take a look at this from top to bottom

A friend pointed this site out to me the other day, with the comment that I "shoulda done this." I get respectable number of emails every day hyping and promoting some band or another. Some are slick PR pieces, complete with attached digital presskits, whipped up by professional promoters. Others are sent directly from the bands themselves. Even though most of the material really isn't to my tastes or not easily contextualized as an annotation to an old Captain Marvel story, it's flattering to be noticed...though given recent events, maybe willful obscurity is a wiser course of action.

In any case, I've never been able to bring myself to publicly pillory any of these desperate contenders for my listening attention, no matter how lousy the music or how overblown the hype. (Well, except for that one time where I redacted the names of the parties involved.) As I said then, and many times before, I am not an arbiter of public taste. Do you really need me to tell you that jam bands are antithesis of all that is good and decent?

This is all ground I've covered before, except for one enigma which I finally believe I have resolved. An astonishing number of the acts represented in the promotional emails hew very close to the AOR template established by the Dave Matthews Band/Maroon 5/circa 1996 Goo Goo Dolls. I find that style of music to be aggressively bland and unlistenable in the extreme, but that's beside the point. What baffled me was that someone would be actively and unironically pimping the spiritual heirs of Phil Collins and Michael McDonald to the hipster-heavy music blogging scene. Or that anyone would earnestly hitch their wagons to that particular tired genre star in the year 2008 in the first place.

It eventually dawned on me that what I was seeing were working bands, ambitious lads and lasses with residencies at the local college bar or crab shack, seeking to crack into the big time. It's an understandable dream, but while their inoffensive sound might go well with a plate of softshells, a bottle of microbrew, and some inane conversation, it doesn't carry well to the world outside the realm of soft rock radio.

It's like choosing practical over theoretical study -- the former will likely net you steady work, but the latter offers the better chance of making a massive breakthough and universal acclaim. There is no shame in choosing either path, but transitioning between the two can be difficult. Easier, I think, to just accept the situation and carve a profitable niche in Mix 98.5's AOR ghetto*. Today's hipster darlings are tomorrow's forgotten heroes, but Michael Bolton's stream of royalties is eternal.

If folks do intend to keep sending me info about new artists, however, here's a prime example of what I am interested in listening to...

Statues - Living in Lines (from New People Make Us Nervous, 2008; also available on eMusic) - Top-notch Canadian punk/power pop pointed out to me by a reader (to which I will forever be grateful). The rest of the album is in the same fist-pumping, boot-tapping vein and fills my bitter heart with hope for the future of hooky, well-crafted power pop.

If you go the eMusic route in picking this one up, swing by and nab the Tranzmitors' eponymous 2007 album for more killer punk pop from the Great White North...or if you're low on downloads for this month, just pick up "Alma Blackwell." You won't be sorry.

*I will always remember Mix 98.5, one of the Boston market's many lite rock stations, for the TV ad they ran featuring Janine Turner a few years back. In the spot, the GOP shill-slash-actress let potential listeners know that the station playlist did not contain "lyrics that will embarrass you in front of your kids." Y'know, the same kids who are grooving to "Do Me in Da Butt," by Ephebe Jailbait. Come to think of it, the ad might have been for Magic 106, after all...

what you don't know

For all the talk about sales figures, mainstream media coverage, and whatnot, the comics scene is still a fairly insular environment with a public profile on par with that of contemporary poetry. Most people are aware it exists, few outside the bubble of cognoscenti and critics would be able to name even handful of recent "important" works. Comics do have a leg up on poetry in terms of licensability (there isn't exactly a rush to adapt Charles Simic's work into an XBox 360 game or a Hollywood summer blockbuster), but that cross-medium saturation hasn't effectively translated into a boost in interest regarding the source material.

I attended a number of poetry readings back in college. It was part of my "excuses to spend more time with a girl I liked" program, though I do have a certain fondness for verse (mostly Classical, Romantic, and Moderinst stuff). With only a couple of execeptions, the material presented at the readings was tripe of the most self-indulgent variety, sophomoric profundities gilded with free verse sleight-of-pen. Then, a couple of days or weeks after the event, I'd read a review (written by a colleague or friend of the poet in question) in the Boston Globe or The Nation praising the poet's works to the rafters.

What contemporary poetry lacks in Entertainment Weekly coverage, it makes up for in perceived legitimacy. Taking up a pen and composing verse means participating in a tradition stretching from Homer and Ovid to Byron and Shelley to Eliot and Pound. In contrast, to the ears of the American masses "comics" doesn't evoke Eisner, Miyazaki, or Moebius as much as Superman, The Family Circus, and Rob Liefeld's X-Force -- disposable diversions largely targeted at children or scary obsessive fans.

This situation, combined with the insularity of the scene, has led to a defensive mindset, complete with elaborate attempts at self-justification, in some quarters. The people who have tied their sense of self-worth to the hobby, as outlined in Pal Ken's infamous post, are most frequently cited in regards to this phenomenon, but it has wider and more subtle effects than ingrained fan entitlement.

