CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Los Campesinos!

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:17:05 GMT

Hold on Now, Youngster . . . | Wichita/Arts & Crafts
Los Campesinos! are what happens when Sarah Records meets Minor Threat.

Get with the brogram

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:13:37 GMT

The Constantines at T.T. the Bear's Place, April 18, 2008
Just shy of midnight, one of the few dozen of us hardcore Constantines disciples at T.T. the Bear’s warns his girlfriend: “You might not like them. They’re really manly.”

The power of love

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:11:22 GMT

A respected music critic contemplates Celine Dion and has a crisis of conscience
Carl Wilson’s recent entry into Continuum’s esteemed 33 1/3 series — a series of books by critics and musicians devoted to canonical pop albums — is framed by an irresistible concept.

Carl Wilson’s recent entry into Continuum’s esteemed 33 1/3 series — a series of books by critics and musicians devoted to canonical pop albums — is framed by an irresistible concept. Instead of exhausting another album whose impact and context has been well covered by the critical elite, Wilson — the lead music critic for Canada’s national newspaper — turns the series on its head by seriously considering a blockbuster hit by Celine Dion, internationally adored and lambasted French-Canadian pop star.

By immersing himself in the work and life of an artist he “can’t stand,” Wilson is trying to define the difference between “us” — his readers, the music writers and general hipster populace who enjoy challenging music that’s interesting to think about — and “them,” those who unironically embrace Celine Dion’s naked, overpowering sentimentality.

Wilson’s strangely haunting argument is that we’re really not all that different. Elitists are every bit as interested in being moved by art and music as middle American Celine Dion listeners are, but are moved by innovation and ambiguity, whereas Dion’s fans are content to take her words, grand gesticulations, and emotions at face value. This begs a devastating question: which group is more delusional?

Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste begins spitefully. Wilson admits that he’s never liked Celine Dion, but his annoyance “got personal” after she beat out one of his (and my) heroes, the whispery singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, to win an Oscar in 1998. (She won for Titanic’s theme song, “My Heart Will Go On;” Smith lost with “Miss Misery,” from Good Will Hunting.)

Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste by Carl Wilson | 161 pages | Continuum | $10.95

The author rather irrationally poses Dion’s inevitable Oscar win as a typically mainstream instance of the oppressive, well-funded bully triumphing over one of the world’s “fragile, unlovely outcasts.” He only softens his bullish stance after he admits that while her music doesn’t speak to him, her schmaltzy style has a long and dominant popular history.

Schmaltz has, in fact, been the most popular music of the Western world for centuries. From opera to the parlor song to the Rat Pack to arena rock, popular music has been about inspiration and aspiration, reaching for higher places by singing in higher octaves. Her music is beholden to all of these populist traditions (she collaborates with Andrea Bocelli and Barbara Streisand, among others), resulting in what Wilson calls “a Frankengenre of emotional intensity.”

Travel New England!

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:10:38 GMT

...with a gas can and Brock Clarke’s wily novel
Clarke’s satire leaves enough room for at least one resounding lesson: a good story shouldn’t always make you do bad things.

Brock Clarke

Before Sam Pulsifer is sentenced to ten years in prison for burning down the Amherst, Massachusetts, home of Emily Dickinson and killing two other trespassers, his judge asks a thoughtful and (by this novel’s standards) typically pointed question: “if a good story leads you to do bad things, can it be a good story after all?”

Brock Clarke’s fourth book, the rambunctious An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, takes a number of approaches to the question. Pulsifer, who torched the Dickinson home in a fit of nervousness — his mother told him wayward tales of its being haunted; tantalized, he snuck in, got nervous, lit a smoke, heard a creak, and bolted — is but a sounding post for the answer. He’s so overwhelmed by stories that he’s devoid of tact, opinion, even foundation.

Our narrator’s backstory is elaborate, but suffice it to say that after ten years of prison and another ten years starting a new life in a nearby suburb, Pulsifer suddenly finds himself hounded by the ghosts of stories he’s tried to forget. Chief among the new problems is a box of letters Pulsifer received while in prison, from embittered readers asking him to burn down more literary landmarks. One by one, the letters go missing, and the fires begin.

Clarke casts a wide net of possible suspects, and goes to great lengths to reveal their motives without taking them very seriously. Envy, revenge, misdirected anger, writerly pretension, the self-indulgence of book clubs: Clarke and Pulsifer take them all on in what’s intended to be a great lampooning of literary culture. While too pat to compel as satire — Clarke’s targets are anarchically broad, and the insider poking fun at his own medium sometimes reads as dull shtick — the book is still a great lark, a beach read for the coffee-shop dweller.

An Arsonist’s Guide works best when exposing how readers adopt narratives for their own emotional gain. Seeking refuge in a bookstore, Pulsifer eavesdrops on a book club’s discussion of a self-help memoir, and observes that “the book was there to give the women ... a reason to confess to the feelings they’d already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn’t actually read.” Conversely, the letter-writers imploring Pulsifer to burn down more writers’ homes have been spurned by the false promises and lofty ideals of literary giants.

St. Vincent

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:31:05 GMT

Marry Me | Beggars Banquet
Clark’s soaring soprano is capable of hitting a Billie Holiday swoon just as easily as a sinister incantation.

