Conversation Hearts

Two Words. Infinite Meanings. True Love. Missed Connections. 50% Divorce. First Date. Happy Nights. Sad Days. Star Crossed. Wedded Bliss. Bad Breakup. Holding Hands. Making Out. Great Sex. Poly Love. Gender Blind. Online Dating. Random Hookup. Passionate Kisses. Dirty Sex. Whispered Confessions. Secret Affairs. Unmade Beds.  Broken Hearts. Undying Love. Sex Worker. Sacred Vows. Late Nights. Lingering Desires. Hotel Sex. Craig’s List. Red Lipstick.  Body Parts. Together Forever. Fractured Fairytale. Say Anything. Play On. (C. run time: 48:48; direct link for mobile access: http://8tracks.com/anna-march/conversation-hearts .)

Conversation Hearts from anna march on 8tracks.

-1-
“Jackson (Live)”
Johnny Cash
At Folsom Prison (Live)

-2-
“Love Is Strange”
Mickey & Sylvia
Dirty Dancing (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

-3-
“Anyone Else But You”
Various Artists & The Moldy Peaches
Murderball

-4-
“Ohio”
Kent Schoch
Ohio

-5-
“Chuck E’s In Love”
Rickie Lee Jones
The Duchess of Coolsville

-6-
“Everything Trying”
Damien Jurado
The Dilemma (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

-7-
“Giving Up”
Ingrid Michaelson
Be OK

-8-
“Wake Up (Next to You)”
Graham Parker
Steady Nerves

-9-
“Mary Anne”
Marshall Crenshaw
This Is Easy: The Best of Marshall Crenshaw

-10-
“Button Up Your Overcoat”
Ruth Etting
Bring On the Girls 1926-1934

-11-
“Train In Vain (Stand by Me)”
The Clash
Story of the Clash, Volume 1 (Disc 1)

-12-
“Two Cousins” (Acoustic Version) [Bonus Track]
Slow Club
Paradise (Deluxe Edition)

-13-
“A Wonderful Guy”
Mary Martin and The Women’s Chorus
South Pacific – The Original Broadway Cast

-14-
“Send In The Clowns”
Frank Sinatra
The Very Good Years

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• Aural Fixations, the Rumpus Mixtape #8: Van Gogh
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #7: Revelry
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #6: Drinking Red Wine

But Richard Meltzer, whose magisterial Aesthetics of Rock (1970) fashioned part of its reputation by undertaking, e.g., to transcribe the entirety of “Surfin’ Bird,” by the Trashmen, has only matured, deepened, grown  as writer and thinker. He has been a lyricist of note (for Blue Öyster Cult, among others), he has been a poet, a novelist, a spoken word artist, never content to linger long at one vocational way station. At one point in this commendable journey, Meltzer became acquainted with the great California punk band The Minutemen. The members of The Minutement were, as is well known, keen fans of Blue Öyster Cult. In fact (as you will soon hear), The Minutemen were in discussion to record an album with Richard Meltzer at the moment in 1985 when D. Boon, guitarist for The Minutemen, untimely perished in a car accident. It took Mike Watt, the bass player, a long time to make his way back to the Meltzer project—more then fifteen years. But after the turn of the millennium Watt did approach Meltzer anewto complete the project, at which point Meltzer assembled an omnibus of lyrics, some old, and some new, and recorded himself in performance. Then Watt, along with members of the Japanese band Cornelius, made music to enhance and embrace and antagonize and celebrate Meltzer’s funny, wry, prickly words, under the Watt-esque name Spielgusher.

In this album-length suite, Meltzer has a fair amount to say about gerontology, the Merchant Marines, loneliness, cunts, things that start with the letter S, and penises. His voice is not so far from the voice of your strangest bus driver of childhood, except with vision in surfeit. “Did I kill somebody/Tell me if I did/Because I just don’t know.” The music, on the other hand, in small pointilistic bursts, skitters restlessly from genre to genre from piece to piece. The playing is loose, irrepressible, and inspired. And the conjunction of the two things—words and jams—in one long undifferentiated track, is luminous, memorable, and more suggestive of The Minutemen and of the hardcore period of American indie rock than anything that has been recorded in more than a decade.

Watt’s playing, above all, is avuncular and melodic, and the one-sheet he wrote for the album is these things too: “I found d. boon all red w/fever, he had a sickness. damn, he was like a lobster and thought he should stay home but he said he wouldn’t be driving and anyway, I said look here’s the richard meltzer spiels and he was so happy – like me, he couldn’t believe it and face lit up w/a light that was nothing like the fever one I had found him w/when I got there – man, it was a righteous glow and we looked at each other as if to say “fuck yeah!” or something like that. he said he would take them w/him and work on ideas for them like me. that’s the last time I saw him.”

The result (on Watt’s own ClenchedWrench label) is one of the strangest, most attenuated, and most beautiful records of the new decade. Which led me to what follows. I approached this Richard Meltzer interview with a great deal of trepidation. Few are the American writers who really intimidate me, but this one does, for his philosophical chops, his zero tolerance policy on bullshit, and for his unsparingly earthy instincts. This interview was conducted over Skype in December of 2011, and I was shaking a little and scratching myself nervously throughout. 

 ***

The Rumpus: Weather in Portland today?

Richard Meltzer: The 20s. Are you in New York?

Rumpus: I’m upstate, and it’s sort of overcast and creepy looking. Could snow. Okay, so may I ask you some questions about the Spielgusher record?

Meltzer: Please ask.

Rumpus: I’m so impressed with it, I think it’s really strange and beautiful and singular. Intensely anachronistic in some ways.

Meltzer: Thank you.

Rumpus: I’m curious how you feel about it?

Meltzer: My issues with it are that simply in terms of my own work. It represents 30 years of output. And some of the things, some of the pieces I’ve used there, when I first wrote them, they seemed probably very menacing, and I hear them now, and they’re just kind of pleasant, if that’s the word. And then the stuff was recorded, my stuff was recorded, about 2002, ’03, those years. And so it’s basically, when I hear it now, I don’t recognize myself directly in a lot of cases. I was expecting more menace. And the fact that it didn’t seem menacing at first troubled me. Then I thought, What the hey, you know? I’m 66 years old, and I could just crack open a beer and listen to it, and it doesn’t trouble me that it doesn’t kill. Once upon a time, it probably would have.

Rumpus: What was the process for you in assembling this particular body of lyrics? Considering that it’s from the expanse of 30 years? How did you decide what to include?

Meltzer: Some of it is from as far back as when I was going to be doing a recording with the old Minutemen. Ari Cohen was going to buy us some studio time for us to record, I dunno, 19 or 20 short pieces. Those pieces were on paper, and apparently D. Boon had them in his pocket when he died.

Rumpus: That’s really incredible, and very sad.

Meltzer: I don’t remember exactly what those particular pieces were. You know, I don’t read as often in public as I used to, but I used to read 10, 12 times a year, and so I would say at the time that I recorded these words, this time around, I was still part of this crappy Portland band called Smegma. I was their so-called vocalist. They were a band that was formed in Pasadena in 1972, and they moved to Portland in a school bus. In the ’70s, and they were a so-called “noise band.” And they provided noise. You know, anywhere from five to 17 members at one time. So they asked me, in ’99, if I would like to be their vocalist, and I could do anything I wanted to do with my voice. I could yell, I could whisper, I could sing.

So a lot of this stuff was material that I was doing with them. It was getting very tedious being with them. At first, there was some novelty to it, and this guy Rick, who was running the show, he ultimately didn’t care for the fact that I was using the same material all the time. He says, “Write us a rock opera.” Yeah, right. I just wasn’t going to do anything original for them, and after a while I just used either some of the perennial stuff, or snippets from recent books. Like, uh, what was it that came out that year? Autumn Rhythm. The pieces in that were written from, uh, anywhere from ’97 to ’01, I guess. And so I used some items from Autumn Rhythm in Smegma. And they were still nearby when I did these recordings. Ultimately, it was just whatever stuff wasn’t just completely overused, whatever I had in my satchel that I wasn’t sick of. I think everything in there was something I had read live.

