As all the hubub over the HPV vaccination has demonstrated, the Christian right has a big time Lolita obsession. I wasn't thinking about that per se when I pitched this piece about the right wing shit storm over the Girl Scouts of the USA, but I'd say that the article has perfect timing in that regard. After all, the Girl Scouts hysteria comes from the same place as the hysteria over the vaccination: lurid right wing imaginations applied to young girls and sex. It's all very icky, but I think an important factor in understanding the Christian right worldview. So check out my article "The Girl Scouts Allegedly Radical Feminist Lesbain Agenda". Spoiler alert: Girl Scouts do not have a radical lesbian feminist agenda, but they are pretty pro-girl, so I can see why you'd make that mistake.
Also, it's time for a Panda Party! Can I get a woo woo? Just pop in, check out the theme, and start playing tunes (or listen to others play tunes, which is what about 2/3 of people prefer to do). Pandas. They party. At the Panda Party.
Panda Party! Play music! Hourly themes! Good times on a Friday! If you haven't joined the fun, you don't know what you're missing. So come join the Panda Party. If you don't know what Turntable is, here's an excellent FAQ.
I have an unbelievable time such of a website called Retronaut. They just collect photos and videos of historically interesting stuff and commentary on it. Totally fucking addictive. This picture is from a collection they got from a guy who saw Iggy and the Stooges play a high school in 1970.
Seriously, that must have been mind-blowing. I'm so jealous. I love the variety of expressions on kids' faces. Some are like, "WTF" and some are like, "I'm so cool that I totally am not surprised by this."
The site has a lot more than that. There's WWII stuff, classic bits of New York living, and a little bit of physics. When the current ugliness and meanness of our political climate gets me down, I find that going to this site functions as a great reminder that people can actually be pretty awesome.
We try also to capture some of that awesomeness in the Panda Party, so hop on over!
I think I ate something that disagrees with me, and it's fucking up my ability to come up with coherent blog posts. Will resume in the morning. In the meantime, Wild Flag will eat your babies and you will thank them:
It's both Friday and my birthday, so a perfect time for a Panda Party! Panda Party is every Friday on Turntable, and it's just an opportunity for Pandagonians (and whoever drops by) to hang out, play and listen to some tunes while you work, and knock out a Friday in style. We have hourly themes that are described in the Room Info, and this week, I hope to use one of those for a fun challenge.
So here's Cibo Matto playing the most aggressive birthday song ever:
Come join us for Panda Party! Bring your virtual cake and a headful of musical goodies.
Matt Y. and Atrios both weighed on the concept of "guilty pleasures", basically denouncing the concept by focusing on the notion that one should feel guilty about liking something. I'm a little less hostile to the phrase, for a couple of reasons. One is that I think arguments about it veer a little far off into the irritating modern tendency to argue that anything non-quantifiable is so far out of reach that you can't actually render a judgment on it. This argument gets trotted out a lot by people who have been exposed to someone mocking as crappy something they like, and rather than thinking about it, sucking it up, or leveling an interesting defense of their taste---aka, the grown-up options---they try to derail by claiming that since taste is subjective, it's functionally meaningless and no judgments can be rendered at all. This is irritating because it's an argument that tends to be offered in bad faith, since the people making it probably do make judgments all the time, just about other people's taste. But it's also irritating because, as big a fan of empiricism as I am, I think there's limits to it and that doesn't mean that we should simply shut down entire avenues of thought and discourse because you can't "prove" something beyond the shadow of a doubt. What makes discourse about art fun, as long as you follow the rules of being a grown-up about it, is that it's beyond absolute proofs. And unlike with discourse about god and spirituality, art is real, and so you escape the problem of making it up as you go along.
The other reason is that the phrase "guilty pleasures" can tell you a lot about how the concept of "good taste" is created, how diverse views are about what constitutes good taste, what the flaws are in those views, and therefore how to improve the concept of "good taste". While Atrios and Matt both rejected the concept of "guilty pleasures", they both immediately knew what they would consider a guilty pleasure. I find myself reluctant to abandon a concept that has such immediate meaning to people, instead preferring to analyze what it says about their personal models of good taste.
