Playlist for a Legal Interpretation Take-Home Exam

1. One Reason - The Hospital

2. Chixdiggit - Summer Please

3. Smoking Popes - No More Smiles

4. Off With Their Heads - Die Today

5. Ann Beretta - Not Invited

6. Eef Barzalay - Could Be Worse

7. The Hi-Fives - Transistor Sister

8. The Ergs - Ben Kweller

9. Good Luck - 1000 Open Hands

10. Superchunk - Learned to Surf

11. The Lawrence Arms - The Slowest Drink at the Saddest Bar on the Snowiest Day in the Greatest City

Absolutely perfect compliment to arguing that Ronald Dworkin's views on constitutional interpretation in Freedom's Law are not entirely consistent with his general theory of interpretation in Law's Empire.

R Kelly

So, let's recall that Ignition (Remix) is among the best four or five things in the history of Western Civilization. And we should include Trapped in the Closet on any list that deals with weird and awesome and completely outside-the-box artistic endeavors. And then that song Real Talk is, well, I'll just say it's something else.

But now he comes out with Pregnant. And, yikes. I think we can go ahead and give him whatever it is you get when you become the most interesting R & B artist of all time.

A lot of people are going to try to say that he's crazy or stupid or completely out of touch, but know better. Kels is completely self-aware and the only people who claim otherwise are utterly unfamiliar with his work. If you've been paying attention, you know that for R. Kelly, being real and being goofy aren't mutually exclusive, and there's nothing wrong with R&B being fun and over-the-top.

Pre-Christmas Update

After a two year absence, in which I wrote two issues of a quarterly print zine (you can try to do the math, but you won't come away with anything coherent unless you also take into consideration that I've been doing this other project called "law school," and it's taken a fair bit of my time over the past two years) about music and other things, and I still find print to be a vastly superior format to blogging, not least among the reasons being that the term "blogging" leads me down the dark path to dystopian hate for an echo chamber of . And print keeps me honest. And allows me to say and do things that blogging could sit around being jealous of.

But, technology being the easy, convenient thing that it is, I figure I'll at least supplement the zine (which by the way is called Coins! and you can get yourself a copy if you email coinsquarterly at gmail dot com) with random and passing thoughts on music that aren't permanent enough for print, thoughts like, "man that new John K. Samson solo seven inch is great, and the first song sounds like the sequel to One Great City."

So to recap:

1. I'm back on the blog because fuck you, you know?

2. Still doing the zine, although this semester has been incredibly busy, but that ain't nothing because I take the bar next summer.

3. Email me if you want a copy of Coins! Two issues are out, and a third is nearly complete and will hopefully be out by Christmas.

4. John K. Samson's solo record is great. Seriously.

5. The Lawrence Arms seven inch, which is called Buttsweat and Tears, is much better than the unfortunate title would suggest.

6. Barring a fourth quarter miracle, Dear Landlord's "Dream Homes" is my favorite record of the year.

5. Half the stuff in the recap was actually new information not found in the pre-recap text. Precap?

Two Utterly Desperate Songs That You Love

The first is The Cure’s Lovesong. Admit it. You love this song. You love the way Robert Smith’s voice tries so valiantly, and fails so miserably, to hide his desperation. In fact, you love this about damn near every song in The Cure’s 30 year catalog. Even the songs ruminating on his desperation seem to be concealing an even deeper desperation, like those never ending Russian dolls, or that scary story where the guy keeps taking off shirts until we find out that he was really just all shirts, or the old lady from that Stephen Hawking anecdote who claims that the universe is just turtles all the way down. You get a sense that it’s just desperation all the way down for Smith. The only real difference is the manner and extent to which he decides to conceal it. Oh but man on Lovesong, it’s just brutal. It’s the starkest example of a disparity between his attempt at genuine love song and the resulting song, which probably can’t, in good conscience, be called a love song, but is nevertheless infinitely more interesting than some “pure” love song. To put the matter frankly, the love in Lovesong is unhealthy. It’s chillingly dysfunctional, really. It’s a love borne out of an almost pathetic insecurity. And what’s more, you’re absolutely certain Smith actually believes that he will always love whomever the song is about. There’s no doubt about it. And yet you’re equally certain that there will come a time—and that time has likely passed long ago—that Smith will no longer love the person. So the whole song is a lie, but a lie that Smith forces himself to believe because the truthful, transitory nature of love would be too painful to admit.
This is the first song that made me wish I had come of age in the 80’s. Even though I’ll probably always contend that I wouldn’t have survived my teenage years without Jawbreaker, I think had I discovered The Cure, like so many who were teenagers in the 80’s did, I’d have been fine.

