Canned Dragons
One Actress and a Melon
The creative forces behind Ginger Root have a concept for a show featuring one actress (it’s all they had the budget for). Their Japanese protagonist changes looks and activities often to keep people of the world glued to their sets. In the end, it seems, what suits her best is rockin’ out.
The song “There Was A Time” itself has a breezy 70s feel, with a healthy dose of tropicalia in the mix and a smidgen of psychedelia. There is a warped cassette haze on the whole track that wouldn’t sound out of place in the heyday of chillwave a little over a decade ago (this could be due to the Toro Y Moi influence). Ginger Root’s mastermind, Cameron Lew, describes the project as “aggressive elevator soul.” “There Was A Time” is a fun listen and matches the rest of the currently available tracks from the upcoming Shinbangumi in style.
Ginger Root - “There Was A Time” (YouTube)
Shinbangumi by Ginger Root will be released on 9/13/2024 by Ghostly International. The cloud vinyl version includes a pop-out paper building!
Your Analyst Was A Placekicker For The Falcons
I woke up at 4 AM a few days ago, hungry from fasting. I decided to check out what the internet had in store for me and ended up perusing through videos on YouTube. My early morning restlessness led me to a very strange video from singer Caroline Polachek and I followed that rabbit trail to an interview with her.
As with other times I’ve seen her interviewed, Polachek is lively, engaging and articulate. One part that struck me, though, is when she talks about the magic of crowds at her shows singing in unison. She understands the positive power that a group of people singing together brings. However, when she tries to come up with an instance of people coming together to sing in a way that expresses transcendence, the best analogy a creative and intelligent woman like Polachek can come up with is… a sporting event!
This seems strange to me, since at least once a week, I go and sing with others in praises to God in church. I think it’s another oddity of living in the post-Christian West that people now have a kind of ignorance of religious traditions. Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds this to be odd or concerning. Even atheists are lamenting the disconnection from religious roots. Derek Thompson writes for The Atlantic about the decline in church attendance.
That relationship with organized religion provided many things at once: not only a connection to the divine, but also a historical narrative of identity, a set of rituals to organize the week and year, and a community of families. PRRI found that the most important feature of religion for the dwindling number of Americans who still attend services a few times a year included “experiencing religion in a community” and “instilling values in their children.”
Despite his own unbelief, Thompson recognizes the value that a church community provides. Justin Brierly is a Christian who is capturing the stories of those who realize how much our culture is indebted to Christian values in his documentary podcast The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Shocking as it may seem, prominent new atheist, Richard Dawkins, is now calling himself “a cultural Christian” (though this may be due to his xenophobia more than anything else).
Recently, author and professor Gary Shteyngart wrote a much-discussed and sometimes hilarious piece for The Atlantic about his time aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise. He was interviewed about the piece by Hanna Rosin. His experience of the fervor of the cruise aficionados sounded a familiar tone to what others have been describing about filling in the gap left by declines in religious observance.
So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.
And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to be an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.
There are, of course, more direct ways that people are trying to replace traditional religious practices with secular ones. There are churches for humanists and just plain atheists under the premise that if you just take out the supernatural stuff, church services could be kind of cool. My hunch is that trying to create something based on nothing will not work, in the long run.
I go back and forth about how I like to listen to music and on what media. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I probably won’t be settled anytime soon. Wes Davis writes for The Verge about vinyl outselling CDs for the second year in a row.
But it’s not hard to see why record sales are trouncing optical discs. CD players aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they used to be. New cars mostly don’t ship with them anymore, and neither do computers. Plus, it’s impossible to impress anyone with your collection of jewel cases. But invite either your cool audiophile friend over or their nostalgic parent, and either is probably equally likely to pore over the tattered spines of your collection of garage sale scores, special-edition records, and concert trophies — and engage with you when you say things like, “Vinyl is cool, but it’s not actually better than a CD.”
Hey, I’ve got my CDs (most of which don’t come in jewel cases anymore) in some pretty cool storage bins in my Ikea Kallax shelves. It makes for a nice-looking display. Although, I won’t be hanging those things on my wall like my vinyl.
I’m going to assume that part of the reason vinyl is outselling CDs is that increasingly, music is released to stream and download and physically on vinyl with no CD version. I frequently see this on Bandcamp. The big exception to this trend is Japan, where CD sales continue to outpace vinyl.
