imomus | Devendra Banhart is 'the real thing'... and I'm lovin' it!

Devendra Banhart is 'the real thing'... and I'm lovin' it!

Michael Gira on Devendra Banhart:

'Whether the songs are pained, twisted, whimsical, or even sometimes weirdly silly, aside from being fantastically musical and expertly played, they are also utterly sincere, and devoid of a single drop of post modern irony. In short, he's the real thing.'

'2 years ago,' Gira tells us on the XL Records site, 'I first heard the crude home made recordings of Devendra Banhart... His voice - a quivering high-tension wire, sounded like it could have been recorded 70 years ago - these songs could have been sitting in someone's attic, left there since the 1930's... When it came time to record new music we were of course faced with the quandary of how to go about it - does he continue making hiss-saturated home recordings, or do we go into a "professional" studio? We mutually decided that it was best to move on - why should he be ghetto-ized as a possible low-fi crank/eccentric? Besides, his songwriting and his guitar playing (in my opinion) have taken such leaps and bounds forward, that we were compelled to record them in a way that made it possible to really hear the performances clearly... we recorded 32 songs (culled from something like 57 Devendra had initially submitted!) in his living room, using the best possible vintage gear. Ideal... Deciding on the final arrangements was ridiculously easy - the songs were so good in their raw state that there was no need to bolster them with sonic fluff or cheap impact.'

You know, there are so many weird assumptions and contradictions in that text! I like Devendra's records, but he by no means escapes the post-modern irony Gira claims he does. A recording made now that sounds like a 1930s recording is an example of post-modern irony, whether that's deliberate or accidental. Gira's desire to avoid the pomo label just pushes Devendra into the Oasis school of (accidental) pomo irony rather than the Matmos (deliberate) school of irony. (Visually, Devendra's retro-hippy look is also completely post-modern. Also, check out the incredibly camp, post-modern and ironic atmosphere that prevails on Devendra's tours. Especially the hilarious video spoofs featuring Captain Krizzle.)

Good grief, where to begin with Gira? The idea of 'fantastically musical' is just silly when applied to an artifact that appears in the category of music. It's like saying that one cultural artifact is more 'cultural' than another cultural artifact. I also have major problems with 'expertly played'. So this means that Devendra is getting closer and closer to the day a crack session musician could take over the guitar chores? As for 'recording in a way that made it possible to really hear the performances clearly', I find it completely odd that the best way to do this was to 'use the best possible vintage gear'. Are we Lenny Kravitz? Do we believe that pop's Platonic ideal is the exact sound of 1968? And as for 'the songs were so good in their raw state that there was no need to bolster them with sonic fluff...' Is there really sound here and sonic fluff there? Are they distinguishable? One is serious, and the other is fluff, right? One is essential, the other inessential, right? One is signal, the other noise? One is figure, the other ground. In short, if you find a barrel containing both music and sonic fluff, hunt through the sonic fluff for the music, because sonic fluff is just fluff but music is the real thing. So off with the hiss! (And if you're Devendra's stylist, remember that his head is the important thing and his hair is just fluff.)

What Gira describes seems either naive or willfully perverse. It's Platonic and entirely yoked to 'the metaphysics of presence'. In this vision, there is the 'real' and 'clear' sound of 'well-played' music which 'production' can only tarnish. The hiss on Devendra's early recordings is merely an impairment, to be banished when the budget allows. To retain it would make him a 'lo-fi eccentric'. Devendra Banhart, eccentric? Heaven forbid!