Rumpus: Can you talk a little bit about how you generate texts like this? Do you write everything down? Are you a compose-by-hand guy, or do you ever improvise the texts?

Meltzer: If I’m very drunk, I can improvise. But generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, almost all of my work is material that was first done on the printed page. And the shorter ones that you might call poems, I had a stretch from ’79, ’80, for five or six years, where I wrote a lot of poetry as such. Simply because I was asked to. Somebody said, “Would you like to do a poetry reading?” I said, “I don’t have much poetry.” “Well, write some.” So I did, and up to that point, a lot of things were written in one draft. A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy about every syllable. I wouldn’t allow the work to be seen unless it felt perfect. Not clunky at all, no clunky syllables. So, really, for the printed page, it had to have a feeling of rhythmic and syntactic verisimilitude or something. I didn’t mind writing incoherently, up until about 1980, occasionally. But after that, I decided, might as well be articulate. And I found, though, that writing poetry affected my prose to the point where I never again wrote in one draft, and my prose just took longer and longer and longer. It took longer and longer to come up with an acceptable text. And that’s probably one of the reasons that my output has slowed down.

If I looked at some of these pieces as if this project was not spoken-word but just short anthology, I probably would have fussed with some of the sentences, you know? Syllabication and prosody and such crap. Because the printed word is etched in stone. But for reading purposes I accepted this book of texts in the manner in which I wrote them, no need to fuss. Most of the shorter stuff was written as poetry. Meaning lots of white space on the page.

Rumpus: In what circumstances did you record the pieces?

Meltzer: I had this friend Michael who has a little studio in his basement. And he used to get one day off from his job, and  we’d hang out on Mondays, and over a period of a year or two, these were recorded.

Rumpus: You would do one at a time?

Meltzer: Well, you know, there were very few that I’d do multiple takes on. Some of the stuff didn’t sound plausible, the versions I had just weren’t, once I replayed them—but most things I recorded were one or two takes. Very few as many as five.

Rumpus: There are spots here that sort of remind me a bit of those amazing Captain Beefheart home recordings, you know? Like you were flipping the button, making it up, and then turning off the recorder as soon as you finished the thought. And that would be the take, you know? That level of kind of, um, purity and self-sufficiency, I guess. But is that totally illusory?

Meltzer: It’s a sonic outcome of just doing it, doing it, doing it. And, uh, you know, I don’t know that there was a consistent system to how we approached it. I think I remember on occasion resting my pages on an ironing board. Usually I had a beer alongside, but not always.

Rumpus: When you listen to the whole thing now, what kinds of thematic concerns do you think bind together the lyrics?

Meltzer: A lot of it is smut. It’s just a lot of testosterone, a lot of, you know, excesses of penis. Portland is a very tolerant place, and everybody’s an artist and blah, blah, blah. But I would say, in general audiences in Portland have winced and blushed from some of the penis texts.

I mean, what’s thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I’d even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it’s like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff.

When finally I’m reading it’s like coming up for air and taking a breath. I’m sort of, you might say, celebrating the fact of having actually created these trifles. I mean, in a way, at my age, I’ve been writing for 45 years or something, and now I look back and find pockets of delight. The first five years as a writer, I didn’t know how to write at all. I couldn’t write my way out of a white paper bag. And yet, I did some remarkable things. And later on, there were periods where I got this mission to find an articulate voice with rewrites and all. There were periods where I was as dense as Faulkner. And from those periods, there are also little pockets of delight that I get. No matter what, I’m never going to get an anthology from an actual publisher, though I could always score another music anthology. But if this is going to be a document of a multiplicity of my writings, it’ll do. It feels like a birthday party or something.

Rumpus: I think there are moments on the album that startled me for how romantic they were. Relatively ardent love poems or . . .

Meltzer: Oh, yes. Certainly.

Rumpus: Or what would pass for that in your work.

Metlzer: In the same sense that the testosterone level is high or used to be in my writing I’d say there’s a goofy romantic, as well. And also a white-bread-toast-and-butter version of philosophy. You know, I’m a philosopher and a romantic and a smut hound. And just a general all-around fool. A purveyor of folly, as such.

Rumpus: Are there ways that testosterone and romance are particularly appropriate for an album that would be a collision of your words with music?

Meltzer: I guess. I mean, what is rock and roll? Rock and roll is a text evolving over the course of the last 50 years or whatever, 55 years. First time I encountered rock and roll, I was fortunate because I was 11 years old and Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan Show. And it changed my life. It was, for me and most middle-class people my age, white people in New York, it was beyond our experience. It was whatever it was that Elvis on TV was, we couldn’t even figure out what it was. And to think, I remember in the years that followed thinking, Oh, it was sex. Is that all it was? No. I mean, looking back, it reminds me more of  monster movies in the ’50s  than sex. Whatever it was, it was just something big. Something was really going on in the gamut of the human nervous system.

My sense was the lyrics had no place in it, until 1965, let’s say. This original rock and roll kind of model was boy-girl music. I mean, what The Beatles did, nobody any longer regards The Beatles as having been innovators of anything, and they were innovators in 50, 60 ways, and one was essentially, they were a white band that figured out how to do boy-girl songs that weren’t stolen from country, Tin Pan Alley, or R&B. And The Beatles did very good boy-girl stuff for a stretch of three, four years, and their time came and went. The British Invasion was to me the most significant cultural event in my lifetime, and then suddenly that was gone and you had, you know, a few U.S. bands, like The Doors. Most of the ‘60’s U.S. bands were low testosterone, and so The Doors struck me, still strike me, as having been the most maximum-testosterone band ever.

And I saw the, uh, I was writing for Crawdaddy, let’s call it the first rock mag, and four or five of us went to see The Doors. There was a club called Ondine under 59^th Street bridge in New York, and the bands played four sets a night, and The Doors played like two months, three months of bar-band sets. But every time we went there, we’d just look at each other—I mean, no one regards the Doors as important anymore . . . But the first night that we saw them, we looked at each other and said, “Is this the greatest thing ever or is this the greatest thing ever?” And it was just something, so, so, of the night, and of menace. And looking back, it seems to me what my impression of Jim Morrison was, my initial impression was that it was the music of my own penis. It was like universal heterosexual testosterone overkill.

And he had, you know, the greatest line, “When the music is your special friend, dance on fire until the end.” You know, dance on fire. That’s it, you know? It’s ritual music of, you know, whatever it is. Live in fire, die in fire.

The Doors probably didn’t have more than ten or eleven good songs, but that’ll do. So that was the beginning of my interest in writing lyrics, was The Doors. And you know, we had, “Horse Latitudes,” which was probably the first example of spoken-word recording. And, I just, everybody I knew would make up phony neo-Beatnik Jim Morrison poetry. I used to read that and just get sick of it. Something like, “Get down. Get with it. Teach your dog to swim.” I forget the rest of it.

