Colin Marshall

A lesson from Nick Drake

This past Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the release of English singer/songwriter/guitarist Nick Drake's first album Five Leaves Left, which hit record stores in Drake's country ("record shops") on September 1, 1969. He would go on to record two more, the lush Bryter Later, which most serious enthusiasts regard as Drake's best, and the stark, brief Pink Moon, which some serious enthusiasts regard as Drake's best. But Five Leaves Left remains my favorite, especially with the favorable data point that I've just produced an entire radio show about the album and haven't grown sick of it.

The show in question is a Marketplace of Ideas special on Five Leaves Left, featuring conversations with Trevor Dann, author of Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake, Patrick Humphries, author of Nick Drake: The Biography and Peter Hogan, author of Nick Drake: The Complete Guide to His Music. In a way, something of a miniature dream has come true for me: I've long thought about making something for the record's 40th in the far-flung year of 2009, but only as the date approached did the relevant ideas coalesce in my mind. I'd hoped to interview Humphries since reading his biography, a vivid tapestry of personal remembrance and historical context, but couldn't think of a reason. Morally opposed to making anything easy on myself, I ultimately asked: why talk to just one biographer when I could talk to everyone who's ever written a Nick Drake book?

In these conversations and my extensive, enormous, exhaustive preparatory reading for them, I saw a certain lesson emerge from Drake's story. Here was a young man who, through a degree of dedication to his craft that reduced everything else in life — especially academics — to dim background noise, developed a musical skill and sensibility that, committed to tape, still awe, captivate and nearly mystify listeners. But he failed to find success: some estimates of his record sales place them as low as 10,000, total, in his lifetime. This didn't align with Drake's high musical ambition and — some would say — his arrogance about the quality of his own material. He seemed to assume his music, by mere virtue of its excellence, deserved to be heard, and, let loose, would spread like a melancholic wildfire.

By the time his music actually did sweep the listening world, Drake had been in the ground for about 25 years. Would that he could have lived to enjoy his modern-day popularity, but it's no mystery why that popularity took until the modern day to arrive: whether by inability, disinclination or both, Drake didn't promote his albums. Absent radio single releases from his label — and it's far from certain that such products, had they materialized, would have achieved heavy-rotation airplay — the need arose to gig and gig and gig. Uncomfortable with solo performance, Drake gave touring a handful of attempts, heart never in it, songs never adapted to a live setting, and eventually just threw in the towel altogether.

From Drake's disheartening experience, I draw the lesson that (quality) * (promotion) = (success). Not to put too fine a point on it, but it seems that if you're not actively selling your work, then it doesn't matter how abstractly "good" it is or how much effort you put into it. When I say "selling," I don't mean literally exchanging for money; I mean "selling" as in "pitching," as in "hardscrabbling some brainshare the old-fashioned way." For example, I've put quite a lot of work into this Five Leaves Left radio special, but if I don't tell potential listeners about it — by writing blog posts, say — then that's all for nought.

On a related note, a television director visited my film production class last night to help us recreate and shoot a scene from The Big Lebowski. After the shoot, I asked him what surprised him most about his career in The Tndustry, and he mentioned meeting all these aspiring actors, directors, writers and the like on his way up. They didn't seem like much, but they talked a big game, declaring that they would — would — become big players, doggedly pushing forward without hesitation. And they're the ones who made it! I asked if, conversely, he'd encountered many aspirants who seemed to have the goods and the skill to spare but got discouraged and fell off the ladder: oh yeah. He found that the separator came pretty clearly down to "tenacity."

In a podcast conversation with semi-regular guests Lynn Warren and Alex Ali, Adam Carolla cites, with equal conviction, the importance of resilience. He argues that, if you're doing anything worthwhile, nine out of ten of your projects die trying to get out of the gate. The trick is not to stare at yourself in the mirror in aftermath, questioning your value as a human being and desperately trying to divine why, exactly, the universe has it out for you — this, apparently, being a condition with which Adam's guests routinely struggle — but just, like a salmon going to spawn, keepin' on facin' in the right direction and keepin' on swimmin', never stoppin'. It's unclear whether Nick Drake ever stared into the mirror and cast his self-worth into question, but his sister Gabrielle did once say that he could handle neither rejection nor criticism, nor, presumably, being ignored — that he was "born with a skin too few."

