In October Da Capo Press, publishers of this book among many other fine music-related tomes, will release Best Music Writing 2007, edited by Robert Christgau. The book, we’re happy to report, features one of our own: among the pieces that made the cut is “Multiple Personality Disorder,” a piece on irrepressible local MC Multiple Man written by contributor and former staff writer Sarah Godfrey.

Two City Paper contributors made the longlist for pieces in other outlets: Nick Green’s “Invisible Oranges,” which ran in Decibel, and Ben Westhoff’s “Private Enemy,” which ran in the Village Voice.

On Sept. 4 Akashic Books will publish Silent Pictures, a collection of photos by Pat Graham that documents the D.C. rock scene in the ’90s, and also features acts like Modest Mouse, Bikini Kill, and the Shins. (Akashic makes sense as the publisher of choice: it was founded by Girls Against Boys‘ Johnny Temple.) It’s a fun nostalgia trip for anybody who was paying attention to indie rock in the ’90s, or who just wants to learn what the fuss was all about. Graham spent much of the decade in D.C. (he now lives in London), and the book has a few casual, relaxed shots of iconic indie-rock musicians at the time–Unrest in a Bethesda yard in 1993, the Make-Up strolling through foggy London in 1997. But Silent Pictures is mostly made up of band photos like the one above, of Fugazi at St. Stephen’s Church in 1992–serious and intense action shots that expose Graham’s knack for capturing musicians at their fiercest, vein-popping-est moments. (On the same page as that MacKaye shot is one of Ian Svenonius flailing on the Black Cat stage in 1993 and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein in San Francisco in 1994, when she was in Excuse 17. Elsewhere is a shot of Lou Barlow hoisting his guitar in such a way that makes the mope look suprisingly, impossibly badass.)

In her afterword to the book, Cynthia Connolly notes that Graham often had trouble getting his due:

Pat was always the nice guy. He was constantly helping people out, taking photos, giving photography advice to people like me. When he started getting all these jobs shooting photos for bigger magazines, he had problems, as do most photographers, with getting paid and receiving credit for his work. One year, for a gift, I letterpressed him some business cards with big words that said, PHOTO CREDIT: PAT GRAHAM.

Graham will be in D.C. to discuss the book on Sunday, September 23, at 6 p.m. at the Dupont Circle Olsson’s.

Photo used with permission of Akashic Books.

Fiction writers seldom get rock right. Perhaps it’s because they aim for the bleachers—you know, like Cameron Crowe’s Stillwater, the Almost Famous band that was Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, and Skynyrd rolled into one. Somehow, in trying to achieve too much, most writers don’t achieve anything at all. William Gibson, though, he’s different. In his new novel, Spook Country, the post-science fiction novelist gets at something substantial.

Here, Hollis Henry, the former lead singer from the Curfew (terrible name, I know), is asked by Alberto, a geo-hacking, culture-jamming, Wired-type artist, where the band broke up:

“She looked him in the eye and saw deep otaku focus. Of course that tended to be the case, if anyone recognized her as the singer in an early-nineties cult unit. The Curfew’s fans were virtually the only people who knew the band had existed, today, aside from radio programmers, pop historians, critics, and collectors. With the increasingly temporal nature of music, though, the band had continued to acquire new fans. Those it did acquire, like Alberto, were often formidably serious. She didn’t know how old he might have been, when the Curfew had broken up, but that might as well have been yesterday, as far as his fanboy module was concerned. Still having her own fangirl module quite centrally in place, for a wide variety of performers, she understood, and thus felt a responsibility to provide him with an honest answer, however unsatisfying.”

What I like about this quote is that Gibson, who was born in 1948, nails the granularity and fractionalization of today’s music culture. The Internet has allowed us to bury ourselves inside our own Curfews to the point where few of us seem to realize how inchoate things have become. To borrow a term from Robert Christgau, there is no monoculture anymore. For those of us who want to at least understand the place and appeal of all the Curfews of the world—even if it’s the most surface understanding—the landscape is more treacherous than ever. Any good music critic has been Alberto, with the “deep otaku focus.” (Anyone heard the new Baroness? It totally rules, dude!) But there’s a difference between being that guy and being that guy and knowing which Ravel or U2 record to recommend.

Bob Mould, like most sensible people, has serious issues with James Blunt and Live Earth. This week, Bob weighs in on the folly of rock stars broadcasting their feelings about global warming in song. Got a question for Bob about life in D.C., music, culture, or anything else that springs to mind? Send it here.

“You ever have to beat the shit out of a bunch of dudes in lockup so you wouldn’t get raped?” That was John Stabb’s attempt to defuse the fight he got caught up in on the way home from work on July 17. The former Government Issue frontman sustainted three facial fractures, two broken bones, and a broken nose. Jessica Gould has the story on Stabb, who’ll be the recipient of a benefit show tomorrow night at the Velvet Lounge. Gould also has the story on the Warehouse’s potential new digs, and the latest on beleaguered club H2O.

