On a Golden Razor

How's this for a true story? My housemates were just watching TV and I thought I heard an Aphex Twin being used as the soundtrack for a Dove soap commercial. I'm not kidding. There are many Aphex imitators, so it's likely that it wasn't an Aphex Twin song, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that I heard a trippy glitched out electronic song in a commercial for soap...SOAP!

My friend Peter told me the other day that we're living in a golden age of musical creativity. We've had the conversation before and I agree with him. There are remarkable things happening to music these days. Technology allows us to create and share music more easily than ever before. The internet -whether through online magazines, customer reviews, or blogs- has made it easy for just about anyone to make their criticisms known to the world. Everyone can know what everyone else likes (and can therefore know what bands are too popular to be cool). Everyone can know what bands are safe to consider as influences. Everyone can help predict the next big thing. We're approaching total trend awareness, and it's making life great for us music lovers, but it's making things harder for bands intent on making an impact. I think the lyrics from LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" communicate the sentiment well. Observe...

i'm losing my edge
the kids are coming up from behind
i'm losing my edge
to the kids from france and from london

but i was there
i was there in 1968
i was there at the first Can show
in Cologne

i'm losing my edge
to the kids whose footsteps i hear on the decks every night
i'm losing my edge
to the internet seekers, who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962-1978

i'm losing my edge
to all the kids in tokyo & berlin
to the art school brooklynites, in little jackets & borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s
i'm losing my edge

but i was there
in 1974, for the first Suicide practices, in a loft in new york city. i was working on the organ sounds
i was there when captain beefheart started his first band.
i told him, "don't do it that way. you'll never make a dime"

i was there
i was the first guy playing daft punk to the rock kids.
i played it at CBGBs. everybody thought i was crazy

we all know, i was there
i've never been wrong. i used to work in a record store

i was there in the paradise garage dj booth with larry levan
i was there in jamaica during the great sound clashes
i woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in '88

but i'm losing my edge
to better looking kids, with more ideas & more talent
& they're really, really nice

I heard you have a compilation of every good song done by anybody
every great song by the beach boys. all the underground hits
all the modern lovers' tracks
i heard you have vinyl of every niagra record, on german import
i heard you have a white label of every seminal detroit techno track - 85, 86, 87
i heard you have a cd compilation of every great 60s track
and another box set of the 70s

i hear you're buying a synthesizer, and an arpeggiator and throwing your computer out the window
because you want to make something real
you wanna make a yaz record

i hear your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables
i hear your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars

i hear everybody you know is more relevant than everybody i know

pere ubu, gil scott heron, david axelrod, electric prunes, soft cell, human league, this heat, pharoah sanders, the monks, the outsiders, the germs, PIL, the normal, the bar-kays, erik b & rakim, the slits, mantronix, the sonics...

Last week, I tried to illustrate how I tried to carry my taste music like a trophy. I thought my knowledge of a slightly obscure, yet totally awesome, band lent me some kind of credibility. For whatever reasons (I'm too tired to examine them), this is a common phenomenon. For a musician to be hip, or for a critic to be credible, they all need to know which artists are hacks and which artists are legit. The list of artists that closes "Losing My Edge" is really just a list of passwords that the hip use to identify one another (they forgot The Left Banke). The funny thing about today's music scene is that the sheer output of music requires the list to change day to day (why else would Pitchfork have to relist the best albums of the 90's?). While it might seem silly, I think it's a good thing. As I said two weeks ago, I feel overwhelmed by the amount of music available to me today. The feverish pursuit for fusion of just the right influences mixed with a bit of originality has become a massive quest for a holy grail. Artists are joining the quest every day, but no one's ever going to find the grail because it keeps changing shape. But I don't care, as long as they keep looking, we'll all benefit.