PHINALLY.

so, if you missed me ranting about this constantly all week, you won't know already, but i finally saw phish this weekend...after seven years, i got to see a two-night stand at the gorge to lose my phish-virginity. and it was incredible. and i will write more about it later, as well as post some pictures and videos. but for right now i just wanted to say WOW. and post the setlists.

Night One (from Phish.com)

Set One

• Down With Disease
• Ocelot
• Pebbles And Marbles
• Possum
• Sleep
• Destiny Unbound
• Stash
• Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley >
• Cavern

Set Two

• The Moma Dance >
• Light >
• Taste
• Fluffhead
• Joy
• Bathtub Gin >
• Harry Hood

Encore

• Slave To The Traffic Light

Night Two (from Phish.com)

Set One

• The Mango Song
• Chalk Dust Torture
• Middle Of The Road
• Tweezer
• Driver
• Twenty Years Later
• Ya Mar
• It's Ice
• Wolfman's Brother
• Character Zero >
• Run Like An Antelope

Set Two

• Rock & Roll >
• Makisupa Policeman
• Alaska
• The Wedge
• You Enjoy Myself
• Backwards Down the Number Line >
• Piper
• Grind

Encore

• Good Times Bad Times
• Tweezer Reprise

more music everyone likes that i don't

i've been drowning lately trying to keep up with new music. somehow. there's seemingly not that much coming out that i'm that interested in, and with the cardinals no longer touring (and i don't download wilco night-to-night; i love them, but they don't vary enough each night to make the bandwidth, time, and CDs worth it), i thought i'd have time to catch up with recordings i've downloaded, as well as CDs i've bought (half.com is a wonderful thing).

i was wrong.

but, anyway, i tried some new things this past weekend. the internet has been screaming for awhile about the dirty projecters' new album, bitte orca, as well as the low anthem's oh my god, charlie darwin. also, i worship at the altar of white regularly, so i had to check the dead weather's horehound.

i listened to all three, and i can honestly say i don't really care to listen to any of them any more times. i didn't hate them, but the first two merely affirmed what i've been fearing for the last few years: that now there is an established "indie rock" sound, and you can draw critical acclaim by manipulating and tweaking that sound slightly, and writing some good songs.

don't get me wrong, both of these albums have solid songs on them. but as you can easily tell by hearing tweedy play "i am trying to break your heart" solo acoustic and then by listening to the studio version of the same track, a lot can change in a studio. i would listen to a lot of these songs played by someone using a piano or an acoustic guitar. and i would like them. and i appreciate the experimentation in sounds on these two albums as well. i really do. i just don't like the results. it's sort of like combining three flavors of kool-aid and ending up with shitty-tasting kool-aid, when cherry kool-aid would have worked fine by itself. especially in the projectors' case, i had a lot of wtf moments when some synthesized sound or nonrhythm would pop into a track, because it didn't seem to have any real purpose in the song as a whole to me. it sounded more like "well, we heard someone else popular do this once on an album, so let's drop it in here". plus, i'm just not into that "it's cool to be miserable" lyric bullshit anymore. i'm 28 now...i don't really have a lot of extra time to spend not making the best of things. i guess it's cool if other people do, i just don't want to hear about it.

the dead weather hit me about how i thought they would. solid, well-crafted songs, presented through a genre of music i'm really not that interested in. i mean, i love the white stripes for their dirty, muddy, bangy-ness. but the dead weather is just too dirty, muddy, and bangy for my taste. the guitars are frustrating because, while they aren't bad, you know jack white is sitting like three feet from them and not playing them. he's solid enough on drums, but when you play this type of garage-rock blues, who cares about the drums anyway, as long as they're loud? and i could take or leave the lead singer's approach to these songs vocally. the one thing that the raconteurs and the stripes have always provided, even on songs that i don't like, is a turn of phrase, turn of melody, bridge...something interesting and unique, something that makes you do an aural double-take when you hear it the first time. i had no moments like that on this album. it's well-made, and i'm sure if the sound is your bag of tea (or whatever) then you'll love it...but to me it's just sort of boring.

as usual, i'm totally willing to be talked out of any of these opinions.

the holocaust

well, not the Holocaust. just one of many.

i was chuckling with a friend of mine the other day because a lot of the early 20th-century documents i'm currently working with were using extraordinarily over-the-top rhetoric to describe a series of fires that struck the pacific northwest in 1910. one word that kept popping up was "holocaust". now, we currently obviously associate this term with one specific incident, but in 1910, that wouldn't have been the case. so i decided to check up on what "holocaust" actually means.

my uninformed guess was something like "holy" + "fire", but it turns out (according to the OED), that "holocaust" is from Greek, made up of words for "whole" and "burnt". the first definition refers specifically to burnt offerings, and the third to something having been completely burnt (as if in an accident, for example). in that sense, the lowercase "holocaust" completely makes sense in the context of the 1910 documents. if anything, it makes less sense in its 1940s context now.

either way, interesting to see how a meaning a word changes over time.

words are fun! learning about holocausts is fun!

sell out!

i saw this post on RAA the other day, from a poster whose name shall remain unmentioned, and it got me thinking:

I've been mulling this over during the past coupla days, even though I made a point of not getting sucked in to the latest meltdown. When I got into music in the 70s and 80s if your favourite band or songwriter, either musically or otherwise, went in a direction you didn't like you stopped buying their music and seeing them live. That was pretty much it.

