Back in the mid-’90s, I briefly worked at the Library of Congress, where Polvo guitarist Dave Brylawski’s uncle was one of my supervisors. At the time, his nephew’s North Carolina alt-rock outfit was one of my favorite bands.

(I spent a week last month listening to Polvo’s entire catalogue–every skronky aside, every Dinosaur Jr.-worthy hook, every Indian-sounding riff–going to and from work. Know what? It sounds every bit as great as it did back in the band’s early-to-late-’90s heyday.)

So, when I discovered that the Brylawski I worked for was related to the Brylawski in Polvo, I began a regular ritual of asking the uncle for news about the band. I remember, at one point, getting kinda PO’d when I saw a new EP, 1995’s This Eclipse, at Vinyl Ink in Silver Spring. Why didn’t the uncle tell me about this?!?

Anyway, I used to go see Polvo whenever they would come to the Black Cat, which, according to Pitchfork, is where the band is scheduled to play its first show on an All Tomorrow’s Parties-inspired reunion tour.

If it’s anything like the show or two I saw during my Library of Congress stint, the May 9th set will involve equipment malfunctions, tuning problems, and a sleepy-looking Ash Bowie. Can’t wait.

I was on a stationary bicycle on Sunday. The radio was stuck on a ’90s feed. Live’s “The Dolphin’s Cry” came on. I seem to remember a very old rumor that people thought the song was about male masturbation, i.e. “dolphins” equals “dicks.” Makes sense to me. But maybe I’m just makin’ shit up.

Last week, Plug Research released D.C. electronica duo Chessie’s latest, Manifest, a full-length that San Francisco’s influential Aquarius Records says is both “very highly recommended” and “one which will no doubt be on [lots] of folks 2008 top ten lists!”

Mark Jenkins wrote a City Paper feature on the train enthusiasts in November 2001.

Here’s an excerpt:

Chessie’s new label, Plug Research, calls the duo’s music “a swirling, indistinct realm of sonic abstraction with influences ranging from the Beach Boys to My Bloody Valentine and Satie.” My Bloody Valentine is a longstanding model, and anyone looking for Satie need only play Meet’s “Katy (For Satie).” The Beach Boys, though, are less immediately evident in Chessie’s style.

It’s “more in theory than in sound,” Gardner explains. “Sure, Pet Sounds is a big influence to me—and everyone else in the freakin’ universe making records at the moment. It’s not particularly interesting or revealing to say that. Except that I really am still profoundly moved by the care and detail devoted to sound beyond the composition and lyrical content. I feel like that record opened up a whole new dimension of pop music. I’m still inspired by that.”

At the duo’s MySpace page, you can hear what Stephen Gardner and Ben Bailes are up to now.

‘Snice.

If you bothered to stay up late to see Amy Bigwig’s acceptance speech near the end of the Grammys, the phrase “Blake, incarcerated” might still be in your head today. It’s a total renaissance for the word. (Full quote at NME.) Suggested usage: If your cat or toddler is stuck somewhere, you say, “Fluffy, incarcerated” or “Booboo, incarcerated.” It has to be monotone and slightly haughty.

But enough of that. I’m here to make the point that Amy’s Blake Fielder Civil might find inspiration from the life of poet William Blake. Fielder Civil is awaiting trial on what most reports call “charges of assault and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.” The bard Blake was tried on charges of assault and sedition. He was acquitted.

As far as I know, Fielder Civil is not a poet.

More bad news from Kenya: three of the members of the DC/Nairobi afro-pop band Extra Golden are among those affected by the country’s post-election unrest.

Here are a couple of Washington City Paper pieces on the band: mine and Christopher Porter’s.

And here’s January 11, 2008 radio piece from NPR’s All Things Considered that addresses the band’s current misfortune:

Extra Golden Members Stranded in Kenya
By Joel Rose

The group’s American members are soliciting donations to help their Kenyan bandmates. Here’s the spiel from Pitchfork:

“We are asking for donations of $5. Of course we will accept any amount you can muster, but we believe that with enough contributions of $5 we can make a huge difference in our friends’ lives.

“To make a donation, please go to www.paypal.com and choose ’send money’. When asked for the email address of the recipient, enter ’service(at)kanyokanyo.com’. Please feel free to forward this message. We thank you in advance for your compassion and we hope that your help will enable us to compose a song of thanks for our next album.”

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC Nightly News anchor and author of the best-selling book The Greatest Generation , has just written a new book about what another author has called “The Greater Generation.” Boom!, a collection of I-was-there reminiscences, explores the pop culture of the sixties. It is subject matter that would seem to require some knowledge of, you know, pop culture.

Or maybe not.

In an interview in this week’s Entertainment Weekly, Brokaw offers this as one of his “defining memories” of the music of the sixties: “I remember the first time I heard ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ by Bob Dylan, played over and over one night. Everybody has those memories.”

