My post is on the website The Awl today:

http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/djing-a-halloween-loft-party-in-midtown

…it is packed and really hot now. I roll my sleeves up and I am sweating a little and my glasses got fogged up so I took them off and then put them back on a minute ago. The girl who looks like Lady Gaga is still dancing about three feet in in front of the DJ booth. I am playing A Milli by Lil Wayne and everyone is rapping along. A zombie has his hands in the air. A female jungle cat, maybe a lion or a tiger, just took a pill out of a Tarzan’s hand and downed it with a clear cocktail. A girl with a neon wig on is grinding against Elvis I think. I play The Monster Mash and a lot of people do that dance that Uma Thurman and John Travolta do at the diner in Pulp Fiction where they stick their arms out like dinosaur arms and bend their knees and swivel their torsos…

I get to the #Offline Festival, Pitchfork’s CMJ-weekend festival that was announced last week, a few minutes before Angelica, who is meeting me there. It is at a venue in Brooklyn called Brooklyn Bowl that is both a live music venue and a bowling alley. I go up to the box office window and give the guy behind the window the name of my friend who told me that he’s on the press list, but he can’t go to the show tonight and he told me that I could go in his place. The guy with the guest list lets me in.

Inside the venue, the band DOM is on stage and they are playing one of the songs off their EP. I like this band. There are not that many people here now and everyone seems disinterested in what’s happening on stage except two dudes near the front who are bobbing their heads. I wonder if they are friends with the band? The lead singer has long stringy hair that hangs over most of his face, a nose ring, and he is wearing a small t-shirt and jeans that are ripped at the knees. He sings with a high, nasal, bratty voice that may or may not be a joking affect. I guess part of the fun of this band is trying to discern the total joke parts from the half-joke parts. DOM is maybe the most anticipated band at CMJ this year and they are often compared to the band Black Kids whose first EP received an 8.4 Best New Music right before CMJ in 2007. That band was an overnight sensation and played several packed and sweaty CMJ shows and then signed a contract with Capitol Records right after CMJ, and they were really popular until their record came out. The record wasn’t very good because major record labels handle indie rock bands about as well as cats fly planes, and then Pitchfork gave their record a 3.3 and the entire review was just this picture:

So Angelica gets there and finds me in the crowd as DOM is playing their last song and then they finish playing and we try to go look at the bowling alley but the security guard won’t let us go into the bowling alley area, so we wander around other parts of the venue for a while. We see the lead singer of DOM on a couch talking to a photographer, and the guitarist and bassist of DOM are sitting together on a couch in a different part of the venue and we watch as this girl goes up to them and starts taking pictures of them and they start talking to her.

The lead singer of DOM is talking to a photographer on a couch closer to the entrance of the venue and I wait near them for like ten minutes, and then the photographer gets a phone call and looks at his phone screen and looks worried and says to the lead singer of DOM that he has to take the call but he’ll be right back. I figure this is my window, and so i walk up to the lead singer of DOM, whose name is Dom, and i say, “Hi, my name is David and I write a blog about music — can I ask you some questions please?”

And he smiles and says, “Sure!” He shakes my hand and taps the space next to him on the couch to indicate that I should sit down, and so I sit down next to him. CMJ weekend is a big weekend for him as the lead singer of an ascendant indie rock band and I wonder how many interviews he has done already and if he is tired of talking to interviewers. I am thinking about how we are the same age, and also I notice that he has a small tattoo of a star on the bridge of his nose (between his eyes, but closer to his left eye) and some tattoos on his hand, and I say, “What Pitchfork score would you have given your record?” He says, “10 out of 10,” and I say, “No, seriously” and he starts saying something about how it’s hard to say because he doesn’t want to name a low score so then people will believe that he actually thinks his record isn’t that good, but he also doesn’t want to go high for some other reason that I didn’t write down. I guess, really, he just doesn’t want to bite the ‘fork that feeds by second-guessing them because his EP got a good enough score. He continues to explain his scoring logic, but I guess he sees that I am no longer writing down what he is saying, partially because he’s speaking too quickly for me to transcribe it all, and then he says, “Okay — 8.2,” and I say, “Best new music?” He goes, emphatically, “Best new music!”

I say, “I saw that you smoked marijuana with Gucci Mane — can you tell me approximately how much you smoked?” He says, “Yeah, we smoked a lot,” and then he tells me about how Gucci Mane gave him some Grey Goose out of his own cup, which must have been quite an honor, and that they had actually talked on the phone before they met.

I go, “I also saw that you smoked blunts — did you smoke Phillies or Dutches?” As I’ve heard in rap songs, these are the two most prominent brands of cigars that are gutted and used to smoke marijuana with, and Dom tells me that he always smokes “Dutch Masters” and I ask, “What flavor?” At the deli I always see that they come in different flavors, and Dom says, “The Gold’n Honey ones.”

We talk a little more and he is very friendly and forthcoming and he grins a lot, he’s happy to be here I think, but he says a lot of stuff to me that sounds rehearsed for interviews and/or that I have already read on the internet, which is disappointing. Maybe I didn’t ask him the right questions. After we speak, I thank him and say goodbye and then Angelica and I go outside the venue to get some food, and then we eat and come back, and then before we go back inside the venue again she says she wants to smoke a cigarette so we sit on a planter outside the venue while she smokes.

As she is smoking, Pitchfork Founder Ryan Schreiber and Pitchfork writer Larry Fitzmaurice come out of the venue. Larry Fitzmaurice has short brown hair and a beard and is wearing a pair of headphones around his neck, along with a brown and orange striped sweater. He looks like he’s about to leave, and then he and Ryan do one of those high-fives where at the end of the high-five, their fingers sort of interlock and they make a snapping noise. I don’t know how else to describe it, but put your palms together while keeping your forearms horizontal in the air and curl your fingers and keep them curled and pull them apart so they make a snapping noise, and that’s like what Ryan Schreiber and Larry Fitzmaurice did as Larry left the #Offline Festival.

Now Ryan Schreiber is standing 15 feet in front of me and he is talking to three people. He looks in my direction and I wave at him and he smiles because, I guess, he recognizes me from the time I briefly interviewed him at a Pitchfork office party. He is smoking either a Parliament or a Parliament Light and he’s wearing gray Converse sneakers. The girl that was taking pictures of the guitarist and bassist in DOM that I mentioned earlier comes out with the guitarist in Dom, and the guitarist looks pretty drunk, and they walk away from the venue together. Ryan Schreiber takes out a second cigarette and lights it.

Ryan Schreiber keeps turning to the side and looking at me as Angelica and I are talking, and then the people that Ryan Schreiber are talking to go back inside the venue and he stays outside to finish his cigarette, and then he comes up to me! He says, “What up, Shapiro?” David Shapiro is the name I used for a post I wrote yesterday on The Awl. Ryan is smiling and I am smiling, and he gives me a sidearm high-five that turns into a handshake and I say, “Hey, how’s it going?!” 

He tells me it’s going very well, and I introduce him to Angelica and then he says, “Wait — did that thing with Tom Wolfe really happen? He sang you a Paramore song?” And I say, “Yep! Weird right?” And he’s like, “That’s crazy! Ah! That’s so nuts!!” He puts his arms to his sides and jumps up and down and says, “That is so crazy!” I am honored that he read that thing I wrote, I must be smiling in a way that I have read (describing the feeling you get after eating a really fresh bagel from this one bagel place in Minneapolis) as “that squinty-eyed weak smile look generally only associated with sex.”

We talk for another minute and I ask what he’s been up to, and he tells me that he saw Porcelain Raft at the venue Shea Stadium the other night. He says he really likes that band, and I ask him what he’s doing for CMJ and he says that he’ll pretty much just be here because the pitchfork #OFFLINE festival runs at this venue for a few nights during CMJ.

I tell him that I talked to Dom from DOM but I didn’t really get a good interview because I guess I didn’t ask him the right questions, and I say that DOM sounded really good tonight, like so good that it is hard to believe that they are an impoverished indie band because their recordings and shows sound unusually crisp and professional to have been made by some disaffected 22-year-olds…

And he tells me that there is a rumor that DOM is on EMI, which is a major record label that would have the money to finance their really professional recordings and shows, and I ask him why he thinks that and he says that they retweeted someone who said that there is a rumor that they are on EMI. It seems like the truth could go either way. Ryan notes that the DOM guitarist was really shredding on stage tonight and he demonstrates how the guitarist was shredding with an air guitar, and as he is playing his air guitar he looks up and closes his eyes and bites his lip. I tell him that i just saw the guitarist leave with a photographer. Then, to explain their expensive-sounding production, he says, “Well they’re from Massachusetts, maybe they’re just rich kids,” and he laughs when he says “rich kids” because he is mostly kidding.

I say, jokingly, “So what’s going on in your personal life?” Angelica giggles, and Ryan laughs and says that not much is going on in his personal life, and he asks what’s going on in mine and I tell him some personal stuff that would be best not to print here.

