I actually asked Pranav about this when I was editing. A transcript from our Gchat convo:
me: feces bastes?
Pranav: As in basting in feces.
So there ya have it. Maybe if you Google "basting in feces"?
I agree with the assertion that all extremist ideologies when followed to extreme ends lead to extremely unsavory results. No argument whatsoever. I just don't think that's what's occurring here. Tom Araya said something on Instagram expressing his viewpoints; I said something in response on Twitter expressing my viewpoints; Tom Breihan wrote about it here expressing HIS viewpoints; and then a bunch of commenters had a conversation about all of this. That seems like precisely the type of open debate you're suggesting is being silenced.
Thanks for sharing that. Maybe it's really "Fuck Tom Araya," then, because the IG comment was (and I quote) "posted by me Tom Araya." Kerry should speak up. Believe me I take no pleasure in talking or thinking about this. It bums me the fuck out more than I can possibly express to you.
The upvote/downvote function has been a part of Stereogum longer than I have so it's not my place to justify it, but to be fair, exceeding the threshold of downvotes doesn't exactly silence a commenter, it just collapses the comment in question, the same as it does on Reddit, and that comment can still be easily viewed with a single click. (I suspect collapsed comments actually get more attention than non-collapsed comments, but I have no way of proving this.)
The Charlie Hebdo massacre was committed by jihadists -- heavily armed Al Qaeda operatives trained in military tactics expressly to commit acts of terrorism -- who believed the newspaper's portrayals of Muhammed were blasphemous and punishable by death. It wasn't in any way related to the many liberal critics who felt the newspaper's unapologetically racist caricatures of Muslims were "indefensibly gross." You really can't connect the two, no matter how hard you try.
As for the comment being "inconsequential" -- I dunno, man. Were Kanye's pro-Trump comments inconsequential? What about the countless artists who've spoken out against Trump? Etc. I kinda feel like Steven Van Zandt nails it here:
Nice guys. Met them. I wouldn't say right or wrong. Up to them. But it's naive to think one can separate Art and Politics. Art IS Politics. https://t.co/yoAtWruY9B
False binary. Tom Araya said some stuff that I think is indefensibly gross; I responded by saying, "That's indefensibly gross." Divergent opinions expressed by two parties, neither calling for the other to be silenced. If anything, Araya comes closer to trying to "smother" opposing voices when he says: "I never would have guessed that there were so many snowflakes commenting their distaste for the new president. Like him or not he is the president." Also: I'm not trying to prove how "metal" I am because, like, I'm a fucking grown man, but maybe you can tell me how "metal" it is to say, "Like him or not he is the president"? When I was coming up, that kinda shit wasn't really "metal."
I dunno if I'm allowed to say this but I just got an advance of the new Pallbearer like half an hour ago, so I'm about half an hour into the new Pallbearer, and ... the answer to your question is unequivocally yes. You can definitely 100% add that one (and Panopticon of course, although I haven't heard a note of that one yet) to the list of reasons I'm hyped for metal in 2017.
In answer to your other question: You can email me at michael[at]stereogum dot com or if you wanna get an email to everyone on staff here, send to tips[at]stereogum dot com. Just note what it's about in the subject because I get like 5,000+ emails a day and I don't always get to all of them.
Yeah I guess I was maybe 13 when I got into Slayer, but for some reason I never considered them "extreme metal" -- I got into them along with Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, etc. in '87, so I always lumped them into that grouping. Kreator were like my "gateway band" into the real heavy stuff when I started high school. You really can't go wrong either way.
Yeah, Krallice's "surprise release" strategy is maybe not the best system for getting the word out, considering they play atonal virtuosic prog-jazz-black-death in complex time signatures AND self-release their own albums, but you gotta respect their game. Just announced last week: http://www.stereogum.com/1915037/krallice-hate-power/music/
We start compiling this pretty much right after Thanksgiving and then have a couple weeks to put it together, so Batushka came to our attention too late for us to consider it on 2015's list. Krallice have an album coming out next week that we'll have to consider NEXT December alongside the 2017 releases. It's an imperfect system but it's the best we've got.
I can appreciate and understand any individual response to Hardwired (or any other album for that matter), but FWIW I assure you, Adrien's not on the take. He genuinely loves the album.
