Every year since I started running down some of the songs I enjoyed most in the previous 12 months, I’ve lamented in the intro about what a chore selecting the songs had become, as I grew more and more distant from the popular tastes of our age.
To my surprise and delight, 2013 broke the streak. I have no idea if that’s due to an improved ability at finding things I would like or an overall increase in quality this year; I have no overarching ideas or unified theories on music in 2013, but the fact that I actually to cut my list down to ten selections was a welcome surprise. Even more surprising is how this year’s selection ran across more genres than in previous years. There are actual guitars, y’all! Enough preamble! Let’s dig into this, in no order.
Back in the summer my editors at Bloomsbury asked me to do a little interview for their website, all of the authors in my “class” were doing it, a way to introduce ourselves, talk about the albums we were writing about, what we were trying to bring to the table. By the time my turn was up, I started to get this itch like I wanted to jazz it up, do something new, not because I thought the interviews were getting repetitive, but because I didn’t think I had anything interesting to say. So I asked the editors if I could throw together a video instead. It was fun, I always like flexing those muscles, even if I did blatantly rip off the rhythms and style of a million other video bloggers.
One of the later questions in the interview concerned howI listen to my music: vinyl, CDs or MP3. At the time I said that as much as I enjoyed spending an afternoon flipping through stacks of records, living in a bachelor apartment in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood presents certain realities of storage space (not to mention the financial barriers) so most of my music had to live on my laptop.
A few weeks later I was back in my hometown staying at my parents’ house. The plan was to get out of the city, to the peace and quiet of small town living where I wouldn’t have as many distractions and could bang out the first terrible draft of the book, spending the rest of the month tweaking and polishing. I packed a gift I had received for my birthday the previous year, a copy of Donuts on vinyl. My folks had a turntable and I was curious to see if I’d hear anything different in the album in that format. Donuts is intentionally constructed as one continuous piece of music, meant for a compact disc. Listening to it on vinyl adds an entirely different dimension to it because the listener has to change the record every five tracks or so. None of this ended up in the book, but it was a worthwhile experience nonetheless.
The draft didn’t really get done while I was down there. In all honesty, it was one of the worst trips home I’ve ever had. In addition to opting for the couch instead of my father’s bed, which had been known to give me backaches (the couch gave me worse backaches) I also received some upsetting information of a personal nature that put me in a panic for most of the week. The plan was to wake up early every day, shower and coffee by 9.00 and put in a solid workday of bashing out pages. That happened maybe once. The rest of the time I was texting friends, emailing colleagues for advice or lying on the floor and generally trying to avoid things in any way possible.
This is where I fell in love with vinyl again.
As later documented on Instagram, I spent an evening rooting around my parents’ crawlspace and digging through their record collection. It was filled with what one would expect to find in crates belonging to white people of a certain age: Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Journey, some disco, a little new wave. I grabbed a stack of LPs known and unknown and took them out to the stereo. My father’s had all of the same equipment for as long as I can remember, so even the act of turning it on was nostalgic and wistful: the chirp as I flicked the power switch on the receiver, the clicks of the levers on his old Dual turntable as the tone arm lifted and positioned itself at the edge of the disc, the pop and crackle through the speakers. There wasn’t much that made me feel good on that trip, but that evening I spent sitting cross-legged in front of my father’s stereo, as I had as a child and teenager was a happy moment. I started thinking it would be cool to have a turntable in the house. Back when I lived with a woman, we talked once about how cool it would be to take the CDs, rip them to a hard drive, sell them, then buy the essential, desert island discs on vinyl.
It’s an idea that never really went away, I just figured it would be too much of an investment. When you start digging through websites about this sort of thing, people will have you convinced that a minimum of 500 bucks is the minimum investment required to really hear the nuances of the recordings and blah blah puke.
Last weekend I took a stack of birthday money and bought an Audio-Technica LP60. Cost me a hundred bucks. I’m running it through my iPhone dock. I couldn’t be happier.
Cause you see, what I was reminded of back at my folks’ house, what I had forgotten in recent years, is how vinyl forces you to really connect with a piece of music. When I’m walking the streets with my headphones on, I’m constantly skipping through tracks. Three hundred songs on my phone, I don’t want to hear any of them. You probably do the same thing. And walking the street or riding the train is the place for that. Thing with vinyl, though? I put that record on, I’m stuck with it. I have to listen to it. Sure I could skip songs or swap out the record, but that’s a pain in the ass. Putting on a record has forced me to reconnect with music in a way I think I’d maybe forgotten about.