So, for instance, Matt's examples of guilty pleasures---even as he rejected the concept---were Lily Allen and Katy Perry. In other words, he went straight for young, cute, female pop singers. He saw the connection between the two as obvious because they have these things in common. But it would never occur to me to group those two together, and not just because I like Lily Allen and loathe Katy Perry. It's because Lily Allen writes her own material, can actually sing with verve and style, has a lot of wit to her lyrics, and because she doesn't seem to feel the need to act in a submissive, unthreatening style to be considered sexy. Now, I'm not saying Matt is wrong to group one way or that I'm wrong. I think it's more interesting than that; how we group these artists tells you a lot about the kind of models we're exposed to in defining good taste. Probably, for one, I just spend a lot more time in virtual spaces where genre-busting is considered vital artistic work, which would make Allen more interesting for being self-directed rather than less interesting for being pop. Also, I have an obsession with bold, brassy female musicians, and that model is in play when regarding pop artists like Allen or Perry (Allen definitely fits it and Perry definitely does not). But, at the end of the day, I'd probably not group them together just because when you put on a Lily Allen song, there's just more there there. You could replace Perry with someone who looked like her, tweak her voice in the studio, and most people wouldn't notice the difference.
Atrios's definition of guilty pleasures, on the other hand, was defined along the lines of how challenging something is, which he again denounced as being just unfair to what people out there really need in terms of entertainment. I agree whole-heartedly with him that there's a lot of people who use "complexity" as a measure of quality. Ironically, I would say these people are generally lazy people who, at best, want a nice, simple rule to guide what is quality and what isn't so that they don't have to develop their aesthetic muscles. The most obvious example is people who say things like, "Turn of the TV and pick up a book," even though that could very well mean turning off "Mad Men" and picking up some mindless, poorly written airport novel. I particularly love the people who wring their hands about TV being "passive", as if sitting there reading a novel isn't also passively absorbing someone else's story-telling. "But, but, but!" I can hear you say, and you're right. When you read a book, you're often thinking in depth about themes and character, and it's not passive at all. TV can be watched this way, too, and often is---thus the idea of the watercooler show. And books can be read mindlessly by people who get nothing out of them but a way to pass the time.
But one thing I've learned from the concept of "guilty pleasures" is that a lot of people's rules of what constitutes good taste are, sometimes unconsciously, built along class, race, and gender prejudices and often other arguments about good v. bad taste are employed to cover up what's going on there. I think it was interesting, for instance, that Matt picked female artists as his guilty pleasures while denouncing the concept, and suspect that he experiences, as a man, a lot of subtle discouragement against taking women as seriously as men, and he's rebelling against that. Since I've gotten onto Turntable, I've been exposed to a wide range of the unconscious rules people employ when determining what they think is tasteful and what's not. Turntable is especially good for this, because people play not just what they like but what they think will reflect well on them in front of others, but also the concept of "guilty pleasures" gets a lot of play because periodically in rooms people will declare that it's time for everyone just to play some their most indulgent crap and everyone gets a chance to show off what their bad taste is, too. So you learn a lot.
Certain patterns have come out that I find really fascinating. For instance, there's an entire subset of people, and they are mostly dudes (in my experience, exclusively dudes, but I haven't dealt with everyone so I'm not going to go on the record with an "all" here), who are belligerent about the notion that the best music in the whole world is sleepy indie rock by earnest white guys (and occasional women) who have never flicked a pelvis in public in their lives, and these guys play this music in any room that's indie-friendly even if everyone else is playing stuff that you could fuck to. And they're often surprised if people grouse about it. I find this hilarious, but as of yet have no real understanding of this particular dynamic. On the flip side of it, if someone feels that 80s dance and New Wave music is appropriate for every occasion, there's a 95% chance that person is female.
But when it comes to the subject of bad taste or guilty pleasures, some times it's remarkable what kind of prejudices you'll unearth. I got into a room with some folks who were playing all sorts of stuff, and I cheerfully dropped a rap song---I forget which, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that for some reason, two of the dudes in the room started to get angry and---in 2011!---started grousing about how much they don't like hip-hop. Like, as in all hip-hop, though one begrudgingly said he liked Outkast sometimes. In the chat bubble, he, and I swear you could hear the sniffing, said that he preferred stuff like French house music, you know, like Daft Punk. And this was the kicker, when those of us on the side of the angels pressed him about this, he called hip-hop "simple". You could tell that he could tell what we were thinking about him at that moment, and so things got a little weird and everyone went their separate ways, though as soon as he left the room, I think I said something like, "I'll bet the guys in Daft Punk have HUGE hip-hop collections."
Anyway, this is becoming a long, digressive post, but I think there's some interesting stuff to ponder here. The classifications of "indulgent" or a "guilty pleasure" or even just "bad taste" are often influenced strongly by certain prejudices. In some cases, it's just blatant racist or sexist or classist prejudice. But I've also noticed that some music gets classified as less tasteful because it's music that provokes one's more "animalistic" desires to dance and party and fuck, instead, I don't know, sit around drinking coffee and thinking deep thoughts. In other cases, "guilty pleasures" don't have that kind of political weight at all, and instead the category is more like "music you know is silly, childish, soulless or poorly performed but you like anyway because it provokes a pleasant memory". You know, like Hanson or something. Eliminating the phrase completely would probably make it harder to understand the various and often conflicting models in play.
