Nervous Acid

• DOWNLOAD | NORMAN C. BRANNON ”Concession...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:38:00 -0400

• DOWNLOAD | NORMAN C. BRANNON ”Concession Stand” Demo, 2008

GPOYW: The I’m Also a Hack Musician Edition. This diptych, shot by John Mockus at a Texas is the Reason show at Maxwell’s, has always been one of my favorite photos of myself — if only because it doesn’t look like a chaotic rock show at all. We could have sounded like Sigur Rós and you’d never know it by looking at this.

I’m posting this photo for a few reasons today: Firstly because I’ve been thinking a lot about making music again lately — largely because I haven’t been doing much of it — and seeing a picture of myself playing guitar reminds me that, oh yeah, I do that. Secondly, because earlier this week I read an amazing quote by Doug Martsch from Built to Spill that would have caused me to spontaneously high-five the guy if we were within arm’s length of each other:

“If you send me into Guitar Center, I’d get laughed out of there,” he says. “I’m technically not a good guitar player at all. I never took lessons, I never practiced. All I did was grab onto a few ideas and played them with a lot of confidence. [Dinosaur Jr. and Neil Young] know their way around the neck, which I don’t. I just took their aggressiveness.”

This idea — that he plays badly confidently — is the driving force behind ever believing I could make music at all. I realize that there are people who think this is modest speech, but no, seriously! I know people who can “play guitar” and I’m not one of them.

At any rate, the third reason is because I wrote a whole mess of songs at one point in 2007 and 2008, and it occurred to me last night over a dinner conversation that only a handful of people have ever actually heard them. During the writing process, it seemed like I was working towards an album, but when I finished writing, I didn’t feel a compelling need to share. I wrote these songs to get my head right about something, and when I felt good again, I put the guitar down.

But this week’s been weird, and I’ve been feeling kind of sharey, so today I’ve decided to put one of these demos out there — if only to prove that this thing I made actually exists. If you like it, you can share it, too.

I remember thinking that “Concession Stand” was a breakthrough of sorts for this collection of songs — that its delivery felt authentically fragile, whatever that means — so here it is: What it sounds like when I’m left alone in a room with a guitar. It’s not perfect, but I like the mistakes.

Rob Tisinai might be the smartest person talking about gay...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:49:00 -0400

Rob Tisinai might be the smartest person talking about gay rights right now. His YouTube channel is the only one I check regularly, and this amazing animated short — starring the National Organization for Marriage’s Maggie Gallagher at the gates of heaven — will give you a good reason why: He knows that, sometimes, the most compelling argument against anti-gay bigotry is outside of their ideology. It’s not what they’re doing, but what they’re not doing that best exposes their crumbling rhetorical fraud.

• DOWNLOAD | AZURE RAY “Silver Sorrow”...

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:38:44 -0400

• DOWNLOAD | AZURE RAY “Silver Sorrow” Drawing Down the Moon, 2010

Despite having lived with him for a little over sixteen years, I only have one memory of my father. It was late at night for a seven-year-old — something like 11:30, which is the time he came home from one of the three jobs he kept — and I insisted on staying up to greet him. As soon as I heard the key turn, I jumped off the couch and ran to the door, jumping up and down, most likely holding my breath so I didn’t just explode right there. He was only one step inside when I grabbed him, wrapping my little arms tightly around his torso.

“Daddy!”

The look my father gave me was indelibly filled with contempt.

“Get away from me, you piece of shit,” he said.

I went to see The Switch last week, and I wasn’t expecting to get so fucked up over a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston. In the movie, a young boy named Sebastian — born of artificial insemination to Aniston’s character — collects picture frames and decidedly keeps the stock photographs in them. He invents bizarre narratives for the people in these photos, and seems to believe that all of them are somehow related to his father, whom he has never met. The old man with the fishing rod is, for example, his grandfather; the jockish blond guy is his father’s brother. A picture of Sebastian’s actual father is noticeably absent, obviously, and this is presumably because he hopes to see him for real one day. In the meantime, these narratives fill the void.