What’s also fun about all this is how little I care for the ancillary concerns that fuel most other collectors. I’m coming at this as a fan, not an audiophile. An audiophile would see my setup and laugh me out of my own house (foremost among the reasons why, in my investigations at least, “audiophiles” are the worst). I don’t give a shit about original or Japanese pressings. I’m only buying albums I consider classics. I’ll get to my hip-hop essentials eventually, but at the moment I’m into soul, funk and jazz. I’m not really into 45s because they seem too disposable to me. I know I should splurge on the 180g reissues, but I love a record that feels like it has some history. When shopping last weekend, I had to choose between the remaster of Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book or a cheaper copy in a dingy, weathered sleeve. Of course I chose the latter.
I’m giddy with the excitement of having a new obsession. I love drafting my wishlist in my head, I love the idea of heading out to the shops in this city, looking for the cheapest copies I can find. Comic books were probably the last thing that gave me a similar sense of meditative peace (sad as that is), but comics could only be found at comic shops. You can find records everywhere. I love the fact that you can spend 10 bucks on a used record and feel like you really bought something. CDs never made me feel like that. I love that the Donny Hathaway album I bought had a gatefold with liner notes by Nikki Giovanni.
Mostly, I just love feeling like a music fan again.
I’ve heard it mentioned on occasion that everyone has one story in them that only they can tell. A story so inextricably entangled in the core of that person’s most authentic self that to withhold it does a disservice bordering on insult [series like The Moth or the back page of Toronto Life butter their bread on this very theory].
For a while now, I’ve known what my story is, I’ve just been trying to decide on the medium to tell it in [closest I ever came was about a dozen pages worth of graphic novel scripting, still sitting on my hard drive. If any artists out there want to take a crack, email me]. Longtime readers know I will always maintain that my coming of age, while not necessarily unique, or stuffed with hardships, was just really fricking weird.
When you grow up in a rural part of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, during the 1980s, surrounded on all fronts by body shops, dilapidated tractors, abandoned barns, and poorly tended corn fields while the nascent forms of hip-hop, house and techno are crossing the river via radio signal from a Black cultural giant like Detroit…when you gravitate towards that culture, in that environment, it cements your outsider status, and it leaves you with a sense of, not isolation necessarily, but of standing apart, being out of step. And that feeling never really disappears. Sometimes you’re reminded why.
A few weeks back I came across the above photo on Facebook. As a joke, it’s a cute pun but not very funny; as cultural commentary it’s a ‘facepalm and move on,’ type of trifle. It just amazes me that this some people still find the need to engage in this insecure dick swinging, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Take my Pops. He took me to buy Fat Boys tapes at Devonshire Mall when I was nine years old, I still remember him trying to explain to the clerk what exactly it was I looking for [“I think it’s called ‘rap,’ or something? I don’t know, it all sounds like garbage.”]. He loves to make jokes deliberately getting the names of MCs incorrect [‘Biggie Big’ is a personal favourite of both of us]. He’s watched me embrace this music for almost 30 years, he knows I’m writing a book about it, yet there is definitely a part of him that still cannot believe that this music, this culture, still exists, let alone evolved into the economic titan it is today. And that’s not entirely unreasonable of him: the origins of the music and the cultural concerns present therein couldn’t be more foreign to him. They should be foreign to me; I’ve yet to suss out a reasonable explanation for why it resonated with me so fully, but it is what it is. Between the rhythm of the beats and the education in classic soul, jazz and funk they’ve always provided, I’ve just always found it a more rewarding musical experience than ‘Arrrrr, rawk!’ [I’ll give some slack to Deftones, who fully exposed their desire to be a Depeche Mode cover band somewhere around 2005. Abe still plays too busy, though].
And I’m not going to sit here and act like I’ve never looked down my nose exasperated at a crew of gel-spiked dudes in Affliction t-shirts throwing up the devil horns at the camera, but I’ve tried to adopt a certain level of cultural detente with those camps as I get older and mellowed out; as the homie Big Ghost once said: “I aint really mad at it tho…like it aint horrible or nothin. It jus dont got no real purpose in my iTunes.”