Yeah, they're easily one of the most ferocious live bands I've seen in the last five or so years (and I've seen 'em a bunch of times), and your description nails it. Absolute monsters.
Yeah, Torche is actually a really great comparison. (They had a dB AOTY too not THAT long ago!)
On the subject of Goes Cube: My little writeup above initially stated that "I've listened to 'Goes Cube Song 57' probably a thousand times in my life, and the thing still crushes."
However, I meant to say "Song 30," not "Song 57." Nothing against "Song 57," but "Song 30" was/is my jam; I just got the generic song titles confused. I've amended the text and link above, but everyone should spin "Song 30" if they don't know it (and even if they do!). It's killer. Do it!
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Man I was gonna mention Pete Steele in this thread but I feel like I somehow bring him up in every conversation so I held back. (To be fair, he wasn't historically averse to "slinging slurs" as well as baring his emotional nakedness, sometimes in the same song, sometimes in the same lyric, using the former to achieve the latter.)
Nah, I was supposed to go but I bailed at the last minute, in part because the town in which the event was held had been papered with KKK fliers a couple nights earlier and I'm not looking to get in a room with those scumbags. Not that I have any reason to believe people who turned out for that show are racist assholes -- in my experience, Carcass and Deafheaven fans have been pretty cool people, and I count a very small number of them among my closest friends -- but I woulda been out there looking for a fight, and that wouldn't have been much fun.
http://pix11.com/2016/11/17/kkk-flyers-found-in-patchogue-overnight/
How was the crowd for the two headliners? I was curious to know if people turned out. I hope they did -- those bands are so great, and they deserve big crowds wherever they play.
You are way too fucking kind, thanks man. I actually decided not to write a review because the outline I had was literally broken up into chapters (not kidding) and I just got overwhelmed by it, especially because I keep finding new things to say and I want to sit with the album a little longer before publishing anything. I kinda think I might work it all into a gigantic end-of-year essay or something, so you may still get that write-up, but I don't wanna make any promises I can't keep.
That said, you should listen to the album! It's got a few throwaways in the back half, but on the whole, I like it a lot, I think it's objectively really strong, and I absolutely endorse it.
The album he premiered at MSG ended with "Wolves," and also, he says on "30 Hours" (the first actual "song" among the "bonus tracks" after "Silver Surfer Intermission") something like, "These are the bonus tracks." I definitely consider them to be bonus tracks, personally.
Already apologized to the rest of the Black Market crew for that unreasonably long Metallica blurb (essay?) but wanna apologize to you guys too. It's unreasonably long, and I know it, and I'm sorry.
HAHAHAHA. I stand corrected! The description still fits (tho Ted's vox are not the same kind of "ugly" as Fenriz's). Tbh, now that you mention it, I actually might have been quoting Fenriz when I came up with that.
Hahaha, Fenriz is a total fucking legend, that's a great quote. Credit to Doug for coming up with that genre tag, btw, it's a perfect encapsulation of the music.
I'm beyond stoked for that Carcass/Deafheaven/Inter Arma show; they're playing in the sticks on Long Island, which is a real '80s metal move and I love it. Used to be that all the metal bands would hit the suburbs on their national tours and I think that was a big reason why I discovered metal as a kid. This whole tour is like secondary and tertiary markets and that's so rad -- you get way different crowds than you do in the city, it's just a whole other experience.
By "room-rattling urgency," I'm referring to the sound of the recording, not the "heaviness." It sounds really immediate and organic in ways that I think Neige increasingly moved away from after Le Secret, Souvenirs, and Amesoeurs. And the "unsettling shadows" ... man I dunno, I think of Souvenirs as being a warm, beautiful record with a real dark, ominous quality, and the disparity between those two tones is partly what I find so magical about it, and I think that got flattened out a little bit on Ecailles and Voyages, and flattened out entirely on Shelter.
