A Short Mythology of Lo-fi

Lo-fi offers a history for which three timelines can be drawn. Since the very first recordings of sound, the rawness, the distortion of the record has created an essential factor of a sound lost to time. The early blues recordings offer a haunting otherworldliness as well as an intimacy that is integral to the lo-fi aesthetic. The experience of sound from vinyl to the ear, the physicality of the wax, the friction of the needle react to form the inimitable listening experience. This is the first timeline, this is the “essence” of lo fi, the first steps of recorded sound. The second timeline is the collection of bootlegs, demos, and live recordings of every musical genre. Audience recordings, studio chatter, and unequalized music create the illusion of authenticity, of unfiltered access. Yet, like all other mediums, lo-fi is merely another tool of the magician, another trick of the devil. Music as product must present itself in a way that appeals to the largest audience. The studio system wishes for clarity in instrumentation, for legibility in the vocals, a wish to humanize and civilize the rhythms and emotions of the Bacchae. The lo-fi transcends by descent. Like the Maenads, lo-fi flees from Apollo and embraces the mystery in primal. And in this is the appeal of the bootleg. It reveals the artist outside the light of Apollo, it reveals not the truth of the artist, but merely the back of his hand. For the foreseeable future, lo-fi will be inexorably linked to this idea of insight into creative processes, into a closer interaction with the artist, this is the “mythos” of lo-fi. But of course, this is only illusion.

The final timeline, shows this man behind the curtain to be the same as the man behind the wall of sound. The third timeline is the most recent development of lo-fi as aesthetic choice, as an intentional presentation of noise, of distortion not only as a recording method but a technique, not as a laizze faire approach to the final production of the record but a deliberate manipulation and playfulness with sound. Lo-fi not raw, not uncensored, not all access, but as a formalist reconstruction of the previous two timelines. Beginning with the garage bands of the 60’s, lo-fi became the sound of the underground. The flood of music between the British Invasion and Woodstock created a flourishing ecosystem where major and non-major musicians could compete in the same space. The major recording artists turned to stereo just as the movie studios had turned to Cinemascope to compete with television. Lo-fi is music for the masses, or at least is the music made by the masses. One must reckon with the fact that the number of “hi-fidelity” recordings is miniscule compared to the number of what would be considered low fidelity ones, especially in this age of user content. Lo-fi is music for the masses, it is the “presence” of lo-fi in all culture. The claims of lo-fi’s unintelligibility, its harshness, its abrasiveness is merely a flaw in the audience, not the form.

Transcendence vs. Catharsis

The distinction between the transcendence and catharsis of lo-fi is that the roles of each are switched. Transcendence in high fidelity music offers transcendence through ascension, lo-fi through descent. The clarity in the recording of an orchestral symphony allows the listener to hear the individual notes motion through time, the lo-fi’s musical note falls in and out of the listener’s comprehension. The orchestra is a planet in the sky that can be studied through observation night after night. The lo-fi is a comet crashing to earth in the blink of an eye. The transcendence of lo-fi is in burying the music in a grave and hearing its life throes as it struggles to unravel itself from the dirt. The transcendence is in this rise in dissension, this purposeful dropping out is a play with the imbalance of sound. The transcendence of hi-fi seeks out a balance in which both sound and listener rise. Lo-fi seeks the imbalance where the music drops so the hearer can transcend the sound in his or her own fashion. The true talent of do it yourself.

Catharsis in hi-fi is the tried and true method of rise and relief, conflict and resolution, rhyme and meter, rhythm and melody, the true performance of the musician-poet. Catharsis in lo-fi is the lack of performance (or, at least, the illusion of lack), is the angst wrung from the lack of resolution, the unfinished product. In this lo-fi is not merely a recording method but an argument, a dialectic, that relies in all ways on the ear like a warrior seeking a worthy opponent. The hi-fi has no need for an audience because it is enough to please the musician-poet’s ear and that is enough. The lo-fi is not vindicated as cathartic until presented for an audience. In the hi-fi, the notation on a music sheet may be cathartic. In the lo-fi, the sound must be heard and felt within the proper aesthetic frame to be appreciated and catharsis reached. It is this necessary frame that most critics of lo-fi do not posses thus finding it difficult to appreciate the different roles transcendence and catharsis play in lo-fi music.

The Distinction Between The Modern and The Post-Modern In Popular Music

Beginning with The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, popular music discourses: the rock band, the stage performance, the album, the album art, entered the post-modern era. Post-modern film began with the French New Wave a few years earlier and Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground co-opted these ideas into their performance. Post-modernism is mistakenly defined as a break, as a rejection, as experimental deconstruction. These are in fact the tokens of modernism. Post-modernism was the rebirth of form, the rebirth of unity and the rekindling of joy in art. Modernism was the era born of war. Post-modernism was the escape from war. Modernism owes a responsibility to the world. Post-modernism is a liberation from responsibility and the appreciation of art-in-itself, art free to join with any form, any subject, any belief. The Velvet Underground understood music was no longer merely a separate function but was interdependent on the art world, the fashion world, the film world, and just “the world.” Modern music forms songs in the mold of idea. Post-modern music forms ideas in the mold of songs. Both may co-exist. “The Gift” or “The Murder Mystery” are modernist, ideas set to song. “Sunday Morning” and “Heroin” are post-modern, songs that are ideas. This is a fine line which may be crossed back and forth within an era, a band, or even an album. The post-modern, however, offers a key exception to the modern and that is form without content, or play. “Sister Ray” can be seen as the ultimate form of play, the perfection of form across time, in sound. There are no symbolic and weighty “ideas” to split and deconstruct Sister Ray. Sister Ray is whole. “Ideas,” whether to critique other “ideas” or to argue for itself were essential to what we think of as modern art. Post-modern art is able to exist without content. It merely becomes a form, or not even that, merely a medium. It has no need for history. It is able to separate itself from the social and political world that modern art so struggled to intervene in. It plays. Retro is is a return to the formalist ideal while offering modernist allusions. Lo-fi is not an ideal. Lo-fi has no manifesto. Lo-fi has no ideas. It certainly may be attached to ideas, but in-itself lo-fi is merely a form. There is no “selling out.” There is no authenticity. The existence of these terms in the present day is merely the long shadow of modernism still lingering over us. One could imagine a future where we may escape modernism and ideas of authenticity and credibility and sincerity may never again haunt us. Intent is the beginning of the end for modernism. The Velvet Underground saw a possibility for a new musical form, music meant to be buried in the closet, hidden in machines. Their embrace of lo-fi, as valuable, as worthy of aesthetic appreciation, is a momentous date in music. After jazz, lo-fi is the sound of America.