So, let me get this straight. The best way to get a 'real' and 'clear' sound is to use vintage gear, right? That means stuff like tape hiss, wow and flutter, right? But not quite as much of it as Devendra used to use, because you're trying to get away from 'eccentricity' and the 'lo-fi ghetto', right? But tracking down and using vintage gear (only 'the best', mind, not 'the worst' -- we want only the best quality errors, not cheap glitch and fluff) is not considered 'production', somehow, just as it wasn't 'production' when Devendra made those early hissy recordings that evoked the 1930s so pleasurably for Gira. None of this is 'production' because production is bad. Production is a stumbling block in the clear, natural, unproblematical path between the artist and the listener. (Do I have to add 'Protestant' somewhere in that sentence?) Production is something calculating, something that takes us away from authenticity and 'the natural', isn't it? And neither hippies nor retro-hippies like to lose touch with nature, do they? In the end, production itself is dangerously post-modern. After all, what is a rack of sound effects units but a series of quotations of all the other records which use the same sound effects? But, whoops, what is vintage analog gear but a quote of the records made with vintage analog gear? There is no way to produce an un-produced record. There is no neutral way of recording. The fourth wall and the live recording are conventions we go along with because we love theatre. There's just no escaping post-modernism, quotation, and irony. It's there at the front door and it's there at the back door. Dress up nicely and step over your porch to greet your friend post-modernism with a wave on the street, or flee out back and end up at his feet in a pile of his junk and rubbish, it's all pretty much the same thing in the end. Except that it's always friendlier to wave rather than sneer, and nicer to affirm the inevitable than deny it.

So, dear Michael Gira, here is the news. It's 2004. Reproducing, deliberately and self-consciously, the sound of the past is an absolutely key part of post-modern music-making. I do it, you do it, Devendra Banhart does it. When you deny there's anything post-modern or ironic about Devendra Banhart's records, it's terribly post-modern and terribly ironic!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Maybe he's the Pierre Menard of pop?

I sometimes think there are so many Pierre Menards (http://www.english.swt.edu/cohen_p/avant-garde/Literature/Borges/Menard.html) in pop that it's like being stuck at a ventriloquy convention.

After all, what is a rack of sound effects units but a series of quotations of all the other records which use the same sound effects? But, whoops, what is vintage analog gear but a quote of the records made with vintage analog gear?

:) I Like!

One thing that always annoyed me was Jack White's stated (I think...) refusal to use computer production on White Stripes records. Fair enough, his choice; but it seems, to me, a little calulated to broadcast this so strongly, almost like a boast. As you suggest, working like that is pretty much an aesthetic choice, a production style that defines the records as much as the songs and the instruments. Things like computers and electronics are just tools, just a (overused phrase alert) means rather than ends. They aren't bad or good in themselves, it's obviously how and when they are used that's the key. So maybe, given their relative cheapness and ubiquity, explcitly rejecting these tools is just one more point on the spectrum of how the tools are used. Maybe.

Agreed. Everything has it's place, and nothing belongs anywhere. Banhart could use more grind blasts on his albums.

hahaha you said it

Let's say you're a cardiologist and you want to record a patient's heartbeat. And you want to record it as exactly and "unmediated" as possible, because you need to hear exactly what kind of heart murmurs they are in order to diagnose your patient's problem. Is this possible in momusworld? ie can we have production that is less or more "mediated"? How do you interpret the development of recording instruments from the wax cylinder to today? What if, when closing my eyes, I can't actually tell the difference between someone playing a cello and the recording of someone playing a cello? Is this recording less "mediated" than a wax cylinder one? Although I kind of agree with you on the a priori artificality of production, I don't think that's the whole story, there are other things to be teased out.

My partner say him live last Thursday and remarked how much the band (Devendra & backing musicians) reminded him of the doors (I believe they were stoned out of their minds at the time of the gig...).

His voice and his music actually reminds me of really old Tyrannasaurus Rex, when Marc Bolan was doing his weird folk stuff with just another band mate. That stuff, and what Devendra is doing now, are both amazing and timeless.

Reminds me of those old "No synthesizers were used on this recording" tags. But I could always only grin at that rather than be genuinely annoyed. It was just too silly. Same in this case.

No matter. Those Banhart albums are awful good.

Anti-rockism is just a more sophisticated version of rockism, ie, it's not a real binary. There's that line from Gertrude Stein: the truth is there is no truth, and that's the truth. That neatly sums up the paradox. Any attempt to get away from the Platonic ideal ultimately ends up in setting up a further Platonic ideal, a grander truth about the truth or its inexistence. Or, as Wittgenstein said, you can't use language to get outside language. Once you give up claims to authenticity or the truth, on what grounds can you make those claims? Rorty's pragmatism doesn't seem to help here, for what if it is more pragmatic to believe in a Platonic ideal? The Plato/Protagoras debate has continued in one form or other for over 2,000 years. There's a reason for this, and that is that is that it is fundamentally, logically unsolvable. The solution is neither to side with Plato the rockist or with Momus/Protagoras, but to examine what it is that ultimately makes the problem unsolvable and the two positions untenable.

