Today during track I was having a conversation about music with a fellow trackmate.  She was describing how good the song “Pictures of You” by The Last Goodnight is.  I replied that I do enjoy pop, but that I find that particular song to be incredibly formulaic and, quite honestly, boooorrrriiinnng.  Her haughty response was that The Last Goodnight aren’t pop, they’re ‘alternative’.  (Apparently the iTunes store is the last word in this matter.)  I’ve heard the same label tacked on to every ‘punk’ band that has come along in the last 20 years, as well as everything else under the sun, and I’ve begun to believe that the word has lost all meaning.

In the past ‘alternative’ was applied to music culture that was ‘below the radar’ so to speak: bands that were either too brash, too wierd, or too complex for the general masses to appreciate.  But ever since Nirvana made the jump from lo-fi grunge to platinum chart sales the definition of ‘alternative’ has become a hipster ploy.  All of the sudden everyone wearing Hot Topic and some kind of attitude is ‘alternative.’

I personally do not advocate this bandwagoneering and abuse of culture for t-shirt sales.  The same thing happened with hippie culture in the early 70s.  Corporate bigwigs caught on to the hippie craze and began marketing hippie culture to the masses all over the world (I personally believe that screen-printing tie-dies is one of the bigger travesties capitalism has yet produced.  If you can’t make it, don’t friggin’ wear it!).  And do you know what the response to this was?  The last true flower children in San Francisco went to a cemetery and held a funeral for the hippie movement.  Hippie culture is legally deceased with a gravestone and a death certificate, which means that the people living on the streets along Telegraph aren’t veteran hippies, they’re just professionally homeless.  (The truth hurts, doesn’t it?)

You may claim that you can’t kill an idea, which is absolutely true.  But you can stop advocating it when it becomes perverted (just look at Communism).  That is exactly what the SF hippies did, and although I don’t particularly like hippie ideology, I have immense respect for their decision.  So I have a request.  Do the truly ‘alternative’ bands a favor and start calling Fall Out Boy what it is: pop-inflected angst mongering.

Oh, and if you want to hear a truly ‘alternative’ album, check out Mourner by Caina on iTunes.  For those who understand his message, you will revel in the incredible and awe-inspiring beauty of his work.  If you don’t understand, listening to the whole album will probably make you cry for days and then check into an insane asylum to prevent suicide.  The same goes for anything composed by Frank Zappa, who hid seminally genius musical arrangements beneath deranged lyrics about schizophrenic muffin men.  Now THAT is ‘alternative,’ my friends.

-Craig Dathe

We live in a very plastic, cloned world.  Everywhere one looks, it seems to be the same as something else, only milder and cheaper than the one before it.  The complaint of a plain-yogurt universe is not a new one - as far as I’m aware, it stretches back to Greco-Roman times and beyond - yet it still remains a complex problem.  It seems that on the surface everything is the same, but if you dig a little deeper nuance and detail arise.  But when you push through to the next layer, you realize that there still isn’t any difference and that fundamentally it remains just as cookie-cutter as it had appeared before.  This can be applied to anything: music, film, TV, sports, politics, relationships, etc.

Hey all, I have two indie outfits for you to check out this week, both of which are on iTunes and YouTube for you to explore.

The first is (deep breath) Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.  Not the most concise name, but definitely an entertaining and chill listen.  I liken them to the Shins, but in a more lo-fi rough-around-the-edges kind of way instead of the nicely polished sheen on the Shins’ material.  Their self-titled debut is a bouncy yet relaxing record, great for a pick-me-up on rainy days.

The other group I have for you this week is a San Francisco establishment called Deerhoof.  I just recently discovered this group, despite their quite prolific catalogue.  The group consists of four Caucasian individuals with a female Asian singer.  They play a very quirky form of noise rock (think Sonic Youth with a very squeaky singer) that incorporates alternative tunings and rhythms  to create a very captivating and surprisingly dense musical experience.  Their newest album, entitled Friend Opportunity, is supposedly their most accessible work yet, as they tend to be more experimental and dissonant on their earlier releases.  Alas, Friend Opportunity is the only one of their releases I can afford as of yet, but I am attending their upcoming Petaluma show in February, so more Deerhoof is definitely in my iminent future.

And for those of you who aren’t totally keen on what I’m describing in these blogs, I have added the Allmusic Database (aka allmusic.com) to the blogroll/links section.  This is my primary resource for finding new music: typing in one of your favorite bands will give you qualified reviews of their complete discography, all the genres they belong to, and all their similar artists and influences.  The entire site is linked, so one can easily find yourself crossing genres with a few clicks.  Almost every profile has audio clips, and the site covers every sect of music from rock to rap, country to electronica, jazz to pop.

