Metal vs. Punk II (?!?)

File this under: my book is but the crest of a wave...

The Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge, MA is readying for an event of clearly epic proportions: an evening called, Metal vs. Punk II, apparently the second (annual?) evening devoted to pitting punk and metal bands against one another to see which genre reigns supreme. My only question is: why the fuck didn't I think of this first? Apart from the fact that I'm not a concert promoter, of course.

Here's a link to a listing and lineup; check the photos, quite hilarious. And the guy on the right (the metal guy) almost kinda looks a little like me, except for the spikes.

How Teaching Made Me a Copyright Criminal

The semester is coming to a close, and none too soon. It's been a bear, for reasons that I won't belabor. But one running theme this semester has been technical difficulties in the classroom. For my class at UMASS, I was placed in a room where the only a/v I had at my disposal was my laptop. No cd player, no dvd player, let alone anything as old fashioned as a turntable - and this in a graduate seminar on popular music! At Smith things were only moderately better. My rock history course met in a room that ostensibly has all that one would need: cd, dvd, turntable, installed computer as well as plugs to accommodate laptops, hell even a vhs player. Problem is, hardly any of it works the way it's supposed to. The turntable is hooked up to sound like crap, same with the laptop jacks, the dvd player loses audio out of one channel, the in-class computer makes a horrible buzz whenever you turn the volume up past barely audible. So that basically leaves you with a CD player. Awesome - not! So much for being at a school with a $1 billion + endowment...

The upshot of all this is that, not being able to play vinyl in class, and refusing to pay for music I already own - and having to work with a music library that's done a good job purchasing stuff I need for class but still has its gaps - I've had to resort to so-called "illegal" downloading on a regular basis. Not that I think anything I've done should actually be considered illegal, but that's a topic for another post. And not that having downloaded a bunch of music for free is anything that deserves congratulations - in this day and age it's a given. What I find ironic is that I was pretty much forced into the situation of doing so by the horrendously inadequate technical facilities provided in the classrooms where I taught.

This is doubly ironic in that, old school music consumer that I am, I've generally been disinclined to make digital music into something I use on a regular basis. I've posted along these lines but it's worth reiterating: I like vinyl. I still buy vinyl, as well as CD's. I buy a lot of music in physical form, and I prefer to buy my music in that form and to listen to it in that form. I don't like headphones and portability is all but irrelevant to my listening habits. I am the kind of consumer that is allowing the record industry to have some sort of continued solvency, and yet...when all is said and done, I find that there are many situations in which I basically need to go online to troll around for free music because otherwise my options for acquiring the things I need are too limited and expensive.

Besides taking the opportunity to vent about a situation that I find very frustrating, this story seems to me worth telling because it provides something of a parable of the contradictions involved in being a professor of popular music. It's my job to try to cultivate a more sophisticated understanding of popular music and the larger media system through which it's produced. But to do so, I need resources of a sort that are pretty common outside the academic setting but far less so inside. Adding to that, it's important for me not to take the supposedly inevitable tide of technological "progress" as a given. Just because the corporations that earn enormous profits from the production of new technologies have deemed some particular item or format to be obsolete doesn't mean that we should all follow suit. Vinyl may be, in the end, just another commodity item, no more no less, but it was also a dominant form in which people experienced music for the better part of a century, and the notion that we should all dispense with our vinyl archives because of changing media is folly.

I find it a matter to despair that academic institutions, ostensibly a site in which we can resist some of the gravitational pull of market capitalism in at least a limited degree, are so shortsighted on these matters that it would be possible to have a classroom in a music building that doesn't even have a cd player, let alone a turntable (yes I'm talking to you, UMASS).

This rant is now officially done. For now.

Poly, Goodbye

I just checked my blogroll for the first time all day and saw the bad news, posted by Brian at This Ain't the Summer of Love, that Poly Styrene just passed away due to complications from cancer. Poly (born Marianne Elliott-Said) was one of the great women of punk with a wonderful air raid siren of a voice. She was the lead singer for one of the most creative bands to emerge from the British punk scene of the late '70s, X-Ray Spex, and she wrote some of the most trenchant lyrics of any punk songwriter, questioning the daily rituals of consumerism that give us all a sense that our identities have been manufactured for us by some large impersonal system. Anyone reading this who has not heard the X-Ray Spex album Germfree Adolescents, stop reading and go find a copy to listen to now. You won't regret it.

Meanwhile, in memory, here's a rockin' video performance of the band playing their pivotal first single, "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" An anthem for female rockers everywhere...

Metal Idol, continued

This wasn't as cool as Durbin singing Judas Priest's "You Got Another Thing Coming" a few weeks ago, but gotta give the man props - he is unapologetic in his metal-ness, even if he does choose a pretty suck-ass song (Sammy Hagar's title track from the film Heavy Metal) to prove it. If nothing else, this was easily the most time given to a guitar solo in the history of American Idol and for that alone it was sorta neat.

