While Listen to Us continues on a leisurely summer vaction, sipping expensive martinis in an undisclosed hotel bar, we'd like to remind you, dear audience, that some day (some day!) we might return.

In the meantime, go here. Read my article.

Easy Listening for the Hip-Hop Generation

There's something odd going on here.

I'm sure the reader is aware of the Gorillaz and their much-hyped new album, Demon Days. If this declaration is met with a shake of the head, think of the new (and appropriately ubiquituously referenced) iPod commercial. Those outlines, prancing around on roller skates are moving to the Gorillaz's new single.

Appropriate, in a way, that people turned into cartoon images should be dancing to other people turned into cartoon images.

This, however, is besides the point. The first Gorillaz album, inexplicably, sold six million albums. I suspect that the second will do similarily - although, as is often the case, slightly worse - to the former. This from a band that consists of a comic book artist, Blur's frontman, and a random cast of producers and accessory rap artists. I'll happily concede that the comic work is good. I'm not familiar with Jamie Hewlett's work on Tank Girl, but given the illustration here, I trust it to be solid as well.

What has happened, it seems, is that two individuals from completely different backgrounds, neither of which attained this sort of success promoting themselves, have managed to strike a vein in the collective unconcious by promulgating a set of instrument playing apes upon us. Credit is due to them for finding something of such mass appeal. What I don't understand is why the Gorillaz are so appealing.

It's important to note that I'm not taking the position that the Gorillaz are unappealing, but sold well. Or the similar position, if one finds them appealing, one's aesthetic sense is corrupted. I bought the first album, and I'm listening to the second as we speak. I myself find them appealing. And I am slightly disturbed by this fact.

A typical Gorillaz song consists of an odd bit of introduction, an appealing opening beat, lyrics that don't make all that much sense once actually listened to, a change in tempo halfway through, an appealing hook repeated at random intervals, and maybe, for a period of time, somebody rapping. Sometime, this works. Basically, it evidently need work at least once per album. "Clint Eastwood" was a solid song, and so is "Feel Good Inc." More often than not, though, it doesn't succeed, and both albums, as far as I can tell, are filled with diaphonous cacaphonies, in which hip-hop beats are combined with generalized electronic movements and the occasional bit of singing, or spoken word. It leaves the listener with the vague feeling, that well, there should have been something more.

But I keep listening, nodding my head, catching that hook, smiling a little. I assume the reader understands, and has probably experienced the same thing. It's hard to dislike the Gorillaz. But I think that's the problem. They are, either by intent or accident, purely inoffensive. They combine the electronic beat - that throb - that the generation of today seems to find so appealing with that mainstay of modern rock: that catchy riff that makes everything else in song sound irrelevant. Even if it is. Add to this lyrics that are patently pointed at no purpose and rapping of completely unintelligible content, and you have the album equivilent to Tom Cruise. Absolutely inoffensive and appealing, but blank, a mask for whatever desires the listener will place on it.

The Gorillaz haven't even combined a set of disparate genres. They've added together media-sensitivized versions of genres to make something that we pretend sounds new. There's the safe, Outkast (Love Below era) version of Hip-Hop, the little bit of acceptable alternative rock guitars, the odd bit of rap from the mouth of a gorilla, and repetetive dance hall hooks, the sort you'll hear at CroBar, three years after being a hit in Maastricht. It's just so easy to listen to. All the pieces are so familiar, soothing, similar to something else. This is what's going to be playing in elevators fifty years from now.

In the end, we're all just suckers. Damon Albarn and Hewitt are making fun me of me, and six million other listeners, for buying their mask of a musical genre, ostensibly played by the masks of anthropomorphic gorillas. Add a little of behavioralism, and there's a joke of a grand scale: in the end, we are the Gorillaz, grasping at the bananas of music we like because of simple positive reinforcement. At least I hope so. If they're not having a laugh at my expense, well, they're taking themselves a little too seriously. I might have one at theirs.

In the spirit of blatant self-promotion, I'd like to make a recommendation:

Go here. Read my article. That is all.

Unless you agree / disagree / have strong opinions on the matter. Then let me know. A lively little debate on the virtues of just war theory would be a thing of joy.

Little Thoughts Should be Seen and not Heard

Quarters are shiny. And someone asked me today, as I was walking home, if I had change (four quarters, I would guess) for a dollar. I wonder if anyone actually uses payphones anymore.

The preceding three sentences are particularly inane. And they're connected to absolutely nothing. They are, in fact, the most pernicious type of information: the dreaded anecdote.

Unfortunately, anecdotes make up quite a significant portion of social discourse. A normal conversation between two nominal acquaintances who call each other friends often goes as follows:

"Friend" One: What's up?
"Friend" Two: Not much, you?
"Friend" One: Not much.

There's a brief pause here, where both "friends" realize that they don't, strictly speaking, have anything to say. This is where things get ugly.

