The other day Cory and I had an email discussion about Vampire Weekend, and one friend’s (KM) criticism of the band. Cory insisted that I buy the record a few weeks ago, promising to reimburse me if I didn’t end up liking it. He wins.

To: Cory2008@kiblerfamilybeekeepers.uk
From: Howie@supernerdy.informationsuperhighway/AOL
Subject: Why would you lie about anything at all?

I’m internalizing Vampire Weekend, and liking it. I love that they start changing it up after the first four tunes; I like tracks 5-9 way better! “M79,” “Bryn,” and “I Stand Corrected” are my favs. -h

To: Howie@supernerdy.informationsuperhighway/AOL
From: Cory2008@kiblerfamilybeekeepers.uk
Subject: RE: Why would you lie about anything at all?

Howie!

I just think that every single song on “Vampire Weekend” is just so solid of a pop song. My initial favorites were the first 4 or 5 songs on the CD, because that’s what I’d hear first when I listened to it… “Mansard Roof” and “Oxford Comma” are SUCH GOOD ways to start off a record. “A-Punk” and “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” just continue the pop-assault. But then I started loving the sweet baby bejesus out of “I Stand Corrected” and “M79.” Every song is different enough to make the record varied and interesting, but similar enough to make it a cohesive, complete thought of a record.

(Side note: I hung out with my friend KM recently, and she said she hated the record, and she had two reasons for hating it. I think her reasons are bad reasons, but I didn’t tell her so. I’m not going to get into that discussion unless you want me to, but I’d love to hear what you think.)

LOVE!
Cory

To: Cory2008@kiblerfamilybeekeepers.uk
From: Howie@supernerdy.informationsuperhighway/AOL
Subject: Why would you lie about anything at all?

My feelings on Vampire Weekend are pretty solid, so I think I can discuss KM’s criticisms without it ruining the record for me! :-)

To: Howie@supernerdy.informationsuperhighway/AOL
From: Cory2008@kiblerfamilybeekeepers.uk
Subject: RE: Why would you lie about anything at all?

Okay: KM had two criticisms. The first was that Vampire Weekend is completely ripping off Paul Simon. The second is that they are a bunch of privileged trust-fund kids from Brooklyn who are presumptuously appropriating African pop-music for their own purpose, and bastardizing it in the process. I think these criticisms actually help negate each other, but anyway, here’s what I think:

Having heard “Graceland” as well as other Paul Simon stuff, I don’t think VW sound enough like Simon to call “BS.” I can see some similarities, but not enough to take any issue whatsoever. But, let’s say that one thought that VW was ripping off Simon. My response is: who cares? They’re clearly not taking chord progressions/lyrical ideas from him, so it’s not outright plagiarism. And, if you want to hate on every band that sounds really similar to another band, well, you’ll have to hate on every single band in the world (except for maybe Buckethead or someone). Every band I’ve been in or liked or seen live or whatever has sounded similar to some other band that came before it. That’s just how music works.

As for the second criticism about them being white kids from Brooklyn who’ve appropriated Afro-pop: well, it’d be one thing if they were mocking it, or trying to pass their music off as *authentic” Afro-pop. But I don’t think they are, and I think it would be just about impossible to prove that they were. Also, Paul Simon is a white kid from Brooklyn; what made it okay for HIM to do it? The fact that he did it first? I don’t think so. If VW is guilty of it, so is Simon. So I don’t think you’re allowed to call out VW on it without calling out Simon on the same thing. But as it stands, I don’t think it’s an issue that they’re influenced by Afro-pop. If it is an issue, there are some cruddy consequences: if one did think it was uncool for one culture to appropriate and interpret another culture’s music, you and I aren’t morally allowed to play rock/blues music any more, and KM’s not allowed to play tuba for a hip-hop group.

Thoughts? -Cory

To: Cory2008@kiblerfamilybeekeepers.uk
From: Howie@supernerdy.informationsuperhighway/AOL
Subject: Why would you lie about anything at all?

I agree with your arguments. Specifically,

1) Ripping someone off is not *in itself* a reason to discredit an aesthetic work. As you point out, if it were, all art ever would be discredited (reduction to absurdity). There may be a legitimate criticism of a work as *merely* derivative, but I agree that Vampire Weekend avoids this.

2) KM’s criticism here is actually a special case of #1; a ripping-off with colonialist undertones. In general, the same counter-argument applies. Specifically to the colonialism, I think the burden of proof is on her to show that Vampire Weekend has actually done concrete harm to the African musicians/music they’re ripping off, and I doubt she’ll be able to make a convincing case. For example if Vampire Weekend’s success totally destroyed sales of West African music, or if they plagarized stuff, or sampled indigenous music without giving credit/royalties. I don’t think they’ve done any of those things.

No harm, no foul. -h

Hat tip to Mom for sending me this short article. My comments below.

