Flashfact: Slanted and Enchanted, 20 years later

Want to feel old for a second? Pavement's debut album turns 20 later this year; it's old enough to get drunk in Canada. Has it really been that long since Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs first popped up?

Slanted and Enchanted is one of my favorite albums (although I think Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is their best album) and it's the kind of music that will always have an audience: young college people looking for something different that isn't really all that different, really. For all their little tricks and tweaks, Pavement is a pretty normal-sounding band under all the distorted guitars.

And that's a good thing: in the decade or so since Pavement stopped recording new music, Malkmus' solo career has been more or less pretty good, but they're not quite as reckless or dangerous: just compare his solo track Dark Wave to Pavement's Perfume-V. Pavement's earlier stuff rocks a little harder and cares a little less. From my essay:

[Slanted and Enchanted] is alternately noisy, loud, obtuse and catchy. The guitars slink, they’re noisy and screechy. However, Pavement’s pop sensibilities are never far from the surface. There isn’t anything resembling a sing-along here, but by today’s standards, any one of these songs could be slipped into a radio playlist without anyone batting an eye. 

And when it comes to how Pavement sounds 20 years on, how much they sound like the mainstream is something to think about.

Click here to read the whole thing.

The Good Point: Durant and Westbrook...

I was thinking about the NBA's MVP race a few days ago and wondered: can your team be too good for you to be the MVP?

It depends on how you define MVP: does it go to the league's best overall player, or to the player who means the most to their team? If one player completely outclasses another statistically, can he still be less valuable?

I guess what I'm really asking is: will Russell Westbrook cost Kevin Durant a MVP award? From my article:

This season, the Oklahoma City Thunder may be the NBA’s best team. They’ve got the best record in the competitive Western Conference and are among the NBA’s best teams in advanced stats like SRS (third with 6.40) or offensive rating (second, with 108.6). This is happening largely thanks to two young stars: Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

Their game styles may not completely mesh, but they’re working well together this year. Only a few weeks ago, they combined for an amazing box score in a win over Denver.  Durant scored 51, Westbrook scored 40, plus nine assists, and Serge Ibaka picked up a triple double: 14 points, 11 blocks and 15 rebounds. Most teams would be lucky to have one player with this level of talent. That the Thunder have two is amazing.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Flashfact: The Secret History of Bootleg Records

I used to go this record store in Barrie, a grimy little place on Clapperton, that sold all kinds of stuff: used CDs, LPs, counterfeits, CD-R-sourced bootlegs, everything. It was a really great place, I bought some really interesting stuff - things I've never seen since, at least at a reasonable price - there: Rhino's old DIY series, the original LP of Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East, Rykodisc's reissues of David Bowie's catalogue, those IRS issues of REM's first few albums with bonus tracks. The guy in charge was cool, too: an aging hippie who kept a giant sword behind the counter to deal with shoplifters.

But it was the bootlegs that really got me: those weird little things with odd covers, questionable sound quality and stuff inside I never dreamed existed, let alone hearing. Finding out about these was to find a new world of music. For a teenage me, looking for a little more than just the official releases, this place was amazing.

That store's gone now and so is the old hippie. The industry's changed so much in the past decade it barely resembles what I barely knew growing up: we don't have a CD store here in town anymore and only ones within an hours drive are chains like HMV or Sunrise. Bootlegs are more or less gone now.

Which is partly why Clinton Heylin's book on the history of bootlegs - The Great White Wonders - was so interesting to me: it's a history of that shady industry, why it started, how it kept going even as the RIAA tried to crush it and what it did to the entire industry. From my review at Flashfact:

When Heylin is recounting the history of bootlegs, it makes for great reading: enterprising people sneaking intentionally-mislabelled tapes into mastering studios, running truckloads of illicit LPs around at night to shady figures and trying to keep one or two steps ahead of the FBI and RIAA. It’s a little like reading about Robin Hood, or at least someone who swindled a bunch of rich people and got away with it.

Click here to read the whole thing!

Flashfact: 100 years later, Sunshine Sketches still resonates

This is kind of a two-fold thing for me: it was a chance to finally get around to reading Sunshine Sketches, a book that defines Orillia: from the Leacock retirement home to the Mariposa Market where I eat breakfast once or twice a week. And the book was good, better than I thought it'd be.

The other thing is for me: this is kind of a warmup piece for something in the future, which doesn't have a home yet. While waiting for that to come up, please give this essay a read:

There was a billboard here in town with his face, a quote about how the harder he worked, the luckier he got. Stephen Leacock occupies this town, his legacy a major influence.

When he wrote what would become his most endearing book, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, he said it wasn’t any one town, but any small town, on either coast. And while his characters are everyone, in a town that could be anywhere in Ontario, Orillia has taken it as it’s own; businesses use names like Ossawippi and Mariposa and there’s even a museum dedicated to his works.

I’ve lived here for most of my life but until recently, I’d never bothered to read his book. I expected some similarities between Orillia and Mariposa but I didn’t expect to enjoy the book so much.

Click here to read the whole thing.