Another guy who is very tall and wearing glasses comes out of the venue and stands next to Ryan Schreiber as we are talking. When our conversation reaches a lull, Ryan looks at the tall guy and he introduces himself, he puts his hand out for me to shake and says, “I’m Mark Richardson, it’s good to meet you,” and I am in heaven because Mark Richardson is one of the other Pitchfork editors. We shake hands and I say, “I’m David,” then he introduces himself to Angelica and we talk about the show for a minute, and then I say, “How long are you [In New York]?” Mark Richardson lives in Chicago and I’m guessing that he’s visiting for the #Offline Festival, and he says, “Just the weekend — are you gonna be here?” I tell him that I am actually visiting elizabeth at her Artists’ Colony over the weekend, so I won’t be here, but the lineup looks very good and I am sorry to miss it.

We talk about the festival again for a minute and I ask ryan why he announced it like a week before it happened. He said that he was planning it for about two months but he didn’t want to announce it before he had everything in order for it. I ask him if he has read Cometbus, which is this punk ‘zine from the ’80s and ’90s that someone gave me a compilation book of recently and I am reading the book now, and he looks like he isn’t familiar with it but Mark looks like he knows it and says that someone recently mentioned it in connection with this blog. Ryan says, “speaking of ‘zines,” that his friends’ ‘zines in Minneapolis in the ’90s were what inspired him to start Pitchfork. He says that when he started Pitchfork in 1995, the internet was sort of a novelty, and that when he wanted to contact record labels, he actually had to call the Minneapolis Public Library to get their phone numbers because contact information wasn’t available on the internet yet.

I ask him if he wants to contribute a piece to my ‘zine, and he says, “When did you come up with that?” I say, “Like 45 minutes ago when I was reading the Cometbus book on the subway,” and he laughs and says, “That’s pretty much how you work, right?” I say, “Sometimes,” because I feel like when you get an idea that is really fresh to you and you want to act on it, you are really driven to act on it and then you get it done, but then after a while if you haven’t done anything about your idea, the impetus fades, so I try to do the things I think would be worthwhile things to do as soon as I think of them so I can get them done. Ryan starts laughing and says, “Would it be weird?” I say, “Not to me!” He smiles and says that he’ll consider it, and i don’t know if he actually will consider it but i am glad i asked because, as my Mom says, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, David!”

Ryan lights his third and final cigarette and we talk more about Cometbus and how Aaron Cometbus, the zine’s author, went on tour with Green Day in 1990 before they became a really popular band. Ryan Schreiber says that he really likes this blog and I make the “squinty-eyed weak smile look generally only associated with sex” again.

Eventually he says that he should get back inside and then we say goodbye and he walks back inside. Ah!

…Mike waits until Tom Wolfe is finished talking to the woman he’s talking to and then Mike introduces himself, asks Tom Wolfe some questions, and then finishes his questions and introduces me to Tom Wolfe. I ask him if he listens to any pop music.

Tom Wolfe says that right now he is quite fond of this song called You Are The Only Exception and I guess I make a quizzical face to indicate that I’m not familiar with the song, so he starts singing it to me. Tom Wolfe sings, “You are the only exception, you aaaare the only exceptionnnnnn, youuuuu are the ooonly exceptionnn,” and he snaps his fingers to the beat and I laugh and he smiles and keeps singing, and then he stops singing and says, “I also like country music. I like the song That Ain’t My Truck In The Driveway,” and I say, “I don’t know that one either…” I just want him to start singing again, but he continues, “I like that one because it presupposes that there are no other kinds of vehicles beside the truck: no sportscars, no sedans, no minivans…” He thinks for a second, “…no motorcycles…”

http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/went-to-a-literary-gala-interviewed-jann-wenner-jann-wenners-son-and-tom-wolfe-sang-to-me

No new long post today, but two weeks ago I was in Whole Foods and I got a Google Alerts e-mail and it was a link to pitchforkreviewsreviews.blogspot.com. I emailed my mom to see if it was actually what it said it was, this blog read out loud in a German accent, and she said it was real and that the boy reading it “reads beautifully.” I thought you might get a kick out of it! I did.

I was coming up out of the subway on the way to work today, listening to the Baths record, and I ran into a girl named Natalie who I went to school with, and I took my headphones off and we spoke for a minute and I asked her about some people from college that we both know, but she knows them better and has kept in contact with them and I’ve fallen out of contact with them. Most of her answers involved the person I was asking about leaving New York at some point between when college ended in May and right now, and eventually she just said, “Yeah, I think almost everyone I know fled the city. Like, you can’t find a job here…” And then she looked down and I looked down and we changed the subject and we said goodbye and she got on her subway and I put my headphones back on and walked to work listening to Baths.

In this book about North Korea that I just finished, the writer ends the book by describing the starving people sitting on benches and on the ground along the highway and keeping their heads down or staring blankly and just waiting for something to change, people who are helpless and without agency, and in a way it’s strange to think about people reacting to a bad economy this way (North Korea was going through its second major famine in two decades when the reporter drove by the people she described) instead of protesting or trying to overthrow the government. But sometimes when there’s a problem that is overwhelming and terrifying and almost universal, it makes it harder to address than some marginal, conquerable problem, and the best way to address it and keep your sanity is to get away from it. At one point in the 1990s, even as they could barely feed themselves, North Koreans went to the movies on average 21.8 times/year and at the same time, South Koreans went 2.3 times/year. When you can’t get a job for two weeks you can get angry and try harder; when you can’t get a job for two years it’s hard to get out of bed.

I studied economics in college and when I’m not reading about music, I’m mostly reading about the economy, except sometimes i can’t bear to read about it anymore because there is this pervasive sense of hopelessness about it. We’re living through a rare occasion in economic history when mainstream economists and fringe economists are in agreement about America’s economic present and short-term future: it’s bleak. Kim Jong-Il’s speeches about North Korea’s wildly prosperous economy sound preposterous and the rest of the world laughs at him because his people are starving, but it’s harder to laugh when are own leaders are making the same speeches and people here are starving (“New York City’s 1.7 million recipients of food stamps”). So I guess it’s intuitive to think that American independent music, made and received in the context of a collapsing economy, is a product of a similar escapism.

There’s a general understanding among economists, and this might be true among scholars in other fields too (about their respective disciplines) but i didn’t study other fields so I don’t know, that history can be accurately understood through an economic lens and almost any mass idea or action can be tied to a parallel circumstance in the economy, and also that there are superficial circumstances that are put forth as explanations for these ideas or actions but if you dig deep enough, or sometimes you don’t even have to dig that deep, there’s an economic motivation to explain anything. Wars, art movements, political movements, trends in mass psychology, etc., can be explained via the economy. There are aesthetic changes that shroud economic changes — as they say, “Cash rules everything around me.”

And sometimes I read Pitchfork reviews for chillwave records or witch house records and think of how often they review a record and use words like “amniotic”, “womblike”, or “womb” to describe it — it’s pretty constant, right? Five or ten years ago, every other twentysomething band wasn’t making hazy, woozy, droney, “womblike” music. There was no band called Baths and no crop of hundreds of projects that sound like Washed Out, but suddenly, since 2009, there are multiple micro-movements that sound like nosedives back into the uterus, “amniotic”, maybe because the world has gotten too hopeless and terrifying to handle. Two years ago, bands like Toro Y Moi (age 23) and Baths (age 21) and the hundreds of other projects that sound like that might have been (or were) on “the beach” musically, because two years ago it seemed like the economy might recover soon and the beach was a fun place to wait it out or escape it temporarily. Now they’re crawling back into bed or getting into the bath.

Missing the idea that chillwave and its siblings are the product of a collapsing economy and the instinct to escape it, and the effect the economy is having on the first generation of kids to have it worse than their parents, including kids who graduate prestigious schools and wind up working at the supermarket and kids who have no hope of making a decent living as a musician for very long if at all, is like thinking that Citizen Kane is a movie about a sled. Every music writer that has written about chillwave and neglected to understand this has failed the kids who make it. Chillwave is an economic phenomenon, and it’s the sound of kids who are long past anger and frustration and defiance.

After the Japanese economy collapsed in 1991, the country went through what is referred to as “The Lost Decade” (1991-2000) and the kids who graduated college during that time are known as “The Lost Generation” because they lived with their parents for an unusually long time before becoming independent, and they went through a bunch of other social turmoil associated with chronic unemployment. American economists have been talking about avoiding “the lost decade” since 2008. One of the symptoms of that is “hikikomori,” which is a term that refers to “the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation… from various personal and social factors in their lives.” How many chillwave artists are one-man bedroom projects? Almost all of them, right? Think of Dayve Hawke, Ernest Greene, Chaz Bundick, Will Weisenfeld, Alan Palomo, Tom Krell, etc.

It’s frustrating that the music press considers the sonic choices of bands like Toro Y Moi and Baths in isolation, because that cheapens their ideas and turns chillwave into an aesthetic fad or a trend or a bandwagon instead of a more psychosocially-rooted movement or a communal reaction, a bunch of kids going through the same thing and reacting the same way. Chillwave, and whatever microgenre How To Dress Well is, is resonant because its listeners want to get into baths too, you know?

During the Christmas break of my sophomore year in college, I went to California to visit friends and see California and get out of new york because I had just stopped dating the girl who I had been dating and I was torn up about it, and I think there is this idea that when two people stop dating, the person who initiates the breakup feels good and the person who gets broken up with is heartbroken, but I think sorrow is generally more evenly distributed than that.