The Authenticity Argument

I argue that The Velvet Underground are post-modern because musically and conceptually they retreated from any historical or even contemporary acknowledgements, and in this, set adrift, timeless, became alien, or underground. The authenticity of The Velvet Underground and the skill and passion with which they were able to perform this authenticity has led to the bitter arguments of a thousand mad critics, of the snuffling audiences who bicker over the “intention” of the artist, his or her truthfulness in their art. That lo-fi bands are seen as more authentic than other musical aesthetics can be tied directly to The Velvet Underground and their pretty persuasion. The Velvet Underground invented cool in rock music just as Miles Davis had in jazz, through attitude. Sonically, Miles was not very different from other musicians in his play, but the subversiveness of his look, the stylizing of himself as above (therefore below) the mainstream was key to his success. The bop musicians retreating from big band, Miles retreating from bop, The Velvet Underground retreating from the high studio engineered production are all moments of radical reinvention, of creation, of form, of rebirth. The notions that bop is more authentic than big band, that “Heroin” is more authentic than “Surf City” are merely cold leftovers from the social requirement surrounding the music at the time. From a formalist perspective, each song, each form, stands on its own as a work of art. lo-fi in-itself is not a politically or economically or socially burdened form. In itself, lo-fi is distorted sound, buried vocals, indiscernible instruments, and loud or unequalized levels recorded on analog but now also digital media. The motivations for and reasons for a song being recorded with these attributes are secondary and separate from lo-fi. The songs of The Velvet Underground are not great because they are “real” but because they are a child seeing snow for the first time, they are songs built on the air of muses naked in the dawn, tied to nothing.

(No) Sympathy

The complaints that lo-fi music is unlisteanble, or a chore, a struggle, is a mountaineer berating the Pyramids for being too steep too climb. Art appreciation improves with training and due diligence. The greatest artwork is not known till the death of its contemporary critics. The critic being the extension of the audience carries a heavier burden than the artist and his art at least in the sense of interdependence. The artist may have personal struggles with their art but this has no effect on the audience at large. The critic on the other hand is the gatekeeper. The critic must decide what will be heard in the ages of men to come. In this sense, the critic must have all sympathy for the artist. The sickness of ratings, the plague of recommendations in the capitalist market has tolled the death of criticism and the rise of consultants. In the past, one could only say that the critic found the work favorable or not favorable and that was the final word. Now the math has entered. Criticism has become a numbers game not because the audience demanded it, but because, as a whole, the commodity of art is easier to consume than the form of art. Lo-fi is not easy. Therefore as a commodity, it will naturally be “rated” lower, recommended less, than art that is commercialized easier. In a war of attrition, it is always the more visual, the more pronounced army that will win. The bold party has the appearance of victory, therefore the opposition, mistaking themselves outnumbered, surrenders. This is why lo-fi and other underground art are fancied as more authentic because of their difficulty in being bought and sold, in being the underdog underground. Yet, since post-modernism has shown authenticity to be the emperor’s new clothes, that victory is in appearances, lo-fi is merely a donkey pinned with multiple tails. Andy Warhol recognized the system was of his own making so therefore by being alien, subversive, and outsider, he became the most popular artist of his era. Lo-fi is art for the masses just as the Campbell’s soup can. It only takes the sympathy of a critic or the empathy of the listener to let it through the gate.

Times New Viking and The Sound Obsession

Lo-fi in the 60’s and 70’s can be easier understood by economic conditions rather than aesthetic choice. Of course, The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat was a purposeful act of lo-fi, if not the first, then the most notable. Beginning with punk in the late 70’s and stretching into the 80’s. Lo-fi became the choice tool for revolting against the baroque and fanciful recordings of the major genres of the time: disco, progressive, new wave, pop. This punk revolution reinvigorates lo-fi not merely as the sound of history, or of the unwanted demos of the recording studio, but as sound that can speak to and for an audience. In the 90’s, lo-fi reaches the peak of its artistry with Guided by Voices and Pavement. Lo-fi is transformed from a revolution to a style, from the 4^th of July to Thanksgiving, a form capable of great diversity, with many heads beneath its umbrella. The path that Guided by Voices and Pavement took, that of increasing in recording fidelity as they grew in popularity is troubling not because of any notions of “selling out” or “going commercial” but that it seems a symptom of a society where artists and critics and audiences are attempting to meet each other’s expectations without communicating them in the first place.

In the middle of the first decade of the 21^st century, lo-fi has another rebirth. If lo-fi in the 20^th century contained the “essence” “mythos” and “presence” of lo-fi, the current lo-fi movement is the post-modern reunification of these into a new form. The current crop of lo-fi bands recognize the power of this trinity and exploit it. Exploit in a positive sense as in to exploit to its fullest potential, to reveal the inherent power and instinctual connection with sound lo-fi offers. Lo-fi, being a form without content, ably affects the listener in ways different from genre. Genre requires a historical appreciation of past works which affects both the present work and the past works, a timeline with ever changing points of notice. Genre can and is appreciated in itself but one might be charged with ignorance, however unfairly, of debts owed. “Retro” is interesting in that it uses the tools of the past to create new works for a new time. Thus, genre and retro are both modern and post-modern whereas I argue lo-fi is strictly post-modern. Retro is the house where nobody lives. Lo-fi is the foundation of the house of the rising sun.

