Last year a friend sent me a link to Dylan Hears a Who, a mysterious and wonderful collection of songs that set the words of Dr. Seuss to music in the style of vintage Bob Dylan. Then some lawyers for the estate of Dr. Seuss got involved, and the site was taken down. Dan Brekke summed up the affair in Salon.

It's a shame that, unless you downloaded them at the time, you can't listen to these awesome recordings anymore. Of course, you could acquire them via Bittorrent, using this torrent file. But that would be wrong.

I feel kind of lame linking to a Pitchfork review. But I also feel kind of psyched: look, they gave Let It Be a perfect 10! O ambivalence! Update, now that I've heard it: The remastered version sounds great, and Let It Be is still all-time. Let's hope these reissues prompt Sire to remaster Tim, the Mats' major-label debut and perhaps the worst-sounding great album I own.

Indie-rock smackdown! First Stephen Malkmus, in Spin, says:

For all the mistakes that were made marketing Pavement, it comes down to the song; and the song ["Cut Your Hair"] was pretty good, but it just wasn't the song of the time. The Offspring song ["Come Out and Play"], "Cannonball" by the Breeders -- those were bigger songs people could get behind.

Kim Deal's response, in Time Out New York, seems to me a bit of an overreaction:

I liked Pavement. But if he keeps fucking smacking his mouth off about me, I’m going to end up not being able to listen to any of their fucking records again. Anyway, I thought, God, man, “Cut Your Hair” isn’t as good of a song as “Cannonball,” so fuck you. How’s that? Your song was just a’ight, dawg.

Fact-checking top music critics' assertions about digital audio file formats, second in a series: Sasha Frere-Jones writes:

I am using these posts to lead into a topic that I am going to beat senseless this year: the fidelity of digital files.... For instance, songs are burned onto traditional CDs in a format called AIFF.

This, I'm afraid, is totally false. Songs are burned onto traditional CDs in a format called Red Book. When those songs are extracted, losslessly, onto Mac computers (or a few others, such as Silicon Graphics workstations), they may take the form of AIFF files. Sasha: perhaps you should study up a little before starting in with the senseless-beating.

Slate's Taylor Clark on the disappearance of Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum.

I would not have imagined that I could be surprised and disappointed at the critical standards prevailing at Maxim, but somehow I am.

Dumb musicological thing: The Guided By Voices song “My Valuable Hunting Knife” is in one very specific way the exact opposite of “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd.

The hook from “Comfortably Numb” depends on a colloquial mispronunciation. The title phrase gets exactly four notes, sung on even triplets, which requires Roger Waters to sing it with the t before the r: “cumf-terb-lee,” as opposed to “cum-fer-tub-lee.” (I know no one pronounces comfortable correctly, but you can bet that if Cole Porter wanted to use it in a lyric, he’d give it four notes.)

“My Valuable Hunting Knife” does exactly the opposite: valuable gets four notes all to itself (“val-yoo-uh-bull”). Robert Pollard emphasizes the unnaturally elongated pronunciation by (a) setting those four syllables to an up-and-down pattern of pitches that can’t be elided or slurred, and (b) singing a three-note melisma on my right before it: “mah-ah-aye val-yoo-uh-bull.”

Thinking about this has made me think once more about the ubiquity of the pronunciation “cumf-terb-ull,” which is something I’ve probably thought about on twenty separate occasions in my life. Of course, the main reason it has achieved such hegemony is that it’s easier to say. But is it possible that its adoption was encouraged by the way the first two syllables of comf-terb-ull rhyme with disturb – that the mind unconsciously recognizes comf-terb as an antonym for disturb and perturb?

If you can watch this all the way to the end without getting even a little choked up, I don't think I can be friends with you.

Indianapolis, why don't you sing? I am reading This Is Your Brain on Music, which is fascinating but also tantalizingly inconclusive. I suspect that reflects the current state of neuroscience -- we know just enough about the brain's mechanics to have our interest triggered, but not enough to satisfy our curiosity. I'm still waiting to learn why perhaps the most thrilling of all neuromusical experiences is hearing a song you love successfully transposed into a different genre. E.g. this, via Emily Gould.

The song remains the same

David Brooks has addressed himself to the subject of rock music, and as you'd expect it's a total Rothgasm.

Brooks's problem is that rock is no longer a monolithic entity centered on megastars like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, or Bruce Springsteen, because "there are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock." In making his case, Brooks pulls off a pretty incredible rhetorical trick. Watch as he explains the fragmentation of the pop-music audience:

Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices... And there’s the rise of the mass educated class. People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.

