MTV MUSIC VIDEO AWARDS.

8:03. JLo is here! But when she wears a dress this conservative to an awards show, what's the point?

8:05. So she just said nothing of note. That whole intro served only to get cheap pops from the Miami crowd, and introduce an nondescript Usher performance that seems to exist solely to get his abs some air time ...

8:07 ... UNTIL L'IL JON SHOWS UP! With Ludacris in tow, obviously. Hey, wasn't Usher on this record too? I forgot.

8:14 Will Smith reminds us that we're in Miami another 593 times and introduces Shaq. As long as he doesn't rap this is actually a nice surprise for this lively crowd. And Bill Simmons was right ... this is ANGRY Shaq, he looks like he's dropped loads of weight and is in fantastic shape, all ready to wreak vengeance on the Lakers for giving up on him.

8:17 Best Pop Vid (nominees are all women!) -- won by No Doubt (essentially one woman + her bitches) for their run-through-the-motions cover of "It's My Life". What's that, Nellee Hooper produced the song? And props to Gwen for acknowledging Talk Talk!! First time TT have been mentioned on MTV in, EVER?!? And can you believe it, we just had multiple white people on stage at the MVA's and none of them tried to make smooth and witty comments to the crowd. And none of them embarassed themselves in any way. So we're way ahead of last year's pace.

8:25. Hilary Duff cannot act convincingly -- can't even convince me for a second that her co-presenter isn't there. So she can't sing, act, or present awards. I'd still hit it, though.

8:27. 50Cent's "P.I.M.P." is nominated for Rap Video? Why is that this year? He even performed the song LAST year. Anyhow, Jay-Z wins for "99 Problems", and he looks amazing in a white suit and hat.

8:29. I love how mainstream rock is so immaterial these days that they (Jet/Hoobastank/band whose name I've already forgotten, oh yeah, Yellowcard) get the Medley Performance Treatment, a la bluegrass at the Grammys a couple of years ago. Actually, that was more of a "let's get this passing fad out of the way in one go". More infamous was the "194 'Urban' artists in seven minutes" segment at the Junos a few years ago, possibly the most ass-hatted programming choice at an awards show, ever. If you're going to make it so obvious that you don't care about these artists, then why bother?
It occurs to me that if I were a fan of one of these bands, and had tuned in specifically to see them, then I'd feel pretty ripped off right about now. Then it occurs to me that I don't give a damn about fans of these bands.

8:40. Who is this Matt Babel blonky on MM? Why is this Barry Bonds lookalike pimping upcoming MTV-esque programming on MM and CITV-TV? Why me?

8:42. Jon Stewart ends the Cool MVA Segments By White People Who Are Jewish streak that was carried over from last year. Everything he says (via tape) seems to go over the heads of the crowd.

8:46. Beyonce wins in the Catfight category against Britney, Xtina, etc.

8:47. Mark Anthony's emo-laden introduction for Kanye West is thankfully not *too* handwringing (compare to, say, Michael Stipe's interminable intro for the White Stripes at last year's MTV Europe Awards). And now here's Kanye to help save the show, just like he did at the MMVA's a few months ago ...

8:48 ... that is, until he's joined by a blimp, I mean, Chaka Khan who is HORRIBLY out of tune. We're talking American Idol audition bloopers here.

8:49. You know what's missing from this show? Humour. There's not a single solitary bit of it, which is directly traceable to the lack of a host. Like I said last year, Chris Rock needs host this, and every other major awards show on a permanent basis.

9:00. Xtina is out to present, dressed as Madonna in "Dick Tracy". And there's no awards envelope -- the winner is revealed by members of the pit lifting placards above their heads to reveal a picture of Usher. Who should never say the word "yeah!" ever again. Leave that to the other guys in your video, please.

9:04. The Kerry daughters are here, and are getting BOOED LIKE NUTS. The Bush Twins join us via tape from New York, and are met with a much warmer response. The message from both = vote for our dad, but make sure you do get involved, educate yourself, and vote. Good sentiments, but the crowd turned viciously on everything.

