Pages tagged “issue 29”

I think Jesse Colin Young mostly got it right. Deep in my heart of hearts, I want to smile on my brother. I’d like us all to get together and love one another, right now. Then somebody cuts me off on the freeway, or a brazen telemarketer interrupts my dinner, and all these fuzzy hippie sentiments are shot to hell.

When these sort of things happen, I do what any petty, non-confrontational and easily offended music lover would do. I put on Bob Dylan. Specifically, I listen to “When the Ship Comes In” from The Times They Are A-Changin’.

The backstory that surrounds this song maintains that Dylan wrote it after he was snubbed by a New York City hotel clerk who didn’t like his scruffy appearance. Dylan finally stormed upstairs with his room key, sat down at the typewriter, and pounded out the greatest apocalyptic revenge song ever written. Why settle for a mere insult when you can summon wholesale destruction on an epic, biblical scale?

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’.
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands,
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh’s tribe,
They’ll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.

It makes you wonder how he would’ve responded if room service had been slow.

In any event, I listen to that song when I’m feeling oppressed and downtrodden—particularly put upon by the excruciating demands of a middle-class, suburban life. My whine turns into Dylan’s howl, and for a few minutes I can envision a world in which all is right and just, where hotel clerks and telemarketers receive their deserved thrashings, and where I always get my way. There is a delicious appeal there. I’m not sure many people would want to drop by for a visit, but the doors are always open and ready to swing back, hard, on somebody’s sorry ass.

It’s also quintessentially Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan, more than any contemporary songwriter, has perfected the art of the melodic middle-finger salute. Songs like “Positively 4th Street,” “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Idiot Wind” confront the bastards head on, and no one has ever spewed poetic bile more passionately. But these are only some of the early salvos in an ongoing bombardment. Now 46 years into his career, Dylan has never really eased up on the invective. “Workingman Blues #2,” from his latest, Modern Times, foresees a world in which the proletariat will drag their oppressors down to hell, stand them against the wall and sell them to their enemies.

It’s one of the many things I love about Dylan’s music. He has virtually created a new genre—Spleen Rock. It’s the neat trick of holding nothing back in dazzlingly creative and spiteful ways. And it is justice for me, and upon your head.

But I still think about old Jesse Colin Young. And I continue to live in a world that hasn’t picked up on the fact that it’s all about me, that seems strangely oblivious to the way things are supposed to work. There’s a part of me that revels in the sheer audacity of “When the Ship Comes In,” that delights in the casual and contemptuous dismissal of all the small-minded people, the surrender that is refused, the minor annoyances and major sorrows that are swept away with the apocalyptic tide. It’s a first-class vengeance fantasy. And it is very much a fantasy.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s an astonishing song, still, 44 years after the petulant fact, even when seen in the context of a musical universe that now encompasses The Sex Pistols and Public Enemy, a thousand New Dylans and a thousand new Angry Young Men. It’s the peculiar genius that can whip up a howling fury out of an inconsequential rebuff, and it’s one hell of a kiss-off. But it’s also impossible to escape or excuse the vindictiveness that hangs like a shroud over “When the Ship Comes In.”

I understand how it works. I understand it every time I retreat to the den after a hard day, put on the headphones, and settle back to enjoy the fantasy. You revel in the fury, and you sneer in a mild-mannered, non-confrontational way and wait for the catharsis. You call down imprecations and thunderbolts. You nuke your enemies, and you get on with your life. I love that song. I love all those songs. But I still don’t like what they say about Bob Dylan. Or me.

Typically we love The Onion's sly manipulation of journalistic protocol. Like when instead of interviewing real actual sources who are typically unfunny, they photoshop George W. Bush so he appears to be standing in the oval office hoisting a large anaconda and grinning. However we were both flattered and dismayed when the concept for their recent Sousaphone Hero story appeared to be cribbed right from the pages of our March '07 issue. Thanks and damn you, Onion! Love, Paste.

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DEAR RED OCTANE,

My name is Elbert Lagerfeld, and I serve as the Senior VP of Interactive Entertainment Marketing Solutions for a reputable firm here in Corvallis, Mont. We keep an eye on the video-game industry’s hottest new trends and brainstorm creative ways to draw a bit of extra sizzle from them. A sales associate at Best Buy recently turned me on to your wildly popular Guitar Hero II and now I find it popping up everywhere. Just this afternoon I heard a comedian on some VH1 list special call the game “so totally sex!” and, though I’ve never heard “sex” used as an adjective, I’m pretty sure I agree 100 percent.

The game’s track selection is impeccable: Mötley Crüe (spandex-clad Satanism!), Rush (anarchic time signatures!) and G N’ R (a child who is sweet!), to name just a few of my personal faves. Plus, I honestly feel like a guitar virtuoso when I wield the miniature plastic Gibson SG controller and mash its color-coded “fret buttons” in time with the relentlessly encroaching dots on screen. This game might be more addictive than Tetris.

So you’ve got a great game. Well, buy yourself a sandwich! You can’t stop there. Let me hit you with some ideas right off the top of my head. I’m talking brand extension here, people. I’m talking a whole line of games. Ready? Here goes:

1. Sitar Hero: I know, I know, this one’s kind of a no-brainer—I figured I’d start with low-hanging fruit. For starters, the word “sitar” is phonetically similar to “guitar” and I’m pretty sure you play it while sitting Indian-style. One thing kids don’t like is exercise and Guitar Hero involves standing, which—to most hardcore gamers—has exercise written all over it. Plus, the metal plectrum you use to pick a sitar is called a mezrab, which sounds like the name of a Norwegian black-metal band. Guitar Hero fans adore Norwegian black metal and will be anxious to get their hands on this one.

2. Sousaphone Hero: Kiss the stereotype of the pimply-faced, overweight sousaphone player goodbye! The instrument is now considered a symbol of virility, and—let’s face it—it’s incredibly hot in marching-band circles. The instrument’s metal is literally heavy, so just being able to march around the football field with it resting on your shoulder is a feat of strength. Granted, the plastic sousaphone controller will weigh less than two pounds, but remember: perception is reality.

Gameplay-wise, what if every time you play a set of 10 notes in a row mistake-free, your character’s sousaphone bell gets a bit larger? (Idea for unlockable character: Oom Papa.) If you manage to hit 50 notes in a row without a mistake, the bell sucks the entire crowd into it and, moments later, spits their half-digested entrails back into the bleachers—this will be worth the “M” rating, trust me. We could also sell the game in fancier packaging, add $14.99 to the price tag and label it the X-Treme “Halftime Is Go Time!” Edition.

(Note: in our marketing materials, we leverage the fact that Marilyn Manson played sousaphone his freshman year of high school. I read it on someone’s blog and verified it against a news website called The Onion. Could lend us some cred with our scary-contact-lens-wearing demographic.)