In other words, the fact that people are listening to a variety of different musicians and genres indicates that they are both (a) sheep who have been brainwashed by "music industry executives," and (b) posers eager to show off their specialness. Whereas back when everyone was grooving on Led Zep together, they were all free-choosing individuals, immune to marketing and peer pressure. Yes, that makes sense.

Brooks trots out Steven Van Zandt to bolster his credibility, but Van Zandt doesn't seem very interested in Brooks's fragmentation narrative. He makes a different argument: the familiar "today's music sucks in comparison to the music that was popular during the years when I was fourteen through twenty-two, which happened to be the greatest music ever made" argument.

Van Zandt "argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock." This is a bit like saying that if World War II were fought today it would be over in five minutes because the Germans would be on the same side as the British and the Americans. If the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because everyone would think they were ripping off the Rolling Stones.

Hilariously, Van Zandt has

drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

Good idea, Miami Steve -- let's sit the kids down in the classroom together, the ones who listen to Justin Timberlake and the ones who listen to Radiohead, the ones who like Lil Wayne and the ones who like the Get-Up Kids, the one who's into Ornette Coleman and the one who's into Deicide and the one who just borrowed her parents' Dylan tapes, and let's explain to them that they should all start listening to the Allman Brothers, because they are the inheritors of a long conversation that culminates with bearded white men making their guitars go hoodly-hoodly-hooooo! I bet that'll work real well.

I got my back against the record machine: "So what happens when you’re Van Halen, the last song in your set list is the million-seller 'Jump' with its synthesizer-keyboard opening … and the recording you’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K?"

A couple Springsteen links from that Carl Wilson piece linked below (which you should go read now, if you haven't): a nice essay on the resurgence of Bossmania from the Toronto Star, and, uh, footage of Bruce onstage last Sunday. With Win and Régine of Arcade Fire. Doing "Keep the Car Running." Holy fuck.

Beyond the pale

Sasha Frere-Jones was an interestng and useful choice to be the New Yorker's music critic. It would have been easy to imagine the magazine running a column that served as an extension of the Nonesuch/Starbucks/KCRW "music for grownups" movement, reviewing new releases by Norah Jones and Elvis Costello and Wilco as though that were all there was to know about popular music in the 21st century. Instead, SFJ explicates country and crunk and mashups and Mariah Carey for the curious general reader. It is not inevitable that the New Yorker would include writing about these kinds of music; SFJ only makes it seem that way.

But he has this one hobbyhorse, and it is called indie rock.

The idea that indie rock abjures those aspects of rock 'n' roll that derive most directly from black musical forms is neither new nor exceptionable, and the story of indie rock's move away from blackness could be told in a non-pejorative way. In its classic form, indie rock is played on straight downbeats rather than with syncopation (compare Kim Deal's basslines to Keith Richards's guitar parts). Indie singers and guitarists typically don't flatten the third, fifth, and seventh notes of the scale in imitation of the blues. ("In the Velvets we had a rule," Lou Reed once said. "Anyone who played a blue note would be fined.") And archetypal indie bands don't groove -- they don't generate rhythmic tension from the interplay of disparate elements, in the manner pioneered by James Brown (although there are important exceptions here, which we'll get to).

This tendency doesn't begin with what we think of as modern indie, and it certainly didn't start in the '90s. Musically it's the heritage of punk. Perhaps SFJ doesn't want to blame punk; he dodges the question by focussing on the Clash, who blended "pure" punk elements with rootsier sounds like reggae and soul. But the Clash were the exception. Most punk bands, from the Sex Pistols and the Ramones on down, never made records like Sandinista; they never opened their aggressive straight-ahead rhythms to anything swingier. Punk's relationship to black-derived rock 'n' roll is best captured in the Pistols' recording of "Johnny B. Goode": the band tears through the twelve-bar changes while Johnny Rotten complains, "I hate songs like this!"

"Songs like this" -- blues structures, shuffling beats -- had been the template for rock 'n' roll since its inception, and they no longer signified in the way they once had. "Johnny B. Goode" sounded fresh and exciting in 1958 (in part because of they ways it crossed racial boundaries: a countryish narrative set to blues changes, sung by a black man with such precise diction that many listeners believed he was white, accompanying himself on guitar in a style derived from Delta bluesmen), but in 1977 it sounded like your dad's music, a story you've heard a million times from a war that took place before you were born. Punk made rock sound exciting again, and it did so by stripping away the derivative mannerisms, the reflexive note-bending and self-satisfied riffage that had accumulated over thirty years of white men playing black-derived music. Indie rock grew from that fresh start.