The second is Jean is Dead by the Descendents. Admit it. You haven’t heard this song. And, if that’s true, then in the words of Jay-Z, I feel bad for you, son. Because, whether you’ve heard it or not, you love it. It’s not the average song about suicide, in which the retrospective songwriter tries to make ex-post sense of the tragedy (for a good example of this type of song, see History to the Defeated by the Weakerthans. For a bad example of this type of song, see any other song that tries to do this). Jean is Dead is as selfish about feelings as is possible, perhaps even more selfish than the act of suicide itself, which is probably a topic for a different day. The emphasis of this song is on the “and I’m alone” portion of the phrase “now you’re gone and I’m alone.” Seems selfish, yeah, but anyone who’s known someone who has committed suicide can instantly relate. As much as we want to think of the bigger picture, or respect the wishes of the dead, it’s about us. You should have told me, I should have known, why’d you do it, etc. It’s horrible and weird and desperate of us to react this way, but suicide is a horrible, weird, and desperate thing. I could go on for pages about this song, but I’ll stop here. You just gotta hear it. Preferably alone, at night, while drinking a nice bordeaux and contemplating the people who have
inexplicably exited your life, through suicide or just chance fallings out, or even just because you were a total dick and drove everyone you have ever loved away.

One last thing that these two songs have in common: both are 80's songs. This is not to say both were incidentally written, recorded, and released in the 80's, but rather both are instantly recognizable as capturing some element of that decade. It's a subject that I've been thinking about more and more, and which lurks in the shadows every time someone brings up the fact that some of my favorite albums "don't hold up" or "sound dated." To fully explain this phenomenon will require more time and space than this article can sustain, but suffice it to say, for the time being, that part of what makes these two songs particularly effective in the ought seven is their stunning lack of timelessnesss. They're relics. But they're relics of something profound, something in which the particularity of time lends itself to the inference of universality. It is precisely the fact that they can be instantly located in the spirit of a bygone era that make them all the more poignant to those of us who were not a part of that era; the specific being that strange ancillary to the universal.

In the Mood to Exclude

Documentarian and perenially non-getter of jazz Ken Burns must really have it out for Glenn Miller. Not only did his 5 disc, 94 song comprehensive history-of-jazz-according-to-Ken-Burns box-set only include 1 of Glenn Miller's songs, but the otherwise glowing liner notes decide to take cheap, unwarranted pot shots at that lone inclusion.

The song in question is none other than the genre-defining In the Mood, and if you haven't heard it, yes you have. Everyone has. Likewise, you'd be hard pressed to find a member of the American public who hasn't at least accidentally heard Chattanooga Choo Choo, Moonlight Serenade, Tuxedo Junction, or Pennsylvania 6-5000, all conspicuously absent from Ken Burns' Jazz, which is subtitled, "The Story of America's Music," and which should be sub-subtitled, "With the Glaring Exception of Glenn Miller."

To be sure, I'm all for deconstructing the canon, but to pretend that Glenn Miller wasn't extremely influential in the history of jazz is just silly. One could argue that his songs were too commercial, or that his signature clarinet and tenor sax lines with alto saxes harmonizing had been done before. But keep in mind that the compilation's subtitle, undoubtedly supplied by Ken Burns himself, is "The Story of America's Music." Not "A Redefinition of the Innovation of America's Music," nor "A Revisionist Analysis of the Truly Exceptional Standouts of America's Music," nor even, "A Case Against Glenn Miller." Ken Burns commits an egregious act of dishonesty here, akin to a historian pretending that Nixon wasn't the president, simply because he didn't like Nixon's policies.

One measly song. Compare that to his big band rival-in-popularity Duke Ellington, who came in at a whopping 9 songs. Ellington accounts for nearly ten percent of the music on the compilation; Miller is just shy of a single percent.

And talk about adding insult to injury, here is the entirety of Ken Burns' write up of In the Mood:

One of the great musical questions of the 20th century is: why "In the Mood?" What was it about Glenn Miller's recording of this above-average but by no means exceptional instrumental that made it the quintessential theme song for an entire era? The riffs all came from the great black bands of the late Twenties, Miller's band could and did play harder and better music, and yet this recording continues to sell into the 21st century.

There it is, folks. That's it. Asks a question, talks about how unexceptional the song is, never even bothers trying to answer the question it asks, and moves on its merry way towards talking about Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra being among "the greatest units of all time."