Yeah, I dunno, I moved out of Astoria like three years ago so I'm not gonna pretend to be Mr. Queens, but I saw good bands in cool spaces when I lived there, and I definitely think LIC, Ridgewood, and Astoria are pretty central to the culture right now. Plus you gotta remember that CMJ shows aren't always hosted at places like Bowery Ballroom, but like Cake Shop or Brownies (RIP) or whatever. Places like that -- little bars with performance spaces -- absolutely do exist in Queens, and if you were hosting an honest small-room music festival spanning NYC, you'd want to include them ESPECIALLY because the scene in Manhattan is so wack today. Also in fairness St. Vitus is way closer to LIC than South Williamsburg, and Shea Stadium is way closer to Ridgewood than North 6th St. etc. But if you wanna strike the Queens mention, that's OK, I think the point stands -- I was just saying present-day NYC is not like Austin, where you can walk to and from basically any SXSW-participating venue in 15 minutes or less. If you gotta haul from Baby's All Right to fucking Irving Plaza, you're probably just spending the night at Baby's All Right.
Haha yeah those quotes are gold but that's Lefsetz, and he's just a reporter. It would really be something if Sir Lucian Grange went in on Frank Ocean (publicly).
I'm on vacation or else I woulda written about it here. Not gonna go deep on my immensely complicated feelings about it from my motel in Cape Cod, but because you asked (and because I really WANT TO talk about it): I'm into it! But super reticent to commit for obvious reasons. Leaving it there for now but will return to it later I promise.
Will, please don't apologize -- I'm super-flattered that Mick and passivepinetree are familiar with my byline, but I'm pretty sure they're in the minority, and that's totally fine with me. Also, please don't refrain from commenting. You brought up a great question! FWIW, I think commenters here are generally really friendly/informed/engaged. It's my fault for not responding sooner.
It's definitely a chicken-and-egg thing, and both parties are using the other to boost their own profile. One thing I left out of my assessment: If the Shins released their album next month, it would (presumably) be followed by a tour, so that by the time Coachella rolled around, lots of people would have seen the Shins touring behind the album already, thus making their appearance at Coachella less of an event. But if the tour is built around a headlining spot at Coachella, that becomes THE event. And it helps the band too: a Coachella topliner can probably book bigger venues than a Coachella midliner, in part because they'll probably be booking a lot of AEG venues (and AEG runs Coachella), so there's maybe a little quid pro quo going on. I don't mean to imply anything shady, it's just a mutually beneficial arrangement that the band probably has little control over.
Hey guys! Just saw this. Will, your question is a good one, although it would be impossible to track whether festival flier placement had any effect on album sales. My GUESS is it's like this:
The festival wants its big-font acts to be prominently in the news -- doing interviews and late-night appearances -- not least because the album (or reunion) PR cycle helps them promote the festival.
The label wants its high-priority acts to get big-font placement because those fliers act as advertisements outside the festival. They're extremely visible to millions of people who don't even attend Coachella. Being at the top implies you're an "important band" while being in the middle means you're either "on the way up" or "on the way down" and in the case of the Shins, it would be the latter. For Sub Pop (and the Shins) there's definitely real value in having the Shins at the top of the flier, but again, there's no way you could actually track whether it has any effect on sales because every case is unique.
I mean, that's my guess anyway. Hope it helps!
I still use a Classic too and when that dies I'm gonna splurge on one of those Sony Walkman 128gb mp3 players. They're kinda pricy ($700 I believe) but the specs look great and the reviews are uniformly superlative. I'm lucky though that I don't have any DRM on my library and I can move my files to a non-Apple device without the hassle. Still, not looking forward to that day.
This is what I mean about questions that deserve more attention than I can give them in the comments. Please don't mistake my brevity for anything other than me just having a ton of stuff to do -- this is really well-organized and compelling and it deserves more.
1. Lyor: I mean, come on. I'm not trying to deify the guy but I do think the POV of a four-decade biz veteran -- especially one with his resume -- is meaningful inasmuch as it pertains to an invasive species like iTunes and a music dilettante/opportunist like Jobs. But honestly, I mostly quoted him because I just read the piece last week and it stood out to me as something I wanted to think/talk about and it ultimately provided a good framing device for the bigger story.
2. If it doesn't matter to you, it doesn't matter to you. It mattered enough to me that I did switch to Android. (This is partly because -- no joke -- I needed a new phone anyway because my iPhone 6's Lightning Connector stopped working.)