"Friend" One: I saw a Knicks game on Friday.
"Friend" Two: Oh? Really - sounds great. You know, I ran into your ex-girlfriend last week.
"Friend" One: Really? How was she?
"Friend" Two: Great, I think. Bitchy, though. I never really liked her. Did I tell you I got a raise?

This is all very distasteful, so I'll end the discourse before it gets out of hand. But the reader can imagine these two everymen continuing on with their discourse, imparting small pieces of unconnected activities, thoughts, and extended expositions until one of them gets bored and makes up an excuse to walk in a direction he hopes the other isn't.

Four distinct threads are at work here. There's a basketball game, a pay raise, a brief meeting with a former paramour-once-removed, and a random opinion about her. I'll concede that the latter bears some relation to the meeting. But if I were "Friend" One, I would not care what "Friend" Two thought on the matter. Nor would his salary particularly concern me. Nor would I expect him to think my attending a Knicks games was all that exciting. After all, I attended the game - he didn't.

It's worse than this, unfortunately. The anecdote has squirmed its way into the novel. There is, it seems, no bastion strong enough, no stronghold impenetrable. One would think that the possibility of actual narrative would dissuade authors from the frivolity of paragraph (or even sentence!) long thoughts that develop no individual plot line, advance no story, nor actually develop a character. But no: why write that much when it's so easy to dither away making up thoughts for a character, connect them with a pigeon or two on the street and then move on to another minor episode? The author can easily enough pretend that a large enough collection of such episodic material constitutes some sort of psychological picture - whatever that might be - of the character and move on.

I'm not talking about the airy fluff sold in supermarkets, either. Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer, a novel of much promise, fails in part because the author finds it so necessary to explain minor and masturbatory activities, and the devil's repetitive thoughts such diversions. Television, a novel whose author was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as an "original and significant writer, whose fiction can be as engaging as it is surprising," wastes an entire paragraph describing the buying of Kleenex. This, I am certain, has no bearing on the book as a whole.

And that media darling of the moment, Jonathan Safran Foer, who inexplicably decided to narrate his new book through the eyes of a supposed child (I say 'supposed' because no eight or nine year child is even remotely capable of expressing the opinions thrown about by Oskar Schell - but this isn't really a complaint), has opened his book with at least thirteen pages filled with anecdotes. An example:

It's pretty amazing that I can play "The Flight of the Bumblebee," because you have to hit incredibly fast in parts, and that's extremely hard for me, because I don't really have wrists yet. Ron offered to buy me a five-piece drum set. Money can't buy me love, obviously, but I asked if it would have Zildjian cymbals. He said, "Whatever you want," and then he took my yo-yo off my desk and started to walk the dog with it.

The point of the paragraph, as the reader learns shortly thereafter, is that Oskar doesn't like Ron, who I presume to be a father replacement figure of one sort or another (Full disclosure: I only just started Foer's book. And really, I don't mean to disparage him, only to demonstrate the anecdotal invasion. Because in the end, I'm just very jealous of the man). But more than this, so much information is bandied about: Oskar likes the Beatles. He likes drums, and tambourines. He's impressed with his tambourine ability. He owns a yo-yo.

And what do I learn about Oskar, overall? Very bloody little.

I have a problem, though. No matter how hard I try, I cannot avoid the anecdote. I try not to ask people questions too much, because their answers are far too often anecdotal. Yet to refuse to report unconnected information, or unsolicited opinions, would be to end the vast majority of conversation. It's a difficulty.

But not all is lost. Discourse matters, and the vitality of language can be reclaimed. So my admonishment to you, impressionable youths: don't talk about what you ate for breakfast, and what it tasted like, and how you felt at two in the morning (are you reading this, livejournal users?). Launch into grand rants at the drop of a hat, explain why you think what you think. Don't let that hipster's grimace scare you off - if you let him, he'll run all over you, and you'll be stuck learning about that time, last year, that he might have seen Kirsten Dunst on the street.

Collections

Since our little forum has been starving for several months now, I thought I'd offer up a little observation. But before we can come to it, we must raise a larger question, which this observation tries to answer.

How do we define ourselves today? In a world that is becoming more interconnected and more mobile, our identities become less stable. For most of us, the self is something of the utmost importance: there is nothing more important than the "I." But what allows us to utter "I"? What distinguishes one "I" from the innumerable other "I"s in the world? In earlier times when our positions in society were more fixed, we could establish our identities quite simply: for example, by economic class or by profession. But today we are given the gift of being able to change these factors, at least in theory. These things arise externally and are nothing but accidents of our being. Where then does our essence lie? In our talent? Our knowledge perhaps? Knowledge comes cheaply today; everybody has access to the vast store that we have accrued over the centuries. And our talent only places us within a larger group of the individuals of similar talent. So what stable source of self is left?