3. Keytar Hero: The band Devo was conspicuously absent from both Guitar Hero releases—as were pioneering musical acts like Thomas Dolby, John Tesh and Croatian sexpot Belinda Bedekovic. Keytar Hero will remedy those sinister oversights and restore balance to the force. There’s nothing wrong with pianists resenting guitarists for having a cooler, more phallic instrument. After all, the word “pianist” doesn’t sound phallic enough. I’m just being facetious; it sounds totally phallic! Regardless, the keytar is a national treasure and our game will cement its legendary status.

4. Air-Guitar Hero: We simply repackage the original games by themselves in a large, mostly empty box and charge people an extra $29.95 for a limited-edition air guitar. Lower manufacturing cost = solid profit potential. At first people will think it’s a scam but then they’ll realize that hello it’s limited edition.

5. Triangle Hero: We’d be out of our minds if we didn’t have a spin-off that catered to preschool gamers. The triangle is one of those elegantly simple instruments that’s never gone out of style. One day Lil’ Timmy will get the bridge of his nose pierced and pledge what’s left of his soul to heavy metal, but for now let’s give him a small length of bent metal (or, in this case, plastic) and teach him to sit quietly through a 14-minute Bach concerto, waiting patiently to strike his one chiming note toward the end of the piece. Parents will love it because the game dovetails perfectly with their child’s classroom unit on shapes. And young kids will love it because it lights up and makes obnoxious giggling noises when you chew on it!

Please contact me immediately so we can implement these ideas and go over others I didn’t have room to include in this missive.

Playing for keeps,
Elbert
ccdevilleizgod666@gmail.com

Surprisingly effective tribute marries Ono’s distinct vocals to fresh music

In the broadest pop-cultural sense, Yoko Ono’s name is shorthand for the opportunistic hanger-on who ingratiates herself into a scene and, through ill-conceived meddling, ruins something perfect. This is the context in which her music is usually heard. Or, more often, not heard, as it’s frequently dismissed out of hand. But a trawl through her back catalog reveals that Ono’s early experimental work now sounds oddly prescient, and she also wrote a number of great pop songs. She’s received her props through the years—praise from bands like Public Image Ltd., Sonic Youth and, more recently, in chart-topping remixes from the likes of The Pet Shop Boys and Basement Jaxx. But common perception has been slower to change.

Doubters would do well to start with this unusual compilation. It’s not exactly a remix set; instead, a number of artists were given access to original multi-track tapes and were told “take what you wish and create something new.” Almost all of them borrowed Ono’s vocals only and built a new piece around them, becoming, in essence, her backing band for a single song. Generally, the focus is on the pop Ono, with only a couple songs given over to her avant-garde work, but even these are made more accessible.

The result is a de facto best-of album, created in collaboration with a number of interesting bands whose treatments range from conservative expansions to radical re-workings. Some songs come together just how you think they would, like the crunchy, driving update of “Kiss Kiss Kiss” by nü-electro artist Peaches, who digs back to the ’80s for blocky synths and brings them to bear on a harder groove from the post-rave world. Others are completely unexpected, like Spiritualized’s shockingly effective take on the oft-remixed “Walking on Thin Ice,” which re-imagines the New Wave song as an epic, gospel-tinged acid-rock anthem.

Between these extremes are a number of flat-out great songs. Antony Hegarty, the versatile cabaret singer who usually fronts the Johnsons, intensifies “Toy Boat,” removing the original’s soft-rock instrumentation and bathing the song in shimmering electronics while adding his own distinctive croon in the background. Chan Marshall of Cat Power turns Ono’s 1995 song “Revelations” into a touching call-and-response duet, shifting the order of the words to great effect and then sealing the deal with casual upright piano that works perfectly with the song’s intimate scale. The Apples in Stereo prove that their Beatles worship extends neatly to spouses, as they dress up the stately, mid-tempo “No One Can See Me Like You Do”—originally a ridged electropop concoction—in lovely baroque clothing that reeks pleasingly of Glaswegian bands like Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura.

A few other tracks are decent but not revelatory: Producer Hank Shocklee, co-founder of Public Enemy, contributes intro and outro versions of “Yes, I’m a Witch” that never quite catch fire; and The Flaming Lips turn noise freakout “Cambridge 1969” into an instrumental that sounds too much like one of their own outtakes. Still, the highlights are very high indeed, demonstrating just how wrong received wisdom in pop music can be. All I am saying is give Yoko Ono a chance.

Despite the warming glow, the Brindley Brothers’ sophomore effort fails to ignite

Filled With Fire would be more satisfying if it existed in a vacuum. Luke Brindley’s storytelling senses prove sharp as ever with the waltzing, bittersweet romance of “Everybody Wants,” and newcomers may latch onto his streetwise and emotive prose during the E Street shuffle of “Saturday Night.” But Fire simply isn’t as much fun as the Brothers’ bracing, rough-hewn 2004 debut, Playing with the Light, where even tender tracks like “The Crazy One” featured sputtering guitars and Daniel Brindley’s edgy Fender Rhodes keyboard. Here, the embers are stoked to a milder flame during “Hurricane,” which borrows David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” riff.

Believe me when I say I didn’t expect much from this secret supposed paradise known as Isla Mujeres, a tiny island off the coast of Cancún.

For one, it’s a tiny island off the coast of Cancún—Cancún, which is nothing but a hairy ball-sack of a tourist trap. It’s stuffed with so many T-shirt shops and tequila-shooting frat boys that you can barely see the giant stucco restaurants where the waiters wear gun belts with booze bottles tucked in the holsters, let alone the refuse-infested seascape beyond that.

Besides, I never thought I’d go back to Cancún after the last time I’d visited a few years prior, when I’d made sure to piss off all the shop owners by being a bitchy tourist before I left. “Excuse me,” I’d say, “but do you sell T-shirts here? I mean, I know you have T-shirts here, but I was wondering if you sell them, since I’ve been standing here a good 45 seconds and you haven’t waited on me. So I thought maybe this was a T-shirt museum or something, and all these T-shirts are actually on display rather than for sale. Am I wrong?”

So you see, I couldn’t exactly revisit this place without the expectation that I’d be forced back to the plane at torch-point. But the way my new neighbor, known simply as The Psychic Miss Sherrie Cash, kept talking about Isla Mujeres made me wonder if I’d tossed that part of the Caribbean into the toilet too soon. I’d never heard of the little island, but The Psychic Miss Sherrie Cash used to live there, and every time she talked about it she foamed at the mouth and lapsed into a trance, practically, recalling the loveliness of the place and how she couldn’t wait to get back. At dusk the sky was the same color as the ocean, she’d sigh, which made the horizon a mystical parfait of blue hues, and the sand—sigh—was white as washed linen and warm as a womb.