But both Wittgenstein and Rorty simply deny the importance of the question and get on with it. I know that's a simplification, but it's basically right. Likewise, there are many people who scoff at "the question of God." For many people, it's not even worth considering because there is no question.

Can't we imagine a point in the future where questions about the Platonic idea are as remote as "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin"? That question was also never resolved, but it was left behind as irrelevant.

I don't think there's any way you could say Rorty denies the question and gets on with it. That may be his advice, but he hasn't practised what he preached, since he's spent his whole career arguing the toss. The question of truth and the relationship of the world with our representations of it is more fundamental than theology, because as a metaphysical enquiry it encompasses the possibility of theology. Rorty comes down on the side of the anti-Platonists, and therefore has to face the paradox of claiming a truth about something while denying the possibility of claiming a truth about something.

From what I remember (it's been awhile), Rorty takes the Continental stance and claims that 'truth' and our relationship with the world is hopelessly bound up in our language and impossible to extradite. Kant came up with a similar view but then spent his life showing how you CAN get to know that there IS a Truth and a Reality and a God (even though you would never REALLY know them or it).

I see Rorty as a philosopher in the sense that late Wittgenstein and Nietzsche were: he's more of a guy going around smashing or poking holes in other arguments and showing how there are no inconsistencies in his arguments.

I still remember him basically saying, "Ok. We can never know Truth outside of our relationship to the world, so why don't we just STOP. We don't NEED a further explanation and all of the explanations we've added have led us into mass confusion."

The authenticity argument is a perfect example of a concept that makes sense in text, but little sense in the world. What is this thing called "authenticity" and how and why does it help us interact and live in the world? What does this concept contribute? I think it largely contributes muddied thinking and moralistic grounds to claim that what I like is better than what you or anyone else likes.

It's been a while since I read any Rorty as well, but he was more radical than Kant in that Kant posited an unknowable truth/reality while Rorty denies any such thing, knowable or unknowable. However Rorty can't get past the fact that he's still in the business of making statements "about something", while undermining any truth claim for them. For him the new transcendent is pragmatic value - we're back with impossible Platonic verities being smuggled in the back door.

Although I'm sympathetic to the anti-rockist position outlined by Momus in his post, I do see a sort of vicious circle developing, when what is perceived as knowingly inauthentic becomes the new authentic, leading to a new form of sterility. Postmodernism can become a new restraining type of ideology.

I have to admit I'm going on my faulty memory, but I don't remember Rorty making the claims you mention. I remember Rorty being a commited American Pragmatist. He argued (roughly) that the "meaning to a word is the response to it" (a simplification of late Wittgenstein) and that the worth of an idea is its effects in the world.

That is, ideas are words and words are tools. That they mediate the world is undeniable. What Rorty asserts is that we don't have to go any further and that any additional claims about the nature of the world are unnecessary.

He doesn't deny anything else (again from what I remember). He just claims that, not only is it not a real problem, but the "solutions" have muddied our thinking and led us down paths that are harmful (again, I would argue that the whole argument about authenticity is a dangerous one that leads people to claim moral stances based on their subjective tastes).

I'll have to look at my books when I get home. It has been a LONG time and I might be totally off-base.

Also, I'd like to do away with the entire concept of authenticity. Artists follow and build upon their loves. Certain artists will love something and build something from it that no one has seen before. I don't see any ideology stopping that - maybe holding it back for a few years or decades, but I don't see that process going away.

And I'd argue that postmodernism is largely a repudiation of modernism's ahistoricism. I'd also argue that there really is no ideology to postmodernism.

But I do agree that the art world, in particular, has been to beholden to theory for the last 20 years, and that obsession has produced a lot of boring and repetitive art.

to hell with plato. we used to be able to know the Truth before that guy came around. these days "any attempt to get away from the Platonic ideal ultimately ends in setting up a further Platonic ideal." damn you plato! you have enslaved us all!

OTM, totally OTM. I like Devendra, but there seem to be a dangerous amount of rockist authenticity detectives gathering around these nu-folkers.

btw, has anyone asked DB what he thinks of Tyrannosaurus Rex?

