The Awesome Button

My Jeep was in for rear caliper upgrades last week, forcing me to log time in a 2002 Dodge Intrepid SE. On the back of my second stint with this model, I declare Chrysler's LH platform the worst since the K-Car. Interior build quality is horrifying, the transmission is a throwback to the days of freewheeling, and cornering response beyond a 15° angle is at par with a Gulfstream 232 on Strawberry Shortcake BMX wheels. This thing had less than 15,000 miles on it, and I not only peeled but spun out taking a 90° turn at 2800RPM.

The greater downside to this experience was having to deal with Boston-area FM radio. Our dominant "alternative rock" provider is the commercially-operated/Brown University-staffed mega-station 95.5 WBRU out of Providence, which, along with foundering behemoth 104.1 WBCN, has ruled the region since it went alternative/modern rock in 1988. A smaller-wattage outfit in Boston-proper, 101.7 WFNX, has a better reputation for truly "alternative" playlists, but suffers from atrocious regional coverage as they are intelligently broadcast from the top of One Financial Center, meaning that +50% of their signal goes out to sea. All of these stations are embarrassments to their historical reputations; their playlists have barely changed over the last fifteen years. I guarantee that if you listen to WBRU for at least one hour, you will hear Jane's Addiction's "Jane Says", Nirvana's "Lithium", and/or the Smashing Pumpkins' "Today". That is a mortal lock.

The inability (or unwillingness) to draw lines around the guitar rock of the 1990s has bestowed post-Nirvana acts with a kind of infinite shelf life, an extended perception of their modernity. This stasis has been gnawing at me for weeks, as I've been more frequently exposed to recent material like Apocalyptica's "I Don't Care" and—am I really typing this?—Red Jumpsuit Apparatus' "Face Down" at my local gym. This stuff is not very different from 3 Doors Down or Godsmack, though it is markedly dumber and more obvious, lyrically speaking. But I'll come back to this argument later.

The programming sequence that really set me off began when WBRU's DJ played Linkin Park's 2001 single "Crawling", a song and band that have been FM radio mainstays from day one. But I noticed something new listening to "Crawling" yesterday, something that had never stood out before: the secret to their sound is how high in the mix they seat Chester Bennington's whisper track.

Whisper tracks are a not-at-all uncommon sweetening technique designed to accentuate raspy tones as well as consonant-inflection in well-to-overproduced music: the singer whispers the lyrics, and they're mixed beneath normal-volume takes that mostly drown them out. The entire passage is more detailed for the concentrated high-end from the whisper, and the wave-shearing from their breath. In "Crawling", though, the whisper track is audible as a separate stream of sound. Once you recognize this, it completely unseats the sonic palette of the piece, standing out to the point where you can distinguish between Bennington's mouth in your ear and the song itself, somewhere else in stereo space, like a second radio in the background. Pretty radical and apparently intentional; I've gone through their other singles and this technique's used on all of them ("Numb", "In the End").

Sonically, Linkin Park's approach was a static, flattened-out redux of the Ross Robinson formula: track upon track of detuned 7-string buzz-saw barre chords offset by dark "breakdown" flourishes. No more cookie-cutter than a Beatles track, structurally, but hugely reliant on a particular set of effects: octave/pitch shadowing, gating, excited compression and of course DRC. This ushered in a frighteningly monotonous production conformity that continues unabated.

I tend to get analytical when I'm stuck listening to obvious music like Linkin Park's, to focus on what made it stand out, made them popular. Because if you look back at rock music's biggest successes since the 1980s, it's surprisingly not been about good looks. Predominantly, it's been about attitude and content. Which, you would think, could be viewed as a positive trend, artistically speaking. Limp Bizkit, Staind, and the Deftones did not boast traditionally "sexy" front-men, though theatrics and image were key components for acts like KoRn and Slipknot. Chester Bennington's appeal is debatable, but like most of these bands, Linkin Park's success stems from the reception of their self-martyring, self-righteous rage, which still resonates today. That is why FM radio can play rock music from ten years ago alongside new releases without any notable incongruity: the unifying undercurrent shared by artists as apparently diverse as Nickelback and Evanescence is that they all speak from the perspective of an indomitable victim.

There is a wonderful quote I carry with me, from a film director who summarized his unhappy experience with a particular Oscar-winner thus: "When you constantly make yourself out to be a victim, it is easy to feel righteous. This breeds baseless indignation, and finally arrogance." That selfish, solipsist arrogance has infected all forms of popular music over the last ten to fifteen years, and the sustaining factor is that there's an audience for it. I don't know which end of that see-saw is more depressing, but rebellion, independence, confidence, longing, and especially happiness are increasingly absent from pop anthems. No artist more dramatically and singularly embodies this shift in popular culture than Eminem, who was interpreted and sold as a rebel by the media, but was in fact a whining adult child.

As "Crawling" drew to a close, my music-anticipation cortex expected something from the '80s to lighten the mood. "I Melt With You", "She Sells Sanctuary"—one of those great, grey Anglican classics. Instead, the DJ came on and said, "Here's something new by a band called Phoenix, this song is called '1901'," with an unmistakable air of "These guys are from England and who gives a shit."

I spent more time in 2007 with It's Never Been Like That than I had with any new release since Radiohead's Hail to Thief. Significantly, I did so for personal rather than editorial reasons. Enjoying the band from that perspective, I am consumed by violent urges when conflicted lifestyle consumers guised in critics' robes try to drive a wedge between It's Never Been Like That and Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. I don't know what the fuck is going on with American society that ABC and NBC are nurturing this Most Insufferable Dickhead contest between Dan Harris and Brian Williams, but somebody with half a brain and a legitimate business pedigree needs to sit both networks' marketing directors down and slap the shit out of them. There is no real or even social currency at stake in this arena.

