I know it’s been a while, but this is important. I’m bringing this blog out of hibernation for another one of our famed end-of-year lists. Typically these lists are reserved for albums we liked that were released over the course of this year. Unfortunately, I really didn’t care for much of anything that came out this year, other than the Men and Condominium full lengths, but that would make for a pretty sad list. So it looks like I’ll be dedicating a list to the only music I really did enjoy this year, Turquoise Jeep.

Few things are known about this elusive rap collective, whose love for breakfast foods is matched only by their love for blowjobs. Seriously, it’s strange how little is known about a “band” this popular. Many of their videos, and there are many, have near a million views on Youtube (“Lemme Smang It” is approaching 7 million), and yet they have no Wikipedia page. Sure, plenty of Youtube celebrities don’t have Wikipedia entries, but Turquoise Jeep is an actual band that performs live (including a riotous headlining set at Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest), has a full-length album for sale on iTunes, and has been covered by MTV News. Their official website reveals nothing about their hometown (listed on their Facebook page as “All Across the Nation”) or any kind of back story. When you call them (which a friend of mine did in an effort to book them) you will be told, “Oh sorry this is Leon from the record label. You want to call their management.” When you call their management, you’ll speak to Leon Imperial, who is just rapper Flynt Flossy using a different name. Their “behind the scenes” videos, which is basically just the crew hanging around a recording studio they’re pretending to use, hint at just how shoddy their actual recording set-up is.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that Turquoise Jeep is more than just a comedy group. They’re methodical and careful about how they present themselves, aided by hilariously fake facial hair and a good dose of method acting. What’s even more commendable is their ability to write seriously incredible pop songs. When lines like, “Go grab my belt, you need a spanking baby” get stuck in your head for upwards of several weeks, you’d probably have a hard time dismissing them as just a comedy group, too. With that said, here are my top ten favorite Turquoise Jeep lyrics and their respective videos. Happy Sexgiving:

10. Whatchyamacallit: “This position I invent is crazy.”
from “Licky Sticky”

9. Flynt Flossy: “We could play a game (Twister!)”
from “Ooh Ahh Sound”

8. Flynt Flossy: “She got a sexy thing
Go touch a sexy thing
She got a sexy friend
Go touch a sexy friend”
from “Did I Mention I Like to Dance?”

7. Flynt Flossy: “She was just a fling
She just suck my thing
She don’t compare to you
You my wifee boo”
from “SHUYAMOUF”

6. Yung Humma: “This is what I like to call ‘smash/bang fusion’
Gotta focus momma, you don’t wanna get a cooch contusion”
from “Lemme Smang It”

5. Young Humma: “When I say ‘fried,’ I’m talking breakfast eggs
But when I say ‘fertilize,’ those the eggs between the legs
She began to blush, I heard her coochie whistle
She was fiending for the heat up out of Humma’s missle”
from “Fried or Fertilized”

4. Yung Humma: “When I look at you baby, I think of breakfast:
Pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and cheese grits
You got warm buns, let me hop in the middle
And I could have it taste somethin’ like a Cheese McGriddle
Yummmm”
from “Sex Syrup” (for whatever reason, this video refuses to be imbeded, so click on the song to play it.)

3. Flynt Flossy: “Guess what nigga,
I ate dat ass
I ate dat ass
I ate dat ass
I ate dat ass”
from “Stretchy Pants”

2. Slick Mahoney: “If you even had a choice, I know who you would choose
It starts with ‘S’ and ends with ‘lick,’ how could you be confused?”
from “Go Grab My Belt”

1. “Why I Gotta Wait??”
Every line in this song is golden. EVERY. LINE.

As I see it there are two ways to get yourself reviewed positively these days (at least in music and this is discounting having your record label pay Rolling Stone to give it a minimum of three stars): 1. Do something wholly original, or at least “original.”  or 2. Do something that has been done countless times before but do it with as heaping helping of an ineffable quantity of “panache.” And, at the most basic level, what determines which of those two groups a type of music will fall in to is time. Obviously, I guess, but I just want to make the terms within which I will be working clear at the outset.

For what it’s worth, at some point this piece is going to contort itself in to something resembling a review of The Wonder Years’ record Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing. It’s an excellent album, FYI.

