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February 27, 2007

Who speaks to the common listener?

Yesterday I sought gently to chide the young fellow in charge of booking musical talent at Morehead State University, hoping they might use their muscle to bring more interesting sounds to our little town. He turned the tables and asked who I thought they could afford who the freshmen would have heard of, and of course I had no ready answer. More to the point, he said they'd surveyed the students and THEY had no consensus, that twenty percent wanted one kind of music, twenty percent wanted another, and so on; and that within each of those segments there was no ready agreement.

My brother, responding to a previous entry here, wrote: "I haven't heard anything approaching music which could appeal to what Copland referred to as The Common Man in many years, and don't actually think any is being recorded right now. As we discussed when you were in town there is no contemporary rock station in Seattle right now, and I am forced to believe that there's damned little contemporary rock to play even if there were such a station. Can it be that the Offspring are the last American rock 'n' roll band? Say it ain't so!"

Leaving off his dubious taste (although he did bring both Waylon and AC/DC into my life, and Hoyt Axton, and Weather Report, so who am I -- the guy who still likes Styx, occasionally -- to throw stones?), Bryson has a point. Otherwise Tom Gillam and the Bottle Rockets and several dozen other worthies would at least be driving nicer cars right now.

So does Ed Ward, in a longer note I will condense slightly:

"There hasn't been a consensus artist in popular music since the Beatles broke up. Why do you think Beatle-stalgia is as widespread and pernicious as it is? Why, for that matter, do you think John Lennon was shot? 

"The nature of the way music was sold in the post-Beatle era caused the consensus to be shattered just as the number of consumers was growing. You didn't need to have a hit single any more -- and because you played heavy metal, you weren't going to get one anyway. But you could sell a buttload of records and make more money, potentially, than the Beatles ever did....

"So if you couldn't chase consensus, you could aim for dominating your niche. More and more people were buying records, and being number three in your niche meant fame, power, and money (at least for your manager). Under circumstances like that, who'd WANT consensus? 

"Furthermore, consensus was built on radio, singles, and the charts. Radio went into formats in the early '70s, the average singles buyer went from a 16-year-old with a 60% chance of being female and an 80% chance of being white to a near 100% chance of being a 14-year-old 'minority' female by 1980. Ten years later, singles were dust: it was all about radio play, which meant there couldn't be a consensus because you HAD to aim towards a format, which by definition excluded consensus. 

"I'm old enough to remember those legendary radio stations that'd play Frank Sinatra, the Penguins, Ricky Nelson, the Ventures, Bobby Rydell, the Frank Chacksfield Orchestra, Lonnie Donegan, Brenda Lee, Sam Cooke, Don Gibson, Nat 'King' Cole, the Impressions, and Dion in proportions that would show up, more or less, on the pop charts. That list, in fact, is a bit misleading, because there was way more crap in a given serving. But nobody stopped to think whether Sam Cooke, let alone Nat Cole, was'urban,' and I remember being amazed when I re-encountered Don Gibson as I was discovering country in the early '70s and realizing how many of the songs on his Greatest Hits I recognized from listening to the radio...in New York City. But stations like those were consensus builders. There WERE teenage black girls who hid their Ricky Nelson records!

"Where is the artist who can touch the market? Build me a model of someone like that. I myself can't even conceive of it. 

"Where is the song which will define this age? For whom? 

"Yeah, I hate that it's like that, too, but I do think the toothpaste is out of the tube on this one. Sorry."

I don't have standing (nor the years; not quite) to dispute Ed's reading of history, but even within the increasingly discrete markets of pop music there have been songs (and artists) which came to speak to broad if not entirely inclusive segments of our society. I think of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and Nirvana's "Teen Spirit" and the hoary "Stairway To Heaven" (whatever the hell that song is really about) and even "Behind Closed Doors." Past "Who Let The Dogs Out?" all I can guess as a defining song for the last few years might be something from Eminem, but...I don't pay attention there, and it didn't speak to me. Well, there's one more: Alan Jackson's "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)."