I was sitting in Alaina’s family’s kitchen in West Hollywood listening to this band she was introducing me to, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and I was looking through Facebook pictures and I saw these new pictures of the girl I was dating with her ex-boyfriend and it made me upset. I told Alaina, “I’m deleting my Facebook, I don’t need to see this shit every day,” so I deleted it, and I was also generally thinking that the social internet was making the quality of my mental life worse all-around and that it is a powerful and untested psychological experiment that might be driving people slowly insane. Perhaps other people are less sensitive and are better-equipped to handle it, and the social internet might not be making other peoples’ lives worse.

Jonathan Richman says, “You can have a cell phone, okay, but not me,” or something just like that.

And then last night I saw Catfish, which is a heartbreaking documentary about humanity that happens to be told through the medium of Facebook and the internet, and the documentary’s narrative begins when the subject receives a package containing a painting that a little girl made from a photograph that the documentary’s subject took, which is sort of like something that just happened to me.

Because last week I got an email from someone purporting to be the old Pitchfork writer Chris Ott who wrote a book about Joy Division and may have left Pitchfork acrimoniously and is known for being especially bitter, and I think it’s hard to stand out as bitter among people writing on the internet, and he told me that he had something to send me in the mail and I should email him back my address.

Then he said he had tried to obtain my address from other Pitchfork writers but he couldn’t get it and he wanted to surprise me but that was no longer possible because he had to contact me to get my mailing address, and could he please have my address, and I said okay and gave him my address because I am moving in about a week anyway, so it won’t be my address for long.

I was afraid that the person purporting to be Chris Ott would send me something sprinkled with a chemical death powder, and I told my mom that I gave an ex-Pitchfork writer my mailing address and she said I should immediately cut off contact with him because he may be mentally unstable, and I think she was scared i was going to chemical death powder too.

And then last week I got home from work and my roommate had brought in an envelope addressed by Chris Ott from his office in Massachusetts and left it on the kitchen table, and I saw it and opened it and inside it there was no note but there was a folded up Elvis Costello poster.

And I unfolded the Elvis Costello poster and what fell out of it was Chris Ott’s original review of Slanted and Enchanted, hand-written, every page.

It was touching, especially given how at odds the gesture was with Ott’s public persona as a curmudgeon.

And I thought more about it when I finished the documentary Catfish last night, about how inside every bitter internet person there is someone who is probably very sweet in real life but for some reason the internet compels people to be bitter, which is not what Catfish is about but if you see it you’ll see why I would be thinking that.

And I was also thinking about why the internet makes people bitter and I thought about all the times I’ve written bitter things on the internet, like, “I don’t like this band, what awful lyrics,” and I guess all I wanted to do was discern something that other people had also discerned but not yet written, and raise a chorus of people who would agree with my opinion so my opinion would be valid and I would have correctly seen through whatever band I said I didn’t like, and I would be proven right through the chorus of agreement, and I would receive approbation for my opinion from other people on the internet, and my life would be a little more worthwhile.

But nobody ever chimed in to agree, and even other people who thought the band sucked were trying to frame their arguments in different ways than how I was trying to frame my argument, like I could say, “This band is bad for X reason,” and instead of people saying, “Yeah, they do suck for X reason”, someone else would respond, “No, they suck for Y reason,” and someone would disagree and say, “You’re both total morons, they suck for Z reason,” because I guess everyone wants to be the person who starts the chorus of opinion and receives the approbation, you know? And I think even people who agreed with me would be hesitant to chime in because feeling bitter is an ugly thing, and sometimes a friend will say that a band sucks and even if I feel the same way I won’t want to agree.

And Catfish is superficially about how the internet is a deceptive place and my friend said that it reminded her of that old New Yorker cartoon where there’s a dog typing on a computer and the caption says, like, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” except they should update it to have someone typing something nasty into a comment box and then in the next frame you see the person and it’s like a marshmallow man and the caption would say, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a softer,” so what i am saying is that probably Chris Ott is a softee, like me or you sometimes.

And also in the vein of Catfish and internet deception and how nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet, I was at a party on friday and a friend said she was sort of in disbelief about the veracity of my interviews and interactions with people I write about, like last week asking Christina Aguilera what she ate for breakfast or asking Kelly Osbourne what her favorite Black Sabbath record is, and also maybe this whole thing might strike you as an elaborate fiction project and I actually am a dog writing this from an internet cafe in Scottsdale, and I have no way to prove that I am not, which sort of bothers me but I guess is just the nature of writing anonymously on the internet, because every encounter written about on here is true except the stuff that’s obviously a joke, like writing that the Pitchfork office party like it was the gathering of a dark secret society, and I only wrote that because the actual party was fun but uneventful.

But also, I am a dog!

When I was 14, I was 5’2” tall and I weighed 220 lbs, and every day I woke up and had to go to school, I wanted to walk in front of a bus, and every day when I came home I wanted to walk in front of a bus, and I didn’t want to look myself in the mirror and I didn’t let people take pictures of me. Every year I went to the doctor for a checkup and I gained at least 20 lbs, and some years about 25 or 27 lbs, except one year when I only gained 17 lbs, and the pediatrician showed me the height/weight graph and for the first time my height/weight combo was actually on the graph instead off the graph. On the way home, my Mom was really happy and proud of me that I’d managed to gain so little weight that year, and I went home celebrated with a huge plate of chicken parmesan and spaghetti with meat sauce and cheese and bread and Diet Coke, a piece of cake and some cookies and Starburst before bed that my mom didn’t know about (Sorry, Mom if you are reading this right now).

Anyway, so I went to summer camp every year and got really into tennis because it was the sport I could play that didn’t have shirts and skins teams, and I swam in the lake at camp with my shirt on and told counselors that I didn’t want to get sunburned even though I am an olive-skinned guy and had been sunburned under only the most extreme solar conditions.

On days in school when the school conducted physicals in the gym, we were given a card and had to walk around the gym to all the different stations to get weighed and have our heights measured and our blood pressure taken and other stuff checked, and the staff would fill out our cards, and on those days I would either pretend to be too sick to go to school or go into the bathroom with my card and fill it out myself and wait like half an hour in the library so people wouldn’t suspect anything was up, and then just hand the card in so I wouldn’t have to walk around with my weight publicly displayed, even if it was just on a little card, not like written across my forehead, I don’t know what I would have told someone if they had asked to see my card and I would have had to show them and then they would have seen that I was 13 and weighed 200 lbs.

One year in middle school, I saw my friend Doug’s card and it said 90 lbs and my card said 180 lbs and I wanted to tell him I weighed as much as two hims, and laugh, but obviously I didn’t because it was too sad to laugh about and I didn’t say anything.

So every day on the walk to school I’d get a $1.59 bag of Dipsy Doodles (which was a huge bag) and a Starbucks bottled Frappucino to supplement my lunch, which was like a chicken parmesan sandwich or cheeseburger and french fries and a soda, and my parents didn’t keep any good-tasting food in the house so sometimes I’d get candy from the vending machine and hide it in my bag and eat it secretly before or after dinner or before bed. One time I heard my mom crying and telling my dad that she didn’t know what to do to help me, and I used to look in the mirror and think of what I would do or give away to be able to lose weight, like I would think to myself that I would literally amputate one of my legs to make the rest of my body thinner and other stuff like that, or I wished I was too poor to be able eat that much, honestly. I played a lot of tennis and walked a lot and every time I exercised I’d reward myself with food so it was negated.

When you are fat, and you eat a lot, you don’t start off by eating huge portions of individual foods right away, or at least I didn’t — I started eating a little of one food, like one cookie with lunch, and I’d eat one cookie with lunch for a long time and then one day I’d be like, “What the heck, two cookies please,” and then the next day I’d go back to one cookie because two cookies seemed like an indulgence and then the day after that two cookies again because really what’s the practical difference between one and two cookies right? Or between medium and large? And then one cookie again, and then two cookies and then two cookies and two cookies for a long time, I’d promise myself, “Two cookies is the most I’m gonna have with lunch EVER,” and then one day I’d just say three cookies, because, hey, what is the difference between two cookies and three right? And it’s just one day right? And then the next day I’d get two cookies and be proud of myself for eating just two and then the day after that I’d get three to reward myself for having only two the day before, and then it would be three for a long time after that. Portions grow gradually because you are trying to not gain weight.

Another thing about being fat for me is that on one hand it felt like it was totally my fault and I was the one eating two or three burgers as dinner or three slices of pizza because that was what I was choosing and I hated myself for it, and on the other hand I felt like I had almost no control over what I ate and I needed three cookies and if I restricted how much I ate at one meal, I would feel like I owed myself an overindulgence at another meal, and there is a more complex psychology to overeating than that but you get what I’m saying, right? But there is no one else to blame except yourself and I’m sure a lot of fat people would find it condescending if you said they didn’t have that total agency in their overeating but I know that’s what it was like for me. Being a conscious and ongoing victim of yourself is maybe worse than being someone else’s victim because at least you can blame them and know there’s something wrong with them, but in this case, you just know there’s something wrong with you.