It may sound strange coming from a person who technically grew up with a mother and father, but this scene resonated with me so strongly that I wanted to stand up and stop the movie so we could rewind it. Because I did that too. But instead of stock photography, I stared endlessly at magazine adverts. I asked parents of friends — more than once — if they would adopt me. I told friends that I was pretty sure I had been adopted, and that someday, my real parents would come and find me. To this end, I paid close attention to every very-special-episode of a television sitcom that ever dealt with adoption, and searched for hints as to how to make that day come faster.

When I turned sixteen — when I realized that day would never come — I decided to drop out of school and leave home. My mother locked herself in the bathroom, crying, but I knew it wasn’t because she was going to miss me as much as it was that she could never explain how this happened to the members of her church. After all, she did everything Jesus said to do, including and perhaps most fervently, strengthening her commitment to never ever spare the rod under any circumstance. Sometimes she took the rod out just for fun — or the belt, or the cookware, or the wooden clogs she wore in the summer. Whichever was closest. She fucking loved the power the Bible gave her.

If my father had any reaction to my departure at all, I might have remembered it, and then I’d have two memories of my father. But he didn’t seem to care either way.

I wasn’t born with the name Brannon. My birth name is out there — on the records I’ve made and in the magazines I used to write for — but it’s been so long now that a lot of people I know don’t realize I was ever called by anything else. Even my birth certificate is clear about who I am: NORMAN CHRISTOPHER BRANNON. I don’t respond to any other name.

As far as I know, my father doesn’t know that I had my name legally changed. It’s been so long since we spoke, I can’t even say whether or not he’s still alive. I think about this because his surname was the last vestige of connection between us, and I just as easily abandoned it as he did me. I can’t feel bad about that; in the only memory I have of my father, he called me a piece of shit. The old man with the fishing rod would have been happy to see me at the door that day. He would have said, “I love you, son,” before tucking me in, instead of sending me to bed crying.

It’s unfortunate, but there’s a point when these narratives stop working and nothing can fill the void except for that thing you know you’ve never had.

OK, really, I don’t see how anyone with that new Vanity...

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:36:00 -0400

OK, really, I don’t see how anyone with that new Vanity Fair article about the Vampire Weekend cover model and a copy of Futura Bold on their laptop could resist. Also, Maura asked for it. I do these things so you don’t have to.

I need a haircut and a shave, but I’m about to start...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:51:06 -0400

I need a haircut and a shave, but I’m about to start painting my bedroom and I felt compelled to post a quick GPOY — if only for the shirt, which I can probably only really wear out to a Kylie Minogue concert or something. My friend Scott found it at a thrift store a few years ago and brought it home for me as a gift. Really, you should have seen the grin on his face when he handed it over and I first read the text. This is what it means to really know someone.

lifeserial: If you’ll allow me just a second: Today is a big...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:19:53 -0400

lifeserial:

If you’ll allow me just a second: Today is a big day for me. That’s the cover of the book that I made with Ian Dingman. And, starting now, it is available for PRE-ORDER!

Matthew’s blog is one of my favorites, so I’m more than happy to reblog the announcement of his first book, To Slow Down The Time. I know how it feels, and it’s kind of a big deal.

I mean, I realize that I’m on Tumblr and that means I should be all like, “Hooray, Internet!” But for me, right now, I think this is more of a feeling of “Hooray, Stuff I Can Touch!” It’s important to regularly run the risk of moving into the region of tangibility, and I’ve always felt particularly affected by work that offers more than just an ethereal sense of a person’s existence. The fact that Matthew bound the hardcover edition of his book by hand says something about that idea, and it made me think about how my extensive history with DIY fanzine culture and independent record labels intersects with how I view this project: This book is the reification of author as artifact, and that’s valuable.

I am perpetually in awe of anyone who can integrate, in equal...

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 20:32:00 -0400

I am perpetually in awe of anyone who can integrate, in equal capacities, the potential to become a groundbreaking pop star — with an irrefutable talent as a songwriter and live performer — alongside a significant potential to become an equally fascinating Saturday morning cartoon character. I wish I was that kind of person. (via bloodfromaghost)

This week’s overall national album sales were the lowest...