Speaking of toothpaste...I ran onto another troubling comment in the current Mother Jones as part of a one-page essay by Giles Slade called "iWaste": "As Steve Jobs said, 'If you...want the latest and greatest...you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year.'" This appears as part of a larger discussion about the batteries in iPods, which apparently lose half their strength after 13 months of use and are expensive to replace (and are not meant to be replaced by mere mortals at home). And which is part of a larger discussion about the marketing march of new technology, and when we consumers will quit buying in.

But let's just think about the implications of Mr. Jobs' remarks (beyond the iPod's potential as decorative landfill): If the iPod is the platform of choice for the youth of today, and we really expect them to buy a new one every year or so, how much of the potential market for music have we just priced out of the business entirely? And how idiotic is that? Is it any wonder they're not buying more music from iTunes or whomever?

I still have the second turntable I purchased, a pretty decent Thorens with a SME-III tonearm that I no longer remember quite how to align, but use so infrequently that I've agreed not to worry about whatver minor damage that does to my vinyl. And I still don't have an iPod, though I'm grateful to Mr. Slade for providing me with a new excuse. Are we now subordinating music to the gizmos which play it? Or did I just notice...

Posted by Grant at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 25, 2007

The digital dilemma (another tilt)

My thoughtful brother sent a clipping from the Seattle Times my way, a wire piece originating in USA Today that I was too inept to find online. The Times headlined it, "Forget hype, consumers just aren't buying their music online." Kevin Maney's article is built largely around Steve Jobs' February 6 essay, "Thoughts On Music," principally a call for an end to copy-protecting online music. Maney also summarizes a study by Forrester Research which found "that just 3.2 percent of all online households -- homes that have computers and Internet connections, a subset of all homes -- made an iTunes purchase over a one-year period.

"About 10 percent of buyers purchased just one track during the entire year. About one-quarter of buyers spent $5 or less for the year. Most iTunes users, Forrester says, own fewer than two CDs' worth of iTunes music."

Jobs notes that only 3 percent of the songs on your iPod are likely to have come from iTunes, and suggests that since the majors are selling 90 percent of their music in unprotected (CD) form, they should relent and allow all the downloading entrepreneurs to sell unprotected music. (Incidentally, this leaves the music publishers, who have no little say in copyright protection, entirely out of the equation, not to mention the licensing agencies: SESAC, BMI, and ASCAP. And the one thing almost everybody remains certain of in the music business is that the sure money, the lasting money, involves controlling copyrights.)

The question is, which of the following do these numbers reflect: (1) a failure of the iTunes copy-protected (DRM, they call it) model painstakingly worked out with the major labels; (2) don't believe the hype; (3) early adopters of new technology aren't drawn to major label output and favor more niche sites like eMusic and MySpace; (4) the iPod and Zune are really just the next walkman and people are listening to music they already own while working out or commuting; or (5) Is there simply an absence of music in the marketplace that will drive consumers to purchase it? Or (6) is music increasingly irrelevant in the youth market? Or (7) as more and more new music is availiable only online (since retail has already crumbled into elite specialty stores), will those numbers rise? Or (8), is Maney right that it's simply too difficult to download music now? I still haven't tried, and so I don't know; but, then, a number of sites do not support we poor Mac users...

This balances against an observation (and I can't remember who said it to me, else I'd footnote them) that 30% of a strong-selling new release sold online. That may mean physical CDs were shipped for all I know, but some of it was assuredly downloaded. If you want the new Patty Griffin record in Morehead, as several of my friends do, your only option is to buy it online in some form or fashion, especially as the Sam Goody store is newly empty. (Not that they would have carried it...)

Ed Ward wrote from Berlin to argue, in part, that we in the States suffer from a disease he calls "neophilia, the idea that it's great because it's new, and because it's new, it's taking over from what used to be there. Neophilia is (admittedly only) one reason people  tolerate MP3s after audio engineering spent most of the 20th century learning how to reproduce sound so that it sounded like, uh, sound instead of noise. Once the screen becomes just as much of a drag, and a part of the daily grind, as the car or the dishwasher, it can assume its rightful place next to the car and the dishwasher. Once people remember that the crap on those screens is only as reliable as the people who put it up there, and that gatekeeping has always been part of the human intellectual process, the concept of mediated information will reassert itself." (Ed nurtures a wonderfully acerbic blog at berlinbites.blogspot.com which I highly recommend.)