And then one day I was on the bus up to summer camp after freshman year of high school and I was reading Stupid White Men by Michael Moore because I was 14 and that was where my politics were, and there’s a chapter about being a vegetarian in the book and I obviously needed to make a drastic change in my life, so I decided to become a vegetarian on the spot and threw out my salami sandwich at a rest stop and told the other kids I had been a vegetarian for six months so they wouldn’t be cynical or doubt my resolve when I said I didn’t eat meat. And then I used being a vegetarian as a way to not eat almost anything — I’d say, “Oh, chicken patties for dinner tonight? I can’t eat that but it’s okay, I’m not hungry anyway,” and my motto was, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” and I don’t know how I summoned the willpower to not eat but I was not eating as voraciously as I was eating before that. Losing weight became effortless and I felt a sort of ecstatic peace that maybe like monks feel, but I didn’t care if I fainted because at least girls would talk to me if I was thinner and I could play basketball or ultimate frisbee like a regular kid. My first girlfriend, junior year in high school, called me Rocawear because that was the only brand of clothing I’d been able to fit into — I was like a XXXL and had to get my sweatpants hemmed.

I am not telling you all of this so you will feel bad for me because I lost a bunch of weight and am now of normal weight and there is nothing here left to feel bad for, and I am sorry if you are thinking I told you all of this so you will feel bad for me, but there is no other way to tell this story and it’s gonna be music-blog relevant in 30 seconds.

So when I was in high school, my girlfriend’s mom said she was an alcoholic and I asked my girlfriend if she drank like every day and my girlfriend said she hadn’t had a drink since 1985, and being fat is sort of like the same thing — like when you are fat during formative years you will always think of yourself as fat, or maybe it was just me, but like eventually no matter how skinny I could ever be I will probably still feel really fat and Ihave never had an unconflicted relationship with food and have made peace with the fact that I will pretty much think about my weight consciously every day for the rest of my life but I wanted to say that as easy as it is to blame fat people for being fat, it’s not really right, or it’s superficially “correct” because no one is putting a gun to anyone’s head and saying “eat.”

But there is so much more going on in the mind of the man who’s sitting in front of you on the train who weighs 415 lbs and is eating a Whopper with extra cheese and a large fries and a large Coke and even if you want to slap that food out of his hands and shake his shoulders and say, “Stop killing yourself!,” you might be missing the point. And not even in a “Society makes poor people fat by providing only cheap unhealthy food options” way (although that’s true too), because there’s more going on on a personal level. Literally I could not stop eating and all I wanted to do was stop eating since before I can remember, and blaming fat people for “choosing” to be fat sort of misses the point and it’s a condition that deserves compassion, and I don’t mean that condescendingly because nobody wants to be pitied but there’s a difference between pity and understanding. For instance, you know a heroin addict would probably stop using heroin if they could flip a switch to turn the heroin need off and it’s easy to vilify the heroin addict or fat person but food is as addictive as drugs. If you ask the 415 lb. man on the train if he thinks his lunch is a ludicrous lunch he might tell you it would have felt like a ludicrous lunch ten years ago, but today it feels like a rational lunch, just like the guy with the $50/day percocet addiction or cocaine addiction would feel like something was missing with only $35 of percocet or cocaine even though that would be enough to lay me or you out.

So anyway, the reason I was fat was not because I was poor and could only afford cheap food, like my mom kept all snackfood out of my house and stocked the fridge with fresh vegetables and fruit and made me healthy meals that I could circumvent at school, and my parents chided me into not eating so fast so I would feel full sooner and always tried to get me to eat healthy and paid for me to exercise almost every day through tennis lessons and made sure I walked a lot, but I think that me and a lot of other overweight people feel an unusually strong consumptive instinct — I can just say I felt uncomfortable when I wasn’t consuming a lot, and I still feel that way and when I do stuff I like to do, I do it a l lot.

And so in the vein of alcoholics often replacing their consumption of alcohol with consumption of something else like cigarettes or the Bible, I came home from camp and was afraid that I would be plunged into circumstances where I used to eat a lot and it would trigger me eating a lot again, but instead of food I came home from camp and started downloading music more and reading about it, especially Pitchfork obviously, obsessively and every day like I used to eat, and I could download records and add them to my iTunes all day every day after school instead of eating, and I started going to concerts every weekend and buying CDs and instead of rushing to the kitchen after dinner for dessert I’d rush back to my computer to see if anything new had come out, and I would download and download and add and add and that became what satisfied my need to consume and consume. I’d just download whole discographies of bands I knew I’d probably never listen to. Anything anyone mentioned, I would find, and if I couldn’t find it after a while I’d just buy the physical CD, and honestly, all of this may be unique to my psychology, but I’d bet that there are a lot of people who used to be really overweight who replaced the consumption of food with the consumption of something else and this wouldn’t sound that crazy to them.

Downloading music became like buying or ordering food, and hearing it became like tasting and chewing and swallowing, and thinking about it is like digesting. Have you ever heard someone say something like, “I heard that record, but I still need a few more listens to digest it, you know?” That’s how I feel all the time.

And if it wasn’t for the ability to download as much music as I needed to be satisfied, and I know this might all sound crazy to someone who it hasn’t happened to, but it is what I went through and how I still feel, I probably would just have gone back to food or done drugs and I would have either weighed (and this is a conservative estimate based on gaining only 20 lbs/year which was much lower than average) 380 lbs right now and died from that very soon. Downloading music literally has saved my life.

okay so did you ever read that really long New York Times Magazine piece called like “All The Obama Twentysomethings” about all the really young White House staffers, kids in their twenties who went to like Harvard and Yale and now work as liasons or advisers or coordinators in the Obama Administration?

okay well so on Saturday i was at a party and i was gushing about Obama to this kid who said he [worked for] *was in town with* the Democratic National Committee, i told him how i didn’t think Obama was getting a fair shake from the press right now and a bunch of other stuff. i also told him about the night i was DJing at Lit and Obama won the election and people were dancing out on the street, on 2nd Avenue, and how it was like fucking magical and i really wanted to run outside but i couldn’t because i was working

and then he goes, “do you wanna meet the president?” and i was like, “hahaha yeah sure, tell him to email me and we could chill”

and he was like “no seriously, do you wanna meet him this week?” so he got my email address and told me that if i wanted to, on Wednesday (which is today), i could volunteer to drive a van in the presidential motorcade. so we emailed back and forth a few times to set it up and what i am doing today is driving a 12-passenger Ford E-350 van in the presidential motorcade as he passes through new york today to do two democratic fundraisers and tape an appearance on the daytime TV show The View. right now he is reportedly eating a sandwich at a sub shop in Edison, New Jersey and i am sitting in the lobby of the heliport just south of the South Street Seaport with like five hundred cops and secret service agents monitoring the perimeter.

my van’s name is Press 1 and i am supposed to keep my mouth shut around the press that i’m chauffeuring because anything i say is “on the record” and could embarrass the administration.

if you’re wondering why some random 22-year-old is doing this, there’s three reasons: 1) the president is doing Democratic fundraisers, which are political, so using enlisted military men or policemen to drive his people around would be ethically questionable because those dudes are apolitical by nature 2) it’s expensive to fly in drivers from DC, and there’s no real reason to 3) there is a culture of volunteerism within the Obama administration. like apparently when he does a “rally” in St. Louis there are like a hundred people doing what i do. also i just found out that the president no longer does “rallies”, he does “High-Energy Message Events”. they did an extensive background check on me to do this too. i wonder if secret service agents read this blog?

also if you’re wondering if Secret Service agents are gonna be tapping on my window for blogging about this, i was told that they won’t be as long as i don’t include any sensitive security stuff. so if you are a terrorist and you’re reading this to obtain national security information i’m gonna tell you right now that there’s nothing sensitive here and i’d also like to take this opportunity to recommend to you the new Big Boi record entitled Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty because it is so good

so anyway today i took the day off from work to drive this van in the presidential motorcade and i hope that by the end of the day i can ask Barack Obama what his favorite indie rock band is and if he’s familiar with Pitchfork (i know he’s 48 but he’s pretty hip and from Chicago and lived there for years while the festival was going on and before he was president) and i’m gonna ask him what he thinks of it if i can!!!

so as i just said, i am sitting on a bench in the lobby of the South Manhattan Heliport. the president’s car is out back and i just took a picture with it. on the drive from midtown to the seaport i listened to old school hip-hop/r&b show on Hot 97 on the radio, i was driving a 12-passenger-van by myself with my Google Maps directions printout stuffed under my leg so it wouldn’t fly out the window and listening to Mariah Carey’s Fantasy , i was so scared i was gonna crash the van because i’ve never driven a big van before

now i am sitting in the van because the president’s helicopter just left new jersey and a woman just opened the passenger door to the van and she startled me because i was writing that post about pitchfork being searchable by writer and i was like “ahhhh hi!!” and turned the radio off really fast because i’m listening to Hot 97 and the new Young Jeezy single featuring Plies was playing really loud and the Plies verse was on and he was saying “ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS, THAT’S WHAT THE ***** (pussy, it was bleeped) COST ME” right as she opened the door. i think i just got off on the wrong foot with that woman

then i wait another five minutes and a different woman gets into the passenger seat of my van and introduces herself and we chat fot a minute and i ask her what kind of sandwich the president got at the sub shop in New Jersey and she says he got a “super sub” which she assumed had “everything” on it, and then she told me that the prices at the sub shop were quite reasonable and she remembered a lot of the prices. she said “a small bag of chips was 50 cents, a large was $1, a small potato salad was $1.69, a large was $2.49…”

then we drove to ABC studios and the president went on The View. as i was walking into the studio we passed the president’s car again and i looked inside it and in the back seat of his car were two bottles of Aquafina and a ziplock bag with trail mix in it. the ziplock bag was rumpled like it had been reused a bunch of times and the trail mix looked like it was homemade/home assembled. me and the other drivers stood around in a basement room with all the press people watching the president on The View. the press people were using their laptops, many of their laptops had extra batteries and wireless receivers taped up with black electric tape to the back of the laptop screens which i thought looked pretty hardcore

then we went out to a space they set up for the president to take pictures with people. it was a red carpet with flags and fake trees and a curtain. all six of us, the drivers, stood in photo-ready formation for awhile waiting for the president. david axelrod walked by, he looked a little disheveled, he waved to us. and then the president walked down a hallway with some secret service dudes around him and into the room we were in and looked at us and said “hi guys!!” and we all said “hi!” and he thanked us for driving and then looked us over, we’re all pretty young, and said “are any of you students?” and two of the drivers say “yes” and he goes “where do you go to school?” and they say “yale” and he says “what do the rest of you do?” to each person individually and they each answer. he shakes all of our hands

i’m last and when he gets to me he shakes my hand and i say “it’s great to meet you!!” and he says “what do you do?”

