Final quotes and discussion points from EddyFest 2011 (Weingarten/Kogan)

[CHRISTOPHER WEINGARTEN]

• CE: “What’s weird about Accidental — and it seems like a lot of people like Accidental more than Stairway now — this is a tangent, but — Accidental, a lot of those lists, it’s proto-ILM [a.k.a. I Love Music]. To me it kind of decreases its value over time, it’s just like, ‘oh, I was just doing ILM threads.’  CW: Yeah, where as now you’d have, like, 50 people to help you make it even more thorough.
• “Now the information is on your fingertips, so like, who gives a shit? Back then, it was actually just fun to figure that stuff out… Back in those days, you actually had to listen to music.”
• CE confesses to using Wiki: “You can’t not use it… Everybody’s knowledge becomes everybody else’s knowledge. Which means there’s no secret knowledge, there’s fewer and fewer surprises.”
• CE re: the Cloud: “You know what? I don’t want fucking everything at my fingertips. It was better when it wasn’t at my fingertips… I would rather find something by accident, or hear something accidental over the radio, than be, you know, looking for it and be able to find it in 30 seconds. It takes all the fun out of it. Not all the fun, but it takes a lot of the fun out of it.”
• CW: “We’ve kind of lost the folklore aspect of music” (to illustrate the point, notes the “Eat Me easter egg” in the Licensed to Ill album art, which he was told about well after the fact).
• CW: “What do you do to keep that element of surprise in your listening?”  CE: “What do I do? Outside of what I have to do for money, I don’t listen to music on the internet — I just don’t. I live in Austin, there are eight pretty good record stores here, maybe, most of them have dollar bins, there’s a record convention twice a year that has dollar bins, there are garage sales, there are thrift stores… in the car I have my radio on and hear stuff by accident.”
• “I want to walk into a used record store, go to a dollar bin, and see “Shoot the Pump” by J. Walter Negro that Christgau wrote about in his “Additional Consumer News” to the Consumer Guide in 1982, that I’d never seen, and I’m like, holy shit — this is that record. And pay a dollar for it. And it’ll be the best record I’ve heard in the last five years, which it is…. You can still do it, you just have to not fall for everything they’re trying to sell you, I guess. Just because someone creates a need for me, doesn’t mean I have that need.”
• CW: “So, let’s say I were to adopt the accidental method of hearing music. How would I know what chillwave sounds like?  CE: Why would you want to?  CW: That’s a very good point! But I feel that part of our job is knowing what the discourse is about, and knowing, you know, the things that are defining the sound of now.  CE: It’s part of your job if you’re writing about chillwave, for one thing. It’s not part of my job to know…. [discussion then detours into another terrible-sounding genre he’d be better off not kowing much about] what power violence sounds like .. Until I’m assigned a power violence article, I could give a shit what power violence sounds like.”
• CE acknowledges that his perspective in part stems from being “one of the very, very few people in this world lucky enough to get free promos in the mail pretty much every working day for the last quarter century.”
• Good points by CE on why it’s not necessarily important to know what chillwave is, or which chillwave artists matter, if you’re reviewing a chillwave record… “the point is, I’m writing about that record… I don’t even have to pretend chillwave exists!” (CW: “I wish I could pretend it didn’t exist!”)
• CW ends interview by “[lobbing] a softball” — “Have you talked to any of the Beastie Boys since?”  CE ponders writing a 25-years-ago-today essay — “hey, maybe I should!” [Heard it here first.]

[FRANK KOGAN]