Scott LeGere, from Eclectone up in Minneapolis, offered this as part of a longer exchange: "I think our current value structure of recorded music is way off base. At first, I understood price parity between digital tracks and records, but now, I’m pulling for the 10 cent price point on iTunes. Let's place a more realistic value on an MP3 without artwork to re-value our physical product. And, lets bring back a focus on “craft” in artwork, the copy in sleeves, mutli-media content, etc."

I remain mindful of a germ of wisdom passed on by a Music Row executive which said that their marketing efforts were geared to attract serious buyers of country music, which, by their accounting, meant they purchased 3-5 CDs each year. Or some such number; memory is an imperfect aids.

Of course I've no notion how this all adds up, ends up, works out. The combination of big boxes (WalMart, Target, Best Buy) and small boxes (this computer we're communicating through) has devastated retail and is quickly eroding traditional distribution networks for music. If there isn't greater acceptance of the new digital models, the music industry is going to be in deep trouble.

But I still think it's about the music, dumb idealist that I remain. Right now I'm not persuaded that there is music being made which is broadly viewed as touching the American psyche with sufficient foce and durability so as to make us reach out and buy that music, however it's to be sold. Any number of niches are managing this neat trick, and we are fortunate to be able to write about much of that music in our pages. But where is the rising national act who speaks for our time, for our needs, for our hopes, for our dreams. Where is the artist who can touch the market, not just discrete market segments? Where is the song that will define this age?

Posted by Grant at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 22, 2007

Iraq: A small logic of hope

Our foreign policy is a car wreck, and it is increasingly difficult to watch the carnage. But it is OUR foreign policy, no small number of the dead and maimed are our responsibility (regardless what positions we have taken on the war over the years), and as a citizen of these United States one cannot simply drive on. Nor can we abandon the people left within lands invaded in the name of freedom and democracy. The newly vigorous Democratic opposition to the Iraq war -- or at least to its escalation, seems to provide both a fingerhold and a figleaf (or at least an electoral strategy), but it does not offer anything like a real policy alternative, nor does it suggest anything like a moral solution to the chaos we've stirred up.

One of the many problems is that, having begun with arguments resting on a series of false assumptions, it is difficult to know what logic (as if war were a logical enterprise, though I fear on its own terms it may be) to employ resolving the matter with the least damage possible.

So I should like to share the opening remarks of a journalist by the name of Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the March issue of one of my favorite small magazines, the Washington Monthly, beneath the headline "Apocalypse Not":

"The Bush administration famously based its argument for invading Iraq on best-case assumptions: that we would be greeted as liberators; that a capable democratic government would quickly emerge; that our military presence would be modest and temporary; and that Iraqi oil reserves would pay for everything. All these assumptions, of course, turned out to be wrong.

"Now, many of the same people who pushed for the invasion are arguing for escalating our military involvement on a worst-case assumption: that if America leaves quickly, the Apocalypse will follow....

"But if it was foolish to accept the best-case assumptions that led us to invade Iraq, it's also foolish not to question the worst-case assumptions that undergird arguments for staying. Is it possible that a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces will lead to a dramatic worsening of the situation? Of course it is, just as it's possible that maintaining or escalating troops there could fuel the unrest. But it's also worth considering the possibility that the worst may not happen: What if the doomsayers are wrong?"

The British, perhaps, are testing that assumption; or they've simply had enough.

I don't know that I accept all the details of Mr. Dreyfuss's argument, though clearly I don't know nearly enough to pick at them. (I am thinking, in particular, of my young Vietnamese friend, the daughter of two refugees from our last failed contest; and of my neighbor, who can never return to his native Iran, having once served the Shah.) But there is something appealing about its logic, about finding any kind of logic to this enterprise. Maybe it's appealing because any kind of resolution that extricates the U.S. is attractive. But mostly it's appealing because we have relentlessly been sold certainty in a most uncertain world.

And I hope, during the run-up to our next armed encounter, that those on both sides remember that part of the price of supporting our troops is questioning every single assumption which leads them into battle. "My country right or wrong" is a failed policy. Dissent is our job -- our moral, mortal obligation -- as patriots, as parents. Arguments and policies which cannot survive close examination should not survive.