Kind of amazing that the East Coast will be going through an earthquake (albeit a mild one that didn't really cause any major damage) and a hurricane (this one I'm far more worried about) within less than a week. The big concern, of course, is for the folks down south that are right in the path of the hurricane. I'm not overly worried about New York City getting more than a super-bad tropical storm/minor hurricane---which will suck, but you know, not the same. For instance, no need to evacuate and make hard decisions about what to do with pets. However, there is a strong chance the city will lose electricity, possibly for days, so we're preparing for that.
Our thoughts are with our neighbors down south. We hope your evacuations go smoothly, your property stays safe, and most of all, we hope that those who cannot evacuate for some reason stay safe.
In the meantime while we wait, there's not much we can do but do our jobs, get prepared, and of course, Panda Party. For those who don't know, what we're doing every Friday is getting on Turntable.fm in the Panda Party room, where we get ready for the weekend by taking playing music. (Here's Turntable's FAQ if you want to learn more about the service, which is free.) Some rooms have a no "no lame-ing" policy, but Panda Party is not one of those rooms---we feel free to lame anything we don't like. But also feel obliged to awesome anything you do like. Since it's a room that spins off a political blog, I feel everyone in there is good with the concept of democracy.
Last week, we started doing hourly themes, and that worked out really well, so that's going to be a permanent fixture. You can go to the Room Info to find out the theme. The idea is to play songs who have lyrics, titles, or even just band names along those lines, though most people end up going with lyrics or song titles. For instance, last night I went into a room where a New York theme erupted, and I played "New York" by Le Butcherettes, "New York, I Love You" by LCD Soundsystem, "Take the A Train" by Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, "South Bronx" by Boogie Down Productions, and "Rockaway Beach" by The Ramones. Most of the time you won't need so many songs, since we change the themes hourly.
Another Friday, another Panda Party! Every week, it's getting more popular, so I recommend people jump on in. For those who don't know, Pandagon readers and friends have taken to going on turntable.fm every Friday and getting amped for the weekend by spinning some tunes all day. You can upload them from your computer or search Turntable's database. It's a fun thing to do while you work, which is why some of the most popular rooms on the site reference work, like "Indie While You Work" or "Coding Soundtrack". But forget those fools and come to Panda Party!
(I was actually at this show, but upstairs.)
A couple of times now, themes have spontaneously erupted in the rooms, so my dude suggested an experiment: this week, I'm going to announce a new theme every hour about, put it in the room info at the top of the page, and DJs can play songs in that theme. It will be generally broad themes that encompass either the songs or the bands. (So, if the theme is "animals", you could play TV On The Radio's "Wolf Like Me" or you could play something by Grizzly Bear, for instance.) Nothing too hard, but to give the day some shape. We'll see how it works!
So I got to see Gloria Steinem speak last night, and that was pretty cool. I'll be blogging about it and her documentary airing on HBO on Monday at XX Factor in a bit. One of the things covered in the documentary is something Sady Doyle talks about a lot with eloquence, which is how the roots of feminism---a complex, multi-tiered, intellectual endeavor---starts with a child's basic sense of right and wrong, the ability to simply look at injustice and say, "That's not fair."
With that in mind, I thought I'd kick off today's Panda Party in turntable.fm with what to my mind is a feminist anthem before its time, one that really came out before the women's movement became a phenomenon, but one that with simple common sense points out that the expectations on men and women in heterosexual relationships are simply not fair. And demands, without apology, that they be fair.
For those who haven't come to previous Panda Parties, they are the shit and I highly recommend it. Good people, good tunes, good times: an excellent way to kick off a weekend. A lot of people just spinning all sorts of fun stuff to listen to while you work.
After the showing, a group of ladies did the traditional "feminists get drinks and try to talk about stuff other than work though work invariably comes up" thing, and there was a lot of discussion about the importance of self-care and this excellent post at the Crunk Feminist Collective about the importance of seeing your own self as a person who deserves care and support and pleasure, as well as all the other people that you're fighting the good fight for. And that a lot of people fail to be as good as they could be because they neglect themselves, and that means they stress out and that's not good for your effectiveness in the world. You really should get a good night's sleep, etc. So we talked about the various ways we self-care and I said that music was definitely a big part of it for me. It's a medium through which people can get past a lot of the sniping and point-scoring of daily politics and chill and see each other as human beings. Through our cartoonish avatars. And that's pretty neat.