Times New Viking is the greatest lo-fi band of this 21^st century. What they have produced is something that embodies and puts forward all musical possibilities. By striking at the raw nerve of music, Times New Viking has legitimized all forms of recorded sound as art. Metal Machine Music gift wrapped for the people. There are undoubtedly bands who are more distorted, more noisy, more violent, more lyrical, then Times New Viking, but TNV has the one element that those bands do not, and that is the possibility of mass appeal. Suffice to say, great art is popular art, that is, art that wants to achieve the thoroughly historical idea of greatness, or influence, or significance must be popular with as many patrons as possible. The works of the underground, the folk, the local, are formally, just as powerful and communicative as mass art. Yet the art of the masses contains within it a certain formula, likewise a misnomer, that there are particular touchstones and support beams in which popularity can be concocted like a recipe for soup. The old truth however is that an audience doesn’t know what it wants and the critic and the artist and the support structures around them are built to offer newness, freshness, and experiences which separate the present from the past. Post-modern art which can exist without a past is the most susceptible to this popularity and thus most ready. Times New Viking is the great post-modern band. The samplers, the satirists, Beck, which are seen as the pillars of post-modernism are really the chain links of modernism cuffed to a temple in ruins. The false idol of post-moderism, sampling, does not sleep well in the fields of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Echoing in poetry, plagiarism in literature, forgeries in painting have existed throughout history. The reason that sampling is an attribute of post-modernism and not modernism is that even though sampling looks to and appropriates the past, formally, it is not necessary to have listened to the sample works to enjoy the song, whereas The Wasteland takes considerable literary knowledge to fully appreciate and understand. The post-modernist sampling is unique because it simultaneously engages and ignores the past. It creates through deconstruction while maintaining a formal integrity and originality that can attract new, naïve audiences. And if we move from the sampling of individual melodies or riffs to sampling something larger such as genre or style, then retro can be seen as the mix of modern and post-modern music that it is. Everything is connected yet lo-fi is able to disconnect from the culture even while being in debt to a hundred years of recorded music.

Play It Loud

On TNV’s first album Dig Yourself, the cover shows Subterranean Homesick Blues Bob Dylan with a censor bar over his eyes. This strictly modernist collage technique offers a fixedly post-modern ideal: Dig yourself, you-in-itself. History, even mythological Dylan, is dead. Find meaning for yourself.  Dig Yourself like all great debut albums has the intangible energy and strength of conviction that is hard to replicate in subsequent recordings. The sound of the record is explosive and booming. The distortion is thick enough to feel in the gut. The empowering riffs, the anthemic choruses are youth revolts, like tiny insects winging it through a storm.

Dig Yourself represents the old testament punk of self actualization and noise catharsis, the album Adam and Eve would have recorded upon having been exiled from the Eden. Rip It Off, the group’s third album, is the new testament pop transcendence, the second coming of the savior, a reunion between god and his creation, musician and listener. Lo-fi finds purpose on Rip It Off. The standard dismissal of lo-fi as “poor” is obliterated in the overpowering richness of “my head” or “faces on fire.” No record as ever had its pockets so full. Rip It Off will be the lo-fi album to stand the test of time. The art school tricks of their first two albums give way to pure blissstricken popular ascension. The album seems to offer an escapism but actually is a forceful call to arms, not a political call to action but a philosophical awakening to the current. Teen drama isn’t its theme, it is the album’s essence:

‘I was convinced I could tear a hole in the landscape and step through to the other side. It reminded me of a line by Proust, who once said that “the only interest in existence lies in those days when a pinch of magic sand is mixed with the dust of reality.” Communicating across the ages, Times New Viking respond with nihilistic glee.’ ^[1]

The descriptions of Times New Viking’s sound is sensuous and textural in its descriptions: buzz, crackling, hiss, fuzzy, scuzzy, muck, sludgy, blown-out, shit, gaze. Lo-fi forces a reckoning with the sound, that music is more than lyric or melody but is the form of sound, organic or artificial, that is integral to the listening experience. Play it loud. Volume is the scepter of the masses.

The High Street Aesthetic

High Street is the cultural bloodline that runs through the downtown of Columbus, Ohio and The Ohio State University. It is the home of numerous dive bars, record shops, and bohemian restaurants. Once an apex for criminal activity, it is now being slowly gentrified. I have only been on High Street a handful of times. I am no authority on it. I am barely a tourist. But to understand Times New Viking one must understand High Street. As a college town, Columbus contains a large multicultural, multiethnic community. Local art is the refuge for students to escape the sterility of college, a stage for drunkenness and loud music, a community of artistic outreach and local flavor. It is also a hellish, chaotic center where poverty and prestige meet, where college kids go slumming, where traffic congests and buses dump out their tired masses onto trash strewn sidewalks. The Doo Dah Parade is anarchy on the march, an annual freak show farce, where modernism and post-modernism clash at intersections. High Street is both a smirk and a grimace. High Street is lo-fi by necessity. It being sunk in the heart of a cowtown must rise above its limitations. Times new Viking plays loud to be heard over the bustles of engines, to get the feet of the pedestrians moving before they get run over, to say wake up. The High Street Aesthetic is a rough work where the art school educated meet the necessities of harship in the capitalist system creating a disillusioned, weary coming of age in cornfed Columbus. TNV has written the “alternate academy fight song^[2]” for this clown college. The High Street Aesthetic exists in bars, record stores, local art galleries. Lo-fi is giving change to hobos on the street. The High Street Aesthetic is the Newport music hall and the ghost of history. Lo-fi finds inspiration in leaving Ohio by planting its feet in it.

“Romantic Nihilism”

