#200

Wow, the two hundredth post. The second hundred is complete, or will  be, when I smash that "post" button. When it gets smashed. When I pound that post button, grinding it hard into the surface of the world wide web, the two hundredth factually pointless post will burrow into internet's flesh and there it will fester for eternity, or however much less than that depending on how things go.

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200.

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There are a lot of bands and musicians that are very special to me in the kind of way that sort of defines one as a person. The hard core, you know.

If a person's hard core is made up of, say, early-nineties gangster rap, a few particular strains of what the record companies call rhythm and blues from the early and middle aughts, and the Frank Ocean wave, it will have some bearing on how the person carries and dresses themselves, and how they parse their cultural world and move through society. You might have formed a picture of this person in your mind; you may be able to form various pictures of various persons that might fit this bill. How this is done is dependent on the lenses you view this person through, your own hard core; perhaps this person stands very close to you, or perhaps your fascination with honky-tonk, bluegrass, and country music recorded before the year nineteen-sixty places a few lenses of refraction in between the place where you stand and they do. Perhaps you mainly listen to Sibelius and Debussy, or are completely consumed by surf-infused third-wave riot grrl shriekpunk. Maybe you used to be very into hardcore but now it's groovy 80's synthpop and the return of the electronic organ aesthetic.

'Sall good, folks. Music is just math you can hear. Patterns and iterations. All of it unique and exactly the same. The rest is coats of paint and personality. Intent and reception.

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Selectively--keeping it after 1900, avoiding incidental music, and omitting artists for whom only spare tracks reach this level (one fine day perhaps I shall generate a tracklist), and relegating The Red Hot Chili Peppers to "honorable mention" status--my own hard core is comprised of the following artists:

Gogol Bordello, Caspian, Rubén Blades, Robert Johnson, Quinteto Contrapunto, Two Gallants, Simón Díaz, Muddy Waters, John Frusciante, Serenata Guayanesa, Aesop Rock, Modest Mouse, Louis Armstrong, Santana, Ensemble Gurrufío, and Nina Simone.

There was no particular order, there. There is no truly ranking the hard core, you need it all to be who you are, totally separate from art that you can talk rationally or dispassionately about. There is art you can fully compass and bind within your ideas, and there is art for which though your ideas are bigger and more important and more fully  developed than perhaps any other ideas you have, they fall short, and don't matter, in the face of the indescribable feeling, the duende, the grace.

Beyond the hard core, though, residing in an innerspace even more vast and intimate than the place where your favorite music lives, there's the stuff that transcends even the ranks of the first and best. To analogize, in bookworld, Lord of the Rings is, as I have stated in no uncertain terms, beyond human reproach and the greatest extant literary achievement. On this matter, I will brook no argument because there is not one to be had; people who care less than I do about Lord of the Rings can have those arguments. To me, those people, when they are talking about Lord of the Rings, might as well not exist. Easier to understand people who actively hate Lord of the Rings or cannot so much as begin it than people who read it, maybe even more than once, and don't "get" it.

Even though there's nothing to get because what is actually happening is that this work warps the space around it (my psyche) and fundamentally changed its reality. My subjective position is both integral to my being-in-the-world and at odds with how the world actually is, for in this world, no work of hand or human symbol reigns supreme, and in mine, a miracle took place. In the end, of course, it's just a story. But everybody has their Story.

Coming back to music, it's Queen, and The Mountain Goats.

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This year, The Mountain Goats dropped their seventeenth studio album.

Yes. Seventeen. Kind of an important number in this blog. 

After the way Goths was received and popularized, I felt pretty sick in myself about where things were in general, and not long afterwards a lot of life happened, so I was caught off guard by In League With Dragons because I had stopped reading about music, stopped looking at places that hype and criticize music. And I didn't listen to it for a few months after it dropped because I wasn't acquiring anything new either, hadn't heard the new Two Gallants or the new Gogol Bordello, nothing. I was icy with music, frozen in place.

Things are thawing now, though, and I've given it a few spins. Every Mountain Goats album is at one time or another my favorite, it never stops, always something is happening, and right now In League With Dragons is it, their best work and best writing so far, absolutely beautiful, a comfort and a clarion call and an incredible pleasure.

"Possum By Night". What a fucking track. How does something like this even happen.

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When you were born only a few years before somebody started putting their music out on cassette tapes, there is a disadvantage when it comes to being on board for the early days. I didn't hear The Mountain Goats till I was sixteen and they were starting to become quite popular--Heretic Pride, an album which was pretty big, dropped a little while after I started listening; my first new Mountain Goats. Heady, halcyon days.

The track that got me good, the hook, was "Up the Wolves". 

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Feels good to be listening to music again. I may write more about The Mountain Goats tomorrow, and I may not. 

I have also been listening to a lot of Jimmy Cliff, Toots and The Maytals, The Animals, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Also all the other music I have mentioned today.


--JL