The music and style of Devendra Banhart and his sister Joanna Newsom make me feel very uneasy. Unfortunately they're also very real and not just cartoons. I prefer Jandek.

joanna's music is hard for me to take in large amounts. she sounds like a granny on acid. But, nevertheless I still think it's interesting.

This posts also goes with your John Peel post. It's a continuation of the theatrical vs. authentic argument. Where, exactly, does authenticity start and theatricality end? At one point does a facade become reality?

The distinctions, in my view, are false. There is no dilemma there other than the ones we create. There is music and sounds that we like, and music and sounds that we dislike. Music we dislike gets labeled inauthentic and theatrical, and vice versa for music we like.

A Robert Johnson recording from 1934 is no more authentic than a Bel Biv Devoe recording from 1986. One may be more original. One may have spawned more musical styles and hence be more important historically. I may like one over the other. But I just fail to see how you can talk about something as ridiculously vague as "authenticity."

An anonymous poster brought up Wittgenstein. He once said that the word "beauty" is simply a substitute for "WOW! I like that!" That's a paraphrase, but I think it also works when anyone says "authentic."

Oh yeah, I just had to say: I like Banhart. I like his music and I like the person.
Also: I'd like to suggest Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226262138/qid=1098978633/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-7262785-9992124). It's a great book - he takes the exact opposite view of mine, but I've used his analysis to support my view.

Some really good points came up here while I was away.

Let's say you're a cardiologist and you want to record a patient's heartbeat. And you want to record it as exactly and "unmediated" as possible, because you need to hear exactly what kind of heart murmurs they are in order to diagnose your patient's problem. Is this possible in momusworld?

Well, this reminds me of Picasso's conversation on a train with a man who asked why he couldn't paint more realistically. Picasso asked 'But what does that mean, realistic? Can you show me a realistic image?' The man reached into his wallet and produced a photograph of his wife. 'Very nice,' said Picasso, 'but is your wife really so small and flat?'

I think the point is that just because we have a tendency to forget that our representations are coded, it doesn't mean they aren't. They can't really be read without a common, often unspoken, understanding of their conventions. I don't believe a scientist can make an 'unmediated' recording. But he can certainly make mediated recordings which give him real information. In fact your example isn't a good one, because doctors tend to use a very 'unrealistic' representation of the human heart: the bleep of an ECG machine. Does that sound like a human heart? Not at all. It sounds more like a cricket with a stammer. But we can decode its mediated representation and map it to our understanding of the workings of the heart.

So I don't believe that some recordings are less mediated than others, just that we are more familiar with the codes of some than others, and therefore tend to forget about the mediation involved, and see it as transparent. Marshall McLuhan pointed out that in every era we tend to designate one medium as our 'window on the world'. In some eras it was print, in others TV, in ours it's becoming the webpage. Now, as soon as we shift this 'window' -- say from TV to web -- the formerly authoritative 'window' suddenly looks rather humble. It seems to blush and say 'Okay, I'm not really a window after all. I am just... television. You loved me before as a frame around reality. Now please love me for what I really am. Dots rushing across a screen. A speaker wired to a screen and a receiver. A set of narrative conventions.'

What if, when closing my eyes, I can't actually tell the difference between someone playing a cello and the recording of someone playing a cello?

I think it would be interesting to compare all the technologies of which people have said 'You can't tell it from the real thing!' They would be surprisingly different from each other. What would become clear is that there is always a leap of faith involved. There is no definitive reproduction. There are only different ways of tricking humans (or animals) into recalling experiences they had in the real world. Even the human sense organs mediate a reality which is, finally, unknowable.

Anti-rockism is just a more sophisticated version of rockism,

This I can sort of agree with. Anti-rockist arguments tend to be an appeal to a more subtle form of authenticity. I'm not so interested in the philosophical debate about Platonism as in the idea that it's possible to step outside of history, outside of ideology, outside of time, outside of context. I don't accept that any music is 'timeless'. It's rooted in its time, in the understandings and technologies that are current. I see the kind of statements Michael Gira is making about Banhart as something akin to Sartre's 'bad faith'. By so pointedly denying that Banhart is post-modern, Gira is arguing for the idea that Banhart can somehow transcend the present, escape the current state of technology, escape all contemporary understandings of what music is... This is not only impossible -- I think I show how we simply fall back into a rather more self-deluded and unfriendly version of post-modernism when we try to transcend the present by sounding like the past -- but it's cowardly, it's attempting to be ahistorical, it's reactionary, it's Essentialist. I would simply ask people like Gira and Banhart to 'be here now'. It's modest, it's natural, it's cultural, it's historical, it's rooted, it's sexy!