Phoenix were just as good three years ago if not better than they are on Wolfgang Amadeus. I'm drawn to argue as much by the exploding chorus of "Napoleon Says", and the bum chord as it ends; by the deliberate and pensive "One Time Too Many" (nicely improved as "Rome" on the new LP). The chord-crushing crescendo that closes "Long Distance Call", and Thomas Mars' divine delivery of the line, "I remember this young guy died and I took his part." The last band I submitted to this completely was probably the fucking Smiths. Obviously Phoenix are not in the same class, but they are driving an ambulance with rock n' roll in the back, on life-support. And I'm chasing it along with the rest of you.

What struck me about the transition from Linkin Park to Phoenix was that, despite my ebullience where this band is concerned, it didn't work, and I had thought that it could, hoped that Wolfgang Amadeus would break through to radio. At the very least I thought it would elevate them away from dead-end subservience to film soundtracks, the unquantifiable collapsing feedback loop of the Internet, and/or Apple, whose propagandist thought-crime appropriation of clever young bands—as well as said bands' eager submission—has disturbed me the entire decade.

It's still possible, but "1901" sounded so small and peculiar in the context of FM radio, it was as if the song were turning its back to me, turning its back on the listener. Or that it was embarrassed to be there, like Phoenix were sharing a bill with Kenny Chesney, propped up in front of an unreceptive audience. Initially I felt bad, because they can't possibly lift the intellectual siege FM radio is under and are doomed to flop in that space. That hopeless resolve, of a band undefeated but unaccepted, was somehow audible as the song wound down.

Without introduction or comment, the DJ cut to "My Own Worst Enemy", by Lit. Using Phoenix, my current proxy for rock n' roll optimism, as a bridge, he'd taken me from downtrodden social rumination to ground-zero for the running debate on honesty and integrity in music. Studio vets and gear-heads know exactly where I'm going here, but, a lot of people don't.

"My Own Worst Enemy" is the first volley in the Auto-Tune war, as far as its use to mask a lack of talent. Pundits who broach this topic always invoke Cher's "Believe", which is historically probably the best talking point on dramatic early use and breadth of impact. Sasha Frere-Jones' conspiratorial piece in the New Yorker last year rolled out said barrel. To his credit, S/FJ is always up-front about the ubiquity of pitch-correction in studio environments going back to the Beatles, and favors the most agreeable defense for its use: it costs a lot of money and time to bang out perfect takes (even in the digital age, you're only saving on rewind time).

"Believe" is a massively-layered house anthem, a synthetic, ecstatic dance track; it uses Auto-Tune as an effect, an accentuation, not as some underhanded trick to boost Cher beyond her limits on her twenty-third album. Lit's "My Own Worst Enemy" did exactly that: it employed Auto-Tune egregiously to sell a band past its intrinsic talent. This was a toes-in-the-water moment for popular music, and nobody blinked. "My Own Worst Enemy" sat at #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart for 11 weeks. To listen to the first pitch sweep over the line "Please tell me why" today, it sounds like something out of the movie Tron. The digital squelches on the words "please" and "me" are hilariously obvious, to the extent that their producer tried to mask them with bursts of guitar feedback. In concert, they not only used Auto-Tune, but avoided this line whenever possible by begging the audience to sing it for them (you can hear why (ahem) this was necessary immediately afterwards). Ten years ago, nobody knew the audio footprint of auto-tuning, and Lit got away with using it for the wrong reasons. In their defense, Lit did not start this fire: Auto-Tune was already rampantly in use.

When viewed within the scope of its intended purpose, Auto-Tune is a simplification, a rationalization of more arduous processes that have been in place since the 1960s. Most of the second-wave "Girl Groups", for example, relied on multi-tracking to improve their lead vocals, if not the entire product. The clearest example is probably the Shangri-Las, who are also my favorite group of this era for a variety of reasons (including the clever if sometimes cynical marketing that surrounded them). Mary and Betty Weiss, and especially the Ganser twins, were fine singers, but were barely past puberty at the peak of their fame. Physically and experientially, none of them were studio-class vocalists. The Weiss sisters' tracks were the most notably swelled by double-tracking, equalization and reverb, which had a desired melodramatic effect, but on cuts like the definitive "Out in the Streets" and more disposable "What's a Girl Supposed to Do?", one can deduce that Shadow Morton was also smoothing out some rough edges. This is the same reason George Martin double-tracked and phased John Lennon's vocals (at Lennon's request): producers used studio techniques to augment a singer's talent, not manufacture it wholesale. My go-to case for the benefits of studio enhancement is Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth". There's a lot going on in those vocal tracks. And it's all awesome.

Pitch correction is a distinct action, separate from the kinds of sweetening techniques I've mentioned. Christmas With the Brady Bunch, from 1970, is the most famous example of early experimentation with pitch correction going too far. The album was loudly remarked-upon at the time as an unsettling listening experience, and even casual consumers complained that the children, who had no musical training, sounded "like robots". I'm not aware of any technical breakdown of how the pitching on this record was accomplished, but I would assume most of it was based on tape speed manipulation, which in a slippery-slope sense is not all that different from a band tuning to a particular key nearer their singer's range. The Smiths, invoked earlier, did this constantly; almost every band has. The problem facing the producers in charge of Christmas With the Brady Bunch was that the kids couldn't carry a tune, meaning that their pitch would swing wildly from phrase to phrase, word to word. And so tape speed, ultimately, was not a practical solution, as you would need to constantly vary the speed to match the kids' mistakes, and mapping that with notational scotch tape and paper time grids was an untenable undertaking. Instead the producers punted, and did the best they could to set the vocals in tune using chorus, phase-shifting and tape speeds that shifted the music into the their sustainable ranges.

Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and their software ilk are descended from a specific progenitor that vastly improved producers' ability to buttress bad singers: the Eventide H910 Harmonizer. Harmonizers and pitch-correction plugins are all post-effects applied to a clean signal in order to bend the waveform algorithmically, on the fly, and produce an end result, in real time, that is artificially closer to pitch. Harmonizers entered the music landscape not as a means of vocal correction (because they weren't complex enough to handle this transparently), but of correcting bum notes in instrumental passages that would be difficult to re-record completely, or punch in on a subsequent pass. These devices took care of little mistakes, and saved everyone a lot of time and money. Their use crept into concert rigs, helping guitar gods of the 1970s give their fans more for their money. Gradually, as music became more about personality than performance, harmonizers were used to sinister advantage, helping very good-looking people pass themselves off as singers.