Adam Elliott, drummer and vocalist of Times New Viking, coins the term “Romantic Nihilism^[3]” to describe the band’s musical philosophy. the romanticism of his nihilism can related to the 18^th century movement because those romantics found connection in nature even as they disconnected from humanity. Lo-fi mirrors this connect-disconnect dichotomy in its varied states: authentic-inauthentic, indebted-liberated, ascending-descending. Yet Elliott’s romanticism is colored by an existential freedom: “I am equally connected to all those things. I am equally disconnected from all three of those things at the same time.” there is no one meaning in the nihilist world and thus the individual is forced to choose a path from an infinite number of roads. Because, “everything has been done before” this allows the romantic nihilist to drop any pretension of exceptionalism. Elliott’s notion of drop out can be seen as the leap of faith necessary to existential success, that by letting go of all ties to the world, one can than forge new bonds with an autonomy that transcends the limits of reality. The romanticism of his nihilism is really the practice of existentialist liberation. The true romanticism of Times New Viking is in the music and lyrics itself. Superficially, the riffs, the rising choruses, the youthful vocals are the revolution, romanticism as revolt against industrialism, lo-fi as revolt against ennui. Dropping out is action against stasis, lo-fi is music emerging out of static. You have to fight for meaning. The songs of Times New Viking are about the initial separation from the world and the decision on who or what to join up with, what relationships are worth keeping when the world is falling down around you. And even if their lyrics denote a cynicism in the human relationship, their music is a celebration of coming together, whether by dancing, by traveling, or by connecting over a favorite band. Romantic nihilism while sentimentalizing the loss of meaning also searches for hope in the interpersonal love between two individuals that are victims of the system they had no hand in creating. The speakers are singing to the young their own mistakes while seeking a cathartic expression of rhythm and noise in a world gone dead. The songs are the empathy of feeling and a distress call seeking connection. So it is important when Elliott describes their music as “product” because as stated above the commodity of art is easier consumed than the form of art. Music on a mass produced medium is more easily shared. Music made for sale is capable of great outreach in this economy where value and price are intermingled. Commodities, in general are more known and popular than non-commodities. The art world is a non-commodity system where the value revolves around “priceless” originals in the hands of few. The mass media forms of books, music, and movies are priced very cheaply but are valued higher than almost any other art form. Purchasing designates ownership and an implicit psychological connection between the artwork and the consumer, artist and audience. As a band, the release of an album, or a live show, or an interview is a product in the marketplace of time and attention. In recognizing that their music is a product, Times New Viking is able to enjoy sincerity along with artificiality, is allowed to mass produce the DIY aesthetic. Artists may cater to audiences but they can also be inspired by them. The possibility of mass appeal, so often seen as a commercial bastardizing, should be seen for what it really is: knights of faith reaching their hands out to a higher calling, the blind helping the deaf to hear.

The Future of the Past

One cannot understate the power that the lo-fi aesthetic can give to even the most unskilled recording or musician and the appeal it has to down and out listeners. If music was about skill this would be a problem, but a thousand karaoke singers drown out this criticism and lo-fi offers safe refuge for the tired and the poor to always be able to express themselves in a way that transcends limitations. Lo-fi is a bendable medium. The focus of lo-fi should not be on how or why it sounds, but what the sound does, what it means. So it is a tragedy that it seems the only thing critics of lo-fi can discuss is the how and why rather than the “what” of lo-fi. Because lo-fi is inexorably linked with the dawn of recorded sound, it is a form that will seemingly always be appreciated in the future if not practiced. Lo-fi is not a state of poorness but a distinct reaction to a world which has no time to stop and listen. Everything in time will fade and it remains to be seen if Times New Viking will be the last footsteps on the stairs of low fidelity, but it is certain that while there is still lo-fi music being made, music and sound will still be viable mediums of expression to those with open ears and a stereo.

The internet has shaken the core of phenomenology,  the order of the world. Instead of “reality as we know it” being the default setting, the virtual or artificial reality of computers, phones, the internet have become the primary language. Instead of laughing out loud, we type lol, instead of viewing a sunset or a concert through the eye, it is through a camera lens The medium dwarfs the message. The phrase “video or it didn’t happen” places more importance on the recordings of a machine than on the human confession, constructed objects are the truth tellers for the subject.

The natural world now only exists to be documented, recorded, cataloged, organized, and disseminated through the network. It’s not the end of history but the mass infection of history. Broadcasts emanate into space, time becomes shiftable and subjective, the world becomes a controlled experiment for devices to play in. Looking out at crowds, individuals, walking, silent, there is a contradiction, a split in the self. The artificial, maybe anonymous language that the internet prefers, almost requires, becomes the shatterer of the whole. No longer are we just ambiguous surfaces with secrets worn underneath the clothes, the skin. We become hypocritical in silence. The computer is dead without language. The human race is forced upon an alternative, to either be in or out, to exclude or include the self into the virtual hegemony.

The private fear in public faces stands at a giant’s height, stomps and cries with an elephants temperament, rises in the shadows to claim its recognition, but meets only the far distant stare of a screen gazer. The social network is mistaken for connecting person to person when it is only a conversation with the medium, whether voice, video, or text. The medium affects the what, how, and why of the communication. The purest form of expression is the physical facial and bodily expressions that no camera can capture, the second is the human voice that microphones only distort, the third is physical touch and contact which becomes impossible through a wire, and the fourth is the written word which is the most difficult and unsatisfactory of the expressions. And through the internet, the word becomes even more fractured and incomprehensible, yet also free and easily disseminated, therefore powerful. Urban dictionaries, memes, purposeful misappropriation of words, phrases, and images, puns, and substitutions are all rapidly and fleetingly picked up and dropped in cyclical experiments of language. Other non-written expressions such as image distortion and illusion, video mash ups, and sound bytes are all extensions of a text, of a category of expressing underlying ideas other than the surface, usually irony or satire.

Post-modernism dies at the turn of the century. A new, more inclusive umbrella term emerges from the internet era, that of a new representational, referential art. We no longer strive for verisimilitude in nature, but verisimilitude to internet zeitgeist and cultural touchstones. Parody, homage, lip syncing, cover songs, fan art and fiction, with anonymous therefore universal authorship. An artwork that can now be spread, saved, and personalized to every machine and member of the web is not only a post- modern technique of appropriation and then merely a matter of fracturing it or to add ironic context upon it but also an audience appreciation or criticism, a record or “view count” of audience behavior, and also, a tool for learning, studying, and training for new artists and new audience members. Now, replace artwork with any other enterprise whether news journalism, dating, finances, or politics and it becomes clear that post-modernism cannot account for the complexity and contradictions that the internet presents. Meaning is reintroduced through the strength of the medium, share resurrects the author, marks the death of ivory tower criticism. Relevance and hits are the rise and fall of the text. Comments sections, forums, chat rooms become the rock the house builds itself on.

The computer is dead without language. The computer is the most human of the machines and thus the most important, dangerous, earth shattering. The world exists merely to be shared, to be filtered through the medium. The internet is now the sole medium as it melts all other mediums into its mold and uses them as what some call Information, or raw data, or text, or code. Our world is no more simple, yet in the hyperlink, is once again reunited, past-present-future join in the one current, chained to link. The web is complete even as it adds nearly infinitely within itself while humans are split, the incompleteness, the leftovers of progress. Our only job now is as messenger boys, mail carriers, preservations of our destructions until computers advance enough not to destroy or enslave humans or the earth but to efficiently and absolutely control and perform the duties of the historian, the scientist, the artist, the doctor, the lawyer. We then become passive admirers of our accomplishments, we shut down ourselves so that the networks may run, definition is downloaded for the infant, life comes of age at the death bed.