9:10. Alicia Keys wins ... something. I'm still in shock from the whole First Daughters thing and wasn't paying attention.

9:17 And it's Dave Chapelle to finally spice up the show by making fun of Cubans and Justin Timberlake. Then it's Petey Pablo, the Eastside Boyz, the Ying Yang twins, and the ubiquitous L'il Jon to wake up the subdued crowd. L'il Jon is playing 50 Cent's role from last year, in that he seems to be all over this show, looking like the breakout star that nobody can stop talking about.

9:26. Thank you Owen Wilson, I was forgetting what an uncool and unfunny white guy sounded like.

9:28. Jet win for Best Rock Video and are met with a nearly muted response. Yep, MTV 2004 doesn't care about rock, chart pop 2004 mainly neglects rock, and a Miami crowd certainly isn't one to give rock music the time of day.

9:34. "New Series" on CITY-TV = "Sex and the City". OK, it's an awesome show, but "new series"? Sure, they may be a season beyond on "America's Next Top Model" (which has already aired on Life Network), but at least that's a show still in production. And this Babel guy needs to put these "can Samantha stay on her feet" comments to rest -- she's a slut on the show, OK, we get it.

9:36. Hello, Olson twins, and Mary-Kate is still looking thin, easily as thin as she looked (in public, anyhow) before getting hospitalized. It's good that she's out and about, though. I guess.

9:40 Jessica Simpson gives an impassioned, determined performance. Wow, that was a nice surprise.

9:42. New category for best Video Game Soundtrack. Cool! You know what's not cool? Good Charlotte trying to be funny. On second thought, that it cool, because I get to laugh at them, which is fun.

9:47. More Jon Stewart and Al Sharpton "vote for Viewers Choice" total non-funniness.

9:53 This Jimmy Fallon vs Gary the Announcer fite has gone on for so long that's it's passed through "annoying" and travelled fully around the boundaries of good taste and is back to being funny.

9:54. Best Hip Hop video ... hold on, first we have to wait for Wayne Coyne to make his way over the crowd in a plastic ball (the same one he's been using at gigs, I suppose). Why are they playing the Strokes to introduce him? Play his band's music! Anyway, Wayne arrives with the Hey Ya envelope, and OutKast humbly accept the award (Andre and Big Boi together!).

10:00. Xtina and Nelly? She's a jazz and blues artist? Since when? Since this show started? What kind of an introductioni was that?
However, the performance is actually quite good! Nelly and Xtina have great chemistry, and the song has more funk than three-month old eggs (largely thanks to the "Superfly" bassline). And it's better than Maddy's "Dick Tracy" phase, because Xtina is ten times the singer Maddy was. And ten times hotter. Whose album is this appearing on?

10:10 I just noticed Diddy's mohawk. Huh? Who told him THAT would look good? He and Ma$e deliver another "get out and vote" message, although in truth, Ma$e was too busy yelling "welcome BACK!!" to really deliver any sort of coherent message.

10:13 Best Dance Video ( = indistinguishable from all the other categories judging by the nominees, gotta love the nonsensical MTV awards categories) goes, deservedly, to the biggest breakout stars of the year, Usher + crew for "Yeah". I must mention that the diamond goblet L'il Jon's been carrying to the stage all night is just about the coolest thing ever.

10:18. Alicia Keys is apparently this generation's Marvin Gaye. I guess Great Soul Singer = singing ballads while playing piano at the same time. Geez, even Axl Rose used to do that. But all gets forgiven when STEVIE WONDER appears to sing "Higher Ground"! At times like this, it's easy to forget that he hasn't recorded anything listenable in twenty-five years.
And just as quickly as it peaked, we fall from the apex as Lenny Kravitz gets to sing a verse. Too many cooks, etc.

10:30 I can't look at Paris Hilton without thinking of that Fashion Polizei skit from Ali G. I'd still hit it, though. Duh.

10:31. No Doubt win again. For Best Group Video. Next.

10:34. After some more advertisements for Tony Hawk Inc., Maroon 5 win for Best New Artist Video (or something to that effect). And they're not there? Come on, this isn't the MMVA's! Too bad, I actually don't mind this song, but at least we get spared from watching the band embarrass themselves by trying to give a funny acceptance speech, since they seem to be the sort of band that would attempt such a thing.