As I'm sure you're all aware, I have an allergy to grumpy old farts claiming that the world is going to hell, so I wasn't likely to have a positive reaction to this particularly weird argument from Simon Reynolds that things were better in the 60s, man, because they were, uh, not as nostalgic as people are now. Yes, folks, Reynolds is nostalgic for a time when people weren't, he claims, as nostalgic. I combed the article for any indication that Reynolds is aware of the irony here, but alas, he's too far up the ass of the good ol' days when they weren't longing for the good ol' days that he didn't realize what's he's doing here.
Anyway, the argument, which was repeated by another writer at Salon, is that we're so busy regurgitating our culture that we don't make new culture. As compared to the 60s, when they were very forward-thinking. I reject this argument, and believe that it only seems that way because the people making it are looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. Does our culture have nostalgia now? Yep, but I would argue no more than the 60s. Did the 60s have innovation? Yep, but it's false to claim that our culture is being eaten up by retreads.
Let's talk about music. To hear Reynolds say it, you'd think current pop music is just mired in the past. Let's examine this claim. Here's this week's Top 100. Objectively, only one of the top 10 artists is a nostalgia act, Adele, and she updates the soul sound she's working quite a bit. Here is the top 100 of 1964. In the top ten, there are at least two acts I'd call nostalgia---Louis Armstrong singing "Hello Dolly" and this country-nostalgia-sounding song by Gale Garnett called "We'll Sing in the Sunshine". In case that seems unfair, here's 1966, when "The Ballad of the Green Beret" was the #1 song of the year. Unless you want to argue that Nicki Minaj or Lady Gaga are nostalgia acts (Gaga may steal, but she distances herself from her inspirations), then I'd say that the objective facts aren't really going Reynold's way.
In fact, there's so little nostalgia for the past that New York Magazine up and declared rock and roll niche music like jazz or something. I also think the argument is overstated, but they have a point. Rock radio is fading away. Contrast that to the 80s and 90s, when Boomers drove the market for "classic rock radio" to the degree that you were more likely in much of the country to hear a song from the 60s by randomly flipping on the radio than you were a current song. That's not really how radio works now. Reynolds tries to dodge this by pointing out that genres come and go constantly, and that there's not a lot of centralized pop music for people to back (except, you know, hip-hop, which crosses a lot of boundaries), but the increasing numbers of genres actually strike me as evidence that our culture in innovative.
Even if you restrict yourself to rock music---which you really shouldn't, because part of the point of not being all nostalgic is accepting that popular tastes can shift dramatically, and as they shifted to rock, they can shift away---the notion that we're mired in nostalgia is just objectively false. Sure, there are nostalgia acts. But there are far more innovative acts. Here's some music that I listen to all the time lately:
I'm unclear how any of them are nostalgia acts. I mean, the last one uses the harmonium as a rock instrument, which is the sort of bold choice that made people slobber all over the Beatles. Even Nick Cave now doesn't sound like Nick Cave 20 years ago. I promise you that I go to SXSW every year, and while there are a handful of nostalgia acts, they don't get near the traffic of people doing something truly new.
But they draw inspiration from older forms, you could argue. Sure, but that's the nature of innovation. Someone like Reynolds would say the two Most Important Acts of the 60s were Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and they borrowed and indulged nostalgia as much, if not more, than any of these bands. Dylan basically built his early career mimicking decades worth of American folk music, providing his audience with a nostalgia for a life they didn't even live. That nostalgia was notoriously dear to them, which is why the panic when Dylan went electric. The Beatles drew heavily on 50s rock music and Tin Pan Alley melody-writing to craft their music. In general, a lot of 60s music was about rooting through the older blues, rock, country, folk, and R&B for inspiration.
Which isn't to say the 60s weren't innovative. They really were. But like I said before, the notion that our culture as a whole is mired in nostalgia compared to then doesn't hold up. I posit instead that the people who are worried that the culture is overly nostalgic are externalizing what might be a personal problem, that they and their peers have given up discovering new stuff. I get it. I'm getting to the age where some of my friends look uncomfortable if you put on something that's too new-sounding, because it has weird sounds and rhythms that don't sound like what they were listening to growing up. You can't just throw on the big rap record from this year on the stereo in a mixed group of peers like you could when I was 21. Some people are going to be like, ugh, that's loud and noisy, even if they wouldn't say the same about the record that came out in 1999. There's a reason that sneering at hipster is such a hobby---it's my generation really starting to work its "kids get off my lawn" muscle. It happens. But we shouldn't mistake our own peer group growing older and disengaging from youth culture for the end of innovation.
As for fashion, well, the reason I know it's still innovating is I look at what young people are wearing these days and I think, "Ah, no way in hell." That, I think is a good measure that things are still changing.