The distinction is clear: a guitarist plays an incredible solo with a couple of flubs; the harmonizer acts as a safety net, and rescues them from having to do it all over again, possibly making a different and more overt mistake, ad infinitum, studio bill mounting. And provided the player is worthy of their status, it improves the less-forgiving concert experience for fans. For the artificial element of pitch correction, the dexterity, memory and creativity behind the solo is largely intact.

As applied to vocals, harmonizers helped make household names of preening new wave poseurs and misogynistic hair metal oafs who otherwise had no shot on the radio. It would be grossly unfair to crucify a single artist for the sins of their age, but there's a one-two punch that shortens the discussion nicely: Andy Taylor's "Take it Easy". This single launched Taylor's solo career following the cocaine-fueled breakup of Duran Duran in 1985, and his confidence-inspiring turn in one of the decade's most successful super-groups, The Power Station. Andy Taylor, it should be noted, did not sing in either band.

Drunk (to put it mildly) on the L.A. rock scene of the mid-80s and egged on by more-than-drunk Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, Taylor built up enough bravado to attain egomaniac nirvana. "Anything I do is great, because I am great." Since it was never mentioned or aired without the prefix "from former Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor," name recognition and rampant chart manipulation launched "Take it Easy"—probably the fiftieth or sixtieth rehash of T. Rex's "Bang a Gong" to that point—into the Billboard Top 40. That it peaked at #27 is actually a glaring failure in 1980s terms.

Even to the casual listener, Taylor's vocals sound wet, though that's not an adjective casual listeners are likely to use. In empiric terms they sound "airy" or thin in some way. This is because all of the vocal tracks have been equalized to move their sonic footprint away from the instruments, because the instruments are in tune, and the singing is not (the two waves would conflict more obviously if they shared the same frequency response). In addition, the vocals are endlessly multi-tracked, so that bad notes in one take can be overshadowed or blurred by another (it's unlikely that even a mediocre singer is going to hit the same wrong note every time). In addition to the equalization, quintupling, reverb and delay fattening the sound, a harmonizer is clearly repairing pitch fluctuation on a number of tracks underneath the overall vocal bed. When applied to a talented singer, these types of techniques produce the Jeff Lynne/Mutt Lange wall of vocal unity. In Andy Taylor's case, you are polishing a sneaker.

The punchline in Andy Taylor's defense is that producers used the same effects less overtly on Simon Le Bon, which Ian Little has gently confirmed.

Those warrants served, harmonizers did not allow someone who couldn't sing at all to pass for Simon Le Bon. In changing the pitch but not the timbre of a person's voice, Auto-Tune in large part does, and that simplification is what's stirred up so much debate, because to the untrained ear, well-produced pitch-corrected music in 2009 is very hard to recognize. Which means it is much harder to know whether or not someone has talent and took a shortcut, or relies on Auto-Tune to literally perform for them.

Just as baseball endures the black mark of a Steroid Era, rock music's reliance on performance-enhancing software should be branded bullshit and demarcated. And we can easily pin down year one: if you look at the Billboard Modern Rock chart for 1999, every song on it employed Auto-Tune. Every one. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication, which is the most-often cited example of the Loudness War's deleterious effect on rock, is equally suspect for its heavy reliance on Auto-Tune's transformation of Anthony Kiedis from an energetic punk-funk front-man into a crooning, circa-"Cry for Love" Iggy Pop facsimile. Sugar Ray used it some, and gave way to the bolder Crazy Town, who turned the dial up one more tick, because nobody noticed. Everlast got away with moderate use, begetting the more blatant Uncle Kracker. Pop-punk acts like New Found Glory and Blink-182, whose Enema of the State was dripping with AT, polished Lit's turd, leading us to Simple Plan and finally Fall Out Boy, who have completely relied on it for their singles. Almost everyone in the mainstream rock sphere has wrapped their fingers around Antares' knobs over the last ten years, but nobody seems to mind.

Instead, the outrage is focused on hip-hop, a medium that is not rooted in melody in the first place, and leaves that component to back-up girls if it's even a concern. Hip-hop is almost uniformly built in a digital vacuum, from looped samples, and generally speaking leaves nothing to chance. Mainstream hip-hop is a clinical, precise product, a platform for the celebrity of its author, and has been for quite a long time. For these reasons, Auto-Tune has a very different and more cynical implication than simply making someone sound "better," because it allows rappers to sing, to lay down melodies, which is to say it allows them to participate in a genre they never could before: R&B. Everyone in hip-hop recognized this, and that's why it's so out of control. Slow jams—ballads—are where the money is, and that's true of every genre. But every rose has its thorn.

Auto-Tune is well-past its saturation point as a media talking point in 2009, a divider marginalizing its users as money and/or fame-driven frauds, and elevating abstainers as instantly more intellectually and artistically honest. This predictable puritanic panic opened up yet another window of profitability and renewed relevance for Jay-Z, who has been an unrepentant culture vulture for the last five years. In the end, the medium will settle on a different novelty, technique or tempo, and in six or seven years, Auto-Tune will resurface as a cutely nostalgic prom memory (Sasha Frere-Jones was smartly out in front of that long-tail view from the start).

In terms of the impact to these very different forms, I favor plastic surgery as the go-to analogy. With mainstream hip-hop, Auto-Tune takes a young starlet with an athletic figure and upgrades her from a B-cup to a DD. It's absurd, it's right in your face, and there is no pretense that anything natural has transpired. As applied to commercial rock music, Auto-Tune's evolution tracks a marquee beauty who had tasteful work done early enough that it seemed natural, but as time bore down, they relied on the knife more and more, to the point of tragic distortion..