Yes, but not everyone has a book contract.

Even more baffling are his comments about jazz. “I was a child of the ‘50s, so I was a student of cool jazz,” he says. “I was with a friend yesterday and we were at a restaurant and he looked up and said, ‘Hey, they’re playing Miles Davis and John Coltrane.’ And I thought, ‘We’re the last generation that still recognizes that.’”

It’s perhaps churlish to mock the musical commentary of a guy who never claimed to be a music critic, but this quote is just baffling. The mere fact that this stuff is programmed at all suggests that there’s a demand for it–and one that extends beyond folks like my boomer dad, who owns several CDs by both Miles and Coltrane, but probably couldn’t ID them if he heard them outside of his living room. How far out of touch–or self-aggrandizing–do you have to be to think that only the Boom! generation knows what Miles and Coltrane sound like?

After reading this piece on the folk singer Cat Power’s upcoming album, I revisited a few samples from her latest, The Greatest, to remind myself of why I never bothered to listen to the rest of the album. The music is beautiful, as so many Chan Marshall fans already know, but there’s a distinct whiff of advertising fodder about the whole thing.

Which, of course, is hardly Cat Power’s fault. It’s a slippery slope from the collection of demographic data to the over-saturation of edgy-yet-pleasant music. And it doesn’t hurt that so many listeners think that music should be free or close to it. (Among them was director Stanley Kubrick, who, as Alex Ross points out in his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, used György Ligeti’s music in 2001 without paying for it.)

So what’s an artist to do? They either can’t afford health insurance—because so many listeners think that music should be free or close to it—or, if they’re successful at writing edgy-yet-pleasant music, they become primarily associated with images of shiny new hipstermobiles or banks that spring up in Joni Mitchell’s idea of a forest.

If I had a time machine, I always thought I would use it for good. You know, go see a band that I missed because I was born too late—such as Quicksilver Messenger Service, or the classic Coltrane Quartet. But now, every time I hear a breathy folk singer trying to sell me something I don’t need, I think about the “Pink Moon” commercial and what might’ve been done to save future generations from its unintended consequences.

A few days ago I was walking past Crooked Beat Records with some friends and one of them pointed out the promo poster for Nothing Is Underrated, the sophomore solo album by Fugazi bassist Joe Lally. He mentioned the image’s similarity to Phil Collins‘ scarlet-tinted, egg-shaped visage as it appears on the cover of No Jacket Required–Collins’ Grammy-winning third solo effort, which spawned such rockin’ radio singles as “Sussudio” and “Take Me Home.” At first I wasn’t convinced, but after referencing No Jacket Required’s cover, I’m not so sure. I don’t think Lally will be hearing from Phil’s management any time soon, but they certainly have something in common–the faint red light, the neckless head hovering alone above a bottomless darkness.

Admitting you like columnist David Brooks is kind of like admitting that you’re not trying to get to the right or left of anyone. The guy goes straight up the middle, which, in these polarized times, is rather annoying to some on the fringe. I suspect that a few of them will be upset by his characterization of the present-day pop and rock scene in this column from today’s NYT.

The column deals with über-segmentation, which is, as Brooks asserts, a long tail issue. That is, the many (all the bands that sell under, say, 100,000 to 500,000) can rival the few (the blockbusters) as long as there are good sales channels, such as Amazon or ArkivMusic.com. Brooks thinks it’s a problem. His solution? Ask Springsteen sideman Steve Van Zandt.

“Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.”

It seems to me, though, that the long-tail thing is a by-product of democratization. Just because you play kids a bunch of Dylan records doesn’t mean that they’ll like them better than the T-Pain track they just downloaded onto their iPod. When I was a kid, I would’ve much rather purchased a Joy Division record than a Dire Straits record, but, in my hometown, the Dire Straits record was all you could find. So, what we’re seeing now boils down to choice. More choice equals greater fragmentation.

It’s the downside of liberalization. When you give the people more options, you might not like what they choose.

Making fun of Celine Dion lyrics is like shooting fish in a barrel, but, hey, BPB takes its chuckles where it can find them. In the New York Times review of Dion’s new album, Taking Chances, Kelefa Sanneh highlights the absurdity of this line from the album’s title and opening track: “Don’t want to be alone tonight, on this planet they call Earth.”

Sanneh writes: “By the way, that last prepositional phrase, portentous and meaningless, can be tacked onto just about any lyric in need of extra oomph: “Sweet home, Alabama, on this planet they call Earth”; “You lived your life like a candle in the wind, on this planet they call Earth”; “We be big pimpin’, on this planet they call Earth.””

Props to the NYT for publishing an aside that is just a few words shorter than the record reviews in Spin…which, of course, is printed on this planet they call Earth.