Straight up Stroopwafels - Incredible instantaneous pleasure. If you are in Holland smoke cigarettes, stop that and allocate your funds to Stroopwafels. A much more satisfying addiction
Peanut butter + Stroopwafel - Thick and wonderful.
Jelly + Stroopwafel - Fruit goes well with Stroopwafels so jam and jelly usually complement them quite nicely.
PBnJ Stroopwafel - Sex
Super Stroopwafel, from the market near my apartment - These are the big ones that they warm right in front of you. They taste much different. It's hard to describe and a bit hard to remember right now. Definitely worth checking out.
Grilled Cheese and Stroopwafel Sandwich - A worthwhile experiment but I wouldn't really go out of my way to do it again. It was definitely weird. I would rather have both things by themselves.
Fried Stroopwafel - I saw God
Still yet to try:
Nutella + Stroopwafel
I'm forgetting stuff. I'll edit this when I remember or try something new.
If you're looking for a good summation of why Nevermind changed the face of music and youth culture, you'll have to go elsewhere. I'm no musicologist; God knows I try. I've read some good articles. Slate had a good article earlier in the year about the state of the Nirvana legacy today. Drowned in Sound also has a good, honest critique of the recent Nevermind reissue. There are some others I'm having a hard time finding. I'll put them here when and if I find them. I probably have nothing new to add to the twenty-year-running conversation about Nirvana and Nevermind. The only things I can really share are my experiences.
I literally have no recollection of my life pre-Nirvana. I'm not going to say "I was there." I was one year old when Nevermind dropped, only just a bit older than the baby on the cover. I was there, but it was my mother that was really there, exposed to the music of the time and able to appreciate the music as it happened. She listened to the radio and she had a CD player. So yes, I heard Nirvana, a lot of Nirvana, on the radio or otherwise, for the entirety of my childhood. It wasn't until middle school, though, that I rediscovered my mothers CD collection and all of its gems, including most of the Nirvana CDs, which included Nevermind.
Can you imagine what that must have been like? For someone entering puberty, confused as fuck about everything and in doubt of himself and the world around him, Nevermind was pretty much a gift from above. It was cathartic, emotional, punk rock as hell, confrontational and nihilistic at once, and it practically underwent its own identity crisis every time I spun it. In a way Nirvana's music made a whole wealth of my own repressed emotions acceptable, because someone else expressed them: Life really just isn't fair, it's okay to hate your parents for divorcing, the truth is ugly, you don't have to dress like everyone else, people just aren't listening.
In addition to life lessons, Nirvana taught me about a whole new world of music. My obsession with them did not come without a hell of a lot of research into an incredible amount of liner notes, articles, websites, books, VHS tapes, interviews and more. Kurt pushed all of his favorite bands harder than his own, and I would have never known who scores of bands were without his guidance. Through his words, Kurt introduced me to indie rock. Could there be a greater gift than that?
This 1992 interview is proof that Kurt was completely aware of the effect that he was having and would have on young people like me. He realized it and after the fact he continued to spread his knowledge of music and the music industry to everyone he could. That's a pretty generous stance to take on music. His words being broadcasted on MTV and the like, how could he not take advantage of his popularity and use it to change things for the better?
And I suppose I should write a paragraph about the actual music. A big topic of discussion about Nevermind, especially recently, has been about its production values. Some people say they cheapen the album. My feeling is basically that this album's glossy production has nothing to do with why it was popular. Nevermind blew up because it is a legitimately good album. A good album for rock music, for punk music, and most importantly for pop music. To me the keystone of the Nirvana oeuvre is the Unplugged album. Take all the production values away from those songs and you just have some beautiful melodies, simple as that. The "secret" to Nirvana's success is the painfully obvious fact that Kurt Cobain was a great songwriter.
To say Nirvana was important to me would be a criminal understatement. They opened up completely new worlds of thought, music and expression that I had never thought possible. I can imagine that thousands, millions of kids went through the same stuff about ten years before me, and at the same time as me, and still do now, and will continue to do so ad infinitum, at least as long as kids are still into rock music.