Where Will it End? - 33 1/3 reading this Sunday 3/1

I will be reading a new essay called Where Will it End? this Sunday, March 1st at Barbès in Brooklyn's still-ascendant Park Slope. Things will kick off about 7:00PM, with audio and video clips most Joy Division fans will be well-versed in, if not my interpretation. Depending on how quickly things go I might do a little Q&A as well. Hope to see you there.

The One Who Shopped You

Victims of editorial indifference (or assassination) love to assert that music journalists are frustrated musicians: parasitic, reactionary wallflowers driven by their jealousy and/or impotence. This year, critics have finally responded with their debut album. It is called Merriweather Post Pavilion.

The impeccable reputation of Animal Collective is a fiction created by writers, who, as ever, need to believe they have some stake in the game, but are tired of getting the cold shoulder when everyone pairs off at the after-party. This band will never leave an interviewer holding the door as they hop into a limo with satchels of nose candy and a buxom tart on each arm (metaphorically or actually). Which is to say that the possibility of Animal Collective "selling out"—and thereby torching a supportive publication's transitive cachet—is so inconceivable that critics can safely back them until the end of time (as can the anoraks who worry about that sort of thing). In a medium where motives are so easily obscured or misread, that kind of certainty is exceedingly rare, and, when your greatest fear is backing a gauche horse, priceless. A recently re-armed Nick Sylvester pointed me to a blog I had yet to see called Hipster Runoff, which in a dissatisfying, open-ended and rhetorical way, tried and failed to make the previous point. I don't know, seems pretty obvious.

Consumers, for temporal reasons as well as laziness, will always need critics as a filter. If enough blogs make enough noise about a particular artist, Pitchfork will weigh in; if Pitchfork gives their record an 8+, the mainstream mags will run watered-down restatements of Pitchfork's position (always with a tweak of indefensible reserve, given that most of them haven't led an editorial charge since the mid-'80s, if ever). Owing to the internet, the writers staffing these publications are in constant contact. The problem then is the lack of consumer feedback in this rapidly contracting loop, because only their money talks, and nobody is buying records, or participating in a financially meaningful way. The same people attend most of the club-level concerts in a given city, rather than individual bands bringing a distinct subset to bear, and there is no form of promotion as immediate or powerfully unified as FM radio and MTV once were. In their stead, consensus-elected websites dictate the progress of pop music, through a more distributed and therefore less tangible—but assuredly no more diverse—clique of chancers.

Online reputations are wholly derived from popularity, which suggests a populist triumph, but, appealing design schemes, ease of use, and most importantly, the quantity and frequency of a site's free content are composite if not dominant factors in status conferral. The quality and intellectual honesty of that content is a secondary concern debated, if at all, in the very online communities these publications are clocking for the next act that might generate traffic (increasing their statistical footprint, and therefore their advertising revenue). This snake isn't even long enough to eat its own tail.

The idea that a band can sell 25,000 copies and clip the Billboard Top 10, that is still very difficult for me to swallow. Animal Collective's appearance at #13 is not a victory for anyone: it is confirmation of how far pop music has fallen, commercially speaking. For purposes of comparison, the British band House of Love—largely unknown outside the UK—signed to Fontana for $680,000 in 1988, on the back of three truly mediocre (even by post-C86 standards) Creation singles. In today's money that would be $1.17 million in pound-adjusted USD. By the end of 2009, Animal Collective will likely surpass the House of Love's lifetime album sales, with strong chart appearances in both the US and UK. And they will have very little to show for it, financially speaking, because they stayed on an independent label and are dealing with the slow drip of points on albums sold. Creation founder Alan McGee has tactfully avoided embarrassing anyone with that line of thought.

But Animal Collective have no alternative: the profit margins in pop music are gone, for both the label and the artist. Which means the only people who can afford to make music, or take on the risk of making music full-time, are either broke or loaded (usually the latter). Record companies can't help make anyone's lives easier—can't make the dream real—because they can't make any money, even if they guess right. When you could count on a 1:15 or 1:20 ratio in terms of hits earning back your flops, you had a vibrant, course-correcting industry. An industry that is responsible for Phil Collins' version of "Tomorrow Never Knows"^[1], but an Industry nonetheless. As I've said before, you had the choice to finger-point and accuse that industry of laziness, self-absorption and corruption, bathing yourself in the credibility of renunciation, and getting laid for those reasons rather than your first-cousin being the guitar tech for Mr. Big, who "are really great guys, really down to Earth."

In 2009, the chart space previously occupied by pop, crossover R&B and straight-up rock n' roll has been supplanted by music that is consumed explicitly for the sense of aesthetic refinement it affords the buyer. Being a band—drummer, bassist, lead singer, guitarist with mystique—and writing pop songs simply isn't enough these days, because nobody's buying pop songs. They're buying a representation of consenus in a certain sphere—an accessory that broadcasts "I get this." That much, I think, most of us understand. And Animal Collective will be this year's beneficiaries of suburban-refinement couture.

Last year's I've Got a B.A. and I Don't Know How to Use It weapon of choice came from Vampire Weekend, whose new single "Brunei Hilton" (note: this hasn't been mastered and may not be the final mix) is, despite the suspect and tedious ethnic title, reassuringly not influenced by Malaysian roots music. It's a tasteful if predictable crossover, which...more power to them—you walk and talk like the Jonas Brothers, you might as well sell like them. Say what you want, the breakdown at 1:51 is fantastic.

M.I.A.'s forthcoming digital-only EP is called Terrorism (It's Bad). I swear to God, I'm gonna put her in the back seat, and drive her to Tennessee. Put it this way: if New Edition came out tomorrow, every single article about them would drip of ethnocentric condescension, and worse, they would respond in kind, detailing their tragic, impoverished upbringing. In films we have torture porn; in the media, we have tortured porn. Every celebrity—musician or otherwise—has to have some desperate malady (like, being fat), or a soul-fortifying rags-to-riches anecdote in their bio. New Edition came from one of the most horrifying, trashed and totally neglected places in America, and sang "Cool it Now" and "Candy Girl", among the helium-lightest bubblegum A-sides of their era. I doubt if M.I.A.—graduate of St. Martins, free market capitalist on hers and her parents' ethnicity since 2000—would last a night in Roxbury's Orchard Park circa 1984. But THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A CENSORD VERSION of "Paper Planes". IF U SEE IT PLEASE REMOVE! SHE WILL NEVER CENSOR THIS SONG.