The past is a back button to the left, future, forward button to the right.

The question is not whether if we pulled the plug now that humanity now or 500 years from now would be better off or worse, but how in the dawning age of the word, can humans maintain the natural limits and health of nature while proactively critiquing and questioning the construction while maintaining the benefits and efficiency it offers. The answer might be a restart of philosophy, not logic, not the fallacy, but a Cartesian skepticism even a Socratic pugnaciousness. Nietzsche thought the dialectic bad manners, but when fighting the machine, it becomes the proper roughhousing for blood to arm against wire. This philosophy must be a descriptive investigation that shows the search as greater than the answers, that shows time and space as restrictions to our physical limits but not our mental strength.

Frailty Street

The blast of air hits that says too cold for shorts
To those in shorts, to those who roll the windows down to smoke
And sun, to those with wet hair and light shawls:
Time to bundle up and salt the walks.

-America realize the conquest!

Security admit as power (not safety or justice).

Mob mentality claim to individual affirmation,

Not name tags nor property nor poster child

For a bill of rights gone wrong. Embody the ridiculous,

Flaunt ignorance as a freedom, call life a monopoly and be done with it.

O’ Anonymous Coward put a face to the monster, the shill!

Or else neither seen nor herd, sweeten before the children sour.

Plead guilty and spare us the trial.

I recently watched the film Manic (2001) and found it very insightful and moving in a lot of ways. Its characterizations were complex and alienated yet sympathetic, the script was ambitious yet grounded, and the camerawork was styled yet representational.  Heading over to Rotten Tomatoes to check out the “expert” opinions, I expected to find some criticism of the sporadic structure and some of the less-believable events. Instead, I found some negative reviews that were foolishly picking at the films use of shaky cam and even at the kids themselves. First, I will tackle the criticism of shaky cam which is so misguided that it seems history is doomed to repeat itself once again. I’m sure that in the 1920′s, there were critics of Soviet Montage and in the 50′s critics of widescreen cinema, and in the 60′s jump cuts, and in the 90′s CGI ad infinitum. To criticize a technical or formal part of the film, to label a term as inherently pejorative is, for lack of a better pejorative, dumb. The criticism of Manic’s use of handheld camera by most of the negative reviewers is as if the film was shot with no purpose or goal to its direction. Isn’t it possible that the filmmakers use of shaky cam is a deliberate attempt to disturb and alienate, to make the viewer uneasy yet at the same time intimate with the characters? I can see some criticisms to be directed at the film, even in the way it was shot but the broad claim that shaky cam in general is a  bad or dizzying effect, that shaky cam discredits the film and prevents relating with the characters, is lazy and shallow. A closer analysis of the film reveals an appropriate aesthetic to the film to capture the fragmented and brutal existence these kids and adults live. However, that the film adds even some stylish touches like lens flare and high contrast lighting is evidence that the filmmakers are in control of what they are doing. I think the filmmakers more than the critics would know what the appropriate style for their film is and it should be the attempt of the critics to reconcile these formal elements with the story and characters, not divide them. Reconciliation is a much harder job but in this film it is pretty basic, as the use of shaky cam gives the film a documentary feel, a feeling of process, review, and rote discussion as well as mimicking the states of its turbulent characters. Frankly, I don’t see how else the film could have been shot as any higher quality film stock or style would only serve to further remove the audience from the already disconnected characters. Even though I don’t have the degree of problems these child victims have, I found I could empathize with not only the mental problems but also the physical state of the characters and the hospital building they inhabit thanks to the closeness of the camera. This brings me to the other criticism from one reviewer in particular who writes the following:

“Spoiled adolescents fill a mental institution with whining, pouting, and tantrums, and we’re supposed to feel their pain. What really hurts is the movie’s shallow screenwriting, self-indulgent acting, and woozy camerawork.”

In this review lies the problem with today’s film criticism. Anytime strong or complex emotion is attempted to be portrayed in reality or fiction, it is criticized as self-indulgent as if the cool, meta, hipster, self-awareness of post-method acting isn’t also self-indulgent. Acting should be self-indulgent! Life too! As for the shallow screenwriting, is it possible for the acting to be indulgent yet the words they speak shallow? Maybe, but the reviewer offers no example of this, and I found all of the dialogue to be an appropriate balance of teenage confusion and more philosophical musings read effectively by Don Cheadle. Finally, the ultimate insult of the film’s spoiled adolescents. Did this reviewer even watch the movie? One of the kids is a victim of rape, one of physical abuse, one of verbal abuse, one disassociated from his parents, all seem to have attempted suicide. Even the rich are capable of being abuse victims, especially youths. To label these children-repeat children- as spoiled and immature is the kind of behavior and opinion that allows for child abuse in the first place. This reviewer is implicit in child abuse in attacking and blaming the victims. I don’t know if this is done consciously or unwittingly, but it is irresponsible either way. To point to the camerawork or the method-like performances as a point of criticism is to miss the larger point. Some films raise above their formal faults to reach for a new understanding, to give a those in the shadows a voice. It would be perfectly reasonable to criticize the film from the top-down, to examine how kids more or less behave like this or that, how the adult workers should or should not have been portrayed, how the hospital in the film compares to actual mental institutions etc. But since I’m guessing not many film critics know what is like in a mental institution for abuse victims, I am willing to put my trust in the filmmakers that they are being fairly accurate and truthful in their portrayal. Media members decrying the end of film criticism maybe should look at what is actually being written by critics and not just the aggregates, which I too am guilty of looking at. We need a critical literature that appropriately balances the technical and narrative aspects of the film, that is able to appreciate the overall effect or goal the film strives for and to offer evidence for both positive and negative critiques. Then maybe the supposed experts can raise above the user review and become a beacon of balance and resourcefulness rather than being distinguished from the masses only through their byline.