I recently had occasion---I can imagine you can guess what it is---to think a bit on two separate versions of the Carole King-penned* "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow", the original by the Shirelles and the cover by Amy Winehouse.
I like both, of course, but what's interesting to me is the gulf between these performances of the same song. The Shirelles sing it cleanly and powerfully, but there's not a lot of melodrama to it. If you aren't paying close attention to the lyrics, you might not even notice how heart-breaking they are. Winehouse turns in a highly dramatic performance where the heartache is emphasized in every note she sings. Now part of the reason Winehouse made the choice to sing it that way was that was just her style. But her perfomance on this is especially heart-breaking, even for her, and I think the reason is that she's trying to take a familiar song and remind the audience of how sad it really is by exaggerating the drama in it. The original didn't need you to bring the drama to it; it dropped in an era when the context was enough to remind the audience of how fraught the young woman in the song's dilemma is. In fact, the song struck such a chord with its intended audience of teenagers that it was the first #1 hit for a girl group, coming out as it did in 1961.
1961: pre-pill, pre-legal abortion. When Winehouse is singing this song, the audience implicitly understands that the worst that can happen to the narrator is a broken heart. She'll cry. She'll maybe be depressed for awhile. She'll probably pick herself and love again, though. But in 1961, the context brought the drama. Audiences knew that the young narrator is taking a risk that could lead to social ostracization, loss of freedom, or even death.
It's this that I was thinking about while reading this article by Justin Elliot at Salon about Mitt Romney's relative who died of a septic abortion in 1963, and whose grieving parents asked only that donations to Planned Parenthood be given in the name of the victim of this tragedy, whose name Ann Keenan. Keenan was one of up to 5,000 women a year who died of botched abortions in the years when abortion was a crime; some of them went to illegal abortionists but mainly they died because they, alone and afraid, desperately tried to take matters into their own hands. (This is something I still struggle to wrap my mind around; I barely know how big my uterus is, much less how to manipulate it in any way. I imagine most self-aborters know even less.) Romney cited the loss of Keenan when he was trying to establish his pro-choice bona fides; he has dropped the issue now that he's trying to establish himself as a supporter of abortion bans.
It's tempting to just horse-race this one---will it hurt Romney to be a flip-flopper (invariably it will)---but I'd like to take a moment to remember that this is what we've overcome as a society, and what anti-choicers want to return us to. It's not just that they're widely supportive of a regime that makes sex ridiculously dangerous and even deadly for young women, in order to punish them for being, well, human. That would be enough to condemn them, but it's also that they long for a time when women's lives were pinched and strained by sexual expectations that were too high for the vast majority of women to meet: that you never make mistakes, that your desires are always perfectly in line with what's best for you, that you know exactly what's best for you because you possess the power of prophecy and can easily predict what man is going to be a loving husband for life and which will abandon or abuse you, that you have nothing else to live for but to marry and have children. And should you be a human being---fallible, unable to predict the future, unlucky, or simply desiring of more than a life lived just for others---they want a world that treats this like a failing that should come complete with the destruction of your life and perhaps even death.
It's trendy now for anti-choicers to pretend that they want this for women for women's own good. Sandy Rios on Fox News even tried to argue that withholding contraception would be good for young women, because an unwanted baby or two would teach them not to have "multiple" sex partners (remember, that just means "more than one"), and that having multiple sex partners is the worst possible fate for young women. This is ludicrous from a purely logical standpoint, but it's also incredibly heartless, even as it's framed as somehow being charitable. I think about this song and I can't help but think that the lack of options experienced by the narrator isn't really doing her any good. A world where she can pick herself up and love again is a better world. Even more importantly, a world where she can wonder not just if he'll love her tomorrow, but whether or not she'll feel the same is better for women. Above all other things, what anti-choicers are asking for is a world where women can't contemplate their own desires, and decide as free people whether or not it will be this man at this time---knowing what you want is hard to do when your main focus is on surviving, and in a world without real reproductive choice, women's social and even literal survival often depends on whether or not a man chooses them. They don't have as much space to decide what they're choosing for themselves.
I think it's useful to step back from the weeds of having these fights a little and think these things through: the context that made "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" so poignant, the completely unnecessary deaths of young women like Ann Keenan, who sounded like she was a bright spot in the lives of people around her:
"She was so intelligent, beautiful and a friend to everyone," Marilyn Frey, a classmate and friend of Keenan in the 22-member class of 1959 at the all-girls Liggett School, recalled in an email to Salon. In high school, Keenan was active in theater, performing in "The Importance of Being Earnest" and serving for three years on the drama board. She was a scholarship recipient and class president her sophomore year. One of Romney's sisters was quoted in the press in 1994 recalling that Keenan "was a beautiful, talented girl [whom] we all loved."