10:43. Interesting how the sasquatch gets more camera time than the Ray Charles tribute.

10:47. The Yellowcard guy is giving a serious acceptance speech? This ain't the Oscars, buddy.

10:49. The Polyphonic Spree are a band I've heard lots about but never actually heard. Verdict : they're the Flaming Lips redux. And they're going for the Acid Trip feel, seriously, if Brian Wilson was watching then he's already mumbling on the phone to his confused manager about altering the stage show for the "Smile" tours. Or maybe they really were mashed, the show is in Miami, after all. Anyhow, I needed that because the show was boring me to pieces for the last little bit.

11:00. What is this, a retirement ceremony for Jay-Z? This is ridiculous. I'm losing the will to type. I mean, if you want to honour Jay-Z, then just do it (even though nobody thinks he's really retiring). And if you want to have fun with him, just do it. This accomplished neither of those things.

11:04. Now it's Olympic bling time (JoJo, or whoever you are, never say that word again, I'm begging you) with swimming, gymnastics and volleyball champs. I knew that once you put Carly Patterson in a regular outfit then she'd look highly shaggable. Pardon the off-putting comment about underage girls, I am losing the will to go on because this is the longest show ever. Linkin Park win for Viewers Choice, and I really don't care.

11:11. Video of the Year. Finally. OutKast win. Of course.

11:15. Even John Mellencamp gets to come out to his own music. And Wayne Coyne doesn't. Anyway, it's Andre 3000 lip-synching ... is he really playing guitar or is he faking that too?

11:16. When they're projecting the American flag all over the arena and making people in the audience hold signs with the names of the states and messages like "I WILL VOTE", then things have gone too far. They're hitting us with a sledgehammer here. And everyone knows if you want a kid to do something then all you have to do is tell them a billion times and they will surely do it.

11:20. There are worse things than signing off an awards show with "Hey Ya!" (for the millionth time, ha, maybe even Andre is getting bored with it) but if I hadn't been lulled into a comatose state by the sheer length of this show. And a month from now I doubt I'll remember anything that didn't involve L'il Jon.

Now I'm going to do something, anything else that will get me the hell away from my TV.

I normally wouldn't "double post" like this, but I liked the stuff I wrote on these threads. Of course, I'm a sucker for any "Best of ..." list, so I'm eating this stuff up.

ILM Top 100 Tracks 2000-2004
No. 51
Artist: M83
Title: RUN INTO FLOWERS
(Barry blurbs about "Run Into Flowers", sort of)
I'm trying to give Daft Punk another chance, I really am. So much luv and high hopes are surrounding them. But first, I was listening to "Dead Cities ... " as the sun went down. I don't know where else to turn when I want to deafen myself with a choir of synths. It's got to be either this or the instrumental version of "The Perfect Kiss". In the meantime, "Run Into Flowers" got played twice, the second time twice as loud as the first. Aspiring trance producers can learn a lot from the mid-song break here. It rarely fails to get me to my feet, air guitaring (to a synth) and cheering.
Then I gave "Discovery" a spin while watching the Olympics and putting off cooking dinner. Suddenly, the rot of the day sat in as the apartment became darkened due to the lack of sun. And I was reminded about little I've actually done today in comparison with what I intended to do. So I'm done with *these* Frenchmen now, I'm returning to the others.
So now "Run Into Flowers" is deafening the neighbours again. I think I'll play the break twice this time.

ILM Top 100 Albums 2000-2004
No. 44
Artist: GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR
Title: LIFT YOUR SKINNY FISTS LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN
The debut was good. But it wasn't, um ... big enough. It was gloomy, cinematic, and pretentious (duh). One year later, they returned with 641 new members and an ep that sounded like the end of the world. Certainly the only piece of pre-millenium tension worth listening to. Gotta go with the biblical script when you need to make your apocolyptic point.
Then came this album, which has it all. Tantalising, extended intros blasting into screeching strings playing "Amazing Grace" soundalikes, careening into caustic drones and twinkly ambience. And that's just the first track!
That's their pre-9/11 album. Afterward, the focus turned toward proving that Lockheed Martin are destroying the world. Listening to crazy old men ranting about the golden days of Coney Island is somehow far more harmless, and considerably more poignant.