For an additional element of worth: The Wonder Years are most assuredly a part of the second group I have presented, if that isn’t already wildly apparent based on their name (a television show about which the members of this group are likely nostalgic since they’re probably too young to have been very aware of it when it was first on and that was itself a nostalgia affair about the late 1960s and early 1970s).

The longer I think about it, the harder it gets for me to consider groups in the second designation to be totally absent of a nostalgic motivation (no one is saying it’s the only reason they exist, call off your dogs). There is little reason to play a type of music that has already been done outside of an attempt to invoke not only the older music itself but also the environment in which it was initially created. It’s basically a truism to say that music communicates emotion beyond language’s communicative ability, and one of the most salient elements that it communicates is that of memory. Music has a unique ability to latch on to a certain time in our lives and snake its tendrils backward through time regardless of when we heard it first. I mean, I feel fairly certain (though I’ll concede that there is, as far as I can tell, no way to know for sure [and you know what, that brings me up against probably one of the most fundamentally important concessions I'm going to have to make in this piece, that a majority of what I'm about to say is more or less anecdotally extrapolated conjecture. I'd hope this is understood, but I feel like I'm making a disproportional number of assertions thus far and I'd like to say that while I firmly believe everything I'm saying, I've got little beyond logical reasoning and gut feelings to back me up. Which, in a way is sort of poetic since I'm basically going to be discussing a bit of logical reasoning and a whole lot of gut feelings]) that this is something most people implicitly understand, but again, I want to make sure to get all of my assertion ducks in a row before I get going in earnest.

Thus, nostalgia is among the most fundamental building block of roughly half of all recorded music. The problem though is that nostalgia is about the most subjective thing you can imagine, it’s vague, and in many ways it’s pretty much meaningless beyond its fundamental feeling (and what, I beg of you, is more subjective than a feeling?). Take as an example pretty much any type of music that relies on nostalgia (or induces it). For instance, The Wonder Years’ and their name. The name invokes nostalgic memories for a television show from the late 80s and early 90s- a time that the member’s of this band (who are, based on context clues in their lyrics, about my age i.e. 22-23) don’t actually remember all that well because they were around four or five years old. They’re nostalgic for something that they didn’t actually experience the first time, which, at first blush seems to render their nostalgia at least partially nostalgia because what’s the point of nostalgia if its fake? This is, however, not my way of dismissing nostalgia like this as invalid as a feeling but rather an attempt to point out that it’s a constructed, fraught, and highly subjective feeling (like most of them, I know) for not just those people who are looking back and feeling nostalgic for things they didn’t experience the first time around but for everyone.

Take another example, a more glaring one. The Gaslight Anthem seem to be in love with 50s America. They sing about Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, and countless other contemporary subjects. Further, they sound like Bruce Springsteen did in the 70s. At the same time, the guys in this band are no older than their late 20s meaning that they were in no way culturally aware or even alive for either of these periods. That being said, I would probably die in defense of my argument that they are perhaps the greatest peddlers of nostalgia in all of popular music. The fact that I am 22 years old and would do this is vital to the point I would like to make namely that nostalgia in popular music is ultimately a complicated ontological re-positioning of regret, regret either for missing something altogether or regret over the fact that there is literally no way to “go home again.”

(There is, of course, another element of this nostalgia/regret pair that involves the connection of popular culture items irrespective of when they were originally conceived with particular elements in a person’s own life. This type is a great deal more personal/specific, is less unversalizable, and is therefore a bit more difficult to talk about in an effective way since it hits every consciousness differently. That being said, it’s essentially analogous to the type of nostalgia that I’m yammering about i.e. it deals with an idealized and constructed past. It’s just that in this case the past is part of one’s own timeline instead of a greater cultural one).

The problem however with a lot of emo music (and music in general that plays with nostalgia) is that it does not “ring true.” That is, regardless of whether we lived in an era or not we’ve got a pretty good idea of the way that era “felt” or, at least, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how we think it felt. There is a need for this type of honesty (or at least a feeling of honesty) in any music that tries to foist nostalgia on its listeners, otherwise it’s going to just sound like empty fronting to most listeners, which no one wants to hear. This honesty is probably a synonym for “panache.”

