For a few days, I was tasked with researching the life of Christopher Savage. Savage had moved to D.C. from Bakersfield, Calif. in the hopes of starting a new life. After five days in the District, he ended up dead. The cause of his death remains a mystery. His life is a different matter. He tended to wear his life on his sleeve. You can read the full story here.

But one thing that struck me–aside from everything else–about Savage was his dedication to being a punk rocker. He came here with three jean jackets emblazoned with shoutouts to his beloved Turbonegro. He also brought with him only one CD: a best-of Motorhead compilation. And for his new friends, a sack of Crass buttons.

Savage was 36. It’s just a long time to be a punk rocker. I don’t think this is so rare anymore. The Internet certainly helps. He lived on the Turbonegro fan message boards. And just about any band has some sort of forum for other fans to communicate with each other–trade bootlegs, merch, set lists, and just feel like they are a part of something. So few scenes feel like scenes anymore. Except on the Internet. Pitchfork makes a point about this today with its review of the new No Age record–a band very much rooted in a city and in an all-ages space.

Maybe with the music shake-up in Mount P, things could change here as well.

No Wave is kind of hard to describe using actual words. One generally has to rely on onomatopoeia like skree and krang to effectively capture the chaos and dissonance that defined the music. But in his book No Wave Arlington music writer Marc Masters does a good job of characterizing the movement without resorting to a Thurston Moore-invented vocabulary. If you want to check it out in person, he’ll be doing a reading and signing tonight at Crooked Beat Records around 7 p.m. If that leaves you curious as to what No Wave music actually sounds like, Masters will also be DJing tonight at Marx Cafe (located at 3203 Mount Pleasant St. NW) from 10 p.m. to 3 am..

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Jason Cherkis checks in again with Jack Carneal, the Malian music enthusiast and label owner of Baltimore’s Yaala Yaala.

Cherkis and I tackled Carneal’s first trio of recordings almost a year ago in City Paper (“Griot Grand” and “Interview with Jack Carneal”).

Now Carneal’s got a fourth Yaala Yaala disc, a self-titled release from Yoro Sidibe, a Malian hunter and musician who is “around 70.” The album came out last week.

According to Drag City, the Chicago label that distributes Yaala Yaala, “the grooves are as uplifting as any pep talk could be. They’re low and hypnotic — and after an hour of them shaking and rattling, you too will be loose and ready for what may.”

Given that there’s no music on Yaala Yaala’s MySpace page, we’ll just have to take their word for it.

A friend just pointed out this post from Jessica Hopper’s blog, in which the blacklist-happy music writer goes after Chicago black-metal band Nachtmystium. The problem? Well, Hopper thinks they’re racist and homophobic.

Now, I loved Nachtmystium’s last album from 2006, an arty slab of psychedelic metal called Instinct: Decay. But I don’t go around doing due diligence on every band I like, so I’d never read any interviews in which frontman Blake Judd uses questionable language, or expresses questionable ideas.

But I decided to Google Nachtmystium and “Zionist conspiracy” and got nothing but Hopper’s blog. (Googling “Nachtmystium” and “Zionist” gets you here.) I didn’t bother with the f-word, because it seems clear enough that the guy is upset with message board lurkers, not, um, gay people.

Now, I’m not going to condone what Judd said, but, if Hopper’s going to call out poor Stephin Merritt for not liking rap, then perhaps she will understand that–as Faulkner once said about the South–some of us like despite, not because of.

In this week’s New Yorker, staff writer Burkhard Bilger has a good article about American folk music. It’s not online, but it’s worth seeking out.

Not only does he interview Frederick, MD’s Joe Bussard, a 78 collector who has been the subject of several Washington City Paper features (Eddie Dean’s and Andrew Beaujon’s), but he also makes some worthwhile points about American folk music and its pursuit (whether by collectors or those making field recordings).

Most interesting to me—especially having grown up around adults who, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, were still in the thrall of the fifties folk revival—is how many of those musicians, such as Robert Johnson, who—especially since the ‘60s—has been written about in mythical, almost god-like terms, owe their legend to serendipity.

Bilger writes:

“Fame in folk music can be less a matter of talent than of opportunity, [down-to-Earth folk revivalist Art Rosenbaum] said. People talk about the Delta blues because Charley Patton and Robert Johnson were from Mississippi. But if H.C. Speir hadn’t opened his music store in Jackson we might talk about Georgia Blues instead.”

