Is garbagepunk a word? Because it should be.

Gorillaz' Demon Days opens with a very noir oboe, punctuated by sirens, timpani, and an incomprehensible loop of some garbled rap lyric. The image of a dimly lit alley, graffiti scrawled on the brick walls, trash cans overflowing, is inescapable. And as a good intro should, it sets the tone for the underworld, counterculture feel of the album. Listening to the album is a lot like scrambling through an enormous junkyard. To be clear, that's a good thing. The album flows well, but that doesn't mean it's predictable. Every track is not quite what you expected, and though some are difficult to categorize as good songs on their own ("November Has Come", "All Alone", "White Light"), nothing is dead weight. If you're going to look at a junkyard with an eye for the aesthetic, you're going to have to use a very different metric than that you would use for a garden: everything here is interesting. Here the city's refuse has assumed the shape of a cathedral, the altar an overturned turntable ("O Green World") - there the contours of a Miami highrise ("Kids With Guns"). "Dirty Harry", one of the strongest songs on the album, is a good example of how this garbage approach to music works: it starts with a catchy synthesizer riff and a driving cowbell. The bass enters, a sort of off-beat jaunty staccato, and is joined by the drums and a children's choir:

I need a gun to keep myself from harm

The poor people are burning in the sun

They ain't got a chance, they ain't got a chance

I need a gun, cause all I do is dance

Cause all I do is dance.

The song then goes into a brief strings interlude before breaking it down into an anti-war rap (a pretty good one) and then resumes with the choir and bass. It then segues into the crazed laughter of "Feel Good, Inc." - and let me just say, if this song does not make you dance inside, you have no soul. Perhaps the catchiest, darkest bass groove ever devised, under a quiet guitar arpeggiation and the two-ton weight of a junkie's addiction:

You got a new horizon it's ephemeral style

A melancholy town where we never smile

And all I wanna hear is the message beep

My dreams they gotta kiss because I don't get sleep, no

Then it opens up into an ethereal acoustic guitar for the chorus before reverting to a surprisingly unsettling rap, given that it uses the lines, "It's my chocolate attack" and "Care bear bumping in the heart of this here". It goes ABABA, ending, as it began, with insane laughter. You have the drugged-out hazy dance groove of "DARE", the mostly-spoken folktale "Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head" - a rather heavy-handed but well done anti-imperialist polemic - and the gospel choir of "Demon Days" to finish off an always-interesting, often-excellent album. I'll get in Plastic Beach at a later date.

tinker tailor hipster nerd

The first thing you're going to notice when listening to Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal (who are in fact of Athens, Georgia - the juxtaposition of the B-52s and Of Montreal in my head is doing interesting things.) is that there is a hell of a lot going on. (The first thing you're going to notice about this blogpost is that I have once again jammed a bloated parenthetical in between the subject and the predicate. Again. In the very first sentence. So much for that.) There are layers of production, multiple vocal lines chasing each other round, plenty of weird instruments, abrupt mid-song stylistic shifts - sometimes two or three per song. You will already have noticed - from the band name, album title, and songs called "An Eluardian Instance", "Beware Our Nubile Miscreants", and "Triphallus, to Punctuate!" - that you are in for some pretty hipster times, and nothing you will hear is going to contradict that. The lyrics are swollen masses of referentiality and are mostly incomprehensible. What might surprise you, however, is how much you will enjoy it.

The first song, "Nonpareil of Favor", opens with a harpsichord, followed quickly by an irresistibly upbeat rhythm section and a catchy pop tune which lasts all of a minute-and-a-quarter before slipping into something more comfortable: a slowed-down swinging verse which makes it maybe half another minute before they decide that what they really want to do with this song is hammer the same chord very loudly for a couple more minutes, accompanied by harpsichord. Then they decide that they're instead going to hammer the same chord more quietly under a hazy mix of vocalization and...celeste, I think? It's better than it sounds - the hammering in the middle is jarring at first, but they do good things with it.

Third song: "For Our Elegant Caste" opens with the immortal lines,

We can do it softcore if you want

But you should know I take it both ways

We can do it softcore if you want

But you know that I go both ways

The next iteration of these lines turns into a round, mostly in falsetto, and this brings up another characteristic of of Montreal: they are the single gayest-sounding band I have ever come across - quite apart from their lyrics, which admittedly don't contradict that impression. For me, this is utterly delightful, though the exuberant camp might grate on some people.

Another characteristic is their habit of inserting bits of - sometimes spoken - dialogue into their songs: from "An Eluardian Instance",

You sat me down, we had some drinks

And you told me all kinds of insanity

I asked your friend if you were available

She answered, "no, but yes, oh well oh well yes and no."

From "Women's Studies Victims",

Then threw me out into the snow, I waited for the bus

Up came some values voters screaming are you one of us?

I said, "Of course man can't you see I've got some text reconstruction?"