Now disgruntled former fans can join together to make their negative feelings known, and, from what I have seen, a lot worse too. This seems to me to be unhealthy on a whole range of levels. Artists these days need a pretty thick skin to keep out the slings and arrows of outraged fans - there are some who need a lot of armour or should simply not put themselves in the firing line...

the "meltdown" mentioned is an internal RAA thing that isn't worth mentioned, but...it brought up the much larger issue of fan-artist relations. now, the internet doesn't have a monopoly on creating obsessive fans, but one phenomenon it has made a lot more clear (at least to me) is the music fan that gets attached to a particular artist and his/her music...to the point that when that artist no longer lives up to that fan's image of them, the artist no longer feeds that person's need to define their world for them, the fan lashes out angrily. and now, as artists are becoming more internet-savvy and (as is especially the case with smaller, more independent artists) are often actually ending up interacting with these fans online directly...shit gets creepy.

i mean, yes, a music artist, by the very nature of their work, is exposing him/herself to a lot of public scrutiny. but, (and maybe this is just me), i don't think artists should have to deal with personal attacks from fans who have to put 10 seconds of effort into insulting someone they've never met before who has (for some reason) built their own sense of self around that artist's music.

so...i don't know what to do about this. shut off the internet? okay.

umm...no, i guess this just really bothers me; the idea that people forget that when they're fans of an artist, they're ostensibly fans of watching someone create art. but somewhere along the line, for a lot of people (seemingly), it becomes more about "wow! song #3 by that artist really helped me through a tough time" and then, somehow, "what?! song #4 doesn't make me feel the same way?! who the FUCK does this guy think he is!"

i love music probably more than most people. i really enjoyed ryan adams' and phish's music especially, and both of their recording and performances helped me deal with a lot of things and helped me to see aspects of life in ways i wouldn't have thought of otherwise. on top of that they made me interested in learning how to play and write music of my own. all of that has been immensely valuable to me. but, at some point, both bands decided to call it quits. and sure, i was disappointed. but we're all people, and sometimes you just have to deal with your own shit and stop expecting other people to do it for you. if you don't like your savior's new album, so what? grow up, it's just a song.

bah.

shorter albums? is it snobby of me to say this only matters if you listen to shitty pop music?

i read this article the other day, and it got me thinking. mostly about two things. first, is there any truth to the idea that albums are getting shorter? second, if so, who cares? i mean, an album is an album, and anyone who is a genuine artist who is making an album as part of being a genuine artist (you know, instead of making an album the record company tells you to make so you can get some cash) is probably going to make it however short or long as they want, and good on them if so.

i mean, most of the extremely short albums and extremely long albums i've ever heard have been by artists who could never be accused of holding up the status quo. i own a mason jennings album that is around 24 minutes long and a phish album that is 78 1/2 minutes long. i paid the same amount for each (approximately), and do i feel ripped off somehow when i listen to the shorter album? no. if i get a disc (like the abovemention phish album) that is completely full to its capacity with songs, i'm still going to be happy if those songs are good. and if they're bad, i'm going to feel ripped off. likewise, if somebody wants to give me 24 minutes of their best work and doesn't like anything else enough to include it on the album, then i'm willing to take them at their word that those 24 minutes are the real deal.

does that mean i think nobody should give a shit whether albums are long or short? no, not really...but after years of concertgoing and blog-reading, i've seen many a concert review spoiled by people bitching because a band played 20 songs instead of 22 (seriously, the excellent wilco show in spokane last year was largely panned because the band "quit early", playing two whole songs less than their tour average). so maybe i'm a little sensitive to the length issue. i don't see why album or concert length should matter that much if what you're getting is excellent. sure, if we hear a good album or see a good concert, we're going to want more. but we just have to listen, we don't have to actually write the songs. that shit takes time.

i saw m.ward this past spring, and it was one of the best concerts i've ever seen. i drove all the way to portland, got a hotel, and hung around all day waiting for the show, to see him play for 55 minutes. is that short by most concert standards? yes. would i have liked for him to play longer? yes. was i appreciative of what i got? yes.

if you don't like it, just take your attention and money elsewhere. but that's a point for the next post...