But anyway I would say essentially by 1980, I was starting to read. By 1981, I start, I gave myself the warrant to read, and, you know, I read Faulkner and Joyce and the whole thing, and the Beats. And so, uh, I’m much too young to call myself a Beatnik, but, Anne Waldman, who is only three months older than me, no, one month older than me, she calls herself a Beanik. But, basically, I collect Beatnik books. Old chapbooks and poets like Ray Bremser and Jack Micheline, and to me that stuff still informs my life, feeds me. Bands, I mean, since the mid-eighties, I have played very little new music, and people have had to tell me, “Oh, you should listen to The Replacements or Guided By Voices” And, uh, okay, that’s nice. But generally, I’d say the music I’ve absorbed since 1985, I still play in my head. And I don’t even know if I have room for anything else. I actually opened for four or five Guided By Voices shows in Portland, and only because Robert Pollard, it’s his band and he says he likes my stuff. He read me in Creem when he was in high school. So he says to the audience, “This is Richard Meltzer, pay attention to what he’s doing, don’t boo him off the stage.” Because usually when I open for bands, I’m booed off the stage.

Rumpus: I’ve done a couple of those gigs, and I always have found it really not very much fun. Opening for bands.

Meltzer: The kids say, “Get off.” They want music.

Rumpus: They want music. And then they start talking in the back of the room, and they you’re trying to kind of get over on the front row a little bit, but you can’t concentrate.

Meltzer: The most fun reading I ever had was Dave Alvin from The Blasters arranged a reading called “The Night of the Macho Poets.” This was in ’86 or ’87, and, uh, at the, uh, where what was it . . .? Some club. And it was Dave Alvin, John Doe, Mike Watt, me, Christy from Flesh Eaters, and Henry Rollins. And Henry insisted he had to be the closer, and he was so macho he wore a dress. And it was really a good show. And it was a full house and everybody was so concerned at the end: “Did they like us? Did they like us? What do you think?” So everybody’s standing around stroking everybody else, so by the time we actually went to greet the audience, they’d cleared the house. So we never got to ask them how they felt. It was actually a great night. Unrecorded.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

Meltzer: Hard to say. I wrote a novel that took me seven or so years to do. I guess I finished in 2004 or 2005. And it’s proven unpublishable. It’s as good as anything I’ve done. Half the book is boy-girl stuff. It goes back and forth from boy-girl, to a reality that doesn’t exist. It just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and I can see why some would consider it hard to read. But basically, I’ve reached the point where I’ve lost any direct relationship to any of the editors I used to have. I suspect I’ll have to pay to publish this myself, and I think a lot about about putting out fifty copies. I used to think about hogwash like my legacy and silly things like that. But I feel like if I never have another book out, I’ve done okay, I’ve had like twelve or thirteen little books, and I won’t be upset about this on my death bed.

When I was living in New York in the ‘70s, early ‘70s, people would set it up for me to meet these guys with the three-day stubble, these editors from the 1920s who were still around. They’d have a bottle of whiskey in their desk and they’d smoke a cigar in the office. And these guys they’d take me to lunch, and they’d say, “Well, your stuff looks good, kid. You know, uh, it needs a lot of work, but when you finally got it figured, you come back and there’ll be a place for you.” At Scribner’s or Random House or whatever. And by the time my work was up to snuff, they were all gone. No replacements for those people.

And the whole online thing is like, I just, that to me is a world that doesn’t exist. It’s not something you could touch or lick or smell. And as my eyes get worse, it’s very hard to read. And there’s no money in it. I mean, it’s like they pay, like the best you can go is 1970 prices.

One of the things about me is that I actually had marginally middle-class living from writing. For years and years, I actually wrote so much through the ’70s and ’80s that I made a living. And very rarely have I had to take another job. And now it’s impossible for anybody coming up to make such a living. They’ve pissed in the temple, you know?

Rumpus: What part is philosophy playing in your life these days?

Meltzer: An old Asian thinker said that things happen in seven-year cycles, you know. You know, when you’re seven, you can piss and you can shit, but that’s it. When you’re thirty-five, you can you do something. And the age for philosophy is eighty-four. When you make it to eighty-four, then you’re ready to sit back and think universal and systematic. I was a philosophy major a long, long time ago. At Stony Brook. You had something to do with some state university school?

Rumpus: I taught at SUNY Purchase for a little bit.

Metlzer: I went to Stony Brook just when it just opened, I had four or five great teachers, all of whom were denied tenure or fired outright during the time I was there. They were the only good teachers I had, and they were all dumped. But they all encouraged me to basically, it was basically, think for yourself or perish. Not only think your own thoughts, but develop your own systems. And so I was doing this from pretty early on, and when I wrote The Aesthetics of Rock, it was an extension of what I wrote for an undergraduate class, and some unreadable junk, basically, but I kind of still appreciate the, just the groping for something there. And these days I find, all these years later, I don’t remember much of what I read, Hegel or Kant, but I still have a certain rigor. And I’ve gone, I think I’ve gone from being a Platonist to being something of an Aristotelian, I’ve become more of a pluralist in recent times. And more and more, I’ve seen the relationship between philosophy and poetry, which began in the same place, and at some point, philosophy tried to combine what is interesting, poetry, and what was true, science, and I think did a decent enough job. But the poetry side is what appeals more to me today. Metaphor, just absurd linkages and coming up with categories, labeling, taxonomy, and I’d say that I do have some tools left. There are days I can’t make a sentence out of anything, and anything I make looks clunky to me. But I still have a general grasp of the cliché, of the generic sentence. And if I didn’t have that, I’d be a blob of putty on the floor.

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***

The Rumpus: You include songs written during your teenage years on your EP. How long have you been writing music? How did it start for you?

Luke Rathborne:  I started writing music when I was 11 or 12. We always had people passing through our house in Maine. Someone needed a place to stay when they were in the middle of some sort of trouble or something like that, they could stay there. A guy named Kevin stayed for a few months. Sometimes he’d bring out his guitar to play and I’d go into his room to watch.

One day Kevin was gone and there was an electric guitar sitting there in the room. I saw him the day before he left and he didn’t even let on a hint that he was leaving. I knew it was important to him, so the gesture was one that was important, meant something. Kevin passed away a few years back, so I always appreciated him leaving that behind.

After I got this guitar I was playing all the time. A friend gave me a Sex Pistols CD and a Buzzcocks record. By the age of 12 I started a band and was already recording music and organizing shows around the area. There was a DIY scene in Maine and we’d rent out Veterans’ Halls or churches and have these enormous punk rock shows. It was great and
it’s where I honed down what I wanted to do in life. There was a sense of community for sure.

A lot of those people went insane. I remember a guy named Cal, who just ended up living in a tent in the woods taking LSD. I don’t really know what happened to him.

Rumpus:   You write poetry as well as songs.  Does your process for each differ intuitively, or do things occasionally cross from one genre to the  other?

Rathborne:  I wrote a book of poems called L.A. that got published by a place in Los Angeles last year. The book was kind of a loose narrative where everything connected together, about drifting through New York and Los Angeles and the things that happened in that period of time. Those were different than songs the way they came out. Lyrics don’t have to act like poems. It’s good if they do. It’s great if they do. But they don’t have to. That’s why you have a band in the 1980s saying, ”Don’t You Forget About Me / Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t.”

I could never quite wrap my head around what married those two forms. I’d had moments, but they all seemed unconscious.. Looking down at a piece of paper almost like drunk or stoned and seeing a whole piece there ready to sing. I felt that way with the song, “Cold Breeze”.

Lately, though, something has been coming forward to me. Listening to some writers, some singers. Something has really hit me. I understand where they are pinning something, a motion, a way of something being said.

There is such thing as a spiritual aspect to people and their lives. Whenever I get the chance to be near a television, which is very rare these days, I’m struck by how I see every day American people overcoming problems, addictions, transcending conflicts.

To some extent I think we’ll never be able to fully relate that which is packaged, processed and presented to us. You walk down the street and you see all kinds of funny things that say how you’re supposed to be, feel, what you should believe. But these are almost always motivated by money, and what you’re being sold. There is a degree of deception being propagated by the people who present these things to you.