In recent years, musicians like M.I.A. are creating themselves better than PR agents did in the old days. Everyone has some ridiculous angle. Bon Iver: I sat in a log cabin for three months crying about my ex-girlfriend. Right here, bro; *pats chest*. Amy Winehouse's career trajectory paces her proximity to death. Sid Vicious, a comparably famous pin cushion, is a t-shirt; Amy Winehouse made the mass media millions of dollars by accenting her avowedly fantastic music with piteous catatonia, domestic violence and footage of her smoking crack. Her career-defining single is about refusing to go to rehab. Does anyone else find this mildly troubling?^[2]

What's happening is that pop music is locking into the same structure of patronage the art world swelled with in the 1980s. Keith Haring, Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Chuck Connelly—endless acclaim, affirmation, drugs and access flowed, seeded by writers who needed an angle to get read, then conferred by educated yuppies looking to acquire relevance and present-tense good taste. In the past there was no need to muddy music's sheen with troubling biographies and sociopolitical depth. You would never look to pop music for social currency of that kind with Boy George on the radio. I mean you get near to addressing real issues in your music, you're Midnight Oil, and you're boring the ass off everyone.

Pop music has always been driven by emotion, but it was generally celebratory of a state of mind, whether happy, sad, bemused, indignant, etc. Whatever consensus its fans submitted to was rarely questioned, because the music did what it was supposed to do, when it was supposed to do it (in the car, in the rain, at the dance, in the coliseum, on MTV). In cases of niche music like punk and hip-hop, consensus was critical in a different way, as both a formative boundary and for their sustenance—these were self-policing movements, stylistically and behaviorally. The kinds of questions those fans asked each other were beside the point when confronted with the face-on sexuality of INXS's "Need You Tonight", or the countless and not entirely disposable reveries to abandon offered by Def Leppard et al.

What used to be that upper tier of "rock" and pop music—arenas of escapism, contexts in which we let our guard down—is now a disconnected succession of sonic tidal waves, the Sound of Sound.^[3] So much of the music we're charged with absorbing is arrogantly self-reflexive and dragged down by either cynicism or a lack of devotion to the end result. "Indie" right now means "half-assed, too long". Animal Collective are princes of this realm, wherein the act of constructing an actual song is an achievement. The band's image, and the emotional character of their music, is a this-is-what-you-want, this-is-what-you-get response to the easily-divined desires of their audience, who spend a shocking amount of time broadcasting their demographic identity online, crying out for representation. Would that critics were touting the band's deft recognition of this culture shift, and their ability to swim in such untested waters—rather than annotating the "appropriateness" of their influences—I could probably get on board with the whole thing.

Hipster Runoff's outburst addresses the extroversion of modern music fans from the wrong side of the fence, blaming the medium—the Internet's dizzy, inherent immediacy—and "street level" fans, who are participating the only way you can these days: by joining in the chant. You can't maintain any self-evaluated, self-directed identity in the underground now, because the depth of immersion and filtration required to keep up overruns even the keenest observer. Not very long ago, you could poach or reject proposals put forward by theorists and critics^[4] at your own pace. You could check in once in a while, wear the shoes for a few weeks, and see if they fit. Today, you step off the conveyor belt to tie your laces, and whole genres will pass you by. This is not the audience's fault or doing, it is simply the reality they're confronted with.

Rabid music fans have embraced acquisition, accumulation, and knowledge expansion in lieu of devotion to bands that excite and speak to them. Unable to submit to music openly—due in equal part to the demystification of music, the self-absorption of musicians, and the unpopularity of popularity—the die-hards who once put up posters of their idols, traded tapes of their in-studio banter, and traveled to see these heroes in person, are finding their fix proselytizing for their own impeccable taste. The proliferation, debate and evolution of pop music as a form is now a team sport, but who is enjoying this game? Who is enjoying music?

^[1] Turns out Alan McGee is a big fan.

^[2] I wish I could say "Well, you have to market the artist over the music, because the music is shit," but that was only true of the dire synth-pop days and maybe late-90s hip-hop. Amy Winehouse is one of the most important singers of the last twenty years. Imagine her doing doo-wop versions of Gits songs. We simply have not had a talent like this, and her fame is based on her self-destructive impulses. Way to go, everybody.

^[3] Mainstream anthems are comparably frigid and rote, but at least you'll get a chorus out of Coldplay. Know this: the difference you perceive between their latest and Merriweather Post Pavilion is a measure of your complicity in the devaluation of the underground.

^[4] The topper: I overhear that Michaelangelo Matos has started a blog declaring what he's calling a "Slow Listening Movement" in response to the sort of detachment and ennui that follows from the state of affairs I just described. Listening habits, as a phenomenological Statement. Mike, can't you just...listen to less music? Why does it have to be some kind of treatise? Why do so many online extroverts have to quantify and shape their behavior, then sell it as some kind of conceptual exercise—a "meme", or worse (and most reprehensibly obvious), a book pitch. 2009: very educated people are responding to the placement of an artificial constraint on consumption as if it is a Movement. Guys, you are fucking bricked.

David Bowie: Low (red vinyl)

$615.00 LIVE | The red-vinyl edition of Low, David Bowie's schizophrenic 1977 masterpiece, is one of the most sought-after pieces in his discography. Though it takes a backseat to the sacred purple Scary Monsters and his early Deram singles, Low-rouge increases in value every year.