The anti-Oleander screed

From a 1997 Perfect Sound Forever interview with Ken Freedman, general manager of freeform radio colossus WFMU:

PSF: Could you talk about importance of freeform programming?

KEN: It's an approach that doesn't really exist in any other form, really. Freeform radio demands that a listener employ different sensibilities to judge or appreciate the different components of the program. Nothing else does that — museums, records, books, etc. Freeform radio can make people realize that their musical biases are utterly full of shit, and once you realize that any of your beloved biases are baseless, then you're ready to make some real progress as a human being.

Here we see the finest articulation of a thought I've often had myself, but never so clearly. I think back to eighth, ninth, tenth grade, and how we all led such small, confined lives — thanks, in large part, to the schools funneling us into those grades — that we had little else with which to build ourselves but the music we listened to. Pledge allegiance to a certain band, and we implicitly swore off hundreds of others. Enjoy a certain singer's album, and our identities became those of people who "love" that singer. Get annoyed by a certain single by a certain artist, and we were lumped into the group who "hate" that artist. How much effort we burned struggling to maintain the stupidly consistent mosaics of musical biases in our heads. It was just like Super NES versus Genesis in the elementary schoolyard, writ large.¹

Then again, maybe musical choices offered the most effcient hack we had to determine who to hang out with, though if they did, it's a sad commentary on our inner lives' then-poverty. I remember many high school couples, especially early in the game, claiming to have gotten together when they realized they "liked the same music." I scoffed at this even then, despite suffering from the inverse affliction of needing to gripe about the music the girls with whom I was associated at the time listened to. "Alternative rock?" I asked, rhetorically. "Uh, alternative to what?" While I can no longer produce my full anti-Three Doors Down, anti-Oleander and anti-Alien Crime Syndicate screeds, rest assured I once could. Sort of.

Whether my negative musical biases or their positive ones, though, Freedman is correct about both: they were utterly full of shit. Why in the name of the baby Jesus did I care? I have, as I've written before, an awfully hard time getting inside the mind of those who hold strong opinions about what cultural stuff sucks, and that includes Colin₁₅. As Patton Oswalt said in a recent Paste interview, "Pointing out that stuff sucks is not edgy or dangerous anymore. Everyone knows what sucks. What’s better is to find the stuff that’s amazing and hold it up." At this point, I only care about what's fascinating; I'm comfortable with my indifference toward everything else. And except in rare special cases, active dislike — and especially hatred — is completely off the table. "You really hated that movie/album/book?" I think whenever someone professes to have, in fact, hated that movie/album/book. "No you didn't. Not so impacted by? Maybe. Hated? Doubtful."

The astute connection Freedman makes between freeform radio and the discrediting of said full-of-shit musical biases seems totally logical and yet surprising, especially since, despite my own love of the format, it hadn't occurred to me. Musician, music writer and "curator of sound" David Toop once said an interview that he began listening to massive quantities of experimental music in his youth as an attempt to "reprogram" his brain, and I suspect he was on to something big. The "culture = brain programming" meme has bounced around my head for months and months now, and it shows no signs of bouncing out any time soon.

I've found that whatever cultural experiences I happen to have shape the background states of my mind, influencing what I want to do. If I've been watching Charlie Rose's shows, I think about interviewing how he interviews; if I've been watching Huell Howser's shows, I think about producing programs how he produces them. If I've been reading Clive James' books, I think about writing how he writes; if I've been reading David Foster Wallace's books, I think about writing how he writes. If I've been watching Werner Herzog's films, I think about shooting how he shoots; if I've been watching Andrei Tarkovsky's, I think about shooting like him. If I've been listening to Thomas Dolby, I think about recording how he records; if I've been listening to Cornelius, I think about recording how he does. Everything I absorb effects, pretty much immediately, how I perceive the world, how I organize and interpret experience. As the composition of what I've internalized changes, the world changes — or at least my processing of it changes, which is all I can access anyway.