But what really got my Internet-ticket-finding fingers working was the fact that she had lived there an entire year in a hotel that only charged 10 bucks a night. Ten bucks a night? Now I had to see this. I knew it couldn’t have been a crappy hotel because The Psychic Miss Sherrie Cash was?? partial to her makeup, hair extensions, rhinestone-studded butterfly clips and reams of beaded gowns she quick-changed in and out of all day. A woman like this cannot live in the kind of spider-hole you’d think 10 bucks a night would afford you. The room had to have had adequate bedding and a good cross breeze, if nothing else, and I would happily wade through that puddle of hangover puke called Cancún if it meant a decent room on a rustic Caribbean island 9 miles off the coast of Mexico for only 10 bucks a night.

A Fact-Finding Mission

It was just a matter of time before round-trip airfare to Cancún was on sale for less than my water bill, so I hopped the plane with The Psychic Miss Cash and off we went. I have to tell you, from the air, the ocean was the color of the knees on child’s faded dungarees, and I almost believed right there that anything was possible, even the Caribbean on 10 bucks a night. The drive through Cancún to get to Puerto Júarez—the port where you catch the 15-minute water taxi to the island—was the hell I expected, but once I stepped off the boat and onto Isla Mujeres I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—a perfectly passable, bucolic little Caribbean enclave. The sun was setting, and the sky was such an acid splash of vivid color that it hurt my heart to look at it.

We went straight to the legendary $10-a-night hotel—a tiny, tidy, three-story adobe called Marcianito (translation: “little Martian”), with double beds, painted shutters and balconies dripping with blooming vines. Sure enough, prices had soared to a whopping $25 a night. I tried to muster some huffiness over that, but it’s hard to be huffy when, outside, the horizon is a mystical parfait of blue hues and the sand is white as washed linen and warm as a womb.

"The world, unlivened by alcohol, music or sex, was tinny, pallid, unwound,” thinks Lucinda Hoekke, the protagonist of Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet.

Driven so relentlessly by her appetites, Lucinda seems the obvious point-of-view choice for a novel about a struggling L.A. rock band that manages a single modest hit before the obligatory betrayals and squabbling over songwriting credits take them down. Lucinda can only make sense of the world by drinking, screwing or playing her bass. “I bet they fuck all night, every night, when we’re not looking,” she says to drummer Denise during a visit to the L.A. Zoo.

Lucinda is at once spontaneous and irresponsible, irresistibly flagrant and self-destructive. She sleeps with three quarters of the male leads in this novel, makes a rather desperate and deluded pass at the remaining quarter and, yet—for all the damage she does to herself and those around her—she loves her band. When things go well for her, as they do when she’s engaged in her favorite activities, Lucinda feels that the source of her happiness was a stream through all their lives, a bass figure under all their music.” The fact that she breaks up with her lover Matthew, the lead singer, in the first chapter is no loss to her. In fact, she sees it as a plus. “A lot of the great rock and roll bands are founded in break-ups, love triangles, love-hate relationships.”

Like the perfect pop song, Lucinda’s character straddles the murky border between cliché and profundity. It’s often hard to tell whether she’s a true rock ’n’ roll talent or a poseur. Lethem saddles her with a sensibility that can seem both shallow and appealingly forthright. He carefully avoids making her a musician with an annoyingly literary way of understanding the world, a trap many writers fail to avoid when writing about artists other than writers. Yet her songs come from that place from which all art derives—the unexpected collision of desire and some artifact blown in mercifully by the wind.

Her artifact is Carl, an older man who compulsively calls the complaint line she answers at her day job. The complaint line is actually a piece of performance art created by her ex-lover, Falmouth. In a nod to opportunistic art-world figures (clueless about rock ’n’ roll, if not indifferent to it) who promote rock bands—think Andy Warhol and Malcolm McLaren—Falmouth becomes, briefly, the band’s impresario. The band’s first gig, in fact, is at a sort of “happening” staged by Falmouth.

Lucinda’s infatuation with Carl the complainer leads to a binge of sex and scotch, and, eventually, to his appearance at their inaugural gig, where he discovers that the words out of his mouth—often uttered during copulation—have turned up in the band’s best songs. (One of his phrases, “Monster Eyes,” becomes not only the title of the band’s lone and ephemeral hit, but also its name.) The gig, improbably, is filled with label scouts, A&R men and a Los Angeles legend named Fancher Autumnbreast whose radio show is a known rung on the ladder to rock stardom. Industry types want to sign them, Fancher Autumnbreast wants them on his show—and now Carl wants to join the band.

The problem is, as Denise points out, Carl doesn’t really look like a member of a rock band. He’s pudgy in contrast to their hip thinness, and nowhere near as stylish a dresser as moody lead guitarist Bedwin, who wears top-buttoned thrift-shop shirts. But Carl has an enormous loft the band can use for practice space, and money to spend on booze and food. And, by this point, he’s Lucinda’s lover. At the radio gig, Autumnbreast pegs Carl immediately as a fifth Beatle, and, indeed, his disastrous performance on the show breaks up the band.

When Lethem describes Monster Eyes’ music, the prose becomes stiffly analytical; the sentence rhythms do little to convey the quality of the music itself. But the novel is less about a rock band than it is about Lucinda’s attempt to understand the choices she makes, particularly in love.

Despite the shifting allegiances, creative differences and wounded egos of these fledging rockers, it’s the rhythm of Lucinda’s movement from lover to lover, her verse/chorus/verse return to Matthew by novel’s end, that leaves the reader pondering the conundrum of great pop songs. How to create that hook, or some magical but archetypal-familiar sequence of chords, that will linger in the listener’s head, evoking both mystery and the sense that the song was written from inside the listener’s heart?

“You can’t be deep without a surface,” says Carl. There’s quite a bit of surface in this novel, but there’s also a sweet truthfulness in its investigation of how the songs we love express something we can never fully articulate. Lethem understands this paradox, even if his characters don’t.

The lowdown on high school...

There are bronzed jocks and pimple-faced dweebs in these essays about “barely surviving high school.” But the 25 “true stories” submitted by up-and-coming fiction writers (Owen King, Lisa Gabriele, Sean Doolittle and others) lift the fog of nostalgia that has enshrouded the high-school experience in pop culture and actually shine some new light on those trying times.

Not all contributors were dorks (though Will Clarke is called the “Will-tarde”); some were even half-cool (Zsa Zsa Gabor interrupts Todd Goldberg’s romantic tryst). But most are able to discuss the clichéd angst of adolescence with surprisingly fresh language—with an honest, restorative effect.

High school wasn’t the “best time” of these writers’ lives—but it surely has made for the best kind of reading material: In this collection, high school never sucks the same way twice.

The members of Air are no strangers to a well-chosen collaboration, having provided music for an album by Italian poet Alessandro Baricco, composed tracks for Charlotte Gainsbourg’s upcoming debut and contributed songs to Sofia Coppola’s films.

The Parisian duo’s latest, Pocket Symphony, brings them back together with longtime producer Nigel Godrich, as well as guests Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy) and Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), the latter of whom literally stumbled into the sessions. “Believe it or not, [Jarvis working with us] was a complete mistake,” Godin says. “He was coming to the studio to visit a friend but he took the wrong door. He didn’t know we were there. So we said, ‘Hi! Hi!’ and then the next day he was hired! It was very weird.”

