I’ve cut myself off from such meaningless digital stimuli but preserved my ability to answer texts or phone calls if necessary. (I’m too much of a millennial to actually leave the house without any phone.) I find myself looking more at my surroundings, which are particularly enjoyable in springtime, and I am more relaxed when I return from the excursions. When I switch the sim card back into my iPhone, the device seems momentarily absurd: an enormous screen filled with infinite entertainment and information that follows me wherever I go. Then I open all my usual apps in quick succession—e-mail, Instagram, Slack—to see what I’ve missed.
The rationale behind dumbphones isn’t lost on me but it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t appear to reach Generation X as a point of serious interest or concern, which is not to say it shouldn’t be of great concern but simply that it isn’t. Oh, well, whatever. Never mind.
Kimberley sent this to me earlier this evening. I’ve been waiting to stream TANGK until after we’ve torn the shrink from the LP but that’s starting to seem like unnecessary depravation. What a wonderful song!
I’m an outlier with regard to these statistics, which is to say they don’t really apply to me. It’s probably the way I seek music, which is usually to come upon a style or genre or artist and then dig in exhaustively. Another factor is determined by what kind of music I want to make myself. So, for example, the last 10 or 15 years, roughly ages 40-55, have been a time of breathless discovery, ranging from West African and high life music to Salsa to the drone compositions of Lamonte Young and Tony Conrad to creative and improvised music of all sorts. I listened to almost none of this stuff prior to my 30s, a decade spent in discovery of other kinds of improvisation, jazz, americana, post-rock, and more. What does ring true for me is “From 30 onward, we listen to more music outside the mainstream.” I think the statement originally refers to listening to music from mainstreams past, but in my case its application is my journey into much farther out territory than I used to occupy.
I imagine that some of the despair the author faces stems from listening habits and streaming as one would have listened to radio, from trusting the algorithm(s) to do the legwork.
But it’s still interesting to think about, to consider how much of what we’re after sticks with us from earlier and more formative times. I’m doing this myself in a way with My Life with Peter Gabriel, following a single artist through my own life and music, examining the formation and extension of that influence.
The fact that we’re still arguing about O.J. shows that we haven’t come as far as we should have, in part because too many white people misunderstand the reaction among many Black people to his acquittal in the first place.
What they miss is that if Black people cared about Simpson’s trial and the way it exposed cracks in the criminal-justice system, they never cared much about Simpson the man.
Disappointed to find that Shabaka’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace has been removed from Bandcamp. It’s still worth linking to, however, so you can find it on your preferred streaming platform here.
I joined Jawbox in 1992. It wasn’t my first band but it was my first mature band, the first group that was already on its way, touring, making records. It was not only a new practical level for me but a new social one as well. The band was known and popular. It was a breakout situation for me and I was anxious. My first couple of months with the group were spent learning the songs. Our singer and leader, J. Robbins was touring with his friends in Pegboy and we used the time at home to get me settled in with Kim (Coletta, bass) and Bill (Barbot, guitar and vocals).
I knew the songs as a fan so rehearsing them was more a matter of getting a handle on the arrangements than finding my place in them, a goal we postponed until J. got home. By that time, nine weeks later, I was ready to run through the set. Looking back, I established myself quickly, and if memory serves my first show in the band was in July of that year and we left for tour immediately after that.
Me and Bill, St. Andrew’s Hall, Detroit, MI, 1992
We wrote, in those short months, two songs as a group, a new and exciting turn for the band. Previously, J. more or less wrote the material and presented it to the band fully formed and arranged. One of the new songs, “Jackpot Plus!” was, in some ways, as much of a straight-up post-hardcore song as we ever played. Like many young players, I was creating my parts to suit the genre as opposed to molding the genre to suit my playing. Two relevant drummers in particular, Peter Moffett from Government Issue and John McEntire from Bastro were on my mind, and though I no doubt failed to rise to their level, I think my beats are a short step away from “Jaded Eyes” and “Recidivist.” What I wanted was to sound like them.
The other song we wrote was called “Motorist.” It was a new kind of song for the band, a new feel. It marked my first effort to rip off Manu Katché, Peter Gabriel’s drummer from So onward. It was, like many such efforts, a failure. I was hoping for something along the lines of “Digging in the Dirt,” which was released the month before on Peter Gabriel’s Us the eagerly anticipated follow-up to So.
There was a lesson in this failure: not sounding like Katché led directly to a reliance on my own voice and feel on the drums. And I noticed it. Whether or not I sounded like anyone else became immaterial and even something to be avoided. That is, I think “Motorist” was the first time I sounded like myself. From that point on, I brought influences I knew I could not reproduce, just to see what would happen in the group.
We re-recorded the song (“Jackpot Plus!,” too) for For Your Own Special Sweetheart and the sort of refinements we were looking for individually and as a group are audible. The production is more focused, more in tune with the kind of energy we sought in our live performances. And the feel of it is shared, common among us. By the time we recorded FYOSS we were functioning much more as a single unit, feeling our performances together instead of playing by rote.
I found that almost anytime I introduced one of Peter Gabriel’s or Manu Katché’s rhythmic strains into the band, it warped or escalated or shifted into a new and original feel. To reiterate at the risk of redundancy, the distinction between influence as a site of imitation and influence as a site of creation changed everything. I don’t think I quite knew this before. And as our music became increasingly reliant on the drumming, these strains came to guide much more of what we were writing. As was true for the band as a whole, this was the moment I transitioned from being a musician who sought to make sounds like those I loved (imitation) to one who sought to make sounds that originated in my own playing (creation). Like PG says in “Sledgehammer,” paraphrased: I shed my skin. This was the new stuff.