It’s funny, I remember a few months back watching Lords of the Underground perform at Hip-Hop Karaoke’s Competition Round. In the middle of ‘Chief Rocka,’ Mr. Funkee cut the beat off, and said the following before he finished his verse:
“Let me explain something to y’all. I been doing this shit for almost 22 years. And there’s people that still can’t say this shit. So on this whole tour we’ve been on, I’ve been breaking this shit down so that people can understand it, because it’s important for us to communicate as hip-hop artists. Because they don’t want hip-hop to flourish, they don’t want hip-hop to survive, they don’t want…they hate this shit, dude. Trust me.”
I remember standing in the crowd thinking, ‘well, that’s a little dramatic.’ After three decades, the music had gone from a block party conceit to a globally dominant culture, and you can’t play the underdog once you’re on top.
But then I see that photo. And it occurs to me how wonderful it is that after all this time, this hip-hop thing can still get people shook enough to draw their lines in the sand, even via something as benign as a chalk sign.
It’s a reasonable question. It’s about the halfway mark of this adventure I’ve been on. I’ve read a pile of books, a stack of articles, reached out to and spoken with amazing, brilliant people, I’ve listened to Donuts and the records used to create it at least 75 times front to back [and that’s likely a conservative estimate]. So I can certainly understand why people ask.
Doesn’t mean I have any fucking clue how to formulate an answer.
But I try. People are being polite, taking an interest, and I’d like them to pay for the thing when it comes out, even if they have no intention to read it and buy it out of courtesy. I’ll take it. The popular answer, as in the one I go back to again and again is the ‘oil tanker’ response.
See, oil tankers actually consist of eight to twelve smaller tanks within the ship. Keeps the cargo from slooshing around too much, which could compromise the ship’s balance; less movement = more stability. My brain currently feels like an oil tanker with a single tank: production techniques, Soren Kierkegaard, the Kubler-Ross scale, Albert Camus, different approaches and opinions on late style, Roland Barthes, the epidemiology of lupus; all these things are just rolling around clumsily from one end of my brain to the other. I’ve given numerous lengthy and sensible ideas to the showerhead as I prepare to face each day, but this hasn’t translated into as many words on paper as I would like.
Put it another way: late last year the webcomic Toothpaste for Dinner put up a single panel gag called ‘The Creative Process.’
That seems accurate. We’re well into the ‘Fuck off’ segment of the program, far enough from deadline that panic isn’t on my back yet, but it’s waving at me from just over the horizon, a box of tissues in its twitchy hands.
And that’s fine, because I know it’ll get done. The structure of the thing, what I wanted it to accomplish, has been loosely in place since I began, a requirement of the proposal. Scenes, fragments, caveats and addenda are floating to the surface with more regularity than they once were; you can’t have all that material swishing around in your brain without something coagulating into something usable eventually. It will get done. It might have more academic meandering than the heads will want, and not enough for the theory kids, and maybe it gets savaged on Goodreads and the Stones Throw Message Board, but it’ll get done. If you’ve been with me a while, friends, you know that’ll probably end up the most surprising victory of all.
So keep asking the question. It’s good, it keeps me focused. Just don’t expect me to have an easy answer for you.
This gets harder and harder to do every year, friends. My relationship with new music in 2012 was a lot like my relationship with people who still watch Glee: I have a vague idea of what they’re talking about, I used to be more heavily invested, now I really don’t care enough to pay much attention to it. The few times I did pop my head out from the wormhole to 1994 I typically live in, there was nothing but poverty-fetishizing dustbowl folk music at one end of the musical spectrum and monosyllabic raps over trap beats on the other. Growing disconnect with the musical landscape is not an atypical condition to find oneself in, and God knows I’ve been on the wrong side of the cultural fence over the years as both a player and a listener. I’ve grown to accept and embrace it.
That said, despite the increased difficulty factor, there were still ten songs that managed to cross the divide to my lonely island. Some clarifications:
These songs are the ten songs I liked the most. Not the most perfectly constructed, not the most beautifully melodic, not the ones that had something to say about the human condition. I might be able to appreciate that the military precision with which Taylor Swift’s team of drones can craft a chorus, but it’s not anything I’m ever going to want to listen to. Perhaps that’s a deficiency in my musical genome, but something in a song has to speak to me on a level I can’t articulate. There has to be something in there that summons a mood, or a feeling, something I’ll want to go back to again and again. These are the songs that I’ll still be listening to when I draft next year’s list. So, in no particular order.