To me, that's what I find really impressive about Nirvana, Nevermind, Kurt Cobain. I was relating to this music with my mother. Thirty plus year age gap, there. That's the kind of pathetic reality that Kurt Cobain sought to steer young people away from. I guess that didn't work the way he planned, at least in my case. I think he underestimated Nevermind.
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture—it's a really stupid thing to want to do."
—Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.
I'm late to the draw on this one, I'll admit. If you follow electronic music closely you already know about Teengirl Fantasy's single Cheaters, heard the chattering, etc. For everyone who hasn't heard it (which was me until fiarly recently when I saw all the literature FACT Magazine has written on the song, including being their favorite song of 2010), it's a killer song and I also think a legitimately important song.
First listen to the source material of the main sample, the 1977 single by Love Committee "Cheaters Never Win." The vocals are already pretty damn impressive, not just the delivery but also the lyrics. But, this is a pop song. It's jangly, happy, and upbeat, but it has a dark gravity to it when you listen to the lyrics.
Now listen to Teengirl Fantasy's 2010 single "Cheaters."
Fucking brilliant. These guys take a relatively standard, momentous house beat and then take those vocals from "Cheaters Never Win" and turn them upside down. The result is that those vocals are in a completely new, epic context, rhythmically and tonally, and have much different things to say. Suddenly "they always get it" becomes mantra. The bridge reaches new heights of intensity. Something is telling me that this recording is really important. The obsession with warped soul/R&B samples in electronic music within the past couple years peaks here, folks. This is taking that shit to a whole new level. The "manipulation" is pretty minute. None of the high pitched stuff Burial pioneered and many other artists have experimented with. The pitch is slightly lowered and the sample is chopped up a tiny bit so it fits, but its mostly the same as it was before, just running free in a completely environment.
I've heard the Amsterdam public library, Bibliotheek, likened to a colossal Apple store, in sleekness and modernity. I thought the person sitting next to me was watching porn, but it turned out to just be a very PG-13 scene in some tv show which I don't recognize. A lot of people do watch porn in libraries, though, or at least so I'm told. I recall the description of a row of computers labelled "Porn Alley" in a library where my father used to work because there were no security cameras covering the row, and old horny men would flock to this row to do their business or what have you, and the large exmilitary staff member would have to sneak up on these people and scare the crap out of them and warn them not to do that shit anymore. This library has a huge music collection, at least in comparison to the libraries I'm used to raiding the music collections of, though those are public libraries of towns that are much smaller than Amsterdam. They have obscure electronic compilations that I didn't even know people owned, let alone libraries. I'm hoping to come down here with my colossal laptop tomorrow and rip some CDs.
The album that's really striking me now is this album The Tape Hiss Hooligan by producer / independent filmmaker .L.W.H(odge).
It's a hip hop album, and it features many rappers including Main Attrakionz, Squadda B. and Shady Blaze. This is the second hip hop album I've talked about on this blog so far and it certainly won't be the last. It is my belief that from a production standpoint, hip hop and electronic music are very closely related, and that's becoming even more obvious as we continue to have modern beat-smiths like the Brainfeeder crew and others really straddling, blurring the line between the two. It's going to take me several more listens to really get to know The Tape Hiss Hooligan and decide what I think of it, but my first impression is that this guy is a really good producer. He's not doing anything terribly experimental here, really. Most of the other hip hop I've been paying attention to this year definitely is. It's not nearly as three dimentional and bizarre as Shabazz Palaces' Black Up or as rhythmically progressive as Knxwledge's Hexual.Sealings.LP, definitely a far cry from the layered, dramatic beats of Clams Casino. The Tape Hiss Hooligan is, both in beats and rapping, a direct and dirty album, but it's presented in a very classy way. The backing tracks really go all across the board, some minimal and hard hitting, others beautiful and melancholy and others still groovy. The rapping is solid, nothing outwardly spectacular but definitely good, steady and reliable, and also delivered with this world-weary, stoned out casuality. The whole thing's got this gritty, stark, realistic feel to it. It hits an exhilarating high with "Spinning 87," which is just achingly beautiful and groovy as fuck, behind rapping that has real command. I wanted to embed a youtube video of the song in this post but it doesn't even seem to be on youtube yet. YOUTUBE HASNT EVEN HEARD OF IT YET, THATS HOW FUCKING UNDERGROUND THIS ALBUM IS. .L.M.H. really lets this album go its own course, beats setting really distinct atmospheres for the rappers to go to town on. It seems to me like Hodge is communicating things that are different than what the rappers are saying, not necessarily bigger things but parallel things. Part of how he asserts his voice on The Tape Hiss Hooligan is by how he handles the intro, outro and interludes, and I won't try to break that down because they are definitely things you should experience without any prior knowledge of them. He's definitely showing and not telling, which is exactly how you write well and direct well so it makes sense that this methodology translates to music as well. So if you're into hip hop check it out, definitely.
