Even if someone makes something terrible—like the music the Insane Clown Posse makes—at least they’re doing something that speaks to them. And they kept going even though people told them it was terrible. And they found their audience, and now they built a community around their work. Look, you couldn’t pay me to listen to their music, but I still feel like I have more in common with the Insane Clown Posse than I do with someone who just sits on the sidelines and shits on other people’s work and who never puts themselves on the line.
Tom Scharpling in Mike Sacks’s Poking a Dead Frog (via nickdouglas)
When I was a young boy, I put on Stockhausen or Albert Ayler, and I said, “I hate this music. I hate it! But what is it? Who are these people and what the hell are they doing?” I don’t feel our young people get that feeling anymore, or when they think about playing jazz, they’re really thinking about idiomatic certainty. Jazz equals walking bass, drum set, chord changes, a particular kind of voicing. But it’s all a known space. If I knew what it was about then I wanted to go to something else, because I came to see that music wasn’t about just style. What attracted me to the discipline of music was this component that I couldn’t understand, but I could sense, in every kind of music. It helped me to see how little I knew about music. It also helped me to learn humility, because whatever you can do there’s always someone who can do it better. There’s always someone in a different idiom who can do something that pushes my buttons and makes me want to work harder because I’ve been inspired.
Do you recall a time in America when the income of a single school teacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?
I remember. My father (who just celebrated his 100th birthday) earned enough for the rest of us to live...
The suit claims the woman behind the accusations was a liar who made “despicable, false, outrageous, and defamatory statements” about Oberst last December.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they were sexually assaulted.
Oberst’s lawsuit says the woman posted accusations that Oberst raped her a decade ago in North Carolina after his brother, her middle school English teacher, introduced the two at an Oberst show. The lawsuit says she also claimed Oberst punched her in the face and that she was 16 at the time.
Oberst, an Omaha, Neb., resident best known for his work with Bright Eyes, is seeking monetary damages, attorney fees and other costs.
He says the media coverage that resulted from the three posts in the comments section of a blog has damaged his career, especially in New York where most of the major music publishing houses are headquartered. He says he was in the company of his brother, bandmates or then-girlfriend at the time of the claims. The suit also says the woman who made positive social media comments about Oberst in the past decade.
I’m a fan of NPR. Literally, I “Like” NPR on Facebook. That’s partly why I came across the above article an this afternoon. From a baseball fan’s perspective, that’s a little like asking, “Mariano Rivera’s Cutter Can Devastate, So Why Don’t All Pitchers Throw It?”
The article was spurred by Baltimore’s recent hiring of Hall of Fame Knuckleballer Phil Niekro to school three of its minor leaguers in the art of throwing the knuckleball. NPR follows the usual narrative we’ve seen - the knuckleball is finicky and can resurrect careers. Knuckleballers are rare, etc.
The reporter even consults Alan Nathan, a physics professor who runs The Physics of Baseball site. The article concludes that the knuckleball is both hard to actually pitch and comes with a stigma attached.
What it doesn’t mention is the truth.
That the knuckleball is like an ex - you pick things up when you’re down, and everything’s great. And then your tumultuous relationship throws you back into a pit of despair, but you remember the good times, and you stick it out. Sure enough, those seven inning, eight strikeout performances come back into the picture, and that four inning, ten run monstrosity form the previous week is forgotten.
That the knuckleball is solely responsible for the creation of the word “frenemy.”
That the knuckleball is like a gift from a race of superior beings who wanted to encapsulate the joys and hardships of playing and watching baseball into a single, beautiful pitch.
A lot of what I did in X was making fun of ’70s music… I remember watching the Doobie Brothers on this Christmas rock concert. The songs were already boring and pretentious to begin with, and then they did this one where the whole band stopped and the guitar player took this solo-wheedly-wheedly-wheedly-playing lots of notes and making all these faces and shaking his hair. And he wasn’t even doing anything. There were a lot of notes, but it was a real easy riff, you know? I noticed that all of these rock groups were always making these faces, trying to make it look hard but not really playing anything. So as a joke, I would play something difficult and just smile and not look at the guitar and act like it was nothing. To me, that was funny. In the beginning, most of the audience got it, but after a while, people looked at it and thought, ‘Well, he isn’t doing anything hard, or he wouldn’t look like he was.’
Billy Zoom, in a 1998 interview. (via oneweekoneband)
I always loved the way he did this and now I know why he did it
For those of you who criticize Janelle’s signature monochromatic look.
From her speech on “Black Girls Rock”:
“When I started my music career, I was a maid. I used to clean houses. My mother was a proud janitor. My stepfather, who raised me like his very own, worked at the post office and my father was a trashman. They all wore uniforms and that’s why I stand here today, in my black and white, and I wear my uniform to honor them.
This is a reminder that I have work to do. I have people to uplift. I have people to inspire. And today, I wear my uniform proudly as a Cover Girl. I want to be clear, young girls, I didn’t have to change who I was to become a Cover Girl. I didn’t have to become perfect because I’ve learned throughout my journey that perfection is the enemy of greatness.
Embrace what makes you unique, even if it makes others uncomfortable.” - Janelle Monáe
The George-Porter “dick pinching” story. It never gets old. From George’s 1996 autobiography, “I Lived To Tell It All.”
“One of the worst things I ever did was against Porter Wagoner.
Tammy and I were playing the Grand Ole Opry. The show is run in segments, and Porter was the host of our segment. My mind became extremely altered when I mixed liquor with diet pills, and I often got very aggressive and hostile. Flat-out mean. I was drinking and taking pills when I saw Porter head for the men’s room at the Ryman Auditorium.
I had gotten it in my head that Tammy and Porter were seeing each other romantically. I followed Porter into the rest room and saw him standing at the urinal.
I walked up behind him and shouted, ‘I want to see what Tammy’s so proud of!’
Then I reached around and grabbed his dick. I twisted hard.
Porter began to jump and wave his arms. His sequin suit made him a blur of shimmering silver. He doesn’t move much onstage.
He moves a lot when you pinch his penis.
He peed on himself and had no change of clothes. Somebody said he missed his next segment and Ernest Tubb had to substitute.” — I Lived To Tell It All, 1996
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
— Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (via volumexii)
