Some brief and scattered thoughts on the new Jay-Z album, The Blueprint.

Things about the first listen through: seemed a lot more rhythmically plodding than I have been used to from the rap I've been listening to. I had heard about the Nas verse on "Takeover" before hearing it, but wasn't really aware that's what I was listening to until quite a way through it, when I thought, shit, he's being so casually, offhandedly viscious here. From then on and on later listens I caught a lot more of the lyrics, and the big fat Doors bassline made much better sense rhythmically (as someone on ILM said, the whole thing just feels totally relentless). Some later songs - predictably the Timbaland-produced "Hola' Hovito" - have less drab beats. In fact that one feels so much more vital that it underscores why Timbaland is of such value to the whole scene. The Eminem verses on "Renagade" surprised me. His intonation is a lot less spastic, except when he begins to employ a more spastic one to complement his lyrics later on. In fact, that's not enough - I should say that it's for the most part surprisingly smooth. The lyrics, too, are great. In an apparently much more adept way than in whichever song from his last album where he begged off responsiblity for perverting the souls of innocent children, he lays out a pretty convincing position (well, as far as pop song lyrics are concerned) wrt his effect on his listeners. If I get around to it I'll put up the lyrics and giggle over them in glee, as they touch on a lot of the basic points that come up in arguments about the intersection between ethics and aesthetics.

Aside from just now when I switched to Spring Heel Jack, I've been listening to The Blueprint all night, and it's been coming along nicely. I still think the beats are for the most part very straightforward - sometimes I'm not sure if they move me below the waist at all, to put it in Tom's words. But then I keep finding my ass moving a little more - and besides that, finding that the beats suit the emotional and lyrical tenor of the album well. I can see why Jay is highly regarded as an MC. It's an odd kind of flow for me, though, because it's so regular and uniform. There are rappers that sound to me as if they have similar sorts of monotones (and Jay doesn't, quite, but it sounds kind of like it to me), but often they're either taking advantage of that monotone for some more grating purpose (than Jay's, I mean, since on this album at least I think you might be able to link his tone to the content and style pretty well) or they're just bad. Clearly, though, Jay is an excellent MC, which means that it's something else (cf., oh yes, Danto on the "style matrix" and adding rows to it, though I didn't say much about it there (yet) so you'd really have to read the article to get it at the moment - I hope to add more later).

Eminem produced "Renagade" too - and the production is quite nice.

I even like the tracks that are a lot more soul and R & B influenced (partly maybe because they not just sample old tunes but build the rest of the track to sound like old soul tunes), though I don't really feel like the "even" is appropriate anymore. Maybe if I bought a Britney CD, or some Carpenters or something, it could be. But perhaps not even then, I suspect. I don't mean that the "even" is inappropriate because I think I just like anything, or that I would necessarily like a Britney CD. But my reactions to music that in the past I've deliberately or semi-deliberately avoided no longer surprise me, as in "I can't believe I actually like this." They haven't for a while, for the most part - this is just a moment of clarity. And what it means, maybe, is just that I'm being honest with myself.

More to come, I hope, as long as I can get myself to write some things down before they become too comfortable and I can't be bothered to write them. But I think I'll be listening to this album a lot.

So let's say Autechre make process music. Is it any different in the way that it is process music, from other people's process music?

Arthur Danto on the artworld.

Musically, I'm stuck in a rut. It's a comfortable rut. When the headphones are on I don't want out. When I'm picking music from my traveling case I can't decide: I try to get myself to pick something less familiar, or something that I haven't heard in a while, that I put in the case in order to try breaking out of my rut. But then I'm indecisive and eventually cave in and just pick something I've been listening to non-stop lately anyway, like the Beta Band, or The Hot Rock or Crescent. The same indecisiveness plagues my attempts to start fresh and pick 24 new discs to carry around on my back all day: when I try to reload my traveling case I lose the will to hunt for CDs, and what's worse I can't bring myself to evict any of the ones already in the case, even the ones that I am consistently avoiding listening to.

