This article ran on April 2nd, 2009, in The Weekly. The full version can be found here.

Vintage Vinyl owner Steve Kay looks like a record collector. He wears average glasses (no square frames a la alt-bro music store clerks), wears his hair long like a character in Dazed and Confused but with a lot more gray, and looks serious enough to be in record collecting for the long haul. You know the type - crate after crate of LPs in the living room, a partially scratched off list of sought-after treasures stashed away somewhere and more obscure knowledge than a thousand Internet fan pages.

Or maybe you don’t know the type. Only recently has vinyl has re-emerged as a popular medium, meaning you may not know any record collectors at all. In 2008, vinyl sales doubled from the previous year as 1.9 million wax records got pushed in music shops around the country, according to Nielsen Soundscan. If you’re interested in why anyone cares about a once-dead and cumbersome format, there are few better places to dive into the vinyl arena than Vintage Vinyl, which is located close to campus on 925 Davis St.

Kay’s made a living out of his record collecting for a long time; the store’s been open for 29 years, and with its massive inventory doesn’t even include any of Kay’s personal records for sale. “None of them were from my collection,” he says. “They were all things I bought with the idea of opening a shop.”

(Continued here.)

This interview ran on May 7th, 2009, in The Weekly. The full version can be found here.

Kelsey Wild is not just another college singer-songwriter-pianist - she’s a college singer-songwriter-pianist at your school. Marvel at how her soft-spoken voice transforms into a strong, assertive alto devoid of jejune collegiate aloofness once she’s on stage at Evanston venues, such as Bill’s Blues. The Communication freshman, who’s been playing live since high school, shares her feelings on performing, being compared to Avril Lavigne and how it feels to play in front of classmates.

What kind of songwriter do you think you are?

That’s a hard question. It’s hard to look at my own music from an unbiased perspective and say exactly what it is.

What would you like it to be?

What would I like it to be? I would like to be considered … I don’t know, I guess the easy genre would be singer-songwriter or like, indie or something, but I don’t even think indie is a genre. You can be metal and be indie or you can be anything … it’s hard. I guess I would just like to be looked at as an artist (laughs).

(Continued here.)

This article ran on April 3rd, 2009, in The Weekly. The extended version can be found here.

After a couple of months of dealing pot out of his room in Bobb-McCulloch Hall, Simon was getting a little paranoid. His clientele, which at first had just been a small circle of friends, had expanded to include friends of friends, kids down the hall he didn’t know, and sometimes, visitors from outside Northwestern. His CA didn’t care about kids drinking as long as they didn’t do it in the hallways, but dealing was an entirely new offense. The giant gallon Ziploc bag full of carefully divided eighths of marijuana, each separated in its own little baggie, started to smell more and more to Simon as the grind of winter quarter wore on.

Weed smells. It’s the toughest thing to deal with if you’re trying to keep your stash a secret - you can lock it in a box, put it in a drawer, vacuum-seal it or put it in an airtight mason jar and it’s still going to stink. No matter how many CVS bags Simon wrapped his product in or how deep he shoved it into his closet, the odor of wet grass, burning rope and pine continued to fill the room. At least he thought it did. He couldn’t be sure. Though his friends said they never smelled anything, they weren’t the ones who had to leave the room and hope a gaggle of cops wouldn’t be standing in front of it when he came back.

One day, when his roommate wasn’t home, Simon dug the bag out of his closet and made sure it was sealed tight. He peeked his head out of his door to make sure no one was walking through the hallway. Bag in hand, he quickly stepped out and walked toward the men’s bathroom.

No one was inside. He walked over to a stall and stepped in and locked the door behind him. He quickly stepped on top of the toilet seat, still holding the bag, and looked up. He put his fingers to the ceiling tile above him and propped it up. Then, he took his massive Ziploc bag - covered in one wrinkled plastic bag after another - and put it through the hole in the ceiling he had just created, resting it on top of an adjacent tile. He replaced the tile, stepped down from the toilet and went back to his room. From then on, whenever a customer came calling, Simon would go into the bathroom, get back on the toilet, take his weed down, distribute it and put it back.

“You know, I never found my piece or grinder at the end of the year when I moved out,” he laughs hard, after taking a break from his bong to talk. “Do you think if I went back, it might still be there?”