There is a great importance to seeing how real people feel and what they’re telling you face to face. Whenever I travel the country I never see the people that they show on these magazines or advertisements. What I come across is people of an entirely different, unique nature. It is something real and special, that is never shown, that has value and meaning, that can’t be pinned down by someone in that kind of way, it has a poetic truth to it, which is something stronger than what they could show, something absolute. The truth usually has more than one side to it. That is what is lost when we try to sell people, or sum them up for something they’re not.

Rumpus: In the press I’ve read about your music, the word “vulnerable” comes up a lot. How do you feel about that?

Rathborne:  That doesn’t bother me. I haven’t seen a whole lot of the press. A few times, someone will send something to me and I look away. The thing is, it might be a good thing even, it’s just you’re never gonna feel satisfied being put on a piece of paper.  I try not to come across it too much.

In the end, People are going to portray you a certain way, in a positive or negative light, in anything you do in your life. It can’t be your job to look at it. You have to live truthfully. You must make amends with yourself, and who you are, constantly. When you wake up, you look at yourself in the mirror. You get yourself to the point where you are strong, where you have understanding.

I like to work. I do it obsessively often. When I find something within myself that I think could be beautiful or important to express, I use every part of my being to get to it. Never once has it ever crossed my mind what anyone in the outside world might think about it, at that moment.

Rumpus:  What was your musical upbringing like?

Rathborne:  I grew up moving between two towns in Maine for the summer and the winter. Everywhere was the radio, things like, Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” brings me back to being young. I spent most half of every year in Northern Maine living in the woods where they took people down rivers for money. There was a definite, ‘commune-feel’ to
the way people came and went, and a lot of my formative experiences with music were by travelling late at night on buses with these people. There was these bearded, grizzled woodsmen fellows to young hippie-types, I absorbed a lot of their ideas on music and life. Music is what we all had in common, what we shared.

Rumpus: Do you make music every day?

Rathborne:  I play and make music every day. There are periods of time when I give myself a break, but I am usually only lying to myself. Music is my means of expression really. More than physically talking with people.

Rumpus:  What is your creative process like?

Rathborne:  The process in which I make things is to a certain degree, pretty secretive, and as a result, I feel like I even conceal some of it to myself. I go through long periods of time focusing on certain ideas, trying to come up with a way to get them down, get at the heart of them. A lot of times, that’s a theme, or a feeling or conflict. Getting them down helps me to understand them on some kind of deeper level.

Rumpus:  Your voice and vocal delivery are quite unique.  What do you think formed them?

Rathborne:  I grew up listening to so many different singers and kinds of music. I really spent my whole life collecting things, songs, and ideas to the point that there must be a root to everything somewhere along the line. If somebody sang in an odd kind of way, it always jumped out at me as unique. Somebody like Mel Torme with his beautiful warm voice or Shane McGowan with this gravelly sincerity, it all meant something, and it all connected. There are probably just as many links in my head to the Clash and Neil Young as there is to some obscure band from the sixties or the Manic Street Preachers.

Rumpus: What informed your choice to release both Dog Years and I Can Be One  simultaneously, rather than releasing one and then the other?

Rathborne: The decision was made so you have this Vinyl record that acts like this piece of art. That is, when you flip it over, you have two different kinds of music on each side. I took that from a few different people. The Beach Boys’ album Today has a flip side to it that supposedly Brian Wilson wrote when he was stoned. It’s really downbeat and pretty songs. On David Bowie’s Low when you flip the record over, it’s all synthesizers on one side, no vocals. Then the other side is all rock songs, like “Be My Wife” and “Sound and Vision.”

Rumpus:  What was the recording process like for these releases?  How did it differ from making your first album?

Rathborne: My first record, After Dark, I made crawling around this place I wasn’t supposed to be, it was this college radio station that was in my hometown. I used to sneak in there and record as much as I could, then stay all night and skip school the next morning. I learned how to use all the equipment and would sneak my friends in to play
instruments sometimes. This went on for probably the last two years of high school. I think I called it After Dark because it was all recorded late at night.

When I recorded I Can Be One and Dog Years I went to a real studio. Sometimes I engineered some of the stuff. I produced all of it, except for the track, “Dog Years.” That was done with the guy Joey Levine, from the 60s band “Ohio Express.” He was a big Tin Pan alley type songwriter in New York back in the day. I read that Joey Ramone
named himself Joey after him. He wrote and sang the song, “Yummy Yummy Yummy” when he was 16. He’s the inventor of Bubble-gum [music]. You can still find him in New York City.

Rumpus:  I’m really intrigued by “Pantomime Fear.” off the Dog Years EP. Can you tell me more about that?

Rathborne:   I wrote that song around the time of After Dark, which means I was probably about 16 or 17 when I wrote it. The title just came up to me. I wanted a song about the passing of time and relationships that fall apart. I actually wrote that with a friend of mine originally. We were in the middle of the woods playing across this huge lake, and he was playing piano, the line came in my head, “Meet me on the avenue..” and then, “Time, time, time..” which I thought was good. Then there was the title, ‘Pantomime Fear’, kinda like a pantomime horse I guess. Something hidden and incomplete that sneaks up on you.

Rumpus:  Are you planning any videos for the songs?

Rathborne: At the moment, I’m working on a video for, “I Can Be One” based on the artwork of Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch artist from the 70s. He’s a very cool artist, his final artwork was sailing a tiny one-man sailboat across the world and ending up back in Sweden. He never made it and his boat washed up off the shore of Ireland, without him in it.

Rumpus:   What are your live shows like?

Rathborne: Lately they’ve been very high energy, in a good way. For this upcoming tour of Europe with SoKo I will be playing solo, which is different in its own way. I hope to come back with my band as well in the later Spring. We’re doing something like 40 dates all over Europe and Scandinavia in March.

Rumpus:  You’re obviously already a man of many talents, but what would you like to get better at, musically?

Rathborne: I would love to get tighter on the drums. I always liked how Prince and Stevie Wonder played their drums on their records.

Rumpus:   Who are your favorite authors/poets?

Rathborne: My favorite authors and poets are people like J.D. Salinger, Russell Banks. Huysmans wrote a book called A Rebours which I liked. As far as poets go, Rumi, Walt Whitman. I am really mesmerized by some of W.H. Auden’s poems, like, “Funeral Blues.” Some other writers I had a huge fondness for are Yukio Mishima, [and]  J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun I’m reading right now.

A writer that had a great deal of influence on me is the playwright Sam Shepard. He writes plays, but what I am more specifically referencing is a few books he produced over the past 10 years. One of them is called “Cruising Paradise” that a close friend gave to me. It is a beautiful collection of stories about kind of, wandering through America.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with James McMurtry
• The Rumpus Interview with Mirah
• Record Related #2: Wild Flag, Wild Flag, Wild Flag
• Songs of Our Lives: Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”
• The Rumpus interview with Jóhann Jóhannsson

Making a Pie  (Instructions for Pie and Life)

1.  The act of reading poetry is a fine thing to incorporate.    Begin, say, with Cornelius Eady’s “Gratitude” and take it from there.

2.  Clean surfaces at the start are good for everyone and can only enhance goodness.

3.  However, making a mess while going along is expected and encouraged. Virtually everything can be restored to order.

4.  Working out the kinks: a good thing.

5.  Bouncing around, or at least dancing, are thoughtful additions to process.

6.  Strive for perfection, but know that this is a life’s work and, if you’re lucky, your vision will just barely exceed your grasp.

7.  Don’t burn.

8.  A la mode is never a bad idea.

9.  Savor.

(C. run time: 54:24; direct link for mobile access: http://8tracks.com/anna-march/making-a-pie .)

Making a Pie from anna march on 8tracks.