And then there’s the whole issue of authenticity—finding artists untouched by the modern world. This is like manna for folk-hunters. (When Leadbelly came to New York, Bilger writes, noted folklorist John Lomax “told him to put on prison stripes.”) But Bilger notes that even some of ye olde biggies might not stand up to present-day standards:

“When John Lomax first recorded the blues, the genre was newer than hip-hop is today, and both Leadbelly and Robert Johnson learned songs from records.”

None of this invalidates a good song (and Johnson, especially, wrote quite a few), but it would seem to invalidate the collecting and compiling concept that anything that’s old and, um, folky is worth transferring and cleaning up. Some recordings you’ve never heard of because they just weren’t very good.

The much-anticipated Green Apple Festival got doused with sobering sogginess yesterday, on what would have been the greatest 4/20 spectacle since 1908. Yeah, there’s the well-observed irony that Mother Nature rained on her own parade…yeah, there’s the fact that the day was more gray than green…and of course Toots, the Roots, and Gov’t Mule in toto (among others) never even made it to the stage.
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Ben Sisario’s NYT article about indie record stores was quite a bummer, but Sasha Frere-Jones blog post from last Friday got me thinking that the demise of 3,100 record stores since 2003 isn’t such a bad thing.

SFJ writes: “There are many educating angels out there, and I owe several kind people a lifetime’s tuition, but, good Lord, record-store employees can be grumpy. And scary. And insulting. And make you feel like never ever going into a store again. And that’s relevant.”

It is relevant. We’ve all had these High Fidelity-type experiences and if you think of this stuff in small business terms–as opposed to cultural terms–it’s especially baffling.

I certainly don’t welcome the demise of record stores, but here are some questions to think about, once again in small business terms…

Will the stores that are left over have to work much harder for your money?

Will they have to do things to differentiate themselves from the vast resources of the internet?

Will they be much happier to see you walk through the door?

I think the answer to all three is ‘yes.’ Is this a tragedy? Not at all.

Man. The New York Times has a pretty depressing story today on the state of the indie record store. Here’s the nugget you all should take away:

“Some 3,100 record stores around the country have closed since 2003, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a market research firm. And that’s not just the big boxes like the 89 Tower Records outlets that closed at the end of 2006; nearly half were independent shops. In Manhattan and Brooklyn at least 80 stores have shut down in the last five years.”

Well. We can do something about it. National Record Store Day hits this Saturday. A number of area shops are getting in on the action. Crooked Beat in Adams Morgan plans to mark the day with free grab bags of cool stuff. The first 50 paying customers will get bags stuffed with CDs, stickers, 7-inch singles, buttons, and posters.

One lucky customers will receive a bag containing a $20 gift certificate to the shop. Sounds like a good time as it always is at Crooked Beat.

So at least for one day, we should stop downloading, freeloading, and burning.

After hearing that the recent Kimya Dawson show at the Black Cat didn’t quite sell out, we thought maybe the Juno soundtrack phenomena had come and gone. Amazingly, the soundtrack is still holding its own among indie rock’s stalwarts. At least at Adams Morgan’s Crooked Beat. Here’s the store’s top ten sellers from March:

1. Stephen Malkmus - Real Emotional Trash
2. Vampire Weekend - s/t
3. Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
4. Beach House - Devotion
5. Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely
6. Dirtbombs - We Have You Surrounded
7. Juno - Juno soundtrack
8. Mission of Burma - Signals, Calls & Marches
9. Magnetic Fields - Distortion
10. Destroyer - Trouble in Dreams

Ballrogg, a Norwegian duo, is coming to Blues Alley for two sets on Wednesday, April 2. The band’s bassist, Roger Arntzen, is a member of In the Country, a Keith Jarrett-esque piano trio that records for one of my favorite boutique labels, Rune Grammofon. I wrote a piece about the Oslo indie and two of its records in the spring of 2005 (”The Fjord Foundation“). Since then, I have yet to hear weak Rune Grammofon disc.

Ballrogg’s debut is on a label called Bolage, not on RG, but that shouldn’t keep you away from this unusual Blues Alley booking. According to its PR, the band will be “exploring the music of Eric Dolphy in a small format, stripped down to only bass and reeds.”