From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V3 #213 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Wednesday, July 23 2003 Volume 03 : Number 213 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' ["G. Andrew Hamlin" ] Re: [loud-fans] this past weekend...the long version [Cardinal007 ] Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' [dmw ] [loud-fans] guided by that loser liz, no doubt (ns) [dana-boy@juno.com] Re: [loud-fans] guided by that loser liz, no doubt (ns) [Jeffrey with 2 F] Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' [Dan Sallitt ] Re: [loud-fans] Plugz away/labels [OptionsR@aol.com] Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 15:39:00 -0700 (PDT) From: "G. Andrew Hamlin" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' > As to both Bowie and Iggy, though, have either of them made any music anyone's taken seriously in the last 20 years??? Well, I put HEATHEN on my 2002 Top Ten list. On the Pazz & Jop list, at least, it placed at 109 with 109 votes, if I'm reading that right. Agreeing with me (and granted, I don't know most of these people): A.D. Amorosi, Kenny Berkowitz, Tony Engelhart, Dave Gil de Rubio, Nick Marino, Ken Micallef, George Petros, Parke Puterbaugh, Ken Scrudato, and Annie Zaleski. I didn't pay much attention to Bowie from LET'S DANCE up to EARTHLING, it's true. glenn's review of OUTSIDE makes interesting reading, though: http://furia.com/twas/twas0039.html#entry1 Moving on to Iggy...rats, PARTY doesn't make the cut-off. John Strausbaugh is wild about 1997's KING BISCUIT FLOWER HOUR set, though. And we all know that John Strausbaugh is never wrong. What can I say, I dug BRICK BY BRICK. Still enjoy "Candy" at karaoke. Oh, and "Cold Metal" from INSTINCT. No karaoke on that one though. And of course, he *is* back with the Stooges... > Is anyone here willing to tackle Liz's adoration of Keith Richards and what that may mean? I'm not even going to touch that one beyond saying that there's two schools of rock and roll, and the one in which Keith Richards stands for everything rock means is the one the needs to be burned to the ground. Only two schools of rock and roll? All I'll say for now is, Patti Smith has that famous poster where she's wearing a Keith t-shirt, and you can't tell the difference between the two. I don't see people lining up to tackle her. But the last ten days have been strange days indeed. So long as we're nearly on the subject, I liked Stewart's short story a lot. Not sure if the "Black Babies" typo lies with the author. I'm also not aware of any other short stories on the subject of mixes, actually. Anyone wants to mention a few, I'm game. While I'm waiting another three months for LINER NOTES to come out, Andy It's a dark day in Washington sometime in the not-so-distant future. A deadly plague has attacked all the men on earth but spared the women, if you call being thrown into a post-apocalyptic nightmare full of psycho biker chicks and gun-toting Republican housewives being "spared." Only one man has survived, a 20-something slacker named Yorick Brown. On this dark day, disguised as a woman to keep himself from being torn to bits by rabid Amazons and sex-starved survivors, he's joined a crowd of his sisters in front of the Washington Monument, which has become a de facto shrine to America's lost brothers, sons and husbands. As Yorick sits down to pay his respects to his own loved ones, the woman next to him confesses that she's not thinking about the men she knew and lost; she's thinking about Mick Jagger. The two sit together in shock and reverently trade off names of the recently departed: Tom Waits, Neil Young, David Bowie, Bono, Bob Dylan, Radiohead -- the scene, which appears in Book 4 of the bestselling comic series "Y: The Last Man," is the best argument for the preeminence of men in rock 'n' roll since the Lilith Fair. - --Sheerly Avni, from a review of the comic Y: THE LAST MAN, at http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/07/21/yorick/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 16:51:14 -0700 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: [loud-fans] Mountain State Memories Jen: >>Where in West-by-God? I've lived in Huntington for 10 years now. Eastern Panhandle. Little town (if I may state the obvious) called Keyser, right there on the Potomac and almost in Maryland. I have fond memories of Huntington... that's where I kicked *everybody's* ass at the State Social Studies Fair. Well, everyone in the state who was my age and did a Social Studies project that year, anyhow. Yes, all of them were forced to bow down before What Factors Influence Political Party Choice... and tremble. Anyhow... now I've really gotta get those Let's Active reissues. And I might as well pick up the reissue of Verlaine's Flashlight while I'm at CCM. I'm guessing it'll have a page and a half of liner notes and sonic improvements to the tune of exactly jack SQUAT to differentiate itself from my IRS edition, but I guess I can't stop myself from giving money to musicians named Miller. (Those Rhino Television reissues are gonna be rather nice, though...) - -Rex, who totally missed the fact that Iggy even did another album after that weird quiet one... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 18:42:35 -0500 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' Quoting Dan Sallitt : > I actually don't know if gender issues are the central ones here, but I > do think that rock 'n' roll culture is a little too sensitive to the > sell-out concept, that it requires a little too much unity of persona > and music, that it takes too many circumstantial data into account when > evaluating the actual work. I would agree...although I was saying to Steve the other day, if there *is* such a thing as "selling out," Liz Phair's hiring of the Matrix (and whatever image consultants were involved) is the textbook case - not a problem saying that, since she's pretty much said, yeah, she's doing everything she can to get a hit record. Quoting dmw : > i'm really really REALLY trying to stay out of this. but come on: bowie > has been through roughly a zillion chameleon changes, and if "let's > dance" > and "heathen" weren't at least as reprehensible on whatever scale is > being > used as phair's working w/ an established production team, than either > something is wrong with the scale, or no one is really being sinned > against here. Actually, one thing I was thinking of when Bowie came up was that it's hard to accuse him of prefabbing an image...since he's made a career of changing his image every other day. _Let's Dance_ had a couple of good songs on it, and is far better imo than the albums that follow it until _Outside_. And _Heathen_, I like a lot. > something else i tried to restrain myself from saying: y'know, when > james > osterberg, who's pushing 60 -- almost the same age as bowie, in fact -- > sings songs on recent records about boffing 17-year olds, it seems like > people say things like "yeah, that's a little gross, but, you know, it's > iggy," without working themselves into outraged moral fervors. So you're saying people actually listened to that last Iggy album? I don't know what "people" have said, but I'm pretty sure at some point or another I've stated that adult rockers singing about teenagers makes me feel a little icky. > some of us see a double-standard being applied here, and some of us > don't, > and i'm not sure discussing it is very productive at this point. At this point, I think we should back up a bit and re-examine what the discussion began about: Gina Arnold wrote an article claiming, essentially, that the real reason male rock critics dislike the Phair album is that they can't handle real, adult women being themselves: that is, in a word, sexism. For this to be true, those critics would have to (a) dislike, for similar reasons, most other albums by women being real, adult women (Kristin Hersh, Amy Rigby, just to name the first two that leap to mind), and (b) like albums by either male artists or fake, non-adult women that sound like Phair's album. In other words, the problem with Arnold's argument is that she discounts utterly the possibility that the male critics she criticizes simply think the music is lame, the lyrics dumbed down, and (sticking point) the image contrived, false, and ill-fitting. The reason the image is relevant in the first place is that the kind of music Phair's attempting is at least fifty percent image in the first place. Or to put it another way: part of the way Phair is attempting to increase her record sales is by adopting a facsimile of a currently successful image-type. Insofar as that image comes in a package deal with the musical production style, it's a legit target of criticism. It's hard to say whether critics would dun a male artist who attempted something similar...because (comments about 'N Sync aside) male popular artists don't use sexuality in the same way female popular artists do. Is that sexist? Probably it is...but as I said earlier, it makes my head spin in confusing circles when critics who criticize the phoniness and second-handness of the new Phair's version of sexiness get criticized as sexist...when to me, the whole image *depends upon* sexist preconceptions of women in order to work in the first place. Early Phair used sexuality - including those infamous photos we were discussing - clearly as a critique of certain received notions of women's sexuality, including the (then more prevalent) reaction against sexiness that derived from late-seventies/early-eighties Dworkinite feminism. The New Phair seems to have given up that meta-critique, and instead embraced w/o questioning the whole conflicted arena of female-body-image-as-object that her earlier work neither accepted nor rejected as a whole, which it instead *thought through* and worked with, used as raw material. Quoting Aaron Milenski : > Right on. Trouser Press once said that "Bowie jumps on bandwagons so > quickly it looks like he started them," which pretty much sums up how > seriously you can take his "artcstic integrity." This is why, re Doug's comments, the notion of "selling out" is problematic: Bowie clearly and openly manipulated his image from the very start in such a way that looking for the "authentic" Bowie, the one that could authorize his "artistic integrity," was a ridiculous notion. He was a put-on from the start. But he and the glam movement that largely followed him were among