Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band - Outer South

(listen to it on NPR’s “Exclusive First Listen”)

I keep catching myself wanting to dislike the Dylan/Beatles/Allman Brothers mishmash of this album, but I can’t, it’s such a great sprawling piece of positivity.

I love the Austin City Limits songwriters-in-the-round episode with Oberst and M. Wood (is that is name?) and a couple others - the guy from My Morning Jacket, I think.  I only watch it in my mind, though - for some reason I recorded over my VHS of it.  I think I succumbed to the same impulse to dislike - where does that come from?

Generally speaking, this kind of classic rock reconstruction strikes me as like the Annie’s brand of organic macaroni and cheese you can buy these days in the grocery store.  Delicious, but cognitively dissonant.  Don’t they risk enshrining rock and roll in the same kind of cultural straightjacket jazz occupies in mainstream culture?

In some respect, of course, the idea that Wynton Marsalis has ruined jazz is a myth.  Norah Jones, for example, in her role as the Shania Twain of jazz, clearly shows that people are still unbound by proscriptive jazz doctrines, and there are plenty of jazz innovators in between segments on All Things Considered - although even jazz too freaky for ATC is feeling rather cemented in place.  Really, though, the progress of pieces of culture from fringe to mainstream to relic is not undeniably a bad thing, much less any one person’s fault.

But if a given collection of ideas is like a person, every time a band does something because that’s the way the Rolling Stones would’ve done it is one more step towards rock and roll’s retirement.

This album and Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle are a couple of great-sounding new albums coming out of Texas. This one was recorded at some kind of awesome pleasure palace near El Paso - Sonic Ranch Studios.  Check out their “adobe studio”.  That’s just one of five studios and three houses on the site.  It’s kind of ridiculous.  I guess the results speak for themselves.  It ain’t Blind Willie Johnson!

Metric - Fantasies

Over at Rolling Stone, the singer of Metric talks about how one of their songs almost ended up just like a «shudder» Shania Twain song.  In the video, they entertainingly demonstrate exactly what they mean.

But how far from Shania Twain is this music, really?  The thing that characterizes Twain’s music is its second order genesis - that is, she is strongly aware not of the core reality of the music, but of the cultural environment which the music creates and inhabits.  Essentially, she creates it ironically.

My impression is that Metric’s creative process is also rather secondly ordered.  Their cultural awareness itself demonstrates something like a lack of integrity.  The danger in sounding like Shania is associating yourself with her and her audience, and Metric’s fans, I would guess, largely view that association with contempt.  Such ill-considered contempt for other groups is generally accompanied by a blindness to the content of one’s own perceptions.  People rather base their opinions on the social effects of holding them.  In that sense, both the creation and the reception of Metric’s music seem very likely to be second order phenomena.

I know some Shania Twain fans, and I can say that they have no self-awareness whatsoever about their enjoyment of the music.