“Holnolulu Blues”

Craig Finn

Honolulu Blues – Single

-2-

“South Side”

Moby

Play & Play: B Sides

-3-

“As Is”

Ani DiFranco

Little Plastic Castle

-4-

“Lust for Life”

Iggy Pop

Lust for Life

-5-

“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1”

The Flaming Lips

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

-6-

“Goodbye Stranger”

Supertramp

Breakfast in America (Remastered)

-7-

“Dog Days Are Over”

Florence + The Machine

Lungs

-8-

“A Drowning”

How to Destroy Angels

How to Destroy Angels – EP

-9-

“Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo)”

Ennio Morricone

Lolita (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture)

-10-

“You’re a Winner”

Wild Ones

You’re a Winner – EP

-11-

“She Moves In Secret Ways”

Polly Paulusma

Scissors In My Pocket

-12-

“All Through Cryin’”

James Hunter

People Gonna Talk

Related Posts:

• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #11: Conversation Hearts
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #9: Chilly Scenes of Winter
• Aural Fixations, the Rumpus Mixtape #8: Van Gogh
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #7: Revelry
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #6: Drinking Red Wine

***

The Rumpus: I saw a reference in your bio to your father having a studio. Were your parents musicians?

Chelsea Wolfe: My dad was in a country band.

Rumpus: What sort of musical training did you have?

Wolfe: I’m mostly self-taught. I’ve learned from people here and there over the years, took some guitar lessons with this old guy when I was in college. Mostly just taught myself how to play. I don’t know how to play anybody else’s music or anything like that. I just write my own songs.

Rumpus: I read something about a trip you took doing some theatrical performances in Europe. What can you tell me about that?

Wolfe: In the summer of 2009, I went on tour with a group of performance artists. A good friend of mine is a well-known performance artist and invited me along to play music. It was cool. I had a chance to learn a lot from each performer and play in some unconventional spaces, old factories and converted churches and things like that, and the sound in those spaces, the huge reverb and the industrial feel, inspired me a lot.

Rumpus: What did you learn from that trip?

Wolfe: I think it taught me about what kind of performances I’m interested in. It got me out of my shell a little bit. Sometimes I would be put on the spot at the end of a performance and asked to play one or two songs, and I think that was really good from me. Getting away from my normal life for a few months. New faces, new places.

Rumpus: Did you have a favorite city?

Wolfe: I spent a lot of time in Tallinn in Estonia. I really loved it there. It was really cold.

Rumpus: The songs seem like they’re very densely layered. How do you go about creating that effect?

Wolfe: I usually start with an idea and build layers upon it. The songs have a lot of strange vocal layers. A lot of screeching and singing in the background. I wanted it to feel kind of like a film soundtrack.

Rumpus: Did you get any images in your head for what the film might be?

Wolfe: When I’m writing, I try to keep it reality-based, but I’m also trying to tap into other dimensions of reality at the same time. So it’s kind of a contrast. I’m trying to have a grand vision, but, at the same time, a reality-based vision. The book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand really inspired me for this, a lot of grand imagery for the way things are in the world and the way they could be.

Rumpus: How long did it take you to write and record Apokalypsis?

Wolfe: The writing was spread out over about six to eight months. I don’t typically set out to write a group of songs for an album. I might do that in the future. It just kind of becomes a theme. In this case, end of an era, revelations, hence that title. We actually recorded it in two weeks’ time. I wanted to try and accomplish this in a week.

Rumpus: Where did you record it?

Wolfe: In a studio in Sacramento.

Rumpus: And who produced the album? Did you?

Wolfe: Yeah, it was kind of coproduced by me and my bandmate Ben Chisholm. It was engineered by a guy named Ira Skinner.

Rumpus: I read that you’re an Ingmar Bergman fan. What’s your favorite film of his?

Wolfe: I don’t really choose favorites. But I like The Seventh Seal. The character of Death in that film got to me a lot at a young age.

Rumpus: And you’re also a fan of Selda Bagcan?

Wolfe: She was a Turkish singer kind of like folky in a way. She just had an amazing voice. I don’t know what she’s saying, but the way she uses her voice is incredible, and it really touches me.

Rumpus: What sort of writers do you like to read?

Wolfe: Some of my favorites are Ayn Rand for her grand vision. And also Vonnegut. One of my favorites is D.H. Lawrence. I love the way he describes nature. It’s so intense and dreamy and beautiful.

Rumpus: Did you study music at university?

Wolfe: I took a semester in music theory.

Rumpus: What was your major?

Wolfe: I went to, like, five different colleges. I could never figure out what I wanted to do. Or maybe I was hiding from the fact that I only really wanted to do music.

Rumpus: Do you do any other kinds of writing or art?

Wolfe: No, I’m not very visually talented. Mostly I just tell myself to keep writing, even if I don’t feel inspired to write something on a certain day.

Rumpus: What are your live shows like?

Wolfe: It kind of depends. When I have my full band usually, it’s drums, two guitars, synthesizers, and bass. I try to create a really intense, heavy atmosphere. It’s obviously rock n roll based, but we try to keep it experimental. A lot of the songs have really repetitive feelings to them so it’s kind of like a chant for me.

Rumpus: Are there any social causes in which you’re active or would like to raise awareness of?

Wolfe: I’m definitely a person that likes to be educated about things. One day I’d like to use music and any sort of voice I have in the world for causes like human trafficking and the fact that people don’t have clean water to drink. It’s kind of overwhelming how much stuff there is. If I can help in the future, I’m definitely going to.

Related Posts:

• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #11: Conversation Hearts
• R.I.P. Etta James
• The Rumpus Interview with James McMurtry
• David Lynch Interview
• Record Related #2: Wild Flag, Wild Flag, Wild Flag

You can see the architecture of things in winter.

Structures glisten. Naked trees drip with clear popsicles. We find ourselves alone with ourselves. Everyone else has gone away to someplace warmer/better/more fun or else they are tucked indoors. Even when you live in a relatively warm place, winter still haunts. Chilly scenes, indeed. Deep freezes. A glaze crackled over every surface. Bright blizzard whites. Snow drifts. Flannel pajamas. Nights that last too long and are far too quiet. Winter is about longing and unrequited and freezing. Belle and Sebastian sing of the “solitary cell of your mind,” and that’s winter. You know who your friends are in winter. It’s not picnics and days at the lake. It’s heavy coats and lost mittens. Scratchy blankets and the smell of wet wool. And yet, Blake told us to enjoy the winter. Probably good advice.

More than we remember stays green all winter long. There’s something under there, buried under all that muck. Our job is to tease it out; sharpen our gaze to locate it underneath the melting slush and extra blankets. Winter is about finding what saves us, what keeps us company most. We lose ourselves a bit in the cold; yet can find ourselves if we want–find what survives, what endures. The finest work human beings can do is to manufacture hope. Winter gives us a canvas and a reason to do so. We must remind ourselves to revel in the majesty of the cold, the brittle wonder of an ice storm. Go ahead now, mix another hot toddy, figure out how you are going to scrape together the money for the raging electric bill, button up your overcoat … and enjoy this wintry mix. (C. run time: 47:42; direct link for mobile access: http://8tracks.com/anna-march/chilly-scenes-of-winter.)

from anna march on 8tracks.

-1-

“Misspent Youth”

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Hysterical

-2-

“The Boy With the Arab Strap”

Belle and Sebastian

The Boy With the Arab Strap

-3-

“Trans-Continental Hustle”

Gogol Bordello

Trans-Continental Hustle

-4-

“She Left Home” (Instrumental)

Jane Birkin

Arabesque

-5-

“Knee Deep At The NPL”

Camera Obscura

Underachievers Please Try Harder

-6-

“Cold & Wet”

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

The Letting Go

-7-

“’Round About Midnight”

Miles Davis

Highlights From The Plugged Nickel

-8-

“Your Love” (The Outfield Cover)

Bon Iver

Bon Iver Covers

-9-

“Moonlight Mile”

The Rolling Stones

Sticky Fingers (Remastered)

-10-

“World Keeps Turning”

Tom Waits

Orphans

Related Posts:

• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #2: Chicago
• Aural Fixations, the Rumpus Mixtape #8: Van Gogh
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #7: Revelry
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #6: Drinking Red Wine
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #5: Maudlin

His influence throughout the internet is undeniable. In 1991, he famously created the line, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people” as well as influential concepts like the “anxious interval” and “cute formalism.” Momus has also blogged for places like The New York Times and Wired.