If we knew how many copies existed, it might be easier to pinpoint a fair market value. However, as with Scary Monsters and the tangerine Lodger, these pressings were an inside job, and given their almost universally pedestrian tales of transference ("A friend gave it to me"/"I found this in a stall in Madrid"), these clearly weren't made as vanity editions for executives. Oddly, whatever Bowie fanatic at the RCA pressing plant was responsible ignored "Heroes", which is not known to have a color pressing at all. For a long time, it was rumored that only a single copy of Scary Monsters existed; this has been proven false, but it's clear from collector activity that Low is the most common of the three RCA color vinyl runs. [Lodger's critical and popular standing may have something to do with the less-than-frantic quest to quantify its possibly rarer status.]

The fanatical devotion Bowie engendered, from fans and industry backers, is staggering in retrospect and sadly probably lost on future generations. He is, or at least he was, everything pop music promised it could be, which turned out not to be enough, but for a few years, through David Bowie's image and music, fantasy, romanticism and rebellion nurtured a reverie du enfants. Unlike punk, the Beatles, or the hippie movement — all rock n' roll before him — Bowie's Peter Pan status was implicitly acknowledged by an audience for whom he represented wish fulfillment. That fire consumed, he became a Warholian prat fall in America, happily embodying an effeminate, ethnocentric joke, mugging and drugging ruinously before his Berlin retreat. Inevitably, the artistic renaissance Berlin seeded, and which critics like myself have celebrated for over 30 years, gave way to commercial concerns, and Bowie sank into a soulless, feeble period marked by barely-contained self-hatred.

Aerosmith: Quadraphonic 8-Tracks

$160.00 NO SALE | Quadraphonic sound was largely beyond the technical limits of audio engineering in the 1970s; whatever aural benefits it promised were more theoretical than deliverable. Immediately derailed by format confusion and costly barriers to entry, quad failed to find an audience, and has been consigned to history as another "hi fidelity" marketing gimmick.

In the US, Q4 (1/2" reel-to-reel) and Q8 (8-track) quadraphonic recordings were mass-produced, and peaked in popularity around the mid-'70s, when Aerosmith was on top of the world. This auction compiles all three of their quad albums in Q8 form, which is true four-channel sound, though 8-tracks lacked the frequency response and quality tape-heads Q4 reel-to-reel benefited from. Like Q4, however, Q8 required all new hardware: a separate, quad-capable player, and of course, two more speakers. The upside of that investment was a totally unique mix prepared for 4 channels. In the most exciting cases, secondary recording was done to augment the quad release, creating in essence an alternate version of a particular album. This is not the case with any of Aerosmith's quad releases, though they are well-isolated discrete 4.0 mixes as opposed to cheap "double-stereo", a rip-off approach that simply ran the stereo recording slightly off-time, producing out-of-phase expansion, chorused sound, and lots of artifacts.

QuarterInchers tracks sales of Q4/8 media, as well as the player/recorders you'll need to enjoy them (the site also monitors the ridiculous and long-forgotten PlayTape format). Collectors vaunt the predictably woodgrained Akai CR-80D-SS, a quad player/recorder that boasted a then-invaluable pair of XLR inputs for direct, discrete stereo microphone recording. The collector market for Quad players is fairly active, and prices are low; if you've any interest in experiencing quad sound, and the often comical mixes produced during its heyday, it's not actually a princely indulgence these days.

Enthusiasts have recently taken advantage of multi-channel encoding software and affordable DTS sound-cards to transcribe 4.0 mixes for the digital era. Prior to DTS cards, only matrix-encoded quad sources could be converted to digital, and it was an extremely lossy proposition. The preeminent matrix format was SQ vinyl, which involved phase-shifting and decibel spikes to isolate each of the 4 channels within a stereo groove. Played back on a quad turntable, these variables acted as cues and were decoded for discrete transmission to 4 separate channels. This 4:2:4 process ensured that SQ vinyl could also be played on standard stereo equipment, which was a consumer-minded courtesy that unfortunately did not pan out. SQ vinyl played on a stereo turntable nicely simulates listening to music underwater.

In the digital era, the precise phase and dB adjustments SQ was encoded with could be programmatically decoded from a stereo WAV file with reasonable clarity. Additionally, modern surround decoders like Dolby Pro Logic and the less common SRS Circle Surround could translate SQ stereo recordings reasonably well. Still, discrete 4.0 quad — Q4 and Q8 — couldn't be translated accurately until SACD and DTS-capable soundcards and burners came to market. As they become more common, we should see an increasing stream of DTS-encoded quad mixes hitting filesharing networks.

Les Fleur de Lys: "Circles" 7"

$643.57 SOLD | Protégés of one-time Svengali Jimmy Page, Les Fleur des Lys revolved around drummer Keith Guster from 1964-1969. This single — their second with Page producing — takes the Who to the wall with multi-layered vocal harmonies, popping single-coil guitar work from Phil Sawyer, and an overall commitment missing from the woozy original.

"Circles" fared better than Les Fleurs' debut (a forgettable version of Buddy Holly's "Moondreams"), but the EP was a pirate-radio curiosity, and did no chart business. Nevertheless, with Page's continued support, the Who's exploding popularity, and the marketability of Freakbeat in 1966, Les Fleurs were well-positioned for the majors. Their ranks filled out with a keyboardist and dedicated lead singer, Polydor signed them at the crest of the Freakbeat wave. Unfortunately, the new lineup proved fractious, and collapsed under the weight of expectation and bad behavior. Les Fleurs' by-then vexed manager Frank Fenter opted to hedge his bets, and stuffed the remaining members behind the curtain, as backing players for his sexy teen prospect, Sharon Tandy.

Les Fleur de Lys' signature version of "Circles" and the shockingly licentious "Mud in Your Eye" were included on the controversially broad Nuggets II box set from 2001; Reflections 1965-1969, a dedicated compilation of the band's 22 surviving recordings, was issued in 1999. Also valuable is a 2000 compilation of Jimmy Page's pre-Zeppelin session work from this period, Hip Young Guitar Slinger.

