diasco

"It goes down here now"

Yeah, this blog has been mothballed. Check the new one: http://etredieu.blogspot.com.

posted by Brock @ 4:13 PM 3 comments

"Whoa, dude"

This is fucking fun.

posted by Brock @ 11:53 PM 0 comments

"My Name Is X"

Geza X is a punk-rock studio whiz, pioneering MIDI/electronics geek, and forgotten genius. He's worked in LA for some thirty years, working in the studio with people like the Dead Kennedys and Kurtis Blow. He reviewed gear for Spin Magazine back in my father's day, when Spin was something worth reading. He's put out one solo LP - carnival lunatic music with hooks that will make you feel like Divine in hell and the best synth and guitar tone I have ever heard. And yes, I do check for that sort of thing. The closest thing to a hit that he had his hands in was Meredith Brooks' "Bitch." This is what people like Trent Reznor and Dr Dre aspire to, or should be aspiring to.

posted by Brock @ 5:40 PM 0 comments

"Rock 'n' Roll McDonalds"

Mark E Mark and the Funky Bunch

I love Mark E Smith. The man is my mother's age and still as petulant, dumb, and repellant as the foulest pasty art-fuck teenagers. The death of John Peel, The Fall's approach to stagecraft, and Smith's influences and personal life are discussed. Watch in bemusement as the poor hapless interviewer tries to decide whether to be alienated or charmed.

Step through the fog; creep through the smog

Psych-soul genius Swamp Dogg interviewed way back in 1998. The man's music is indispensible, and despite not exactly being an old hand at interviews, this one is beguiling.

Interviewer: Do you see any similarity between some of the work that you've done and today's rap music?

Swamp Dogg: Like you say, there are rappers, they sample my music and that type of thing. But I don't think we have any mass hysteria going on. I like more of them than I dislike. There's only rap act out there that I don't fucking understand. Bone Thugs 'n' Harmony. I can't understand a motherfucking thing they're saying. I don't think it has shit to do with the generation gap. 'Cause I've asked motherfuckers their age. I said, what are these motherfuckers saying? They said, we don't know. But it's great. I said, well, cool. It reminds me a little of, in the '50's one time, you could hear the music, but you couldn't hardly hear what the singer was saying. And the people were saying, but we're buying it for the beat. Okay, cool. So I was trying to find out what they're buying it for. 'Cause Bone Thugs is outselling most of the rap groups. And I love Tupac. Tupac had a lot to say. Ice Cube used to have a lot to say. He don't say quite as much as he used to. Ice T got a little- he got a little too emotional in delivering the message. His anger started to overshadow his creativity. I think he's got a new album now, I haven't heard that yet. But most of the rappers out here today, the newer ones, they're not saying shit. I like the ones with the message. I always have to have a message. I mean, I like some good-time rap. Tribe Called Quest, they don't show me shit. I dig MC Breed, his first album, but then after that, with the lawsuits and shit, and then he started doing some other shit, and he tried to get real real real dirty. And his career just went on down the toilet. He did himself a hell of an injustice. I loved LL Cool J's first couple of albums. And Public Enemy. I'm starting to like De La Soul a little bit.

Oh yeah, it's bad. You know you want to laugh, so laugh.

Straight out of New York City comes The Bravery, the latest representatives of the despicable, flaccid NY indie scene that spawned such shitbucket luminaries as Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. With only an EP under their belts thus far, these 80s-worshipping aesthetic abominations have been praised to the moon not only by the famously ridiculous NME, but by the BBC as well.

It is not hard to see why The Bravery have hit all the right buttons for a music industry crying out for excitement, edginess and talent.

Before the music starts, the eyeliner gives away the fact this quintet are pitched between glam and goth, and the swagger is of a band who know how good they are.

This despite the fact that they sound exactly like Interpol without technical skill, or The Killers without so much as feigned passion. Isn't it time we put a bullet in post-punk's head?

posted by Brock @ 5:30 PM 2 comments

"Put You On the Game"

A blunted bongo beat and some Prince-tonian funk guitar wank. Bravely enunciated faux-sociological rambling that sounds like the core philosophical idea of a long-forgotten blaxploitation film. Thus begins The Documentary, the first album by The Game, Dr Dre's most recent discovery. With a cast of producers that reads like a "Hitmakers of the Year" list in The Source, The Documentary may very well be one of the most expensive debut albums ever recorded. It's certainly the most heavily-hyped hip-hop debut since the first record from another Dre protege, Eminem.

The buzz circling the head of this young Compton native, who has heretofore made his name spitting on mixtapes and beefing with no-counts like Joe Budden and Yukmouth (who?) has been so deafening that even the creaky, farty old Rolling Stone took notice, granting our lad a patronizing, oh-so-slightly racist interview. In this (and nearly every other) interview as well as on record, Game invokes the names of nearly every legendary West Coast rapper: Eazy-E, 2Pac, etc. Game states plainly that he aims to bring California, fast asleep since 1996, back to rap prominence. On the album standout "Higher," Game spits the record's key line: "Wake up, the West Coast is back."