Happy Same Ol’ Same Ol’ Year

Juno- The popularity of this film seems to be from its blatantly ripping off Napoleon Dynamite as a coming of age tale about odd assortments of family and friend situations. Whereas Napoleon was a somewhat believable and recognizable cliche, the titular character Juno is an impossibility as no person let alone teenager is this smart-allecky, this esoteric, this sharp. The character is a punch line with a mouth. The film only appears edgy but really is only venomous and replaces misogyny with misandry which may be a new experience yet still off-putting and wrong.  The story is mainly about female problems, pregnancy, the ultra-sound etc. but the dialogue, acting, and direction are so aggressive the film feels masculine which is reversing gender stereotypes but still maintaining the stereotypical structure as building blocks. This is probably a story that needed a female director along with its female writer and star. I use the term female instead of woman because I believe the term woman applies to a human gender construction whereas female denotes  a biological condition that offers a fixed set of conditions, such as child bearing, which would be the sort of experiences that could have offered directorial insight to the film which a male director can not.

Elephant- Like the Coen Brothers whose films I also have major problems with, Van Sant’s films be the most subtle cases of hoodwinking ever put to film. His film Elephant is the most egregious. It runs its students like mice through a maze, deconstructing a day of school unlike any day of school there as ever been. The actual facts of the school day seems so confused with students wandering around outside, showing up late, dark hallways, no teachers in the halls etc. The verisimilitude of the school day is so off that the school seems to exist in some alien universe. In this alien universe there is also Beethoven and Erik Satie (in a high school movie off all places), stilted dialogue, overlapping structures, and a discussion of homosexuality in a classroom which does not seem to be a very common occurrence at least where I went to school. The infamous tracking shots and overlapping time structures are for lack of a better term: wrong. High school is not about the overlapping time-structures, the clear-headed long takes, the cleanliness of the composition. High school is chaotic, fragmented, fast, and loud. A school is the last place a tracking shot be used, a school is the last refuge for youthful rebellion in public structures. This is why Elephant is problematic. The shooting at the end is not  some grim depiction, not some objective analysis. Formally and in the context of the film, it is a celebration, a re-affirmation of youth, guns, and film. The stagnancy of the camera remains yet life is injected in the mis-en-scene. The shooters bring salvation and purpose to these young lost souls. The bulimics, the nerd, the lone black student, the weak administrator, even one of the shooters himself are given life through death, meaning through blood. The film would have been more successful using cardboard cut-outs. Now I don’t know if Van Sant intended this or not, but there is enough dark humor to suggest he at least sympathized with the shooters and that subconsciously effected the formula of his film. Micheal Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine is equally unsuccessful as it shows how gun culture is infinitely more exciting then non-gun culture, or I should say his documentary without guns. Guns like a camera are just tools and in the wrong hands can do harm. I actually support stronger limits and regulations of gun ownership, however I do support training and arming people whether its tasers or small non-lethal firearms for self-defense and to deter preying criminals and violent activity. Elephant offers nothing but a celebration of automated weaponry, oppressive architecture, and stale children. Plain and simple, the film is a mistake.

Little Miss Sunshine- Other than not offering a more sharp critique about child pageants, this road trip films offers us the high schooler on a vow of silence and the facile little girl who just wants to live her dream, however stupid and unfulfilling it may be for the rest of the family and even herself.  In high school, I was thinking of typing up a poster that said “I am taking a vow of silence to protest vows of silence as a form of protest” but once I realized the ineffectiveness of protesting ineffectiveness I decided against it. The film offers us the vow of silence as a symbol of the contemporary angst ridden teenager and the beauty pageant in which one form of sexuality is offered as a subversive force against another type of sexuality. Both of these are played for comedy rather than turning a critical eye to the parents who allow both to take place and yet who are even more childish than the children. I really don’t understand why this film was so critically lauded either being so cliche driven and unsurpsingly sweet and simple. It’s like other Hollywood comedies yet its closer focus on children is even more probematic than the kid sidekick blockbusters we see.

Millions- This is the film I really wanted to like but it fell short of my expectations. Hearing about a bunch of elementary school kids getting wads of cash brought me back to my old school days when I and others would have thrown the mony around like crazy, been caught, shrugged it off and gone on. Here, the main child is too moral. He talks to saints, gives to the poor and generally feels guilty about inhereting cash from God and buying electronics. The older brother is much more interesting in creating a group of followers and cash allowance system that took full advantage of his situation. These scenes gave the film a much needed edge in contrast to the cloying dialogues with these imagniary moral guidance counselors from heaven. Only an adult could think up a kid conversing with angels in full sentences and the film feels like its directed by a forty year old for forty year olds. No one under twenty would seem to be interested in the moral underpinings of money and just want to see cash, see it spent, see it manipulated and see the repurcussions.  Millions should have been a crime drama film in grade school instead its a man’s ideal sugar-coating of a much messier world.

Slumdog Millionaire- Boyle would seem to give us a messier world and does only to again paint it over with music, love, and a happy ending that makes poverty only a prologue to a fable. The childhood scenes are the best of the movie and the film would have done right to stay within that time frame, similar to the Middle Eastern films of the 90′s and early 00′ about children which are probably the best films about childhood ever made.  Boyle shows us the depravity and the struggle of the situation and shows equally the joys, excitement, and freedom of slum kids along with the horrors. Whether these are equal in real life I can’t say but I feel the film is balanced in this respect and neither overly sunny or depressing since children would seem to have a stronger resolve in the face of adversity than many would give them credit for. The second half of the film lets them down since the adult teenager seeks to escape poverty by going on a gameshow. The gameshow offers him questions that he so conviently learned while in poverty. How convenient! If only it were this simple, we could have homeless people on Jeapordy, drug-addicts on Wheel of Fortune, and ex-cons on the Price is Right and the world would be a paradise once again. This is the vision Boyle seems to offer us. City of God did it much better and seemingly true to life. That the better life in Slumdog is won by playing the rules of the game, sitting tensely in a chair, pandering to the host, having the eyes of the world on you, and being spoon fed questions from your past for the girl, the money, and the fame is a complete dream and a red herring to real questions and answers of importance.

I am sure there are others I am missing or have blocked out of my mind, but I just wanted to expose a gap in our story-telling in movies. Literature seems to much more sucessfully tell youth stories than films and television and I hope to see works where children are no longer used as comedic devices or Dennis the Menaces for adults and examined with a proper complexity and soberness that the adult world of movies sometimes achieves.