Now playing: The first disc of Peggy Seeger's 70th birthday concert. She and Ewan MacColl were, as it happens, the first musicians I ever interviewed, at the Greyhound bus station in Seattle, about 1978. My mother should've been an engineer.

Incidentally...the balance of this issue of the Washington Monthly includes a timely report on the failure of the Bush Administration to safeguard the lives of coal miners, who are under increasing pressure as our energy dependence drives the price and need for coal skyward. It also includes a section discussing the Administration's failure to safeguard chemical plants because the industry wishes not to be regulated, wishes not to spend the money.

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February 18, 2007

A second tilt with the new impermanence

Among the arcane disputes which occupy modest amounts of editorial time is the matter of how typographically to identify television shows. Bear with me, for I think (this morning, anyhow) that this minor matter can suggest something about our changing relationship to media.

It may be helpful to understand that Peter and I have very different relationships to the cathode ray tube. My parents wouldn't let one in the house until I was in junior high, when mother relented and brought a 12-inch black and white home and, much later, caused it to be hooked up to cable so we could actually use it. This had nothing to do with the softening of her belief that there was nothing worth watching on TV (she still doesn't have one). Rather, it was her dawning recognition that when father and I drove to his colleague's house to watch football games, well, a certain amount of wine was consumed by the adults. (I remember, in particular, the legendary Oklahoma-Nebraska battles of the early 1970s, and a triple overtime NFL playoff game between, I think, Kansas City and Miami.) The colleague in question had his own vinyard and looked rather like Bacchus, and perhaps too much fun was being had before our winding drive home. Peter, I suspect, had a more conventional raising, which doubtless accounts for the fact that he has at least twice thanked "Gilligan's Island" in our pages.

(What this means as an adult is that I am unable to tune out a television when it's on in the room. What this meant as an adolescent was that I was so fascinated by the twelve-inch object, and by the proceedings, that I watched the entire Watergate hearings. That was also the summer I had an unpleasant interaction with the family chainsaw and couldn't bend my right leg, else I suspect I'd have been off playing soccer somewhere.)

Our dispute, in any event, has to do with whether television shows should be rendered, as above, in quotation marks, or, as Peter would prefer (and as I remain unable to do here because I still haven't downloaded Firefox) in italics. The way I was taught, films, plays, books, and album titles were italicized. TV shows, poems, and individual songs, were placed inside quotation marks. Peter argues, and let me apologize for approximating both the sense and force of his words, but he's off at the edge of the arctic circle just now, that TV shows should be italicized and the individual episodes, which now have titles, should be in quotation marks. (I note, sadly, that a number of daily newspapers now italicize song titles.)

Leaving aside, for the moment, the matter of what one might do with the nightly news or the "Tonight Show," neither of which have episodic titles (that I know of), I simply refuse to accept the possibility that a TV series merits the same consideration that a film (or a book) gets. Television, to my way of thinking, is a much more transitory and commercial art, whereas movies -- the ones one thinks of as film, at least -- can aspire to survive as more durable exemplars of a particularly difficult and elusive artform.

But as I contemplate our changing relationship to popular music, I am obliged to reckon the possibility that I am simply wrong about this. (I'm not, but I have to be open to the possibility, eh?)

Watching college kids meet each other at the family coffeeshop, I have been struck that their initial conversations, during which they seek to locate each other on some kind of spectrum of shared interests, do not focus on music. In my high school you could easily segment kids on the basis of what they listened to (or didn't). The guys with bondo muscle cars in the south parking lot, the ones who smoked and made out with a steady stream of wild and tawdry girls (the luck!), they listened to Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Now, in Seattle during the 1970s, we ALL listened to Led Zeppelin, but that's not my point. Those were hostile, macho, dangerous sounds. It was fighting music, on several levels, and my crowd steered clear (and listened to Jackson Browne). By college we sorted ourselves out by t-shirts, for those who listened to Duran Duran would surely not cavort with the Springsteen crowd, nor the B-52 fan, nor those few who had actually heard (instead of hearing of) the Sex Pistols or, say, Gary Numan.