He is currently living in Osaka, Japan and is set to go on tour in Europe starting February 2012.

This interviewer’s favorite blog entries written by Momus, which she believes would serve as an interesting glimpse into Momus’s thought include:

Momus’s entries on Tavi, Tao Lin, Fumiko Imano, “Raunch Feminism”, “Growing old in, and with, Japan”, Orientalism, Kate Moss in blackface, and (of one among many) on design.

***

The Rumpus: Some of your fellow fans I have talked to have said that you are guided mostly by your aesthetic sense. Do you agree? I remember that we once talked briefly about the dangers of being led by your aesthetic sense. What do you feel about that? I feel like you aesthetically/emotionally/intuitively respond well to something and then build up a rationalization around it. I think this makes for some very interesting and innovative thoughts/ideas, but this also seems to offend and repulse a lot of people (e.g. your defense of being primarily attracted to Japanese women.) What are your thoughts on all of this?  Do you feel like it’s the duty of an artist to be a provocateur?

Hypnoprism cover

Momus: Yes, I’m an aesthete. I respond first to things on that level, a “blink” level of reflexive attraction or repulsion. Actually, I think my life is structured around the ramifications of orgasm, the sublimated bubblings and percolations of orgasm through cultural areas. And yes, it’s probably all too obvious to people that my philosophy, such as it is, got tacked on to “things that make me come” — either literally or figuratively — as an afterthought, a post-rationalisation that I nevertheless insist on in a slightly guilty way (while pretending to be bold and unapologetic). That’s probably rather infuriating. I’m very strongly marked by a post-protestant north European mindset — one you might find stupidly expressed in the British tabloids, or intelligently in Kierkegaard’s Either / Or — which is structured tensely and productively around the dialectic between prurience and prudishness, the aesthetic and the ethical, amorality and guilt, Saturday night and Sunday morning, sensation and will, penis and brain.

I think people would be entitled to get annoyed by “he only likes that because it makes him come” if I held some kind of authoritative position, wielded power, claimed objectivity, and so on. In fact I do as much as I can to make that impossible, using (maybe over-using) the “unreliable narrator” device, posing whenever possible as a dissolute and untrustworthy character, dressing weirdly, contradicting myself, working in art. I think that in art my most horrible vices can be virtues.

Rumpus: Your Wikipedia page says that you are “obsessed with identity.” Even though I’ve been following your work for a long time, I’ve never understood exactly what that phrase is getting at. What are your thoughts on “identity”?

Momus: I had nothing to do with the writing of that page, and I have no idea who did. So I don’t quite know what they meant. I’m actually very bored with Identity Politics, which seems to have undermined and displaced the politics of collectivity and the politics of class, particularly in American and British universities, during the neo-liberal period. What I do in my work is play games with identity, perhaps in order to prove that it’s fluid and fake and doesn’t really matter very much. I privilege pre-cut, shallow identities over faceted, nuanced, psychological identities. Masks over faces. For instance, in my Book of Jokes the characters are The Molester and The Murderer, and a father and a son. You don’t really need to know more about them than those roles. Yes, role is a much better word. Roles and masks. “Momus is obsessed with roles and masks”. The thing is, whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry was probably an American, and Americans — mired in individualism — prefer to think in terms of identity than in terms of roles and masks. An American would never have called a novel “Confessions of a Mask”.

Rumpus: There seems to be a lot of “faux-nostalgia” among very young people for the 1990’s (an admiration for a decade they didn’t experience/weren’t really aware of.) In the 90’s you seemed to be living a very exciting life in the art worlds of Tokyo and New York City. What can you tell us about the 90’s, good and bad, that you think people would find interesting?

Momus: I was asked recently to write a piece about Tokyo pop in the 90s and turned it down rather rudely saying I was totally bored by the subject. Perhaps it’s still — for me — in the shadow of what I’ve called “the anxious interval”. I haven’t yet had my impulse to revive it. It may come. For me, right now, the 90s represent what Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance”. A bubble feeling. Because money was around, I got drawn into making commercial music. I had hits, and lived, surrounded by gadgets and designer trinkets and girls, in a penthouse pad in London. Some of my website writing from that era really disgusts me now. It’s like “dahlings, I went to a super art party, Tracey Emin was there, it was so glamourous”. Actually, I get the same disgust now when I read Andy Warhol’s diaries (or, rather, listen to Bob Colacello’s autobiography on Ubu.com). What an idiot Andy Warhol was in the 1970s! Just completely superficial and supine before money. I know that money and success could easily have made me idiotic. I don’t like that person. In the 90s I almost became him. I believed in America, I liked the fact that there was this asshole president making lots of money and getting lots of blowjobs, just like I was. I believed in digital culture. I believed in glossy product design, high-concept London restaurants. I liked the West.

Now, in contrast, I think the internet is boring and reductive, I’m quite anti-Western, I live in a slummy part of an Asian city, I’m into the positive side of poverty, I think the best design is amateur and shabby, I like the idea of ignoring commercial culture and abstaining completely from high status purchases, I’m into the valuable estrangements of austere highbrow art. I can barely stand pop music any more. All I listen to for pleasure is ancient Japanese folk music, on crackly vinyl. Then again, when you make pop a guilty pleasure you make it strong. Pop will rush back periodically. Many happy returns of the repressed.

Rumpus: You mentioned in a comment on Marxy’s blog about how despite Japan being a collectivist society, it’s producing a wide array of innovative fashion styles, unlike in the individualist West, where according to you, everyone mostly tries to look the same. It was an interesting comment to me because in individualistic cultures we tend to have an idea of collectivist cultures as being very stifling, creatively speaking. What do you see as being the benefits of collectivist societies with regards to art, and creativity, generally?

Momus: All societies are collectivist, it’s just that some pretend not to be. So in the West we get tied in knots trying to explain why rebels and hipsters all rebel or stay hip in such narrow, glib and repetitive ways. And occasionally we wonder whether there really is a place outside society, or whether that “maverick” space is actually also in society, and just has a different name. The question of originality matters to me, but I’m also a relativist. What looks like originality at one level can look like conformity at another. Japan is very group-oriented, very conformist, very collectivist, almost like a communist or fascist society in some ways. At the same time, it’s a very eccentric country, and very ambitious, organised and productive. People who dismiss Japan are foolish. There was just a very good article in the New York Times by Eamonn Fingleton — the inspiration for a character called Declan Singleton in my Book of Japans — about how Japanoclasts are misguided. Other countries should be so lucky as to have Japan’s “problems”.

Basically, what I learned from Japan is that creativity isn’t solely the domain of individual artists or inventors. Groups can be creative too. It took me a while to realise this, but when I did it made me happy, because it resolved an apparent conflict between two of the things I hold most dear: collectivism and creativity. I think you can say that Japan is capable of producing both the cliches of the manga industry and the originality of someone like Yuichi Yokoyama, whose quirky abstract mangas depend for their impact on twisting the conventions of mainstream manga. It’s not like Yokoyama defies manga, or appears courtesy of divine lightning.