(What does that mean?) No clue. It must be illicit - pentagram.

(What are you talking about?) No clue.

And from "Triphallus, to Punctuate!",

"You should call me sometime.

I won't answer but at least I'll know you care."

"How will you know it was me?"

"What do you think, I've got caller ID."

Which is charming, is the point.

Also! These songs are incredibly obscene in the most delightful way imaginable. "Plastis Wafers", for instance:

I confess to being quite charmed

By your feminine affects

You're the only one with whom

I would roleplay Oedipus Rex

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know what it's like to be inside you

I want you to be my pleasure puss

I wanna know how it feels

There's really a hell of a lot to say about this album, and you should listen to it yourself, so I'll leave you some surprises, but just a quick overview: "For Our Elegant Caste" is two-and-a-half minutes of the most enjoyable ear-heroin I've ever come across; "Gallery Piece" is a wonderfully schizoid love song; "Women's Studies Victims" is the perfectly representative blend of pointless referentiality, interpolated dialogue, and really catchy upbeat tunes; "Plastis Wafers" is both incredibly catchy and so very obscene. In summary! Fifteen very catchy, layered, ADHD songs. Well worth listening to.

Last week I said I would deliver my opinion on the state of the world. Then I realized that this would be stupid as I just have half-educated guesses based on very limited and probably inaccurate readings of Marx, collateral knowledge of economics, and wild extrapolation. Thus I will not do that, instead sticking to subjects I know things about. Next week - let's see - how about Gorillaz' Demon Days and Plastic Beach? That sounds good. Should get some film in as well. Season 5 of Doctor Who, or maybe one of Clint Eastwood's westerns. Also literature assuming I have time to read. Eventually I'll finish Swann's Way. Been in the middle of it for over a year now goddamn.

Side note: somewhere back in the archives - way, way back - there's a cringingly embarrassing fanboyish rant about xkcd. I think for the sake of honesty, integrity, and justice, that I should say that the person who wrote that was young and foolish and that xkcd - and the nerd culture that has sprung up around it - is little more than festering shitegobs predicated on, among other things, a tribal mentality of "us" v. "them", a smug assumption of false superiority, a belief that a store of utterly trivial knowledge somehow makes one a better person, the utterly perplexing belief that having Asperger's Syndrome is a virtue, and a mindless conformity to all of the above.

To clarify: I understand where these self-described nerds are coming from. It's a lot like the worldview of me and my peers - we're all fairly elitist, we all like stereotypically nerdy things - roleplaying games, sci-fi television shows, superhero comics, video games - and there's more than one aspy in our ranks. But there are differences. We don't have the martyr complex of the high school nerd, we don't judge people by how much Batman trivia they know - and more importantly, we have knowledge - and discussions - of the non-trivial variety: about literature, physics, biology, chemistry, history, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, higher math, Talmud, Bible, music, art, psychology, sociology - you get the point. The point is, we're intellectuals, not nerds. We've all been - and many of us still are, to some extent - part of the nerd culture I've described. The thing is, we all grow out of it.

The fetishization of the nerd is a perplexing, fairly recent pop culture phenomenon. If you've seen the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the past few years, you've noticed it: the immense hype surrounding it, the movies and books that have been made about it, the media personalities condescending to the victorious middle-schooler who is orders of magnitude more literate than they. And, by and large, it's awful. Don't get me wrong, I love the spelling bee. But my god is it painful to watch the media milk adorable younger siblings of contestants, or interviewers asking some eighth-grader who was favored to win how it feels to be eliminated in the fifth round on some word only spellable if you've happened to have come across it before. Also, Akeelah and the Bee was an unholy abomination and should have been aborted in the first trimester.

Or perhaps you've watched a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which is about the lives of physicists as imagined by someone who's never actually hung out with any sort of intellectual. The laugh track is the least objectionable portion of the show. Or perhaps you've come across My Life Is Average, a website founded in response to the pathetic whinging of Fuck My Life, a website populated entirely by anecdotes of stupid people about their terrible lives. MLIA started out as a rather clever statement, where people would post completely mundane, uneventful stories about their lives. Then it became a circle-jerk for nerds to congratulate each other on how delightfully quirky their lives were and how they recognized that Harry Potter was superior to Twilight, apparently forgetting that one step above awful is still just mediocre. Or, again, maybe you've come across the creepy, bitchy, faux-intellectual, artless pile of shit that is xkcd. I used to call these people nerd posers. Then I decided that they were real nerds and I was not. And that's fine with me.