CJ Chilvers has a post about why he is buying more CDs now. He gives a bit of background on how this came about, which involves recordings he loves being changed on the streaming services. Since your two real choices for music on physical media are vinyl and compact discs (sorry cassette lovers), he goes into why he favors the latter.
CDs have the best sound quality. At least they have the best potential for sound quality in physical media. They don’t always use that potential. But, for the music I love most, CDs often have the same or greater dynamic range compared to vinyl, without the degradation over time that vinyl experiences (or distortion, clicks, and pops).
I tend to think the longevity of my vinyl collecting is one of the reasons I now gravitate towards CDs. As I have discovered over the last 30 years, vinyl just doesn’t age that well. For this reason, I’ve always been wary of buying used LPs. I would rather not buy an LP that’s already been worn out by someone else. I’ve also gotten to a point where I don’t want to wear out my music media myself, either. The cool factor that vinyl has comes with some serious drawbacks in terms of durability.
In all, Chilvers lists 14 reasons to underscore the rationale for his decision. The one that struck me most was that last item on the list.
It’s fun. I could eliminate all other reasons from this list and I would still be OK with buying CDs just for the fun of it. It’s why I would never discourage anyone getting into an all-vinyl hobby either. Since I’ve started buying CDs again, I’ve listened to way more music than I have since my 20s. I’ve also learned about good audio equipment: what it is, where to find it cheap, and how to restore it. I’ve found the best-mastered versions of favorite albums in bargain bins, while lower-quality “remasters” sell for 10 times as much. I’ve met new people, listened to new artists, and had new sonic experiences. What more could you ask for in a hobby?
I have only recently resigned myself to the fact that remasters are not always better. This is helpful to know when I get the urge to replace a perfectly good CD from decades ago with a fresh new remaster. Not only that, but a dozen vinyl variants of an album are starting to come across as desperate money grabs. The artist Billie Eilish talked about this in a recent interview focused on sustainability.
Eilish: We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more…
Some trends, such as saturating the market with variants of the same album, portend hitting peak vinyl, but people have been predicting that for years, so who knows?
In Paul Simpson’s review of the new album from the Houston-based Khruangbin (sorry, no link), A La Sala, he acknowledges the fact that they’ve moved past their influences into a sound all their own.
While it was easier to point out the key influences in the band’s sound on their earlier records, from Thai funk to Afro-pop to flamenco, by now it’s just easier to identify the group’s atmospheric guitars and steadily paced snare slaps as sounding like Khruangbin.
At this point, Khruangbin sounds entirely unique, and as this piece from Ryan Bradley explains, they are hard to imitate.
Music now exists primarily within the stream, which is to say passively: We turn it on, like a faucet, and out pour songs representing some mood, or emotion, or any of the other words we used before we had “vibes.” Perhaps it’s an aura, like “chill.” Or a vague, evocative mind-set, like “always Sunday.” The tap turns and out pour songs we already liked, along with burbles of what is a little new and different yet fits in beautifully. This is the arrangement in which “Khruangbin vibes” excel. Such music is extremely slippery, genrewise. (Is it psychedelic lounge dub? Desert surf rock? The sound you hear inside a lava lamp?) As such, it pairs well with a huge span of music, across genres and eras; it has a kind of algorithmic inevitability to it. But this slipperiness also means that quite a lot of the bands now producing Khruangbin-vibesy music are entirely forgettable.
The consensus on this album among critics seems to be that this is sort of a return to their roots for Khruangbin, embracing the power of a more deliberate groove. The single, “May Ninth,” which was released before the proper album dropped, is a sweetly soporific, minutes until midnight slow jam with an intimate feel.
The whole album is cohesive, so it’s easy to take a song like this as a statement of intent. Listen to the entire record and you’ll probably find yourself in agreement. You’ll also most likely feel a lot more mellow.
Asymmetrical news coverage at most of the mainstream media sites is something that I’ve almost just come to accept without any particular frustration. However, there are times when a particular topic comes up, and it’s so obvious that the coverage has been unfair and skewed, that it creates a sense that I have only been told what the media outlet wants me to hear. It feels a bit insulting that the leadership at these organizations has decided that I’m not intelligent enough to get all the facts and make judgments for myself.
Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, just came out about the institutional bias at the network. He relates the conversations he has with people when he tells them he works at NPR.
