WHAT J-ROCK GAVE ME

Once upon a time it was the summer, and I was thirteen years old. I was going to be in marching band in August, I had just gotten my first cell phone, and the myriad possibilities of girls and late nights and rule-breaking were splayed out in front of me, waiting to be seized. This, however, made me no less weak to the vice of the 9-to-15-year-old boy: Shōnen anime, serial Japanese cartoons about hotheaded young fighters. Maybe the obsession stemmed from watching DIgimon in fourth grade, but by the time I was headed for high school I was watching a program in Japanese with fan-made subtitles that had not yet been marketed in America. It was called Naruto.

Eventually they did market my favorite TV show to American eight-year-olds, but back in those days I was riding high, swapping CDs of four episodes at a time with five other teenagers and trying to figure out which ninja school I would practice. I regard it as the nerdiest time of my life (and again, this was before I started marching band), but in return for that squandered social capital I got to hear this song a few times every day. 

Anime theme songs, particularly the Japanese originals, tend to be hammy and outdated as a rule, and that's not to say Asian Kung-Fu Generation’s "Haruka Kanata" isn't goofily dramatic, but somehow it's in lockstep with the young-loser-itching-to-prove-himself baggage the Naruto character carried. It had the heft of emotional punk rock behind it, owing quite a bit in retrospect to bands like Jawbreaker. Quite simply, the song gave voice to how I felt as a relatively annoying teenager, and how the only thing I really wanted was anything other than my life.

For me "Haruka Kanata" became a classic, a song where I can sing every word despite barely grasping, through awful translation, the shadow of its meaning. Of course, I had the vast (and, regarding matters international, rather vague) Internet to go even deeper. Eventually I had an album on my 256-megabyte Rio mp3 player that had three different transliterations of its title. I had no clue what was happening, only that I thoroughly enjoyed the noise and the thrust of it all.

Eventually I’d figure out they were a band of college friends who made a few indie records before signing to a Sony subsidiary, a reasonably successful group still cranking out records as of 2013. They even host their own bilingual music festival every year in Japan, featuring American and British bands along with national talent. Despite all this, though, they haven’t garnered as much of a following Stateside; while I’m inclined to blame that on the language barrier, I think it’s also because they’re similar to the punk and indie rock we crank out here. People probably expect Asian stuff to be weirder or more divorced from Western cultural convention—take Dir en Grey for instance, who have headlined at least one U.S. tour with their gruesome bastardization of the “Visual Kei” movement. Since they’re operating in familiar cultural territory for us, a rock band like AKFG won’t shock or excite people just because they’re Japanese, and that may be a disadvantage here in America.

Regardless, I may have exoticized them, back when I first thought anything Japanese was cool (and at times, vice versa). After a while, though, I stopped interpreting the band’s foreign nature as a sign of unique mystery, and appreciated what their music offered me as a lover of music in general. It taught me about language, about the contorting songwriters do to cram their message into a harmonic context; the lead singer managed to fit the endless syllabic stream of Japanese lyrics into repeating verses, a habit he may have learned writing the band's early songs in English. It was also the first time I'd heard songs that demanded reflection and encouraged introspection, making me wonder what feelings within me a song like "Mugen Glider" was dredging up.

More than anything directly experiential, it taught me to hunt and to stay hungry. It made me work to discover music I could fall in love with, even if someone was making it half a world away. I gave a classmate ten DVDs a few years after outgrowing Naruto, and he handed me back missing volumes in my encyclopedic view of rock music, bands that no doubt could top anything Western I was hearing at the time. Not as dire or poetic as Soviet teenagers swapping samizdat punk tapes, but it still seemed valuable to me, because it's hard work liking something that isn't immediately popular. Before Pitchfork--hell, before Myspace--I had J-Rock.