I agree.

And in response to the Platonic/Protagonist poster, I think a historical argument is the perfect counter to his problems of ultimiate Truth. You can show how things are never ahistorical - including the "laws of nature." Once that is established, the questions of "ultimate reality" just get left behind since "ultimate reality" is always already mediated and impossible to experience as a thing in itself. Truth with a capital T becomes unknowable.

When you take a historical stance, that branch of metaphysics just melts away. It doesn't go away (like the angels on the head of a pin arguments were never solved and never went away) but it does become unimportant.

I'm wondering whether there isn't a fundamental category difference between a photo and a recording. A photo really is a representation of something, it's coded information, ie, no one will ever mistake a photo of a person for an actual person. But you may well mistake a recorded voice or piec of music for the real thing. I'm sure I've done it. In other words, the recording isn't just a representation or coded information. It might also be a recreation, which is not the same thing. If I attempt to duplicate something, then it does become valid to talk about how much the duplication really is like the thing it's duplicated. Whereas the question is meaningless for a Picasso painting.

Another point: I've just realised one thing that annoys me about in-yer-face postmodernism. It's not that I necessarily have a philosophical argument but an aesthetic one. Postmodernism is so literalist! It's constantly telling me that the movie is only shadows on the wall, that music is artificially created sound and theatre, that stories are not real and that narrators are unreliable. I know all that! It's boring to be told it! And even if I don't know it on a totally explicit level, I know it implicitly. When there's a fire in the movie I'm watching, I don't run out of the cinema. The twilight world of suspension of disbelief with one half of the brain while the other half knows just what's what comes very naturally to humans. If that weren't the case, storytelling would be impossible. There was a time when it was new and refreshing to be told that within the construct of the story. But I think that time has passed. I'm not saying we should go back to older, more conservative forms of storytelling, but maybe we should move on from the literal deconstruction of the story, and concentrate more on that twilight world of believing/not believing. Maybe what I'm arguing for is actually a more radical form of postmodernism, one that doesn't even make the distinction between the movie (fantasy) and shadows on the wall (reality) - since ultimately this does lead us back to essentialism!

I agree.

Can we not enjoy a work of art without always turning it into some tiresome intellectual puzzle to be picked apart? Have we lost to ability to build work organically rather than cobble together pre-existing forms? Does being constantly self-aware of one's postmodernism really get us very far in creating new, vital work? Ultimately, this nit-picky self-consciousness is terribly confining; it's also comes off as being a bit dogmatic, narcissistic and linear. It may be 'correct' but it's a bit tired, and not very satisfying on its own. Besides: do artists even have to be 'correct' in their thinking in order to make interesting work?

Polymodernism might be a more inclusive and constructive alternative: employing postmodernism as it is required, of course, but relaxing our grip on any one intellectual dogma, be it postmodern universalism or transmodernism or modernism. Call it what you want--I'm going dancing.

W

Wouldn't you agree that any artist who works under a severe intellectual straight-jacket tends to be a hack? The work usually looks (or sounds) pretentious, hackneyed, or worse, completely boring.

"Correct thinking" artists are usually pretty horrible. I agree with a comment

imomus made days ago about letting the "dark side of your personality run free" (or something like that) in order to make interesting work.

And I think academic writers will always be around to come and pick apart a work as an intellectual puzzle. That's what they do, no?

I agree up to a point, young squire. Strangely enough, those who place creative parameters upon themselves are usually very productive, since they provide an inner tension for their work; those who flail about with no parameters or allow parameters placed limits upon them are usually the hacks, because they are not really being guided by any kind of vision. Whether said vision is correct is beside the point.