Listen | Les Fleur de Lys: "Circles" b/w "So Come On"

I'll Show You All the Out-Takes

I began this piece in June 2007, just after viewing Control.

At some point during the fall of 2004, I walked into a classic brick-and-beam warehouse office diagonally across the street from CBGB^[1], home to a pair of film producers whose most famous respective works are the disoriented Talking Heads feature True Stories, and everyone's favorite sadomasochist dark comedy, Secretary.

After some transparently vexed half-jokes about my punctuality (a VIP at People had dropped his Treo in the stairwell; I had to swap it out), my hosts began a cat-and-mouse conversation about a short book I wrote in 2002. For the most part, it is a recitation of facts I absorbed after hearing a song called "True Faith" on the soundtrack to a long-forgotten American film, Bright Lights, Big City, in the spring of 1988. A few months later, I learned that a very different song my friends and I had skateboarded to, "Failures," was by the same band. I was told they used to be called Joy Division, and that their singer had killed himself.

Flanked by pillars of VHS tapes—despite the fact that you could fit the entire visual record of Joy Division on two of them—my hosts (and their impossibly young, adorably brainwashed PA) detailed their predicament: A couple of years before 24 Hour Party People blossomed from music obssessive's daydream into well-cast, semi-serious production, their New York-based film company, Double A, negotiated the rights to Deborah Curtis's memoir, Touching From a Distance. This occurred primarily because one of them (Neal Weisman) was a close friend of Tony Wilson's.

In the years since Double A had optioned the book, all manner of things happened—or didn't. Secretary was a critical smash, which must have distracted Amy Hobby from the project. Deborah Curtis may or may not have vacillated on certain things (the word "difficult" was used). Neal was unable to entice people from within the Factory camp to participate. Fingers pointed in all directions, but the end result was that the option lapsed, without fruit. Which is something 24 Hour Party People bore in bushels.

The idea of a dedicated Ian Curtis biopic was—and truly still is—ridiculously niche. It was always going to be a vanity project for whomever took it on, and without the financial and experiential resources to do justice to a story held so close by so many, a budget DIY venture would have been indulgent blasphemy. From the vantage point of a major studio, Curtis's life was too private, brief, and regional to translate, his contributions to popular music too unquantifiable to merit a multi-million dollar investment. Sensitive kid from rough town straddles working class guilt with romantic aspiration, sings songs of sadness, nobody can save him, end credits.

As a subject, Ian Curtis is only as captivating as the music he made, and the number of people captivated by Joy Division, as well as the depth of their devotion, was not well understood outside the realm of music journalism—until the success of 24 Hour Party People. Thereafter, a dedicated tribute to Joy Division, and Curtis in particular, became emotionally necessary for some, and financially lucrative for others. People who lived through those times, as well as latter-day fans, were shocked by the poignant and bittersweet first half of the film; how it accomplished the impossible so delicately, yet honestly, cracking the seal on a hitherto unthinkable notion: a public celebration of one of our most privately-cherished pop bands. The Ian Curtis Story was suddenly, definitely, properly going to happen, and Double-A—by 2004 operating under the name Washington Square films—had let sole ownership of the project slip through their fingers.

Two weeks before Washington Square contacted me, a press conference was held by Orian Williams, Anton Corbijn, Todd Eckert, Matt Greenhalgh, Anthony Wilson and Deborah Curtis, announcing the allegiances that would film Control. I'd read the transcript of this conference before our meeting; in fact, I'd been closely following the press release war between the competing Joy Division biopics for some time. Apparently, this was a source of frustration for the Control team, as about halfway through the conference, Tony took a very nasty swipe at Neal, and their producer said there was no way Washington Square could legally ever make a film about Joy Division.

Wounds like this are never clean. I wasn't going to assume the door was closed, and wanted to hear about their project. The Control production team had essentially no experience, and Anton Corbijn had never directed a film before. At the time, I figured it might still blow up in everyone's face, and the more seasoned Washington Square team would be there to clean up.

After some namedropping on both sides—Radiohead/Blur video director Jamie Thraves was on board to direct, Moby was handling the soundtrack—"Oh you know I just had drinks with his keyboardist last week!"—I asked them, "What's with Tony calling Neal a 'tosser' in public?" "How can you make this movie without Deborah Curtis?" An awkward silence split the table. Neal began twiddling my book, and asked sideways why there was no bibliography. Not offended at the indirect admission he hadn't read it very well, I replied that the book was sourced in the text, due to the limited number of references. He asked if I would be interested in working on their script with Jamie, verifying dates, and providing general background on the time period, musically speaking. It became clear they were looking for a way to legitimize their project, to source their script, and I worked myself into something of a self-righteous pique. "I'm sorry, but, if you're looking to use my book as an end run around Touching From a Distance, this is a non-starter. Both ethically, and insofar as that book is one of the three primary sources for mine. There's no way."

And so we struck the meeting, and Amy and Neal went off, I would have hoped, ready to accept reality. In the face of the press conference, there was no wiggle room: it was clear who should be allowed to tell this story. Yet as I understand it, they are still laboring in obstinate disregard, enjoining Lindsay Reade from the inner circle, using hers and journalist Mick Middles' atrocious carcass-sniffer Torn Apart as the reference point for a movie that should never, ever be made.

Sadly, the people you might have trusted to tell this story have failed. Corbijn's aplomb in personally financing the film (to the tune of £5 million) is admirable, but Control is a passion play of the first order. It is a blithe, Christian film that affords an even more casual means to pity or mourn or pretend to empathize with Ian Curtis, and as such it buries him, once and for all. The grand myth he became, the figure Factory made him—that he in all likelihood wanted Factory to make him—is cheapened if not undone by this ordinary, linear treatment. Corbijn has scotched a story that yearned for unforgiving, brutal eyes. For an exorcist. Mike Leigh's Naked is exactly the grotesque fin de siècle of naivete, romanticism, fatalism, petulance, rage and talent that Control should have been. This is a story about a guy who wrote cataclysmic, morbid poetry, delivered it in terrifying fashion, and hanged himself. It's not about the fucking good times^[2].