Some of the music that grew out of punk restored certain black elements. Talking Heads laid anxious, nerdy vocals over jerky James Brown grooves to make music that was both danceable and ironic; then they found their way through the irony to a kind of transcendence by routing around African American musical forms to straight-up African ones. Gang of Four did something similar with expressly political ends. (This strategy largely disappeared in the 1990s and then returned a few years ago.) Other bands departed from the punk sound without reverting to blues scales or dance beats. They made music that was verdant and mysterious like R.E.M., or dreamy and textured like My Bloody Valentine, or melodically rich like the Shins, or goofy and elusive like Pavement, or idiosyncratically expressive like Neutral Milk Hotel or Yo La Tengo or Radiohead, rather than physical and rhythmic. SFJ names two good reasons why they chose to do this: white musicians became self-conscious about their borrowings, and black musicians gained access to mass media. There's one reason he leaves out: for indie bands, making music that way felt more authentic and expressive, less like regurgitating the received wisdom. If Sasha Frere-Jones finds their music polite and precious and lacking in vigor, that's his right. But I wish he didn't let a narrow and rather arbitrary personal aesthetic (James Brown-style syncopation = good; Beach Boys-style harmonies = bad) get in the way of a useful historical argument.

Update: SFJ touches on some of this stuff in two blog posts. From the second:

Indie bands had good reason to look for uncolonized territory—that’s how art moves, how it lives. A less rosy interpretation is that if indie rock is rooted, at some level, in punk, then this re-sorting was preordained. Johnny Ramone effectively subtracted the blues from rock and roll, and that ideology may have attached itself to the entire project. Maybe the Clash and the Minutemen are exceptions in a long process of establishing a popular music that is structurally determined to escape the blues and its offspring.

Update 2: I have company, according to Slate's Carl Wilson, in a piece densely packed with good points:

Many commentators have pointed out his article's basic problems of consistency and accuracy: ... the conscious and iconoclastic excision of blues-rock from "underground" rock goes back to the '70s and '80s origins of American punk and especially hardcore, from which indie complicatedly evolved.

An unusual moment of confusion from the NYT's estimable Jon Pareles: "Even at 160 kilobits per second (Kbps), In Rainbows is a sonic notch above the standard 128 Kbps iTunes download, and on a portable MP3 player through good earphones, it has plenty of detail."

But when it comes to measuring the fidelity of compressed digital audio, bit rate is not the only relevant criterion. Other things being equal, files compressed at 160 Kbps definitely sound superior to those compressed at 128 Kbps. But other things are not equal. The In Rainbows tracks are in MP3 format, whereas iTunes tracks are compressed using the superior AAC codec. To my ears (and I'm not alone), AACs at 128 Kbps are sonically equivalent to MP3s at around 192 Kbps. I am surprised that Pareles doesn't understand this, given how smart he is.

Weird: Joni Mitchell has a poem in the New Yorker. It's, um, not her best work:

We have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell-phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls

Fun thread of "famous songs rewritten as limericks." Samples:

Shall I get you a drink, Maggie May?
Though I'm used, I don't care what they say.
While you're older (and how)
Please enjoy my youth now
'Cause 'Hot Legs' is just five years away.

Stevie Ray brought his Strat to the jam
When DB said "I'm through being glam.
"I'll no longer be soulful,
"'Sperimental, or doleful,
"So Let's Dance and cash in. Where's my gram?"

Third Avenue and 53rd
I stand without saying a word
Where once I turned tricks
Stabbed a guy just for kicks
Now it's luxury condos ... absurd!

Am I the last person to know this? The NYPost reveals that the big current emo bands -- Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, The Academy Is ... -- are created on an assembly line by a couple of Svengalis, just like *NSYNC/Backstreet/O-Town.

Re: On Chesil Beach: Who knew that Ian McEwan was such a fan of the early-'60s British blues boom? I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's the greatest novelist in history to mention both John Mayall and Alexis Korner in two consecutive books.

It was twenty years ago today ...

... that i watched a BBC documentary entitled It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, about the making of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember coming home from school and sitting on my parents' bed with my dad, glued to the screen as George Martin played the original master tapes of the album to show how the different parts were layered and various commentators explained how the songs were sequenced to create the impression of a continuous, thematically coherent work. Today, on the twentieth anniversary of that formative childhood experience, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic. I'm not sure if there's been a falling-off in quality or if I'm just getting old, but somehow today's documentaries about defunct pop groups can't compare to the classics of my youth. The documentaries of 1987 had an innocence, a feeling of possibility, that I'm not sure we'll ever recapture. I feel sorry for today's kids, having to listen to things like this weekend's Radio 2 documentary, in which "multi award winning engineer Geoff Emerick heads back in to the studio to demonstrate the innovative techniques employed for the recording at Abbey Road studios back in 1967." It's just not the same.