Funny, then, that the record sounds about as classically West Coast as the first Smiths album. The five Dr Dre tracks appearing here (all coproduced, if you're keeping score) do not evoke his classic work with NWA or Snoop Doggy Dogg; they sound only like the beats 50 Cent and Eminem didn't want for their recent albums. Tinny, repetitive, and dull, these undistinguished tracks lack both the energy of Dre's early work and the sophistication of his best 2001-era material. Only "Higher" and "How We Do" stand up to repeated listens, and even these tracks pale in comparison to the sort of stuff Dr Dre made, and kept his name on.

The other producers, nearly all big names, either hit or miss. Kanye West turns up with a beat so rote and typical of his formula, it sounds like a "MAD TV" Blueprint parody. Havoc produces a Faith Evans duet which is quite pretty, but marred beyond repair by the weakest verses on the entire album. Eminem produces and guests on "We Ain't," delivering a synth banger miles ahead of everything he has produced up to this point, as well as a verse which is certainly nothing to write home about, but nowhere near as annoying as anything on his last solo and D12 albums. Just Blaze is responsible for two highlights here - the horn heavy, confident pimp stomp "Church For Thugs," and "No More Fun And Games," ironically the closest this album gets to G-funk. Finally, Timbaland hits it out of the park with the classy yet clubby "Put You On the Game," easily the best thing here.

That handles the beats; what, then, of the MCing? Game is certainly a capable rapper; he comes with catchy, memorable verses quite often, and has no trouble holding the listener's attention. His thuggish, deep rasp sounds precisely how Dre thinks his own rapping sounds. Unfortunately, the hype that has encircled this MC belies the fact that he is deeply flawed on the mic. Certainly, he's listenable, but he's not bringing anything particularly interesting to the table. He delivers the same old thug anthems, sex jams, and chick songs ("Special," featuring chick song kingpin Nate Dogg) that every single other MC does. It's unreasonable to expect a rapper to set the world on fire on his first record, but even the slightest hint of innovation would've gone a long way towards justifying what's been said about Game.

More annoying than his mediocre lyrics is Game's tendency to shamelessly namedrop his influences and collaborators. Clumsily, Game dedicates half of a verse to cloyingly big-upping Kanye West on his track. While doing this, he falls off the beat and seems to run out of rhyming words. Wouldn't a plain old hot verse be a better homage to the producer? On every Dre track, Game makes sure to tell us that he is indeed rapping on a Dre track, and that that Dr Dre is one hell of a swell guy. Isn't that nice? Drunkenly on "Start From Scratch", he begs for the return of Eazy-E, as if nothing of note has happened in hip-hop since Straight Outta Compton. Finally, on "We Ain't," Game actually says "Call Dre quick/Em just killed me on my own shit." By doing so, he comes off as a simpering, witless just-hired middle manager who wants nothing more than to suck up to the big bosses.

For someone supposedly out to revitalize the West Coast, Cali lacks a presence on this record. Certainly, past legends are invoked, but what of California as it is now? No other upcoming Compton MCs are featured on The Documentary; the only people getting verses here are Aftermath posse members, as well as Faith Evans, Mary J Blige, and Nate Dogg, here coming off as glorified hook girls. Snoop Dogg, surely on the outs with Dre for proving that he can make hits without his aid, is nowhere to be found and is sorely missed. Laid back, smooth, and effortlessly confident, Snoop would've proven to be the perfect foil for Game's straight-A student smarm.

A rapper as discussed as Game has been ought to spit with purest confidence, yet the best Game can muster is vanity. With his constant namedropping, Game avoids establishing his own personality (truly a must on a debut album). Overproduced, costly, mediocre and firmly stuck in the past, Game proves himself nothing less than the hip-hop Oasis.

posted by Brock @ 7:18 PM 0 comments

"The Healing Force of the Universe"

Two months and six days. Jeez louise.

But I have an excuse. See, this thing was originally intended as a replacement for my livejournal. Soon after creating it, however, I found that there was a bit of life left in the old girl after all. Not for journalling, of course. I very rarely post in my livejournal, and when I do it's something incredibly inane; things like those "What x are you?" quizzes, or pictures of weird-looking animals. Not exactly heavyweight stuff. I've never seen the point of online journalling. Isn't a journal meant to be a physical archive of private thoughts? If so, why would anyone want to share their private thoughts with the internet at large? Livejournal unwittingly defeats the very purpose of journalling.