Call me oblivious, call me a late bloomer. I'm not ashamed to say that some part of me still thanks that ninja cartoon every time I fall in love with a rock song, and every time I find a gem in some hidden corner of YouTube. Without it I'd still be memorizing Linkin Park lyrics, hearing music but not feeling it, not digesting or understanding it. Surely not writing about it. 

DAN DEACON IS ILLUMINATI

How can you still not understand? You've seen the Pravda articles about Lady Gaga, so it's not like you don't know. She's just one of the more obvious ones, but so many of these charlatans are in on it too. The modern pop machine unsubtly reminds all of us of our bondage under their rule, either in a Brave New World prioritized-pleasure way or just in demonstration of our world's tidy paganization and ritualistic defilement. They bury me, and my fellow crusaders for truth, in peals of laughter because they know we are absolutely right. Above all else they have no fear and no mercy, and they hold all of the strings in their skeletal fingers.

Yes, the Illuminati! Duh, asshole!

Well I've been watching the waves, you know, trying to keep tabs on them as their ruthless brainwashing content goes live against the citizens, and I think one more Person of Media Interest is among them. He seems to have been a relative sleeper these years, frolicking around at Bang on a Can and slowly encouraging that most dangerous wave of destruction—the "Hipster" phenomenon—around this fine nation.

But now there can be no doubt. Dan Deacon, “Waiting-Man” to the Devil, is a member of The 100% Grade-A Card-Carrying Ain't-No-Doubt-About-It Illuminati…

Okay, okay, the name is just the Illuminati, jeez! It's called hyperbole. Read a book sometime. Or actually don't, because most of them have encrypted messages that access your subconscious. They activate the mind control mechanisms in the fluoride from the tap water. And for the last time, no, a Brita filter will not help, you have to catch rainwater, except when the chemical dispersant planes are out. We can go over that one later.

Anyway, this guy totally started making the proper young people of America do an acid dance for Satan when he unleashed this monstrosity:

His Rolodex (or at least his laptop) brims with the sort of company only an agent of the New World Order could keep. PSY, the Korean operative whose eyes remain covered for his having seen the powerful truth? Grimes, who offers herself as an apocalyptic odalisque, in whose falsely virgin womb grows the endgame of all their spastic distraction? Lil' Wayne, upon whom their deeply encoded sigils are inscribed, who advocates the use of intellect-suppressing "illegal" drugs? They all sound off within a space of five minutes in Deacon's twisted fantasia, each voice blurring together into legion.

In that same five minutes he provokes thematic conflict for those who pay closer attention, playing the localized Koreana of "Gangnam Style" off of the pentatonic Orientalism of  "Oblivion" to split the difference between cultural pride and performance. Deacon is unmooring essential intercultural distinctions to demonstrate (or transmogrify?) the identical melanges of eighth-notes that comprise the world's pop canon. Why does he demand that we forfeit our appreciation of our American identities to this indistinct mode? Because he wants us to drink their Kool-Aid! Because he must honor his overlords with our addled minds, leading us to Moloch on a road paved with glittery snare hits and Nicki Minaj's discarded hair extensions!

Christ, stop eating all my canned beans! Can you not hear how nigh the end is? Am I not getting this across properly? This filthy fallen cherub named his latest album “America” only in provocation! Not only this, but the “music” if you must call it so, clangs along like a Middle Eastern bazaar fed through a talking robot. It pulls and pushes you across its computerized torture rack as if an occult hand were dangling you over the very mouth of Hell. And that's only the “music,” however reluctantly I afford it that designation.    

No, Deacon is not of Commandant Gaga's “haus” of vapidity—he refuses to cloak his lyrical prophecy of the coming darkness in talk of love and fame. "True Thrush" (its title a nod to the infection spreading from his mouth into the ears of the masses) makes frequent mention of the “beast in his brain,” as in all brains, which when harnessed will prevent its “turning gold,” or devolution into material wealth. He insists that this disruption of the economic status quo will be "just fine," because, "we don't own the world around us," as the morning star of the Illuminati does.