I’m thinking of, for example, Fall Out Boy, a band that I have got no amount of hate for, but that doesn’t really ring emotionally true in the way that I feel emo/pop-punk usually sets out to. For one there is a preoccupation with being clever (and out of this we were given the gem “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends” which is absolutely and unerringly fantastic, unlike pretty much everything else they’ve ever produced) and sort of smarmy that tends to envelop any honesty in poorly integrated irony. I have a hard time taking any sort of romantic or personal assertions seriously when they’re coming from a singer who can’t stop winking every couple of lines and practically demanding that you acknowledge how clever he is at turning a phrase. On the other hand, you got bands like The Wonder Years, The Gaslight Anthem, and The Hold Steady (all of whom I feel are of similar ilk and are just approaching vaguely related ideas from different generic angles) speaking in straight forward and declarative terms about, yes, their feelings or the way their characters feel about things (the fact that Finn and Fallon rely more on characters is less, I tend to think, a result of their own predilections lyrically and more a result of their chosen genre).

This type of refusal to obfuscate your point in layers of irony and double meanings can be uncomfortable for reader and listener alike. I would like to confess here and now that despite my unbridled love for The Wonder Years, I still hear the clank  of a corny declaration in the lyrics from time to time. That being said, I think this type of willingness to expose one’s self in a simple and direct way takes a type of bravery, and, in the case of this group, it works more often than it doesn’t. It reminds me of John Darnielle, who we all know can turn a beautiful phrase when he wants to, settling on “I used to live here” in “Genesis 3:23″ because of the strength of emotion that simple repeated phrase could convey over any amount of poetic pussyfooting.

All the layers of obfuscation and jokiness in groups like Fall Out Boy inevitably bring about the question of “what’s the point” to the top of my mind. It’s an odd relic perhaps of emo’s crossover into pop music that it has become less and less the purview of catharsis seeking twentysomethings. Which is lyrically what makes The Wonder Years so refreshing. On the coda of “Came Out Swinging” we hear, “I spent the winter writing songs about getting better/ and if I’m being honest, I’m getting there.” This is not how I expected the line to go the first time I heard it- I expected to end with self pity (e.g. “I’m getting worse”). This is why the lyrics feel so honest, they admit that things are bad, but they could be worse, and furthermore that they can be made better through musical catharsis. This is the self-awareness that I’ve so often longed for in Dashboard Confessional (who I persist in liking in spite of myself) and Fall Out Boy (who I am pretty roundly annoyed by).

What’s more, and this is the real crux of everything, The Wonder Years aren’t looking back at things with rosy colored glasses, indeed in many ways they don’t seem to be looking back at all but rather critically inspecting the present and looking for the latent threads from the past and toward the future. Here’s what I mean: almost every pop-punk band I can think of ride this awkward line of being in their twenties or older but continuing to sing about high school. Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, MxPx. In fact, I’m having trouble thinking of a commercially successful pop-punk band that didn’t (doesn’t) manipulate memories of high school for gain. That is, aside from The Wonder Years (and based on some of the production on this record I wouldn’t say that they aren’t quite commercially successful yet, though their recent AP will probably help them get some much deserved servings of success in the demographic that reads/takes AP seriously). Their lyrics don’t speak of experiencing the school dance for the first time, but of coming back to the room where you had the dance several years ago and realizing how much your mind had distorted it over the years. I submit that The Wonder Years are engaging with and complicating the idea of nostalgia for high school in their music. Suburbia has brought the narrator of the album’s title to nothing because it is a false idol, and The Wonder Years are subtly exploring that notion in their music.

Of course this isn’t all that ‘original’ or ‘avant-garde’ itself, but if you come to emo/pop-punk expecting avant-gardisms I would argue that you’re in the wrong game. The Wonder Years play an invigorating variation on a theme that always (even in high school) left me wanting a little more. The Wonder Years, I am firmly convinced, are one of those bands that will hold up for the kids who like them now as high schoolers. They are more Blink-182 and less Sum 41, more (from personal experience) Catch-22 and less Five Iron Frenzy (except for Proof that the Youth are Revolting and on certain days All of the Hype that Your Money Can Buy both of which, I would argue, hold up reasonably well).