Despite this glaring flaw, though, Livejournal remains very relevant. The point of keeping a livejournal isn't the main journal page at all. Livejournal's secret heart and soul is its vast network of communities. LJ communities bring people of common interests together in a manner which is all but foolproof. And nearly all interests are satisfied. Want to read slash fiction about The Libertines and other NME faves? LJ has it. Want to rate others, and be rated on your taste in music? Check it out. Or maybe you're a Nazi fangirl? Or you still have a crush on Reb and VoDKa?

No matter how esoteric your tastes are, you'll probably be able to find similar folk on LJ. It's a voyeur's paradise, and a surprisingly vast storehouse of information. Livejournals themselves may indeed be as interesting as a 14 year old's diary with all the nasty bits markered out, but their communities are indispensable.

I will post more here. Oh yes I will.

posted by Brock @ 11:51 PM 0 comments

"My Education"

Since I was old enough to love, I've loved music dearly. I started at the proper age (14), with the purchase of the then-just-released Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile. On the advice of Kevin Guillet, an odd boy who was quickly becoming my best friend, I bought it about a month after it came out on one of the first genuinely miserable days of the winter of 1999/2000. After returning from the city, my mother and her boyfriend promptly left the house to do something boring and middle aged. I was left all alone with the strangely-packaged, plastic-smelling double album. I'd snuck a peek at the lyrics on the car-ride home and found pretty much exactly what I expected: "Tear a hole exquisite red/ fuck the rest and stab it dead!" "My god's a shallow little bitch trying to make the scene." Yes, Trent Reznor was indeed "fucked in the head." I was utterly thrilled.

I put the first and second discs into slots one and two of the CD player, respectively, poured myself a tall glass of chocolate milk, sat down in the central easy chair, and pressed play. "Da-nuh-nuh-nuh." An almost neanderthal-simple acoustic guitar riff. An angry male voice playing the part of lunatic adolescent id. A rampaging drumbeat and a wall of noise unlike anything I'd ever heard in pop before. "Somewhat Damaged" confirmed everything I'd suspected about adolescence and changed, saved, ruined my life.

The record played on. Parts of it enthralled me, parts of it puzzled me, and parts of it put me off. But NIN's bloated, overlong, angst driven opus put the touch in me. I slept soundly that night. I listened to The Fragile obsessively for the next month, dragging it with me to school and playing it in between breaks. I extolled the album's virtues to anyone who would listen. Most found my obsession absurd, and asked me if that was the album where he talks about fucking you like an animal. The music stunned me. NIN's meticulously arranged noise symphonies were a million miles removed from the vaguely dissatisfying ape rock of Limp Bizkit or the saccharine platitudes of the Backstreet Boys.The lyrics spoke to me: isolation, anger, paranoia, loss of friends, discontentment with belief structures introduced in childhood; the main motifs of The Fragile and the rest of Reznor's body of work addressed everything I was going through then. I, like Trent, was fucked in the head. And maybe being fucked in the head isn't the worst thing in the world after all.

I needed more. I worked my way through Reznor's back catalogue, devouring The Downward Spiral's dense sex and death rants, Broken's bitter, caustic fury, and Pretty Hate Machine's danceable self discovery. I bought the issue of Spin Magazine with Reznor on the cover, staring me down like a pretty, goth Professor X. On Spin's recommendation, I sought out Rage Against the Machine's Battle of Los Angeles and Ol' Dirty Bastard's Nigga Please. After that, I bought Spin religiously, soaking up their recommendations and studying the hipster lifestyle, passing off the magazine's useful tidbits as my own in conversation. MuchMusic helped me recognize what I liked and (maybe more importantly) what I didn't. I became a regular at The Vinyl Exchange, the hippest indie record store in Saskatchewan, and became friends with the staff, all of whom pointed me in the right direction like big brothers.

I continued down this path for a few months, soaking up interesting pop, rock, and hip-hop releases and cultivating my budding elitism. In the middle of summer, a Spin review caught my eye: Radiohead's new album Kid A reviewed two months in advance. It was given a 9/10, the highest marks I'd seen Spin give a record. The review beautifully described Radiohead's drastic departure from their old sound, and the alien, unpop soundscapes contained within. Reading it, I couldn't believe that anyone, let alone a mainstream rock band like Radiohead, could make such an album. I pored over the review again and again, trying to imagine what it could sound like. Save for the brilliant "Just" video, I avoided Radiohead's back catalogue and distracted myself until the album was finally released.

The Vinyl Exchange was famous for jumping the gun, putting their new albums out not on the official release dates, but on their day of arrival at the store (Fridays). Knowing this, I called to confirm that they'd sell it to me and skipped school in the middle of Friday afternoon to go pick it up. True to form, on the car-ride back I glanced through the lyricless liner notes looking for more clues as to how the album sounded. I gazed at the computer generated landscapes in the booklet and thought myself pretty clever when I discovered the goofy little comic book hidden behnid the CD tray. Finally I arrived back home, my mother left to run errands, and I put the album on.