And that video, the endless repetition and replacement, the subtle mutation of a symbolic overthrow! A whirlwind of participants file through this occult chamber, each setting up a face, hanging a portrait, and then commending each other on a nation well-defiled. The segments fly by, de- and re-programming the viewer into submission, but one freeze-frame holds multitudes.

In this iteration the portrait is of Odie, the dog from Garfield. Jon Davis’s Illuminati ties are well-documented and not worth recounting to you, but it is rather obvious that the great demon cat represents the Illuminati ruling caste, mocking all below him, while Odie is the disgusting stereotype of the idiotic sheeple. To celebrate this dunce is to denounce the freedom of the American people at large.

The false idol raised is—no surprise here—the All-Seeing Eye, their omniscient idol of worship that represents the Illuminati’s quest to oversee a dystopic future. Did you see Lord of the Rings? Yeah, like that. Anyway, I drew the triangle for you. Look up the back of a dollar bill and that same image is there. It even says TRUE above it just so you know it’s what they see as the be-all and, in their minds rather hopefully, end-all.

Anyway, they give each other the devil’s salute and the film keeps rolling. But what about that little image on the table? The one that says A L I E N? Yeah! Dan Deacon isn’t just Illuminati, he’s pandering to the Reptilians too!

...You know, the Reptilians? There’s one in the Queen of England and in Barack Obama and pretty much everybody important; they get into the back of people’s heads...no, I hadn’t noticed your new haircut.

Well, shit.

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

I hereby resolve the following (note that resolutions are not legally binding but are subject to deep regret upon failure of compliance):

FIRSTLY, to write clandestine letters to Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, and Gillian Gilbert, in order that I may surreptitiously mend the acrimony between them and Peter Hook for the purpose of a 2013 New Order 'classic lineup' reunion. What with the geriatric 12-12-12 circuit for aging British rockers going as full-throttle as their prostate issues can allow, some Hacienda-esque blowouts could offer a fuller celebration of the fine synth revivalist work now reaching a fever pitch.

CONCORDANTLY, to obtain and dissect The Night of the Silver Sun, the debut novel of one such synth revivalist, Twin Shadow's George Lewis, Jr. Of course, that is predicated on the fact that it will in fact emerge this coming year. Based on the excerpt that's been puzzling me since August, it's either going to be an anachronistic hootenanny or total proof of the dude's cocaine-addled and opalescent vacuity. Whatever happens I will probably have dreams for months of shredding a homemade chopper down the tungsten steps of a cryo-dome, and will totally ignore the fact that I do not live in the Fifties, the dystopic future, or their nutso Eighties love child.

NEXT, to steel myself against the possibility of My Bloody Valentine's next record being a complete dud for which I should never have been waiting for my entire conscious life.

FOURTHLY, to dig up all the fascinating music writing that the Internet (or, more specifically, Tumblr) buries in fandom and art blogs, and more closely follow the fine work that Lindsay Zoladz, Trevor Link, Nitsuh Abebe (if he ever again updates "a grammar"), and others have been offering analytical freaks like me who only want to read their film textbooks over and over again. Zoladz’s Ordinary Machines is offering one of the freshest music columns on the internet right now too.

FINALLY, to reaffirm my dedication to strolling down the manifold path of musical experience; to find the trailheads leading off into as-yet dark woods, the promise of 2013 pooling underfoot and swaying overhead; to hear the voices echoing across the valley, pushing against each other and knotting into news-feeds, into convergent and protracted lists of Top 10, 20, 50, 100; to see and encourage new art, that it might be empowered to take its city or the world; to embrace in the coming year the culture of dreamers that makes what I do possible.

POSTSCRIPTUALLY, to eat more kale and listen to more hip-hop, probably simultaneously. 

