BREAKING NEWS...Ashlee Simpson...EXPOSED

Okay, so I'm watching Saturday Night Live. Ashlee Simpson does her first song, that Pieces of Me treacle. I could swear that she's lip-synching. I'm staring hard. She's cupping her hands around the mic so you can't see her mouth. Still, something seems off. But I had always heard that SNL had a no lip-synching rule with musical performers, so I just assumed that I was being obsessive.

Then she comes out for her second song. Just as the band is about to start, a vocal track starts floating out from somewhere. It's the vocals for Pieces of Me. The band, unsure of what to do, starts playing the music for Pieces of Me. Ashlee starts skipping around the stage nervously. It then seems as though she's going to start "singing" that song again. Then, another different vocal track starts pumping out. Ashlee walks off the stage, leaving the band to continue to play the music for Pieces of Me. The show quickly cuts to commercial. When the show ccomes back, no Ashlee, no band.

At the end of the show, at the goodbye part, she BLAMED THE PROBLEM ON THE BAND PLAYING THE WRONG SONG!!!!

I'm not necessarily against lip-synching (or enhancing) as a part of big stage shows with lots of dancing (see Madonna and Britney) but this is SNL and it's a show that positions itself as a home for good LIVE music. And she wasn't dancing. Really.

But I guess it was exciting to see a major fuck up on live tv. Her Daddy couldn't control this script.

The Marks / Siberia / October 21, 2004

Reviewed by Sara Marcus

I sit next to the Marks‚ bassist, Mary, in an aesthetics theory class every Thursday morning. Mary doesn't care much for theory, and she spends the two hours scribbling furious notes to herself and me about the fates she wants to inflict on the visual artists in the class. Sometimes she can't take it any more and a short populist diatribe erupts. Yesterday morning, during a conversation about Brecht and alienation effects and the potential uses of holding an audience at a distance, she exploded: "Excuse me, isn't the point to communicate?! Ten hours later, Mary got onstage with the other two Marks and the band's first-ever show began.

About half of the Marks‚ songs are examples of that form of populism known as three-chord punk rock. The remaining songs are excellent, and I am going to focus on those because once the six-month-old band writes more of them, I have reason to believe that they will not be playing the CBGB's tunes any more unless they need to warm up their hands in a freezing club.

Apparently the guitar and vocals person, Phil, believes along with Mary that the point is to communicate. Instead of singing, he speak-shouts very quickly and clearly into the microphone. He likes to make sure his vocals are turned way up and he likes to tell you what the songs are about before they begin. "This is a song about sit-coms." (He had to repeat the word "sit-coms" because he had slurred it the first time and somebody in the audience had yelled, "What?") "This is a song about getting married in Wal-Mart."

The rhythms are quirky, the sound punk-whimsical. A Dead Milkmen parallel is immediately apparent, but speaks more to a sense of playfulness than an actual quality of the songwriting itself. The Minutemen comparison emerges more gradually from the experience, because the sound is nowhere near that frantic, but when I told Mary after the show that I was hearing a slightly laid-back version of the Minutemen, she grinned and said, "That's exactly what we're going for."

Happy Ending Reading Series/Happy Ending Bar/Oct. 20, 2004

WHAT? She's reviewing a reading series? Don't those literary fucks get enough chatter on their own overblown blogs?

Simmer down.

The Happy Ending Reading series, put on by the saucy Amanda Stern, is different than all that scratchy throat Barnes and Noble bullshit. Stern curates the evening so that there's reading and music and hopefully mayhem.

This night's gathering was lacking in mayhem, but made up for it in other ways.
First off, one of the readers was Matthew Sharpe. He used to be my fiction teacher and now I kind of stalk him. I really think you should go out and get his recent novel The Sleeping Father. It's about this overly precocious, overly obnoxious kid named Chris Schwartz. If you are reading this blog, you are or were Chris Schwartz. Click here for the section Sharpe read last night from the novel (you have to sign in to Amazon to access it), the part where Chris is supposed to be giving a class report on Paul Robeson and by accident slips a Nirvana disc into the player instead of the Robeson Smithsonian anthology.

Also please note that Sharpe has an interesting publishing industry story that mirrors the music industry stories we hear so much about, except in this one, Sharpe clobbers the Man. (You could probably substitute "Wilco" for "Sharpe" and "Nonesuch" for "Soft Skull" in the following story.) When Sharpe handed in the manuscript of The Sleeping Father to the Big Publisher that had put out his previous stuff, the Big Publisher rejected it, saying it wouldn't sell. Sharpe then went to indie Soft Skull press and sold it to them. And guess what? It's sold like black tar H in the East Village. Gazillions. Well, maybe not THAT much, but lots. It was picked by the Today show for its book club and everything. So ha ha ha on them.