While the duo appreciated Cocker’s vocals, they apparently were more interested in vibe than lyrical content. “I don’t even know what he’s talking about,” Godin says. “I don’t care. Since I was a child I heard English and American songs on the radio and I never understood a word of it, so I keep on like that even though I’m an adult. That’s why I can like very crappy things—because I don’t care anything about what they say.”

After leaving his record label and having his East Village apartment sold out from under him this summer, singer/songwriter Jesse Malin found out just what it means to work under pressure. Temporarily homeless, the straggly-haired native New Yorker put all bets on his newest batch of songs and headed upstate to the tranquil hills of Millbrook to record his third album, Glitter in the Gutter. Longtime fans and supporters Bruce Springsteen, Ryan Adams, Jakob Dylan and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme all make guest appearances on the album, released this month on Billie Joe Armstrong’s Adeline label.

“I’m kind of going back to my roots with this record,” explains Malin, who wrote much of Glitter on an electric guitar rather than an acoustic. “The new songs have a quicker tempo. It’s sad pop still, but the writing’s leaner.”

Introducing big choruses and catchy guitar hooks to his evocative, scene-setting lyrics, Malin seems to have found the musical middle ground between his first two solo records and his work fronting glam-punk outfit D Generation. “He’s punk rock and Phil Spector all rolled up into one,” explains Bruce Springsteen, who shares vocal duties with Malin on piano ballad “Broken Radio.”

Like those first two albums (The Fine Art of Self Destruction and The Heat), Glitter in the Gutter is emotionally steeped in Malin’s hometown. “I’m always going to have a lot of New York in me,” he says, “but it’s always important for me to think globally. … I want [my music] to be something that people can relate to wherever.”

So instead of writing songs about hanging out in the Village because it’s hip, Malin sings about finding ways to express yourself, ways to be happy and loved, and ways to deal with the times you can’t. “It’s an optimistic record,” he explains. “It’s a record about taking action, about survival, about being in the moment—that’s why the energy is really up.”

In 1990, college student and amateur musician Matt Hinton came across a flier for a Sacred Harp singing outside of Atlanta. He followed it to a small church, assuming he’d stumbled on a run-of-the-mill gospel-folk concert. Instead he discovered a little-known musical tradition that would later become the heart of he and his wife Erica’s labor-of-love film, Awake, My Soul, a documentary 10 years in the making.

Sacred Harp singing—which experienced a brief moment in the pop-culture sun after its appearance in 2003 Civil War movie Cold Mountain—is a form of a cappella music that began as a part of the American South’s Protestant Christian tradition. Sacred Harp singers meet in churches and sit divided into four, pitch-based sections (treble, alto, tenor and bass), creating a “hollow square” center where the leader stands. It’s often called shape-note singing because the notes are written on the music staff as shapes that represent a particular syllable (think do re mi).

Hinton says it’s nearly impossible to capture on tape the strength and uniqueness of sound at a Sacred Harp singing. Participants are expected to sing loudly and passionately. “It shakes you to your core,” he says. “In most other contexts if you sing as loud as you possibly can, people look at you funny. But there, no one cares.”

Several years after Hinton picked up that fateful flier, his wife Erica made a 10-minute documentary on Sacred Harp singing for a class at Georgia State University. The pair quickly realized that such a short film didn’t do the subject justice, so they began working on the full-length Awake, My Soul, which explores the deep roots of Sacred Harp singing and also takes the pulse of the tradition as it exists today. Matt and Erica still can’t believe they were the first filmmakers to seriously mine this rich territory. “It’s arguably the earliest distinctively American music,” says Matt. “For no one to have made a movie about it is absurd.”

Sacred Harp singing has been left out of more than just films—it’s rarely found in college curricula or music-history books. According to Matt, this lack of exposure is due to the fact that Sacred Harp music has always been subversive. “It’s the closest we can get to an a cappella version of rock ’n’ roll,” he says. “If you’ve heard ‘Iron Man’ by Black Sabbath, there are those two-note [power] chords [instead of the more traditionally accepted three-note chords] that music people consider problematic.”

The Hintons don’t claim to be objective documentary filmmakers. Awake, My Soul grew out of an intense connection to Sacred Harp singing and an urge to share it. “While we were making the film, we wanted to sing,” says Erica. “Sometimes it was awful to walk in with a camera.” But their partiality resulted in more than just an educational film—it’s a motion to gain Sacred Harp singing the more prominent spot it deserves in the American musical lexicon.

Christopher Quinn’s new documentary, God Grew Tired Of Us, opens in Kakuma, a Sudanese refugee camp in Northern Kenya. But the inspiration for the film goes back to Rwanda in 1994, while Quinn was watching a news story about the country’s horrific civil war.

“I had such a great issue with media in general in America,” he says. “I remember the story that was covered on the nightly news was on the concern for the endangered gorillas. People were tramping through their terrain to escape the war. And I thought, what an incredibly misguided story. You want to preserve the gorillas, but meanwhile, 300,000 people have been hacked and murdered, you know? I couldn’t get my head around that, that it could go unrecognized.”

Quinn wanted to give Americans a more personal look at some of the atrocities in Africa; to put a human face on these events and make it harder for Americans to turn a blind eye to this continent that oftentimes seems so distant. His film follows three of the Sudanese refugees known as the Lost Boys, as they leave Kakuma, hoping for a better life in the U.S.

Though John Bul Dau, Panther Blor and Daniel Abol Pach all have leadership roles in the refugee camp, life there is very difficult. “They might eat for 10 days and not eat for five,” says Quinn. “Those five days are called ‘the black days.’ We were watching the people collectively starve. By the third day, camp almost became silent.”

But as Quinn and his crew followed the young men to their new homes in Syracuse, N.Y., and Pittsburgh, Pa., it quickly became apparent that their struggle wasn’t going to end with their arrival in America. Working multiple jobs to pay bills and send money home to friends and relatives in East Africa, there’s little time or money left for college. “They are so communal in the way they were raised,” Quinn says, “so they take it on as a real responsibility.”

And a life where every hour was spent in community with fellow refugees is replaced by one spent in a culture that is extremely difficult to penetrate. As Quinn tries to show Americans the results of African atrocities, it’s equally disturbing to look at our own culture through unfamiliar eyes. “One of the things people come away with from the film—something I didn’t really see as I was filming—was the critique on America. It’s easy to see where the excess is. The Lost Boys came here and were evaluating everything. John is hoping to see a communal celebration at Christmas, but it’s all quantifiable materialism.”

Never forgetting the people he left behind, former Lost Boy John Bul Dau is now the director of the Sudan Project at Direct Change, raising money for medical and educational needs among the Sudanese still in East Africa (for more information, visit DirectChange.org/Sudan).