No.43
Artist: LOW
Title: THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE
Low were comfortably entrenched in their slow-and-quiet blueprint, and could have continued to duplicate it indefinitely without much protest from a majority of their fan base. They dip into whimisical pop ("Sunflower") and grim, sinister dirges ("Whitetail") but those styles turned out far better on the follow-up album, "Trust". But here, the less they do, the finer they sound. "Lazer Beam" is little more than four repeated twangs of a guitar and Mimi Rogers' haunting vocals. The other 90% of the song is blackened empty space. Overtop of drawling, pleading vocals, "Closer"'s lurching rhythms surge forward again and again, barely moving forward despite the greatest possible effort. And the sweet harmonies of album closer "In Metal" linger on the brain long after the CD stops spinning. A fine cap to an album that achieves maximalism through minimalism so very well.

No. 37
Artist: PRIMAL SCREAM
Title: XTRMNTR
XTRMNTR is angry as hell and noisy as a plane taking off. Sometimes it's a techno album, sometimes it's a guitar album, sometimes it's a hip-hop album with swearing and screaming on top. Sometimes it's a New Order album (with Barney Sumner on guitar for authenticity), sometimes it's an MBV album (with Kevin Shields on guitar for authenticity), and sometimes it's a David Holmes soundtrack album (with movie samples and er, David Holmes twiddling the knobs for authenticity). What more could you possibly want in an album???

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All of these are more than deserving of their positions except for the Low album, which may not have finished that high on my own personal list (but was ranked #8 on my ballot since, uh, I wasn't familiar with much on the ballot other than the indie rock). I really would have liked to see "Run Into Flowers" higher, because I believe it's a truly original and uplifting single. The Godspeed album is top ten, easy, if the list were entirely my own (#3 on my ballot), and I would have expected some resistance to such a high ranking from that polarizing band, but it didn't happen. In contrast, I certainly wasn't prepared for the tempest in a teapot in the wake of PRML SCRM. Of course I stand by my #1 ranking and laugh in the face of those who find greater excitement from relative dullards such as DFT PNK and RDHD.

One of the things that makes "Swastika Eyes" so great is that unlike other well-received IDM/electronic bands *coughdaftpunkcough* it's not a watered down wimpy approximation of house and/or techno -- rather, it stands up to any of the hardest and finest house or techno that many DJ's would/should be proud to spin.

Berlin Music = forever be associated in my mind with the city of Berlin.

Teyl Eins. Cocteau Twins -- Twinlights ep. Discussed in detail last November. Berlin-music-cocteautwinlights are the first thing that come to mind in any word association game, easy.
Bardo Pond -- On the Ellipse. Spending hours in the lab around people most of the day only intensifies the craving for some alone time. I started sacrificing a bit of sleep for a dollop of serenity. I would stay up a bit longer when I returned home at night and would listen to music in the dark. It is a very effective sanity-preserving exercise. When things get busier then this is not possible because only an idiot would sacrifice any of the scant hours of sleep he has allocated. Fortunately, you can only work so much until a threshold is reached and you have to start with shift work in order to obtain both work and sleep for everyone involved in the project. Success! -- you start walking to and from work with only a discman for company, and you exceedingly rely on those few quiet, relaxing minutes to start and end your day (no matter what hour it is according to the sun).
For the early mornings and late nights alone, this album was the accompaniment.

Teyl Zwei. Cocteau Twins -- Twinlights ep. Yeah.
Plastikman -- Closer. Long train rides, silently gliding past tranquil run-down neighbourhoods, together with this album.

Teyl Drei. Galaxie 500 -- Today. The soundtrack for many sleepy days and nights, and there'd be times that I'd have it on repeat (or sometimes just one or two tracks from it) in a fruitless attempt to purge those tunes from my head.