TUNES IN OUR HEAD: Oliver Sacks on the power of music to heal us and transform our lives (From AARP Magazine Jan-Feb, 2008)

“I’d always suspected we were a musical species,” says Oliver Sacks, 74, the famed neurologist and author of Awakenings, explaining how he decided to delve deeply into understanding the role of music in the brain. But his research turned up more than he’d anticipated. “I’m actually amazed at how much of the brain is recruited for musical experience,” he says. The ability to appreciate music, he believes, is a defining quality of our humanity. In his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf), he shares his discoveries. He talked to us about music’s astounding potential.

*Music as medicine– “In music therapy for Parkinson’s disease, where my interest got kindled, the rhythm of the music is crucially important. People with Parkinson’s misjudge time grossly and have difficulty coordinating speech with their movements, so they tend to stutter or stumble, or just come to a stop. While the music lasts, it gives them precisely what they lack, which tempo and rhythm and organized time. The music doesn’t have to be familiar or particularly emotionally evocative for them. For people with alzheimer’s, it’s a different story. For these patients, the evocativeness of music is primary-the music has to recall emotions and scenes and memories they seem to have lost. Even for those with advanced Alzheimer’s who have lost language, music can grab them and calm or stimulate them. It’s enormously powerful.”

*Compensating– “Blindness seems to enhance many people’s appreciation of music. And many deaf people are able to analyze very complex experiences in the peripheral visual field, which sighted people can’t do. I think whatever sense one loses, there’s a sort of compensation. You can see in scans how, when one part of the brain isn’t getting its normal input, it won’t be wasted. It will be pressed to another use.”

*Musical hallucinations– “Imagining music can activate parts of the brain almost as vividly as listening to music. But our enormous sensitivity to music also has certain dangers, including those catchy tunes that infuriatingly repeat in our heads. These musical hallucinations evaporate eventually, but probably the best relief is listening to other music.”

*Music haters– “An emotional response to music is very strong and almost universal, yet there are a few baffling exceptions. Sigmund Freud, for example, lacked appreciation for music altogether. I actually think something was missing in Freud’s life, and perhaps his analytical communications would have been richer with music. But he’s a puzzle because, at least from the few things he says, one wonders if in fact he was suppressing an emotional response because it mystified or angered him.

*Beatlemania?– “I didn’t respond to the Beatles, probably because I was 30 when they appeared. But I think if I’d been 15, it would have been very different. It’s such a passionate and impressionable time in life. And I don’t think it’s just music. It’s the poetry, the landscapes, the paintings. I can recall novels I read at 15 or 20 in boring detail. But I don’t remember what I read at 60 nearly as well.”

*Transcendence– “I surround myself with music-Chopin, Bach-and it takes me places I can’t take myself. The last concert I went to, I watched the most amazing conductor, David Randall, who is in his 90s but as agile and energetic as someone in his 20s. He leapt up onto the podium and conducted a wonderful Mendelssohn’s Walpurgisnacht. I see a lot of sad, sick, aging people, but I also see people like Randall. He gave an amazing impromptu talk. Resilient, witty. There was just no age there.”

I’ve always remembered my high school band director Mr. Palensky wistfully reminding us that playing music requires us to use 90% of our brain, compared with about 10% for most other activities.

Sacks’ research with Parkinson’s patients is especially interesting; it points toward the idea that humans have a deep inner pulse, a beat that helps us organize time, and that Parkinson’s involves the loss of that pulse but it can be externalized and regained through music.  I like that the pulse seems to be something innate within us; we don’t have to learn it, it is already there, we just discover what’s inside.

Musical hallucinations – This reminds me of something kind of weird I’ve been experiencing lately.  When I’m listening to “…not nothing” in the car, I can often feel my throat moving.   I’m subconsciously subvocalizing to my own music!  It can be uncomfortable, especially for the parts where I sing loud, because my throat really tightens up as if I were belting out a pure tone.  (Bad technique, I’m sure…)

The Beatlemania thing seems to have less to do with music than with memory, though they’re related (as the Alzheimer’s research shows).

Transcendence.  Yes.  Ego-less-ness.  Magic.  These are The Reason I make music. -h

Sorry for the late post – I’ve been preparing to go to Tijuana with five close friends and a bunch more to build a house for a family there with the partnership of Amor. -h

Jill and I tiptoed away from our post at the Friends of the Kaw River beer tent just in time to see the Lips on the main stage at Wakarusa Friday night, resolving a chord of mine that had hung suspended for nine years.
The winter of 99-00 after “The Soft Bulletin” had come out, Wayne Coyne & Co. toured through Lincoln NE. Advertising for the Knickerbocker’s show wasn’t consistent; some posts listed the admissible ages as 18 & over, some as 21 & over. Charles and I called the club and it sounded like we, as 18-year-old seniors in high school, would be able to get in. We drove through a light snow and arrived at the door with only hoodies for warmth (the club was notoriously hot inside) and were told that we couldn’t get tickets yet, but to hang around in case some were made available. In retrospect I’m sure the club was near a sellout at the 21-and-over level and didn’t want to sell tickets to kids who couldn’t buy drinks if they didn’t need to. We froze in the doorway for an hour; Wayne walked out, and back in; and after pleading our case one more time it became obvious we weren’t going to see The Flaming Lips that night.