My primary question of cultural selection has, therefore, shifted. Where once it was "What will probably give me the most pleasure?", it's now "How do I want to program my brain?" That's not to say that the answer sets to these questions are mutually exclusive; don't mistake this for some sort of eat-your-greens mindset applied to culture.² I, for the record, lived and will die a Genesis man. (If a bitter, crusty jazz aficionado instructs you to "listen to music that's good for you," you should just sock him.) I find there's a great deal of pleasure indeed to be found in the brain-programming task, but it's not one to be taken lightly: "you are what you eat" holds even truer for what you read, watch, listen to and experience than, uh, what you eat.

So perhaps an even better question than "How do I want to program my brain?" is "Who do I want to be?" And thus we might seem to have circled right back to culture-as-identity, but I mean more how you want to be than what you want to be. One way I most certainly don't want to be is mediocre, and thus I continue my War on Mediocrity. But to find the truly non-mediocre tools of brain programming, one must do a fair amount of brain programming, specifically to open it to new input as wide as possible. (There is no mediocrity so thundering, so poisonous, as that of the narrow mind.) Freeform radio is, indeed, a decent route to that.

---

¹ I, for the record, lived and will die a Genesis man.

² Though I've become acutely aware that many of the extremely health-conscious with whom I interact will, despite their vigilance about what they put into their mouth, consume the cultural equivalent of the foods featured in This is Why You're Fat without a second thought. Or even a first.

Better than the spork, even

Conducting the latest Marketplace of Ideas conversation with Travis Elborough, author of The Vinyl Countdown, a history of the vinyl LP, brought a question to mind: people love vinyl, some people — mostly of a certain hip-hop generation — love cassettes, but has anyone ever loved the poor, rapidly-getting-irrelevant compact disc? Elborough replied that, well, naturally, someone must have loved it at some point, and they certainly sounded fantastic when first introduced. But I'd say it's undeniable that, at sixty years old, vinyl claims orders of magnitude more declared enthusiasts than the CD, over its 27 years, ever has.

That's not to approve of the sort of vinyl fetishism that goes on these days — I also enjoy reading, but fixation on books themselves or any media objects over and above their content irks me — though I must remain vigilant not to fall into it myself. My collection habit began in high school, at the feverish peak of my Goodwill-haunting days, but back then, when the majority of my listening hours happened in the car, vinyl was little more than a novelty. It's since pulled out in front of every other music delivery system; rare is the night I don't come home and drop the needle on something or other. I just yesterday Craigslist-purchased an additional Tec 12, for nefarious DJing purposes, from a dude in deep Isla Vista. Those 35-pound S.O.B.s really turn heads when you're schlepping them around by hand. Especially when you take them into Barnes & Noble. Or to get a burrito.

This ends a long spell of CD-only spinning for me, which I can't help but argue says something, grandly, about the listening world as a whole. I don't plan to affect a metamorphosis into one of those insufferable everything-sucks-but-vinyl DJs — my setup will likely remain two-CD-one-vinyl at least until I buy a car move all this gear from place to place like a civilized human being — but vinyl's essentialness becomes clearer to me with every play. Why? I have no ironclad answer, and I hesitate to join the chorus of tofu-soft defenses like "vinyl has life." Two facts do stand out, though. (a) Vinyl provides a superior user experience, and lately I've gotten big on the experience component damn near everything — film, food, interaction — to the exclusion of most other elements. (b) Vinyl is a better design object than other formats. Hell, it's a better design object than most other objects. I've half a mind to declare the vinyl LP the best object of the past century. This is a designation CDs will never, ever win, and it has two words to thank for that: jewel cases. Oh, the affront, the affront to my tender sensibilities!

Unpredictable intermediation

Dicking around in Amoeba Music's experimental section, as is my wont, I came upon a pile of FM3 Buddha Machines. I'd long been intrigued by the devices, as anyone with even a passing interest in ambient music is. (Though my interest in ambient has, shall we say, past beyond passing.) They're a little like iPods in that they're rectangularish, made of plastic and play sound. They're unlike iPods in that:

• They play not just through headphones, but out of a built-in speaker
• They come with sounds pre-installed, which you can't add to or remove
• The sounds aren't songs, but seconds-long loops

Needless to say, I had to have one. So did Madelaine, and since it was her birthday anyway, we had ourselves the making of a convenient coincidence. I snagged a pair of near-randomly-selected Buddha Machines (no his-and-hers models available) to my growing pile of sweet, sweet 180-gram vinyl (50 grams better than regular vinyl!) and anticipated.

