Holding up the 48th second of the Beatles‘ “Rain” as an example, Wolk claims that, “if some band of 25-year-olds with radio aspirations wrote and recorded ‘Rain’ today…that take would probably be thrown out, or at least digitally edited to fix the screw-up.”

With respect to Wolk, this strikes me as a hollow, distinctly codger-y argument. (And one that cites exactly zero contemporary acts by way of illustration.) Couple points here:

1. “[The Beatles'] recording [of "Rain"] is a mess.” Not perforce true. Sure, it’s loose, and there’s a soupy-psychedelic lag to the arrangement, but the Beatles were always in tireless pursuit of shit like that. (As when John instructed George Martin to make “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” smell like “sawdust on the floor.”)

2. “It’s full of mistakes, accidents and inconsistencies that would be utterly unacceptable by the pop-music standards of 2009.” What “pop music” are we discussing here—the Jonas Bros., or indie rock’s more mainstream extrusions? ‘Cuz it seems to me we’re still in an era where authenticity, even salable authenticity, gets stored in the garage. manifested in tape hiss, &c. &c. The White Stripes were massive in spite and because of the over-discussed sloppiness of Meg White. And I’m no expert in the whole Jay Reatard thing, but doesn’t he tend to drop eighth notes here and there?

3. The Beatles is an odd band to tout as an example of studio imperfectionism. It’s true, their obsessions geared toward invention rather than toward metronomics, but after 1964, this was no garage band. These are the guys who lugged 40-piece orchestras into Abbey Road and spent over 30 hours recording this song.

4. Studio perfectionism isn’t a product of Pro Tools. And it’s not a phenomenon unique to rock, either—think Glenn Gould, whose OCD approach to studio work infuriated sound engineers and entailed unprecedented (and literal) cutting and pasting in order to effect a synthetic perfection that live performances couldn’t approach. (Christ, imagine what a pain he would’ve been in the Pro Tools era!)

5. “The lead singer’s wobbly notes, and the not-quite-in-tune bass guitar, would get fixed with AutoTune.” Sorry, how many current rock acts actually use AutoTune on a consistent basis?

What I’m wondering, I guess, is why we have to discuss this exclusively in terms of songs from the mid-’60s. “The high-tech ideal of popular music means no botched rhythms, no sour notes, no shaky dynamics, but also no ‘Sex Machine,’ no ‘Louie Louie,’ no ‘Rain.’” These are the only three songs Wolk even mentions in the post. I’d love for Fischer to chime in on the lo-fi implications of all this, and mebbe Riggs has something to say re: Emo or something like that. But this whole thing strikes me as a pretty straw-man mode of obituary.

Morning, y’all! Roundup’s a little late today, as your pep pep had a helluva night. Top of the news pile: the Book World podcast is in trouble! Daniel Radcliffe fulfills early 2000s-era MAD magazine prophecy by morphing into Harry Pothead! Somebody get Mike Phelps on the horn to counsel this kid through his first big publicity pitfall! And a short video about Dock Ellis’ love of LSD (via kspace.tv).

Vicious mockery of Malcolm Gladwell, the failings of great writers and of the much anticipated Amelia, and what the Beatles’ shitty recordings say about contemporary album production, after the jump.

- One could safely argue that Malcolm Gladwell, more than anyone else, helped popularize counter-intuitive nonfiction writing. For this, he should have his pubic hair plucked out by sand crabs. Or be lampooned by Vanity Fair. Here are some gems from the latter option: “Why do people unwrap Christmas presents? If we could come up with an answer to this question, it is entirely possible that we could stop all wars, erase all famines, and bring an end to global warming”; “In a controlled research investigation involving uninterrupted surveillance videotaping, a sustained loop of twinkly music, and state-of-the-art ­merriness-determination equip­ment, a Dutch santologist named Hans Bunquum discovered the secret to Claus’s phenomenal success”; “On every accepted level, Santa Claus is a total loser.” HAHAHA.

- Mary HK Choi’s review of 2012 is the literary equivalent of being punched in the face and then spun in a circle and then made-out with.

- What do Ernest Hemingway, William Golding, and Winston Churchill have in common? They all suck as writers, according to a machine that judges such things. Thankfully, the machine was developed as a joke. Just kidding! “[E]xam boards [in the UK] are working on systems which would allow pupils to sit their exams online and for them to be marked by computer.” Y’all are fucked, kids!

- Yo-Yo Ma is set to release the largest box set of all time: 88 discs.

- Andrew Hazlett, whose twitter feed is judiciously artsy, posted a doozie of a question yesterday: “Does online ‘monopoly populism’ crush niche culture?” Hazlett quotes a revealing analogy from the Whimsley blog: “[I]n Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops.” And where does that make more sense than music writing? Just keep on an eye on the Best of 2009 lists that are starting to roll out, from New York magazine to NPR to Hipster Runoff, the portion of the Venn Diagram that represents agreement is growing, but the information contained by that slice is not. Ergo, I am feeling more and more agreeable towards Howard Mandel’s views about the lack of diversity in music writing. This also (might) explain (in part) why Mark Athitakis, who knows everything about Chicago and its writers, didn’t know about Cyrus Colter until very recently.

- Douglas Wolk on why sloppy playing is actually better without Pro Tools.

- Why is Amelia sucking? Virginia Postrel has the answer.

Alright, folks, that’s it for today.

Children’s music is like child pornography: Both serve the same purpose as their adult counterparts, but an adult’s interest in either is unacceptable. Why, then, have They Might Be Giants made the children’s book/DVD Kids Go and, in this last decade, redefined themselves as post-Sesame Street songwriters?