*The older I get, the more I appreciate the way King was routinely willing to explore the dark recesses of American attitudes towards sex and gender in her lyrics to what were meant to be radio-friendly pop songs. "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" is by far the most notorious example, by way of being obvious, but there's darkness in "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow", "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" and even "Natural Woman" always struck me as songs with dark undertones indicating a deep dissatisfaction with gender norms.
LaToya Peterson has a great piece in Spin's newest issue dedicated to Nirvana's Nevermind, which turns 20 next month, and a bunch of extra quotes she had to cut for length but she published here. Her piece is an examination of the social, political, and cultural context that turned what probably would have been a underground rock record turned mild breakout hit---think Jane's Addiction---into a megawatt blowout hit that actually did change the music industry for a few years, before they reverted to cranking out half-naked teenagers pretending to be virgins to get some easy hits. LaToya's argument, and I think it's well-founded, is that the early 90s were something of a Reagan hangover and my generation, which is really kind of a lost and abandoned one compared to the ones that flank it, was perfectly set up to relate to the angst and alienation that Nirvana was serving up on a platter. I think the proof's in the pudding on that one.
My relationship with Nirvana began and ended on the road, which isn't as strange as it sounds. I liked being on the road and concocted many reasons to not be stuck in my small town, feeling bored and frustrated, and especially feeling alienated from the hyper-conformist atmosphere at my tiny high school. Surprise! I was not very keen on the social climbing politics of a small town Texas high school, where the worst thing you could say about someone was that they were "different". So I took lots of trips. I visited my dad in El Paso a lot. I went on school trips, and enjoyed spending time around kids from other small towns, kids whose lack of knowledge of my official reputation as "ugly" meant they saw a perfectly normal-looking teenage girl and not the deformed monster the kids at my high school saw. Being not at home suited me really well.
Thus, I first heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in a hotel room. I was 14 years old and I do believe on the first trip I'd ever take with the speech/debate team. By the end of my high school career, I had gone on more of these trips than I could count; during the height of the season we were out of town nearly every weekend. I got into my room, and as was my habit, I flipped on the TV to MTV. It was night, and it was probably late 1991/early 1992. Anyway, the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was on, and like pretty much everyone else around that time, I was absolutely transfixed by it. I don't have to remind you of its power and its aggression and how it captured so perfectly the sense of alienation. For a kid like me, whose least favorite part of the week was being forced out of class to sit through the hell of pep rallies, watching a video based around a pep rally turning into a riot was like every fantasy I'd ever had rolled into one. I was particularly impressed by the anarchist cheerleaders---taking a piss all over the hallowed role of "cheerleader" was inconceivable in my world, and it delighted me.
It's not like it was my introduction to good music or anything, though it did have a large impact on my growth as a fan. I was already into REM and some other 80s-style indie rock music, and I think I may have already acquired a Sonic Youth CD by then, though I can't remember. I was in the process of converting myself from teeny bopper to glowering rock fan teenager. I knew where I was headed, but Nirvana really did help me get there.
A little over two years later---through the popular revival of Bleach, the release of In Utero, the "Sassy" cover, the horror as frat boys and rock stupid jocks got into the band and nearly ruined everything---the relationship as it was ended because Nirvana ended. And I was on the road again, this time at a week-long camp thing for kids interested in careers as journalists. I forget how I found out, but I ran into a room full of some of the kids I was finding simpatico and simply said, "Kurt Cobain's been found dead. He shot himself in the head." No one was surprised, I think. But it was still devastating news to us. That night they had a dance to wind up the week of camp, and my small group of camp buddies (including the inevitable making-out partner) and I asked the DJ to play some Nirvana. At first he refused, saying that the organizers specifically told him not to, because they were worried the kids would get out of control. It was a weird thing to think, but I suppose a little youthful alienation has always looked dangerous to the square side of adults, even when it's objectively not. When the DJ gave in---c'mon the guy had just died, how could you not?---we bounced around to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the spirit of camaraderie as fans, and no riots happened.
On the flight home, I put my copy of Nevermind, which was taped off the CD, into my Walkman. I played it from beginning to end twice, fingering the dirty, peeling tape on it between listens while I looked out of the window. I didn't look forward to going home and I didn't really think that we'd ever put Nevermind in the player again as we drove up and down the main drag in town, circling around looking for something to do or someone that was interesting, a something and someone that never materialized. When the second play-through ended, I fell asleep and slept all the rest of the flight from D.C. to El Paso, where my mom was picking me up for the four hour drive back home, so I could go back to school again on Monday, to drift through the next year of my life spending most of my days with people I didn't like who didn't like me. I've never been able to fall asleep on a plane since.