To test my machine, I wrote the majority of my latest 3QD column while listening to it. Verdict: positive. I wound up with one of the first-generation units which, unlike Madelaine's Buddha Machine II, lacks a pitch bend wheel. No matter, though; you'd want to own a few of these babies — Sasha Frere-Jones has four — in order to get the full experience of their loops moving in and out of sync, interacting. But even if you've only got one handy, one's enough. Though the individual sounds don't seem to have any obvious designed randomness or generativeness to them, I could swear some sound as if more is going on than a drone on repeat. Then again, it could just be the mind playin' tricks.

The Buddha Machine is the only deliberately "lo-fi" thing I've ever enjoyed. It feels nearly hollow and built out of the sort of plastic that comes from a country whose laws governing the manufacturing of plastic are much less enlightened than ours. (The feel is cub scout crystal radio-y.) While headphones do the job, you're better off with the tinny speaker; that way, you can line up a bunch of these things and, Phil Spector-like, create a meditative wall of sound. (If he'd had a Buddha Machine, he probably wouldn't have felt it necessary to shoot the Barbarian Queen.) It certainly validate Brian Eno's oft-stated thoughts about how much more interesting electronic sound is when you dirty it down with cheap, unpredictable intermediation. Then again, what doesn't validate Brian Eno's ideas?

(The Buddha Machine experience is also available, depending on your fanciness, as an iPhone app or an elaborate Flash simulation.)

Note on Astley

I'm slightly irked by the (now nearly passed) craze of Rickrolling, the practice of posting disguised links to the Youtubed music video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", but not because of the normal reasons to dislike easily-replicated net memes. The trend bugs me because I, earlier this decade, actually listened to and appreciated a lot of Rick Astley's music, and I can't stand being linked, however distantly and indirectly, to any kind of ironic enjoyment. I'm basically Dave Erdman.

Or at least I'm a Dave Erdman who appreciates pop music over a decade old. The statute of limitations isn't there because I labor under the delusion that music was better before; I just like to have a filter in place that simplifies the selection process. Kinda like how I prefer video games to be at least two decades old, or how the dual filters of had-to-withstand-the-test-of-time and had-to-withstand-transplantation-from-a-faraway-culture effectively winnow down film's possibility space to some of the creamier of the crop. Astley's first album, Whenever You Need Somebody, at both nearly 22 years old and, being British, of foreign provenance, passes through a couple filters. So it's allowed.

I first learned of Rick Astley from one of those television commersials — I'm not sure whether they do these anymore — offering a mix tape, CD or whatever. To give the viewer an idea of the selection to be enjoyed with purchase, these spots would scroll the song titles, in white, up the screen; when a song title scrolled past in yellow, a clip from that song would play. (This one is representative, and, though not the particular one I'm talking about, serves up a bit of an Astley song nonetheless.) So Astley's "Together Forever" took its turn in the yellow, I heard about three seconds of it, and my brain, operating on all the musical data accumulated consciously and subconsciously, advised me to go rush that song down. I fired up Napster, Audiogalaxy, Morpheus or whichever piece of filesharing software I was too cool to use in those days and got frustrated trying to download it on dial-up. Then I drove to my usual used-CD haunts on Seattle's University Way and immediately snapped up Whenever You Need Somebody and its follow-up, Hold Me in Your Arms, instead.

Popping the first album into my car's CD player, I heard what sounded to me like some rock-solid pop music. For the first few listens, the wall of Stock Aitken Waterman production simply crashed forth like one big undifferentiated wave of rounded bass, synthesizer pads and overlaid digital glockenspiels, but that was fine by me. Only on repeated inspection did I discover that the tracks were actually quite different. For instance, I'm man enough today to admit that I don't really like "Together Forever" — I find it lazy — and it's safe to say that, if overexposure hadn't dulled "Never Gonna Give You Up" by the end of the 1980s, it's done it a dozen times over today. The title song, however, was and remains my favorite of these big three disc-openers:


(Please excuse the Thomas the Tank Engine video; it's the only one that allowed embedding.)