Don’t underestimate TMBG. Unlike other artists who dabble in kiddie kompositions, the Johns Flansburgh and Linnell are not burnouts. Though not as cool as Interpol or Animal Collective, this nerdcore duo penned a number of college rock anthems in the final decades of the 20th century, including “Don’t Let’s Start,” “Your Racist Friend”, and “Birdhouse in Your Soul.” These songs were good. These songs are good. They succeed as art in the adult world.

“Kids Go,” a call for children to “move like a monkey,” also succeeds as art—lesser art in the Playskool kingdom of children’s music. Like Christian rock or “politically-conscious” hip-hop, children’s music is a farm league from which players rarely advance to the majors.

After all, “Kids Go,” like the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” is a song. However, the Fab Four’s composition redefined the process of recording rock music and revolutionized post-1966 pop’s aesthetics, content, and mission. A song about monkeys can’t compete, as art, with a proto-jungle beat, backwards guitars, and mystical lyrics about Zen and death.

While Flood isn’t Revolver, at least it’s in the same league. “Kids Go” is less than “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Where “Tomorrow Never Knows” transcends, the monkeys of “Kids Go” peel bananas, and not in a cool, heroin-chic, Velvet Underground kind of way.

Come on, TMBG: get out of the sandbox ghetto.

A POSTSCRIPT
But, really, what is the blogosphere if not a kind of readin’ ‘n’ writin’ romper room? You (the reader) just read this post when you could have been reading the New York Times, or the New Yorker, or The Idiot, or Infinite Jest. I (Justin Moyer, the journalist) could have worked on my unfinished novel instead of thinking so hard about They Might Be Giants for the past hour. Why have I sacrificed my novel to blog for the Washington City Paper? Is it the money? Is it the glory (oh, that seductive, elusive, bloggy Arts Desk glory)? Is it the amiable companionship of the friendly, if exclusive, folks at the Washington City Paper itself?

The ultimate question isn’t why They Might Be Giants does what they do, but why you (the reader) do what you do, and I (Justin Moyer, the journalist) do what I do. Why do we do what we do? Tomorrow never knows…

It’s probably fair to say that Tribute To, the My Morning Jacket singer Jim James Yim Yames‘ new disc of George Harrison versions, comes off more as a thought experiment than an organically approached extracurricular. That’s not a put-down: How many times have you asked, “What if ___ covered ___?” and smiled at the thought? (In my case, I fill in “Panda Bear” and “The Raspberries,” but some dreams are just too good to come true.)

It’s easy to dwell more on what the six-song EP, out today on ATO (and available for free on MySpace), doesn’t cover than what is does. The two Beatles selections amount to probably the best, most haunting song Harrison ever wrote ( “Long, Long, Long”) and one of his more interesting ones ( “Love You To”), but they feel too obvious, and far from the most curious potential choices. Why not “Savoy Truffle” or “Only A Northern Song” or “The Inner effing Light?” Why put forward the best (and best known) version of Harrison when you can plumb the late guitarist’s more idiosyncratic side?

The solo Harrison numbers are more problematic, if only because all of them — “Behind That Locked Door,” “My Sweet Lord,” “Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll),” and “All Things Must Pass” — come from the same album, Harrison’s 1970 pop debut All Things Must Pass. Posterity rightly remembers that three-record behemoth as a Great Rock Album, so the appeal to James is understandable, especially since Harrison never again matched such sprawl and ambition. To ignore, say, the purposeful yet understated Living In The Real World (1974), or Harrison’s overproduced self-titled album (1979), or his late-’60s experiments with psychedelia and electronic music (Wonderwall Music and Electronic Sound) probably makes for safe curatorship — just not a particularly interesting tribute. It’s no surprise that fans of My Morning Jacket will get much more out of Tribute To than fans of the quiet Beatle.

Yet it’s hard to begrudge James for playing (presumably) his favorite songs by one of his (presumably) favorite artists (he recorded the EP in late 2001, not long after Harrison’s death at age 58). The alt-country crooner’s sorrowful, heavily reverbed voice is a good stand-in for Harrison’s often shimmering arrangements, as well as for his music’s bittersweetness. That’s most evident in “My Sweet Lord,” transfigured from celebratory to downright funereal. The cover is all acoustic guitar and somber, multitracked vocals; when James swallows a sob on the fourth word of “I really wanna go with you,” it’s clear he’s singing to Harrison and not the titular deity. James gives most of the EP similar treatment, occasionally tickling songs with a gentle, heavily sustained piano. The result is a sameness that won’t demand repeat listens; still, between this EP and James’ upcoming Monsters Of Folk record with M. Ward, Conor Oberst, and Mike Mogis, it’s a good year to be a My Morning Jacket fan.

The EP’s outlier, almost (not quite) worth the price of admission, is “Love You To,” once a swirling raga. Here it’s a far uglier acid trip, less soft transcendence than sardonic menace, in which a banjo slides through each guitar strum like a snake through sand. If the key line in The Beatles’ original was “I’ll make love to you/If you want me too,” here everything almost tilts on “Love me while you can/Before I’m a dead old man” — until you realize James has changed the lyric’s second half to “love our fellow man.” An old message, and Harrison’s most frequent theme, which James manages to find even at his most melancholy.

Photo courtesy of Yim Yames’ MySpace page.

I first came into contact with Unterberger when he was my editor at the now defunct indie rock, jazz, reggae and more music magazine Option. The California-based writer does extensive research for his published volumes, and writes in a straightforward, easy-to-read manner. Based on my conversations with him from way back when, along with his writing, I’d guess that tonight’s presentation will be detailed enough to please Fab Four fanatics and down-to-earth and honest enough for those who may only be familiar with the Liverpool lads greatest hits.

From 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Library of Congress Mary Pickford Theater, Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. SE. 202-707-5677. The event is free.