3. Sure, there will always be workarounds -- you ever see the workarounds for people who run into HDCP walls? They're like these piece-of-crap splitters you get from Radio Shack for 25 bucks. Apple stuff never plays real well with non-authorized gear though, or at least, that has been my experience in buying gas station iPhone chargers. Moreover, it's just a headache to be forced into using workarounds simply to get outside Apple's ecosystem.
4. I just threw in the Mike Herring quote because it was recent enough that I thought people might remember it and it helped give some context to Lyor's quote: I wasn't saying, "Let's pile on with all the old beef we can find," I was saying, "Beefing with Dead Steve Jobs is commonplace, but Lyor's quote stands out to me as characterological rather than a broad critique of his business model." Again, though, it was primarily a tool employed in the service of establishing a narrative arc. If I'm more critical of Apple than I am their competition, it's because Apple have "a finger in every tart" as they say. Spotify doesn't make headphones or hardware. Apple does. Samsung doesn't run an online radio station that employs Zane fucking Lowe. Apple does. Google doesn't sign artists to $20 million partnership deals that include vastly more millions in promotions. Apple does. Sirius Radio doesn't run an on-demand streaming service. Apple does. Etc. It's hard to NOT talk about Apple. The old-school sharks were surely monstrous people but the reach of those businesses was limited by federal regulations. That's not the case anymore. And somehow, even stripped of federal regulations, nobody else is playing on Apple's level. Apple is the biggest (second-biggest?) company in the world, and it has made music its most visible priority. But like I said in the comment above, I do feel like I come off a little fixated, and I really don't mean to do that, so I apologize. There's a lot about Apple that I respect, and more importantly, I use Apple machines every day (even after switching phones).
I mean, honestly, we agree, the music industry was never great. The music industry 100-percent fucked itself and all its artists and basically put everyone in this position. I'm not talking about the prostitutes, I'm talking about the boilerplate contracts and the systemic arrogance and frankly the fact that the whole business is built on taking advantage of 20-year-old kids. I don't think that has entirely changed, it's just that it's scalable now.
Anyway, I guess that wasn't so brief, and yet somehow, still probably too brief. Seriously thanks for reading and sharing yr thoughts.
Thanks! And please, throw 'em at me: article ideas, specific questions, general questions, whatever. I can't promise I'll address everything, but it's tremendously helpful. I was thinking of maybe doing like a "mailbag"-style column now and then because there are so many good questions in the comments already, and I really don't have time to answer them with the attention they deserve, but that would give me a forum to get to some of them. Like, I never got to answer this one guy's comment-question about Live Nation's insurance coverage from three weeks ago. And that was a great question! I mean, I thought it was anyway. I dunno, maybe it wouldn't work, but yeah, by all means, just hit me with whatever ya got in the comments, or if it's way off-topic, just email me or @ me on Twitter or whatever. I truly appreciate it. Thanks again!
Hi guys, thanks for reading!
Just wanted to say a few things here at the top of the comments.
First off, I want to thank you all for the enthusiastic and thoughtful comments on this column week after week since it kicked off six weeks ago. I'm truly humbled by them.
Second, I'm not gonna do a column next week, so the next one might not be till the 26th, or even the first week of September. I'm not sure. I love writing this but it's not possible to do it at the level I want to do it on a weekly basis, so I gotta pace myself a little bit. I apologize. It's still a regular feature, just not a weekly one, which was never the intention in the first place. I just find a lot of stuff to write about every week, so I've been pushing myself to do a column every week. Maybe it'll be every other week or something. I dunno. It'll still be a lot.
Third, this is the second week in a row I went in a little bit on Apple Music, and I just want to clarify that it's not intentional. This time, it was actually an accident. I started writing about something else, but kept finding myself saying, "But let me back up a step..." and by the time I finally got to where I needed to start, I was here. I don't have anything against Apple; I have friends who work at Apple. They're cool people and I never hear them complain about their jobs. Apple makes great products and they employ talented people. It can just be hard talking about the business of music without talking about Apple, because Apple is so involved in so many aspects of the business of music. But I've got plenty of problems with Samsung and Spotify and Youtube and the RIAA and the labels and everybody else, too. I also have a ton of respect for the people at those organizations, too.
I guess that's it. Thanks again for reading. You guys are the best.
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