At first listen, "Whenever You Need Somebody" sounds more or less the same as "Never Gonna Give You Up", but notice one thing: cooler bass. Also notice how each element of the song is just slightly more unusual than its equivalents in the bigger hit. Theme, for instance: given the choice between a song where the guy professes his ironclad devotion to the girl — what else is new? — and one where the guy honestly levels the girl that, yeah, he wants to get with her and thinks she's keen and all, but he's not going to work his boxers in a twist if she doesn't reciprocate. He'll just operate outside of the normal relationship framework instead; no big deal. He's cool. He'll be around. ( once pointed out to me that the track is a retooling of an earlier SAW production for O'Chi Brown. The original's not bad, though the sound's a bit thin by comparison.)

I get the impression that, due to its opening trifecta of "Never Gonna Give You Up", "Whenever You Need Somebody" and "Together Forever", Whenever You Need Somebody is critically regarded as somewhat front-loaded. And indeed, those three are followed by a version of "It Would Take a Strong Strong Man" that does not justify its own existence. (I actually kind of hated it even when the disc was at its peak in my personal rotation.) But the track after that? Different story.


"The Love Has Gone" is choice. In fact, I have it on good authority that it's Rick's own favorite from the album, so there. (To quote that same authority, "the song have a danceable tune but very romantic.") The impact of the very first two seconds is enough to keep me starting the song over and over, or at least I would if I didn't like the synth line over the first eight bars so much. It doesn't hurt that the bass is very nearly S.O.S. Band-like. It also avoids the simple repetition of "I love this woman!", opting instead for something a hairsbreadth more thematically complex. Many of my favorite poppiest-of-the-pop tunes have this form, although it may be more simple correlation (what I like sonically tends to fit with it lyrically) than anything:

1. I love this woman!
2. Except, crap, I just realized she walked out on me.
3. Weird. I wonder why?
4. Hey, I bet I could get her back if I really tried.
5. Y'know, screw it, I'm going to do it, hell or high water.

(Information Society's "Back in the Day", from their latest album Synthesizer, has much the same deal going on, and I've been playing it damn near nonstop this week.)

I have many, many memories of hopping into my car after a workout at the gym, popping in Whenever You Need Somebody — during one long stretch, it was probably already in there anyway — punching it straight ahead to track five and and mentally preparing myself to kick the ass of whatever task lay ahead. I would then follow one listen of the song with another listen of it; call that a "cooldown round". Then would come track six, "Don't Say Goodbye", which doesn't sound like much of anything, but one understimates it at one's peril. Production-wise, I like it quite well — despite going back and forth on whatever that thing is making the boingy pattern on the high end of the percussion — and content-wise, it's not far from the previous number: whatever the guy and the girl had fell apart, but maybe it'll come back together. The difference is that here, the reunion is just a big "maybe", as opposed to the resolve of "The Love Has Gone". It's more like he's begging in "Don't Say Goodbye". Kinda undignified, y'ask me.

Whenever You Need Somebody runs mostly downhill from there. "Slipping Away" merits an honorable number of listens but doesn't ultimately work, "No More Looking For Love" is so bland that it isn't even on Youtube, "You Move Me" isn't much better, and "When I Fall in Love" is another non-existence-justifying cover, not to mention a badly jarring departure from the rest of the set. But I still like the album, even though it'll never again enjoy the same kind of favor from me that I bestowed upon it in high school.

The rest of Astley's catalog is really spotty. Hold Me in Your Arms, his second full-length release, is a quality inverse, having about as many solid tracks as Whenever You Need Somebody has shoddy ones. I seem to recall working up some degree of enthusiasm for "She Wants to Dance With Me" (I liked how they did the verses way more than the choruses and prechoruses), but it's enthusiasm I can't quite resummon. "I Don't Want to Lose Her" would theoretically be this disc's "The Love Has Gone" — I listened to it more than enough times to make that judgment — and I like the guy-reacquiring-girl ambition and all, but goddamn does that steel drum bridge bother me these days. Sophomore slump, I guess. One more data point proving late-80s stuff inferior to early- and mid-80s stuff.

Whether it was Astley's own decision or a handler's, 1990's Free took him in what one might call an "adult contemporary" direction, which I would call a bad move due to the fact that (a) it watered down the pop element and (b) the adult contemporary sphere, such as it is, already had one Michael McDonald and didn't need two. I'd link you up to the disc's opening cut, "In the Name of Love" (yeah, it is time to ban that title), but nobody's Youtubed it, so here's the second-best, "Move Right Out". I can't even remember anything else on Free, which is sort of a terrible sign because I did give it chance after chance.