This type of consideration re: what holds up and what doesn’t brings me to a final point I would like to make, namely that for some reason this type of music invariably appeals more to middle and high schoolers than any other age group. It seems pretty simple that it has a lot to do with the whole thing I presented at the top here i.e. the two-fold path toward success relative to music critics. When you’re thirteen years old pretty much everything seems “avant-garde” and “original” because you haven’t developed layers of experience and cynicism through listening and emotionally realting to music for most of your adult life. If you hear The Wonder Years playing this style of music you’re liable to think they invented the style since you can’t hear the litany of reference points that are like so many sore-thumbs to older listeners It doesn’t sound weird and off-kilter to hear a 22 year old singing about the prom because from where a thirteen year old is standing, there isn’t that much difference between 18 years old and 22 years old (the underlying assertion here is that there is a pretty big difference, I feel like this is true, if only from anecdotal evidence about myself. I mean,I think I’m pretty different now than I was then, though as I think this essay has borne out, it’s pretty difficult to look at things from any perspective outside of your own). The Wonder Years then have a capacity to be revelatory to thirteen year olds and those of us who have graduated high school because they simultaneously (and with a great deal of “panache”) appeal to the forward and backward lookers in pop music fandom. The Wonder Years have a broad appeal, but not in the usual “broad” sense that pop music generally has but in a more ontological sense with respect to the way that music listeners construct their reality. They can give younger listeners the pit-of-the-stomach feeling you get when looking forward to the future with joyous anxiety while also giving older listeners a different pit-of-the-stomach ache that comes when reflecting on how things irrevocably change and how that informs out going forward. That, I feel, is something exceptional.

I’ve always had an inkling that there might be an argument to be made in favor of the EP as the pinnacle of musical expression, particularly in the current age of digital dissemination. It’s brevity effectively lowers the stakes as compared to the full length album form. If a folk rock group wants to try out something a little off the beaten path, an EP is a great place to do it, since they don’t have to commit to it for 12 plus songs. The EP form also removes the chance for a self aware band to include any amount of filler. At four or five songs in length, even one song of sub-par material would be garishly out of place.

So far in 2011 I’ve become smitten with a number of EPs that, as far as I can tell, share only the trait of inherently high quality (that is, I think they’re sufficiently diverse). I’ve already talked about the most recent one- Giant Peach’s People Don’t Believe Me. Some of the others are as follows:

Childish Gambino- EP: I didn’t get this one at first. I just thought it was a low quality actor vanity project with too mainstream (lamestream [it's these types of jokes, fwiw, that get me through my day, I know that's a little depressing]) production and weak flow. Then, one night when I was up way too late the night before a paper on the ontological significance of dance among West African people was due, something clicked. I listened to it twice. Three times. Over and over for almost three hours. After probably hundreds of replays, I’ve still got only a vague notion of what it is about this EP that really draws me in. As I see it, it’s almost entirely about the lyrics, and about the way Glover emotes through them. His verses are of the sort that balance relatability and voyeurism in such a way that I the listener feels as if he could legitimately hang out with Glover and get along quite well, while constantly reasserting that you probably won’t ever get the chance to hang out with him because is damn famous. He’s humble without being self-effacing, but also confident in a way that comes across as rank arrogance in rappers of lesser emotive abilities. He’s funny, but doesn’t come across as if he’s trying to be a comedian slash rapper. He’s funny in the way that your clever friend tries to be, but can’t achieve because the dude just isn’t Donald Glover. He doesn’t have the greatest flow, or the most clever rhyme patterns, but he frankly doesn’t need it. Gambino has a singular personality that is conveyed nearly perfectly in this short little EP, and the fact that it’s such a brief shot leaves the listener wanting more at just the right time.

Extra Life – Ripped Heart: Holy Lord. I can’t talk enough about how much I love the music that Charlie Looker (main guy in Extra Life, formerly of Zs who are also excellent) makes. Melodically, I think this man is almost entirely unparalleled. They snake around in unexpected ways and extend for longer than is reasonable and longer than lesser musicians would even approach being able to do. And his voice, though it’s got a nasal edge (that I’ll admit I love), is incredibly clear and controlled. He’s got a range that enables him to trace those twisting melodies up and down the chromatic scale. The arrangements are musically complex without being obnoxiously proggy, too, which I find just about as rad as it gets. Also, the full length Made Flesh is about my favorite thing ever, and this EP basically just concentrates that beauty into a five song shot in the arm.