With regards to letting the dark side of one's personality running free, what say we to this? http://www.wetterlinggallery.com/archive/nathalia/nathalia_main.htm

And the statement from the gallery, which sounds more like a rationale than a justification: http://www.wetterlinggallery.com/newsletter/newsletter.htm

I cannot speak for anyone else, but to actively kill a helpless, living thing for no better reason than for the sake of a petty intellectual curiosity is to my mind a morally bankrupt thing to do. Are we then condoning shooting or torturing other artists as a comment upon their work?

I am suspicious of the absolutist notion that 'there are no moral limits in art' or that 'art is independent of conventional morality'. This may very well be so in theory, but not in practice: sacred cows, cant and social taboos seem to be rife in ArtWorld, as they are in all human endeavors.

W

Young squire? I'm flattered, sir, but I'm obviously a swain, and since I'm out of my adolescence, not a young one.

Creative parameters are usually a great way to be productive, but I was thinking about making art within the confines of a strict ideology. I can think of very few artists who worked well under strict ideological confines (artistic confines are, I think, significantly different from artistic confines).

And plenty of art is morally bankrupt, although most of it doesn't necessitate the harming of living creatures. I heard about her show awhile ago and think most of it is a publicity stunt - my guess is that she gets the corpses from a shelter but hypes up the fact that they're real dead animals.

I don't think there is any inherent morality in art, but there is obviously morality and norms in the larger culture. That's precisely what the congressional art fights of the 90s were about - was the glorification of fisting (the infamous Mapplethorpe pic (http://images.google.com/images?q=mapplethorpe&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&sa=N&tab=wi)) or the denigration of Christianity (Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" (http://images.google.com/images?q=andres%20serrano&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&sa=N&tab=wi)) art? And if it is art, should it supported publicly?

de Sade still freaks me out. Did he make art? I think the answer is unquestionably yes. Is he sick twisted bastard? Yes.

Should that woman have killed the poor bunnies to make her art? I doubt that she did, but my morality tells me no. Is her stuff beautiful? Yes, but in a conventional modernist way.

Perhaps we might agree that the works in question may be art, but there comes a point where the ethical/moral implications of a work overwhelms the artistsic considerations, which undermines the overall effect or complexity.

That said, cheap outrage has never been sufficient to qualify the worth of an artwork, despite publicity. It always comes off as a short cut to me: when one is out of ideas, one transgresses. It's just too easy.

W

Agreed. On all points.

Formal outrage is slightly different, perhaps. I mean, Caravaggio was pretty shocking, as was Picasso (and "Les Demoiselles" is still bordering that ugly/amazing line).

I still don't know if Chris Burden was making art when he had himself shot. Or even if Duchamp was right when he said "artists of the future will simply point."

And what about Vanessa Beecroft? She's making tableau vivants. Is that art? It is shocking. Shocking in a way that's completely different, for me, from the dead-bunny lady. It's creepy to stare at naked models standing in formation, staring straight ahead. Am I supposed to pretend that their statues? Why can't they look at anyone? Damn... I'm really uncomfortable. I wish they would move. Did that one just shift her weight?

What about Rirkrit Tiravanija, who makes dinner in the gallery and calls it art? It's a lot of fun. The food is good. But is it art?

Personally, I like people who make objects more then performance artists... but... Damn. I was just going to say "I agree" but now I have all these qualifiers. I still agree.

As far as I'm concerned, anything goes as long as nothing that wants to get hurt, does get hurt: amputate your own leg and carve scrimshaw onto your femur if you like, but when going down such avenues, one always runs the risk of the act itself overshadowing the art, the concept.

It seems that drawing up a hypothetical plan for such a thing is more akin to art than the actual act of doing it. Christo's schematics are art, but the bombastic implementation of those schematics often seems more like an antic. I could be completely wrong, of course, but that's my initial impression. We all employ our powers of reason to bolster our prefernces and prejudices, I suppose.

W

happy halloween to mrs. nathalia e.

And I do ineed think that is the job of academics--but to make criticism equal to the work it critiques seems a bit presumptuous.

I was a bit struck at that "dark side of your personality run free" line of Momus's, because it smacked of the kind of dramatic romanticism that he's always railing against...

"Can we not enjoy a work of art without always turning it into some tiresome intellectual puzzle to be picked apart? Have we lost to ability to build work organically rather than cobble together pre-existing forms?"