the earlier questioners of the whole notion of "authenticity" (upon which the notion of "selling out" rather depends). But that *doesn't* mean that some particular image an artist takes up might not just plain suck - or be stupid, ill-fitting, etc. Or - to reiterate what should again be the main point - be an unfortunately apt partner to lame-ass music. I don't buy this position entirely (the "no such thing as authenticity" school of postmodernism), because in fact I'm pretty sure that one of Phair's main appeals *was* the sense that she was One Of Us, at least to the core of her audience, both male and female. Even if that itself was an image, it was a well chosen and well played one: dammit, I've known *lots* of people who came across very much like Phair used to - except they lacked her talent. Ultimately I think the sexual aspect of Phair's imagemaking is a bit of a red herring. Let's put it this way: what if instead of the image and music she did choose, she suddenly showed up posing next to her Chrysler Minivan, dressed like Mrs. Suburban Republican, and put out an album that sounded exactly like Celine Dion (or some other archetype of bland, suburban, middle-aged, middle-classness)? I'm pretty sure the record would be just as roundly condemned by the same critics condemning it now, and I don't think Gina Arnold would be defending it. And yet, Mrs. Suburban Republican is as valid an image for a woman to adopt as any other, isn't it? (That is, any woman has the right to adopt any image she wants.) Further: I strongly suspect that people would imagine Phair was either putting us on, or if she truly meant it, how sad to see her lose everything that made her distinctive... The image is different, but in a way, that's about how I feel about the album that actually does exist. ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: As long as I don't sleep, he decided, I won't shave. :: That must mean...as soon as I fall asleep, I'll start shaving! :: --Thomas Pynchon, _Vineland_ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:36:17 -0400 (EDT) From: dmw Subject: Re: [loud-fans] this past weekend...the long version On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Cardinal007 wrote: > > From: dmw > > I hate to be the one who has to yank credit away from John Sharples, but the > "sharples" song in the Crowd Scene set ["New Year's Day" is, I believe, the > title] was actually penned by Mr. Davies specifically for Sharples' solo > album, which is anxiously awaited. That jelps account for why it fit. ah ha. we're hoping for another crowd scene record too, grahame. > And I must respectfully disagree -- King Kilowatt weren't groovy, powerful that's much more in line with my own assessment, and i'm sorry. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:53:53 -0400 From: Cardinal007 Subject: Re: [loud-fans] this past weekend...the long version > From: Roger Winston > BTW, > I think the dude with the little mic was Robert Christgau. You, sir, are the funniest man alive! ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 21:04:55 -0400 From: Cardinal007 Subject: Re: [loud-fans] this past weekend...the long version > From: dmw >> And I must respectfully disagree -- King Kilowatt weren't groovy, powerful > > that's much more in line with my own assessment, and i'm sorry. In my typical heavy-handed way, i came off sounding nastier than intended. the indoor, garage segment of the evening was a wildly uneven mix of styles and line-ups, from acoustic/karaoke acoustic to balls-out rock. the quick [and smooth] change-overs between acts left no room for soundchecks, nor for any sonic movement by the house soundman. i was venting frustration that vocals that were being punched out with passion ended up lost behind the guitars. A sin i spent about a decade recommitting every time i climbed on a stage. i guess i'm a rock and roll John McCain; having spent time with my hand in the cookie jar [Keating S&L days / early punky, new-wavey days], i am now a humourless reformer. Someone should shoot me. Wait; i'll probably get around to that ..... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 21:28:04 -0400 (EDT) From: Aaron Mandel Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, dmw wrote: > something else i tried to restrain myself from saying: y'know, when > james osterberg, who's pushing 60 -- almost the same age as bowie, in > fact -- sings songs on recent records about boffing 17-year olds, it > seems like people say things like "yeah, that's a little gross, but, you > know, it's iggy," without working themselves into outraged moral > fervors. Moral fervor? As in, people are saying that "Rock Me" is sinful or perverted and that THAT is what's wrong with the album? News to me. Not everyone who dislikes the new Liz Phair album -- not even everyone who dismisses it with one-liners on the internet, nor everyone who attacks her personally because they don't like what they see of her intentions -- is responsible for the statements made by other people so situated. Just because there's a critical consensus on the "thumbs up vs. thumbs down" aspect of the record doesn't mean that weird or puritanical attitudes expressed openly by a small number of reviewers are implicit