This article ran on May 5th, 2008, on North by Northwestern. The full version can be found here.

You’re a kid in the ‘80s. You’ve just come home from a shitty day at school, gotten yelled at by your mom because you got caught smoking dope under the bleachers at school, and you think your girl might be cheating on you with your best friend. Everything, to put it politely, is fucked.

But you’re listening to a band, and jeez, these guys are great because they get exactly what you’re going through, singing about every fucked up notion of career, love, friendship, family, anger and longing you ever had, and they’re not pretentious like any of the other underground rock bands that the douches at your school are into. But your friends don’t care and the Internet doesn’t exist, so you don’t know anyone else who cares about these guys. And so you sit alone in your room, lying on your bed, listening to these guys play and for a moment, at least someone understands you.

Fans of The Replacements, one of the most influential, before-their-time-but-not-really bands from the ‘80s, are in love with the band, not in a way that people say to posture themselves as having good taste, but for reasons like the ones described above. They played songs that obviously weren’t written for you but still sounded like it, and a generation of misunderstood youth, punk rockers, intellectuals and college kids fell in love. They amassed a giant college fan base even though mainstream audiences didn’t care, and didn’t have a hit until they were churning out atypical soft-rock stuff for a major label that still sounded decent but was nothing like their earlier albums put out on an indie label — the ones everyone would hoist up as examples of perfection if they came out today. The Replacements can be remembered for taking the pretension out of underground music, being honest and crude, and having the best songs of any band from that era.

Lucky for us, those first four albums have just been re-mastered and re-released in order to make some money off trendy revival fetishists as washed-up bands tend to do these days, so that everyone can get their panties in a bunch and wonder whether or not they’re going to play Coachella. The Replacements will play another show when they feel like it, so we can just turn our attention to the albums.

Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981)

Some people might say this album sounds muddled, noisy, and crappy. Those people are idiots, or at the very least, not into punk rock. This album’s a real screamer, fifteen tracks clocking in at just under thirty-two minutes and burstin’ at the seams with vitriol and fire. It’s The Replacements like they’d never sound again because they got older, learned how to play better, hired better producers, etc., but it’s got a certain charm to it like the other records don’t, ripping songs like “I Hate Music” (about hating music, natch) and “Somethin’ to Du” (about pissing off Hüsker Dü, a hardcore band also from Minnesota) in just over a half hour. Lead guitarist and professional fuck-up Bob Stinson’s a blowtorch here, his solos sandwiched in between the typical punk rock chugging that fills up most of the songs. But The Replacements don’t play to formula: Check “Johnny’s Gonna Die,” the first instance of lead singer/song-writer Paul Westerberg’s anti-pop genius, a song that slows down when everyone was expecting fast and loud, with Stinson even whipping out a soulful solo, a soul-o if you will (I am so sorry for that). Rock critic Lester Bangs once wrote something about how the Replacements sounded like every other hardcore band out there, probably from hearing this record. That might have been true at the time, had the ‘Mats just stayed the band they were here. But they didn’t, getting sick of the hardcore scene and moving onto a larger spectrum of influences, and in its proper context, Sorry Ma is a punk-rock stepping stone to real greatness.
Key tracks: Takin’ A Ride, Customer, Johnny’s Gonna Die, I’m In Trouble, If Only You Were Lonely (reissue)

Stink (1982)

Alright, I lied a little when I said the ‘Mats (as they were affectionately referred to) got tired of punk rock after their first record, as they kicked out this eight-song EP just fifteen minutes long before they started branching out. Still, it’s one of the best throw-away records ever made, a group of songs that song like they were recorded off-the-cuff and slapped together (the album title does nothing but support that idea). It’s real cerebral punk/hardcore stuff — either it hits you in the head when you’re trying to study and makes you yell out loud, or it doesn’t, and you go back to listening to Sufjan Stevens. All the songs here should have been anthems for alienated Midwesterners (making this album all the more relevant for Northwestern students) but with its low production quality and limited release, it never caught on like The Ramones had five years before. The reissue adds one of the first Westerberg solo gems, the sweet ballad “You’re Getting Married,” which was rejected by the rest of the Replacements when Westerberg played it to them, as Bob Stinson said, “Save that for your solo album — that ain’t the Replacements.” It’s great.
Key tracks: Kids Don’t Follow,
God Damn Job, Stuck in the Middle, You’re Getting Married (reissue)

(Continued.)