Hometown: Atlanta, Ga.
Members [l-r]: Jim Prible (bass), Eric Taylor (drums), Steven Satterfield (guitar, vocals), Todd Lindell (keyboards), Marc Tompkins (lead guitar)
Fun Fact: Though the band’s songs have already been featured on Room Raiders, Degrassi and a handful of other teen-friendly TV shows, none of its members have bothered tuning in.
Why They’re Worth Watching: Silver Lakes’ nostalgic brand of pop has ample room for crossover. Play it loud and proud, and neither your elders nor your offspring will object.
For Fans Of: Belle & Sebastian, Teenage Fanclub, Ambulance LTD

Atlanta’s fastest-rising pop collective may find both its name and its inspiration in the fantastical image of Silver Lakes, but the band owes its beginnings to real sandy beaches and good-old-fashioned male bonding. During February 2001, a dozen veterans of Atlanta’s music scene took a weeklong trip to the remote Mayan ruins of Tulum, Mexico. With nothing but great food, delicious margaritas and each other for miles around, friendships were rekindled, worries were forgotten and, unsurprisingly, a band was born.

“I told [Jim Prible] I had written basically a whole record’s worth of songs and had been sitting around on my living-room sofa playing them for myself,” says frontman Steven Satterfield.

Prible insisted he hear the material immediately upon the group’s return to civilization. “I loved the songs right away,” he recalls. “I convinced [Steven] that it needed to happen, and shortly after that we started recording.”

With Prible onboard, Satterfield had only to convince former Seely bandmate Eric Taylor to take up the drums again, and the group’s lineup was set (at least temporarily; membership is now five and counting). Thanks to producer Tim Delaney, The Great Pretenders, Silver Lakes’ self-released debut, is a tasty collection of impeccably produced ear candy recorded in the unlikeliest of settings—the spooky basement of Atlanta’s historic Biltmore Hotel.

“We were in the bowels of this really old building, and it had this cool, cool feeling to it,” Satterfield explains. “It definitely felt like we were away from everything.”

Fancy that.

Jay Farrar pushes boundaries, boundaries push back

Jay Farrar’s voice is like a ghost; a spirit exiled from nostalgia, it has yet to find a body in the modern world. The age it once channeled with Uncle Tupelo was a time when having a voice—a real voice—was good enough. But, since then, Farrar’s ragged baritone hasn’t sounded entirely comfortable in other musical situations. On his last album, 2005’s Okemah and the Melody of Riot, it often sounded mournful and restless—like it wanted to roam some distant, lonesome hills while Farrar rocked out in the studio, trapped in his fleshy, earthly prison.

On The Search — his second album since reviving the Son Volt brand — Farrar discovers some genuinely exciting new haunts, and frontloads them conveniently. The disc-opening “Slow Hearse,” a Beatles-ish piano cycle with Farrar repeating “feels like driving ’round in a slow hearse” is as great a prelude as one could hope for, his ache at full mast. “The Picture,” which follows, supplements Farrar with bright Stax-like horns. It’s another perfect setting, one he could (and should!) occupy for a full album. “We know when we get there, we’ll find mercy,” he sings, sounding, as always, as if he’s articulating for dustbowl refugees, his voice fading like the edges of a face in an old studio-set portrait.

On the record’s latter half, Farrar reverts to the plaintive loveliness that made Son Volt’s first two albums so wrenching, his prodigal vocal wrapping itself around the swelling steel guitar of “Methamphetamine” as if it’s finally returned home. The steel reappears in “L Train,” and — even when Farrar sings about penetrating Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s hipster enclave — the song’s soul remains on a long stretch between late-night tollbooths. “Highways and Cigarettes” (a duet with Shannon McNally) and the disc-closing “Phosphate Skin” continue in the same vein.

When The Search concludes, Jay Farrar is still Jay Farrar, his grand finale a benchmark of modesty. His is a voice that will sound stately with age, craggier and even more weary. “It can only get better from here,” Farrar croons as the album swirls to a close, “don’t really have any fear.” Farrar’s voice will find a home, a real home, sure as it was born. Everything else is just passing time.

Director: Mira Nair
Writers: Screenplay by Sooni Taraporevela, based on the book by Jhumpa Lahiri
Starring: Kal Penn, Tabu, Irfan Khan, Jacinda Barrett, Zuleikha Robinson
Studio Info/Running Time: Fox Searchlight, 122 mins.

Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake traces the slow, stilted assimilation of a couple who immigrate to New York City from Calcutta in the late 1970s, bear two children, snag a Volvo and split-level ranch in the suburbs, and watch powerlessly as their children inch further and further away from their rich Bengali tradition.

Director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala) expertly captures the devastating alienation endured by immigrants, lingering on the harsh, awkward process of learning a new culture: Ashima (the stunning Tabu) and Ashoke Ganguli (Irfan Khan) are bound by an arranged marriage, and Ashima’s first few months in wintry Queens—which find her unsure of both her new husband (who teaches at a university) and the foreign culture swirling around her—are heartbreaking.

When their son is born, Ashoke names him “Gogol,” a complex homage to both the Russian author and Ashoke’s own ingrained appreciation for global culture. Gogol (Kal Penn) comes of age in the American suburbs, smoking weed, air-drumming to Pearl Jam and taping R.E.M. posters to his walls—so it seems inevitable when he rejects his given name (switching, initially, to his “good” Indian name, Nikhil, and then, unavoidably, to Nick), studies architecture at Yale and dates an Upper East Side art student (Jacinda Barrett), slipping easily into her family’s privileged, J. Crew-catalog existence.

While Tabu and Khan give moving, nuanced performances, Penn—better known for wincing his way through turd-joke gems Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj—struggles with the intensity of Gogol’s narrative. Although he enjoys tiny moments of gravity, Penn’s performance is mostly one-dimensional, and a handful of scenes feel preposterously staged (during a scrap at a train depot, Gogol’s girl inadvertently mentions the name of her extramarital lover, and Penn forgets to let his face make the narrative leap from “Pierre” to “affair,” making their entire brawl feel both unwarranted and strange).

Nair understands the staggering sensory gap between Calcutta and New York—the colossal time difference, frosty New York versus balmy India, the food—and production designer Stephanie Carroll employs two distinct color palettes (New York is rendered in shades of gray and chrome, Calcutta in orange and gold) to emphasize distance. Accordingly, bridges also play a pivotal role in the film, featured prominently in birth and death scenes, re-emphasizing The Namesake’s deep sense of movement and journey. Lahiri’s novel, already essential reading for anyone stuck in an unfamiliar place, is honestly and earnestly rendered here, and The Namesake will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt the crush of a compound identity.

