So my generation’s Exile gets an unnecessary reissue with only a few bonus tracks and a needless DVD. Sweet. Perhaps the only person who needed this product more than Liz Phair was Liz Phair’s kid. The rest of us should prepare to shovel through the new-and-improved Liz Phair profile and the revisiting of all her missteps and failures. It’s an all-too-familiar cycle for the songwriter only now we get to look back at Phair circa 1993.

Thumbing through her arc now feels kinda sad—same kinda sad one feels when thinking about the Blake Babies‘ Juliana (I should get points for namedropping that band) or reading Dean Wareham’s book or listening to the Breeders‘ new one. And this reissue only reminds one of her sad career arc.

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Harp magazine is back. Kinda. The Silver Spring-based music magazine, which ended its run in March, has relaunched as an online-only publication, Blurt, that includes a “digizine”—a digital magazine that includes all the contents of a typical music magazine. Accessing new content is easy! If you want to read EIC Scott Crawford’s editor’s note about the mag’s new direction, here’s all you have to do:

1. Go to www.blurt-online.com.

2. Click on the magazine cover at top right.

3. Click on the “next” button.

4. Again.

5. Again. Hurry, there’s an ad for an Amy Ray solo album!

6. Read pull quote: “The question on a lot of bloggers’ lips—laptop screens–right now is, is print really dead?”

7. Realize that you can’t copy and paste said pull quote. Or e-mail the article. Or provide a direct link to it.

8. Note that, while print may be having a death rattle, ungainly Web-print hybrids are dead from the start.

Dear People at the Next Table at HR-57 on Saturday Night:

I understand the perception that jazz is background music. In some places, that’s quite true. A jazz club, however, is not one of those places. At a jazz club, jazz is what you might call the whole fucking point.

One would think that you knew that, having paid fifteen bucks to get in. However, Eric Lewis’s name on the bill was clearly not a big motivation for you, since you were talking at the top of your lungs all through his set and causing people in the front row to glare back at you. If anything, your motivation was the empty bottle of Maker’s Mark on your table. (For which I grudgingly respect you guys—I’ve never seen anyone, even a large group, finish a bottle of Maker’s Mark in one sitting.)

Still, it might have occurred to you that the other people who paid $15 a head DID want to hear the music. They probably weren’t that interested in your discussion of Barack Obama’s foreign policy platform. Which is why by the end of the night people were choosing to leave their seats and stand against the wall, packed in like sardines, rather than listen to you anymore. Not that it helped, as your decibel range was in the high hundreds.

However, when it comes down to it, the joke’s on you. What you missed was one of the most astonishing musical performances of your lives. Lewis played an astonishing repertoire of classic songs, obscure rock music, and his own compositions, and he did it all with great sturm-und-drang and hands that I’d never believed could move so fast over a keyboard–at least with any reasonable degree of accuracy.

So I don’t even have to tell you to fuck off. You already pretty well did.

Cheers,
MJW

Postie Tom Sietsema, in a Sunday magazine feature, vents about the decibel levels at various restaurants. Early on, he checks his handy decibel counter and sees that the noise level is equal to a lawn mower. I have to say the piece resonated with me.

I am no fan of the loud restaurant. A few weeks ago, at a local organic fancy pizza shop, I had to endure hits from the ’80s blaring at top volume. No fun.

Last night at a coffee shop, I had to endure late ’90s emo. All I wanted to do was read my book.

But the real issue for me is that these places don’t seem to play any local music. Not once have I walked into a store, restaurant or coffee shop and heard Georgie James or the Evens or Trouble Funk or Rare Essence. [I know there are other worthy bands and musicians that I'm leaving out]. Granted, there are some bars that do a good job stocking their jukeboxes with local favorites. But for the most part, the local eateries blow off the local scene.

If they want to crank it up, they should at least keep some local albums on rotation!

