He Told Me I was his Best Friend Today, also

Henry had a playdate with his friend Jake today.  I sat the two boys down for a rice, roasted chicken and broccoli dinner.  Henry found a wishbone in his chicken and explained what is was to Jake.  Jake won the bigger piece, to his delight.  

"I wish-" 

"No!  Jake, you have to say the wish to yourself or else it won't come true," Henry warned him.

Jake bowed his head and closed his eyes.  He whispered, "I wish Batman was real."

Maybe I Am Gay

Even though I'm like the one to the left


"A month after I'm supposed to care, it's still kind of unbelievable to me how little NYC disco made it into Zach's poll or the other one...

... I really hope Antony Hegarty is enough of a hook here to backdoor increasingly uptight indie rock circles--who I couldn't care less whether they actually liked the record, just that they know it would be a good look if they did...

... but the point is this album is very lush, very (for lack of a better word) expensive-sounding, just so enormous, made to play the Big Room, made for a time when records like "Blind" did in fact play those Big Rooms...

... Right now those Big Rooms are, EMI assumes, only in the EU and UK, which (from what I understand) might be why EMI still hasn't figured out a US release for H&LA. It makes sense as a European dance-pop act, but US pop has hip-hop and dancerock on the mind..." -- Nick on the new Hercules And Love Affair record

By now I think you know what I would have to say about the H&LA record, if not, then it would basically go: "This will be my absolute favorite record of the year." And it will be. So, instead, I'm going to latch on to something posed by Nick and focus it on my own locality. Why does Philadelphia so abhor NYC disco?

For our time New York City is the Center of the World, both financially and culturally. Envy follows such status. Hating on NYC may be a universal sentiment, but believe me, it is particularly strong in a city, which for some unfathomable reason detests being labelled "The Sixth Borough". As if we deserve such lofty praise. By so fervently attempting to establish a unique identity my city has actually ruined any chance of doing just that.

How do you vituperate the axis of the world, Philadelphia? You condemn it as pretentious and smart and expensive and gay. I have already said enough about the gay thing here, and I can't believe more hasn't been made out of it, not that I expected anything, but really, having such a large gay population, we should be ashamed about it. The expensive thing, you can't hack it in New York, the pretentious and smart stuff, you're too stupid and insecure for it, city of mine.

All of the disco acts and tracks that Nick cites in his post are extremely prententious sounding, true, but they overcome it by being very very good. All the arguments I've heard against New York disco in Philadelphia, and this comes from the very top of our hipster food chain, basically condemn it as "dorky and gay", "pussy shit", "faggot music." Well, if that's what you want to call the new Hercules And Love Affair record, Philadelphia, can you please shove your dick up my virgin ass?

The one word that I really want to focus on is "dork". Most hipsters were probably at some time in their lives dorks, most likely in school years. After school, with complete freedom to choose friends and form cliques, hipsters isolate themselves. So insulated, they gain a false confidence, and all too quickly forget the hardships they endured, the fact that they were, almost in a sense innately, dorks. They become like all the jocks and cool kids before them, circumspect and insecure, overly concerned about their appearance. They don't dare to "dork" out on a dance floor. They live on the knife's edge. Philadelphia hipster dance clubs are SO stale at this point-- NYC disco almost entirely absent from everyone's rotation. Consequently, nothing spontaneous or FUNNY ever happens on the floor. The same people talk to each other over and over about how good they look and whether they were able to get tickets to the Cobra Starship show. Most hipsters, at least from what I've experienced personally, currently, in Philadelphia, are actually hypocrites.

Why bring all this up? The survival of NYC disco is at stake. "Blind" hatred is suffocating it. Hercules And Love Affair does not at present have a US release! What place other than Philadelphia, if we could finally smarten up and dissolve our prejudice, could better boost NYC disco? Which brings me to the close. Right now I can think of only three others in the city that truly love the record. Two of us four are Broadzilla DJs. Let's start to set things right, Philly, tonight.

It's On!

Choose sides. Right now. Either you're with us or you're against us. And if you're against us, we're not fucking around anymore. We're out for blood. You've been warned.

I fully endorse the Todd Burns Pazz and Jop essay. I think the point Todd's trying really hard to make is that with the emergence of acts like Justice (and let's face facts, they're going to be around for a while) there's a NEED to differentiate between "true, balls-to-bone dance" music and pop (which I'm defining as on the one side of the spectrum Hilary Duff [has anyone else listened to "With Love"? That song was almost something] to Metallica/Linkin Park on the other) you can dance to. I also think you're an idiot if you think that Todd doesn't think it's possible for good dance pop to exist. The guy listed Miss Diamond To You as his favorite record of the year.

"Dance" music, however, is all about prolonged builds, builds that elicit a bacchic and physical response other than fist pumping. I think what Todd's trying to say is that the survival of "dance" music, e.g. Dinosaur L's "Kiss Me Again" to Reese & Santonio "How To Play Our Music" to Villalobos is being threatened by the need-for-immediate-consumption society we live in. Which brings me to drugs-- drugs seem to me the mechanism driving Justice's success-- "yo dude, when you do twenty lines of cocaine, you have to listen to this." Has anyone gone to a Justice show sober? That would be the true test. What's really in control, the music or the drugs? That's my thing about drugs: are they really setting you free? Maybe up to a certain point, but then they just become another type of control. Hey, I just finished Brave New World. Reading a lot into it, I think Todd also might be worried that it's the drugs. What Justice really try to do is will themselves on the listener-- all of the songs start out so aggressively. How can you not feel the violence, the intrusion, if you're not already numb? I don't think it's a sentiment at all, Mr. Wilkes, but an entire lack thereof.

It makes me again turn to LCD Soundsystem's "Yeah" (Pretentious). When I listen to that track, I hear James Murphy putting in time to get his audience to freak out. Moreover, I think he's requiring us to put in our time. Your string must be stretched to its limit. I wholly believe the first ten minutes of the song are the ten most schizo minutes in all of music, you're ready to burst, and when the acid line comes in at the end, it's there for only twenty seconds, not 5 minutes. If it's done right, that's all the acid it takes. I'm never going to do cocaine because I don't have to-- how can it possibly be any different from listening to this song?

But I digress. It all comes down to the music. Chris and I have been talking a lot recently about how so much of the music produced these days will be going along just fine and then will fall completely flat on its face. Lots of Justice songs do just that. Thinking about it, it's indicative of the fact that it's too easy to make a record these days, that people who really don't know what they're doing make music, and way too much of it. It's all too forced. These people don't care about making good records, mostly because, like DJCB says in the post linked in the sidebar, no bloggers/critics blast music anymore, I'm talking about the Forkcast section in particular, which endorses everybody who coughs up the goods that keep the section going, but also Fluxblog. Just keep belting out the catchiness, we'll come up the words to back it somehow. Just crank out the music. Liking something because of its marketability is a bad idea, and it scares the shit out of me because it seems like we have become such consumers, especially of music, since most of us are getting it for free, that everything has a market. Well, we at TPO still love to hate fuck Capitalism, it's just absurd that with the way things now are, it appears that the best way to do it would be to stop listening to everything, to stop reading Pitchfork and Fluxblog and support financially only those bands you've chosen to truly love. Oh yes, the battle lines have been drawn!