Indie heroes’ sophomore effort dark and well-crafted, if not another masterpiece

The Arcade Fire’s Funeral was a crucial record for a variety of reasons. On a circumstantial level — in the same way OK Computer redeemed guitar music in a decade when it seemed at risk of becoming utterly disposable — Funeral represented an indie-rock apotheosis. In the midst of plummeting record sales and increasingly stale mainstream airwaves, the cultural upwelling that turned the album into a cause célèbre offered the industry a galvanizing dose of energy and awe. The Arcade Fire’s musical syncretism bore out the story, as tympani, fiddle and guitar resonated together in postmodern folk dirges that were part Motown, part Talking Heads, and yet were bathed in the soft and murky aftertones of earlier folk and classical music. There’s a reverie and a pregnant sense of promise to Funeral’s stunned, post-funereal solipsism that made it one of the most joyful records about death ever made.

Following in that record’s wake, Neon Bible is heartbreaking in its retreat from Funeral’s fantasy city and its return to a real America that its narrator views with no small measure of dread. Asking the “Black Mirror” where the “bombs will fall”; predicting that there’s no way we’ll survive if the “Neon Bible” is right; running from “the weight that’s pressing down” in “Keep the Car Running”; pleading, “hear the soldiers groan all quiet and alone” in “Intervention”; and declaring “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more,” then later, in “Windowsill,” “I don’t want to live in America no more”; the album has the type of latent rage, nauseous claustrophobia and social paranoia that shows up in OK Computer, and with a similarly diffuse target—a system, an epochal trend, the washing “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations” that an individual, even one with a guitar, can’t hope to stand up to. While not as overtly political as, say, Neil Young’s Living With War, the contexts of the war in Iraq and the flooding of New Orleans appear vividly throughout Neon Bible, which risks tying the album to its time in a way Funeral or even OK Computer weren’t. If Neon Bible is a measure of current ethos, it’s an unnerving report card.

This dark song cycle inverts well-loved formulae. The enveloping wash of church organ in “Intervention” does nothing to subvert the suggestion that “working for the church while your family dies” is perhaps more cardinal a sin than unbelief. In “Building Downtown,” Win Butler sounds like Springsteen and yet there’s no T-Bird waiting to take him to salvation, only the hope that hard work and obedience to the doctrines that encourage it can allow him some small space to live and breathe. Release only comes in the disjointed but welcome inclusion of “No Cars Go” (which was earlier released as a single and likely written apart from the rest of the songs here), where Régine Chassagne and Butler promise a place vehicles can’t reach, or perhaps in “My Body Is A Cage,” where at least one’s mind “holds the key.” Still, the call for escape and release seems as much wishful as determined, and there’s a pained sense of powerlessness throughout Neon Bible. It’s a hard, emotional record—certainly a good one.

But how good? Even following Funeral, Neon Bible isn’t disappointing per se, largely since Funeral wasn’t just an exposition of the Arcade Fire’s promise, but also a simultaneous delivery on that promise. Like OK Computer, it’s a record that’s power is forever preserved and divorced from what the band might do before or after. So, coming into Neon Bible, you aren’t asking if the Arcade Fire grew into the Arcade Fire you thought it could be; instead you open up to whatever direction its members have chosen. But, in truth, after the lavish escapism of Funeral, Neon Bible does feel like a less stratospheric accomplishment.

While there is still a great deal of craft, energy, drama and sonic variety, few of the songs have the kind of majesty of “Rebellion (Lies)” or “Wake Up,” and the fancy and imagination of its predecessor gives way to a more familiar, maybe at times even pedestrian, angst and rebellion. Plus, inevitably, the novelty and freshness of the band’s sonic approach loses its initial impact as Butler’s quavery yowl, his younger brother William’s strident bass work and the layers of orchestral percussion now all feel familiar, even if they remain distinctive. While Neon Bible is not a masterpiece like its predecessor, it is an excellent and frequently evocative album—one that, like Funeral, grows on you with repeated listens. If Neon Bible’s topicality and bleakness are a sign of the times, one can only hope that the members of the Arcade Fire are able to rekindle their funereal torches, renew their love and help us rebuild.

1. Waiting

The crash and tinkle of china. Blaring Muzak. The pneumatic whoosh of a revolving door. A private booth, curtained. A crusty sliced baguette in a wicker basket. Two glasses of water: one empty, the other full, spreading a halo of condensation on the white tablecloth.

The interior of McCormick and Schmick’s Seafood in Chicago is built of oak so glossy it seems to emit its own soft light, an illusion enhanced by the amber-tinted sconces lining the walls. Even at the odd dining hour of 2:30 in the afternoon, the restaurant is bustling with activity. White-smocked waiters dash to and fro, carrying elaborate trays across the gap in the booth’s curtain. I’m waiting for Common, née Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., a 34-year-old veteran rapper and novice actor from the South Side of this very city.

On New Year’s Eve weekend, the theme of waiting, as it relates to Common, is apt. I’ll have to wait until March to see if Finding Forever, a new studio album with returning co-producer Kanye West, will live up to the high standard set by the duo’s Grammy-nominated 2005 collaboration, Be. And I’ll have to wait until the late January release of star-studded crime comedy Smokin’ Aces to find out whether Common is an actor or a rapper who acts. But for now, I’m just waiting for some food. I’m seriously considering drinking Common’s water when, suddenly, he appears from behind the curtain and climbs into the booth.

He’s alone, casual in a blue cable-knit sweater. His countenance presents the same easy smile and sparkling eyes that sold untold acres of khaki in a series of high-profile Gap ads last year. Just as I begin to ask Common about Finding Forever, our waiter materializes. “We’ve been waiting for you forever!” he exclaims. Common laughs good-naturedly. “We’re trying to find forever,” he says, “but instead we’re waiting forever.” Like the best jokes, the comment’s casual surface masks a profundity. He orders a liter of distilled water.

2. Do you guys have any questions?

Is there any meat in the clam chowder? There is a little bacon in it. Oh yeah, no—do you have any other soup? That would be all of the soups today. OK. Well, let me have the mixed green salad—there’s no meat on that salad right? And the salmon—does that come with vegetables? Broccoli and mashed potatoes. Instead of mashed potatoes, can I get spinach? Or do you have corn? We can do asparagus and carrots. But you don’t have any corn? Uh-uh.

Common is fond of food metaphors. “When we order this meal,” he tells me, “I definitely want to get something that’s good, but I want something that’s healthy too.” He’s talking about his balanced lifestyle—he was a vegan for three years—and his music, soul-inflected hip-hop that blends the sensuous with the instructive, the visceral with the spiritual. Common has been a consistent presence in hip-hop since the release of his 1992 LP Can I Borrow a Dollar? (under the name Common Sense). “The whole business has changed since then,” he says. “It wasn’t that long ago when I could go to a radio station and if the DJ liked my song, he could play it. Now it has to be on a playlist and the label has to approve it, and it’s being revealed to me that radio doesn’t control people’s success as much any more.”

Promotional logistics isn’t the only area in which rap has undergone a violent sea-change during the last 10 years. The mainstream had space for politically voluble hip-hop in the early ’90s: The cleansing fire of Public Enemy and N.W.A. still lingered; groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul were on the rise. In the aughties, rap remains socially charged, but its conscience has receded behind an iron arras of nihilism, conspicuous consumption, misogyny and violence. Yet Common, an everyman rapping about love, spirituality, fidelity and social justice, has managed to flourish in the heyday of superhuman crime rap.