Large Professor f/ Cormega, Action Bronson, Roc Marciano, & Saigon: M.A.R.S.
The clear standout from the fourth album by 90’s-era beat king Large Professor, Professor @ Large. This song is everything you want from a grimy, East Coast street cut: Snares crack like a 2×4 over your head and kicks slug you in the chest over a suspenseful pulse of sampled strings, while four of NY’s finest underground MC’s spit some ‘grown man rap.’ Special shouts to Saigon’s surprising show stealer of a verse, and for those 16th notes on the hi-hats. That’s the sort of thing that makes an okay beat a great beat. Class is in session.
BJ the Chicago Kid f/ Kendrick Lamar: His Pain II
Kendrick is the MVP of the year, no one can really argue with that. good kid, m.A.A.d. city is probably the best complete work of art any musician made this year [I don’t know how well it works as songs, I find I have to listen to the whole thing instead of dipping in and out via the shuffle on my iPhone. This is a good problem to have, the last album I felt that way about was My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy]. But even as incredible as his flow his on the album is, there’s something about this guest spot on ‘His Pain II’ that connects with me more, abandoning the galloping, triple time flow he pulls out a little too often and delivers a verse like a conversation, confronting the timeless question of why bad things happen to good people. Which would be impressive enough by itself, but the rest of the song, delivered via BJ’s scratchy, Sam Cooke-lite voice over a head-knocker of a breakbeat, is nothing to sleep on either.
Nas: Daughters
Look. He’s never going to make another Illmatic. The sooner everyone accepts that, the better off we’ll all be. Instead, he dropped the first album of rap’s middle age, an album that isn’t perfect, but when everything clicks into place, Life is Good just soars, never higher than it does on this song addressing a topic rarely if ever discussed in hip-hop: the relationship between a father and his daughter. Nasir comes real on the struggle he faces trying to set good examples and solid boundaries despite being…well, a rap star. Great rappers should always come with the real, even [especially?] if the real isn’t life in the streets, or poverty, or flossing. Nas may never be the King of New York again, but he’s claimed the spot as Rap’s Elder Statesman: the man who’s seen it all and come out the other side ready to drop jewels for anyone with ears to listen. While Jay-Z watches his throne, Nas is teaching in the trenches.
ScHoolboy Q f/ A$AP Rocky: Hands on the Wheel
Kendrick Lamar’s able lieutenant in the TDE crew, ScHoolboy stands poised to be a guy who has an incredible 2013, and the highlight of Habits and Contradictions partners him with a guy in the same position. Yes, it’s just a song about the pleasures of non-sobriety, but the sample selection, a reclamation of folk singer Lissie’s cover of Kid Cudi’s ‘The Pursuit of Happiness‘ [seriously, stop it white girls], gives it a sort of sinister undertone that suggests as much fun as they’re having, everyone involved is well aware of the prices that may end up being paid.
Also? Don’t roll weed on your MacBook. Come on, now. This is why we can’t have nice things.
J. Dilla & Katy Perry: The One That Got Away
My favourite album, the thing I listened to more than anything else, was an amateur mashup album of Katy Perry vocals over known and rare J. Dilla beats mixed by someone calling himself De’von. As with all mash-up projects, there are some uneven patches, not all of the pairings work as well as they could, many are good, and a few, like this one, do that thing all good mashups should: surpass both original components and make you wonder why it didn’t sound like this in the first place. De’Von tweaks Perry’s vocals so they slide perfectly into the pocket of Slum Village’s ‘Tell Me’, adding a dose of funky melancholy to the tale of lost love. Another fine testament to the usefulness of remix culture: no one’s making money here, it’s just a way of making something new and interesting by blending two individual pieces.
Freddie Gibbs & Madlib f/ BJ the Chicago Kid: Terrorist/Shame
My problem with Madlib is simply that he’s too good. There’s way too much quality for me to keep up with at any given time, but when he teams up with one of my favourite rappers I pay closer attention. Freddie Gibbs is not someone I would have ever pegged to work with Madlib, but his tales of stickups and dope deals sound tailor made to the 70’s stained funk of ‘Terrorist’ and soulful strings of ‘Shame’, complete with a video that makes selling cocaine to hipster girls look like a sensible career alternative.