in a random loudfan saying, "Man... this kind of sucks." (Me, I would have liked that song a lot better if she'd sounded like she meant it. Or like she didn't mean it and her not meaning it was the point of the song.) Been thinking about this some, and the best analogies I can come up with for Liz Phair's career are Beck, Guided By Voices, and No Doubt, all for different reasons. - - Beck. Indie poster child. Accused of getting by on his looks. Big lunge toward mainstream radio after a few albums. Changes styles a lot but, with the possible exception of Midnite Vultures, generally with what seems to be sincere intent. - - Guided By Voices. Announced that not only were they going to try to make a big pop album, but that that was what they'd really wanted to do when they'd made the epochal lo-fi albums people loved them for. Opinions on the "big pop" albums seemed mostly split between "this sucks" and "this isn't really that different from the old stuff" but in any case, the SoundScan numbers didn't change much. - - No Doubt. Grew out of a somewhat insular scene, but (like Phair) got big quickly enough that it was never clear just how much they owed to, in this case, the ska kids that gave them a boost on the way up. Long time between albums. Most recent album wasn't *that* different from what came before but showed that given the choice between their old distinctiveness and the chance at radio success, they'd take the latter. Lead singer is almost exactly Liz Phair's age and seems inclined to sex it up. I'm not going to claim these comparisons prove anything in particular, but they feel more apropos to me than the Bowie one. I do think that critical groupthink may have something to do with the reception the album got -- yeah, I think the record's mostly awful, but since when do I expect this many critics to agree with me? Phair took a big risk (I suspect we can all agree on that) and when artists take risks, critics that grew up in the Rolling Stone "brilliant and innovative! three stars" school of moderation may feel like for once it's safe to express an extreme opinion. In this, at least, Pitchfork has the alibi that they *regularly* pan stuff - -- their 0.0 for LIZ PHAIR wasn't exactly unprecedented. http://pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/ s/sonic-youth/nyc-ghosts-and-flowers.shtml f/flaming-lips/zaireeka.shtml b/bachman-turner-overdrive/remastered-hits.shtml f/frusciante_john/smile-from-the-streets.shtml l/lopez_francisco/untitled-104.shtml k/kiss/peter-criss.shtml And some other low ones: n/non/receive-the-flame.shtml p/promise-ring/electric-pink.shtml k/kelley-deal-6000/boom-boom-boom.shtml a/andrew-wk/i-get-wet.shtml Easy targets, most of them, but not motivated by sexism or anything similarly virulent that I can see. Why am I always the one defending Pitchfork? I guess I like their habit of exposing their own subjectivity, and if that means occasional exposure to Dominique Leone's massive pretension, I can live with that. a ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 21:39:44 -0400 (EDT) From: dmw Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Aaron Mandel wrote: > On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, dmw wrote: > > Moral fervor? As in, people are saying that "Rock Me" is sinful or > perverted and that THAT is what's wrong with the album? News to me. yes. (that and the alleged comment clearly designed to increase her market share with 14 year old boys). sorry, i'm conflating criticisms i've heard hear with criticisms i've heard elsewhere, most likely. > > Not everyone who dislikes the new Liz Phair album -- not even everyone who [...] > responsible for the statements made by other people so situated. Just i hope there's no one who thinks i'm suggesting that. or that i'm suggesting that everyone isn't entitled to his/her own opinion. i'll admit a bias towards informed opinion, but i'll also freely admit there are plenty of things i'm sure enough of my reaction to that i feel no need to challenge my assumptions with actual exposure. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 21:44:07 -0400 From: dana-boy@juno.com Subject: [loud-fans] guided by that loser liz, no doubt (ns) Been thinking about this some, and the best analogies I can come up with for Liz Phair's career are Beck, Guided By Voices, and No Doubt, all for different reasons. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I was thinking today that I might go with Lou Reed, and here's why. Early, unheard work where artist learns the ropes and plays with ideas that will pop up later. Followed by groundbreaking release (in Lou's case, releases) where monotone vocals + minimal guitar + experimentation w/song form + unique subject matter = major critic fave and redefinition of the concept of a rock singer/songwriter. Followed by prolonged efforts to deal with that legacy, including the embracing of inappropriate production, attempts to shock the marketplace, marital bliss, marital stress, etc. Lou slept with trannies; Liz sleeps with marines, but it's all relative. It's not a perfect fit at all, but if you close your eyes and squint, I think there's something there. Also, the "fuck you if you don't like what I'm doing which is brilliant