Common’s mainstream breakthrough was Be, for which he hooked up with ultra-hot producer Kanye West, a Chicago native whose blend of sped-up soul samples and crisp drums was the perfect match for Common’s supple, jazzy flow. “’Ye and me, it’s like the foundation,” he enthuses. “I met him here [in Chicago] through No I.D., who produced my first three albums. Kanye was younger, but he was friends with No I.D. and would come around while we were making music. He was always hungry, always confident.” We both chuckle at the understatement. “He had potential, but potential with a purpose is what made him who he is today.”

Purity of purpose is among Common’s chief concerns. “I feel like we all have a purpose in life,” he explains, “and through my music and art, I want people from all walks of life to become enlightened, and enjoy, and be entertained and encouraged.” On Finding Forever—which, besides West, will include contributions from D’Angelo, will.i.am and the late J Dilla—Common feels as if his purpose is to craft “timeless music,” just as he strove to on Be. “You can hear a continuity, meaning something progressive, but with a certain boom-bap element,” he says of Finding Forever. “Me and Kanye have a chemistry that’s going to feel familiar.”

Finding Forever is about “how we exist forever through this music if we just find this place where it’s pure.” To Common, music that lacks purity is “the moment’s hit; they play it on the radio and it has a huge audience, but it just passes away. There are certain songs that were big hits in 2004, but if you hear them now, they don’t have a feeling about them. They don’t even take you back to that time. Where I can hear Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall or N.W.A., and it takes me to an emotional place in my life, because the music has that emotion to it. If you look at hip-hop as a whole, you don’t feel that love for art, that purity in the music. It definitely has become the new dope game, a way to make money, which is one reason why it doesn’t have the impact that it had before.”

Of course, he’s talking about emotional impact, not cultural impact, which rap enjoys in greater measure than ever before. “This culture is obviously strong,” he acknowledges, “affecting the way people dress and talk. This is a powerful voice, the young black voice of America.” This brings us around to the problem of crystallization: When the “young black voice of America” is presented as monolithically criminal, negative stereotypes are reinforced. Where do we draw the line between paying heed to disenfranchised voices and glorifying toxic social patterns? Common makes a careful and precarious distinction between crime rap that comes from the heart and crime rap that’s fashionably lucrative.

“Anybody who has a voice, you’ve got to let them tell their story,” he says. “But they should also recognize that there are certain individual characteristics they have and need to express. You have to look at your voice and make sure you are truly being you. The problem with a lot of the drug rap or party songs is that you don’t get to hear the other side of black culture. We do have a set of people that deal with the pain and struggles of being in a drug-infested, gang-infested world”—Common’s speech is accumulating a passionate cadence, and he slips into another of his favorite rhetorical devices, the litany—“but at the same time, there’s black people that work hard every day, and take care of their families; that work for the Chicago Transit Authority, or do construction work, or pick up trays; that create new inventions for Apple; that paint. We have a diverse culture, but hip-hop is pretty much just showing one side of it. You feel hurt sometimes, you cry sometimes; sometimes you lie, sometimes you want to punch people; you feel pleasure, you feel cocky. We’re human.”

3. Excuse me for one second

Peace. Hey. Yeah, if they can. Yeah. Definitely. OK. Word. What time is it now? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I’ll probably think about 3:45. OK. Yeah. I’m in an interview now. At 3:30 she can start setting up. Can we do it outside? Yeah. Well, let’s just do it outside in the city of Chicago somewhere. A parking garage. If she finds a place outside, I’ll do it. All right, love.

Common is polite—he always excuses himself before answering his cell. If the music industry hasn’t divested him of his humility yet, it’s unlikely Hollywood will either. Aside from his performance in Dave Chapelle’s Block Party, the lifelong movie fanatic (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and On the Waterfront are his favorites) is just beginning to explore the other side of the silver screen. He talks about working on the sets of Smokin’ Aces and American Gangster with earnest awe. For Common, acting, like music, is all about passion. He took classes before he started auditioning for roles, to make sure it was something he could be passionate about, which it emphatically was. He loves his acting classes, attending whenever his schedule permits, and he enjoys working with a cast. “I like being part of a team; I played sports,” he says. “When you’re making music, the producers are your team, but everything falls on your shoulders.”

Directed by Joe Carnahan, and starring Ryan Reynolds, Jeremy Piven, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Jason Bateman, Alicia Keys and Ray Liotta, Smokin’ Aces is about ex-mobster-turned-Vegas-magician Buddy “Aces” Israel (Piven), who turns evidence on his former employers and finds himself caught in an intersecting network of plots variously predicated upon his doom and salvation. Common plays Israel’s right-hand man, Sir Ivy. “I love that he’s a dark character that’s sensitive,” Common says. “He’s one of the sharpest killers in the movie, but he’s very intelligent and warrior-like; he has a heart.”

Common will also inhabit the criminal mind in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster this fall. The film is about a narcotics officer (Russell Crowe) struggling to bring down Harlem heroin kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). Common plays Lucas’ brother, Turner, a role he jumped on for the chance to work with Washington (from whom he learned not just about acting, but about “how to be a responsible man and a good leader”) and for the script’s greyscale treatment of good and evil. “It’s contrasting two people,” he muses. “One is bringing in heroin in caskets, but he’s going to church and taking care of his family; the other guy has problems, like womanizing, but he’s working hard to bring down the guys he feels are doing wrong.”

If all these gangster roles seem like a stretch for the anti-gangster rapper, Common sees no conflict of interest: “When I’m a character,” he explains, “I’m another person. I’ve been told that every character has to have some part of you in him, and you portray that character for whatever reasons you find purposeful. … I just try to bring those human elements to each character. They’re not going to be me, and that’s the fun part about it: I get to explore sides of myself that I don’t express.”

There it is again: purpose. Common’s longevity has a lot to do with his life-affirming morality and musical gifts, but it has just as much to do with his unremitting sense of personal purpose, of meaning in a meaningless age. It doesn’t matter so much whether that purpose is to find forever or to just be. Conviction is a rare commodity, and as long as it’s there, we feel it. Whether Common’s is refracted through music or film, it’s palpable and refreshing. And he knows it. “I always wanted to be important in hip-hop,” he says, “to leave a mark and to help people. It’s hard to see what you are in the world and the music business, the way you serve, but if you know your purpose and create art you feel is pure and sincere, you let the people decide who you are at that point. You don’t stop and look too much; you have your purpose and go for it.”

Admit it—you’ve got shame in your musical closet, too.