The musical guest for this evening of cross-genre entertainment was a singer-songwriter from Ireland named Mark Geary. Mark is short and tweedy and absolutely adorable. The thing about these s-s types is that they can win you over simply with their personalities (see Tegan and Sara). But is that enough? Even though I was there with Mark, there the whole way with his stories and his plucky little songs and his Irish accent, the reality is that there's not enough to set him apart from other talented s-sers.

He has a nice voice, his songs were catchy enough to inspire a sing-a-long and you'd definitely want him to bring his guitar to your backyard BBQ. I was touched, but I wasn't marked. The guy and his guitar? That guy has to haunt you. Or at least me.

Tegan and Sara/Apple Store/Oct. 16, 2004

You know you've seen Tegan and Sara more than your fair share when you can start telling them apart. Tegan's face is just a tad more crisp and angular. Sara's got just a smidgen more softness. I don't know if I can tell their voices apart, though. They trade off singing lead and harmonies. Sometimes their whine sounds like Tom Petty's, all, awawawawawaw, she's an American geh-rrrlll. Othertimes it's just like throwing darts at cotton balls, Stevie Nicks-style.

While I have deep respect for all sorts of complicated machinery oriented musicians, I hold a special place in my heart for the rough and tumble types who could just easily play their show on a street corner. Tegan and Sara are like that. Even though Tegan joked, "We play a lot of boardrooms," and they probably do (they were playing some weird closed-to-the-public CMJ thing that night), they have been those kids on the corner spitting shit in their sisterhood cypher. And they could do it again in a second.

Speaking of sisterhood and cypherhood, T&S could seriously have a second career as comedians. They have some of the consistently best stage banter of any performers I know, and I don't mean that hyperbolically. They have this twin power activate comic timing and they just riff off of each other. I've seen them many times and I've never heard the same story or joke twice. I truly think they are winging it. They could own the Borscht Belt. Or at least the Hummus Belt. Jabs during the Apple showcase included bits on how Sara is passive aggressive when she doesn't like something, and wouldn't come right out and tell Tegan that she didn't like her "early 90s jeans." It really doesn't sound that funny when I write it. But it was, trust me.

They added a new member to their cozy crew. A guy named Ted. Don't really understand his purpose as of yet. All three were playing guitar. He picked up an egg and shook it around a few times. In their real show maybe he does more?

I haven't picked up T&S's latest record "So Jealous" yet, but they played a bunch of new songs from it. My favorite is the one called "Walking with the Ghost," which has this nice jagged guitar line and is very 80s, very Tubes.

Their site has lots of great Mp3 downloads. Go forth and prosper. And Tegan and Sara? Cuter than...let's make that 20 pounds of fuck kitten in a ten-pound bag. Just might entice Amy Phillips to hitch up with the Michigan's Womyn's Festival this summer. Or not.

Shifting Ears Conference/Columbia University/Oct. 16

The fellowship program I have an association with hosted this weekend symposium about (in all caps now) THE PRESENT STATE AND FUTURE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITICISM.

Now, I don't deign to consider myself a classical music critic, but I've been the editor of a classical music critic and I do like classical music and I get so frustrated with the way this field holds itself back, I thought I'd check it out for bit.

I was most interested in John Rockwell's portion the proceedings. Rockwell is a New York Times critic who was brought to the paper in the late 1960s to cover classical and then found himself writing about that new fangled thing called rock-n-roll. And he didn't even have to create a fantastical spear-throwing last name to do it. My name's John and I rock well. He's one of those really, really smart guys who has a really, really large head. I don't mean ego. I mean, the circumference of his head seems on par with Mars. I think there is probably a correlation between head size and intelligence (not to get all eugenics on you) because two of the smartest people I worked with at ye olde alternative weekly had heads so big they couldn't find glasses to fit around their noggins. Now, I personally have a small head. And a big butt. I won't go into what that might mean...

So, anyway, where was I? Ah, yes. John Rockwell. Rockwell talked about how classical music coverage need not be so sniffy and serious. His main argument, which I have a real passion for, is that there really shouldn't be a separation between pop music coverage and classical music coverage. Yet, like Romeo and Juliet or J.Lo and Ben, there are forces at work---strong forces---that work real hard to keep them separated. Both the music and media institutions are real set on keeping them apart. Fear. Prejudice. Ignorance. These are the ingredients.