Demdike Stare- Forest of Evil, Liberation Through Hearing, & Voices of Dust: These EPs have been combined into a big pack called Tryptych for re-release which in my estimation, is delightful. Actually delightful might not be an appropriate word for these guys. There is about zero delight in the music (the amount of delight the music gives me upon reflection, of course, notwithstanding). An anecdote is the easiest way for me to express how I feel about this triptych. It was a Sunday night, I had just gotten back in town from visiting my parents. I hadn’t slept well the few previous nights because of the the low-quality/ extreme age of my mattress at my parents’ house. I was a little bleary eyed. It turns out, through a variety of circumstances that I do not wish to recall (and which are not germane to this anecdote) there was to be a party at my house that night. When I got home the living room was almost completely empty of valuables, it looked spare and weird. I thought about trying to get some work done before the house descended into liquor fueled madness, but ended up sitting on the couch reading and listening to music that I hoped would upset the partygoers (Can, it was promptly usurped when the first person arrived). After about an hour of “partying” I decided to go for a drive, mostly to get away from the constant pulse of noise. I decided, ill advisedly, to listen to Forest of Evil. It was completely terrifying. I felt black figures circling my car at every stop light. I was convinced that every headlight behind me was a murderer tailing me, just waiting for me to stop at a gas station, or return home. Every car driving toward me was a cop, a cop that was going to peg me for doing something illegal that I didn’t realize I was doing but that was so illegal that I would be immediately jailed for life. Demdike Stare makes terrifying music. Music that induces paranoia, revelry, and, most importantly, the desire to drive like a spy in enemy territory.

James Blake- the smattering of EPs he has released: I know, I know, many of these didn’t come out this year (though the full length did and it’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year, it seems to get better every time I listen to it). Even so, I’ve listened to them more this year than last (I didn’t really bother checking them out until early 2011) and I’ve become completely obsessed. As I understand it, they’ve taken on almost mythical status in some dubstep circles, so I’m not going to even try to contribute something new about them. Just know they’re astoundingly breathtaking, and, yes, they’re much better than the full length. Honesty: I only include these to add strength to my implicit argument about the surge of high quality EPs lately, not so I could say anything about them of “critical value.”

Wrap-up: Nothing I write here will be of any inherent value beyond boiler plate “wrap-up speak” (e.g. “So as you can see” and/or “quite clearly”) so I’m just going to stop writing and I hope my potential readers appreciate the circumventing of bullshit. And just so it’s out here, I take issue with those of you tsk-tsking at me for not writing a conclusion paragraph, and I especially have a bone to pick with those of you who assume (baselessly I might add, I hope, you’ll have to ask my lit professors for quantifiable evidence one way or the other) that I’m avoiding this because I haven’t got it in me to effectively conclude an essay (and now that this is breaking in to self-awareness even more than usual, I can’t decide if I should leave all the split infinitives in, like the one in the last sentence. The grammarian in me wants to remove all of them. The part of me that’s read several essays about infinitive splitting by curmudgeonly old men wants to gleefully leave them all in). I’ve got low self-esteem! Leave me alone armchair editors! I’ll end blog posts however I want them! Thank your stars you got written word instead of all pictures and maybe a couple of sentences like “James Black fulfills his musical potential in the righteous and notorious way!” and “Community star also raps! Who knew?”

Alright alright, this is turning in to an obnoxious personal essay. I’ll take it to Tumblr.

I have become obsessed with Giant Peach in the last two days. There is no accounting for it. I’m not sure if it’s reasonable to say that an EP is my album of the year, especially one that I’ve only been aware of for three days at this point, but I want to. I want to, man.

I think rock critics use the words “subtle” and “grower” more often than not as shorthand for “this is a record that I like quite a lot that I’m not entirely sure I can objectively defend.”

With that in mind, Giant Peach’s EP People Don’t Believe Me is subtle, it’s definitely a grower (and vis a vis the latter, one imagines that though it requires a “growth period” that growth period is actually negligible since this EP can be listened to three times in an hour, and for those of you keeping score at home, four times during the period in which David Comes to Life for instance might be listened to).

On the surface, there seem to be quite a few holes in Giant Peach’s bulwark- pretty derivative of standard 90s indie rock, decent though not earth shattering lyrics, not enough “summery hooks,” and so on. But, on the third of fourth time around, all of that falls away  and it becomes all about the panache. That’s right, Giant Peach might just sound like 90s throwback, but it’s 90s throwback with style and with confidence. I imagine a discussion in which the members of Giant Peach were finalizing their lineup and someone said, “Maybe we should get a bass player.” They probably thought about it for a few minutes until they decided, “Screw it, we don’t need a bass player, we sound full as hell as it is.”