Usher: Climax
At this point, anytime Usher releases a song that clocks in under 130 BPM and isn’t produced by David Guetta it’s cause for celebration. It helps if it’s an earworm of a melody sung in breathy falsetto over a Diplo-crafted quiet storm beat. What takes it from a radio-only confection to an iTunes addition is the trick played by the title and chorus. In the oversexed pop landscape of 2012, it would be easy to assume ‘Cimax’ referred to…well, what we all would think it does. But the song is actually talking about that moment in a relationship when it’s as good as it gets, when you’re lying with her and you know nothing will ever surpass that moment, and what a humbling and painful realization that can be. Grown folks’ music.
Y.N.RichKids: Hot Cheetos and Takis
Just so we’re all clear: this song is the product of an after-school program at a YMCA in Minnesota. All the kids in it had to maintain good grades to participate in the song. And when they got in a studio, they rapped about what they liked: snack foods. The catch is that it’s really fucking good.
Nevermind that the beats sounds like it was left off a Rick Ross album, the simple fact is the kids can rhyme, and I’ve yet to see two write-ups that agree on which kid had the strongest verse [Personally, I rep #11]. This song was just such a fun reminder, after how depressed I was after the Lil Reese shitshow that contemporary sounding hip-hop can still have that foundation of fun, innocence and party-rocking that the music was built on in the first place.
Kanye West, Big Sean, Pusha T & 2 Chainz: Mercy
Cruel Summer worked like pretty much every other hip-hop compilation album since the dawn of time: one or two awesome songs, two or three more okay songs, filler filler filler and the continued inexplicable presence of DJ Khaled. ‘Clique’ was the best beat, ‘I Don’t Like’ was the hypest song, ‘New God Flow’ had the best all around rapping. But ‘Mercy’, while not being the best of any of those subjects, kept a high enough average among them to claim the overall victory. From Big Sean’s ‘ass’-play to Pusha’s lyrical dominance and Ric Flair fixation to Kanye’s hook to an anchor verse by 2 Chainz that solidified his career, you couldn’t deny this one.
Knxwledge – wntwrk
My beatmaking discovery of the year was Philadelphia’s Knxwledge, who put out the four-volume Karma.Loops series in 2012 [the above track comes from Vol. 3]. I’m predisposed to love his work, considering it blends the jazziness of Nujabes with the vocal-chopping of J. Dilla. Quick little 90-second bursts of genius. One day the right people are going to start jumping on his beats, and we’re all done for.
BONUS! Three Songs Not Released This Year That I Discovered in 2012 and Probably Like Better Than Any of The Above
Pete Rock & CL Smooth: It’s On You
I have a dream, friends. It’s a dream to DJ [ie, just play songs, I respect the title too much to claim it] a night I’d call ‘Mellow My Man‘ at some lounge in Toronto where they care more about a dope atmosphere and bobbing heads no faster than 96 BPM than cold rocking a dance floor. This song is the reason I want to. Popping up on a Songza playlist this fall, I fell in love immediately. Pete Rock & CL Smooth were already responsible for some of my favourite rap songs, I have no idea why I never delved deeper into their album cuts, but there’s much to love there, especially on The Main Ingredient, which definitely owned the later months this year for me. Dusty drums bouncing over a plaintive piano loop, CL’s flow perfectly in-pocket. Can’t beat that.
Washed Out: Feel It All Around
This is so unlike me, but listen: when I was in journalism school, back in 2003-2004, listening to Royksopp and The Postal Service, this song would have owned my life. So, credit where due. Breathy vocals and airy synths over a chopped and screwed Gary Low sample. People seem to have claimed this as a summer song, but I know it’s the sort of thing that’ll be soothing me through the long Toronto nights.