• How Pere Ubu & Nazareth Brought Frank and Chuck Together at Last: CE asks FK “how we first met”; FK notes it was due to correspondence FK started with CE after reading “Howls From the Heartland: The Untamed Midwest” in the VV (said piece of which is reprinted in RARAF); FK took exception at time to CE saying Pere Ubu “[thought] of themselves as a heavy metal band, and I said, ‘okay, I’m gonna write this guy a letter and set him right!'”
• We Are All Cinderella Now: Randy Montana and the State of Contemporary Country: FK’s favourite RM song, after one listen, is “It’s Gone” in part because the riff reminds him of “Gypsy Road” by “Schoolly-D’s favourite band, Cinderella.” CE responds: “I hear Cinderella in so much modern country that I probably stopped hearing Cinderella.” … FK “really likes” the guitars on the RM album, and notes that “country has kept the guitar as a viable contemporary instrument, and I wouldn’t say that they’re breaking ground, but… if, in let’s say 1969, Jorma Kaukonen or someone like that had done some of those intervals that the guitars were doing on this album, I would’ve said, ‘Wow! That’s damn amazing and innovative.'” … CE and FK affirm mutual belief that (in CE’s words) “this is a really horrible year for country.” … Short riff by CE on hair metal’s affinity with cowboys and with southern rock… CE: “I kind of think that what made country so exciting in the last ten years, it seems like it was “a historic blip, and I just feel like it had to run out.” … FK: “Why Country Sucks: That could be a fanzine!”
• CE and FK on K-Pop:  FK notes of one K-Pop outfit (SW not sure who’s being discussed here) that they have “incredible dance routines” (due to performing the song on different TV shows, night after night) — “they make things into an event very well.” … CE would enjoy more K-Pop if he wasn’t chasing down YouTubes and was instead actually listening to LPs of the stuff (“I have to really go out of my way to see stuff… you have to be very active to pick up on that stuff”) … CE’s 3-year old daughter does, however, love E.Via’s “Pick Up U.”
• Just in Case You Were Thinking of Buying the New Night Ranger Album: FK asks CE “what have you been listening to in the last day?” A seemingly startled CE provides capsule review of new NR, which he just listened to in his car: “I really liked the music, I liked the singing, I liked the melodies, I liked the arrangements, but I kind of think the songwriting sucks from beginning to end. So I don’t even think I’m going to end up keeping the record.”
• CE’s Other Recent Listening… includes: New John Waite and Nazareth albums (FK hasn’t heard either). CE: “In the new book, I write about how I kind of left metal to the metalheads, and I don’t really pay attention to it much anymore. But Rhapsody wanted metal to be my specialty, and I basically have  contracted to a certain number of hours a month for them.” Via which he has also listened to and enjoyed  The Gentleman’s Pistols (from England… “seventies hard rock stuff”) and Cauldron (from Toronto… “early ’80s metal… between really early Def Leppard and really early Metallica, when they were both wearing blue jeans”)… “What’s weird is that I’m actually listening to rock this year.”
• With the Clok Tik-Tokking on Pop: CE: “I say I hate country now, but I hate pop music even more; I kind of don’t give a shit about pop music now, and I feel really bad about that, you know, I feel like I must be missing something, but I don’t know where it is. I mean, I guess it’s in Korea! [laughs]… I can say this is a horrible year for country, but it’s not like it seems like a better year for r&b or pop to me.” FK thinks it’s better than 2009, which was the real disappointing recent pop year for him, and that, following exciting things like “Boom Boom Pow” and “Disturbia” pop “got into a really lame rut, really fast.”  CE: “Last year I got excited by Ke$ha, eventually, and the year before I got excited by Gaga, eventually, and… the Far East Movement stuff last year…” CE also notes that he’s “the disco sucks guy now — but maybe this time, ‘disco sucks’ is right, maybe this time disco really does suck…. And I want to love Pitbull.” FK notes there’s “a ceiling” on how good Pitbull will ever be; CE thinks there may be a ceiling on how good any of it will be, including Ke$ha and Lady Gaga.… FK: “Ke$ha’s interesting. My guess is that there’s actually nowhere for her to go, that she’s actually… if she repeats the stuff, she’s ‘repeating the stuff,’ but if she — how much can you do about, like, I threw up in the closet? How many times can you do that? And be the, you know, the kind of hood rat in kind of glitter rags who mingles with the rich and throws up on them? I thought it was a great idea, I think Tom Ewing said this… she sort of found a way to make auto-tune register as feedback…” CE: “Right, she was using it as noise, or whatever…” FK: “But it’s like, so much of it — it’s like ’60s stuff. ’65 through ’68 was astonishing. But so much of that depended on the sounds being new. And the idea of affronting a lot of people, and you can’t sustain that because it all gets accepted, and in some ways it’s now, sort of, the standard part of the palette, so that Randy Montana’s band can do stuff that would’ve affronted people 40 years ago. And now it’s just kind of, you know, these are the colours we’re using, and…” CE: “But Frank, I kind of think you care more about music affronting people than I do. I don’t care if Randy Montana is affronting people.” FK: “No, I don’t either, what I’m saying is that, the music that depends on affronting people is gonna have a time limit, because it just can’t keep working…” CE brings Eminem, Axl Rose, Johnny Rotten, the Beastie Boys, and Courtney Love into it: “They don’t really last that long.” FK: “Punks don’t grow, they stop.” [Lots more good bits in this part, about old people making pop music, self-destruction in pop, etc., but SW’s wrist is sore, not from typing but from constantly stopping and starting and rewinding the mp3.]
• CE: “I’m getting tired here, Frank!”
• The Revival of Everything Rock vs. Collage Rock:  CE notes that collage = not just Teena Marie but “Wango Tango” by Ted Nugent (and Charley Patton)…. FK draws distinction between ‘collage’ and ‘everything,’ CE calls it a misreading, claims that “maybe everything now” is “everything rock”… “everything rock is no big deal anymore”… CE “really, really, really doesn’t give a shit about Bruno Mars” … CE: “If something like ‘Pump up the Volume’ came on now, I’d probably like it more than anything on the radio, it just seems like it might be more interesting.” Also notes that rock no longer being afraid of dance music or hip-hop didn’t make rock better… CE even down on disco-metal fusion: “It probably ended up happening, and it probably sucked.”