All synth. No distorted guitars. No pop song structures. Oblique, often unintelligible lyrics. "The National Anthem," with that bassline. Kid A was the puzzling, beautiful antidote to all that rubbish nu-metal that young men my age were required by law to like. That first listen blew my mind. Kid A's experimentation made The Fragile, a very unique and experimental album in its own right, look like Bon Jovi. Surely this couldn't be the only record out there like this? What could've influenced this thing? Clues could be found in Thom Yorke's interviews, as well as in rock writing. Tortoise. Can. Neu!. Aphex Twin. Autechre. Brian Eno. Sonic Youth. John Zorn. My Bloody motherfucking Valentine. Music so weird and wonderful that, if The Fragile was Bon Jovi, Kid A was the Spice Girls! I sought it out like a bloodhound. I ordered albums in. I delved into Radiohead's influences, as well as bands who followed Radiohead. What I couldn't find in shops, I made Kevin download, myself still without the internet.

I brought Kid A to school the following Monday and played it for Kevin. On first listen, he didn't get it. I also played it for a rather ditzy blonde girl from my class. She loved it.

Delving further into independent and alternative music, I continued to educate myself through music magazines. Kevin and I swapped notes. I commissioned him to make mix discs of ultra-obscure stuff like Pole and the Soft Boys. I played my weird CDs at school and developed a much-deserved reputation as a strange bastard. I loved everything about music. I loved figuring out bizarre stuff like Squarepusher, and gleefully howling along to Nirvana and Foetus. I loved being seen as an ingenue mini-Lester Bangs at The Vinyl Exchange. Most of all, though, I loved the distance that my music put between me and my peers. As Trent Reznor feuded in the press with Fred Durst, so I feuded with Riley Solnicka, the most detestable jock I went to school with. The joyous look of trump-card superiority that lay across my face as I subjected my classmates to Mouse On Mars and The Velvet Underground was priceless and unmistakeable. Through music I found a way to distance myself from the small minds of my small town, and through music I found an escape from dead-end boredom.

Business went on as usual. As I aged, I found myself growing out of Trent Reznor's one-note lyrical angst. The more articulate Morrissey better chronicled my angry, sullen fifteenth year, in which I forged my character once and for all, and dealt with my most important (unrequited) crush. To this day, I still love Roman noses on girls. Morrissey, prolific reader of music magazines, was every bit the obsessive fan that I was, and chose to cast himself as even more pathetic a loser. His songs, at their best, are perfectly formed pop poetry chronicling every single miserable subtlety of adolescence. Gay, straight, male, female, fat, skinny - nearly anyone who's ever felt put-upon could identify with this pretentious, celibate, foppish, selfish, miserable asshole. I own The Queen Is Dead on LP, and I've played it so much that I can see through it.

Grade 10 came and went, and things picked up. I got my driver's license and my car. I got the internet and joined message boards for Nine Inch Nails, still my favourite band then. Through these boards I was introduced to even more great music, and through filesharing networks like Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, and Soulseek, I found all the hopelessly obscure stuff I could ever dream of. On the boards, I made lasting friends and developed a ballsier, friendlier persona. Through discussion with other people who shared my passion and through observation of those who didn't, I consolidated my ideas on music and life. Much like his music, Trent Reznor's fansites changed, saved, and ruined my life.

Grade 12 came around and, with the light at the end of the tunnel finally appearing, I started to come out of my shell. I'd heard of Pulp a few times before, but for the longest time never really paid attention. Vaguely remembering that Trent recommended it on MTV2, I downloaded their song "This Is Hardcore." Those strings. That arrangement. That leering, drunken vocal. My god. That song stunk of sex - real, honest to god grownup sex; not the degrading jerkoff sessions to be found in the work of Reznor and Rivers Cuomo or the sexless ambiguity of Radiohead and Morrissey. Once more, I was changed. I bought Different Class the next day. In songs like "Common People" and "Do You Remember the First Time?," Pulp presented love and sex like the normal, fun, heartbreaking things they really turned out to be after all. Jarvis Cocker was no scared, porn-addicted teenager. He'd been around. Cocker was impossibly charismatic and sexy, yet a hopeless geek that I could identify with. I imitated his mannerisms and cribbed a few words from his vocabulary. On the day I met my girlfriend, I used an obscure Jarvis quote in conversation. It worked. Pulp gave me the kick in the ass I needed to escape high school and start dancing, laughing, and finally living.

Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? Neither. Music has helped me define my life, and has made it all the more interesting. I've gained friends because of it and it scared off for good those who were no friends at all. God only knows where I'd be without it. I love my life. I love my life.

posted by Brock @ 11:35 PM 1 comments