Phat Kat f/ Elzhi: Cold Steel
The most intimidating part of the book project [so far] has been trying to get a full sense of J. Dilla’s discography. I started to resolve myself to the fact that as far as his musical progression was concerned, I might have to paint in broad strokes. Then a kid at work who’s a total head said he was so excited because he just got the ’64 Beats’ tape, and was horrified to learn I had no idea what that was. To my surprise, he sent me a copy, and buried near the end of that batch [which I’m pretty certain was put together by fans after the fact] is the original sketch to this song. And my jaw just. fricking. dropped. This is maybe the ‘street-est’ Dilla beat I’ve ever heard, more than ‘Fuck the Police’ even. It’s got the bounce of his Soulquarian stuff, a pinch of some Donuts-era vocal chopping but the drums slap your mama, and Phat Kat and Elzhi, two of Detroit’s best MC’s, just eat the track alive. I’ve no idea if this is Dilla’s attempt at a ‘keyboard beat,’ but if it is, he would have been just fine in an era of trap music and ratchet beats.
Because not every great song I discovered last year came out last year, and I did more than listen to music.
The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem
I imagine hardly any people will read this book, and that’s tragic. Non-fiction books by novelists are always kind of a hard sell to people other than completists, academics and nerds like me, and I’ve never really understood that. If you love what an author has to say about people who don’t exist, shouldn’t you love what they say about people who do even more? Lethem’s first collection of non-fiction, the slim essay collection The Disappointment Artist, solidified my love for him more than any novel he’s ever written, an all-nighter with the smartest stoner on campus discussing topics from the John Wayne movie The Searchers to the late-period comics work of Jack Kirby, to his father’s painting career; his essay on seeing Star Wars 21 times in 1977 is one of the best things I’ve read by anyone, anywhere. The book blends cultural scholarship with narrative non-fiction in a way that 97% of bloggers working today wish they could emulate.
The Ecstasy of Influence works the same lane, but augments it a bit. Titled after a controversial essay Lethem wrote for Harper’s in 2007 celebrating plagiarism and demonizing copyright and intellectual property [and revealed in the footnotes to have been reconstructed wholesale from the words and ideas of other people], the book is heavily modeled on one of Lethem’s favourites, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. Like that book, TEOI reprints a large body of Lethem’s journalism and non-fiction on subjects as diverse as 9/11, James Brown and life as a used bookstore clerk, strung together with original pieces and commentaries. Lethem might reprint an essay he wrote about his well-documented admiration for Philip K. Dick, going so far as to move near his house in California, then follow that piece up with a new piece on how Dick would likely have hated him had the two ever met, rounded out with a previously-unpublished early short story to illustrate just how much Dick’s work influenced him. It’s a meandering, comprehensive book perfect for dipping in and out of, but when taken as a whole, shines as one of the best I read this year.
Last autumn a friend of mine at the store told me with excitement that she was volunteering for Manifesto, a weeklong urban music and art festival here in Toronto. Being a tiny Jewish girl and dyed-in-the-wool Glee fan, I found it an odd bit of extracurricular activity, but I’ll support anyone who wants to spread the love [it is the Brooklyn way, after all]. So as the festival drew near, she asked me if I could get a mix together of all of the artists who would be performing at the marquee concert, a free show in Toronto’s Dundas Square featuring Rakim, Kid Capri, Blu & Exile, Phonte & 9th Wonder and more. Like a fool, I said yes, and started looking into some of the acts I was unfamiliar with. One of them as Little Brother, the group 9th and Phonte were a part of with Rapper Big Pooh. I’d heard of them in my travels, but when they were putting out most of their work I was kneedeep in the band and trying to smother my hip-hop self into a little corner of my soul and wasn’t following the music that closely. So rediscovering their second studio album last summer was a revelation.
A concept album based around the fictitious Minstrel Show [the greatest colored show on Earth!] and hosted by Chris Hardwick of Nerdist fame [it’s really him, him and 9th both confirmed that for me on Twitter], the album gives over an hour of stellar soul-sampling beats, guest appearances from DJ Jazzy Jeff and Elzhi, and features the soulful stylings of Percy Miracles, in a parody of R.Kelly/Ronald Isley-style ballads so hysterically good it actually gets legitimately caught in your head. With its ‘Caught you cheatin, you was creepin, to the windows to the walls, skeet-skeetin‘ chorus, it probably predicted contemporary R&B in 2011 way better than they’re probably comfortable with. A crazy good album I will preach on to anyone and everyone.
