http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/07/06/pulses/



Short one this week. Last three 1500 word treatises left me word-dry, all bones that creak meager vowels which mean to but cannot properly represent music and its rude effects. May exit this one having left a similarly long trail, but if so, rest assured, it's unintended.

Reinstated myself into the rush of Detroit techno last week. Felt my blood cook in ways long lost. Particularly wished to be a mere dot of rhythm in Jeff Mills' sprawling invention of a brand new heartbeat, Mix-Up Vol. 2: LiveMix at Liquid Room, Tokyo—like acting as a punctuation mark in Red Harvest, intending to separate but regardless blasted by the heat of the surrounding words, by the surrounding onslaught made possible by two records in maniacal sync driven over a Benzedrine pulse.

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http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/06/29/and-the-world-danced-with-him/



It is impossible to get around Michael Jackson.

I am not one to join the blogosphere in its often incoherent exhortations or its rote denigrations of a culture informed by aggregate pop desires. I prefer to spotlight the dismissed, drag the ignored from their ignored waters—perhaps merely out of a juvenile desire to stand out or above the countless music blogs that regurgitate the same spoiled food into willing beaks.

And so almost anyone with a laptop and who grants their opinions an unearned importance has and will thrust a hand into the meat of Jackson's body and retrieve any and all desired organs though tainted irreparably by the perception through which they analyze and reduce them. I don't pretend this is any different. I am tainted in the very act of writing this. I am one made desperate and sad by news of Jackson's death, one who grew up skating in the long and funky shadow his music made, one who fostered a deep and indelible love of music within and because of that shadow, a love which has only made itself fully expressed as of four years ago, but one which regardless has roots that touch and pierce my very center.

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http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/06/15/my-war-with-the-dirty-projectors/



Last week I read an article on Stereogum that instilled in me a previously unknown rage.

I am not often angry in relation to music—what little I dislike I regard with minor annoyance, or even ambivalence, as I am often wont to retrieve from seeming black holes of songs any good qualities they may hold and keep them permanently in mind so that when I come upon someone who enjoys said disliked song I will not spend the next twenty minutes of their life describing to them in detail why they should feel immense, crippling shame.

That is not how I choose to roll.

But then I read "Wait, is Bitte Orca the best album of 2009?" and felt my synapses all dive into the fire at once because they could no longer live in this cruel, inane world, where every comment that deigns to list the best albums of 2009 (which means what in June, that the other months have all retreated and shrunk forevermore under the immense pall cast by this plague of flawless art in these last six months?) lists the same three albums, as follows:

- Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion
- Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest
- Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca

I cannot argue against Animal Collective—their live show broke open my head and made the goo inside glow in the dark. I have also let go my frustration at Grizzly Bear's inexplicable popularity—I have loved some records for much less than some pretty sweet harmonies. In fact, I like Hole's Celebrity Skin entirely for its occasionally bursts of harmonic light. This is okay.

The Dirty Projectors are not okay.

The Dirty Projectors are boring.

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http://desperationandnoise.com/2009/05/18/i-like-you-so-much-better-as-an-idea/



Hear a pop song lately that compelled you—beyond all reason and learned behavior patterns—to jump up and down on your bed, hairbrush-mic in hand, your emotions incomplete and raw at the ends, your impending adulthood unimportant and totally square?

You're welcome:


IDA MARIA: "I LIKE YOU SO MUCH BETTER WHEN YOU'RE NAKED"

"I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked" is Norwegian whiskey-throat/pop-songwriter Ida Maria's song "for the male population of this planet," who, according to an interview with MTV, she would much rather prefer to "be naked all the time."

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