Three years later came Body and Soul, which I used to think was Astley's nadir but which I've come to see as a net improvement over its predecessor. To be fair, it's a tall order not to frown on an album whose opener is a near-stereotypical exemplar of that early-90s fad where pop stars tried to get all "socially conscious". Because what solves the problem of hungry babies? Rick Astley singing about hungry babies. The whole thing is actually thematically imbecilic — if only you could hear the non-Youtubed paean to womanhood "Nature's Gift", which probably scores the chyx but is nonetheless laughable — but, on a production level, it sounds better and more distinctive than Free.

It wasn't until 2001 that the world would see and hear new Rick Astley material, and when he resurfaced with a video, hot damn was I excited:


My esteem for the "Sleeping" video remains high to this day. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: black-and-white is choice.) As for the song itself, well, almost as high; it probably helped at the time that I had lyrically similar problems getting to sleep with reasonable regularity. Nevertheless, I know full well that I would kill to produce a track that sounds half as solid. Its album, Keep it Turned On, definitely outshines the three that preceded it, but — let's get this out in the open — it lacks three important qualities: Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Perhaps in 2011, when the disc will qualify as decade-old pop music, I'll change my mindset. (Until then, I simply tend to my Savage Garden collection.)

I continue to keep an eye on Rick Astley, though he's put out nothing of interest in eight years. There was a covers album, Portrait, in 2005, but oy, again with the covers. I feel like I shouldn't write the guy off, though; it still seems entirely plausible that he could bust out another "The Love Has Gone" the moment my back is turned, and boy, wouldn't I feel like an a-hole then.

Family Genesis (YMCK, 2008)

I used to love Zach Meston's Bold (But Not Brash) Website, which, if you clicked the link, you see is now only accessible via the Internet Wayback Machine. Back in the 90s, Meston — the author of a bunch of those old multi-game strategy guides with vaguely Boris Vallejo-y covers — used the page to dish raw, unadulterated dirt on the game industry. Evidently, this got Meston into all kinds of trouble, so he pulled the thing down before the turn of the millennium. It occurred to me to use today's advanced search technology to see if Meston had revived the site. He hadn't, but I did find a couple entertaining interviews, one of which contained this intriguing quote:

I was recently turned on to the first album of YMCK, a trio that blends J-pop vocals with jazzy arrangements of NES-era synthesized music; it’s the most unique listening experience I’ve had in eons.

While I wasn't immediately sold — that sounded somewhat gimmicky, and I hadn't listened to J-pop in, like, a decade — I still followed the lead and looked the band up, since I'm always up for a "unique listening experience," even if that "unique" is incorrectly preceded by a modifier. "The most unique" isn't as brain-hurting as the much more common "very unique," but still, ouch, my lobes.

So I surfed over to YouTube — it's become my first resort for music-sampling — and pulled up this video of YMCK's "Starlight":

To which I mentally responded: Oh my christ that's cool.

Maybe you don't share my feeling. Maybe you muttered, "What the crap was that?" If so, let me hazard a guess as to your demographic. I'll bet folding money that you either

• were born before 1972, with which birth year you would have been twelve years old when the NES was released. If you were above Nintendo's age bracket, you most likely never imprinted on the 8-bit audiovisual aesthetic and are now unable to parse it.
• were born after 1988, with which birth year your first video game console would have, barring hand-me-downs, been something more in the PlayStation/Nintendo 64 realm. With two system-generations of distance, you most likely never imprinted on the 8-bit audiovisual aesthetic and are now unable to parse it.
• were one of those kids whose parents didn't let them play video games. I'm guessing you were the victim of Amish and/or Mennonite parenting. That, or you squandered your youth with "serious" games like Civilization. Either way, my condolences.