It’d be pretty easy to draw comparisons here to almost any popular indie rock band with prominent guitars from the last 20 or so years- I hear elements of Polvo, Superchunk, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, and Pavement. That said, the most important point here, I think, is Silkworm, but not for the obvious reasons. Giant Peach don’t really sound like Silkworm (or Bottomless Pit), but they’ve got the same angle on guitar rock. It’s an angle that will be unremarkable or merely serviceable to some, but that will induce foaming at the mouth in others, the ones that stick around. They’re noisy but melodic, loose but controlled.

And, like a perfect argument for the brevity of the EP format, every song here is strong. “Get Outta My Room” peaks hard when the singer wails “People don’t believe me/when I said/ I didn’t mean it in a bad way” and nosedives directly into a noisy freakout that strikes the difficult balance between hinged and unhinged. “On the Roof” pulls the old but still insanely satisfying move of clean guitar quiet intro kicked into a way overdriven verse, complete with thoroughly sick drum fills. It also introduces the male singer, who, though not as emotive as the female, finds his place perfectly in the mix. “Big Trouble” is probably the catchiest and best song on the record- it’s got the biggest guitar and vocal and hooks. In addition, it’s the only song on the record where the band feels like they’re leaning forward into the song, instead of laying back. The closer, “Slowin’ Down” is appropriately the slowest and most meandering track on the record, and because it varies the model of mid tempo rockers set by the first two songs and sped up by the third, it fits nicely with miniature arc established within the EP.

Seriously, Giant Peach are the type of band that I frankly wouldn’t blame anyone for hearing once and thinking they had heard all this before. I wouldn’t blame them, but I would pity them. Sure most of us have probably heard this before, but rarely do you hear it done so freaking well.

Ekoplekz: Uncanny Riddim from Jade Boyd on Vimeo.

Yes, Atlas of Hearts is the siren song for the apocalypse.

Point 1: I find the thematic parallelism in BOM (new acronym, just made it up, tired of typing, this parenthetical is defeating that purpose, etc. etc.) to be one of the most powerful examples of simultaneous send up/celebration in popular culture that I can think of. Other examples of this, to varying degrees, include My Chemical Romance’s Welcome to the Black Parade (at least I think so, this one I’ve never really been sure of, but it really feels like it’s both mocking and celebrating emo and Queen), most of Stephin Merritt’s recorded output (especially 69 Love Songs which practically forces the listener to look at how ridiculous it is that pretty much every song ever written is a love song of some sort while also forcing the listener to play the album on repeat because this particular 69 are so damn well written and charming), Fucked Up’s discography (here I will take a brief aside to tie things in to music that is happening right now. To start: I don’t really like David Comes to Life. It is fine and has some killer singles, but as a whole album I don’t think it works, mostly because it is much too long and over-produced for a hardcore album. But that’s the point, I know it’s supposed to be a too-long and over produced hardcore album. The point here is that I don’t think Fucked Up are particularly successful. Just how I feel. Fwiw I didn’t really like their other two full lengths either, but the various singles I’ve heard have been consistently high quality). So, BOM is great because it sets in parallel mocking and celebrating religion with basically mocking and celebrating musical theater with it’s really pretty standard musical theater soundtrack (standard style, though way way way above standard quality of course).

Point 2: I think BOM and Annie Hall are both dealing with the fact that we “need the eggs” because they are what essentially provide us with hope in life.

Point 3: The BOM is important because it manages to give the viewer satisfaction at an apparent resolution while keeping the real crux of the show as a gaping hole. The fact that it is neither totally open ended nor far too pat is admirable.

To clarify this point: Pascal’s Wager w/r/t choosing to have “faith.” Link to the wikipedia page on the thing.