I've had some new CDs recently, and even some ones I was very interested in, ones that I want to hear a lot more of like Spring Heel Jack or Einsturzende Neubauten or Fela Kuti. But even though they sound good when I play them, they make me tired. I don't want to do that right now. I don't want to try. I am trying at lots of other things. I am waking up early, at almost the same time every day. I am digging in for my new classes. I am meeting an apparently neverending stream of people. I am trying not to let "mundane" life details overwhelm me while I try to be a good Ph.D. student. So it's not just the work of writing about what I listen to that my self is rejecting (like a body rejects a new spleen, or a drug treatment: it's involuntary, impersonal); it's the work, internally, of responding to what I listen to - negotiating it, letting myself be taken in by it, tested by it. Instead I'm falling back mostly on records that I love and know I will feel comforted by. I'm finding plenty of tiny details about them to appreciate, but it feels like a more personal kind of appreciation. There are parts on the new Beta Band record (which if you hadn't figured it out, is far and away my most favorite record of the year so far, and I don't see how it could fail to hold that place for the remainder of the year and beyond... and it's kind of nice, having something stand out so definitely) that, when I notice them (and it's often, even though I've heard them before, the kind of 'notice' like 'oh! where did that come from?'), seem like they're private to my listening experience. Of course the sounds are there on the record, for anyone to hear, but when I catch them like that, especially for this record, it seems like I'm the only one who could hear them. The headphones matter a lot I think.

Suggestion from prof in class on Friday re Weitz article, from some dude's response which I still have to look up: Weitz makes 'art' out to be an open concept based only on things perceivable in the works of 'art' themselves, so that he may be wrong if what makes a piece of art 'art' is external to the work. Will be more on this later, but for now, a question: if I can't tell whether or not it's a work of 'art' from just listening to it, what good does knowing do for me?

At the moment I don't even like any of the songs on it better than my favorites on Things We Lost in the Fire, but it seems as if on their EP with Spring Heel Jack, Low tried something that pointed at another direction for them - one similar enough to what they seem to be trying on the new album that perhaps it could've served that purpose instead, and different enough that it doesn't just come off as a slackening toward mainstream prettiness. (Certainly, the "cinematic" soundscapeyness of the SHJ songs isn't all that unprecedented - and they're probably "pretty" in their own stereotypical way - but at least the discontinuity with their past makes me think they need not have completed what we now have, a history of the band that sees them "adding elements to their sound," "maturing," "infusing their icy Duluth slowcore with more human warmth," u.s.w. with more critical blahblah.)

A sumary of the argument in Morris Weitz's article, "The Role of Theory on Esthetics". Anyone who has ever had to defend the idea that both Bach and the Beatles, or the Beatles and Public Enemy, or Cage and Radiohead (etc. etc. etc.) are music will appreciate the article, I think.

Clearly my new standard of time measurement will be the bus ride. Hot Shots II doesn't finish before I can get to my office. The Hot Rock does.

The first time I heard Drawings of Patient O.T., or whatever it's called in German, I wasn't very impressed by its supposed farther-outness, noisyness, deconsructiveness, what have you. The second time through it worked a bit better, but it still seems to me that the music on it isn't all that different from the music on Silence is Sexy. Yes, on the latter, there are something more like songs, and even the noises made by jet engines and stuff are a lot less grating and metallic (you might say that they've retained less of their industrial, in the literal sense, aura). But in sort of a parallel way, you can hear things that could easy be nudged into being pop songs on Drawings - especially once the get a beat going. I'm not so sure that by the time of its release, "formless" minimalistic noisefests were all that new a development. That kind of stuff could be said to prefigure, in certain ways, lots of electronic music (perhaps in some kind of geneological sense, but not an "influenced by" one), insofar as it shares those qualities.

I wonder what it would sound like if EN arranged something, in their earlier style, more like the new Spring Heel Jack album.