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