One additional note: I would like to mention a few films that I feel do offer a more praise-worthy depiction of adolescents and teenagers even though they do contain a quirkiness and uniqueness that may be less universal and more specific but still believable, respectable or relatable:

Rocket Science, The Squid and the Whale, Pursuit of Happyness, Napoleon Dynamite, War of the Worlds, City of God, Donnie Darko, Nobody Knows, X-Men, Spiderman, Ghost World

Superbad, Adventureland, Garden State and other R-rated comedies containing teenagers are more college/adult/drug-oriented films and should not be included here.

Also, I am not a great TV watcher, so there are probably shows I am missing that would garner either my criticism or praise.

1. Microcastle- Deerhunter

Takes post-rock to its logical conclusion by compacting the alien clatter within two to four minute songs rather than boring, structureless epics. The song-writing is surprisingly sharp and fresh for a mainly instrumental band and the vocals and guitar work are borderline ethereal. The album is beautiful in a classically aesthetic sense while maintaining a looseness in structure and subject matter that gives it a bleakness that keeps its feet on the ground while launching its head into the stratosphere.  The entire album plays like an autumn twilight or a dream.

2. Rip it Off- Times New Viking

I plan on writing more on TNV in a longer essay but let’s just say they were waging a war of noise that fell on mostly deaf ears. The band of the second-half of the decade met ridicule and degradation instead of the acknowledgment for if not starting the new lo-fi/no-fi/shit-gaze movement then at least perfecting it. TNV did get almost universal critical praise but seemingly every comment section and user review commented on poor sound quality, lack of skill rather than the songs. Rip It Off is the pop version of White Light/White Heat and is faster, louder, and better. This music is not for wimps, but is so damn empowering, it’s the wimps who need to hear it.

3. Room on Fire- The Strokes

I honestly enjoy this album more than Is This Is It. I’m not sure I would say it is the better album, but Room on Fire is defiantly darker, harder, and meaner than the debut, maybe even verging on self-destruction. The verisimilitude to Lou Reed no longer seems to bother Julian Casablancas, or I should say bother me. That the band begins to sound like The Cars only garners more praise from my vinyl sensibility.

4. The Dodos- Visiter

This album might be the one I am most disappointed at not seeing on any lists.  If Fools and (especially) Red and Purple are not two of the best songs of the decade, then these so called music critics must be either really old or really bitter. It doesn’t hurt that the rest of the songs are experimentally daring while remaining catchy. A seriously underrated effort that I can’t really compare to any other band. And really, I shouldn’t have to.

5.  ( )- Sigur Ros

Most of the publications have included Ágætis byrjun‘ in their lists but this is problematic for two reasons. It seems the album was orignally released in 1999 and in the States in 2000. I really don’t care to nitpick on these things, but I would say that album would have a much higher ranking on the best of the 90′s list over the 2000′s. The second problem with Ágætis byrjun’ is that after the first three songs the album is just not very good. It feels listless and unorganized and doesn’t carry the visceral weight of the opening. On the other hand there is ( ) which I find much more unified, which some might call monotonous. Each untitled song is beautiful yet never overlong and each is discernibly different while maintaining a cohesion that I feel creates the best Sigur Ros listening experience.

6. Wavvves- Wavves

This album might be the one I am most embarrassed to include, but my no-fi craving can not get enough. Not only are there songs that are impossibly catchy and concussion-inducing, the album also included some instrumental passages and slower haunting tunes that give this album a surprising balance. Wavves seems to get knocked more for stage antics than the music and though I will admit lo-fi bands are usually worse live than recorded, it should not be used to critique those recorded albums, especially when they are this rocking. Oh, and please no more complaining about how anybody could have made this type of music. The fact is, this album is more complex than people are giving it credit for and just because it was recorded in a bedroom doesn’t mean it is lazy or shoddy music.

7. (tie)  And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out                                                         I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass – Yo La Tengo

Yo La Tengo may be the band that scares me the most. The adjective I see most associated with them is “airy” which I associate with intangible. Listening to their albums is like trying to contemplate infinity or the sublime, there is a terror, an awe-inspiringness that I almost dread listening to them yet can’t help but keep playing their albums over and over. I Am Not Afraid of You… is probably the greatest example of post-modern rock music and probably if someone held a gun to my head, the best of the decade, I really don’t know how you could rank any band above them, especially any American band, and even Radiohead fails to match them in the vein of furthering the mystique of rock rather than dismantling it. However, that quality to the music that I cannot define still bothers me. Maybe its the notion that Yo La Tengo is a critic’s band and they are referencing a musical knowledge I can only dream of. On the other hand, it may be the fact that Yo La Tengo sounds like nothing else out there, a completely alien soundscape which when listened to is like trying to imagine new colors or a square circle.

8. Electronic Arguments- Paul McCartney and The Fireman

Electronic Arguments is experimental for Paul McCartney yet it maintains a devotion to pop melody that experimental bands could only dream of. McCartney had a strong decade and this album shows that old masters were still making good music in the 2000′s. Bands like The Rolling Stones, ACDC, REM, even now veteran Pearl Jam, gave us some strong records. That McCartney was willing to go almost electronic, almost post-rock now seems perfectly in tune with the experimentation and re-working of standard forms into new categories of the Beatles records 40 years ago. These old masters should still be acknowledged as producing great music even if they are not as sexy or hyped as our younger musicians. Electronic Arguments sounds, incredibly, ahead of its time, pointing to a future when post-rock circles back to psychedelia to pop and McCartney can again claim first once again.

9. The Rising- Bruce Springsteen

Many might roll their eyes at this selection, yet is there any album that so perfectly captures a singular event? Not September 11th, but the paradigm-shift afterwards where America lost its edge, became, in a sense, the vulnerable singer-songwriter asking questions, looking for answers. The fear, loneliness, and the hope that rock and roll will pull us through all make this album very prophetic in the sense that critic’s choice music of this decade was very apolitical compared to the late-60′s and late 70′s and fragmented compared to the 90′s yet still gave us a lot of good-old-fashioned-in new-material rock-pop-punk to block out the latest news update.  This may be America’s national album, that in 50 years will be looked at like Aaron Copeland in the 40′s or Bob Dylan in the 60′s as capturing a specific time period on record.

10. Hail to the Thief- Radiohead

Most of the major media lists had Kid A number 1, In Rainbows top 25 and even a few had Amnesiac in the lower ranks. Hail to the Thief, I believe is a much more coherent album than Amnesiac and is next to In Rainbows in the quality and consistency in structure of the songs (Kid A remains untouchable). Radiohead’s music is so dense that I’m still studying it, but I at least know that Hail to the Thief is still very accessible work that should not be overlooked merely as a transition from Kid A to In Rainbows.