No more, I suspect. Or at least much less. Now the conversation seems to revolve around television shows and DVDs. Nerd guys who play a lot of video games watch "The Simpsons." Political hipsters watch "The Daily Show." I don't know who watches all those reality things, but they seem to segment along some kind of social fissures, as well. A certain kind of outre affluence seems to attend the Showtime series (and maybe they're not all Showtime, I dunno) like "Six Feet Under" and "The Sopranos." Some of which even aspire to the subtlty and complexity of a film, or so it is argued. And don't even get me started on "Gray's Anatomy," which, at least, shows against the UFC bouts and so Susan and I can retreat to separate corners on Thurday night.

While it's true that musical careers can be made (or at least financed) by song placements on popular shows (if I get one more e-mailed press release touting a new band who have placed a song on "Scrubs," as if I should either watch or care...), it also seems to be the case that fans are loyal to the show, not to the artist. More importantly, the music is subordinate as a cultural signifier to the show on which it is played. And, down the line, the TV show is a more important cultural signifier than any popular music now seems to be.

Which raises the question: Why aren't they selling "Gray's Anatomy" T-shirts?

Maybe they are.

In any event, this all seems a far cry from the times in which I grew up, times in which music could (and had) sound the call to political change, in which the tribes we belonged to were much simpler, in which pop music occupied the space in public discussion now often taken by the latest episode of "Survivor" or whatever.

Downloading may not be killing the music industry; nor saving it. And popular music may simply have lost its hold on our culture. I am trying to think of the anthem which followed "Teen Spirit" and captured the mood of the times, but I cannot. Unless that Spice Girls song counts, and it doesn't, does it?

As always, feel free to e-mail reponses to grant at no depression dot net.

Posted by Grant at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 8, 2007

So many choices, so few choices (SXSW)

The fine folks at South by Southwest sent out their first press release announcing some of the many artists who will be playing during the music industry's spring break this coming March. We here at the ND factory are working diligently on our Friday party, about which we shall divulge more details when we have them. I already know that a number of the artists I was most anxious to see will not be attending: Crooked Still, Patty Griffin, Mavis Staples, Otis Taylor, Uncle Earl, to put a few in alphabetical order.

And so, as happens some years (I've gone every year since, I believe, 1994), I looked at the list with furrowed brow and wondered, "exactly who the heck ARE these people?" This can be what makes SXSW fun, but if one chooses poorly it can absolutely ruin the week, or it can drive me to a barbeque crawl that ignores music for days at a time, or it can lure me to seek refuge among the Belgians at the Gingerman. (And I'm not in training for that anymore, so the results are apt to be unpleasant.) Or I can just hole up in my hotel room and watch NCAA tourney action, which is a complete waste of a great city and good music.

So, just for sport, I'm going to clip and save the part of the SXSW press release listing scheduled musicians (with their caveat fully in mind that things change, constantly). And I'm going to solicit your suggestions. Pick an act that you think I should go out of my way to see. Not an act with which you work, I hasten to add, nor an artist with which you're romantically or genetically linked. I'm after music which touches you powerfully that you would drive cross-state to see if you could. E-mail grant at no depression dot net. Perhaps I'll post some suggestions at the bottom of this as they come in, or perhaps not. We'll see. Here's the press release:

South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Conference and Festival Announces Initial
Band List

Austin, Texas - February 8, 2007 - South by Southwest Music Conference and
Festival, the annual music industry gathering in Austin, Texas is thrilled
to announce a partial list of the artists scheduled to perform at the 21st
edition of the music festival taking place March 14 - 18, 2007 on over 60
stage in downtown Austin.

