The Saturday Morning Car-Tune News Report 08.15.09: Maybe I Just Want To Fly

Posted by Lucas Wesley on 08.15.2009

Sonic Youth working with Gossip Girl, David Bowie re-releasing his greatest album, a small punk venue is immortalized, new music from Radiohead (maybe) and Garfunkel and Oates (definitely), Michael Jackson and Hank Williams hit the big screen (though not at the same time), Beck talks to Will Ferrell and we take a look at the growth of independent music. Read all about it in the Saturday Morning Car-Tune News Report!

Hey kids, welcome back to the Saturday Morning Car-Tune News! Now on week eight, things are a bit light, but let's get right to it.

- In a very long press release on Michael Jackson's official MySpace, it appears to have been confirmed. This Is It will be coming to a theater near you starting October 30. The film will consist of edited rehearsal footage along with a career retrospective and interviews with various friends and collaborators. Also, in select theaters, it will be presented in 3-D. That last bit tears it.



- Hank Williams fans, soon meet the pain of Johnny Cash fans. According to Variety, Marc Williams is writing a script for a biopic. Unlike Walk The Line or Closer, they intend to use Hank's original recordings opposed to covers by the stars of the film. Biopics can usually go either way, here's hoping for the best.

- From our unlikely collaborations department: Elton John is providing some piano and vocals on a new Alice In Chains song. I have no particular interest in AIC or the new album, but this in the very least is rather interesting.

- Beck's second irrelevant guest has been announced: Will Ferrell. I don't know if this is a step up or a step down from Tom Waits. No, I do, it's a step down. But it'll probably be just as entertaining, just in an entirely different way, I guess. Beck also has new shirts out for a limited time only featuring his simplistic version of The Velvet Underground & Nico cover, in honor of the first Record Club series, now up to "I'll Be Your Mirror" (their best cover in a while). Check it all out, where else, at beck.com.



- Radiohead have allegedly released another new song: "These Are My Twisted Words." It's not quite confirmed that it's them, but it sounds like them. And it significantly better than the Harry Patch song, so people are turning to it with hopeful ears, I guess. A day later I learned that there are too many rumors/theories to get in to, so I'm just going to stick with what I originally wrote there.

- The biggest little club in downtown L.A. has a DVD coming out: Live at the Smell will feature bands such as No Age, Abe Vigoda and HEALTH and will be released September 1. This is great for the millions of people who like these bands (well, or like the genres or might like the band, let's not get ahead of the fan base here) but can't make it to downtown L.A.

- David Bowie is about to release a big one: Station To Station, which I consider his inarguable best album, is being reissued in a four disc version. The first disc is the album as you can find it now. The second is a surround sound mix in the DVD format. The third and fourth are a live show at Uniondale, New York's Nassau Coliseum from March 23, 1976. The show features several songs from the set list and various greatest hits up to that era. All hail the Thin White Duke.



- I have never seen Gossip Girl. I have never heard anyone talk about Gossip Girl. I have never had a single thought about Gossip Girl. Until now. Sonic Youth will apparently be appearing on the show in order to perform an acoustic version of "Starpower." I'm suddenly a little bit interested in Gossip Girl. Ah, who am I kidding, I'll just youtube it. This marks Thurston Moore's second time working with Gossip Girl, previously performing a cover of "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" to be used on the show. Thurston Moore's such a cliché high school girl, isn't he?

- Garfunkel and Oates have an album out! Woo! Granted, it's digital only, I have most of the songs (and none are new), but hey, dude, Garfunkel and Oates have an album out! They have shirts, too, which I may have reported on last week, I forget. Anyway, the album is called Music Songs (Kate's solo release earlier this year was called Songs, which I suppose should make you question the musicality of them) and can be found at CDBaby.com. Yay, ukes!

Star Power

For whatever reason, the music world has been pretty light on stories that inspire me to write lately. For this week's Star Power, the only things I could think of where a history of the guitar in honor of the recently deceased Les Paul and another look at live shows due to a couple of arguments I've gotten into this week about how much I don't want to see The Allman Brothers. However, the first one was scrapped because I don't know that much about guitars and for the most part I don't care about them. Not to disrespect Paul, but there's just not much for me to say. The second one, though I could even disguise is as a Woodstock tribute, also loses because I just did that about three weeks ago. Then I read about Squeaky Fromme's release and considered a thing on the moral dilemma of listening to music by bad people. Unfortunately, I could only come up with a few words on Manson himself and then kind of degenerated into a synopsis of the movie The King of Comedy, which has nothing to do with music. Then we look at the "big stories" of the week, which are all American Idol related, and it will be a long time before I have anything of note to say about a show I have never watched.