One possibility is the body. This, however, is problematic for several reasons. First, we like to believe that we are immortal, that there is some essence to us that exists beyond photographs and a corpse in a coffin. Furthermore, some of us are ugly and fat, and we can hardly think of ourselves as merely ugly and fat. There are some, of course, who comfortably associate ourselves with our bodies, but even in these cases, we are something greater, which is evidenced in our refusal to conceive of the prototypical "dumb blonde" as wholly human. The old Cartesian duality has still not left us, and we believe there is a soul independent of the body. Where?

We come at last to the observation: it seems to me that we define ourselves by our collections. Any profile that we come across on the internet is nothing but a list of lists. We list our favorite movies, our favorite music, our interests, our political affiliations, our favorite books and our favorite quotations. We seem to conceive of ourselves as nothing but haphazard collections of preferences and habits. Now, should we be concerned? After all, our combinations of preferences are unique, and these are truthfully the objects occupying the centers of our lives. Where is the problem?

The problem is that this is nothing but a generalization of the condemned concept of consumer identity, captured in the phrase "You are what you buy." Today, we are what we like. We make ourselves as critics, and think that every time we express a preference we are actively creating or asserting ourselves. Where is the original aspect of this? Preferences are transitive: we must prefer something, a something which is always external. We, then, are nothing but parasites off the leviathan of culture. We are virtually nothing. We are not parts of some greater culture; we do not contribute to it in any unique way. We are extraneous, created from without, and, existing outside ourselves.

Perhaps this is not really a problem. Perhaps this the way it's always been, and only now we are aware of it; I at least see no feasible alternative to it (at any rate, without adopting an aristocratic world-view... aristocracy... one can always hope). Nevertheless, it is somewhat dehumanizing -- after all, can we be nothing better than intellectual hedonists?

Today's Ontological Conundrum

I made the mistake this evening, being without much else to do, of watching the O.C.. Now, I do feel that given LowCulture's continued evisceration of the show, there is little need for Listen to Us to add anything (agree with them as we may).

But I find myself confused. Bear with me for a moment, I'll walk you through it. At the end of tonight's episode -- titled, of all things, "The Lonely Hearts Club" - Marissa wanders off to find Alex, who, of course, she finds. Now, I can't say that I've made any effort whatsoever to follow this show, so I'll give the show the benefit of the doubt and assume, that at some point in the past, these two characters did/said/&tc something to explain Marissa's "wanting to be around" Alex.

There's then some nonsense about waves and important events, and the two make out on the beach. Now, from what the O.C addicts around me have gibbered in their brief moments of lucidity, there's something about Alex and bisexuality. Fine. But best I can tell, Marissa's character was, for all intents and purposes, straight.

I suppose that part of me ought to be happy that society's mores have changed enough so that even FOX would be showing such encounters in prime time. Funny thing, though. I cannot imagine that the point was to make any statement about the fluidity of sexuality (which, of course, would be the implication when an otherwise straight character ups and hits on, and makes out with, another character of the same sex). I fear that the thinking was more along the lines of, "Damn. We have two very attractive actresses to work with here. Why don't we have them make out? That 18-24 male demographic might show a little more interest then."

Really. Sitting on the beach, waves lapping the sand, their short (oh, how short) skirts riding up ...that meaningless banter about tides ... giggle, giggle. Making out - are the boys watching? Giggle, giggle.

I’m sure they are.

Am I the only one that finds this a little offensive? Perhaps this all lies in the fact that I seem to be the only straight male in the country who doesn't find the prospect of two women kissing to be sexually toe-curling. But I have grown certain that for anyone willing to look, the media's examples of straight female characters acting just a wee bit gay (but, not, of course, to imply that the characters are gay, just well, for eye candy*) will be quite endemic. Take a look. It could be elucidating.

*For those who prefer to take unnecessary offense: my complaint is not with homosexual characters. Anything but. It's when female homosexuality (or perhaps, acts of female homosexuality) is openly used for the purposes of male aphrodisia. This doesn't strike me as positive. And as I said: I'm confused.

Notes from the Underground

Or: what I think about at 2am, while drinking Jack & Coke in some inane East Village "lounge."

Note 1. The drunk bourgeoisie are more easily convinced of their own worth than when sober. Thereby, Listen to Us resolves to explain the values of an enlightened aristocracy to more drunk people. Alcohol evidently undermines those silly notions of guilt and egalitarianism.

Note 2."Lounges" should not play music at a level that drowns out conversation. Also, why must every thrice-damned location in this city play repetitive hip-hop? If I want meaningless throbbing noise, I'll listen to trance.

Note 3. Evidently, what passes for dancing in most parts is little more than sexualized posing. This isn't to attack the practice. But if one can realize that there is no formal structure, and the entire point is to draw sexual attention to oneself, or respond to such attractions, then there remains no inherent reason why I should find it enjoyable. Dance all you want. Don't harrass me about my lack of desire to do so. Listen to Us notes that yes, this doesn't apply to swing, or salsa, or other formally defined dance styles. Fine. I'm building up enough desire to actually take swing lessons.

Note 4. Outright rejection of experiential content may not be conducive to social drinking. Further reflection necessary.