Wednesday night, I went to see one of those bands that's so cool and so good that you really have to wonder how they aren't wildly famous: The Ettes
Their fourth album came out Tuesday, and can be downloaded for 8 bucks here. It's called "Wicked Will", and continues in the same vein of ass-kicking garage rock as their previousthreealbums. And I continue my run of mostly (though not completely) getting into new bands that happen to be female-dominated. It's not some kind of feminist statement or anything, either. There's just many flavors of indie music lately: quiet & contemplative (gag), noodly stuff that passes itself off as experimental (double gag), sunny pop music that's got a California-dreaming vibe, and good, old-fashioned rock and roll. I'm mostly into the latter two, and for some reason, women are way more common there. *shrug*
Anyway, let's keep doing what's been kicking ass for two weeks now: spending our Fridays rocking and rolling in the Panda Party room on turntable.fm. The format is free-form, play whatever you like. Themes sometimes crop up, and I encourage that, because it's really fun. Two weeks ago, people started playing songs with "Friday" in the title and last week, it turned into a situation where everyone started playing the raunchiest songs they can think of. I was particularly pleased with my selection of Devo's "Penetration in the Centerfold", which goes the distance by using the word "gash". It's a good way to get some music rolling at your workplace on a Friday; I maintain that turntable.fm is a great complement to working at a desk, because it really doesn't require a lot of maintenance.
I was reading the latest issue of The Believer---the music issue!---today, and I found this tidbit interesting. It's from Hua Hsu's examination of the telephone in pop music history, and it made me cackle:
Early newspaper reports of Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, the telephone, exhibited a laughable narrowness of vision. Short of changing business or politics, the greatest effect, some teased, would be in the arena of courtship. "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East Boston," an 1870s editorial in the Boston Times forsaw, before warning of "the awful and irresponsible power" such a device would give nagging mothers.
The technology changes, but the complaints remain the same: 1) Someone, somewhere is using this technology to gain pleasures you yourself are not experiencing and that's alarming and 2) Women are frightening creatures whose awe-inspiring powers to destroy are only being restrained by the lack of this new technology in their lives.
Nona Willis Aronowitz posted a video from MTV News in 1995 about the internet. The broadcasters were not panicked about the internet. On the contrary, they seemed to think it was a really cool invention that had a lot of potential. But they reported on the fact that a lot of people at the time were panicked by the internet, because, you know, orgasms.
(There's a little bit of Billy Corgan bashing Michael Jackson, too. Guess who won history?)
People's continual panic over technological innovation---the way we easily convince ourselves that a new medium or device will somehow be the ruin of us all---is one of those topics I find fascinating without ever really resolving it in my mind. I'm particularly amused at the knee-jerk assumption that older forms are automatically deeper and more interesting. I was compelled to think about that some today after reading the tedious, joy-killing comments at what I thought was a fun post at XX Factor about MTV's early years and what it meant to people like me. Using a little bit of colorful language, I said that MTV raised me, by which of course I meant that I watched a lot of it growing up and it had a big impact on my way of thinking. I made a substantive argument that this was a good thing, but of course the puzzling "OMG TV IS THE DEVIL" folks had to show up in comments.
It is sad....really sad. To think that so many young people (and now old people) park their behinds in front of a television and let mindless television programing become the "inspiration" and the open window into a view of the world and of their lives. REALLY.....I mean REALLY AMANDA? You were "raised" by MTV? That in and of itself is truely a sad statement about not just one generation but multi generations. It is sad, at least to me, that an entire generations view of what is important from their youth was coming home and parking in front of a television to watch a show about a bunch of musicians in made up videos about made up things. But that is also true of the generation that came home and parked in front of a television to watch Andy Griffith or Lassie, or Gulliagans Island. Again a generation defined not by the things they did but what they watched....sad but true.
I told him I rejected his "get off my lawn" argument, particularly the notion that I'm a stupid or sad person because I like music videos. But it did make me think: would such a person crap his pants if I wrote about an older medium changing my life for the better? What if I posted this song by the Velvet Underground and said I related to it? I'm guessing I'd be praised, because radio is an older medium and therefore assumed to be wholesome and intelligence-improving.
In fact, I got something of an answer to my question, as a number of people showed up in comments and shamed anyone who watched MTV for not being more into radio. Radio's superiority was assumed to be self-evident, even though I brought forth evidence in the post and people backed it up in comments that a lot of what was on MTV was simply not available on the radio in much of the country. In fact, I would say that's the point of the post. By simply having more diverse and newer content, MTV was automatically superior, in my opinion. But this notion that technological evolution is somehow immoral (I got both right wing puritans shaming me for the sexual immorality of watching MTV and liberal puritans shaming me for the supposed corporatist immorality of watching MTV) just is asserted as if it's an immutable truth of humanity and not just some arbitrary bullshit.