Probably I should justify this vitriol. In particular, I realize that my accusations of "a tribal mentality of 'us' and 'them'" and "a smug assumption of false superiority" may seem hypocritical, and that this whole thing may seem like mere wankery. So let me justify my statements a bit more: I have a friend, a third-year undergraduate, and young for that, who gives talks on mathematical logic at graduate conferences, and knows a great deal about literary theory, philosophy, foreign film, Kafka, and midrash. I have multiple friends who know so many languages it will make your head explode. I have a friend who reads Heidegger for fun. I have an undergraduate friend who is trying to get a Ph.D. in Classics so that he can become a practicing neurosurgeon. And yes, we are far too insular; and yes, we all, virtually without exception, fanboy or -girl hard over Doctor Who; and yes, many of us have inside jokes which stem from our Shadowrun campaigns; but we don't glory in being unable to interact with people outside our peer group; we accept people who think Zelda is the protagonist of Ocarina of Time; we don't consider non-intellectuals beneath us.

...except for nerds.

Not convinced there's a difference? Yeah, I get that. Not very convincing. I'm not quite communicating here. This is my emotional reaction, and I have yet to completely rationalize it (that might seem a bit ex post facto to you, but I think that's a big part of how our minds work. The reaction is prior, and if you can honestly justify it, then good, and if not, you need to fix your reaction.) So I'll keep working on that - I welcome any input - but I do sincerely think there is something severely wrong with nerd culture as it currently exists.

One last note, re: Asperger's - I hope my comments won't be misinterpreted as prejudice. I have a moderately high-functioning cousin with Asperger's, and a couple of close friends who are quite high-functioning - not that "some of my best friends are, etc.", but rather that I've had some experience with it. Obviously, it's nothing to be ashamed of, but it's something that makes your life more difficult in a lot of ways - something you have to struggle against. My cousin, for instance, can instantly detect spelling and grammatical errors in a document, but has a hard time grasping that not everyone is as interested in All in the Family or ALF as he is. One of my friends has had to reverse engineer a sense of humor and is knowledgeable about theories of humor, which is admirable, but he doesn't have the instinctive feel for it that most people do, and so he tends to say legitimately very witty things at inopportune moments. What I dislike - and I'm open to correction on this point - is people who feel that Asperger's excuses their antisocial, obsessive behaviors and that they therefore don't have to try to change, and everyone else should just put up with it.

Oh, and you should really check out the blog I linked above. It's amazing.

Haha, but seriously, what.

So apparently someone sometime decided that Sid Vicious and his ilk had a really good thing going with the whole 80s British punk rock thing, but what that sound really needed was to be run through a filter of 90s British girl-pop, and thus Shampoo came to be. Now, I realize that music is constantly shifting and evolving, and I listen to a lot of weird music, but that is probably the strangest concept for a band I have ever heard. It doesn't make any fucking sense. Who hears "I - WANT TO BE - ANARCHY" and thinks "that, but with Miley Cyrus"? More things in heaven and earth, etc., and the thing is, I actually kind of like it. We Are Shampoo (1994), their first album (and the only one anyone really cares about - most of the rest were Japan-only releases, because that makes as much sense as the rest of it) is certainly not the best album I've ever come across - no song ever rises above the level of "pretty good pop song" - but it's utterly fascinating.

It opens with their big single, "Trouble", which is a pretty typical pop song - a danceable drum loop and bass line, a catchy repetitive guitar hook, and a couple of teenage girls singing about how their parents will be angry with them for staying out all night. On the other hand, they're yelling the verses in true punk form, and this contrast drives the interesting bits of the album. Sometimes Shampoo wears the girlpop celebrity hat, such as in the completely over-the-top "Viva La Megababes", or "Shampoo You", both about just how fantastic and famous Shampoo is. Other times, they skewer the very pop culture they are embodying: "Dirty Old Love Song" talks about overproduced pop songs - "They're big and bland but they spent four hundred grand/ On the video." - and "Skinny White Thing" is not kind to its titular androgynous beautiful person. This is when they're not just singing veiled sexual lyrics ("Delicious", "Me Hostage"). Then there's the extremely out-of-place "war is bad and we should all get along" spiel of "House of Love", and "Glimmer Globe", which appears to be a post-apocalyptic song about a disco ball, because, again, none of this makes sense.

So, overall, a bit of a curate's egg. Overproduced, catchy songs at best, and several surprises in the lyrics and the attitude, but it's hard to believe, much as I would like to, that this is a completely self-aware parody of 90s culture rather than another couple of teenage girls trying and failing to make it big. Most likely, both things are going on here, but the album remains interesting and unique. For what I think is a purer take on the Shampoo quintessence, try "Bouffant Headbutt", an earlier single which includes the lines "The way you act is such a disgrace/ Now you'll feel a bouffant in your face" and "When we get you outside/ You're fucking dead." Never have I been so intimidated by a 60s haircut.

Also, an official Power Rangers music video was made for "Trouble". At this point, the only conclusion I can draw is that whatever shadowy cabal secretly controls the world has a really weird sense of humor.

Next week on Handful of Dust! The pretentious hipster bullshit of Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal, and my extremely authoritative take on the world in general! Also maybe I will not separate the subjects and predicates of sentences with absurdly lengthy parentheticals!