This ran in the February 19th, 2009, issue of the Daily Northwestern’s culture section, The Weekly. The full version can be found here.

01.
I’ve gotten hungry, real hungry for my youth because the job market sucks, school is a bummer and, even though it’s infantile, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to spend a day when I was 10, 14 or 18, when I had “not a care in the world” and “there seemed to be no troubles ahead,” bland platitudes we reminisce about, forgetting that life sucked then in the same ways it sucks now, and no matter where or when you are, there’s going to be something to whine about. In spite of this, wouldn’t it be nice? To see old friends long passed out of our circles, to watch TV shows that hadn’t yet been canceled, to idle in general art and P.E., to lack that self-awareness that led us to try new things and break out of our local bubble. I’m not suggesting ignorance was bliss, because ignorant is ignorance. But still…

Two Sundays ago, at the Grammy Awards, blink-182 called off their five-year hiatus and officially reunited before a mostly apathetic crowd, judging from the lack of applause, surprise, or even a schlocky standing ovation when Mark Hoppus awkwardly hunched over the microphone and monotonously intoned, “Blink-182 is back!” Privately, I’ve been anticipating this since last summer, when I wrote a throwaway line in an article for my internship at Newcity calling for the reunion. When Travis Barker almost died in that plane crash last fall, I said to a friend, “Maybe the guys will figure out that life is just too short to not have blink-182,” without a trace of irony. At the Grammys, after message board speculation that got the Internet rumor mill grinding away, it happened, and a cheery wave of nostalgic giddiness washed over me when I found out the news while at work. I burst into the lounge where my co-workers were sitting and yelled out loud, “Blink-182 is fucking back!” and was met with silence.

Blink’s reunion is the first superstar ’90s band get-together fueled by altruistically nostalgic reasons; listening to them on stage and reading their website message, it sounds like the guys just want to make some music and play for their fans again. When Rage Against the Machine got back together for Coachella, they seemed motivated by a real desire to change the world again, not just to make music. As they hit the reunion tour circuit, marked by a semi-disastrous outing at Lollapalooza last year, it seemed like a lot of people still weren’t getting it, choosing instead to mosh and slamdance their problems away instead of addressing them. While an over-serious rap-metal band probably can’t get us to change our views on life, a joyful pop-punk band can at least take us back to a day in our youth when all we cared about was loitering with our friends, drinking Slurpees from 7-11 and dreading the return to school on Monday. Does this sound idealistic? Does this sound romantic? Does it sound made up? It happened to me, my friends and hundreds of other kids I know; that’s right, at some point, we weren’t studying for midterms and worrying about getting a job after graduation. We were still sort of living in the moment. That’s what blink-182’s reunion can do for us.

02.
Objectively, blink-182 is pretty shitty. You see, they mostly play power chords, and their song structures are pretty similar (seriously, “First Date” and “The Rock Show” are the same goddamn song). Furthermore, their lack of lyrical sophistication leads to a lot of thematic repetition, most egregious when … snore, sorry, what the hell was I saying? Who gives a shit? Here’s something to do: Think of everyone you know who is complaining about how blink-182 sucks and how their reunion is horrible for the world and stop being friends with them. The horrible truth about blink-182: They’re three funny guys who commercialized an already commercial style of music (all the early punk bands were on major labels; the line between “true” and “fake” punk is blurry). Sure, a lot of their fans never got into the Clash or Black Flag, but not everyone who watched Kill Bill got into Kurosawa or Leone or any of the directors Tarantino was ripping off (or paying “homage” to, if you’re an apologist). You weren’t listening to their records to experience new perspectives on art and politics; you were listening to them because you were 13 and didn’t know how to express how to be 13. What does it say about three grown men who chose to make music for pre-teens? That they were smart businessmen, or at the very least, in it for benevolent reasons. The blink guys weren’t just messing around with music; they covered “Another Girl Another Planet” by the Only Ones, they cited Descendents and The Cure as major influences, and that’s really all I need to know that they had more than a passing interest in music. All things considered, a self-aware group making fun music that had a lot of personal meaning for an impressionable crowd is not a crime; Limp Bizkit reuniting, now that’s a crime.