Over 7800 bands applied and over 1000 bands are scheduled to perform so far.
A sampling of the music festival line-up includes:
Aesop Rock (Brooklyn NY), Against Me! (Gainesville FL), Akimbo (Seattle WA),
Allison (Mexico D.F. MEXICO), An Albatross (Philladelphia PA), The Apples in
Stereo (Denver CO), Aqualung (South London UK), Architecture in Helsinki
(Melbourne AUSTRALIA), Austin TV (Mexico City MEXICO), The Automatic
(Cardiff UK), Kevin Ayers (London UK), Badly Drawn Boy (Manchester UK),
Balkan Beat Box (Tel Aviv ISRAEL), Bayside (Long Island NY), Beach House
(Baltimore MD), Beirut (Albuquerque NM), The Besnard Lakes (Montreal QC),
Andrew Bird (Chicago IL), The Bird and the Bee (Los Angeles CA), Martina
Topley Bird (London UK), Birdmonster (San Franciscio CA), Black Lips
(Atlanta GA), Bloc Party (London UK), Blonde Redhead (New York NY), The
Blood Arm (Los Angeles CA), Bonde do Role (Sao Paulo BRAZIL), The Bravery
(New York NY), Vashti Bunyan (Edinburgh UK), Tracy Byrd (Nashville TN),
Charalambides (Oakland CA), Child Abuse (San Francisco CA), Chingo Bling
(Houston TX), Chingon (Austin TX), The Cinematics (Glasgow UK), Citay (San
Francisco CA), Jill Cunniff (Brooklyn NY), DATAROCK (Bergen NORWAY),
Deerhunter (Atlanta GA), Delorentos (Dublin IRELAND), Dengue Fever (Los
Angeles CA), Errors (Glasgow UK), The Faint (Omaha NE), Ferraby Lionheart
(Los Angeles CA), Field Music (Sunderland UK), The Fratellis (Glasgow UK),
Fujiya & Miyagi (Brighton UK), Galactic (New Orleans LA), Get Cape. Wear
Cape. Fly (Southend UK), Ghostland Observatory (Austin TX), Girl Talk
(Pittsburgh PA), The Good, The Bad & The Queen (London UK), Emily Haines &
The Soft Skeleton (Toronto ON), Albert Hammond, Jr. (New York NY), Kate
Havnevik (Oslo NORWAY), The High Dials (Montreal QC), The Holloways (London
UK), Hoodoo Gurus (Sydney AUSTRALIA), The Horrors (London UK), Hot Club De
Paris (Liverpool UK),Benji Hughes (Charlotte NC), iLiKETRAiNS (Leeds UK), IV
Thieves (Nottingham UK), Jack O and The Tearjerkers (memphis TN), Jack's
Mannequin (Los Angeles CA), Georgie James (Washington DC), Jamie T (London
UK), Jandek (Houston TX), Joan as Police Woman (Brooklyn NY), Daniel
Johnston and the Nightmares (Waller TX), Junior Senior (Copenhagen DENMARK),
KENNA (Virginia Beach VA), Keith Killgo Jazz (Washington DC), Kings of Leon
(Nashville, TN), Kinski (Seattle WA), K'NAAN (Toronto ON), Tracy Lawrence
(Nashville TN), Les Claypool/Electric Apricot (Sebastopol CA), Les Savy Fav
(Brooklyn NY), Lethal Bizzle (London UK), Lily Allen (Hammersmith UK),
Little Barrie (London UK), Little Man Tate (Sheffield UK), The Little Ones
(Silverlake CA), LoneLady (Manchester UK), Lonely China Day (Beijing CHINA),
The Long Winters (Seattle WA), Charlie Louvin (Manchester TN), Barbara Lynn
(Beaumont TX), Magik Markers (Brooklyn NY), Malajube (Montreal QC), Mando
Diao (Borlänge SWEDEN), Maneja Beto (Austin TX), Jo Mango (Glasgow UK), Maps
& Atlases (Chicago IL), Willy Mason (Marthas Vineyard MA), Mastodon (Atlanta
GA), Matt & Kim (Brookyln NY), Nellie McKay (New York NY), Meat Puppets
(Austin TX), Metro Riots (London UK), Mexican Institute of Sound (MIS)
(Mexico City MEXICO), Mika (London UK), Mogwai (Glasgow UK), Money Mark (Los
Angeles CA), Money Waters (Dallas TX), Thurston Moore (Northampton MA),
James Morrison (London UK), The Mountain Goats (Chapel Hill NC), Muck and
the Mires (Boston MA), Alexi Murdoch (London UK), MuteMath (New Orleans LA),
MV/EE and The Bummer Road (Guilford VT), Johnette Napolitano (Joshua Tree
CA), The 1900s (Chicago IL), Paolo Nutini (Paisley UK), The Octopus Project
(Austin TX), Okkervil River (Austin TX), 120 Days (Kristiansund NORWAY),
Oppenheimer (Belfast IRELAND), Ozomatli (Los Angeles CA), The Panda Band
(Perth AUSTRALIA), Graham Parker (Boiceville NY), Peaches (Berlin GERMANY),
Pelican (Chicago IL), Elvis Perkins (Providence RI), Peter and the Wolf (TX)
(Austin TX), The Pipettes (Brighton UK), The Polyphonic Spree (Dallas, TX),
The Ponys (Chicago IL), Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (Waitsfield VT),
Priestess (Montreal QC), Prisonshake (St Louis MO), Psychedelic Horseshit
(Columbus OH), Quetzal (Los Angeles CA), Qui w/ David Yow (Los Angeles CA),
Ra Ra Riot (Syracuse NY), Razorlight (London UK), Jay Reatard (Memphis TN),
Reigning Sound (Asheville NC), Gruff Rhys (Cardiff UK), Rickie Lee Jones
(Chicago IL), Rodrigo y Gabriela (Terra Acida MEXICO), Sam the Sham (Memphis
TN), Satellite Party (Los Angeles CA), Secondhand Serenade (Menlo Park CA),
Ron Sexsmith (Toronto ON), Shout Out Out Out Out (Edmonton AB), The Shys
(Orange County CA), Sloan (Toronto ON), Alice Smith (Brooklyn NY), Soweto
Kinch (Birmingham UK), Spoon (Austin, TX), SSM (Detroit MI), The Stooges
(Detroit MI), The Sunshine Underground (Leeds UK), Jesse Sykes & The Sweet
Hearafter (Seattle WA), Tally Hall (Ann Arbor MI), This Moment In Black
History (Cleveland OH), Pam Tillis (Nashville TN), Times New Viking
(Columbus OH), Tiny Masters of Today (Brooklyn NY), Tokyo Police Club
(Newmarket ON), The Tragically Hip (Kingston ON), Turbonegro (Oslo NORWAY),
TURZI (Paris FRANCE), Under Byen (Århus DENMARK), Valient Thorr (Chapel Hill
NC), Chad VanGaalen (Calgary AB), The View (Dundee UK), Viva Voce (Portland
OR), The Walkmen (Washington DC), The Watson Twins (Los Angeles CA), Mary
Weiss (New York NY), Willowz (Los Angeles CA), Amy Winehouse (London UK),
WinterKids (Peaslake UK), The WOMBATS (Liverpool UK), Wooden Shjips (San
Francisco CA), The Young Knives (Oxford UK), Young Love (Austin TX), and
Youth Group (Australia AUSTRALIA). This list is subject to change. For a
more complete list, check out our website at www.sxsw.com.