and i am looking barack obama in the eye and i say, “i write a blog about a popular music website!”

and he looks at me quizzically for a second, i guess he was sort of piecing it together, and he goes, “oh, which website?”

and i say, “it’s called pitchfork. it’s based in chicago! are you familiar with it?”

and he says, “no, but i’ll have to look into it!”

and then he walks around behind us and stands next to me and the photographer takes our picture twice and then we go back out to the vans to drive him to his next event, where he’ll meet Anna Wintour

so now i am sitting on like 44th street in the line of vans and a man in military garb carrying a huge rifle just strolled by. that Young Jeezy song is on Hot 97 again. i just ate my tuna salad on a bagel. as the motorcade goes around new york, the streets are lined with people. someone in the car remarked on how amazing it is to be in new york but mostly they stay silent. we pass a man who is holding up a sign that says something like SPACE ORBITAL PSYCHOSOCIAL WARFARE or something and the photographer takes a picture of him, and i wanna lean over to the staffer sitting next to me and say “do you think he’s onto something?” but i don’t think we’re on the same sense of humor wavelength. then later the photographer is looking over his pictures and realizes that the man standing in front of the man with the sign is Luis Guzman

i tell the staffer who asked me to volunteer for this about talking to the president about Pitchfork and he says he didn’t think barack knew about pitchfork  because his primary cultural liasons are his bodyguard and the first lady’s “bodygirl”, and my friend suspects that neither of them would have introduced him to pitchfork. on The View they asked Barack Obama what music is on his iPod and he said “everything” and they asked “justin bieber?” and he said “no” and my friend joked that it’s because justin bieber got a bigger ovation at the white house easter egg roll this year than the president. i guess they’re just used to obama at the white house and justin bieber being there was novel. but i just can’t imagine that obama would be listening to justin bieber even if that hadn’t happened

we drive to the west village, where barack chills with anna wintour at her apartment. we park on houston and sullivan. houston street was blocked all the way from the FDR to maybe the West Side Highway and there are people standing behind barricades who can’t cross Houston Street and they have to go a few blocks to get around the motorcade. one of the women who i am driving asks what neighborhood we are in and i tell her “Greenwich Village i think”. she said that one time she ate at a restaurant that frank bruni recommended to her on this street. she said they’re friends.

in the van outside anna wintour’s house i talked to a passenger about music. she really likes the avett brothers and doesn’t really like the jonas brothers. the rest of the staff came back to the van and talked about how cool Air Force One is and how at the World Economic Forum at Davos, it totally dwarfed all the other world leaders’ private jets. then the motorcade dropped barack and his crew off back at the helipad that i started writing this post at and they flew to new jersey in their helicopters and then back to DC. the new york times writer who was in my van filed a brief report about the whole day from the back of the van. you can find it on the New York Times Caucus Blog. it’s pretty different from my report but you know what they say: there’s your side, there’s my side, and then there’s the truth

i am in the american apparel on howard st. and broadway, just above canal street, a live version of I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones is playing on the store stereo and during the chorus the band stops playing and the crowd screams, “I WANNA BE SEDATED”. we just went swimming in the river because of the heat wave and we came here to buy dry clothes and currently i am waiting for my friend to get out of the dressing room and i see a skinny middle-aged guy walking around the front of the store followed by a trail of like 18-year-old girls and he keeps telling them to shift stuff around in the displays and i realize holy cow it’s dov charney

he looks older and grizzled and more wrinkly than i expected but it’s definitely him. now i am lurking around the store

now he’s outside right in front of the entrance of the store giving the girls directions for how to position stuff in the outside display, and i know he’s gonna have to come inside sooner or later so i wait in front of the entrance and when he walks inside i look him right in the eye and go up to him and say, as fast as i can, “hi i write a blog about the website pitchfork, could i ask you two questions for my blog please!!!” and he looks at me, dead serious and with this really cold and impatient stare and sort of rolls his eyes and says “okay” and i say “okay what’s your favorite indie band” and he snarls, “i don’t have one”

and then i say “what’s your favorite drug” and he says “coffee” and one of the girls behind him says, quietly, “nescafe” and then i say “okay cool thank you very much, that’s it” and he starts to smile a little bit, he must be glad i have no more questions, and we look at each other for a second and i say “hey i really appreciate what you do, like without reservation” and then i say “also i’m david” and he shakes my hand and says “nice to meet you”

and he smiles and then i walk out of the store and he walks past me into the store and i look back and he’s standing in the doorway, seriously, giving me a thumbs up and he says “pitchfork!” and he’s still smiling, ecstatic to have made it through a 30-second ambush interview by some kid with a tumblr unscathed by questions about sexual harassment, i know the interview isn’t very good but i was really intimidated, okay that’s it bye

UPDATE: took a bit out of this entry about american apparel politics, don’t think i know enough about what i was writing about to comment on it

right now i am sitting on the edge of a pull-out couch whose rods have been disaligning my back, in the guest room in my aunt’s house in miami because me and my mom are here visiting my grandma. and right now you are at the Pitchfork festival, wasted and making out with Bethany from Best Coast

you are passing out in ecstasy as the sun comes up after seeing your favorite bands, i need a klonopin to knock me out at 10:20 after streaming seinfeld

you are partying all night long in the Chicago area’s finest luxury accomodations, you are throwing furniture out the window of the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago with Stephen Malkmus as he looks you in the eye and tells you how much you mean to him, gorgeous groupies wander in and out offering you drugs, Stephen wants you to play auxiliary percussion on the rest of the Pavement reunion tour, he texts David Berman and asks him to write a book of poems about you, David texts back and says he already did and the publisher is working on the layout but they need more pictures of you

i spend 45 minutes explaining to my grandma what my blog is, my mom asks my cousin if he reads pitchfork and he says he is “only familiar with pitchfork as a farm implement”, me and my family are into different things, you are LITERALLY INSIDE the physical manifestation of pitchfork, now you are getting your shoulder blade signed by Tom Breihan and getting a cab to the tattoo parlor to get the signature permanently inked onto your body. you tell the cab driver to “step on it!!” because your sweat might wash the ink off, he says he’ll get you there “on the double” and compliments your cool haircut

you passed Mark Richardson on the street in the afternoon on the day before the festival and he invited you into his house, Wayne Coyne was sitting on the couch and Mark says “have you heard Zaireeka?” and you say “yeah in high school i listened to it a bunch of times in my friend’s basement” hoping Wayne will be impressed that you had the will and fortitude to actually listen to Zaireeka. and then Mark and Wayne look at each other and giggle and look back at you and say “NO YOU HAVEN’T!!!” and you say “what do you mean?” and then they put Zaireeka on, except instead of 4 stereo systems there’s 7 stereo systems!! and you are hearing the 3 Lost Discs of Zaireeka and you feel like you’re discovering that there were 3 more commandments

and then Mark goes over to his computer and logs into the Pitchfork backend and goes to the page with the Zaireeka 0.0 review, and he tells you to step up to the computer, then he and Wayne stand behind you and say “go ahead, click Delete” and your hand is trembling as you reach for the mouse and click it, and the 0.0 is deleted forever, you’ve changed history, you’re the hero of the festival, and then they say “it’s your job,  to write the review for the 7-disc Zaireeka you just heard” and you feel like a young Luke Skywalker, they just made you an honorary Pitchfork reviewer and you text Bethany about it right away, she texts back that she’s so proud of you, you don’t know how you’re gonna do justice to this unearthed masterpiece and Wayne senses your hesitation and says “i believe in you”

now i am eating lox and bagels at my aunt’s kitchen table, streaming the festival on a laptop, just realized the shorts that had my klonopin in them are in the washing machine, you and James Murphy are comparing white label collections and eventually he admits yours is more impressive, you and Big Boi are smoking marijuana that costs $150/gram and he is playing you his next record and literally music has never sounded better. St. Vincent writes you a love song addressing you by name but you tell her you’re already with Bethany, Nathan from Wavves tries to fight you but you kick his ass in five seconds!!!! you’re the fucking man at this Pitchfork festival