Everyone involved with Joy Division, who supported Ian Curtis as an artist, friend, manic depressive, and epileptic, inherited a responsibility upon his death, insofar as they had a choice: how best to serve—whether in silence or exposition—his memory. What we get from Corbijn is a confused attempt at kitchen sink drama, for all intents an extended remix of his wonderfully vague "Atmosphere" video^[3]. The film is a needlessly rote telling of a private and largely plain story that was already handled appropriately: in the Factory tradition, within the ebullient, myth-making 24 Hour Party People, and the more personal remembrances of Curtis's widow (not to mention the recent ruminations of his daughter).

Everything Joy Division did was obtuse—shrouded, and willfully so—and Factory helped take that to another level, in exactly the same way McLaren/Reid/Westwood buttressed the smart-aleck Sex Pistols. Tony Wilson consistently demurs and defers demurred and deferred to McLaren as some kind of grand patriarch, but he, and Saville, and Erasmus, and Gretton, and Hannett left a grander if less explosive mark on the same landscape. It wasn't the Clash who were "positive," it was people like Rough Trade and Factory, who plowed ahead after the storm died down, who strove to expand punk's societal gains.

There is a situational, historical component to Joy Division that rivals the Pistols, insofar as they were (or at least one could argue they were), the "flowers of romance." Rotten in particular was very big on the Romantics, on the idea of emotional and class anarchy, and prayed for post-punk more than anyone. Punk was about egalitarianism in one sense, about self-expression, but it was a totally rigid, constrained movement, because things were so far out of order socially and musically in England that all you had to do was stand up and scream "NO." Essential dissent was a revolutionary act for those ripped-banner wavers, a notion Greil Marcus discusses much more thoroughly in the epic Lipstick Traces.

Continuing that line of thought, Joy Division can be viewed as delivering on the promise of punk's liberation. They were moved to express a private desperation—feelings of isolation, longing, a lack of faith, a taste for unknowable eternality—in a cerebral, deliberate way. Curtis was lyrically gory, almost pornographic in terms of his emotional nudity, and that honesty has led to untold sympathies. Jon Savage's immediate reaction in Melody Maker was quite beautiful, but shortsightedly dramatic, and too forgiving: "Now no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous." Right at the start, you are dealing with Christian imagery, with the notion of Curtis preaching and self-martyring.

I believe Curtis was initially very aware of the singularity he would attain through suicide—the romantic Permanence of it—but that this idea weighed less and less on him as he chose to end his life. The hopelessness he was embroiled in, as Sumner and most of his friends have always said, was very much down to epilepsy and manic depression, compounded by the counterproductive medications he was prescribed, and the epileptogenic situations prevalent in his chosen lifestyle. This is what makes Curtis a sympathetic figure, unlike Kurt Cobain (a junkie who constantly rationalized his addiction, evaded his responsibilities, then copped out). Ian Curtis was cursed, kept from doing what he dreamed of by a disease he had no control over. He wanted to be under lights that gave him seizures; to stay up all night; to drink and be merry; to walk his dog. He wanted to walk up the stairs with his daughter. He could not be trusted, nor could he trust himself to do any of these things.

Joy Division and Ian Curtis are static entities, monuments to qualities we are more desperate than ever to find in our art: truth, honesty, integrity, individuality, and originality. The potency of Joy Division's music, so haunting and ahead of its time, is amplified in that it didn't morph into something distasteful or compromised^[4]. Most bands embarrass themselves at some point—the Cure, Siouxsie, Bowie, Iggy, the Pistols, the Doors—and in killing himself, Curtis ducked that battle (and so many others).

Thanks to Factory records, Rob Gretton, and the tenacious, quality journalism of Paul Morley—not to gloss over their formidable live presence—Joy Division were able to build a following without promoting themselves in ways fans today consider off-putting and embarrassing. Authenticity is harder than ever to believe in, or unequivocally declare, and because Ian Curtis killed himself, people can project whatever they like onto his life and music. He's not around to tell them otherwise.

Joy Division never had the chance to compromise their music or message, so we can assume they would not have, but we can't know. We stare at the pictures, listen to the music, and drown in halcyon, inherited nostalgia for times and places most of us will never understand, making Joy Division what we want so badly, but may never know again: a band that means one thing.

^[1] I know neither why nor how this inside joke became a Gawker news item. I wrote it before work one Friday morning, marginally hungover, and sent it to Nick because I laughed so hard at even remembering the name Poi Dog Pondering. 2007 has been rife with last-gasp blog-on-blog incest of this sort. I started writing this entry in June, when I first saw Control. Which is to say, before "Meg White Sex Tape" became the #2 search result on Google, thanks to a message board prank.

Most of the people who were first fascinated by blogging—and therefore took it seriously—have grown out of it. The rest are kidding themselves, minute by minute. Worse, a younger generation is poisoned by weekly diapers-to-riches stories of Facebook billionaires, believing the internet is a real medium—that there is real money and authority somewhere in these wires—when the lonely, self-absorbed party-hoppers manning them are more gutless, deferential and deluded than ever. Not coincidentally we can say the same of the music and musicians they tend to write about.

^[2]I will never understand the urge to underscore meaningless, "humanizing" anecdotes when talking about suicides. Why do people stress how much fun people who kill themselves had when they were alive? "Oh I remember the time we sprayed beer all over Simon Topping, and then there was that time he farted in the van and we pulled over and threw packets of crisps and empty Duvel bottles at him!" Obviously moments like this were not very life-affirming for the departed. As far as Naked goes, I have never watched a film and thought, "Gosh some Joy Division would be perfect right about now!" I did at the end of this one.

^[3]Not a very unique turn of phrase as it happens: Simon Reynolds used the very same expression in his excellent New York Times piece.

^[4]For example, New Order recorded (but never released) a version of "Blue Monday" for Sunkist, a story finally came out in the Paul Morley-spawned NewOrderStory of the early 1990s.