If, however, you're like me, born in the late 70s to mid-80s and reared on a hearty diet of 8- and 16-bit gaming — I started with a Sega Genesis but entered the NES market with a vengeance in '95, when it was at its cheapest — you couldn't take your eyes off of that video. It was like an aesthetic crack cocaine. Not only did the music itself bring back the vast majority of your happy childhood memories, but, my god, the visuals — they were like the graphics of the holy grail, the game we thirsted to play. The band members' representations as characters with numeric attributes and specific "skills". The selection screen offering four colored planets. The scaling sprites. The cities, the castles, the satellites, the segmented lava dragons. Stylistic perfection.

There wasn't even a question of whether I should pick up an album. Luckily, Family Genesis, their third and newest release, had recently made its appearance on iTunes. And, yes, I know I probably could have saved the eleven bucks and gotten the tracks from a "torrent" or something, but I burnt all my tech-dicking-around goodwill when I tried to install Ubuntu. But I think I've gotten my money's worth; I've already spun the thing a bunch of times just trying to figure out a way to describe it.

I thought "Pizzicato Five with an NES instead of instruments" would be a clever way to explain YMCK, but it doesn't quite capture what the group is. Like the Pet Shop Boys, YMCK is not merely a band; it's an aesthetic entity. As well it should be. Of the three members, one is devoted solely to crafting videos. They exist in what they refer to as "the 8-bit world" as well as "real life". They come as close as anyone I've ever seen to truly transcending the boundaries between music, video, and the cultural context surrounding both. I'm keeping my eye on them.

(Oh, and the music itself? Solid pop. Nice and catchy. As with all J-pop, I'm probably better off not understanding the lyrics; they mostly just get in the way in Anglophone pop anyway.)

Very (Pet Shop Boys, 1993)

I have been known to enjoy, throughout the last eight or so years, flipping through shelves, stacks and bins of used CDs in search of the increasingly rare album I don't already have. Do this enough, and you start to see the same discs pop up again and again. (I run into Savage Garden's first album quite a lot — I'll buy it one of these times, but I'm convinced that its price will, on current trend, soon reach negative numbers.) The most distinctive to my eyes has been the Pet Shop Boys' Very, with its bright orange, entirely opaque case and LEGO-textured front face. I finally broke down and bought it. Not that I was going in blind. I was sort of familiar with the Boys' body of work, but not enough to, you know, name more than two of their titles. When I found that an art TA of Madelaine's — who's actually sitting right across the coffee shop from me as I type — strongly reminded me of lead singer Neil Tennant, I thought to myself, "Hey, the Pet Shop Boys. They use synthesizers. They make pop. They've stood the test of time. Aren't they a band I should like?" This notion intersected my desperation for some new music. So it turns out I do like the Pet Shop Boys, not just for their music — which is often pop at its most well-made — but for the fact that style and aesthetics are integral components not just of their appearance, their videos and their album covers, but of they very entity they comprise. "The style of the Pet Shop Boys" is not a separate concept from "the Pet Shop boys" in the way that, say, "the style of the Dave Matthews Band" is from "the Dave Matthews Band." The Pet Shop Boys are their aesthetics; take the aesthetics away, and you pull a load-bearing block from the band's Jenga tower. Quoth Wikipedia: Traditionally, Pet Shop Boys have always favoured avant-garde tailored fashions. Tennant has referenced the designers of his suits in certain interviews, and Lowe has often sported outfits and glasses made by Issey Miyake, Stüssy and Yohji Yamamoto's Y-3 for Adidas. Presentation has always been a major theme for the Pet Shop Boys, and the duo have dramatically "reinvented" their image twice in their career. In 1993, when promoting their Very album, they wore brightly coloured costumes and used state-of-the-art computer technology to place themselves in a modern computer graphic world. This concept of reinvention was revisited for the promotion of the Nightlife album, in which they transformed their look wearing wigs and glasses with very futuristic urban wardrobes. In 2006 both Tennant and Lowe were seen on stage and in photographs wearing clothes designed by Hedi Slimane/Dior Homme. The duo have always been interested in the artwork, design, and photography for their releases. Photographer Eric Watson helped create the original image of Pet Shop Boys, creating many of their photographs and videos from 1984 to 1991. In design they have primarily worked with Mark Farrow, who designed the cover of their first Parlophone album release in 1986. The collaboration between Mark Farrow and Pet Shop Boys is comparable to the designer-band relationship of Peter Saville and New Order, Anton Corbijn and Depeche Mode, or the epic-length collaboration of Simon Halfon and Paul Weller. Their record sleeves are quite often very minimal, and the attention to detail is obvious, down to the font type and style. In October 2006, they released a 336-page hardcover book entitled Catalogue, showcasing their accomplishments in artwork, design, and of course, music. This retrospective of work is certainly one of the most comprehensive anthologies any music artist could have. I'm going to have to snag that book. So you've probably gathered that I have never complained of any artist or band that they've forgotten that "it used to be about the music." While the music is a critical component of a musician's career — I'm not enough of a contrarian to refute that — it's but one of many. It's the tracks you lay down, but it's also the clothes you wear, the attitude you project, the character you become, the ideas you embody, the dynamic you have with your fellow musicians, the dynamic you have with your fans, the visual choices you make, the positional choices you make. The Pet Shop Boys have internalized this. The only living recording artist to have arguably done it better is Madonna, and I often regret that I'm a too much of a heterosexual male to fully enjoy her. (I doubt any straight man can find a point of entry — har, har — into Madonna any more; she doesn't even have any ogle value, at least no ogle value without a scary edge.) Not that the Pet Shop Boys are exactly the straightest act around; Very has been called the band's "coming-out album" due to its slightly more overt gay content and Tennant's emergence from the public closet around the time of its release. (And keyboard player Chris Lowe tends to muse, when he talks at all, about how there's only one true sexual orientation.) That's all to the good, since I happen to think that the disc's gayest moments — such as the opener "Can You Forgive Her?", where Tennant asks a guy if he'll accept his girlfriend's ridicule of his homosexual tendencies — are its best. That they can produce sharp, clever songs without sacrificing an iota of production value nearly brings me over to the Pet Shop Boys' side by itself; it's the same reason I'm such a Steely Dan fan. Too often, outfits that put work into the verbal content of their songs act as if that gets them a free ride on, y'know sounding good. And don't get me started on the whole "lo-fi" movement.