my aunt’s seventeen-year-old dog that can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t bark vomited on my backpack in the living room last night when everyone was sleeping. you are at the pitchfork festival and i am in miami visiting my grandma

hi right now i am on a plane to miami with my mom, we are on our way to visit my grandma. i brought my headphone splitter and my iPod and two pairs of headphones so i could share some music with my mom because she’s curious about what Pitchfork writes about. i played her Best Coast because she grew up during the 60’s and i thought it would remind her of girl groups, and when she said she liked Best Coast and it did indeed remind her of girl groups, i smiled because sometimes it’s hard to push youth culture across generational lines and you want your parents to get you, and maybe it’s easier to explain myself to my parents through music than anything else. the same might be true for you if you’re the kind of person to read a blog about a popular website about music. anyway yesterday my mom turned 60 and a week ago i turned 22 and apparently “parents just don’t understand” but it’s extra sweet when they make an effort to, right? i guess i’m at a point where i don’t lock my bedroom door for five hours after i come home from school and keep my parents out of my life you know? last night i tried to explain this blog to my dad and i said “it’s kind of based on a tenet of this art movement, Dadaism, that says that the criticism of a piece of art can be just as important as (or even more important than) the art itself”

anyway now i am watching a program about INXS on the in-flight TV and the guitarist just said “plenty of bands have covered other bands’ songs, but i think WE’RE the first band to go into the studio and rerecord our whole album” and he grins and is so proud when he says it, man i hope pitchfork reviews the hell out of whatever they’re recording to get this guy’s ego in check

so for my mom’s birthday i bought her a Lester Bangs anthology that i really like because she reads this blog sometimes so i figured she might like reading a real music critic, but now i sort of regret it because a) it’s all about drugs and debauchery and i’m not sure if i want her to know that i know about stuff like that and b) it’s like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer buys Marge a bowling ball for her birthday and Marge says like, “i don’t want the bowling ball! YOU want the bowling ball!!” but instead of Homer and Marge and a bowling ball, obviously, it’s me and my mom and an anthology of music criticism

this morning i showed my mom the online flyer for Leon’s reading and she said “who is Das Racist?” so i tried to explain Das Racist to her and now i am playing her Rainbow in the Dark off their mixtape and sometimes i pause it and we take our headphones off and i explain the lines like, “okay when he says ‘catch me on the south side kickin’ it with schlomo’ he means on the south side of williamsburg, like the hasidic area!!” and she laughs, “and when he says ‘cracker in the chocolate, that’s human pocky’ it’s a double-entendre about those japanese chocolate-covered snacks and ‘cracker’ the slang term for white person” and she nods and says “you really have to know a lot to understand this!!” and she even pauses it herself when he says “i’d like to thank Gchat” because i set up Gmail accounts for my parents and sometimes we talk on Gchat so she got that one

anyway in that times article today Scott Plagenhoef said that i use Pitchfork “as a platform,” i guess he means as a platform for my own writing and i guess he implies there’s something disingenuous about that, and he’s right about me using this as a platform because when i started writing this blog i wrote about Pitchfork directly and almost exclusively and it was boring to read that ALL THE TIME because really there’s not an unlimited amount of lenses through which to view Pitchfork, like the inside baseball aspect is wonderful a lot of the time but also boring to read posts and posts and posts about it exclusively, and like at the end of the day both Pitchfork and this blog are entertainment for you and if the writing is a constant and maybe redundant stream of musings on pitchfork exclusively, why would you read it? the internet is a huge place

now i am playing Say It Ain’t So by weezer and writing out some of the lines i like best and the ones you might not hear or can’t understand when you first hear them, like “when he says ‘somebody’s heiney is crowding my icebox’ that’s short for heineken” and “he’s saying ‘this wave is a waterslide away from me that takes her further every day, SO BE COOL’” and “this bottle of Stevens awakens ancient feelings, that’s such a cool line!!” and she agrees. when we get to my grandma’s i’ll play her that video of Weezer on Letterman in 1995 that perpetua put on his blog, rivers is wearing the biggest khakis on earth and he barely moves and he just looks so cool

i’ve tried to play her a lot of rap on this flight too but she can’t get into it, i played her Let The Beat Build and Blowin’ Up Fast and A Milli and by Lil Wayne and I’m God by Lil B and I Don’t Fucks With Em by Curren$y but i think her auditory lexicon doesn’t have rap’s sound in it. there was a Times article about why playing Western music like Pearl Jam for captured terrorists in Guantanamo freaks them out so much and makes them go crazy, it was about how the musical scale that Western music is on is unrecognizable and unfamiliar to their ears in a way that makes it more displeasurable for them to hear Pearl Jam than it is for us to hear Pearl Jam, it’s like cripplingly, neurologically displeasurable for them, and maybe my mom has the same thing with rap. i couldn’t find that article but i found this:

and i explained that the danger and lawlessness and undeniable cool of rappers is, for me, sort of the same badass escape that the rolling stones were to her in the 60’s and 70’s. plus it sounds great and is sometimes really moving. JUST YOU WAIT, i’ll get her to like rap if it’s the last thing i do

okay the plane landed have a good day

i am at the launch party for the 90,000 square foot flagship Forever 21 store that’s opening in times square, the store has 121 dressing rooms and probably like 6 floors and i am in the basement with about 400 fashion industry people and there is a woman who apparently used to be engaged to terry richardson DJing, she is playing Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. almost all the women here have waxed upper lips (i think) and are wearing heels that look heavy and carrying bags that must cost more than macbook airs and i am doing what i really like doing which is sitting in the corner writing this in my blackberry memo pad and double-fisting a flute of champagne and a cocktail that a little sign at the bar referred to as the “East Village Hippie”, i think it has some like artisanal ginger soda in it or something, got two drinks because i didn’t wanna have to keep going back to the bar, people give me weird looks as i walk past them here, do not belong at a fashion party

there is a stage with yellow neon lights going every which way behind it, it looks exactly like what M.I.A.’s stage setup would look like if it was put together by a disposable fashion brand. the band The Virgins is gonna play after the “fashion show” that’s happening at 9:00. the publicist for the store just came up to me and my friend who brought me (he’s a magazine reporter) and said “we’re gonna bring you guys into the green room in five minutes and you can talk to the band”

now the DJ is playing Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

what i know about The Virgins is that they’re a fashion industry affiliated rock band, they are on Atlantic Records i think, i used to play their single Rich Girls when i DJed at this club in the east village, it’s cheesy and i felt like a whore but at least people wouldn’t leave the club when it was on

anyway the publicist brought us into the green room so i go up to the dude who i’ve been told is the guitarist, his name is Wade, he’s tall and wearing all-black jordans, gray skinny jeans, a batman graphic tee and a black leather vest

and i say “hey i write this blog about this website pitchfork, could i ask you a couple questions about your band?” and he goes “okay cool”

he is in the middle of picking out skirts and womens’ tank tops off racks in the green room because the band is gonna dress in Forever 21 womens’ clothes on stage because they think it’d be funny, i am following him around the room as i talk to him and he is pulling frilly pink shit off racks

“so do you guys consider yourselves an indie band?” 

“no way man,”

that catches me by surprise because i thought he was gonna stick to the guns of his aesthetic, i like this guy already 

“it’s, like, hard to say who’s independent. i mean i’m not gonna lie, we’re on a major label. we do everything ourselves but we’re not like a pop group [i think he means like the jonas brothers], but when i think of indie i think of U.S. Maple and like Pere Ubu and we’re definitely not like that. at least until we put out a noise record” and he laughs

Wade has long stringy blonde hair down to his shoulders and he’s wearing a flat-brim vintage basketball cap and he keeps picking his cap up off his head and flipping his hair back when he’s talking to me, he looks like Jay from Jay and Silent Bob, he seems kind of nervous, it actually puts me at ease. i look over to the bassist who has his hand in a bag of multigrain pita chips and is telling someone about what he thinks he’s gonna wear

the woman sitting behind Wade who used to be engaged to terry richardson lights a cigarette and says “how long do you think it’s gonna take before someone tells me to put my cigarette out?” and Wade looks back at her and says, “how long do you think it’s gonna take before they tell me to put out MY cigarette?” but he’s not even smoking a cigarette

he turns back to me, and i notice that when he isn’t flipping his hair back he’s fidgeting with his all-access credential that’s on a lanyard around his neck. anyway i say “so what do you guys think of pitchfork? i know they didn’t review your record”

and he goes “yeah man THANK GOD for that.” we both giggle. “i guess they’re pretty cool, they publish information way faster than magazines publish it. i like funny websites better, like failblog. and i look at some photo blogs. yeah i don’t really read pitchfork that much…”

he’s actually such a sweet and forthcoming dude and i realized i don’t wanna ask him any more questions that would get a real dumb quote out of him or try to skewer him or something

“okay cool. so i know this is a tacky question and you don’t have to answer it, i’m just really curious — how much money do you guys make off your record deal and being in the virgins? and like corporate gigs and other stuff?”

“our manager is like our pimp — he gives us an allowance, like a $1000 a month each because if we got any more we’d spend it like crazy. i don’t know how much the band makes total, i don’t handle that stuff. i know that some gigs we get like $500 for and some we get like $20,000. we get $20,000 just for getting a song in some asinine movie trailer”

we both stop talking to watch two other members of the band argue with a woman wearing a headset microphone about whether they can wear Forever 21 womens’ clothes on stage and i hear her say “if you do that i’m gonna lose my job” which i suspect is because forever 21 is owned by really religious korean catholics whose tolerance for cross-dressing is presumably minimal. Wade looks back at me and says “guess that’s settled then. anyway…”

so i go, “how much are you getting to play this forever 21 flagship store opening anyway?”