KANYE AND ME: EMOTIONAL DIRECTNESS + INTERACTION IN MUSIC CULTURE

Can we talk about Kanye West for a minute? A lot of people I meet, as soon as he comes up in conversation, roll their eyes and say "I hate him," and I can't be surprised by that. To some he represents the nadir of egocentric wealth-obsessed rap music; his "Watch the Throne" collaboration with Jay-Z spawned not only a video in which the two chopped a Maybach for shits, but also world tour shows that included up to 12 consecutive performance of "N****s in Paris." For others, he taints the pop music discourse with rowdy, self-important antics and narcissistic delusions of greatness, snatching the crown as the new King of Pop and jamming it on his own head like Napoleon at his coronation. He is also black man unafraid of acknowledging and discussing race and racism, which no doubt bristles a few folks in the states he often flies over. So crude and thuggish, saying that N word all the time! How dare he accuse George W. Bush of racism!  Hell, even President Obama, perhaps the most influential hip-hop fan in the world, had some choice words after the Taylor Swift MTV incident: "That young lady seems like a perfectly nice person, she's getting her award… What's he doing up there? He's a jackass."

And while some of the criticisms are unfounded and unfair, Obama more or less has it right—he is entirely a jackass, a guy who constantly asks, "you mad?" But this video, from another bygone awards show, captures why people pay attention to him nonetheless.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJHWFXP3fe4

Kanye's hyperbole and self-aggrandizement are not part of a calculated performance or affect. He doesn't make people hate him for the notoriety and subsequent sales, though the curiosity he inspires can't hurt his numbers. All he's really doing is speaking his mind and talking about his own feelings and experiences, as lavish as they might be, and letting people decide for themselves whether his music and his other creative contributions make him worthy of being paid attention to. He has been enjoying his moment since that Grammy win, and his visibility is a testament to that. Not only that, we'll also wonder what stunt he may have pulled, what remark he may have made about that Grammy, just because we can see the mechanism that propels his incorrigibility.

The penetrating honesty that marks Yeezy's presence is, to me, a sign of the times more than his mind. A slew of economic and cultural changes have disallowed the mythologizing that accompanied success in the music industry. The mystery of being presented a few great albums and then given the impetus to puzzle out their mastermind was a major-label-money proposition, and for up-and-comers that mystery more likely means obscurity, which can mean death. Kanye fought hard to get a deal and make "The College Dropout," forming his personality in the public consciousness before the album caught attention, and that kind of exposure is what new musicians thrive on nowadays. Humanity breeds loyalty, which can secure their reputation on an individual basis.

As much as I feel like I know an artist like Kanye, though, all I can do is receive what I'm given. It's thoroughly unlikely that he'll ever be made aware of my existence at all, so there isn't a connection between us besides what I perceive. Though that allows for a degree of interpretive flexibility on my part, and a broader spectrum of reactions to his self and his art in general, it also makes for what still amounts to a curated experience being fed to the public. Acknowledgement, even in brief, gives more weight to that accessibility, and it's just not available on the scale that Kanye's operating.

+++

I went to a show at a bar [last weekend/recently] and saw Fury Things, a band I'd discovered through a tag I track on Tumblr, play out for probably their fifth time. Their debut EP hits a lot of my shoegazey pedal-stomping soft spots, in particular the track "DAY.”. Somehow it distills a profound melancholy into three and a half explosive minutes and twelve words: "Sometimes you stop and realize/ That there is nothing left inside/ You die." They can pertain to almost anything, and yet (or maybe therefore) they can cut pretty raw.

    http://furythings.bandcamp.com/track/day

The trio crashed their way through a half-hour set, chatting intermittently about what to play next and a squealing stompbox. "DAY" got a big hand as the closer, and all the songs had the same precision that their recordings do, but the firmest impression I got from them was that they could step back into the crowd and be indistinct from anyone else in the audience. Though they didn't project their personalities like a superstar might, they shared an enthusiasm with the people who came out to see them play. Sure enough, they joined the crowd watching the next few bands, blending in.