Living in a Magazine (Zoot Woman, 2001)

Upon identifying my four very favorite songs, I punched them all into Pandora so it would, with any luck, spit back a selection of tracks with similar musical properties. Maybe I had an even more favorite song of which I was unaware!

One of the first results to grab me was Zoot Woman's "Jessie", a cut from their 2001 album Living in a Magazine. After the initial "wow, this is great" impulse, I researched the band and discovered that they're a going concern, and a youngish one at that. That's unusual — most of the groups or artists I latch onto have decades of recording behind them, are defunct, or have gone defunct and are on at least their first comeback. The charitable spin is that I prefer to listen to what's stood the Test of Time; what's more likely is that I'm terrified of wiping out while surfing the wave of the moment's current, fleeting trend.

So — and this, for me, is unprecedented — I immediately went on iTunes and bought the album — that's how strong I found "Jessie". The worst case scenario would be one with which we're all familiar, wherein the rest of the disc sounds nothing like the attractive track. Fortunately, that's not the case with Living in a Magazine, a suite of pretty damn well-crafted pop — and pop is one of our time's prime venues for craft — that uses synthesizers in a way that no English pop group has done in decades. I thought synths had become the domain of the laboriously retro (bad) or the the laboriously D.I.Y. (worse), but Zoot Woman showed me otherwise.

That said, the album has some dead zones, especially when things get a little too jangly — in my world, "jangly" is absolutely the most damning pejorative applicable to music — but there's another standout track, "Information First", that's nearly "Jessie"'s equal, especially when it comes to working the synth pads. Sadly, it appears that Zoot Woman have since abandoned the slick pop tradition for something called "electroclash," a term I sometimes hear associated with decent dance-y stuff but more often with garden-variety ugly sounds. A released track from their upcoming album sounds acceptable, I guess, if a little goofy and not particularly distinctive.

I've got a bunch of musical ideas of my own, but not much experience producing the stuff. As I build my home recording studio, it approaches the level where I can use to crank out not just radio shows but fine tunes as well. With this goal in mind, I listen to music for stuff to copy even more than I listen for DJing material or for my own pure aesthetic response. Since I'd ideally like to work on projects with a distinct pop sensibility, a polished surface and a slight edge of cold detachment without irony (note italics), there's a lot I want to copy in Living in a Magazine, so it must be good!