Your Assertion is Being Challenged. Also: Future Book Jacket Photo
Oh, sorry, I meantScotiabank Nuit Blanche. I had no intention of going, friends. Too many people, for one: anything worth looking at is woefully overpopulated [a lesson learned trying to get a peek at the Dumpster Hotel a few years ago]. For two, I was working til 11.00 pm and had to be back at 9.45 the next morning, so it didn’t leave a lot of time to experience the annual ‘all night art thing,’ as they call it. But I had a moment as I got ready for work that afternoon, reading the TO Twitterati and blogs start to get amped up for it. I turned to the Lady and asked if she had any interest in going. She said she kind of did.
“Then eff it!” I declared. “I live in the best city in Canada, dammit, and how many times do I intentionally skip things because I’m tired or because I’m working and because I take it for granted that I live here and something else cool will come along next weekend. Eff that! The whole city’s going out for this, and I’m going to miss it so I can come home, watch SNL and get a good night’s sleep? I’ll sleep when I’m dead, dammit. We’re going!”
So we made plans to meet at Sneaky Dee’s for a few drinks and some nachos before heading out into the streets with the rest of the city to see what we could find.
Lesson learned: I’m not much interested in hanging out with the whole city, am very interested in hanging out with my friends, and that an all night art thing is not necessary for that to occur. Actually, its absence is preferable.
Nuit Blanche has become pretty bloated in the last few years, with over a million people descending on the city’s downtown core from Yorkville to the Distillery District to West Queen West. If you don’t have a plan, you’re kind of screwed. We did not have a plan. Everything we might have wanted to check out was either too far from us [mourning your own death at St Clair West] or too high-profile and swamped with people [the Dune project in Lower Bay Station]. The all-night TTC service, much touted though it was, totally shit the bed the one time we tried to use it, with a northbound train pulling into Dundas after a ten minute wait, bursting with people while the car we ended positioned near was unlit and out of service. We had to wait another seven minutes for the next train.
Really though, it comes down to the number of attendees along with the quality and locations of the installations. Was there really nothing in Kensington this year? Someone tell me I’m wrong about that. We walked from College/Bathurst to Queen/Spadina and didn’t encounter one thing connected with the event, aside from some lovely people inviting us to have some free popcorn and check out the Toronto Underground Cinema [verdict: nice space, though I wasn’t about to watch a short black and white silent film about undersea crabs]. And once we hit Queen West, the thing turned into one giant pub crawl, with drunk and stoned revelers wandering into the streets never quite understanding that only Yonge was the only road closed to traffic. What we did walk by was underwhelming: a lot of things on fire, Daniel Lanois’s nightlong jam session at Nathan Phillips Square, and some guys sitting on a couch doing nothing while a video montage set to Kraftwerk flashed behind them. From the reports the next morning, a lot of the events lost steam or flat-out shut down long before sunrise, so who knows how things looked around 8.00 or 9.00 in the evening. But it sort of betrays the event to look one way during primetime and another in the later hours.
And then, the people. I saw enough snotty tweets blaming tourists and 905’ers for less than stellar experiences during the event, but if you a bad time, you probably need look no further than your beloved 416’ers. The weed smoke, the energy drink cans littering the sidewalks, the domestic arguments breaking out every block and a half, that was all us. Don’t put that on the suburbs.
When we finally got on a streetcar home, the Lady remarked that we while it was nice being out and about, we probably would have had a better time had we stayed at Dee’s splitting pitchers. I said no, we definitely would have had more fun. After living here long enough, you realize of all the annual events that get hyped to the moon by tastemakers and such, you should check them all out, but there are a lot that you don’t need to do more than once [Word On The Street got the axe this year under that very logic]. Can’t say for sure we won’t try it again next year, but if we’re having that much fun at the bar, it’d take a lot more than Nuit Blanche to remove us from it.
For three and a half years, I was fortunate enough to have someone pay me actual money to take words from my feeble little brain, organize them into sentences they then would print in a newspaper or post online.
And I still never called myself a ‘writer’.
I have a problem with self-labelers. I have a problem with people who give themselves titles they haven’t deserved yet. You might do these things, but that doesn’t make you the thing you say you are. If you write, you aren’t necessarily a writer. If you play music, you aren’t a musician, and if you paint, you aren’t a painter, if you take pictures, you aren’t a photographer.