genius, by the way" attitude, even when making horrible missteps, fits them both. - --dana ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 21:25:37 -0500 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: [loud-fans] guided by that loser liz, no doubt (ns) Quoting dana-boy@juno.com: > Been thinking about this some, and the best analogies I can come up with > for Liz Phair's career are Beck, Guided By Voices, and No Doubt, all for > different reasons. > >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> > I was thinking today that I might go with Lou Reed, and here's why. > Early, unheard work where artist learns the ropes and plays with ideas > that will pop up later. Followed by groundbreaking release (in Lou's > case, releases) where monotone vocals + minimal guitar + experimentation > w/song form + unique subject matter = major critic fave and redefinition > of the concept of a rock singer/songwriter. Followed by prolonged > efforts to deal with that legacy, including the embracing of > inappropriate production, attempts to shock the marketplace, marital > bliss, marital stress, etc. Lou slept with trannies; Liz sleeps with > marines, but it's all relative. Veddy eentehrestink...and not even stupid (*extremely* dated reference there). And I'm remembering the complete shitstorm that was flung Reed's way when he did those scooter commercials in the eighties... I'm just hoping Phair's career doesn't go into an endless round of heroin addiction and making worse albums than the Alan Parsons Project based on Edgar Allan Poe stories. Then again, if she played with Robert Quine that'd be cool. Jeff Ceci n'est pas une .sig ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 22:50:41 -0400 From: Dan Sallitt Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' > I would agree...although I was saying to Steve the other day, if there *is* > such a thing as "selling out," Liz Phair's hiring of the Matrix (and > whatever image consultants were involved) is the textbook case - not a > problem saying that, since she's pretty much said, yeah, she's doing > everything she can to get a hit record. As of yesterday I've read a few of the interviews. Sometimes she says, "I want to be played on the radio," "I need money," etc. More often she says things like "This is what I always wanted my music to sound like," "This is where I am right now musically," and so on. Why cite the earlier group of comments as evidence when that forces you to poo-poo the latter group? Better in my opinion not to put too much credence in anything an artist says about his or her work, even when he or she seems sincere. > The reason the image is relevant in the first place is that the kind of > music Phair's attempting is at least fifty percent image in the first place. If she's really trying to get the Britney-Christina crowd, boy did she mess up big time. Even the four Matrix songs are a bit peculiar in that context, and the rest of the songs bear no resemblance to anything but earlier Liz songs. > Early Phair used sexuality - including those infamous photos we were > discussing - clearly as a critique of certain received notions of women's > sexuality, including the (then more prevalent) reaction against sexiness > that derived from late-seventies/early-eighties Dworkinite feminism. It's truly not that clear to me. All along it's seemed to me that she has an almost child-like desire to dress up in Mommy's high heels and lipstick and make sexy poses. I guess if one wants to consider this tendency a package deal with the music, one can, but I haven't found that the most productive approach to her work. - Dan ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 23:47:35 EDT From: OptionsR@aol.com Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Plugz away/labels In a message dated 7/22/03 9:30:56 AM, jmmallon@joescafe.com writes of The Plugz: << All I know of them is their work on the REPO MAN soundtrack, from which I'd agree wholeheartedly. >> One of the tunes on the "Repo Man" soundtrack, "El Clavo Y La Cruz", also appears on their second album, "Better Luck". I'm fortunate to have found a CD of it (albeit of dubious legal origin and obviously mastered from vinyl, but it adds two bonus tracks from a single), and I've been playing it as much as, if not more than, anything else I've picked up this year. Really, both their albums should be reissued by someone somewhere soon. Actually, I think Restless reissued it at one point, but Loudfans are the last people I need to remind of the disappearance of large parts of the Enigma/Restless catalog. It seems to me that Slash (the label, not the ex-GnR cartoon character) put out a whole mess of great records from bands in the early Eighties: The Plugz, Los Lobos, X, The Dream Syndicate, The Blasters, The Flesh Eaters, The Gun Club, The Misfits... aaah, memories. Every now and then a label will be on enough of a hot streak that I'll be inclined to at least want to hear a band/artist I'm unfamiliar with just because they're signed to that label. It happened with me for Sub Pop, Earache, Blast First, Matador, a few others - but it doesn't seem to happen much these days. I sort of miss those times. Other than Bloodshot and Southern Lord, I can't think