Jason, Iggy and John

Last night Holly and I went to see Sebadoh, and it was a great show, better than I'd anticipated. Holly went to high school with Jason Loewenstein, who mainly played bass but switched instruments with Lou Barlow at various points and played some damn fine high-wire indie punk guitar along with singing most of the evening's more punk-fueled tunes. A fine and funny moment happened while Jason was at the mic. He recounted all the time he spent at Pearl Street - the club where they played - and all the hearing he'd lost going to shows there, and looked out at the club to the spot he usually remembered standing, which just happened to be right where Holly and I were positioned. Looking out, he looked right at Holly and said "Hey!" For some reason she found this embarrassing but I thought it was sort of cute.

In a much weirder vein, Iggy Pop appeared on American Idol this past Thursday night (!). The sheer novelty of the thing was fun in and of itself, but I have to say, it was sort of underwhelming all in all. It would have been one thing if he'd appeared with the Stooges but he was there with a bunch of younger musicians who were sort of just okay in the manner of much of Iggy's non-Stooges solo work, and he sang a song - "Wild One" - that was cute in its self-referentiality but really, it mostly proved that Iggy on network TV is largely innocuous, because he can't do the things that really make him Iggy. Still, though, gotta wonder just which producer of the show thought that of all the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-related folks (that was the week's theme) to bring on, Iggy was the one. And it definitely seems to consolidate the show's progressively growing play for a more straight-up rock audience (also indicated by this season's big rocker contestant James Durbin, who sang a Judas Priest song earlier this season - which to my mind, was a way more radical breach of American Idol decorum than having Iggy perform).

A final note: next Saturday (Apr. 16) in Northampton, underground legend John Sinclair will be performing at the First Church chapel downtown. Tickets are $15 and apparently aren't selling like hot cakes so anyone with an interest in seeing one of the most intriguing characters in the past several decades of alternative culture still has a chance to check it out.


For those who don't know, Sinclair was a poet, writer and activist based in Detroit who became the manager of one of the great rock bands to ever hail from that city, the MC5, back in the 1960s. Sinclair wasn't just a manager, he was an ideologue, master publicist, mischief maker and tireless advocate who mentored the Five in the ways of avant-jazz improv and sent shivers down the spine of local and national authorities. In 1969, having caused so much trouble, he was sentenced to ten years in jail for possession of marijuana in a trumped up charge that was obviously motivated by politics. While in jail, Sinclair collected many of his writings in a great document of countercultural idealism, Guitar Army; upon his release in 1972, Sinclair went on to found the Ann Arbor Jazz and Blues Festival, and has continued to write poetry and make music with a distinctive vision. He'll be accompanied for his Northampton gig by some cool and creative musicians who play in a manner conducive to Sinclair's adventurous character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UhaQm6of0I

On the Road Again...

I'm outward bound tomorrow for my second conference in the last few weeks. This time, it's the Business of Live Music conference, hosted by Simon Frith at University of Edinburgh. Frith and a research team including Martin Cloonan have just finished a three year study of the British live music industry and this conference marks the culmination of their project. Given that I'm in the early stages of my own book-length study on the history of live music in the U.S., this is pretty much the perfect conference for me. I also love that it's small, with only about 40 presenters over three days, so it will be a cozy group which should make for some lively exchanges.

Here's a link to the conference website, where the curious can see the program. I'll be presenting some of my work on Jenny Lind, the Swedish concert singer whose early 1850s tour of the U.S. was a sort of milestone in the history of American live music. The image below is from a concert program from one of her early performances, which I found at the American Antiquarian Society.

Good News and More Good News!

My book, This Ain't the Summer of Love, was just announced as the winner of the 2010 Woody Guthrie Award for the best scholarly book on popular music, given by IASPM-US. That the award was announced at the IASPM-US conference, for which I'd worked as program chair, made it especially sweet. There aren't many awards that honor work on popular music, even fewer that honor scholarly work of the more academic variety, so this is an honor, and I am very happy.

As to the conference itself, it was a success, if I may say so myself. Things went more or less smoothly, there were far more good papers than not-so-good from what I could see, and everyone I talked to seemed to have a pretty cool time. And, Bootsy Collins was there, and I got to shake his hand and say hey, which is also cool. And I took this picture with my crappy cell phone camera.


I took some video of Bootsy and former King Records session drummer Philip Paul talking about their experiences with the label for my friends at the Rock Hall, who helped to organize the panel that featured them (one of them, Lauren Onkey, is in the photo, sitting next to Bootsy). If and when they post it to the web I'll include the link in a future post.