"...hate is the new smart..."

I should preface this post by stating that, while I’ve definitely heard of him, I’ve never listened to Ryan Adams before – er, to his music. From what I’ve gathered, the oft-maligned Adams is oft-ridiculed as a poster child of the emo scene, in all its glory and failings. Anyway, he gets a +1 in my book after my reading a post of his on Stereogum.

It seems Adams wrote on some board about his plans for the rest of the year – these included, count ‘em, three separate album projects (one of which is to be a double-LP). Adams, with no less than eight full-length albums to his credit in the past six years, was promptly slammed by the punters on Stereogum as being more prolific than meaningful – too much doily, not enough tea. With true emo ferocity, Adams retaliated:

… if its not your scene then cool. but dont go doggin on somebody cause they want to fucking pick up a pen and tell a story. if these people are so eductaed about the recording process and how records should be, then may i ask, "Where is your record". i imagine there isnt one and if there were to be, they would have to work on it until its perfect. till its 11 songs and they are all essential. so thats my 2 cents. back to the studio. i hope people find their own way and learn to stop hating on everything. hate is the new smart it seems, and the new "smart" is pretty stupid.

He hits here on an all too sad and common trend these days: ever more hip hipsters and knowledgeable chin-strokers striking out against anything and everything because they’re too cool and the subject is clearly not cool enough. (The forever-slung tag of death that is “sell-out” also figures into this phenomenon, but that’s another matter.) Surely, this tendency has been around since the days of Igadan, the first preeminent cave art critic, but it’s still as vexing as ever. The idle and under-talented trashing the prodigious and brave. Call Adams what you like, but a liar he ain’t.

Now back to the hating: Pirates of the Caribbean. People are loving this film?! Pray tell, were you once a cannibal until a ship with a mouse on the side plucked you from your digs of Eden and unto the pages of Rotten Tomatoes where you were forced for 18 hours a day to post positive reviews? I consider myself to be at least slightly mentally capable, but I have to admit, I didn’t understand one frame of this pic…and neither did a number of other people I’ve spoken with. What’s so incredibly rude about this effort is that I honestly believe the studio intentionally muddled the story and characters in order to stun the viewer into some sort of catatonic state, thereby inhibiting higher thought. And America’s buying it – lapping it up like a teacup yorkie with pink socks on. Amazing.

Thom Yorke’s new album is, interestingly enough, an example opposite to the hating described by Adams above. Here you have an artist elevated to demigod status who can do no wrong. “The Eraser”, imo, is pretty damn boring. Reminds me of Billy Corgan’s solo effort from last year, minus the why-haven’t-I-slit-my-wrists-yet-ness of it all. And whereas producer Nigel Godrich hit Zero 7's effort over the Green Monster, his contribution here is more like a bunt that goes foul, what with quirky minimal techno devoid of any heart. Alas, take a listen for yourself, but I was expecting at least one track to be Bopping for Bonzos-worthy, and that just isn’t the case. I don’t hear any of the interesting songwriting found in Radiohead’s recently-premiered works. Oh well.


More refreshingly, I dove into a fantastic novel over the weekend: Peter Carey’s “True History of the Kelly Gang”. Ned Kelly was the real-life Irish outlaw who terrorized Australia’s outback in the 1880s, eventually evading the British authorities for two years and becoming a folk hero to generations of Aussies, and a wider symbol of the anti-authority spirit. The book is a fictionalized memoir written in the first-person, chronicling Kelly’s life – from childhood to hanging. The voice is of the period’s vernacular and region’s dialect, and while it could have easily made for a cumbersome reading experience, the words flow gently with a rhythm that is oddly soothing, given the fast-paced, roughshod action of the stories. Not since Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” have I found myself so enamored with the wild frontier. Yeehaw!