Rumpus: In the past you have talked a lot about “post-men” and “post-feminism.” What are your current thoughts on these concepts? I imagine you are very aware of the “herbivore men” trend in Japan. What are your thoughts on this? Could you give a general account of how you feel about Japan and the differences between how the West views gender and feminism? In the past you’ve talked admiringly of what you’ve referred casually to “femininity-ism” which seems to me to be similar to “lipstick/stiletto feminism.” Can you go into your thoughts on this?

Momus: I was very marked in the 1980s by feminism. A lot of my 80s work was gender-utopian, in the sense that I would happily — I should add “guiltily” — have seen men relinquish power and let some kind of matriarchy replace them. My way of hastening this was to reveal the innermost workings of the male mind, and show it in the worst possible light. Don’t trust men! Don’t trust me, I’m one! It was a deconstructive project. As a club to beat people with, Marx seemed shrunken and soft in the 1980s, but Freud was still a knobbly cudgel. So I flailed away, to rather little effect.

In Japan, because people don’t believe in things “outside of society”, gender roles haven’t been deconstructed. No Japanese woman I’ve talked to has ever wanted to be associated with feminism. Here, you embrace the mask of gender and relish it. Women want men to be men, not surrogate women, and vice versa. The “herbivore men” thing, like the “hikikomori” thing, has been overblown. It’s a marginal phenomenon, and really just confirms the norm that in Japan most men, and most male role models, continue to be very masculine. My Japanese girlfriend often says to me “You’re too passive!” She definitely wants me to be more macho and rewards me when I am. So I’m now inclined to think 1980s gender role deconstruction was a waste of time. I’ve resigned myself to my essential maleness, and I get on well with women who’ve come to terms with the specific power they have as women. Is that “lipstick feminism”? I actually prefer women without lipstick. I’m also with Ariel Levy in the rejection of so-called Raunch Feminism — empowering pole-dancing and so on. I prefer maypole-dancing.

One thing I find interesting about you, Marie, is your honesty about your responses to pornography, about how PC porn is completely unexciting. And I think in retrospect my 1980s strategy “to show men behaving badly as a way to undermine male power” is just another piece of post-rationalisation on my part. I just wanted to show men behaving badly, period. Because it was sexy.

Rumpus: What artists are you most excited about, currently, that you wish more people were aware of? You’ve said before that most of your favorite artists are women. Who is your favorite female artist, and why do you like her so much? What is your advice to young female artists (funny, sincere, or whatever)?

Momus: I think my friend Misaki Kawai might be the female artist I’m most impressed by at the moment. There’s something very primal and childish about her, yet strong-willed and elegant. She travels constantly, in places like India and Nepal and China. She dresses very well. She has a restless, humourous energy. Her boyfriend Justin Waldron is like her enabler and manager, organising and structuring things so that her impulsive and intuitive energy doesn’t have to be chanelled, diluted or disturbed. I really admire people who can preserve the spontaneity, charm and confidence of a 5 year-old, and Misaki seems to have managed that. I also really admire people who remind me of the spirit of the 1960s — the hippy trail, experimentation, colour — and Misaki has something of that about her too. She’s a free spirit, a force of nature.

Rumpus: You’re about to turn 52. What are your thoughts on aging? Some of the things you’ve written have suggested an acceptance of aging, but you are also famous for respecting and admiring youth. Do you worry about losing relevancy? Where do you see yourself in 10 years? Finally, to quote a Tweet, “what is with [“Gen Y”] and Momus?” Are you proud of proving a set of cultural references, inspiration etc to so many young artists (most famously Vampire Weekend and Ariel Pink)?

Momus: There’s good and bad in ageing. My brain used to be full of secondhand experiences, and my model of reality was unreliable because I wasn’t quite sure who to trust. Now it’s full of my own experiences, gathered all over the world, and I trust it more. I can just sit still and think of the people I’ve known, the places I’ve been, the experiences I’ve had, and it’s brilliant entertainment. And while it’s horrible to age and weaken and lose your hair or feel your sexual appeal waning, I wasn’t particularly attractive when I was young, so in some ways I think I’ve improved with age. Also, I think artists who are avant, underground, spiky and ugly aren’t seen to age in quite the way cute mainstream artists do. Yes, it matters to me that there are younger people who understand and appreciate what I do. Ariel Pink recently suggested we collaborate, which meant a lot to me, even if we never actually follow through on it. It really matters to me that people tweet that they’re listening to my records or reading my books, or that I said something that interested them. I want to matter, and keep mattering, and keep being an important part of the lives of strangers, although I know better than ever now that I can reach only a few illuminated, broadminded, perverse and adventurous souls. I have no idea where or who I’ll be in ten years, but I hope — I know — I’ll still be producing things. One thing I never seem to do is dry up.

Related Posts:

• Documenting Sagas
• The Bloggers
• No Comment
• Finding Quiet
• The Rumpus Interview with Marie Calloway

Ty Segall
Goodbye Bread (Drag City)

Orange County native Ty Segall weaves garage, surf, glam, and psychedelic rock into a collage that plays as self-consciously with its sources as any post-1960s folk music. Where folkies value authenticity, Segall’s post-indie rock references a good record collection, incorporating a wide array of influences into an artful homage that adds up to more and less than the sum of its parts. Goodbye Bread layers Segall’s overdriven guitar and muddled vocals, quoting popular and underground music from the last 40 years in order to interrogate the vacuity and appeal of suburban California culture.

Throughout the album, Segall’s voice and guitar establish a distinct sonic identity, one with a strong debt to lo-fi guitar bands from the 1990s (who in turn owed their sound to garage and glam bands from the 1970s). The title track exemplifies the artful pop Segall seems to be half borrowing, half inventing: “’Cause who plays the games we all play? / Won’t you play me today? / And who sings the songs when we’re gone? / Won’t you sing along?” Delivered in an amateurish falsetto over bright, distorted guitar, the offhand lyrics make good on pop’s promise of pleasant diversion, while the music’s jagged edges suggest the dark side of those same pop dreams.

The most obvious songs on the record, “California Commercial” and “Comfortable Home (A True Story)” amount to pro forma shots at the Californian incarnation of the American Dream. As such, they’re too reminiscent of early ’80s punk to be convincing. Because we’ve heard the sentiment before, it seems feigned. Furthermore, Segall and his record collection are clearly products of that same comfortable home of which he sings. Indie subculture remains profoundly middle-class, and when Segall doesn’t acknowledge the contradiction between the culture that produced him and the pose he’s striking, his songs verge on mere pastiche.

Nevertheless, Goodbye Bread offers more than a convincing replica of its sources, and when Segall digs into the way both suburban California culture and indie subculture value style over substance, he achieves minor conceptual coups. Though the title track’s cool braggadocio is older than the blues, Segall pulls it off like he invented it yesterday, and he lets a sinister undertone seep through the pop cliché on “You Make the Sun Fry.” If the shots at suburban California ring hollow, “Fine” (“You / you are so fine / In my / mind / Oh, you don’t know / just how fine you are”) does more to interrogate that culture’s allure—and its malaise—than any of Segall’s more direct assaults.

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And that’s not to mention Music For Airports (1978). It’s difficult to talk about Music For Airports, because it’s like trying to describe the sky, and trying to describe the sky is difficult because the sky is always there and its envelopment is beyond where language can profitably transport us, and then again it is difficult to describe the sky because which sky are you going to attempt to describe, and the one always shades into the other, if, in fact, you can use the word shade to describe what the sky does, and I have been listening to Music For Airports for so long and in so many contexts and with such unspeakable devotion to it that I can’t really tease apart the impressions and I can’t find a way to detail my loyalty to it, in all of its manifestations, in all of the situations in which I have been devoted to it, and if it had been Eno’s only album, and even if there were not an abundance of writing to describe the great reward of listening to Music For Airports, I would still be certain that it was among the very finest recordings of music ever made, and when I say this, I say this without respect to genre, I would stack Music For Airports up against Glenn Gould and Sgt  Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Colin Turnbull’s recording of those pygmies and Alan Lomax, and all of that. Music For Airports makes the world a finer place, makes the people in it more palatable, and we really should launch it out into space and prove to the people on those distant planetoids that we are not just warlike simians bent on auto-destruction.