Weather last Friday couldn’t have been more different than it was for Charles’ and my attempt. The Kansas City spring humidity (!) lifted, a breeze circled the crowd, and it was gloriously perfect to be outside with a bunch of young hippies.

Following a spot-on space rock introduction the Lips meandered through cuts from their past three records including “Free Radicals,” “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1,” “Race For The Prize,” “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” and “The W.A.N.D.” We sang along enthusiastically, but not with abandon; we maintained appropriate Midwestern reserve. Between songs Wayne gushed about the greatness of Wakarusa, the importance of love, the political significance of the ritual of rock music, and his vision of a day when the Ceremonial Bugle is only needed at Flaming Lips shows, not funerals.

Somewhere in the middle of that long moment I realized that my heart makes a theological response to The Flaming Lips.

It takes incredible love to make pop music out of:

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?
We’re floating in space?
That happiness makes you cry?
That everyone you know someday will die?

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn’t go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Or:

If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch
Would you do it?
If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich
Would you do it?
If you could watch everybody work while you just lay on your back
Would you do it?
If you could take all the love without giving any back
Would you do it?
And so we cannot know ourselves or what we’d really do…

With all your power
With all your power
With all your power
What would you do?

The lyrics don’t even come close to capturing what happens when this love is chanted over freakishly fuzzed-out guitars and intergalactic synthesizers while aliens and construction workers dance and Wayne fires streamers and confetti into the crowd with a shotgun-like launcher device.  It’s transcendent.  It’s egoless.  It’s a pause from everything in life that separates us from ourselves, from each other, and from Infinity.

It’s fun!  It’s beautiful.

It’s no wonder I bring my theological lens to bear on it, but I don’t mistake my point of view for what is actually happening.  Weird as they might seem on the surface I love The Flaming Lips for their music, their questions, and their sheer courage to have a concrete vision of where this world could go when it would be much cooler and more indie to snark, posture, criticize, and remain aloof and uncommitted to anything anybody might disagree with.

See them if you ever have the chance.  They’ll show you what they’ve found at the depth of things, and you may not walk away the same.  -h

Catch me on drums next Friday night June 20 with The Sleepover in Omaha, NE at The Slowdown.

I’ve had cause over the past couple weeks to attempt explaining my various bands, projects, and recordings to an audience that’s been mostly out of the loop since howie&scott’s signs.comets. We determined quickly that a flowchart of sorts was needed, and it was interesting enough to put together that I thought you guys might dig it too.

PRIMER: Bands of -h

Any conversation about They Might Be Giants starts for me with a memory of seeing them with Tim, Rebecca, JT, and Bluebird of Friendliness knows who else six or seven years ago at the old Royal Grove in Lincoln, NE.
It was a strip club.

Not during TMBG, though!  The venue regularly held rock shows, then clear everybody out after the music and switch over.

It was the James K. Polk tour, complete with light show, confetti, bunting and Polk banners.  The Band of Dans killed.  Linnell gave me a masters class in surliness, while Flansburgh rocked. out. on. the Telecaster, lifting it high for anything remotely resembling a big riff, roaming the stage with his wireless mic and stand, and tearing into his background vocals with an enthusiasm usually reserved for the showiest of show choir members.

Happily, not too much has changed.

Jill, Doug, and I were thoroughly rocked by the Giants’ set Friday night.

Kudos to the Beaumont for starting yet another show on time; this is becoming quite the habit over there.  And the sound was solid, with the exception that Flansburgh’s vocals were a little buried.

TMBG’s current incarnation is a stripped-down, loose outfit that reminds me of nothing so much as early Elvis Costello.  Their set spanned their entire career, including the expected highlights from “Flood” and a few selections from their recent children’s albums (“Seven”).  Flansburgh joked (At least I think he was joking) that the band doesn’t rehearse for their children’s gigs (they had one Saturday) except for onstage at their adult shows.

Given my history with the band, hearing the phrase “adult shows” from the stage was extra-special.

TMBG gave us a few surprises, including a masterful acoustic guitar introduction to “Istanbul,” a noisy, deconstructed interlude in the middle of “Particle Man,” Flansburgh introducing the members of the band…  twice…  and a pleasantly ramshackle version of “Fingertips.”

If you’ve ever been a fan of the band, or think you might become one, catch them on tour.  They don’t disappoint. -h

“Songs of -h” is still available; mail your cash or check gift to

St. Peter’s United Church of Christ

Mexico Trip 2008

700 E. 110th St.

Kansas City, MO 64131

and we’ll use it to build a house in Tijuana this June for a family that needs one. In the meantime, check out these desktops!

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