After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”
In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
I stopped listening to NPR a few years ago. I used to love the network. Even though I knew it had some biases, it still did a reasonable amount of fair reporting. That all but ended in the years following Donald Trump’s election, as Berliner relates. For example, it was a given that, almost any time I turned on the radio, I was going to hear a story about abortion. I finally thought, well, they might as well come out and say they are now an abortion advocacy organization and not a journalistic one.
I wrote about the bias in October of 2022. Listeners of NPR simply weren’t hearing certain news stories because they didn’t advance the causes that the organization was promoting. It’s abundantly clear in Berliner’s account that the organization has certain goals it wants to advance and intellectual diversity, or even bare honesty, are not among them. It’s not that their objectives are malicious, by any means, but they aim to provide news that supports a guiding narrative and deliberately exclude that which may call that narrative into question.
I first read about this story in a piece written by Ariel Shapiro for The Verge. There were a couple of things that I found interesting about Shapiro’s take. Shapiro writes of Berliner that “he did not give NPR a chance to respond (journalism 101!).” I mean, the guy has worked there for 25 years and the story is littered with anecdotes of how leadership at the organization responded (or didn’t) to his concerns when he brought them forward. He’s not some outsider who may be misunderstanding the perspective of the company that is profiled in his writing. As is documented in the article, he gave his colleagues at NPR many opportunities to address his misgivings. So, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a valid criticism.
Of the demographic findings about the makeup of NPR’s editorial staff, quoted above, Shapiro writes:
This is remarkable given that NPR has a very specific obligation to its audience (and potential audience). It is a public institution. However pitiful an amount, it does receive public funds. According to Gallup, Democrats make up 28 percent of the electorate, behind Republicans (30 percent) and Independents (41 percent). I am sure that some of you will be angry when I say this, but yes, in order to reflect America, you do need some staffers who understand how the other three-quarters of America thinks.
What’s interesting about that statement is that Shapiro knows many readers of The Verge don’t want to hear any opinions except the ones that reflect those of their own tribe. Some people will be reflexively angry about any notion of including views that aren’t in line with their preferred orthodoxy.
Probably the closest publishing platform to the one I’m using — Ghost — is Substack. Although Substack is much more popular for a few reasons, not the least of which is the low barrier-to-entry (it’s free if you are not charging for your publication), it has come under quite a bit of scrutiny lately. There was a big push to get writers to abandon the platform after The Atlantic posted an article asserting that there were many Nazi publications using the platform to spread and even monetize their ideas. A prominent tech journalist named Casey Newton, who was using Substack, led the charge to get the company to amend its content moderation policies. After not achieving complete success with his campaign, Newton took his publication, Platformer, to Ghost. Substack did, however, remove five accounts (out of the six that Newton reported) that were distributing Nazi material, in accordance with its existing policies about violent speech. Many writers opined that this was the bare minimum that Substack could do to quell the outrage that was being directed at them.
Despite the outrage, though, no one (that I’m aware of), including Newton, ever really came out with compelling evidence that there was a major content problem on Substack. The six accounts that were reported to Substack were among hundreds of thousands on the platform. Nor did the people criticizing the moves that Substack took ever really specify what concrete actions they were seeking. Others fretted that Substack making content moderation decisions was a slippery slope and that writers who weren’t associated with Nazi speech would be the next targets. So the furor eventually died down.
Now, the latest source of upset with Substack is that they recently created a separate category of followers for blogs that are not tied to subscriptions. People are worried that this will create lock-in, as a publisher can export their subscribers, but cannot export their followers. Andrea Grimes (presumably no relation to Elon Musk’s mistress and baby mama, Grimes) writes about the change, comparing the move with something Twitter would do.
But when Substack tanks — and I think its right-wing, Musk-flavored, tech-bro-brained management indicates that it will — it won’t just mean losing the audience for our 280-character late-night gummy jokes and covfefe memes. It won’t just mean losing a huge community of colleagues and readers. It will mean losing a substantial portion of the audience for content that takes a hell of a lot more effort to produce — the thoughtful rants, the reported deep-dives, the serial fiction, the smart criticism. And without access to “follower” lists and emails, there will be no way to find them again. Writers will, once again, have to rebuild from near-scratch elsewhere.
It does seem like a concern, and some major publications are reporting that their subscriber growth has dropped off since the changes were made. It’s also the latest controversy about the company to get people all riled up (a trend that started way before the Nazi scare). Given the reactive nature of many writers who are terminally online, I think it’s safe to suggest a wait-and-see approach.