(Continued.)

This article ran in the August 19th, 2008, issue of New City. It can be found here.

If you’ve walked around in Wicker Park during July and August, you might have noticed something other than the thick-bearded hipster set: pink-clad bikers riding around, some dressed in full-body white jump suits. Ensconced in the basement of St. Paul’s Community Church for the last month has been Pink, a courier service/conceptual art project in which people can write love notes to anyone they want and have them delivered via bicycle by the project’s volunteers.

“I wanted to do something that engaged people,” says artist Jaclyn Pryor (whose “Pink” name is Heffi McHefferson, a pseudonym of unknown origins), the projector’s director. She was commissioned by First Night Austin, an Austin-based arts festival in 2006, where the project first took place. “We wanted to do something where people could come in and be a part of the experience of something being made.”

Upon walking in, people sit down at a typewriter to hammer their note out, with books of poetry lying around to offer inspiration. After finishing the note, it’s strung up on a clothesline, and the person yells “Love on the line!” as it’s sent down to reception, where the note is collected and logged into a computer which keeps track of every note (the project had couriered around 1,200 notes, according to Pryor). The screed is then sent to the assembly line, where volunteers scroll and bottle the notes before sending them out for delivery.

“It’s interesting to me how vulnerable and intimate people will be in this context,” she says with a small look of surprise on her face. “They know it’s being delivered by volunteers and scrolled by volunteers and they don’t know who’s reading it, but it gives people a vehicle to express things they’re not going to put in an e-mail and not going to say to someone’s face and they don’t have to wait for it to be someone’s birthday.” In fact, everyone is asked whether or not their notes can be scanned and archived for future use. A lot of people agree, meaning that their innermost feelings and desires could be available for anyone to see.

The biking can be arduous. A blown-up map of Chicago has pink dots placed on every area delivered to, including far West, North and South. “We had a courier go out last night to Hyde Park to deliver six notes to Barack Obama,” Pryor laughs. “She tried to deliver them to his house, but the Secret Service told her to send them to his office.”

Though the project has officially ended, Pryor and her co-workers will be in Chicago until the final batch of notes has been delivered. There’ll be a break until next year, when Pink goes back on the road and picks a different city to bless with love notes for a summer month. Their stay in Chicago won’t be soon forgotten by anyone who had the pleasure of finding a biker at their door with a love note in hand.

This article ran in the July 22nd, 2008, edition of New City. It can be found here.

Surprisingly, no one bum-rushes the show; in fact, at this panel starring Chuck D of Public Enemy, Hank and Keith Shocklee of the Bomb Squad and “Media Assassin” Harry Allen at the Chicago Cultural Center, rushing the stage seems out of the question for the mostly white, mostly beard-wearing, mostly hipster crowd.

The panel, moderated by scholar Kembrew McLeod, is supposed to be about the making of PE’s seminal rap classic “It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” but that’s the sort of thing only stodgy music nerds would be into. Indeed, as the panelists take the stage, they might be thinking the same thing: Allen appears to be on the verge of falling asleep, Chuck D just looks bored—but at least Hank and Keith seem cordial. They quickly deviate from the topic, instead regaling the audience with tales of DJing in youth centers, playing Little League football with Flavor Flav, their friendly competition with Eric B. and Rakim and the art of old-school hip-hop. At points, McLeod looks flustered as he tries to steer the discussion back to the album, mostly to little success.

When it comes time for the audience to ask questions, no one asks silly rock-journalist questions about lyrical interpretations and influences; instead, the panel’s most defining moment is when an audience member thanks the panelists for simply existing and expanding political consciousness, as a black man who was in college around the time “Millions” dropped. The panelists nod politely, and Chuck D’s wry grin suggests he’s thinking, “Why do you think we did that shit, man?”

The following music blurbs have run in The Daily Northwestern between 2008 and 2009. The limit for each review was 150 words.