Ultimately I decided to do something I was initially planning as some kind of anniversary, or for when I return to school (next week) when I won't have as much time to go in depth. But I guess I have to prematurely shoot my wad and hope that I don't end up with a mess on my hands. What I'm going to do is show you adoring fans the article that won me this job. It's about two months outdated, but that only confuses a few Billboard numbers and the term "recent." The rest of it remains true today. Back then it had a stupid title, but now it's just today's Star Power. If that logic doesn't work for you, consider it a continuation of the Gossip Girl story, with Sonic Youth's always growing but never particularly great fame leading me to these thoughts. Or maybe something about how I just bought Dan Deacon's "Bromst" and it's awesome and thus I thought a lot about similar minded music. Come up with your own logic if you're so desperate for it.



On May 26, 2009, the "underground" band Grizzly Bear released their third album, Veckatimest. One week later, on June 3, after glowing reviews from Pitchfork Media, Planet Sound, The A.V. Club and Clash Magazine, not to mention generally positive reviews from nearly everyone else, the album debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200. This is the band's first appearance on the pop charts, and one of the highest charting debuts ever from an independent album. This gradual disappearance of the gap between independent and major label success has been beginning to beg the question: does the underground still exist? And if so, what exactly does it mean?

We keep hearing that independent music is the future of music. Of course, it's the music critics that are telling us this (except for Rolling Stone, where their cover artist is the future of music), and the music critics have always been telling us this. The New York Dolls, punk rock, Sonic Youth and R.E.M. back before everybody hurt, when Europe stood radio free...these are the critical darlings of yesteryear, back when the Eagles and Duran Duran were rocking the charts, respectively. Of course, there was an occasional Rumours or Thriller, where the critics would agree with the pop charts, but our underground heroes always stood in the top five of the critics charts, if not the top five of the pop charts. Of course, this means nothing in terms of sales and the mainstream, and it's (perhaps unfortunately) a rare breed of music fans that respects the opinions of critics, but this stands as evidence that so called underground music was well above ground in the media world. However, it is just now that the popular world is reaching that same level of indie acceptance. It's arguable that the biggest band in the world right now is Radiohead, and we all know their last album came label-free.

However, we'll note this wasn't the first major success that came label free. Fifteen years ago (sidebar: holy shit, 1994 was fifteen years ago), Lisa Loeb released the song "Stay (I Missed You)" while unsigned. Thanks to it's involvement in the soundtrack to a sexy movie (sidebar 2: I've never seen the movie, don't get mad at me if it's less sexy than I seem to imply), it became the first, and thus far only, number one pop hit by an unsigned artist. Of course, a number one song is different from a number one album, and I already mentioned the power of the sexy movie. Although Loeb would go on to sign with Geffen Records, her early success proved success and major label backing were not synonymous. Of course, remove Wynona Ryder from the picture and it's arguable none of us would have heard of the weirdly cute soft rocker and her Nine Lives today. Regardless, success came without record labels long before Grizzly Bear made us all look up the word Veckatimest.



But was it even the success of Veckatimest, the album that launched a hundred articles, which finally broke underground music to popular discussion? I already mentioned Radiohead, but they were a success before they went independent. However, from my studies, the most popular band on college campuses today is Animal Collective, another independent band, around since the year 2000. Their fifth release, Sung Tongs, is the one where I believe the craze started. Their latest album, January's Merriweather Post Pavilion, hit 13 on the pop charts. That part of the story told, I think the answer to whether or not they are underground is found by going door to door asking people if they've heard of Animal Collective. I've never done this experiment, and I would urge you to follow my example in lieu of finding extreme boredom, but I have a feeling we're going to find more people are clueless than are fans. This brings me to my next question: does hitting number eight on the pop charts, or number thirteen, or even number one, mean that a band has broken into mainstream, defeating the stigma of being underground? Despite their number eight placement, if you don't read music magazines or other such publications, you still don't know who Grizzly Bear are. Unless you have an indie-cool friend, you still don't know who Animal Collective are. Maybe back in the 90's we did know who Lisa Loeb was, but that's the difference between singles and albums.