“we get 20 grand from forever 21 for this. and honestly they’re so much cooler than most of the other corporate gigs we do. they don’t hassle us. we did a mercedes-benz gig last week and they had some bullshit red carpet we had to take pictures on for like ten minutes. so far tonight, i just walked in and nobody has said anything to me. hip cool brands milk you for everything you have but forever 21 leaves you alone, they fucking rule. do you want anything by the way?” and he motions towards the snack table that has some fruit and Clif Bars and a box of turkey Lunchables on it. even the snackfood is corporate

so now i’m realizing exactly what The Virgins are: they’re like models posing as a rock band for corporations who want to enliven their brand images or sell clothes to, ummm, youth. they are like the “hot young rock band” as a corporate platonic ideal, you know? the virgins can’t sell out because they were never really in, and they address people whose idea of rock n roll is a set of signifiers from bygone eras, people who go out clubbing in manhattan wearing torn and faded Judas Priest tour t-shirts. and Wade is gleefully in on the whole game too, and seems like he’s having a lot of fun. i know this might not come as a revelation to some of you ethical culture consumers out there but maybe the difference between a virgins song appearing in a cadillac commercial and a big pink song in that commercial is that the virgins make no pretense at being, like, serious artists. they’re hustlers. they hustle music to people for whom music is an accessory.

he says, “yeah some bands are zionistic about this, and they don’t do corporate gigs and don’t get the money they could be getting out of this system, and then one day they’re down at south by southwest playing the fucking Fader Fort with a Levis logo right behind them and doing it for free! the difference between them and us is that we get paid. i don’t come from any money dude, i dropped out of high school, i don’t have any skills or anything to fall back on.”

that picture of Wavves playing at the Fader Fort that was on maybe Brooklynvegan flashes through my mind’s eye. the DJ is now playing Rudeboy by Rihanna out in the main hall. hope they’re not out of champagne

“before i was in this band i was a weed dealer, a Fedex delivery guy, and i also answered the phone for a bigger weed dealer. it’s easy to say you’re not taking corporate money if you have something to fall back on. i don’t mean that in a martyr way but you know what i mean. i heard Vampire Weekend in like every single Judd Apatow movie trailer and in Step Brothers and i was like ‘man that rules, i hope that buy a house with that money’. plus it’s awesome to play in a store. there’s so many hot girls here! how can you deny that you’d play in a store full of hot girls? AND these are mostly the same people who came to our shows when we would play lofts where the lights wouldn’t work and the cops would come and bust it anyway, so who cares?”

then he says, “have you seen the great rock n roll swindle? about the sex pistols?” and i say “no why?” and he says “well, what the sex pistols did was get signed to a label and fuck around so much that the label would drop them, so they would sign with another label and do the same thing, and they’d do it again and again just to keep getting the signing bonus. that’s like us sort of, with corporate gigs. we don’t care about looking cool or hip or credible. this isn’t high school where you’re trying to have the coolest posse. we’re just trying to get by.”

then i say, “i see bro. anyway the biography of your band on allmusic says you guys met at a ryan mcginley photo shoot, what’s the deal with that?”

()

“actually we didn’t,” and then he pauses for a second and maybe scrutinizes me face, “okay i’ll tell you, because why not, i’m tellin you everything.” (i swear he actually said that, i don’t know what’s compelling him to tell me “everything” except maybe he’s psyched to be interviewed because i guess people either never interview this band or just talk to the lead singer). “we actually met watching a yankees/red sox game at Sweet and Vicious [bar in downtown manhattan]. one time some journalist asked us about meeting at the ryan mcginley shoot and we just went with it, we thought it sounded cooler. i kinda regret it, we should have told the truth, but whatever.”

at that point i couldn’t really think of any more questions so we just stood around and ate off the snack table and he said he liked my sneakers and i said i liked his and we talked about the east village, then some girl from MTV came in to interview him so i went back out into the main room and waited until the band got on and watched them, they were pretty good. their new drummer was the drummer in be your own pet, jemina pearl was there too rocking out in the front row with a trucker hat on.

when they finished their set, my friend went to go find ryan mcginley to interview him and now i’m back in the corner writing this again, drinkin a flute of champagne with a blackberry (the fruit) in it, livin off the fat of the corporate land like the second most corporate band in the universe (after the Black Eyed Peas), the virgins. sorry for the tense changes in this writing, i took notes when he was talking about what he was saying and what i was thinking and then wrote around them so it might read weird, man it’s hard to keep tenses straight, also maybe no more champagne for me ;), you get what i’m saying i think

hey so last night me and joe and angelica went to a modular records label showcase at this bar/venue in greenpoint, me and joe biked there and it was like 999 degrees and humid so by the time we got there my face was glistening with sweat, like beads of sweat were dripping off my nose and my hair was stuck to my forehead, and honestly it couldn’t have come at a worse time because the first thing i noticed when i got there was that the rest of the people there were like the 150 most attractive people in the music industry and sharply dressed and not even sweating at all, most of the girls were like 6’2” blondes and had just stepped off a beach in your dreams and joe said “yo even the sixes here are eights.” so we walked in and grabbed some complimentary red stripe lights and posted up in the most dimly-lit area in the whole place while my face dried off and i scanned the crowd to see if i could spot any of the members of tame impala (who i was trying to recognize from their pitchfork guest list thumbnail photo) so i could interview them but i guess they were all backstage…

so eventually the band came on and started playing, as my high school english teacher would say, they laid about eight thick slabs of sumptuous psychedelic rock upon the audience, all of which were met with a disinterest characteristic of people in the record industry. whenever the band hit a quieter instrumental part you could hear people talking over the music and also like three songs into the set the crowd was noticeably thinner. i guess if you have already gotten behind this band financially and it’s your job to listen to records and promote bands and go to shows and schmooze with other industry people like all day every day, you probably could give a fuck less about yet another label showcase and for that i can’t fault you

anyway so then after the show i went outside with joe and angelica, she smoked a cigarette and i concealed my beer and we took in the the warm summer evening air and i thought i saw one of the dudes from MGMT milling around, so we speculated as to whether it was him or not (spin magazine confirms it was him, apparently he also played bass on stage with them with his back to the audience the whole time like a true major label rock n roll renegade). and then at one point i turned around and found myself standing next to the drummer from tame impala who was deeply engaged in conversation with a chick who looked like clare danes and as much as i wanted to interrupt that to ask him about his pitchfork score, it would have been a total violation of that unspoken code between men you know? and he probably would have turned down the interview in frustration

so as i was waiting for their conversation to end so i could approach him with my interview pitch, the lead singer walked up behind them and i intercepted him!! i went up to him and mumbled “hey i write this blog about pitchfork and i was wondering if i could ask you a few questions about your pitchfork score and some other stuff” and it was pretty loud out there and i think he thought i said that i wrote FOR pitchfork which was a misconception i was not eager to correct. he said “yeah sure”

so i was like, “okay cool, so how is your life different since you got that Best New Music” and he paused for a while and said “well now we’re highly regarded indie rock legends” and then he paused again and said “make sure your readers understand the humor in that” and i laughed and said “yeah of course” and then i said, “do you read pitchfork?” and he said “occasionally.” then i was like, “is it as big a phenomenon in australia?” and he indicated he didn’t really know. i said, “who do you like better, dungen or wolfmother?” and he said dungen

at that point i sensed my interviewing momentum slowing and his eyes were darting around over my shoulder, probably scoping the pretty honeys that had turned out to see him be the lead singer of a rock band and that’s not an opportunity he was eager to waste, especially on some sweaty kid with a tumblr, so then i cut to the question i REALLY wanted to ask and was like, “so how much weed do you guys smoke?” and he looked startled for a second and sort of giggled and said “i’m not sure if i wanna answer that” and i was like “come on bro” and he said “okay fine, let’s just say if we go a day without one or two spliffs it’s a rare thing” and then i said something like “you don’t have to answer this, i know it’s tacky but i’m just genuinely curious, how much money do you guys make off your record deal?” and he told me that each member of the band gets $500 a week from the label, and no matter how many records they sell or if their songs are in cadillac commercials they don’t get any more money than that. so now you know how much money some indie bands that get best new music get

then we talked about his record for like three more minutes and he told me the story of how he dropped out of college, which was that literally he was in the car on the way to his last exam ever in college (he studied ASTRONOMY!!! how perfect for a psychedelic rocker right??? like practically speaking, what else could you even do with an astronomy degree beside play psychedelic rock, how many astronomers are there in the world total, like 600?) and he got the call from modular records that they wanted to sign his band! so he turned the car around and drove home and never took his final exam and dropped out of college. i told him i thought that was really rock and he laughed. man i really turned the charm on for that interview ;) i was pretty nervous to be in a Best New Presence but i hope i pulled it off. you should get their record, and pay for it if you can, the dude was honestly really nice, and listen to it on headphones, it’s real good. okay have a good day

so i walked into the pitchfork party last night and honestly all of my darkest suspicions about pitchfork were like immediately confirmed. the first thing i noticed was the walls and floors and ceiling were made of stone, the office looked just like a medieval castle or the clubhouse of an ancient secret society. there were no conventional lights but the walls were lined with flaming torches. i knew i was about to witness something special.