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:46:36 -0400

This week’s overall national album sales were the lowest ever in Soundscan history, with only 4.95 million records sold — period. That means that, since its release, AC/DC’s Back In Black has sold over four times as many copies as every other album ever recorded by every artist ever who sold an album in America last week. It also means that if this were to have happened ten years ago, when ‘N SYNC’s No Strings Attached debuted at number 1 with 2.4 million copies sold, every other album ever recorded by every artist ever would have only sold a cumulative 2.55 million copies between them.

But remember when home-taping was killing the record industry? Yeah, that was cute.

• DOWNLOAD | FLOPPY SOUNDS “Entertainment”...

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:20:00 -0400

• DOWNLOAD | FLOPPY SOUNDS “Entertainment” (feat. Sarah Jones) Entertainment 12”, 1997

My boyfriend doesn’t understand why I watch reality television. “It’s stupid,” he says. And it is. But there’s no pretense that RuPaul’s Drag U is trying to be high-art. I know what I’m getting, and I assess it according to those standards.

Every now and again I need to turn off the news. In the last couple of weeks especially, I’ve realized that these programs make me miserable because it’s all false advertising. These are reality TV-level arguments applied in the public discourse, the arena of simpleton politicians who don’t want to be voted off the island. It’s all strategy and no substance — as if life were a season of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge and you were either on Wes’s side or Kenny’s side, but you had to make a choice.

It’s like how everyone on Top Chef this season unanimously decided that Alex couldn’t cook. He won challenges on the show, and he’s an executive chef in real life, so this can’t be true. But wishful thinking can act as a strategy: If Alex internalizes some of these insecurities, if we get him on the defensive, we can take him down. They did. It’s kind of like the ridiculous — and inexplicably successful — Republican whisper campaign that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Except, of course, that conservatives seem to be grooming America to become a theocratic Christian nation, while the dudes onTop Chef only want $100,000 furnished by Dial NutriSkin.

But even Puck got kicked off The Real World: San Francisco for wearing a swastika T-shirt and being aggressively homophobic. In the real real world, Dr. Laura can call gay people “biological errors” and say the N-word on the radio eleven times, but kicking her off the show is, according to Sarah Palin, a plot by “Constitutional obstructionists.”

So I’m about to watch this season’s finale of HGTV’s Design Star, and I’m OK with that. At least I know that even the most annoying contestant is guaranteed to go home at some point — which is more than I can say for the news. If they had a phone number I could call, like on American Idol, I’d vote all these people off.

GPOYW: The Oh Shit, I’m on Television Edition. At some...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:18:00 -0400

GPOYW: The Oh Shit, I’m on Television Edition. At some point last year I agreed to shoot a string of pilot episodes co-hosting a magazine-styled television show called The Deal. This was, needless to say, weird. I’ve never been in front of a camera in this way before, and I was pretty much thrown into the deep end of the pool, but I suppose this is the life I’ve always asked for — one in which I’m consistently trying new things guaranteed to make me feel totally insecure about myself. So yeah, if that’s the goal, then: Mission accomplished!

• DOWNLOAD | DOUG E. FRESH & THE GET FRESH CREW...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:29:00 -0400

• DOWNLOAD | DOUG E. FRESH & THE GET FRESH CREW “La-Di-Da-Di” The Show 12”, 1985

I’m spending this morning in research mode, working on an angle for a piece I’m writing about Snoop Dogg in the upcoming week. I’ve made a few seemingly sarcastic comments about how this is “kind of a big deal” to me, but to get a little bit earnest for a second, it kind of is.

I realize it probably looks strange that I’ve got magazines like Ego Trip and VIBE on my CV, and yet I can’t say that I’ve ever actually been paid to write a hip-hop feature story. On some level, I felt like I was always perceived as “the rock guy” who could write in a way that was sympathetic to urban readers; I was the guy who could interview Gwen Stefani about her ska and hip-hop forays or Rancid about their collaboration with Buju Banton, but not the guy who could talk to Pharrell Williams or Buju Banton about their rock excursions. To some extent, I resented that.

