the one about Bangkok?), and of course, Yellow Submarine [11-13-68], with the “5th Beatle” effectively erasing an entire half hour from the Beatles’ discography.

1. 8th Wonder, Sugarhill Gang (Sugar Hill, 11/24/82)

Posted on by gene booth

The ridiculo-sublime idea of the “poseur” has got to be smashed. I can’t be the one to do it though — I think too much of my identity still requires it. But seriously, the standard narrative that a band like The Monkees somehow has less integrity than another LA band like, say, the Byrds, and even weirder, that their pre-fabness would somehow correlate to less musical quality, has been by this stage of the game definitively chucked, right? Then why hasn’t it been ditched across the board? Why do we need nerds and box sets to do our appreciating for us and then tell us it’s alright to like “sellouts”, now that what we could refer to as the Monkees Precedent has been established? To wit: all poseurs have as much chance of making amazing music as the coolest of the cools.