So. In my mind, if you’re using a logical proposition to prove the existence of God then you’re doing it wrong. Which is troubling because to me it feels like the only sustainable way to approach life is through the use of as much logic as you can muster (right?). These are in stark conflict with one another. In order to achieve faith you’ve got to put aside your rational mind. But in order to get to the point where faith seems like the reasonable option you’ve got to… reason? This goes back to what I hastily pumped out last night, Elder Price is bridging that gap in “I Believe.” He is willing himself to navigate the ontological gorge (Jesus Christ, I will be using the phrase “ontological gorge” again in the future. It’s just too ridiculous not to) between faith and reason. I think that is so profound in my mind because I’m both jealous of and embarrassed for him.

However, the ability to be that un-self-conscious comes with problem of making him completely un-self-aware as well. Total faithful abandon sort of requires the snuffing out of a person’s capacity for meta-cognition which is equally as troubling as living without hope. This is what I see as the unresolved issue in BOM (unresolved in a good way though). Elder Price and the Ugandans arrive at a point at which they can exist without a great deal of meta-cognition w/r/t their various plights because of the mitigating salve of religion. But, in a bit of dramatic irony, Stone and Parker seem to be winking at the audience (as they so often are) in songs like “I Believe” since we, as the more objective parties, can understand that the belief that God changed his mind about black people in 1978 is patently absurd.

The Book of Mormon is the best thing. As you can see, it’s got me ranting like an idiot.

Confessions aside: I cannot stop listening to “The Book of Mormon” soundtrack. I don’t have any sort of aversion to musical theater so it’s no big coup that I find it tolerable. But tolerable does not describe how I find The Book of Mormon. I have listened to almost nothing but this soundtrack for weeks. I cannot stop listening to it. And more importantly, there are choice moments where I still get chills (aside from this it’s basically Bruce Springsteen, a few Morbid Angel tracks, and the Mountain Goats that can do that to me consistently). I was flapping my arms around like an idiot during the Tony’s performance. LIKE AN IDIOT. WHAT DOES FLAPPING ONE’S ARMS EVEN HAVE TO DO WITH ENJOYING A PIECE OF MUSIC. I DO NOT KNOW.

Until just a few days ago, I couldn’t really figure out why. Now, however, I’ve sorted it out. As an introduction I need to present this clip from Annie Hall:

Focus on the “I need the eggs” bit and the pieces start to fall in place pretty easily. The crux of Annie Hall and of “The Book or Mormon,” in my mind, is essentially the same and two-fold, though they deal with different surface material (religion and love).  Point one is that human relationships and religion (respectively) are insane and on the surface have no discernible objective value (those eggs/golden plates are fake!). At least not until they are approached (until you approach them) from the right direction. The second half is that we desperately need these things. Check out the “everybody worships” part of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” for another variation on this truism. That he concludes that the only choice we get is what to worship is vital, if complicating. It’s also something I’m going to deal with shortly.

First though, a side note: the assumption among religious types (and, full disclosure, I kind of consider myself a “religious type” in a complicated and embattled way) and hopeless romantics is that religion and love are prescriptive phenomena. They are reality, they create it, they manage it, etc. Religion (and from here on out I’m going to hope you’ll forgive me for not typing “religion and love”  every time since it’s a bit tiresome. With minimal variation, I am convinced that what I am saying about religion can also be accurately said about love, as well as various other things) to some is that set of beliefs from which reality springs. God created the universe. God set the clock in motion. So on and so forth. And I think this is an important fundamental element of any sort of real belief. You have to believe at some point that your religion was the first cause in this universe. That it’s not the thing doing the reacting, but the thing that is being reacted to. Joseph Smith did not make up the golden plates, God really put them there.

I think though, the conclusion that “The Book of Mormon” arrives at rather explicitly (and that Annie Hall arrives at implicitly) is that religion is actually descriptive. That is, it is created by people after the fact to negotiate, for instance, AIDS, baby raping, genital mutilation, and anything else in this world (see “Making Things Up Again” and “Joseph Smith American Moses”).

And this is where Wallace’s notion of choosing comes in. We have to choose not only what to believe, but also to believe that what we believe is a prescriptive actor within the universe. This is why I get chills when Andrew Rannells proclaims that he believes the increasingly ridiculous tenets of Mormonism in “I Believe.” (Please, I beg of you, watch him on the Tony’s if you haven’t already). By sheer force of will he is switching from a descriptive to a prescriptive angle. That is tough. The act of creating faith is probably one of the single most difficult mental feats people can undertake. Because as I understand it, faith is belief without “proof.” It’s unscientific and deeply troubling to a lot of people. The man in Woody Allen’s joke is already there — even though his psychiatrist encourages him to turn in his brother, he doesn’t because he is getting substantive results from his beliefs. Elder Price gets there when he trusts in Heavenly Father to protect him from the “warlord who shoots people in the face.” In order to get on the level of the man in the joke and Elder Price, one must not only choose to believe but also completely discard not doubt, but the fact that anything other than the truth he’s chosen can even begin to exist or could have ever existed at all.