This past weekend, a group of artists played two shows in Wroclaw, Poland as a part of the European Culture Congress in honor of legendary modern composer Krzysztof Penderecki. The two featured artists were Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and electronic music pioneer Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. The show that Greenwood collaborated on was on the 9th and the Aphex show was on the 10th. Pitchfork linked up to some videos from both nights, and I will post them here.
This is Aphex's interpretation of Penderecki's seminal piece "Threnody for The Victims of Hiroshima."
And here is a recording of Aphex's reworking of Penderecki's "Polymorphia," entitled "Polymorphia Reloaded."
This particular excerpt seems to be a sort of remix of Avril 14th off of 2001's Drukqs, and it's about as gorgeous as the original, though in a different way.
The fans over at the Aphex Twin board on the We Are The Music Makers forums seem to have compiled the entire show in its various parts for easy (uneasy?) listening. If you liked that Avril 14th mix, the entire thing is there.
Frankly, the entire concert series seems like an amazing idea to me: two legendary modern musical innovators paying homage to a godfather of modern classical music. Putting these artists on the same bill just seems wholly appropriate, and it is wonderful to see both Jonny Greenwood and Richard D. James growing musically into high class professionals. Wonderful stuff.
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Another important concert happened over the weekend, specifically on Sunday the 11th, which is a very big day for us Americans. The Wordless Music Orchestra performed a series of pieces at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. These pieces were thematically focused on loss and remembrance, in honor of the victims of and hardships incurred by the events of 9/11/2001. Among these pieces was "dlp 1.1" by another great composer, William Basinski, off of his album The Disintegration Loops which is very intimately connected with 9/11. You can stream the entire show or individual parts of it over here at NPR.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
The past week or so has been a huge blur, distinguished by an overall lack of sleep, a haze of altered states and a flood of new friends, locations and concepts. Amsterdam is beautiful. There are lovely canals (with swans swimming in them) laced with brick alleys and bridges, lined with green trees and gorgeous old buildings.
It is Wednesday and my second day of classes, but I had some trouble finding this morning's class and didn't end up making it. I am signed up for five classes now, but one of them does not start until the next "block" in November, and the way the school works I am required to drop one of them within two weeks. If I happen to drop one of my Tuesday or Thursday classes, I will only have class for two days a week, but this is unlikely. I'm probably going to end up dropping Amsterdam in the Golden Age, a history class that I hear is pretty intense.
There are many subtle differences in Europe/the Netherlands, but it is still a Western country and the basics are pretty much the same. The Dutch people seem very nice and like 85% of them speak English, mostly good English, which is very helpful. I've found that in Europe, I tend to not have full meals so much as modest snacks. My diet has mostly consisted of bread and cheese of various kinds, as well as small amounts of meat, fruit and vegetables. Eating out is incredibly expensive. We went to a mexican restaurant near Centraal and I got a burrito that cost nearly 15 euros, which is f'in ridiculous. Alcohol is nearly as pricey, costing anywhere from 4-7 per drink, so pregaming is simply more economical. Bud seems much more modestly priced, but that might be an illusion of confused exchange rates.
I haven't had as much time to listen to new music since I got here. I did listen to the new Apparat album, The Devil's Walk, and I found that every song sounded like it could be the last song, so I was always asking myself, was that the end? I don't think that is a good sign. I'm listening to the new Plaid album Scintilli now and I'm really impressed with it. Oh yeah, and the new album by the Field is pretty nice too.