Teyl Vier. Magnetic Fields -- 69 Love Songs (particularly vol. 1). Almost as good as actual love.
The Cure -- Disintegration. The anger and disappointment of missing their Toronto Curiosa stop were washed away (in small part) by hearing parts of this album nearly every day on the way to and from work (events which usually took place on different days of the week).

Staying up all night and listening to Labradford in the morning as the sun shines through a row of windows is a beautiful and tranquil feeling. In this case it was a live gig from the Fixed:Context era, which suits the early morning perfectly with the way they both hang in the air in suspended animation and pass the time impeceptibly.

Bowery Electric's "Lushlife" is almost a great album. I can't even call it a Verve Release, because there's not enough excellent material on it to warrant that label. But the intended results -- or at least, what I will assume they were trying to record -- are genius, yet overall, the album suffers from average execution at best.

In 1997, BE made "Beat", which is one of the many albums that was hailed as "what MBV might/should have recorded as the follow-up to Loveless". And in fact, the magnificent singles more than live up to that sort of praise. With its lurching tempo and shimmery chord sequence, "Empty Words" borrows considerably from MBV's "Slow", but strips aside the latters' gruff demeanor. If "Slow" is a crude sexual fantasy, then "Empty Words" is a considerably more innocent daydream on a humid day. "Fear of Flying" foreshadows what was to come with "Lushlife", with its looped drum break over another huge two-chord epiphany. I'm deliberately avoiding using all the tired cliched descriptions of hazy swirling wall of sound guitar gauze noise, but believe me, they ALL apply here. And they're more appropriate here than in 99% of the existing cases.

But despite all that, "Beat" isn't really a guitar album. It's an ambient drone album. Much of it is beatless (pardon the pun), and the parts that aren't have the (looped) percussion far back in the mix. If there's a touchstone for what was to come on "Lushlife", it's the title-track, with crackly hip-hop beat, this and chunky bassline, breathy, monotone vocals. and almost no guitar effects to speak of. It's also the opening track, and since little else on the album sounds like this, it comes off as a disjointed overture before the "real" album hits.

"Lushlife" sought to expand this overture into a full-blown album. It would be creeped-out and claustrophobic, something like cLOUDDEAD but insert Martha Schwendener's soft vocals instead of whatever they do that passes for rapping. Imagine basslines which completely swamp the mix and threaten to explode your headphones. They'd construct a wall of sound out of rhythms, dispense with guitar almost completely, and let the singing purr you to sleep. And the nighttime cityscape on the cover is the perfect prelude for all of this -- brooding, foreboding, and luminescent.

What happened? The beats feel too well-worn, too familiar, and too basic. Sure, the Funky Drummer Break and the Paid in Full Break are classics, but they've been used so many times that the excitement of hearing them is distressingly low. They are almost boring these days. "Floating World" and "Lushlife" are massive enough, but several other tracks offer interchangeable and unmemorable rhythms that ought to have catalogue numbers called Generic Hip Hop Beat #14A on a sample CD. The vocals do sound lovely, but are mainly drab and monotone. Sure, the opener of "Beat" featured this sort of singing, but that was only one track, not most of an album's worth. Even after several listens, I can recall almost no vocal melodies from this album. The scarcity of guitar is actually immaterial, but its absence does require something to fill that space -- I want a thundering and original beat quaking over shuddering synths, not just hip hop beats used for an indie hipness factor.

What went right? As I mentioned, the opening two tracks largely fulfilled their ambitions. "Freedom Fighter" uses a truly rocking break reminiscent of "Straight Outta Compton" together with a forceful and doom-laden vocal that recalls the more blistering moments of Curve's album "Cuckoo". A great choice for the single. And the closing "Passages" is a powerful piece of music stripped to its threadbare essentials, using a beat (the "Paid In Full" break, yeah, I said it was well-worn before but I've always been a sucker for it and it fits shockingly well here), two eerie chords (note: Bowery Electric should use only two chords as much as possible), and Schwedener's ghostly delivery to create a wonderfully unsettling piece of dance music. If nothing else, they did succeed in making a solid last impression with this finish to the album.