So so so, and to sum up what was really supposed to be like 200 words, “The Book of Mormon” taps something fundamental in the way that humans live their lives — which, to put it bluntly and incompletely, is the constant pull between faith and cynicism. That’s at least a real part of why it’s amazing. It is, of course, hilarious and catchy as well which really really helps.

But this has been gnawing at me all day.

Why is no one saying that their cover of “Birdhouse In Your Soul” on the Onion AV Club site is bad? It’s horrible. Ok, that Bukowski intro is pretty cool, but the actually song itself is bad cover band material. Like, and I’m going to level with you here, it sounds like something Michael and I would jam on after having a few beers on a Friday night when there was nothing to do aside from randomly cover songs that we like, provided that we did things like that (which, I mean, we do sometimes, but usually with much simpler songs than “Birdhouse” e.g. “Where Eagles Dare.” [Not the Iron Maiden one, the Misfits one, oh how I long for them to cover each other] [Important sub-point, I concede that "Birdhouse In Your Soul" is not the easiest song to just pick up and cover. But Titus Andronicus, being the generally great band that they are, should know better]). The difference is that we would be fully aware that no one else wanted to hear it. Or we would, you know, use our awesome rock powers to make it much better than it was the first time we ran through it (“awesome rock powers”).

I’ve been throwing around some big music industry conspiracy theories for the past ten minutes or so: “does the band or their label have some deal with with Pitchfork/Stereogum/the whole interent?” I wonder. They must b/c this thing is no good. It sounds lazy. It sounds tired. It is not tight (and I don’t mean “tight” in the “cool” sense, I mean it in the “musically together” sense) at all. It has none of the energy that we all know and love from Titus Andronicus- for Christ’s sake, Stickles never gets above an almost gentle-by-comparison-coo, not to mention the fact that he is ridiculously out of tune. And the keyboard. It sticks out like a sore and also probably infected thumb. No one wants that.

But that Bukowski sample is pretty cool.

And I will allow some of it might have to do with the AV club being used to cute folky versions of things and not being prepared to properly mix the rock monstrosity that is Titus Andronicus.

But, still, don’t listen to it.

Okay, listen to it if you want/haven’t already b/c you got excited when you saw that one of your favorite current bands was covering one of your favorite songs from your second (or third depending upon the day of the week) favorite album from another one of your favorite current bands (maybe that was just me).

Music criticism, man!!

But seriously, I love Titus Andronicus. If you haven’t listened to them yet:

1. Shame on you.

2. Do it now.

Also, it’s not the type of electronic music that insists on me dancing to it, which I totally dig because I hate dancing more than I hate most things.

And, to pull my head out of my own personal hang ups for just few sentences, this record is fantastic from an entirely objective standpoint as well. The main thing it’s going for it is the sparseness. A lot of “weird” electronic music tries to fill in every sonic hole with as many bleeps/bloops/screeches and etc. as computerly possible, not so with Jaar. The space let’s you contemplate how truly strange that little interlude where the conversation snuck in was, and how creepy in a defamiliarization of pop sort of way that quasi single “Space Is Only Noise If You Can See” was. And, Lord Almighty (again with the deities, he says) the use of piano on this album is magnificent. Again w/r/t this album as liminal between pop and IDM, the piano (and even occasional acoustic guitar) grounds the record in the “real” so it doesn’t completely fly off in to incomprehensible outer space. It’s a foothold for the listener. It’s the perfectly apt sonic underpinning that coheres the record and makes it just approachable enough. It reminds me of that episode of Farscape (after research, “That Old Black Magic” from season 1) where John Crichton is wooed by pitch man presenting him with facts he shouldn’t be able to know about his (Crichton’s) life, and then, once he submits to the pitch, he’s suddenly and mystically transported somewhere else entirely from which he can’t escape. The piano is that pitch man.