Later I introduced myself to two of them and told them how much I enjoyed their music, and the frontman Kyle gave me a CD apropos of only my enthusiasm. We shouted over the setup-break music about Scotland and Minneapolis and their no-frills bash-out-some-songs approach onstage (a later band had a smoke machine and a lighting rig, the tenacity of which they admired). Though the talk was pretty small, it was good to meet some people who are getting their art out there.

That, to me, is the greatest good an artistic community can do--put those of us who consume, consider, absorb, and fall for art among those who devote themselves to making it. So go see a show and get and give some validation, because you're not going to get it from me.

WHY I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE "LOCAL BUSINESS"

Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus doesn't bother fucking around at the beginning of "Local Business," the band's latest megaphone blowout of young New Jerseyan emotional anguish. "Ecce Homo" sprawls, but it still penetrates, its triumphant organ anchored in clean power chords and the opening assertion that "Okay, I think by now we've established/ Everything is inherently worthless/ And there's nothing in the universe," setting the bar for his drastic internal monologue. Stickles demonstrates on "Ecce Homo" his penchant for universalizing personal sentiment into truth, which had, on previous LP "The Monitor," transmuted the Civil War into a diaristic shoutalong. The business of "Local Business" is so local that it concerns Stickles' body— and his demands of himself are often thrust upon his audience, his untamed voice croaking "spit it out" over and over and over on "My Eating Disorder."



The year-end lists might have a tough time finding a place for "Local Business", which despite its frankness is otherwise full of innocuous Springsteen-via-Superchunk histrionics. That, however, assumes its purpose is necessarily to grip critics or evangelize to the uninitiated. Knowing Stickles, the LP could just as easily be another update for those who have already been on board, for those who are more friends than fans. His stream-of-consciousness has, since the band's debut, been a blend of literary regurgitation and direct personal writing, basically “fear and loathing in mahwah nj dot tumblr dot com.” What does melodic innovation have to do with laying your soul bare? It's not the point of "Local Business" or any of the band's other music, of the work of many similar songwriters.



This video called "Will We Ever Run Out of New Music?" explains that there are 79 billion possible melodies in popular music, a number far larger than the approximately 130 million known written songs. Yet we hear music that sounds aesthetically, if not melodically, similar with a far greater frequency, because we're pulled in certain directions by language, cultural trends, or aesthetic influence, whatever principles guide the renowned musicians of the time. We learn by repetition and we grow our purview by degrees, so there's no reason that a familiar blend of rock music can't be worthwhile in 2012. Titus Andronicus, though they may not be pushing boundaries as far as tastemakers are concerned, are quite welcome to the place they occupy. If their concoction is inspiring or even just cathartic, the creative impulse in them--as in Patrick Stickles--has transcendence over the aesthetic form its expression takes.

ON AGAINST ME! AND LAURA JANE GRACE

When Against Me! jumped on board at Sire Records, it seemed more drastic than some other band making a similar sellout deal. Former fans upset with the band didn't just care that more mall shoppers would hear the songs; they were upset that malls would sell the songs in the first place. Laura Jane Grace's early dalliance with anarchist politics, back when she started the group and was still calling herself Tom Gabel, framed her choice to include the band in a capitalist organization as a betrayal.

The contrarian and frank nature of so much of Grace's personality and writing in those days was what spoke to many appreciators, even those who weren't anarchists or even punks. Even I—fifteen years old, totally boring, virtually apolitical, and fresh off the opiate that was Top 40—found solace in the songs.

This song told me everything about punk rock, because no punk I'd met could or wanted to explain it to me. A guy named Paolo played it at a coffeehouse show in my town and it became my credo. I'm sure if I were someone who'd already been a part of that lifestyle I would have felt at home in Grace's words. The song didn't even make an attempt to declare or defend punkness, something that set alarm bells off for me when I got the Good Charlotte album at a wizened twelve years of age. "Reinventing Axl Rose" was for me as much as anybody, and it laid out a strategy by which kind humans could agree to live.