One thing I like about Rockwell is that he's this established know-everything-guy, yet when people in the audience kept talking about how you have to know everything about the history, the canon etc...he'd say, well it helps, but that a good music critic does not make. He argues that one of the main reason classical music coverage hasn't grown is because "a critic confronted with radical music has a problem of feeling insecure in his or her knowledge...lighten up a little bit." The one upmanship of criticism, where someone would never deign to acknowledge not being an expert and just offer a reasoned opinion, shackles music criticism, according to Rockwell.

Even as editor of the NYT culture section, Rockwell wasn't able to merge the forms as he would have liked. He makes a great point: there's no classic movie critic/pop movie critic; there's no old art critic/new art critic. There's just critics covering the field. What do you guys think of that?

Anyway, it was just announced that Rockwell is switching over to becoming the Times' dance critic after decades on the music beat. He made some analysis I also agreed with: the most interesting, innovative, original music he sees on the big stage these days is at dance performances because the dancers are so attuned to that stuff and aren't caught up in the whole hi vs low arguments that abound within music itself. They know what they like and they go for it. And shouldn't we all.

Wilco & the Fiery Furnaces/Radio City Music Hall/Oct. 6, 2004

Wilco & the Fiery Furnaces/Radio City Music Hall/6 October

Reviewed by Tim Carpenter

A few years back, a reviewer said of David Letterman that he seemed to be increasingly interested in creating a show that was for long-time David Letterman fans - and that the change was both for better and for worse.

I sensed the same thing happening with Wilco at Radio City: this was a show for hardcore fans.

I found it immensely entertaining and even enlightening, but I do wonder how it went over for the more casual listener who maybe has one or two of the band's records. In all of its various live incarnations (and there have been many), the band has always deftly updated and/or restructured songs from previous albums to fit their current stylistic mood.

On stage, the twang from the alt-country of the Uncle Tupelo discs and Wilco's "A.M." morphed easilyinto the Stonesy crunch of "Being There" and then into the Beatle/Beach Boy sunny-sad pop of "Summerteeth." But the last two records ("YankeeHotel Foxtrot" and "A Ghost is Born") have paradoxically both expanded the band's sonic vision and limited its live options somewhat.

The cacophony that the new six-man band creates for songs from the most recent work can't be so easily applied to earlier material; indeed, only songs from the three most recent records were played prior to the last encore.

The new textures - dense layers of keyboards and extra guitars, as well as noises from a PowerBook - are integral to the entirety of "Ghost" and much of "YHF," and the live presentations of those songs remained largely true to the records. But their retroactive application to other tunes is challenging, in both a good a bad sense. Good (great, actually) for people who have a strong familiarity with Wilco; bad, perhaps, for someone just wanting to check out and learn more about the band. When I say "strong familiarity," I mean knowing not only the records, but having seen at least a few live performances of various iterations of the band.

Wilco are now at a point where their musical and technological abilities enable - maybe even require - an internal dialogue that, naturally, expresses itself in the songs through the new layering and texturing. Now, on the one hand, that can mean a revelatory version of "Via Chicago," in which the swells of noise deepen the terror of the song in a wholly unexpected and disconcerting way. On the other hand, it can mean that most every song ends in a wash of feedback that, while not genericizing the tune, can make them seem less distinctive. At least that's what I thought when I tried to listen with a novice's ears (and I'd love feedback on this from anyone else who attended the show).

Beyond all that theoretical, career-arc stuff, though, Wilco kicked ass. Jeff Tweedy's voice is gaining in resonance and richness. He's also been working hard on his guitar playing, and it shows. Glenn Kotche's drumming continues to astound; it's the vital ingredient that not only sounds great on its own, but also provides structure for the rest of the band to switch effortlessly between virtual silence and a riveting wall of noise. They're clearly a superbly-rehearsed group, and that preparation opens up interesting possibilities for freedom and improvisation.

The sound was clear and crisp in Radio City, a venue which I'm ashamed to say I'd never been to before. The place is so spacious and the lines so long and graceful, it almost feels like an outdoor venue.

I knew nothing about the Fiery Furnaces going in, but I saw their entire set - a half-hour suite of numerous songs at various tempos with nary a break. For now, I'm reserving judgment. I wasn't blown away, but I certainly wasn't bored. And they showed great energy at a time when only about 10 percent of the crowd was seated.