Because, hey! I grew up in Queens at a time when Run DMC released their first album and LL Cool J was an egocentric teenager. I took my first “girlfriend” — we were in fifth grade, but still! — to see Krush Groove. I wore Le Tigre polo shirts and bootleg Adidas sneakers because my family was too poor to afford real ones. I even started a little schoolyard hip-hop group with my friends Stephen and Lamont in 1985. It was the first style of music that really spoke to me, and truthfully, my engagement with hip-hop has both preceded and outlasted my active involvement with punk rock. Despite its ideological shortcomings, I still care about it.

Snoop covered Slick Rick’s “La-Di-Da-Di” on his first album, and that always struck me as a point of connection to his music. “La-Di-Da-Di” was something of a unifying reference point for anyone who grew up in the ’80s and had a schoolyard hip-hop group of their own; it was the one song we all knew by heart because we all had our own cover versions of it. There are no expensive instruments on this record, no professional studio tricks, and no sense that this is anything more than a street rap on vinyl. In other words, “La-Di-Da-Di” made it possible for young dreamers with limited resources to believe that making music was within our reach. It’s an anthem for kids who can’t afford real Adidas everywhere.

To follow up on this morning’s Ground Zero Mosque...

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:41:00 -0400

To follow up on this morning’s Ground Zero Mosque freewrite, a shot of Ground Zero with a sentiment I’d hope most of us could agree on — at least in theory. It was erected by Glen E. Friedman and Russell Simmons in 2004, and this note from Glen really sums it all up for me:

We are New Yorkers who lived through the events on September 11th 2001. We are American citizens. Our messages honor the core values of communication, love, and understanding. It is every free thinking person’s duty to speak out against these bullies who force average citizens to forget about their own worth and pride in the society they helped to create.

The Sound of White Christian Privilege.

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:28:00 -0400

I don’t usually disagree with someone so much that I feel compelled to go toe-to-toe with them over Tumblr, but I just came across this “brief take on the mosque controversy in New York,” and it made me wanna freestyle. Because I cringed all the way through his argument, and I realized that this was the discourse of privilege in action:

As I see it, the World Trade Center was taken down by a fundamentalist Islamic group, in the name [of] Islam, and that’s the key. To put a mosque in the place of (or relatively near) what was the focal point of a religious attack in the name of that religion is almost like rewarding the attackers. (And don’t you think that the Taliban, and Al-Quada would be celebrating this fact — “We took down their World Trade Center and get a mosque in its place.” Is there a better invitation to encourage further attacks?)

The first thing I want to talk about this line where he says the construction of a Ground Zero Mosque, as they call it, is like “rewarding the attackers.” The word “reward” is significant because it depicts a position of power: Only a person with money, for example, can reward a person without money. So when this writer — and Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich — use similar rhetoric to campaign against this mosque, they are also implying that they have the power to “reward” someone with something that is already guaranteed by the Constitution. In their minds, they can.

We saw this position of power at work with Proposition 8, where one class of people’s “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” was put up to a popular vote. The oblivious nature of privilege means that there are thousands of people who could not understand why this was problematic — largely because their rights would never be put up to a popular vote. That’s the privilege.

Of course, there is also a discourse of fear being wielded in this argument — “Is there a better invitation to encourage further attacks?” — and that’s because fear is historically how the hegemony gets its way. It’s a note that would have only seemed odd in its omission.

There are hundreds and hundreds of places in New York City to build a mosque and a cultural center. Is there any necessity to its placement near the WTC site? Of course not. And wouldn’t that placement be akin to building a booth for selling Confederate flags, and paraphenalia from the Confederacy at the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated? Doesn’t that involve the same kind of sensitivities?

The next brilliant ploy of privilege is group consensus. When you are in the majority, there are certain things you take for granted. Like, for example, how a Muslim place of worship becomes somehow analogous to the pro-slavery Confederate because we said so. But to answer his question, this does not involve “the same kind of sensitivities” at all. By even having this conversation, we are immediately Othering the Muslim victims of 9/11, and telling their families that their religion itself is beyond the pale of decency — according to so-called sensitive peace-loving and overwhelmingly white Christians everywhere.