Walter Benjamin claimed that, just as Freud analyzed the linguistic slips in language that revealed the workings of individual's subconscious, so too can a close reading of a text reveal certain subconscious elements of an ideology. So bearing that in mind, let's take a slightly closer look to see what's really going on with ol' Ken. The phrase that sticks out the most glaringly, at least initially, is "above-average but by no means exceptional." Yet Burns goes on to say that it was "the quintessential theme song for an entire era. This seems pretty plainly to contradict the "by no means exceptional." Isn't "By no means" a phrase that means, basically, "any way you slice it?" No matter how you look at In the Mood, according to Burns, it is unexceptional. There are, in other words, no means by which this song can be considered exceptional. Odd, then, that the quintessential song of an era is unexceptional even on the grounds that it is the quintessential song of an era. What Burns really means, then, is "by my own arbitrary and unelucidated means."

"The great black bands of the twenties" is another doozy of a phrase. And this one is a little more enlightening. Here, Ken Burns shows his real reason for all the vituperation. In something of a hilarious hypocrasy, Burns castigates Miller for stealing from the black man what is rightly the black man's. Nevermind the fact that Burns is himself engaged in a subtle, institutionalized form of racism, in which the white man is the chronicler, the analyzer, the theoretician. Those who wish to remain safe according to Burns standards, take note: making money off of black music by playing it is bad; making money off of black music by talking about it is a-ok.

Of course, concedes Burns, Miller's band did play harder and better music, as though the difficulty of a piece has any bearing on its value as music. I think it's more than a little safe to say that Burns doesn't play an instrument himself, nor does he have much in the way of formal musical training. It might be for this reason that he doesn't really seem to get the whole idea of an artistic enterprise. Perhaps confusing Jazz with his other documentary, Baseball, Burns construes music as something of a sport. Those who can construct the most intricate, layered, polyrhythmic, and otherwise difficult compositions are, in essence, the winners. But, to put the matter bluntly, music ain't a fuckin sport, it's an art. And the purpose of art isn't to be complex or showy, it's to say something valuable about the human condition at a given time. For all his talk about 64th notes, 12-bar choruses, and syncopated polyrhythms, Burns doesn't get what's really at stake in this music. If he did, he'd understand why In the Mood so perfectly captures that particular historical moment. It's dancy, but not too dancy. It has a distinct sauntering-through-a-party feel, but it also makes the perfect accompaniment to a high speed pursuit. The song is equally at home in a relaxing atmosphere and as part of an upbeat, vibrant nightlife. Miller wisely never mentioned what, precisely, he was in the mood for, which gives the song a sort of open-ended transcendence. It is at once the unique encapsulation of a particular moment in American history and a timeless testament to music as a universal language.

But otherwise, you know, unexceptional.

Ideology and Nas

Nas' ideology--or, if you're one of those wanks who, like myself, can't quite pinpoint among the 75 zillion subtle variations on the definition of such a contentious word, "unified set of assumptions taken collectively as the point from which he writes,"--is, as you can probably imagine, difficult to summarize. Its problems are similar to the ones I'm facing right now, not two sentences into this essay. To locate it in a single line, one could do worse than to choose "I ain't droppin' knowledge. I'm dropping the stuff you need to learn, though."
To call this line a paradox is to understate the case. Is Nas somehow differentiating between "knowledge" and "stuff you need to learn"? Are there things you need to learn that are somehow outside the definition of knowledge? Wouldn't knowledge, by its very definition, encompass all things necessary to learn? All things learned, necessary or not?

Well, no.

Nas is much too nuanced for these sorts of umbrella definitions. "Knowledge," to Nas, foregrounds the assumptions of the dominant culture. The history Nas raps about, then, is not the "history" taught in school. He's not rapping about the historical importance of judicial review or the moral fortitude of Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. He's, instead, looking at history from the position of the marginalized, a position so counter to the dominant paradigm in which "history" fulfills its obligations that Nas's history can scarely be called the same thing. In this way, his "knowledge" isn't knowledge in the ideological sense. Rather than conforming to the necessary function of knowledge, Nas's knowledge serves to undermine it.

So, not surprisingly, we find a certain hostility towards both language and "traditional" (or ideological) conceptions of history in Nas's songs. Both function as a framework through which we become placated by the ruling class. On several songs, for instance, Nas claims to "overstand" a concept rather than "understand" it. This can be read as an extremely hostile attack on the implication that concepts come before, and are hence superior to, humans. To understand something would place one beneath--and at the mercy of--that which is being understood. And that thing is, to Nas, ideological in nature. And to a culture that has been consistantly exploited in the name of "economic sustainability," the overthrow of the power of concepts is an extremely worthwhile endeavor.