In One Track Mind, Justin Moyer talks with ukulele rapper Jon Braman about his song “The Weather,” the futility of rallies, and the pleasures of playing a very portable instrument. Braman plays Wednesday, Aug. 15, at 14U Cafe.

Plus our picks: Maggie Serota on British pop-rock sensation the Cribs, Friday at the Black Cat; Dave Nuttycombe on Jette-Ives’ Jette Kelly, leading a six-piece band Friday at the Rock and Roll Hotel; Zoe Pollock on Austin jam band Mingo Fishtrap, Sunday at the Kennedy Center; Serota on Vancouver “psychedelic circus” band They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Tuesday at the Black Cat; and me on Clay Eals, who’ll discuss his book on “City of New Orleans” songwriter Steve Goodman Wednesday at Politics and Prose. (He’ll be joined by Alexandria singer-songwriter Tom Paxton.)

• “Anyone who orders the [Fugazi] book from now until the end of July will recieve it postage paid and shipped within 2 weeks (that’s at your door as much as a month before the official release),” says Glen E. Friedman. [BoingBoing]
• Fake Steve Jobs on Prince packaging his new CD in a British newspaper, and retailer’s complaints about it: “They’re threatening not to stock any Prince albums as a form of pay-back. Here’s the thing. Would you really want to do business with people whose chief form of negotiation is blackmail? Point B: These idiots are all dying anyway, so who cares what threats they make?” [FSJ]
• Douglas Wolk: “I’ve made a mix of 15 songs I associate somehow with specific chapters of Reading Comics.” [Largehearted Boy]

On the two hundred and thirty-first anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Wall Street Journal gave Mr. Wang Dang Sweet Poontang precious column inches to weigh in on the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Ted Nugent’s conclusion? Drugs suck.

This comes as no surprise from Nugent or WSJ’s editorial page–both are bizarre mixtures of conservativism and liberality–but you have to wonder (and I was especially thinking this after reading about the heavy drinking of comic novelist Evelyn Waugh in the July 2nd issue of the New Yorker): Is it reasonable to try to separate great works of art from the process, even if the process involves overindulgence?

Says Nugent of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Mama Cass: “I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit. Their choice of dope over quality of life, musical talent and meaningful relationships with loved ones can only be categorized as despicably selfish.”

It seems callous from a humanitarian standpoint to say that I’d take Electric Ladyland over Hendrix old and gray and pumping out crap like Carlos Santana’s recent music. That’s not to say that it’s better to burn out than to fade away, but that perhaps people like Hendrix have no choice and that’s what makes them notable in the first place. They burn brightly or they don’t burn at all.

My mom was talking about my Grandad, her father, when she called on July the 4th. His parents lived to be in their 90s and she wondered what would’ve happened to him had he not drunk and smoked to excess and died in his 80s. “Well,” I said, “he might’ve stepped out in front of a bus.”

Routledge specializes in scholarly books on popular culture—which is to say they take on interesting subjects and find ways to make them boring. Browsing in bookstores, I’ve often gotten suckered in by various Routledge books on music, film, and television, only to confront blocks of jargony academic-speak that gave me another reason to be grateful that I didn’t go to grad school and pursue a cultural studies degree.

Music in the Post-9/11 World, though, is an intriguing exception, and not just because of its genius cover. In particular, I was fascinated by an essay by James R. Grippo titled “’I’ll Tell You Why We Hate You!’ Sha’ban Abd Al-Rahim and Middle Easter Reactions to 9/11.” Grippo, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the

University of

California,

Santa Barbara, offers a tidy history of sha’bi, a brand of Egyptian popular music (the word literally translates as “popular.”), followed by a discussion of Abd al-Rahim, who has “mobilized the music’s potential to tap into the ‘pulse of the Egyptian-Arab street’ by politicizing songs, often to the point of ridiculousness.” He’s not big on subtlety: His first hit song, released in 2000, is called “I Hate

Israel.”Much of the essay covers his 2003 hit, “O Fellow Arab.” You can watch it here:

 

The essay provides a translation of the lyrics, though the imagery in the video is pretty straightforward, skewering President George W. Bush and

Israel then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Abd Al-Rahim sings, “With terrorism as an excuse, for years America and

Israel have acted as bullies,” and calls on fellow Arabs to stand up against them. His success in

Egypt isn’t just a function of echoing the Arab street, though there is that: “My songs are simple and that’s why people love me,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 2002. But, Grippo argues, Abd Al-Rahim gets some of his appeal by being coy about just how serious he is—making himself the Ferecito of Egyptian pop. “Happily contradicting himself in his songs,” Grippo writes, “Abd al-Rahim cleverly plays the fool card when backed into corners by critical interviewers.”

• The New York Times, late to the story, has a piece on Bob Schieffer’s band, Honky Tonk Confidential.
• Stoked about Morrissey’s concert at Wolf Trap on Monday? Time to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself: How did I become this person? Also, scale back your expectations: Moz reportedly crashed and burned at a Boston concert earlier this week, claiming voice issues.
• The Times of London says that writing a novel about rock music is a fool’s errand. Agreed!