Courtesy of The NIN Hotline (like CNN for people who know every word to “March of the Pigs”) comes a link to this Pitchfork interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and the DFA. Ostensibly a what-do-you-think-of-these-songs feature, it ends up being a fairly lengthy rumination on Murphy’s part about the anxiety of influence. Here’s a quote I liked a lot:
I think a canon is important, but you have to grow into it. That stuff can overwhelm you. You’re 24 years old, you’re in a band, and suddenly people are saying, “Hey, you guys sound a lot like Chrome. You should check out Chrome,” or “You guys sound a lot like Roxy Music,” and you’re like, “I’ve never heard them,” and you go find it and it can just overwhelm you. It can destroy a band. Because it’s powerful stuff. I mean, the Strokes are swimming up some incredibly serious stuff: Velvet Underground. Television. It’s kinda soul-crushing in a way to go listen to “Perfect Day” and say, “I’m gonna go write a song like that,” and it’ll be fucking horrible by comparison.
He also talks about the difference between Iggy Pop appropriating “You Can’t Hurry Love” for “Lust for Life” vs. Jet appropriating “Lust for Life” for “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”; the DFA’s strange pseudo-rivalries with the Rapture and Death from Above 1979; his nuanced and even-handed take on Trent Reznor (hence the NIN Hotline link), and more. I know the highly referential remix aesthetic has come in for some potshots around these parts lately, but if you’re interested in that sort of thinking at all, this is worth a read.
Pitchfork also has its review of with teeth up (again, courtesy of The NIN Hotline, which does not have permalinks–people, this is not hard). It’s laden with the kind of annoying I’m-too-snarky-for-this-album silliness that I usually associate with Spin‘s worse moments (or, at this point, anything from Rolling Stone), but I still thought it was interesting how the review points out that, where Reznor was once the maker of angry-teen music (what Murphy calls “lifeline music” in the interview linked above), he was supplanted by groups like Linkin Park, who stripped the music of both sex and existentialism and made it represent a very specific, personalized, journal-esque form of upsetment with one’s girlfriend or classmates. (Perhaps the smut migrated directly into hip-pop, leaving mook-rock to corner the anger market it inherited not just from Reznor and Cobain but from straightforward gangsta rap as well?)
While we’re on the subject, All Music Guide’s review of with teeth puts its finger right on my main problem with the album, namely that it does not feel like an album it should have taken five years to make. This goes double when its astoundingly laborious predecessor, the fragile, is taken into consideration. I like with teeth–I’ve probably listened to it two dozen times by now–but then, I really do have a direct line to Trent Reznor plugged into my brain someplace. It still feels to me like less effort went into creating this entire album than went into almost any one track off the fragile–“just like you imagined,” for example. Even if you were to remove virtuoso Bowie alums Mike Garson and Adrian Belew from that track, more would still be going on in just one of its crescendos than on songs 2-6 from wt.
Question: Does the reference-laden aesthetic of Kill Bill have anything in common with the reference-laden aesthetic of glam rock? I think too much of KB is outright homage to qualify Tarantino for the pasticheur tradition I’ve talked about in the past, but I wonder if there’s something there that explains my affinity toward both.
Also on the Kill Bill front, in one of his several posts on the subject Jon Hastings says the following:
But sometimes I get the sense that Sean (and others who share his anti-anti-nerd stance) won