For the purposes of this essay, my hypothesis is: Eno had a Sweet Spot. And in addition to his appearance of unvarying confidence, his track record, his ability to pick collaborators well, his knack for understanding what might happen next, he had history on his side in those early years. This is the ineffable quality of the Sweet Spot. It somehow coheres with what history requires. There’s the inevitable feeling about artistic accomplishment when it happens in its appropriate historical epoch. There is inevitability. This has something to do with whichever artist you are talking about, but also has to do with how history happens—in fits and starts. History and artistic merit meet and fall into some adolescent love and death embrace, and it seems as they were always meant to be married together in this way, even if it’s the individual talent that appears to be somehow possessed of mystical perfection. The individual talent gets the credit. History effaces its role in this, at least until history, that fickle thing, turns its attention elsewhere. The Sweet Spot is the Rolling Stones on Exile on Main Street. Everyone agrees it’s a masterpiece, but is it really a better album than, say, Let It Bleed? It was the right album for the moment. As was Some Girls a few years later. Exile sounds exactly right for its moment (1972). Some Girls sounds right for its moment (1975). Pet Sounds is right for its moment. London Calling is right for its moment. Loaded, by the Velvet Underground, sounds right for its moment. In some of these cases, the work under scrutiny is so excellent that you would have a hard time saying the reputation of the work is owing to anything other than its excellence. But excellence also has to do with cultural history, the history of technology, and so on. Thriller, to my ears, is a frequently boring album, but its smooth and perfect arrangements caught something of 1983 as no other album seemed to be able to do. Hotel California seems to me utterly dreadful, excepting that guitar solo at the end of the title track, and yet is any other record as suggestive about American culture at the time? History is what people need to hear, and when they need to hear it, they need to hear it enough that they are willing to revise their aesthetic standards to cohere with the juggernaut of historical necessity.

The nearly instantaneous dissolution of The Clash after their finest work is, in a way, a merciless example of this politics of the Sweet Spot. From London Calling through Sandinista!, the Clash were so far ahead of their peers, they were so adept at hearing what was going to happen, as opposed to what was happening, that it was hard to think of them as anything but supremely gifted oracles. But then there was the precipitous falling off of Combat Rock, with its mere covering of the bases, its slightly warmed over funk, and its leftover bits of glam, and suddenly they sounded tired, dissolute, perhaps drug addled, even worried, and then they were gone. Which led some listeners (me, at least) to go back and listen to what came before. And what came before (especially if you’ve heard the expanded edition of London Calling) was not always as perfect as we’d been led to believe. Great lyrics, I will agree, but not necessarily the pinnacle of creativity, in the musical department, that you might have imagined was there when you first heard the album. The Sweet Spot meant that some of the cannabis-enhanced qualities of Sandinista! do not quite now seem like the visionary white-musician refraction of Lee “Scratch” Perry that we thought they were then.

Or: sometimes things fall out of fashion simply because history (or technology) has moved on, and there’s almost nothing the musician can do, again, to reacquire the reputation from which he or she has been sundered. Think of David Bowie, after Let’s Dance. For a solid decade, he could do nothing, not a thing, to redeem himself, through the Tin Machine period, through the Buddha of Suburbia period, right up through Outside. Not until Heathen did people again pay any attention, though there was no shortage of good music in that lost decade. Sometimes there’s a snowballing effect after the Sweet Spot, and a loss of confidence goes with the loss of attention, and the artist casts about in a sort of desperate way. Lou Reed had a long spell after Coney Island Baby where he made almost nothing remarkable, until The Blue Mask, and then, after couple of reasonably good albums (mostly good because of the presence of lead guitar player Robert Quine), he went back to making music that was, in my view, not terribly interesting. Recently, freed from all historical concern, Reed has been making a lot of abstract instrumental music, not even bothering about the songs, and that has been interesting, because here he appears to be utterly post-historical and therefore free. (And yet one only has to listen to the single, for example, from the Lou Reed/Metallica album, already derided as one of the worst songs ever committed to tape to see how brutal the exile after the Sweet Spot can sometimes be.) Paul Simon between Still Crazy After All These Years (1975) and Graceland (1986). David Byrne for much of his solo career. The B-52s after Whammy! George Harrison after Living In the Material World. Joni Mitchell after Mingus. It is merciless out there, in the cold, where they give you no budget to make your recordings, and yet you are expected to sound as you once might have sounded when you had record company support, when you played with the finest musicians in the world. Now you are relegated to making records entirely on your own.

What, therefore, of Eno after the Sweet Spot? He certainly went on to produce more successful and highly profitable albums, up to and including what I think of as one of the most unlistenable bands of the present moment, Coldplay, whom he has nonetheless managed to make more textural and thoughtful than they deserve to be. These productions are likely highly remunerative, and are enough to insure that Eno’s more adventurous artistic activities of economically secure. But of Eno’s own albums there have appeared to be more missteps than we hitherto imagined, which is to say it’s possible that there have been missteps since 1985 or 1986, as opposed to the decade prior in which mistakes were none. But is this really the case?

I for one love everything up to The Shutov Assembly (1992), an album of highly abstract pieces made for a Russian artist friend. The sounds on Shutov incorporate some more dissonant harmonies, and a lot of music that is frankly ominous, an approach that is certainly at variance with the ambient period that preceded it. Shutov seems to be one of the first of the Eno albums to abundantly feature digital synthesizer, perhaps the Yamaha DX7, or the DX11, which were really good on bell tones, much favored by the later Eno. Moreover, the album, like many of Eno’s most adventurous pursuits, was made entirely by the artist. And much of it may have been fashioned for sound and video installations for Eno’s sideline as a fine artist (for which, he was, in fact, trained in college). The same is true of the very lovely Thursday Afternoon (1986), which is a musical piece that dates to one an earlier video work (of the same name,1984). Again, Thursday Afternoon, to me is highly listenable, if totally abstract, and it follows upon the ambient series (which includes not only Music For Airports, but some albums he produced for Harold Budd and Laraaji, as well as his own On Land, an album I love very nearly as much as Music For Airports), and has something in common with those abstract albums in that you can enter in Thursday Afternoon anywhere, at any point in its course, and have a musical experience, in the same way that you can do so with Cage, or with Morton Feldman, or with La Monte Young.

Meanwhile, something rather monumental happened during the later eighties, and it should be obvious. Eno had stopped singing. After Before and After Science, in 1977, Eno didn’t sing in public at all, throughout the high ambient period, feeling, apparently, that the figure/ground problem in the popular song was somehow non-negotiable for him—the way in which the lyrics were always considered the foreground—perhaps because he had exhausted his lyrical approach, which involved a lot of randomness, nonsense-singing, anagrams, and the like. And yet toward the end of the decade, he tried to make an album of songs again, which was to be called, as I understand it, My Squelchy Life, and this album didn’t find favor with the record companies, or so it is said, and he was sent back to the drawing board, which resulted in a mostly instrumental album, Nerve Net, which was percussion heavy in ways that are somewhat surprising to longtime fans. Some of the Squelchy Life tracks made it onto Nerve Net in a different forms, and some were later to be heard on the Eno vocal box set (a work that I was so obsessed with obtaining, back when it was very hard to get in the United States, that I made use of a trip to England to procure a copy). Nerve Net was a louder, less tuneful, and slightly aggressive album, one that had very little of the gentle, meditative, and paradoxically tender electronic music that Eno had been making for about five years. This likely by design.

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