Lykke Li @ Metro, 2/7

Ah, Lykke Li, breaker of alt-bro hearts; your precociously sweet-sounding-yet-sinister love songs are made even better when you flagellate yourself on stage, pounding your shoulder with a tight fist and dancing madly in the spotlight, a brazen look of “fuck you got mine” scrawled all over your face.  Dressed in a cape and gaudy jewelry, Lykke played a too-brief set of the best songs off her debut album Youth Novels, throwing in a few Kings of Leon and a Tribe Called Quest covers into the mix, adding a bit of that Swedish shake to each jam.  Lykke’s handclaps and the band’s added percussion got the crowd moving to songs like the robotic “I’m Good, I’m Gone” and crying during melancholy shit like “Tonight,” showcasing, what else, her range.  Be my Valentine, Lykke.

Morrissey – Years of Refusal

It’s been 20 years since The Smiths broke up, but you’re always there for us.  You make us feel better about our miserable love lives.  Your ethereal voice, the sound of a choir of angels descending upon the terrestrial Earth, doesn’t sound that good here when you’re trying to belt out over a cacophony of noise, but when you just let the words flow like you always do on songs like “That’s How People Grow Up” and “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris,” life suddenly makes sense.  The sense is in your voice, Morrissey.  No one has an ear for the melodramatic like you, spitting vitriol in “It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore” as you ask, “Did you really think we meant all those syrupy, sentimental things we said yesterday?”  We never do, but you always do, Moz.  You always mean them.

The Black Lips – 200 Thousand Million

Say what’s up to 1969 in a big way, as the Black Lips kick out their best Iggy impersonations filtered through even shittier amps than the Stooges were playing with on this new record. The vocals are strained and garbled, the riffs garagey and bluesy, and the hooks immaculate: Shuffle along to the handclaps and retro pop feel of “Drugs” and warble to the best of modern-white-boy-blues on “Short Fuse” like the English Revolution of the ‘60s never happened. Another standout is the dangerous slither of “Take My Heart,” which would feel at home in a cowboy bar and a punk club. The Black Lips aren’t breaking any new ground, but if you’ve ever wondered what would have happened if the early Rolling Stones had created punk rock, throw this shit on.

The Silver Jews – Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

This record really bummed me because singer David Berman just sounds flat and listless, he’s lapsing into self-parody with ridiculous songs like “Candy Jail” (“Life in a candy jail / peppermint bars / peanut brittle bunk beds and marshmallow walls”) like his buddy Stephen Malkmus.  In previous Silver Jews jaunts like American Water and Tanglewood Numbers Berman’s voice at least settled into a groove that you could swing along to if you were a little drunk, but the music is dull, the production blends all of the instruments together and there’s so little melody that you have no reason to listen without a lyric sheet.  The songwriting has suffered too, as Berman resorts to clichés, generalizations, and other tired poetic devices; for a band that’s about the lyrics, this is problematic.  He’s never sounded energetic but here he just sounds bored, and it’s just not an interesting record.

TV on the Radio – Dear Science

Drenched in the ambient noise producer/guitarist/general whiz Dave Sitek is known for but buoyed along by syncopated drum claps and cute little guitar lines, this is the surest push for mainstream success TVOTR has ever made.  Don’t panic: Just because you might hear it in a club as well as a college radio station doesn’t mean it’s a total departure.  Even though singer Tunde Adebimpe’s vocal delivery is more Anthony Kiedis-ian than ever with stilted rap-rocking filling up a number of the songs, his falsetto yelps will still charm the pants off your girlfriend.  Check the horn/synth outro of “Crying,” which sounds like the breeze of a Carribean dance party, and the pained release of “Family Tree”.  A few years ago, TVOTR would have let the latter track end simmering in a slow haze, but recorded today, a slow drumbeat kicks in towards the end before fading out.  What are the drums building towards?  Whatever it is, these guys are leading the way.

The Replacements – Let It Be

Oh boy, The Replacements – a band that’s lived in my heart since the first time I heard them, one of the most overlooked bands ever, and finally their first four albums have been re-mastered, the best of which is this one.  It kicks off with the romantic, galloping thump of “I Will Dare,” one of the most optimistic love songs I’ve ever heard, and the rest of the album is balanced between emotional devastation and wry humor.  There’s the ache and longing of ballads like “Answering Machine,” about a lover who never picks up and “Unsatisfied,” the best song about never getting what you want to stomping rockers like a cover of KISS’s “Black Diamond” and the anti-MTV roar of “Seen Your Video”.  One of the best underground rock albums of all-time and way, way better than the one The Beatles did.  Take a deep breath and accept it.  It’s true.