Enjoy! - Craig Dathe

This past weekend was pretty wet.  It rained basically all three days of my post-finals vacation time, but I wasn’t upset.  I love rain.  But, with the rain and all, I spent all of my time inside; and since I didn’t have any homework, I did a lot of thinking and writing.  Cerebral stuff.  So I decided to watch a cerebral movie.  Through a reccomendation from a parent I picked up the film American Beauty directed by Sam Mendez (also the director of Road To Perdition, one of my favorite gang movies).

The movie features Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening as an emotionally detached married couple with a frustrated and directionless teenage daughter.  I will never be the one to give away the plot of a movie, but I can say that this film helps one to appreciate a new dimension of beauty in the world.  There are some scenes in this film that are simply incredible.  It definitely deserved the numerous Academy Awards it garnered.

The film came at a perfect time for me.  I already am one of those people who can sit in the woods somewhere and be fascinated by nature’s majesty (garnering me a sufficient amount of hippie accusations), but this film helped to open up a new perspective in me on the beauty of people and ideas and their connections to other people and ideas.  During the weekend I intended to finish a piece of short fiction that I have been working on, a horror short with a particularily disturbing theme.  I initially intended to make the ending just as disturbing, but after seeing American Beauty I devised a very dense and emotional finishing conversation that would inject beauty and complexity into what had previously been a very gruesome piece of gore-horror. 

Don’t you love it when an experience totally alters how you view reality?

 -Craig Dathe

This is to be the first of a weekly series of “What Craig Is Listening To Now” lists.  I currently own almost 16,000 songs from genres across the board, so here are a few songs and albums to check out if you haven’t already.  Please add on your reccommendations as comments if you’d like.

 The Mars Volta - Frances The Mute (Gettin’ psyched for that new album!!!)                      

Spoon - “I Turn My Camera On” (Faux-funk + indie = perfect)

The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Ego Trippin!!!)

Rush - Snakes and Arrows (Inventors of Math-Rock’s latest album)

Music Videos: Check ‘em out on YouTube

Radiohead - Paranoid Android (The most fascinating six minutes I’ve ever spent on the computer)

Enslaved - Path To Vanir (For horror fans!!!  Straight Outta Scandinavia)

- Craig Dathe

Hey Contra Costa, thanks for reading my first LIP blog.  I was thinking about what to write on, when my thoughts turned to the last time I blogged: my Myspace page.  That’s definitely an interesting story.

I started using Myspace, and later Facebook and AIM, at the beginning of the last school year.  To put it bluntly, by mid-terms last year I was totally hooked.  I had all my sites all organized, tons of “friends,” and lots of little pictures and widgets playing music and games and such.  I remember getting home, and then finding myself on IM or Myspace three hours later with absolutely no homework done.  I would actually get up in the middle of the night and feel the need to check my Facebook messages.  Sound familiar to anyone?  Anyhoo, my finals grades suffered.  A lot.  And so did my end-of-term grades.  By June of this past summer I decided it needed to end, so with much effort from my Myspace-addict mind, I deleted all of my Myspace, Facebook and IM info off of the internet.  Bu-bye.  No, I am not going to start preaching about Facebook usage and how it rots your brain.  Even I don’t want to hear that.  But I will tell you the pros and cons of my Facebook/Myspace and post-Facebook/Myspace experience.

During the ME (short for Myspace Era), about half my friends, on and off-line, were girls.  I also did a lot of dating.  But, after a certain point, my circle of friends never really continued expanding.  I tended to just hang out with the people I chatted with online.  What’s more, the three relationships I had in four months weren’t exactly healthy ones.  It’s very easy to progress a relationship online; I’m sure people have noticed this.  Anyone can flirt in an IM session.  But I ended up speed-chatting through each relationship on Myspace/Facebook.  Post-ME I haven’t had a single relationship.  A date or two, but no serious involvement.  But, I have also lost the feeling where I need to be in a relationship.  I’m perfectly fine with single-ship, something I haven’t felt since the beginning of the last school year.  However, I do have exponentially more friends now, in all kinds of different circles.  I don’t hang out with nearly as many girls, but that’s cool with me; a friend is a friend, no matter what gender.

My biggest worry when I got rid of all my chat-tools was that I’d be thrown out of the loop socially: I wouldn’t hear about parties and friends hanging out, that sort of thing.  Truth is, I do miss out on some things.  But those people are the ones who only communicate online.  If someone really wants me somewhere, there gonna pick up the phone and call me, or send me a text.  So far I have never been at home on a Friday night.  And post-Myspace, I have waaay more free time.  I’m working on some short fiction, I’m in two bands and I’ve become much more skilled on both guitar and bass.  The path to pure shreddage grows shorter every day.  Unfortunately, there are still plenty of online ventures to distract me.  Can’t exactly delete YouTube, can I?

-Craig Dathe