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February 3, 2007

A foolish Super Bowl prediction

Though I started out, about 1975, to be a sports writer, I have managed mostly to avoid that fate. One of the consequences of starting this magazine eleven and a half years ago has been that our final production weekend almost inevitably runs up against the Super Bowl, and so I've not seen a full game in at least a decade. Depending on how things are going, I sometimes see part of a quarter here and there, and sometimes none of the game at all. Tomorrow I'll be lucky to see a play.

This year, what with business and a three-year-old who has not yet grasped how ineffably cool it would be to sit with daddy on the couch and watch large men run around on the television screen all afternoon, I've probably seen, oh, three games all the way through this season. Maybe not that many. Perhaps fragments of a dozen pro games, all told.

But, y'know, it's the national passtime, right?

Betting on the game, that is.

Well, I won't. The only thing more foolish than trying to guess how fast a horse is going to run is trying to guess how a bunch of athletes are going to perform.

But I have a prediction anyhow, just because tomorrow's is such an absurd match-up: One of the two or three anointed best quarterbacks in the league against inarguably the worst quarterback ever to play in the Super Bowl. And yet, it says here, the Bears win. (Or, at least, if I were a betting man, I'd take the Bears and the points.)

Peyton Manning still has to prove that he can win the big game. (Maybe I've just never gotten over seeing him run around Nashville one night with Kenny Chesney!) When it's right, the Bears defense is brutally effective, and they've had two weeks to prepare. Their special teams may be able to score just enough points. If I'm wrong, it's a blow-out for the Colts, but I still think a great defense trumps a great offense.

Or I just like underdogs.

But, hey, I could've been writing about Iraq...

Posted by Grant at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)