Come to this:
Club Club You’re Dead
3/4/2009 @ The Stud (harrison st @ 9th)
9pm $5
Jealousy http://www.myspace.com/jealousychina
Easy Street http://www.myspace.com/sexyeasystreet
Special Guests
Return of the Lilith Fair
+40 Gay Beauty Contest!
We’re super into Jealousy’s droney/trippy/bass sampling thing , check out his videos:
Jealousy “Playing with rings” from Mark Treise on Vimeo.
And we love Easy Street’s euro trash dance moves:
-Sent two txt messages to a friend that try to straddle the line of pleading and teasing.
-Worked on a piece where every other word is fuck.
-Really discovered Stephen Sprouse, started looking at his stuff on the internet.
-Talked to an advisor about how confusing SF state is.
-Was lectured by a nervous future high school teacher of America about modal music and how I shouldn’t feel bad about studying literature.
-Felt my skin crawl in the student center.
-Read Kafka’s “Report to the Academy.” Don’t think I got it.
-Read about the Cold War. Don’t get it either.
-A future drone lectured me about how he almost stole 60 PS3’s.
-Re-wrote a song in my head.
-Have not been asked a question by anyone all day.
Constantin Stanislavski
http://www.beefheart.com/datharp/reviews/bangsdecals.htm
For lo, God hath
consigned those
impertinent flatterers
to the circle beyond the circles
for Satan fell
in low cause
but even lower
are those
who fall
for nothing.
-John Milton on Matthew Derby’s Not Enough Protection From The Song
Rock criticism has divided into three warring camps; those who seek meaningful music, those who seek no-meaning music and those who try to see the world in music. This is the fault of Lester Bangs; he was a writer of prodigious talent, so excellent that all other rock criticism is a footnote. He was so talented, that one could in fact write Lester Bang’s critiques of almost any artist with almost any perspective; he could love and hate the same things authentically. Pop music was merely his clay; he was the sculptor.
He simultaneously embodied all three of these approaches, in fact birthed them within himself. All his children, from snarky poptimists to srsly rockistas, dig through his catalog of persona: the serious, emotional Bangs, the funny expansive Bangs, the venomous Bangs, the bored Bangs- music criticism as drama, comedy, tragedy, farce. “We will never love anything as we loved Elvis”, no nor will we be able to ever talk about music with his inner unity. He loved music for every reason one could love music; and he wrote as much about that love as he did about whatever artists did.
Matthew Derby’s Not Enough Protection From The Song is possibly the worst music criticism I have ever read. It attempts a Bangsian transmutation, of using a band to express a moment in time, music as a sort of memoir, but like the sorcerer’s apprentice, he cannot control the power he unleashes. Mr. Derby’s problem is that he has nothing to say; he reaches towards the same faux-grandiosity his subject indulges in, with the same hollow results. The Arcade Fire are a band obsessed with grand gestures, but with no notion of what makes up greatness- no notion that greatness is least contained in it’s gestures. Mr. Derby also desires to be great; his ambition burns through out the piece, but he cannot connect his ambition to the smallness of his ideas; read the piece, what after all, does he say within it? That the Arcade Fire are a cool band? That the people in it are similar to himself? That the show was pretty good? So what? What does any of that matter? If the Arcade Fire matter, it is not because of any of that, nor because of the subtle unfolding that unfolds subtly.
Maybe this is Mr. Derby’s real problem; I do not know that what he says matters, and even if one lacks the words, one knows what matters and what does not.
To lovers everywhere!
deerhoof, clap your hands (say yeah), ponytail, fucked up, sonic youth (very conflicted), fleet foxes, the shins, frou frou, grizzly bear, a place to bury strangers, the decemberists, elvis costello, antony, times new viking or any of that neo-garage stuff, animal collective as idea (never heard there music), ocean, big blue whale, k lots more that i can’t think of right now. but you know who you are. also, if you sound like any of these bands/like any of these bands, i’d really question why your making music, and if it’s for the right reasons.
General George Armstrong Custer