The Nationals are requesting your votes for “7th Inning Stretch Song,” “Home Run Song,” and “Victory Song.” As pointed out in this Idolator post, there’s only one local choice in there, Chuck Brown’s “Bustin Loose” (my personal theme music for overeating) and the rest are pretty crappy (though I do get goosebumps whenever I hear U2’s “Beautiful Day”).

You’d think that, instead of Blur’s Fugazi rip-off “Song 2,” we could get an actual Fugazi song. Luckily, there’s a write-in function.

In case you have yet to see this choice XXL interview with DMX, here’s the highlight:

XXL: Are you following the presidential race?
DMX: Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

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Now comes news via DCist that B.B. King is scheduled to be rolled out on to the Strathmore’s stage. The DCist poster with the misfortune of hyping this news gives it their best spin:

While Father Time has taken away some of King’s technique and forced him to perform seated, his soul is firmly intact and he still packs an emotional wallop every time he sings or plays a note.

But let’s be honest here. King makes one hate the blues in the same way Leno makes one hate comedy. King’s schtick is a tired one. Someone should just take Lucille out to pasture and tell Mr. King that he’s best on TV informing the public on the best way for diabetics to test their blood.

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

“‘The last section of that song is known as the Obama fight song.’”
–Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, explaining the chanted chorus “We can make it better” during a performance last week at the District’s 9:30 Club”

This week Maxim magazine got caught in a lie: It delivered a kinda-negative review of the Black Crowes‘ new album, Warpaint, which the magazine hadn’t actually heard. The band’s management has been angrily demanding all manner of apologies–proving that rock critics are still useful for publicity, if no longer in a telling-people-about-new-records kinda way.

Aaron Leitko and Jason Cherkis are unfazed by Maxim’s embarrassment. In the video below, they discuss Warpaint, Snoop Dogg’s Ego Trippin‘, the B-52s‘ Funplex, and a few more upcoming releases they haven’t heard a second of. Caveat emptor!

Finally someone defends Jeff Mangum. In a Slate piece titled “The Salinger of Indie Rock,” Taylor Clark offers an empathetic argument on behalf of the singer/songwriter for quitting on the record biz shortly after the release of his now-classic In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

That album has produced a book, tons of imitations, Mangum-related hoaxes, and its share of rabid fandom. These fans seem to hate the guy for not producing much in the way of a follow-up. And field recordings and one-off surprise appearances at shows don’t seem to count. But it’s enough that he made Aeroplane. It’s enough that Merge keeps it in print and has some streams on its site.

A year or so before Aeroplane’s release, I had the pleasure of interviewing him back when he was simply putting out tapes under his moniker Neutral Milk Hotel. He seemed like a lot of young folks back then–inspired by K Records, Nirvana, and DIY Culture–who put fuzzy-sounding songs to tape. He was low key, earnest, and warm. He was just another guy who wrote songs–OK great songs–under a funny name.

I think no one wants to be crowned as some Folk Hero or be anyone’s savior. As Taylor writes in his piece, after Mangum realized that music could not erase the pain in the world–or the pain he felt–is it a surprise that he would stop putting out records? [One thing I and everyone else should stop doing is writing that he disappeared. He didn't vanish. He simply stopped making records we could buy.There's a difference.] Taylor writes:

“And if Aeroplane really is Jeff Mangum’s final statement to the universe, maybe we should be happy with that—not because of some tired line about going out at your peak (which he likely didn’t reach), but because his story is a kind of modern fable. Many fans see his disappearance only in selfish terms: They’ve been deprived of more great music for no good reason. They can’t understand why Mangum would shun success just to shuffle through his days, and, indeed, when musicians abandon this much promise, the culprit is usually drugs or debilitating accidents or people named Yoko. So he must have gone nuts, right? Well, no. After all, what if Mangum is just being honest? What if he poured his life into achieving musical success only to discover that it wasn’t going to make him happy, so he elected to make a clean break and move on? We should all be so crazy.”

Maybe this will be the last word on Mangum. No way.