The question of whether or not it is any different after all is a fascinating one to me. Spenser wrote "Faerie Queene" in a retro Chaucerian English so he could access a courtly beauty which he felt was not available to the modern world...kind of the equivalent of recording on analog tape. It was immensely popular and widely copied (even Byron covered Spenser covering Chaucer when he was inventing the "new" Romantic hero in the beginning of Childe Harold--talk about your convoluted poses). Ben Johnson, however, was quite dismissive of the whole idea--not on essentialist grounds, but on the grounds that archaisms were frowned upon as inelegant by classical stylists. The problem, to me, is actually in the whole idea of "organic" vs. "artificial". Even arch-romantics like Coleridge argued vehemently in favor of an arificial, elevated language, and called Wordsworth on it when he claimed he was writing in the common tongue. "Artifice" is essential to art. Nothing is organic, or ever was, and everyone else throughout history has known it. It's strange to me how an intellectual culture so obsessed with the idea of artifice is also so haunted by its imaginary corollary. Momus' comments were directed, not toward Devandra's retro modernism, but toward his reviewer, who was making paradoxical claims about genuine-ness.

B.

Sir:

You're absolutely right to take me to task on that sentence, as it was a sloppy way to frame the distinction between the borrowing, stealing and appropriating that is the ancient hallmark of all art and the hyper-self-consciousness of recent years that has become an inhibiting factor for many in the arts. I don't have an issue with postmodernism as such; I just feel that art must have an open-ended system in order to grow and flourish. Likewise, I adore artifice, but I prefer using it outside of a hall-of-mirrors environment.

I salute your learned reply.

W

...I prefer using it outside of a hall-of-mirrors environment...

...said the twit writing in the blog.

Someone please slap me.

W

I heard him the first time this weekend, and I honestly thought it was unreleased Tyrannosaurus Rex. I can't decide if this is good or bad; I like Ty.Rex, but I think there's about as much of it as there needs to be.

(accidental) pomo irony

I read "pomo" as "porno" and this resulted in unfortunate mental images.

Try the later stuff. The early stuff does sound like rejects from Stars in Their Hair, Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, but I think he's starting to develop his own unique voice. I really like the new album. If you're seriously into the late 60s/early 70s English folk-thing, you'll probably spend most of your time picking out his influences. However, I still like it.

Seems to have touched a nerve with you, that article, no?
Cheers,
John Soutar

but besides all of that, i appreciate your whistleblowing. with all due respect, the pizza delivery dude is waiting at the door, and his name is post-modernism.

do you ever read urbanhonking.com/greatestband?

God, Nick, I could kiss you. I've been barking this exact thing at any who will listen for months, and it falls on deaf ears.

Gira's words make me think of the little tag in the liner notes for Queen's A Night at the Opera, what was it, "No synthesizers, please!", or some similar twee nonsense. This pompous pursuit of some sort of musical purity gets on my nerves to no end. It's sound on recording media; how can it be pure or impure?

Thanks, guys, I haven't laughed that hard in ages. I mean that as sincerely as an ironic postmodernist is able.

Ironically (to which power I've lost count), isn't Gira in sort of a Lomax position as regards Banhart's Leadbelly?

I once had a dream in which Lenny Kravitz was showing me around his house / home studio. We went through room after room of grotesque vintage equipment and sunburst guitars, and finally went down to a crypt protected by a heavy door. "This is where the real work happens," he said, and led me into the room that held his kitted up Mac-based ProTools workstation. He brought his finger to his lips, "shhh!" he said, and laughed a stoned laugh. When I left, he gave me a three-string bass as a present.

Momus,
Is Elliott Smith's final album postmodern?

Fuck this pussy's bullshit. After reading this piece, I want to see this dumb aesthete's face on footprint of an eighteen-wheeler's tire. I call this shit Pussy Rock. The musician's are pussy, but ironically, they get pussy for their pussy rock. Bunch of schlock rock. -- swensonic

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Devendra Banhart is 'the real thing'... and I'm lovin' it!

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Interesting...

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Postmodern Universalism

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Re: Postmodern Universalism

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Lenny Kravitz, crypto-technologist.

Postmodern?

Fuck this Shit