Journalist Sellers, born in 1970 in Grand Rapids, Mich. (where “most everybody listened to Journey. Including me.”), chronicles his lifelong obsession with rock music in this entertaining work. Sellers’ dad was a Bob Dylan fanatic and tried unsuccessfully to turn his three sons into Dylan converts. “We were force-fed Dylan at breakfast, lunch and dinner,” writes Sellers. “There was a lot of ‘Listen to this next song—I think you’ll like it.’ We never did.”

In 1981, Sellers’ world changed when MTV first appeared on the family’s television screen. Sellers grudgingly admits to a now-humiliating youthful devotion to Duran Duran and Wham!, and he spends several pages describing his fascination with early MTV videos of world-historical cheesiness, such as Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” “How embarrassing,” bemoans Sellers, “that a band as breezy and candy-coated as Duran Duran was once so important to me!” At his lowest point, Sellers sang Lionel Richie’s “Hello” at a karaoke bar because “that one girl” told him to.

Sellers’ musical tastes improved in 1985 when he discovered U2, his “alternative-rock gateway drug,” which led to New Order, The Smiths and Morrissey. With U2, Sellers began a pattern with bands he loved—as soon as they’d become too popular, as U2 did after the Joshua Tree album, he’d become disenchanted and move on to a lesser-known (and thus hipper) band.

During his freshman year at Michigan State University, Sellers hung out with a group of friends equally obsessed with The Smiths and Morrissey, listening for hours to music “that seemed tailor-made to awkward, sensitive, spineless guys such as I unfortunately was at that time.” During a 1990 pilgrimage to Manchester, England, Sellers witnessed “the squalor from which my favorite depressing musicians had sprung.”

Sellers lovingly details the crazy rites of musical obsession. “You let it dip into every facet of your life: your wardrobe, your hairstyle, the foods you eat, the drugs you take, the naming of your pets. … You will almost certainly blog about it. Tattoos are possibly involved.” Sellers describes himself rocking out in cars (“If traffic cops ticketed for DWR—driving while rocking—my license would have been revoked long ago”) and obsessively crafting musical lists (He includes dozens of them in the book. For example, his’ “five Songs I Am Most Annoyed By In All The World” includes Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll” at #3 and James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” at #5).

Sellers concludes his funny, self-effacing musical memoir with his most recent monomania, for Dayton-based band Guided by Voices. One of the reasons he loves Guided by Voices, and its booze-soaked frontman Bob Pollard, is the band’s relative obscurity. Sellers feels a highly personal connection to the band and its music. By book’s end, he fulfills two dreams when he makes a 2004 musical pilgrimage to Dayton, where he parties with Pollard, and is then invited onstage to sing with him during the band’s farewell tour. John Sellers has come a long way from “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”

Sufjan Stevens, Norah Jones, The Be Good Tanyas—NPR’s All Songs Considered backed them before many had even heard the names. This weekly online music program, which debuted in January 2000, features around 10 songs from relatively unknown artists, all of whom are hand-selected by host Bob Boilen.

Boilen came up with the show after receiving letters from people who wanted to know more about the instrumental interludes being played on the network’s evening newscast, All Things Considered, which Boilen still directs. Boilen quickly realized that people wanted a place to discover new music, so he moved away from playing instrumentals in favor of bringing the songs of talented, obscure artists to the nation’s ears.

Boilen and his staff receive 200-300 albums each week for possible inclusion on the show. “I think the thing I try hardest to do is to come to all the music honestly,” he says. Avoiding the mountains of press kits that accompany the barrage of releases, he listens fairly blindfolded—often not even knowing which CD he’s listening to.

“[I listen to the albums] with a complete open ear just trying to see if [the music] strikes me. What is a fresh sound? Who the heck knows? But I look for something that has a vitality, that has a sense of creativity to it, maybe that’s breaking new bounds—or something that just feels great. For the most part, we try to find something that’s finding new ways to make music out of the same 12 notes everybody else has to deal with. Something inspiring.”

Boilen occasionally does play well-known artists, but he admits there’s little point in playing something people can hear “in umpteen-thousand other places” such as the latest U2 album. “If we’re going to choose 10 songs every week, let it be Super XX Man—something that few [other shows] are going to play.”

It’s often hard to tell how much of the buzz generated by featured artists can be attributed directly to exposure from the show, but ASC is certainly cutting-edge enough to keep drawing people who are in search of new sounds. Boilen says his quest for musicians trying new and inspired approaches can be traced back to experiencing the British Invasion as a teen. The groundbreaking changes in music brought about by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones between 1965 and 1968 “completely affected what I want to hear and what I’ve come to expect in music,” Boilen says.

His self-proclaimed high musical standards explain why he seeks growth and new challenges on follow-up albums from his favorite debut artists, where “they find something in themselves that they hadn’t found in themselves in their last record.”

Songs of His Own

Boilen uses this same aesthetic in his own electronic musical endeavors, which began when he joined a punk-rock band in 1979. “[I] really wanted to sweep decks clear and try to create something that had never been heard or done before.”

Today, Boilen still strives to break ground in his own music. With the aid of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows computers and synthesizers to communicate, Boilen makes interesting sounds despite his lack of traditional technique. “The fact that I technically can’t play a keyboard very well, and I’m really—other than chords and rhythm—not all that great at guitar, I can [still] use the technology at hand to discover sounds and make music. I understand what I like. [Sometimes] I just don’t know how to get there.”

Using his home studio, Boilen makes unique music he takes pride in. As an electronic musician, he’s inspired by the discovery processes of Brian Eno and John Cage. “It wasn’t about entertainment—it was about finding something interesting and fine-tuning when you found it,” Boilen says. He describes his creative process as finding fascinating rhythms and textures and enhancing them with the use of technology. “It’s like sculpting. You take this big block and find [the beauty within].”

With his work at NPR and his music, it’s hard to imagine Boilen having spare time to casually listen to albums when not researching for the show. “Recreational listening just doesn’t happen like it used to,” he concurs. “I don’t sit down for a couple of hours like I had done as a teenager—just put on a record and sit and listen. Listening to the same album repeatedly, which is often where you find the magic in music, happens less for me because I’m just trying to pick up the next CD in the pile.” Asking Boilen what music he’s currently digging is rather anticlimactic if you’ve heard the most recent episodes of ASC. “If you listen to the show, that’s what I’m listening to a lot of. Those are the records that I fall for—and I just want to pass them on to somebody else.”

ASC is available at NPR.org/programs/asc and through the iTunes Music Store. Boilen’s music is online at BobBoilen.info.

How He Got There

It’s often said that persistence is key when looking for opportunities; This a concept to which Bob Boilen is no stranger. After quitting a job in television, Boilen began showing up at NPR every day looking for work. “I hoped I wasn’t a pest,” he says, “but I had a love of radio—that was at the heart of it.” His passion for it began early—as a child he constantly listened to Washington, D.C., radio. “It was a big part of my world.”

After several weeks, Boilen was hired on a temporary basis assisting with All Things Considered, the network’s award-winning evening newscast. Within a year, he was the director. Boilen modestly attributes his