of any current reliable purveyors of The Kind Of Crap I Want to Hear (jeez, even a noisenik like myself will acknowledge that over half of what Relapse puts out is horrid, not to mention that I have a clearer understanding as to why Man's Ruin went under). Anyone else find themselves noticing the same thing? Perhaps it's due to the economy of the biz, with labels unfortunately having to concentrate on artists that actually sell in quantity. So, who delivers these days that I may not be thinking of? Stories and words, they're here and gone, Mike Bollman ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 00:18:35 -0500 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Phair to Middlin' Quoting Dan Sallitt : > > I would agree...although I was saying to Steve the other day, if there > *is* > > such a thing as "selling out," Liz Phair's hiring of the Matrix (and > > whatever image consultants were involved) is the textbook case - not a > > problem saying that, since she's pretty much said, yeah, she's doing > > everything she can to get a hit record. > > As of yesterday I've read a few of the interviews. Sometimes she says, > "I want to be played on the radio," "I need money," etc. More often she > says things like "This is what I always wanted my music to sound like," > "This is where I am right now musically," and so on. Why cite the > earlier group of comments as evidence when that forces you to poo-poo > the latter group? Better in my opinion not to put too much credence in > anything an artist says about his or her work, even when he or she seems > sincere. In which case the very presence of The Matrix still defines that textbook case, Phair's comments regardless. > If she's really trying to get the Britney-Christina crowd, boy did she > mess up big time. Even the four Matrix songs are a bit peculiar in that > context, and the rest of the songs bear no resemblance to anything but > earlier Liz songs. So, uh, a failed commercial bid isn't a commercial bid at all? > > Early Phair used sexuality - including those infamous photos we were > > discussing - clearly as a critique of certain received notions of > women's > > sexuality, including the (then more prevalent) reaction against > sexiness > > that derived from late-seventies/early-eighties Dworkinite feminism. > > It's truly not that clear to me. All along it's seemed to me that she > has an almost child-like desire to dress up in Mommy's high heels and > lipstick and make sexy poses. I guess if one wants to consider this > tendency a package deal with the music, one can, but I haven't found > that the most productive approach to her work. - Dan Hoo-boy, you'd better not let Gina Arnold read those first two sentences, that's all I've got to say... As for the third: the "package deal" referred to the necessity of image in considering her current, wannabe popstar mode - not for all of her music. It's perfectly possible for indie rockers to have no image at all (although not to the extent of electronic artists). But if you're saying, less literally, that Phair's approach to sexuality (visually and otherwise) has always seemed "an almost child-like desire to dress up" etc., and that ignoring that is more productive to you than paying attention to it...well, okay - but you'd definitely be in a minority. Nearly every review of _Exile_ (and most of _Whip-Smart_) mentions sexuality in some context, whether praising or condemning the records. ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: crumple zones:::harmful or fatal if swallowed:::small-craft warning :: ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 23:42:58 -0700 From: "me" Subject: Re: [loud-fans] Hey Bay Area folks... hey there - i'll be around the bay area fri. and sat. night. aimee mann is playing in saratoga on sunday night (probably too far from you) i have somethign sat. until about 7 in the east bay, but other than that, i'll be around. i don't know of anything going on, but then again, i'm a hermitess, so i wouldn't. :) anyone up for dinner maybe friday or late-ish (8 or so) saturday? brianna - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Elizabeth Brion" To: Sent: Friday, July 18, 2003 2:57 PM Subject: [loud-fans] Hey Bay Area folks... > Anyone going to see the Glenn Tilbrook/Jill Sobule/John Doe show at > Cafe du Nord? My hubby has a 5-day conducting workshop in Santa Cruz > next week, and because of seasonal hotel rates we'll be spending at > least the weekend at his dad's place in Palo Alto (sure, it's a 60-mile > commute each way to Santa Cruz... how is THAT not excellent?). He'll > probably have schmoozing activities going on in the evenings, and I've > learned the hard way that hanging out with groups of conductors is > really, truly not fun AT ALL, so I'm looking for ways to amuse myself > in the general region. > > That concert seemed to be my best bet according to Pollstar, but I'm > open to other suggestions (we'll be somewhere in the general region > Jul. 24-30, but possibly only in places you could loosely define as the > Bay Area on Friday & Saturday nights, depending) (Wow, that was > impressively noncommittal.). > > Thanks! ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V3 #213 *******************************