The privilege of group consensus means that one group of people in America is able to tell another group of people that my ancient myth is better than your ancient myth with a self-imposed authority that allows them to decide what “decency” and “sensitivity” means in the first place.

The point of this post is to lift the veil and get to the heart of the matter, because no one is really saying it: The Ground Zero mosque debate is not about “sensitivity” as much as it is about the exertion of white Christian supremacy in America.

"I called [Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon] and we ended up becoming like really good friends, playing..."

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:09:00 -0400

“I called [Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon] and we ended up becoming like really good friends, playing basketball together everyday, and going into the studio. He’s similar to me, like where he just does shit just so people would be like, ‘Oh shit how did you do that? How did that happen?’ He’s just a really cool guy to be around.”

- Kanye West talks to Rolling Stone about his increasingly successful attempt at making his entire life read like a headline from The Onion. Also, I don’t care what Kanye says, Bon Iver does not play basketball.

youngmanhattanite: Spent - “Excuse Me While I Drink Myself To...

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:21:00 -0400

youngmanhattanite:

Spent - “Excuse Me While I Drink Myself To Death”

Pointed jokes are wearing thin,
Portrait of the artist with his face punched in…

I’ve been revisiting Spent’s Songs of Drinking and Rebellion all week and damn is it timeless. Some of the best mid-90s indie rock out there in my opinion. If you like anything resembling Superchunk (they were on Merge after all) then you will dig this. So damn indie even MAURA didn’t know them. One MeFier says “Excuse Me While I Drink Myself To Death” is an example of a song that climaxes at the very end, which I suppose is true if you count the last third of a song the “very end.” Kicking myself I missed their reunion show in Brooklyn last year.

This is probably more of a keep-it-in-the-family reblog, but I was pretty happy to see YM giving some much-needed props to Spent. Full disclosure: The guy who sings this song is my boyfriend. But still.

Spent were actually around the New York scene at the same time as my old band, so even though we didn’t meet each other until 2005, John and I were both well aware of each other’s work. Texas is the Reason was, after all, totally into Superchunk — obviously! — so Merge Records artists were high on our band’s list of albums to high-five over. He still doesn’t believe this, but everyone I knew in 1996 owned a Spent record. Because of that fact, you could also say this is a see-I-told-you-so reblog.

All biases aside, Spent really were one of the great unheralded indie rock bands of the ’90s — and maybe one day I’ll make a list of the other ones everyone seems to have forgotten. (In a just world, Seam would really be a bigger deal than Unrest.) I will say this though: Missing the reunion shows for and around XX Merge is definitely worth kicking yourself over.

• DOWNLOAD | MOBIUS BAND ”I Just Turned...

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:39:00 -0400

• DOWNLOAD | MOBIUS BAND ”I Just Turned 18” The Loving Sounds of Static, 2005

Exhibit A: Last weekend, Dipset MC Jim Jones showed up at Death By Audio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to see Das Racist and Snakes Say Hisss. He arrived with Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder Damon Dash in tow. No, really. They watched the entire show and then at the end of the night — shortly before the cops showed up — Jones grabbed the mic for a Snakes Say Hisss collaboration. More unsettling than that: It was good.

Exhibit B: I was coming home on the subway last night when a song I couldn’t recognize came on. I was listening to an iPod Shuffle at the time, so there was no way to know what it is. The song sounded vaguely electronic, so my first assumption was that it was a deep cut on a Morr Music compilation. But the voice sounded too familiar, and when the guitars kicked in, I started to think it might be … something from the new Switchfoot album. When I finally had the chance to investigate, I realized it was an old Mobius Band track on Ghostly International. More unsettling than that: He does kind of sound like the dude from Switchfoot.

Findings of Fact: Holding on to any one genre at this junction in music history is pointless. One man’s Dipset is another man’s DIY punk show. One man’s Mobius Band is another man’s Switchfoot. It wasn’t always this way.

What do you think of the current hardcore scene?

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:04:00 -0400

I probably sat here for ten minutes looking at this question and thinking, “I don’t know!”