I remain puzzled as to why people so easily take it as a given that a communication/media technology's newness makes it more immoral and vapid than older forms, which were also considered immoral and vapid when they came out. I'm sure it has something to do with fear of mortality. Any way you slice it , there's an irony there, because I would argue that the knee-jerk rejection of a technology simply because it's new is what is vapid and quite often immoral, particularly when it comes to the people who begrudge young people whose lives are very often saved by fascinating new technologies that show them a world behind the limited ones that are smothering them.
Well, last week's Turntable party was a smashing success, with the room bumping from 8AM to at least 8PM, people coming and going and a good time had by all. Some folks around the blogosphere popped in and spun some tunes, and some readers really strutted their stuff. We even had some new folks stop by, just because the room looked fun. It was so fun, in fact, we're going to try to make it a weekly tradition.
So join me and have some fun on Friday at turntable.fm in the Panda Party Room.
The song above is one I like to play on occasion, but what's fun about the Panda Party Room is that it's a play-what-you-will thing.
You don't have to DJ to stop by. Simply hanging out and listening---and upvoting what you like---is also fun and you might hear some new stuff.
By the way, I was also on the Matthew Filipowicz Show, and you can listen to that episode here. We talk about the IOM and the HHS, birth control, and different kinds of anti-feminists.
Some folks out there have spent the past few weeks trying to get me interested in Turntable, and I'll have you know that you people are both the best and worst thing ever. You've turned me into a total addict. For those who don't know, Turntable is a music service where people get into a room and take turns playing music. It's easy to set up an account---you just need a friend on Facebook who is already in Turntable, and then you can go to the site, and it will pull down your Facebook info to set up an account. You can have as many people as you like in a room and up to 5 people DJ-ing (you just take turns). There's a point system to encourage people to play music others like, and basically that's it. (Here's the FAQ.)
As an experiment, I'm starting a room called Panda Party for today. The idea is that Pandagon readers can hop in and DJ with me (I'm going by the name DJ Freakamouse), as a way to relieve some stress on a Friday. The service is perfect for desk work, since you can do a couple quick adjustments to your queue here and there, rate people's songs, and that's it. It just takes a few seconds of your time, basically, leaving you a steady stream of human-selected music to listen to at work. But there's also chat, if you want to invest a little more time. It's also a good way to learn about new music, with handy buttons so you can go to Amazon and kick a little cash to the people who actually make it by buying their stuff. So hop on in, if you're interested! If it takes off, I might make this an every-Friday thing.
In honor of my new addiction, I'll offer two lists.
Five Turntable Songs That Earned Me A "Rock Out"
1) "Bang! Bang!" by The Knux
2) "White Wedding" covered by Queens of the Stone Age
3) "Who Am I To Feel So Free?" by MEN
4) "Swamp Buggy Badass" by Quintron and Miss Pussycat
5) "Go Outside" by The Cults
Five Songs I Thought Would Go Over Well, But Were Duds
1) "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" by The Slits (I like hanging out in cover rooms, so I'm just going to assume the downvotes were from people with no sense of humor at all.)
2) "Our Lips Are Sealed" by Fun Boy Three
3) "Voodoo Lady" by Ween
4) "Rick Rubin" by Spanx Rock
5) "Hyperactive" by Thomas Dolby
So I'm sharpening my skills at reading a room, not an easy thing to do when everyone is basically a cartoon character. So come on in, and let's see if we can make this thing work.
As all the hubub over the HPV vaccination has demonstrated, the Christian right has a big time Lolita obsession. I wasn't thinking about that per se when I pitched this piece about the right wing shit storm over the Girl Scouts of the USA, but I'd say that the article has perfect timing in that regard. After all, the Girl Scouts hysteria comes from the same place as the hysteria over the vaccination: lurid right wing imaginations applied to young girls and sex. It's all very icky, but I think an important factor in understanding the Christian right worldview. So check out my article "The Girl Scouts Allegedly Radical Feminist Lesbain Agenda". Spoiler alert: Girl Scouts do not have a radical lesbian feminist agenda, but they are pretty pro-girl, so I can see why you'd make that mistake. 
So I got to see Gloria Steinem speak last night, and that was pretty cool. I'll be blogging about it and her documentary airing on HBO on Monday at XX Factor in a bit. One of the things covered in the documentary is something Sady Doyle talks about a lot with eloquence, which is how the roots of feminism---a complex, multi-tiered, intellectual endeavor---starts with a child's basic sense of right and wrong, the ability to simply look at injustice and say, "That's not fair."