11. Chemistry of Common Life- Fucked Up

This band came as a shock to me because I didn’t believe it was possible to have a hardcore punk band in the 21st century that didn’t have demons and devils as its avatars. But Fucked Up is a hilarious band that writes familiar songs with a new attitude that on the surface doesn’t seem as nihilistic as the 80′s scene. I say doesn’t seem because I really don’t know or care what the lyrics are about the large lead vocalist is singing. All I know is that each song has a nifty novelty to it that is downright exuberant and enthusiastic and thus, positive.

12. Auto-Tune the News

I must stop at twelve because my limited musical knowledge prevents me from digging up any more nuggets and the rest of the albums I have listened to are on the major lists. Auto-Tune the News might not count as an album or even rock for that matter, but it is a consistent, unified work so in that sense it is a form of concept recording. Auto-Tune the News might be the perfect match between style and content the decade has offered us. It takes all the political paranoia, pundit bloviating, and direful banter and turns it into something joyously ridiculous joyous. Regular Auto-tune songs annoy me to no end and since they are on more of the pop/hip-hop spectrum, I am largely shielded from it. But Auto-Tune the News is able to maintain the identity and vocal recognition of each individual media member, even emphasizing it by the rewards handed out at the end of each song, which is essential to its success. Although I do find the more surreal humor such as the gorilla and the multiple drug jokes to veer of track and not be all that funny, when the songs focus strictly on the the talking heads especially the rhythmic, lyrical statements they are already speaking even before being auto-tuned, the songs reveal to us how media and politics are just another performance, a manipulation of sound bites and video clips that Auto-Tune exposes and hyperbolates into a perfect summation of the decade in music, technology, politics, and comedy. Really needs to be considered one of the important music recordings of the 21st century so far.

The status of popular comics is pretty lowly nowadays, but I find its “outdatedness” to be very interesting. Beetle Bailey might be one of the most glaring standouts as a service/army base comedy strip. The strip almost never references America’s current wars instead preferring the time-tested Army private shenanigans and bureaucratic angst. So on the rare occasion that it does recognize some theme of war past the 1950′s, I find it not only pathetic but also somewhat poignant. Other than Doonesbury, there is not really any “popular” syndicated strip cartoon about the military and one could argue that both are unrealistic in their portrayals, although I don’t know anything about modern military practices other than national news and documentaries to fully critique Doonesbury. Still, I find the feebleness of Beetle Bailey to be somewhat endearing and inspiring. The strip points back to a time when the military was good for a laugh, playing off its hypocrisy and machismo for scrappy tales of young buzzcuts sticking it to the man. This time I’m mainly referring to is the service comedy movies of the 80′s and 90′s such as Stripes, Sgt. Bilko et al. (I’m too young for MASH).

Is it wrong to be nostalgic for a time when the military was the butt of the joke rather than the joke of American democracy? Are “realistic” portrayals of the army any more useful? Isn’t a film like Jarhead or even Generation Kill more useful in displaying the absurdity and immaturity of soldiering rather than a serious contemplation of our citizens in uniform like The Valley of Elah? When we are able to laugh at war rather than intellectualize and patronize it with respect, solemnity, reverence etc., will we not be able to see the error of our ways and find other channels for world influence? Can’t comedy protect us better than a gun?

At the university I attend, the ROTC students hold drills out in a grass field. They perform drills and simulations in which they fire their fingers like guns, crawl in the dirt, get yelled at. I find this ridiculous. I know these drills are to keep these young people, who are the same age as me, alive on the battlefield but the lack of questioning in their faces, the lack of laughter at the absurdity of their situation is troubling to me. There is not much room for laughter crawling in the dirt, yet if you can’t laugh there, where can you? I know this will sound disrespectful to our troops, but that is what we need. I admire the individual resolve and courage of our soldiers but I can’t help feeling a sense of comedy and even fright at the collective action and synchronization of their clothes, movements, etc. I have trouble finding the individual in the military and this is where comedy comes in as it gives us the rebellious individual willing to challenge the repressive system of group think and blind faith. Comedy has a place in our military and it is needed there more than ever.

Now, I don’t find the Beetle Bailey cartoons very funny, but I find myself admiring the apathetic and daydreaming title character. Who else is willing to shrug off “our most vital importance” for a nap on the lawn? And every so often the comic does hit upon modern cultural memes which only show how dated and out of touch the comic usually is. But I really don’t think there is any better way of criticizing U.S. military practices than this cartoon. Doonesbury is just too esoteric for my taste and most editorial cartoons have no recurring characters to care about. If the harmless yet likable characters of Beetle Bailey find something to criticize in our current war practices then you know something is wrong. This is why I find the comic posted above so striking, with the three characters in ominous silhouette dreaming of a time when war no longer involves bloodshed or human loss but becomes just another videogame for our generals to play war with. Beetle Bailey would do right to tackle more of this modern war zeitgeist similar to what Lil’ Abner did in which the naivety and childishness of the characters provide a striking contrast to the dark world that was slowly surrounding them. Sleepy Beetle Bailey may never leave the army base for the front lines and he doesn’t have to as long as the characters become stronger and more modern satirical figures for our current situation, stranded on an army base surrounded by the insanity of a war which they catch only glimpses of. Many might say they don’t want their comic strips politicized, but really comedy is the only thing that can be successfully politicized and Beetle Bailey offers a ready-made world with a strong cast of characters to begin satirizing the wars. And really satire is not political but human. It only points out human errors not systematic flaws in our philosophy. Good satire aims for laughter, change, and action in that order and the only ones capable of laughter or action are humans not governments, documents, or political ideologies. To my mind, Beetle Bailey is more human than the robotic smart-alacky Doonesbury cast and offers an opening to get young people involved. Beetle Bailey is our chance to attack war where it is defenseless: the funny pages.

So here is a suggestion: If there is someone out there creative enough, perform a Garfield Minus Garfield type reworking of Beetle Bailey but instead add new speech bubbles that reference America’s current military situation and then maybe the creator’s of Beetle Bailey will get the message that the public is ready for a sharper edge to their pop culture.