Honestly, I haven’t had a ton of hardcore cred in a long time, and I stopped going to shows for fun many, many years ago. But when I think about the potential I saw in the hardcore scene when I first discovered it in 1986 — and when I realize that was twenty-four years ago — I can’t help but feel like, to some extent, I was given a post-dated check that I’ll never be able to cash.

So all I have are more questions.

Like, how is it that even though 7 Seconds sang “Not Just Boys Fun” in 1984, the hardcore scene is still a totally male-dominated subculture? Or, if hardcore is about revolution and change, why is it that the scene is totally unwilling to give up on rote traditions like slamdancing and stage-diving? And why was I always the only non-white kid singing along to “Break Down The Walls” at Youth of Today shows in 1988? What is it about hardcore that — in spite of its literally hundreds of anti-racist songs and fanzines and T-shirts — still utterly fails to attract more people of color today? Also, is it weird that hardcore kids spend hundreds of dollars on 25-year-old T-shirts when they could be spending that money on things that really matter in the world? Is it about mining for nostalgia or forward-thinking?

The hardcore scene influenced my life in profound ways, and I will always owe an amazing debt to it. But it’s flawed, and I wouldn’t be paying that debt by pretending that it’s not. As for my own personal experience — and this might be an unpopular thing to say — I’d argue that the scene itself is something like the Buddhist parable of the raft: We build a raft to cross a river, but if we continue to carry that raft on our backs once we reach the shore, it can only weigh us down. If we’re going to move forward, we need to abandon the raft, and leave it for the next person.

Which interview you've done for an article has affected you the most?

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:34:00 -0400

I know that it feels like I should talk about a positive experience, but actually, the first experience that comes to mind was also the worst: It was the time I flew down to Washington, D.C. to write a Tool cover story for Alternative Press in 1997.

I’d love to tell you the whole story — and one day, I will write this all down — but for now, I’ll distill it into this synopsis: I have never met any one group of people so collectively deluded about their own so-called artistry as I did that day. Their naive sense of entitlement was absolutely staggering, and at the end of the day, I called my editor and told him that I would not be writing this piece after all. He’d have to send someone else to get treated like a moron, I told him, because that’s not what I tell people I do for a living.

It ultimately affected me because, at this point in my life, I realize this was a major missed opportunity. The story was there, but I was too caught up in my anger to see it: It was the best 4,000-word argument for humility that I never wrote.

I may regret this, but OK. It’s Sunday night and I’m...

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:49:47 -0400

I may regret this, but OK. It’s Sunday night and I’m downloading Season 4 of The IT Crowd, but it’s not done yet. So ask me anything.

• DOWNLOAD | ELLIOTT SMITH ”I Can’t Answer...

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:57:00 -0400

• DOWNLOAD | ELLIOTT SMITH ”I Can’t Answer You Anymore” 3 Titres Inedits, 2000

Today would have been Elliott Smith’s 41st birthday. I’ve written about him extensively before — here and here are a good place to start — so I won’t go much further than that. But I just moved into a new apartment and I have yet to find a place to hang this portrait, which I love, so I figured I’d write something about the day it was taken.

Joshua Kessler took this photo at Elliott’s apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, right off Fifth Avenue, as part of a feature story I was writing for Alternative Press. I showed up at his place right when they began to shoot, and I remember being greeted as if I were an old friend — which was bizarre because Elliott and I had only met once before, in a dark nightclub, two years prior to that.

When we finally sat down to do the interview, it was almost effortless. He asked as much about me as I did about him, and I felt like it was only fair that I answer him. I wish I still had that tape.

Later that night, we both went to see Pulp — separately. But after running into each other at the show, Elliott insisted that I take his phone number and call him so we could hang out. I always think about this night because I never actually used that scrap of paper. On some level, I respected Elliott too much to be his “friend”; the scale was tipped, and I didn’t mind not being much more than an occasionally friendly face.

But I’ve questioned that so-called wisdom since he died. We got to know each other a little bit over the next couple of years, and I really can’t stress enough how much fun he was to be around. Elliott Smith wasn’t this maudlin character with sad violins following his every move. He was brilliant and funny and kind and ridiculously smart, and I still regret never having called him — the night he tried to be my friend, on the day he sat for this portrait.