I’ve seen this discussion a million different places, with most people opting to soothe the battered egos of the aspiring artist, essentially letting them off the hook and telling them, ‘If you need to say you’re a writer to get your ass in the chair, then fine you’re a writer,’ or, ‘if you write everyday, you’re a writer.’
Um, no.
I might shoot some free throws at the hoop over the garage, it doesn’t mean I’m a basketball player. The title denotes a level of professionalism, and if you haven’t earned it, I don’t think you should have it, is all. I am clearly the odd one out here, judging by the proliferation and popularity of sites like Redbubble.
The problem with Redbubble [or Deviantart, or Livejournal or hell, even WordPress] is this: Yes, there is good quality, there’s the stuff that gets posted to the main page or gets picked up and reposted somewhere and goes viral. And then there are millions of contributions that exist only in the profile of one poster and his or her followers. They post a shitty poem or drawing and sit back for the accolades to come in from people as amateurish as they are. The cost for these compliments is to offer equally vapid and thoughtless [meaning without thought] compliments to them in return, creating this vacuum of sycophancy and mediocrity that I just don’t have the time for, not anymore.
See friends, back in the heady days of 56 K we had forums: awful places with awkward interfaces, but they were the first way most of us started using the Internet to connect with people from across the world, and if you were a writer a quick browse through Yahoo’s category listing could give you some poetry magazines. This is how I found VOiCE. VOiCE was a zine published out of Indianapolis which never took my submissions probably because I wasn’t quite miserable enough and didn’t listen to enough industrial music </sourgrapes>. But they had a forum and a dedicated group of people who would read whatever went up and sometimes offer criticism but most times just offered support. You know what constant support gets you? Shitty poetry, that’s what.
But it was the order of the day, and I just wanted to fit in, so I’d leave two-word niceties on most people’s work so they’d repay in kind when I posted, or at least go easy on me because I was a nice guy. For the most part it worked, but one day one guy wouldn’t let me off the hook, asking me why I always heaped compliments on work that was inferior to my own. It’s still the kindest thing a stranger has ever said to me, and an endorsement I’ve never forgotten, one that shook me out of the coma of cheap flattery I’d been in. I stopped posting not too long after. A quick check of the web address reveals an aborted attempt to relaunch the site as an archival blog, choked with spam comments.
This is an epiphany most Redbubble seem content to live without. They enjoy their complacency, so good on them for it, I guess.
So keep on throwing up first drafts with no revision and call yourself a writer. But you ain’t fooling me, friends. I respect the art too much to toss the title around so frivolously.
Commitments both personal and professional [not least of which: forgetting all about it], meant I completely screwed the pooch on this year’s Bookcamp Toronto, another of those newfangled unconferences you kids think are all the rage. Not surprisingly, especially in the wake of the Kobo’s launch, much of the discussion, in facet or another, circled around publishing’s newest Jesus, the eReader.
Now, it’s hard for me to really form an opinion on what was said, since I wasn’t there and am only now starting to sift through the numerous blog posts discussing the event. But I can see what people are saying and filter it through my experience as a guy who deals with book consumers on a daily basis. Because I feel like that’s the thing that publishing has always gotten wrong, but is really gotten wrong in the past 5 years or so: looking at the middleman [bookstores] as their primary customer.
I have been woefully lacking in public appreciation for the homey Jay Smooth and all he’s done on his various sites over the years. As an orator, Jay’s that cat you wish you could sound like, the guy who breaks everything down real simply, respectfully, in a way that always makes sense. Today, he talks about people with a fatalist attitude towards politics, or when T-Pain met Hannity.
Is this woman a genius? Tens of millions would say so.
Regular readers [Hi, Glenn] are likely aware of my love for the 33 1/3 series of music guides. Slight, portable, packed with insight on records from the classic to the cultish, they represent some of the best music criticism you can find on the shelves. But one selection gave me pause: Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion’s ‘Let’s Talk About Love.’ How could that piece of garbage warrant any booklength examination? Why was it longer than books on Illmatic or OK Computer? So I did what I imagine most petulant and superior music fans would have done: sucked my teeth and walked away.
But this book refused to go away. It made year-end ‘best of’ lists, intelligent people recommended it online and in print, just last week it got an endorsement on the Slate Culture Gabfest. So I finally bit the bullet and read the thing this week. And it is everything they say it is.
Poetry for Gravediggers 