I didn't understand until the next .mp3 that this simple utopian vision was borne of an anarchist conviction, but even in the more directly political songs Grace had avoided being oppositional and preachy. If I were actually living among anarchists, it would have held so much more significance, but I was a suburban teenager for better and for worse. Even so, I respected the ideological content on some level, and the level-headedness with which it was represented.

In the five following years I paid little attention to the band, but then I read a review of the album "White Crosses" and I realized why.

The name of the song implied Grace had written off her old views as childish, disrespecting the older Against Me! music in ways, and saying "the revolution was a lie" was no way to appease the TRU PUNX on the message boards. The lyrics made a good argument—that no philosophy is more important than one's own personal experiential understanding of the world—but their presentation and the circumstances of their development were blasphemous to those who oppose institutional government, and alienating to those who had appreciated the optimism behind a song like "Reinventing Axl Rose". I couldn't be bothered to hear "I Was A Teenage Anarchist" twice.

Then Grace came to Rolling Stone to announce her transition and I realized there was something I'd missed. My personal understanding of the music was developed under the assumption that Grace had been a cisgender white man singing to an audience of cisgender white people like me. I listened to Laura's music for a second time that was more like a first time. What did I hear?

"Beyond a gender, race, and class/ We can find what really holds us back" ("Reinventing Axl Rose"): This has always seemed like a lyric about transcendence, about everyone seeing past their differences and personal idiosyncrasies to improve their community. In this case Grace was perhaps being more personal than listeners expected. Now, past the anxiety her gender dysphoria caused her, she has a chance to effect change for others in the same situation, and encourage society at large to get over their apprehensions about people like her.

"In the depths of their humanity/ All I saw was bloodless ideology"..."They set their rifle sights on me/ Narrow visions of autonomy/ You want me to surrender my identity" ("I Was a Teenage Anarchist"): Despite a radical formulation for society and politics, the anarchist community did not hold compassion for its own, including Grace. She demands individual respect, something they wouldn't offer her as someone outside their normative vision.

"Stop/ Take some time to think/ Figure out what's important to you/ You gotta make a serious decision" ("Stop!"): The universality of the internal conflict in this song has specific resonance in Grace's history—it was written around the time Against Me! signed with Sire, and she attempted to reject her identity and act male. It stands to reason that she may have privately questioned that decision.

"I don't know what I believe in/ I don't know where I belong/ So I scream at the top of my lungs/ And I run in every direction" ("Lost and Searching in America")- Another description of a ubiquitous sensation that has more pointed implications in light of Grace's story.

"Because of the shame I associate with vulnerability/ I am numbing myself completely" ("Because of the Shame"): The song addresses the death of a friend, the chorus discussing Grace's coping mechanism, but the fact that she associates, or associated, vulnerability with shame is a sign of stoicism that's in line with masculine performance. It's telling that this is the narrator's way of dealing, and that it's painful.

"Confessing childhood secrets/ Of dressing up in women's clothes/ Compulsions you never knew/ The reasons to" ("Searching for a Former Clarity"): What seemed like an anecdote ended up sounding more like a confession. One fan's response to this lyric was the lynchpin of Grace's decision to come out.

Queer readings of these songs were never necessary; they appealed to me and to thousands of other listeners on an emotional level that didn't require a sexual or gendered scheme. That doesn't mean, however, that it's pointless to see the ways in which Grace's struggles affected Against Me!'s music, which is often both autobiographical and direct. Rethinking the band's back catalog, and undoing assumptions of normativity, instilled in me a new respect and enthusiasm for someone whom I'd written off. Laura Jane Grace has had the strength to be so publicly true to herself for so long, though we may not have noticed; she's in a band that can play loud and hard every night and that's all that's mattered the whole time.