(1) If you’ve listened to the Mountain Goats, you’ve probably had your head knocked by the hugely good words that John Darnielle writes. Seriously, if he wasn’t a complete word wizard that band would be like the sad Barenaked Ladies. He’s also good at blogging, and right now at his music blog Last Plane to Jakarta he’s working on a project called Thirty Poems About My Favorite Black Metal Band, which is exactly what it says it is. The band is Drastus, and they’re French.
(2) Nick Sylvester has wrung two hella good posts out of Young Jeezy‘s new album The Inspiration. So far. Maybe there will be more.
What do these two have to do with each other, or with anything else? Well, I kind of like the kind of obsession they’re showing. Like, what if patience was the new hotness, and then everyone cool suddenly started ignoring all the chatter–the blogs and the worrying that all of the dudes at the rock club are going to harshly judge your shirt–and just totally got into listening to records? The Internet has cranked the volume and rate of things that you must hear, judge, file, and get over to such an extreme that obsessive indie dorks now actually have to forget more music in a year than they even heard in a whole year before MySpace happened. I would wager that there are entire extinct subspecies of German techno that no one on earth remembers happening.
So watching these guys work one chunk of music over like that is kinda rad. It’s like the music writing equivalent of like the Slow Food movement. It would be interesting to see this turn into a trend. (Possible downside: Pitchfork writers and would-be Pitchfork writers crank out Pynchon-length exegeses and the resulting pile of words that make no sense next to one another crashes the Internet.)
Of course, while I think those Slow Food types are cool for what they do, I seriously eat at Subway like three times a week. That veggie burger is good, and I really don’t know what I’d do if Diplo ever remixed something without me hearing about it.