then i saw the staffers: there were about 75 tall, impossibly handsome and truly sinister-looking thirtysomethings with severe five o’clock shadows and grins of pure evil flashing across their faces, almost impossible to detect but there nonetheless like flashes of genius in the Lucksmiths catalogue. so all these pitchfork staffers were impeccably groomed and clad in the suavest and most expensive hip eveningwear available, like rag & bone, they all looked like princes of darkness. there were wives and girlfriends with horrified looks on their faces huddled together in a corner while their men gloated about who had destroyed the most bands in their pitchfork reviewing careers and what models of drum machines dominated early Detroit techno, whether or not 8-track tapes would eventually overtake cassette tapes as the preferable format for music consumption. there were three doors on the far side of the room: one labeled Mens, one labeled Ladies, and one labeled Vomitorium. an unlabeled door near the entrance led to what someone told me was the dungeon

the floor was littered with check deposit receipts from record labels to pay for the Best New Musics they get. a videochat with scott plagenhoef was projected on the ceiling and his eyes were bright red and he didn’t say anything but he periodically erupted into cackling fits, and the laptop was pointed toward the crowd so he could see us too, it was like he wanted us to know he was keeping watch over his minions. i wanted to take a picture of the stuffed corpses of what i recognized as two of the members of the band Sound Team that hung from the ceiling in nooses like in that scene in the Sixth Sense, but my phone doesn’t have a camera. also a fire pit was dug out in the middle of the room with a spit rotating over it and when i asked Sean Fennessey what they were gonna roast on it he looked me in the eye and said “you’re the kid who writes pitchfork reviews reviews right?” then he winked and licked his lips. i was like trembling with fear and i told him i didn’t know what he was talking about, told him i never read a pitchfork review in my life, “i didn’t even know you guys did reviews, thought it was all news and videos,” i trembled, “my girlfriend brought me because she wrote a couple reviews for you in like 2008-2009,” i said “you can have her, just take her, please, i don’t want any trouble”

a hush fell over the room when ryan schreiber made his grand entrance, he stood eight feet tall and was trailed by three interns hoisting boomboxes over their heads that were playing Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio, and also two interns carrying smoke machines. this lent a certain epicness to the proceedings you know what i mean? one of the interns with a boombox fainted and got swiftly carried out by two guys from the Advertising department (who i could identify because they were covered in complimentary American Apparel). before they reached the door schreiber commanded them to immolate the intern’s body in the video editing suite that’s located above the main office space, noting how that intern had cracked under the pressure. anyway schreiber was wearing a t-shirt for an Ed Droste side project so obscure that ryan schreiber is literally the only person who has ever heard it. during the thirty seconds i talked to schreiber, he told me he’s planning to review the Ed Droste record himself and give it a 10.0, you will have to download the review in a PDF to connote the gravity of the writing, and then schreiber will delete the mp3s of the record then burn the master tapes so no one can ever hear it, and maybe put the video for what would have been the single on Pitchfork.tv but make it a broken link, and then after he told me his plans he smirked and nodded in self-satisfaction and said “yeah that’s what i’m gonna do, that’s how much i loathe independent music and culture.” couldn’t believe what i was hearing. when Beach Fossils played later in the evening he stood behind them, brandishing an actual pitchfork menacingly, and when i talked to the lead singer he said ryan kept whispering, “play tighter, play more authentic” but they didn’t know what that meant

luckily i slipped out before anyone found out who i was, but now you know what kind of shit really goes on over there

i talk to a bunch of people who are really into music and really knowledgeable about it, but who never really got into following which labels put out which artists’ records. that’s a shame because i’ve always found the label that an artist is on can really explain a lot about the records they put out. when i read about an artist i first try to find out their release history, then where they’re from, then what label they’re on. and now, in an era when so many artists are just “from the internet” (the disparate locations of chillwave artists (or that new spooky witch rap genre that pitchfork described a few weeks ago), mean that their “scene” exists more on the internet than it does in a conventional place), the importance of record labels as extramusical signifiers is heightened, relative to where a band is from at least, which is considered pretty important

the label that a record comes out on gives you an idea of the record’s production aesthetic or the quality of the resources and thought behind it, and in a way, that’s crucial to understanding the record itself. for example, you know a record that comes out on True Panther Sounds will probably embody a subversion or ironic-unironic embrace of sunshiney pop and/or tropical rhythms (lemonade, tanlines, delorean, rainbow bridge, girls). Modular records is australian, and their records are almost all Australian psychedelic rock and psychedelic dance punk (wolfmother, tame impala and muscles, cut copy). if that’s your thing, check out their roster for records you might like from bands you might not yet have heard of but play in a style you’re into. underground rap labels like anticon (super left field, often conceptual, unusually difficult rap) and stones throw (also left field, off-kilter rhymes over screwed up soulful beats) have strong label identities too.

labels share resources and producers and contacts, and i’m sure bandmembers sleep on labelmates’ couches and sing backup on labelmates’ records all the time. labels are tiny artistic communities, and if you take the time to understand them as such, you can catch a lot of Best New Musics before Pitchfork calls them that, and, even better, catch the records that pitchfork can’t get to that are your PERSONAL best new musics, like that dignan porch record on captured tracks.

underwater peoples records or woodsist records will sound lo-fi and home produced but not exactly hissy, versus a record that comes out on island or interscope or sony (or any of their affiliates) that’ll sound professional and polished, and, you know, plasticky. if you ever read a pitchfork review and they pan something you think is pretty okay, see if it came out on island records and you’ll know why.

some labels, like the now defunct TVT records (former home to Lil Jon and a bunch of indie bands at the same time) or Universal Motown (home to The Rapture, Scissor Sisters, and some random soul stuff) or XL Records (devendra banhart and m.i.a. and vampire weekend and the xx, all on the same label) don’t really have a conventional sonic identity, but might give you an idea of how popular an artist’s records will be (most records that come on on XL records or 4AD or Domino or Matador are pretty likely to make a splash in indie music), and sometimes an idea of their quality: labels like XL are expertly curated, and the people who run them have earned a lot of listeners’ trust, even if some listeners aren’t aware of that. actually come to think of it, no one is on top of as wide a swath of hitmaking innovators as XL Records is at this moment, and anything that comes out on that label is worth a purchase.

a bunch of labels with really distinct voices have those voices because they’re run by people who don’t sign bands haphazardly/don’t just sign any band they like regardless of how they sound — they wanna develop brand identities that listeners can look to for listening guidance.

so in a way, record label heads, the people who decide which bands to sign, are both businessmen and THE ULTIMATE CRITICS — they’re the people who have to put their money with their mouths are, whose conviction in the resonance of their tastes powers their livelihood. ideally, label heads believe in the bands they sign more than any critic does, because their bands doing well means they can put food on their table and their business can survive (if a critic’s picks don’t sell well, it doesn’t really have any impact on the critic as long as the criticism behind those recommendations is worthwhile). so in the vein of all that, last night me and my temporary sublet roommate were talking about aging and sports, and he mentioned this quote from this football coach Mike Gundy who was defending one of his players after a newspaper wrote a piece attacking the player — Gundy said “COME AFTER ME! I’M A MAN! I’M FORTY!” implying that he saw the value in that player and was wise and schooled enough to be prepared to defend his player.

i think in addition to being the ultimate critics, label heads are also analagous to coaches in team sports. a label’s roster is like a sports team’s roster — the more quality work each band or player produces, the better the team does. Bands send their labels completed records, and labels give them varying amounts of feedback on those records, just like players come off the field or court to be given guidance by their coaches.

so in the spirit of Mike Gundy defending his player and the notion that label heads are the ultimate critics, how rad would it be if label heads wrote serious critical defenses and legitimizations of their artists? these pieces would be beyond the laudatory fluff of the conventional press release and could discuss the merits of each records in terms of the ideas that went into them, the traditions that the music works in, the circumstances the artists were living in when they made the record, themes that run through the lyrics and perhaps the artists’ hidden influences, like i guess influences that are hard to discern from listening to the record on its own but make sense once you read about them. these pieces could be on the labels’ websites or part of the press kits for their records, and could act as catalysts for more informed criticism of the record. if all a writer has to work with is a fruitless interview and a 12 downloaded tracks, it’s easy to get the record’s intent mixed up, to write and think vaguely and inaccurately about the record, and easy to dismiss the record offhandedly you know?

if any label heads are reading this, you should know you’d be doing your artists (and your bottom lines) a lot of good by releasing more information about them, and seriously discussing their work in public, getting into detail about why YOU love them enough and think their ideas are worthwhile enough to gamble your income on (beyond the frustrating vagaries of the press release, which is often discarded anyway), because really YOUR word is likely to be taken seriously because you’re the one putting your money where your mouth is, you are the curator and critic-in-chief of the label, and your unparalleled access to the artists personally and the records before anyone else hears them gives you the upper hand in starting the conversation about the record. obviously you can do this before critics get a chance to malign the record or misunderstand it or damn it with faint praise because they didn’t have enough information to write something really compelling about the record you know? think about it