Nas's use of history is most notable in what I call his Third Verse Historical Narrative, where he attempts to clarify the points he brings up in the first two verses through a revisionist and radical understanding of history. In "What Goes Around," Nas claims:

The Chinaman built the railroads
The Indians fed the Pilgrims
And in return the Pilgrims killed them
They call it Thanksgiving
I call your holiday Hell Day
Because I'm from poverty
Neglected by the wealthy.


In doing so, Nas relates three interconnected modes of dialectical subjugation, all variations of Hegel's "Master/Slave" dialectic, in which any attempt on the part of the slave to subvert the master is necessarily immediately overcome by the very nature of the dialectic itself. The Chinaman's attempt at economic placation is immediately thwarted by the very act. The mode of production underpinning the Chinaman’s sacrifice for his new country is exactly that which exploits him. Taking a different route, the Indians fed the Pilgrims in an attempt to establish peaceful relations through their own mode of production. The difference is that the Chinaman had to establish peaceful relations through an existing exploitive system, whereas the Indians fell victim to the foreign Pilgrim system. The moral being that one can operate under their own modes of production or the capitalistic one, and by capitalism’s very nature, it will still exploit. Capitalism, in other words, doesn’t care whether or not the people it exploits are capitalists themselves.

The third, then, is Nas himself, from poverty, neglected by the wealthy. Unlike the Indians, Nas is subsumed within the current mode of late capitalism. Unlike the Chinaman, Nas was not complicit in his own exploitation. He was simply a victim of circumstances. He draws a direct parallel between his Third Verse Historical Narrative and himself, where the ideology, the false consciousness comes full circle and is immediately rejected out of hand as “poison.” And that isn’t simply knowledge, it’s the stuff you need to learn, though.

Pop Punk Versus Capitalism

Some of the more literary conscious records have a narrative arc. Rarely, though, do they have an ironic twist ending. Face to Face's Big Choice, which on first listen seems so shallow and two-dimensional, has just this twist. It's some real thanks-for-the-comb-but-I-cut-off-my-hair-to-buy-you-a-chain-for-your-pocket-watch type shit. I've talked about face to face before, but the true beauty of this album didn't hit me until jamming it in my rented Ford Focus along the all-too-narrow roads of Ireland while my exhausted wife tried to sleep in the back. It's a beautiful, beautiful disc, and like many beautiful things, it's an indictment of capitalism. The artwork on a CD is always an indicator of its anagogical meaning. Whereas the album cover itself needs to have instant recognition and massive commercial appeal, the CD itself is free to be dressed however the artist wants. The cover of big choice is a standard U.S. Quarter, front side up, profile of Mr. George Washington shining brightly. It's so ridiculously obvious now that I feel ashamed having owned the disc for the last 12 years without putting two and two together. But there's a part of me, a strictly anti-intentionalist, anti-foundationalist, anti-thinking-artists-are-even-sort-of-conscious-of-the-artistic-statements-being-made-in-their-name side of me that predicts Face to Face weren't even aware of their own message. The whole idea of the first twelve songs is, "hey, I have a big chance to make a lot of money, but I feel like I'm compromising my integrity by doing so, so instead I will resist as much as possible, which I'm very aware, by the way, might be an utterly futile gesture at this stage in the world of late capitalism. It's a Drieserian naturalism, forcing individulas underneath the weight of an unwieldy and out of control society. We are, as Social Distortion--one of Face to Face's biggest influences--would say, "Born to lose and destined to fail."
Face to Face gets a little more in-depth, with lines like, "what is wrong and what is right? Everything is justified." and "I want my chance, I want what's mine." Trever Keith also gets sarcastic: "We've been too tolerant. Something has to change," "This was all your choice. Good to see it hasn't changed you." and the biting, "Tell me all about your favorite human being. Tell me everything about yourself. God the story is so terribly interesting."

These last few lines, and several others, personify the capitalist beast as a singular person, with whom Keith has a Faust-esque exchange. "Velocity," one of Face to Face's best songs, which also serves as the apex for the rising action of the album, sums up Keith's attitude toward the beast with the bridge-line, "So let me take a good look at your perfect life, so I know just exactly how I don't want mine." After which, the music slows to a crawl before slowly rising back up.

And here's the thing.