"The easiest way to look handsome and smart," as the old joke goes, "is to surround yourself with ugly, stupid people." Because the comics industry, in perception as well as sales, is dominated by decadent, inbred superheroic material (and manga, which has a similar crap-to-quality ratio as Marvel's and DC's products once one has set aside the lux oriente nonsense), there is a tendency to overvalue relatively decent material. As I said to a friend when Madonna's performance in Evita started to generate Oscar nomination buzz, "Not being lousy is not the same as being great."

Novelty and "purity of artistic vision" (whatever that is supposed to mean) in and of themselves are not enough. It doesn't matter how diminshed one's expectations regarding the medium are, a work has to stand alone on its own merits and not be graded on a scale because the prevailing standard is "barely tolerable, if not worse." Compared to According to Jim, Scrubs seems like a rare work of genius, but the "better of two bad choices" only really works in the realm of politics, and really isn't something a rational person would want to see applied in wider circumstances.

Think of how much the "indie" label has been manipulated and abused, not just in comics, but in film and music as well. The implied sense of artistic integrity and edginess in the term's use is meaningless on an aesthetic level, intended more to engender a knee-jerk "FIGHT THE MAN" reaction. It's a sentiment I can empathize with, but it's not a guarantee of quality or an innoculation against failure.

It's not that I'm saying that "good enough" isn't, well, good enough. I think that the record shows that I have been unswerving in my affection for the "solidly acceptable" class of entertainment choices. How else is one going to pass the time between transcendental works of genius? What I am troubled by is the willingness to laud good-not-great material as the Word made manifest -- replete with suspended critical judgement -- simply because Secret Infinite Invasion Crisis and whatnot have set the quality bar so damn low.

The Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup (from The Very Best of the Foundations, 1995) - Is it bubblegum? Is it soul? A little bit of both? Does it even matter? Not to me, it doesn't. It's a damn fine piece of pop no matter how you tag it.

Ned's Atomic Dustbin - Until You Find Out (from God Fodder, 1991) - "I picked up a couple albums from some bands I'd been hearing buzz about -- Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Nirvana. I didn't really like the Ned stuff, but Nirvana was frigging awesome." On that day in 1991, a friendship died.

and it opened my eyes

From AT's inbox; the names have been changed to protect the guilty:

In regards to your blog, we would like to ask you to write a piece on PSEUDO-CLEVER BAND NAME's new album "UNINSPIRED TITLE". With a diverse range of influences, from LEGENDARY JAZZ PERFOMER and LEGENDARY REGGAE ARTIST to WELL-LOVED INDIE ROCK BAND #1 and WELL-LOVED INDIE ROCK BAND #2, the band still manages to bring it all together and create something that sounds fresh, with hooks akimbo, and a lust and fear for all things cyber-televisic.

Sweet Providence, where do I even begin?

First up, dropping a fistful of self-consciously eclectic musical "influences" is the quickest way to get on my bad side. I have yet to listen to an artist or outfit which indulges in the practice that sounds even marginally like any of the acts they cite. It's a music marketing tactic that simply doesn't work, except maybe on the morbid curiosity, are-you-effing-serious, let's-stare-at-the-bloody-trainwreck level. Better to be up front and just honestly and simply state the truth: "shamelessly apes Joy Division," "wishes they were The Clash," or "sounds like every other lousy jam band."

The same knee-jerk distaste of mine applies to contrived buzz-words and phrases like "hooks akimbo" and "cyber-televisic," which convey the diametrical opposite of the message the PR flack is attempting to transmit.

The part that really caused me to grit my 75% amalgam teeth, however, was the opening line, phrased as a passive-aggressive corp-speak imperative. I'm sure many of you know the drill: "We would like to ask you to conduct a massive time-intensive revision of the database even though we plan on switching to a new front-end interface in two weeks which will make your revisions obsolete" delivered with a smile and unblinking stare. Do they seriously think I'm going to play the role of unpaid PR proxy in exchange for some weak-cheese ego stroking?

Even if it was a paying gig, I'd still turn it down. And not out of any sense of personal honor, either.

I get a fair number of emails asking me to promote or review songs, albums, or artists on Armagideon Time. It comes with being a music blogger (such as I am), and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't slightly flattered by the requests even though I'm baffled why they put me on the mass email list to begin with.

I have never set out to be an arbiter of public taste here. I'm temperamentally unsuited for the role of a "serious" music critic (if such a thing even exists) because I am able to acknowledge the subjectivity of my views. My concept of "good music" applies to me and me alone, and in truth encompasses a lot of what might be deemed, sans malice, as "utter crap." I can live with that burden without trying to redefine the definition of "quality" to conform to my singular tastes.

What I can't, or rather won't, do is regurgitate PR hype or presume to shatter the dreams of a basement studio auteur because I have a venue to do so and an ego in need of gratification. I'm not a gatekeeper. I'm the eccentric old man who lives in a shack by the junkyard, showing off my collection of mismatched depression glass and spouting off rambling philosophical anecdotes to any person foolish enough to stop by.

It's a narrow niche that I've cut out for myself here, but it's a very comfortable one, too.

Pretty Girls Make Graves - Speakers Push the Air (from Good Health, 2002) - My synesthetic take on this track: The sun setting behind Horn Pond Mountain in October, as viewed through the trees in my backyard.