Perhaps the only answer is that unless you get featured in the soundtrack to Reality Bites, or Garden State, or Juno, or Twilight, or the next big teen hit (500 Days of Summer? Finally, The Smiths are going to be mainstream in America!), you aren't going to make that shift from underground to mainstream. Even if you debut at number eight, the incredibly rare time that Two Weeks pops on the radio, someone is going to ask you "hey, who covered Still D.R.E.?"

But this brings me to my last point. Why does it even matter anymore what underground means or what mainstream is? They say there's a disappearing gap in terms of sales, but I disagree. I say there is no gap. Sure, radio play may be different, and thirty years down the line, the new Sonic Youth video still isn't going to debut on FNMTV. But it was Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo that said it in a recent interview with Pitchfork. Asked why they switched from industry giant Geffen Records to independent label Matador Records, one of Lee's justifications was that there is no longer any difference in distributive abilities between major and indie labels. Not to mention artistic freedom: sure, Sonic Youth never quite faced the fear of selling out (though they were accused on Dirty), but Tom Waits has constantly made an effort to stay on minor labels, jumping from Asylum to Island to ANTI-, leaving the first two when they got too big in order to ensure his own artistic integrity, amongst other, less known reasons. Then we have Liz Phair to show us how the other half lives, when her jump from Matador to Capitol resulted in Why Can't I? and Extraordinary and almost no increase in popularity, despite what last.fm charts seem to imply. Perhaps all this shows us is a simple fact: once an underground artist, always an underground artist. Liz Phair never broke it despite "selling out." Though I just mentioned Sonic Youth's tenure on Geffen, they never hit the top of the pops. To bring in more names, artists such as Beck, Cake, Weezer, R.E.M., The Smashing Pumpkins, and many more have all had hits on the modern rock and pop charts, and maybe they aren't called "underground," but people still refer to them as alternative, which was the old word for indie. The words are meaningless, just check the charts.



As I write all of this, I realize I come to no conclusion. That's not an under sight. My conclusion is that the whole idea of labeling music is meaningless. Mainstream, underground, independent, alternative, it doesn't matter. Someone will like it and use these words as evidence that it's good ("yeah, dude, they're so indie"). Someone will dislike it and use these words as evidence that it isn't worth your time ("I hear that Capitol wouldn't even give them a deal—no big surprise there"). Don't worry about the label, because underground music doesn't exist. There's good music you've heard of and good music you haven't heard of. And, of course, there's bad music that fits both categories, too. But music is too personal to be measured in terms of what your local DJ is allowed to play. Don't start deciding whether or not it's worth your time the same way you would a swimming pool.

A final acknowledgment: through the article, I used the terms "underground" and "independent" relatively interchangeably. Maybe this is where my confusion starts—perhaps underground music means undiscovered music, never having entered a studio, forced to expand their talents within the confines of their garages and coffee houses. I know a few bands like that, and surely they fit the underground mold. But let's face it, on the grand scale, those bands don't matter. In no way do I mean to mock them—many of them are highly deserving bands that desperately need someone to break them. But until they break, we're never going to hear about them. Breaking doesn't necessarily mean a record deal: look at Cymbals Eat Guitars. But it does mean studio time and an album release. Usually this means an independent label, although self-release is possible. Regardless of the means, I'm aware the possibility this is the bridge between underground and independent. However, if that is also the bridge between irrelevance and relevance. Unfortunately, since not all music writers have the ability to seek out all of the "true underground" music, we are forced to constantly confuse and garble the terms underground and independent, and in articles such as this I'm forced to look at the most realistic version of underground music I possibly can, and that is the music of independent artists.

Hopefully next week something interesting will happen.

Farewell Song

1965 was a big year. Bob Dylan and the Beatles released two perfect albums each, Brian Wilson continued to mature into pop perfection, Phil Spector started to work with the Righteous Brothers and The Who debuted. There's a great bevy of artists to choose from here, all who made classic and important songs and albums. But none of them made my favorite song of 1965. Instead I choose a song by a then unknown but now semi-legendary artist, written by a legendary songwriter. At the time she was just a model trying to get her foot into the door and he was, well, a songwriter. They don't change much over time in terms of job description. The b-side gets the credit for featuring Jimmy Page on guitar, but the a-side is the one I love. The song is "I'm Not Saying" by Nico, and the songwriter is Gordon Lightfoot.

The album of 1965, with the same acknowledgment of the classics mentioned earlier, is Rubber Soul by The Beatles. Or maybe it's Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan. Well, it's one of those two for sure.

Thanks for joining us this week, fans, and I hope to see you next with some more entertaining (to me) information for the Saturday Morning Car-Tune News!