That rise is the start, the re-emergence of something intense. After Velocity comes the aptly titled "Debt," in which Keith loudly and vehemently proclaims, "I don't owe you anything!"
But that second-person, that capitalist, is certainly not going to agree to those terms. He'll let Keith have his moment in the sun, then he'll go in for the 11th hour kill.

After the album proper finishes, there's a conversation between the band and man with an English accent who is said to be the owner of the record label. He tries to convince Face to Face to put, "Disconnected," their hit song from their previous album, onto this record. Face to Face rejects this out of hand, saying they don't want to "lose the credibility with their following" or "sell out." They summarily end the conversation with, "No offense, but there's no way in hell that song is going on this record."

Then, immediately, without so much as a pause to think about it, Disconnected starts up. The present is unwrapped, and it's a comb for the lady's recently shorn hair. The album's worth of mounting evidence against exploitive capitalism has been completely undercut by the penultimate song. But that's not the best part. Face to Face then reaches back to their roots, back to an era way before and entirely antithetical towards the flirtation of punk rock with late capitalism to cover The Descendents' "Bikeage." It's a song, literally, about prostitution, and it makes for a fitting conclusion to an album left with no choice but to prostitute itself, in spite of its overwhelming desire to stay pure.

Pale Green Things

So I'm assuming you aren't a complete moron and have, therefore, picked up the Mountain Goats' latest effort. If, however, you suffer the unfortunate affliction of being a complete moron, it was released on 4AD last April and it's called The Sunset Tree. They've already recorded a new one to be released this fall, so if you haven't heard The Sunset Tree, you're way behind. I forgive you, though, because the band has released about 400 songs. At any rate, if it's a simple matter of not knowing where to begin, begin with The Sunset Tree. And I will now tell you why.

First of all, the album is a brilliant thematic rumination upon the power of music, and I know how terrible that sort of thing might sound. The Mountain Goats don't care, though. They have a mission. And that mission is to look honestly and thoughtfully at what might otherwise become a relationship painted with broad, assuming strokes. To be less vague, the album is about a young man's relationship with his abusive stepfather, and the role music plays in quelling—or, at least, constructively funneling—the depression and despair of the situation. This is no Golden Boy¹. This is no Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton²

The stepfather is portrayed at turns as a vicious monster (“I start wailing. The lion roars.”) and a misunderstood person with deep and troubling problems (“love, love is going to lead you by the hand into a white and soundless place”). We get a distinct sense of the pain our child-protagonist is going through when he explains how his stepfather “launches a glass across the room, straight at [my mother's] face, and I dash upstairs to take cover; lean in close to my little record player on the floor. So this is what the volume knob is for, I listen to dance music.”

And even this small fortress in which young John took cover is not safe from the terror: “You blaze down the hall and you scream. I'm in my room with the headphones on, deep in a dream chamber. And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face, hoping you don't break my stereo, because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without and so I think about that and I sort of pass out.”

But when the dust finally settles, and John finally “wriggles up on dry land,” he looks back with a mixed sense of anger and finality. I get the feeling he wants to forgive or, at the very least, reconstruct his memories in a manner in which forgiveness is a plausible option. This intangible desire for his stepfather's posthumous redemption duels with his own desire to rid himself of the emotional tyranny within which he has shrouded his life, never more clearly than in the final song, Pale Green Things.

There are four pale green things in this song to take note of. First are blades of grass trying desperately to survive through the cracks of concrete. This subtly parallels John's own struggle to thrive under his stepfather's oppression. But also, and even more subtly, the desire for forgiveness to thrive under the emotional trauma that had been surmounting his whole life. Second, the wet leaves that his stepfather listlessly stared at during a particularly vivid memory. The wet leaves become synecdoche for the far off distance in which things might become okay again. The third pale green thing is the ruminations of “seaweed and Indiana sawgrass” John evokes upon hearing of his stepfather's death. This becomes the process of analyzing information; the “turning it over in my mind” necessary for sincere contemplation of some of the most emotionally fragile aspects of this young man's psyche.

The CD itself is the fourth pale green thing. It's completely green with a black border. Nothing more. Not even the name of the album. It is perhaps John's way of closing the process, finding finality in the place he has sought it his whole life: through music. His own music becomes, as those other striking metaphors, an avenue for solace and redemption, a place to express, however simply, his pale green things.

1An early Mountain Goats song extolling the virtues of kindness and charity on the grounds that “there are no Pan Asian supermarkets down in hell, so you can't buy Golden Boy Peanuts.”

2A somewhat more recent parable of high school would-be rockers whose dreams are crushed by adults who don't “get” the nuanced protocol of the death metal genre and, being adults, assume the worst.