A pleasant Reminder

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:09:20 GMT

Feist comes into her own
Canadian singer Feist’s third solo album is a soundtrack for watching your lover walk out the door.

Handsome Furs

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:57:59 GMT

Plague Park | Sub Pop
Playing Bruce Springsteen to Spencer Krug’s David Bowie, Dan Boeckner came across as the humble workhorse of Wolf Parade. "What We Had," Handsome Furs (mp3)

Dexterous feats

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:50:11 GMT

Menomena + Field Music + Land of Talk, Great Scott, March 27, 2007
Those of us too poor to make it down to Austin for last week’s SxSW festival were treated to a mini-showcase of some of indie rock’s strongest up-and-coming bands.

Indulge me

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:49:37 GMT

How the writer of a generation stopped speaking for himself
If Dave Eggers’s career is any indication, the best way to become a writer of importance is to convince everyone you’re a self-indulgent jerk and then pull the rug out from under them.

Dave Eggers and Achak Deng

If Dave Eggers’s career is any indication, the best way to become a writer of importance is to convince everyone you’re a self-indulgent jerk and then pull the rug out from under them.

Eggers shook the literary establishment with the release of his 2000 debut, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which chronicled the period between the sudden deaths of his parents, his adoption of his young brother, and his attempts to make a name for himself in San Francisco’s literary scene.

The book is the work of a merry prankster with an ax to grind, with its thirty pages of trickster introductory remarks, long imaginary tirades against the author’s potential enemies, and a fake transcript of Eggers’s interview for MTV’s The Real World juxtaposed with lots of genuine and wrenching prose. Eggers became known as an unpredictable self-promoter, hosting elaborate public readings while simultaneously becoming hostile and confrontational toward journalists. Regardless of what you thought of him, it was exciting to see an author matter again.

The over-riding quality that made Eggers such an intriguing and maddening figure, both in his published work and his public persona, was the impenetrability of the author’s identity. Was he the nervous-but-playful surrogate father to his orphaned brother, the reclusive and angry foe of anyone who questioned his actions, or the performance artist looking to break down any wall he could?

The answer — which largely separates his fans from his critics — is that he was all of these things. Yes, AHWOSG is self-absorbed and emotionally juvenile in many instances, and its post-modern impulses are often tough to stomach. Eggers was so aware of when his indulgences would become excessive that he confronted the reader with them in the text — a critic-proofing of his work that critics deemed desperate — and dared you to like him anyway. Eggers’s naysayers seized on this, chastising him for a lack of editorial discipline and accusing him of just wanting pity and attention. His fans saw things differently, arguing that the book was necessarily moody and inconsistent. So was he. So was his audience.

Reconstruction
Being willfully divisive isn’t the best way for a talented writer to establish a career, and the steady decline in publicity and sales surrounding Eggers’s next release, 2002’s You Shall Know Our Velocity!, was probably a consequence of that. Treading emotionally volatile terrain similar to AHWOSG but tempered by its structure as a more conventional novel, the book offered readers something its predecessor refused: growth and resolution, weightier than fleeting catharsis. Its relative lack of success was probably due to its transitional tone; it was similarly erratic and compelling, but less interested in affronting the conventions of the novel.

The new tastemakers

CHRISTOPHER GRAY — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:22:35 GMT

Does Pandora know you better than you do?
It’s a cliché by now, but the Internet allows you to be whomever you want to be.

GOING INSIDE THE MUSIC: To find the songs you don't know you like.

It’s a cliché by now, but the Internet allows you to be whomever you want to be. It’s that singular cultural realm where your self-image can relax, unfettered by the perceptions of friends, family, or strangers. Rupert Murdoch might be making millions off your MySpace account, but he has almost no say in what you turn it into. You can sum up your unknowable self in a ten-word headline, or thousands of words of blogging each day, or a picture of your dog. Whatever you choose, you have effectively immortalized your personality. Until you decide to change it next week.

Most Web sites that engage in automated music recommendations try to cater to whatever your Internet image is today. Amazon.com suggests albums based on customers with search patterns similar to yours. Music-review Web sites function as cliques, by establishing artists that represent their audiences, and basing future reviews on the images they’ve created for themselves. Last.fm matches music your computer has played with the listening habits of other users. If your tastes seem similar, they suggest songs you don’t own that like-minded users do.

A culture of “if you like that, then you’ll like this” recommendations occasionally yields new treasures, but at the same time it’s a bit stifling and simplistic. Just because I revere Radiohead doesn’t mean I’m going to love an icy Thom Yorke solo album, and just because I like MF Doof damn well doesn’t mean I’ll dig Gnarls Barkley. These socially constructed suggestions are generally obvious and accurate, but they serve to pigeonhole you into a scene you’re probably already a part of. Your musical taste doesn’t grow like a family tree; it’s just a random accumulation of songs and artists that speak to you in whatever ways you want to be spoken to. It’s a representation of the dynamic you that no one else understands. Isn’t it?

But Pandora doesn’t think your tastes are all that random. Like Last.fm and other sites, the site proudly argues that its developers have come up with a foolproof way to help you find new music you’ll like. Pandora’s approach, though, is completely divorced from what your friends like, what’s selling well, or even what a band’s songs are about. Instead, Pandora’s people examine the sonic makeup of every individual song on their database, and attempt to offer what those other sites can’t: a deductive, logical explanation of what you like.