The Mountain Goats Don't Kid About Black Sabbath

A couple years in perhaps Portland John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats was sporting a shirt that said either "Listen to Black Sabbath" or "Listen to More Black Sabbath."

Turns out he wasn't kidding.

Fuck Your Jetta is not one for straight pimping of anything, but in this case, we are compelled to note that JD has been published this week in the 33 1/3 series of books about records. If you're anything like us, the idea of books on "seminal" records or those otherwise commonly cited in the rock and roll/punk/indie canon, you're not interested in the least - what could there possibly be to say about In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Pet Sounds or OK Computer anyway? I mean, listen to the record. And then do it again if desired, or never again if lunkheads just won't give up saying something's great because some other lunkhead said it was big deal stuff.

However, when we heard of John's entry on Sabbath's Master of Reality, we browsed what else has been done in the series, and to our surprise and delight saw that Carl Wilson of Globe and Mail fame and a fellow Canadian had published a treatise on the phenomenon of Céline Dion and checked that out in the interim.

We're pleased to report that we are still fascinated by Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste 2/3 in and a little bummed that it's going to be over in a few dozen 4"x6" pages.

So if your dim and unenlightened view matches the previous one of your humble editors that it's senseless to read or write books about records that you have listened to or are going to listen to anyway, as a public service we're throwing out that FYJ is willingly jumping into the petri dish to experiment with reading books about rock and roll music.

Eww, right? That's for, like, Martin Scorsese documentaries and, like, people who like Rolling Stone.

We've cherry picked Douglas Wolk's examination of James Brown's Live at the Apollo as well because we like Doug, his label and his writing about music elsewhere.

If there's a happy ending, stay tuned for discussion of books in this series and jumping right in with Franklin Bruno's entry on Armed Forces and the first one I'd pick just because of the album, Slayer's Reign In Blood.

The Boxer, For Those Contrary to the Contrarians

The thing about being a contrarian is that by my definition, it means simply going against the crowd for the sake of going against them. Either they must be wrong (and they're wrong as often as they're right, the crowd that is), or the contrarian gets a kick from going against the grain. Or maybe is just trying to grab a little attention, which interestingly is attention riding on the coattails of the popular thing.


Now that's the definition of opportunism, and if there's one thing I am not (probably to my detriment) it's an opportunist, band-wagoneer or cheerleader; I hesitate in invest even in the noble cause if it's not with all my heart, and I don't hand over my heart or my brain all that easily.


Yet we're talking about pop music, and I hand over my heart and my brain to that every single day, whether it's on a bender of Heavy Winged and Yellow Swans or Teenage Fanclub and Velvet Crush.


The contrarian is maligned, but not for the reason you might think - you, know, being contrary. These days, you can get called a contrarian if you're for pulling all troops out of Iraq, say; even the lefties will wring their hands and say, yeah, but look at that mess we've made, we have to do something about it when we leave, or ok then, what do you want to do about how we've ruined their country? What does that mean? To be against the war, you have to be for the war?


Interestingly, the popular use of the word contrarian seems to come from investing and economics lingo.

From investopedia.com:

"A contrarian investor believes that the people who say the market is going up do so only when they are fully invested and have no further purchasing power. At this point the market is at a peak. On the other hand, when people predict a downturn, they have already sold out, at which point the market can only go up."


Should we take that to mean that the source of this contrarian stuff means taking the long view, and analytically sizing up the short-sighted?


I knew a kid who was a rich white university-educated child of powerful professionals, a lawyer and a professor. He was a hardline separatiste, and the first thing he would say is, "Without concessions, we must separate entirely. There will be a dark period where everything is fucked. But me, I'm privileged, educated and bilingual, so I'm exactly one of the few who's going to ride it out, so it's easy for me to say, and stick with 100% ideology 100% of the time, and not have to pretend that Quebec could possibly break ties with Canada and the US and not completely collapse. Phoenix from the flames, man"


That's not contrarian. A contrarian just poo poos. Or wants to be cool by picking the easy fight and raising an eyebrow or two. There's nothing easy about what Etienne said above, and you can't pick it apart too much if he already lays out your counter arguments for you, say if you were going to say he was young or rich or whatever, and the first to say he's naive enough to say it because he's investing in his own naiveté in a principled and thoughtful way, an ideological 401K. It might be dumb or wrong, but either way, you can hang your hat on it, because it's taking stock, trying to figure it out, and it's self-aware.


You might say that's not too dissimilar from the stupid argument from dumb people who behave badly and then say, "oh well, what are you going to do? I'm an asshole." They might be right with the words they speak, but if you assume that being right involves a belief system in corroboration with what they're saying, or at least the ability to make a coherent argument for what they're saying with an earnest and scientific disinvolvement with the subject, then it's a bunch of crap.


The dummies (both your redneck and hipster doofus buddies) who say this kind of thing when you object to their offhand use of "bitch" or "faggot" or "nigger" aren't saying, hey, that's just my point of view, take it or leave it. It's a simple trick to get off the hook for their bad behavior by both ingratiating you (a second time) and refusing to put a microscope to the interior world that would have them attempt to get attention in this way, using language that is deliberately inflammatory, or intended to provoke a reaction of "hey, see, we're on the same page, right?", spouting directly from self-loathing and self-doubt.


And it usually works. Maybe because you're smarter than me, and you see all the cues and then ignore them until they go away. But hey, I picked my first fight a couple of weeks ago with a dummy who was trying to cite Lenny Bruce (a true self-hater's self-hater) and shit to excuse some poor choices of language he made, and I wouldn't have it; when he saw it didn't work, oddly enough, he called me a "four-eyed faggot."


There's a big difference though. The first is introspective and willful, and the latter stems from such an utter lack of introspection that the very brain has turned inside out, from a perceptory and belief system that has left the person so fucked that the only way they know how to be affirmed is to provoke anger and ill will so at least you'll pay attention for a second.


But my bad behavior? Hell, my friend, I stand by it, and I can spend all day arguing both how I'm obviously right in 5000 ways to the 5000 you're obviously wrong, and then stand on my head and tell you another 5000 about how I'm wrong. I celebrate it, and this is my way of Thich Nhat-Hanhing my dear. Shit is mindful.


So if you want to say that it's like obligatory that I admit that Paul Simon is a great writer or great lyricist, or possibly a great songwriter, what really are you asking me to say? What does it matter if I agree with everyone else, and where does that get us? Nevermind that if you demand that I agree with what the crowd would say, I will demand you always go with the crowd. Throw away your Pavement and Raccoon records my friend, and start investing in the Master P and ex-American Idol contestant catalogs, because that's what you're defending and obliging me to agree with as well. At least in terms of suggesting that I am being deliberately contrary or obscure.


It's not about saying that Paul Simon is a great songwriter; why do we have to keep saying that? Why is it not enough that I'll agree that he has songs that blow my mind, even lots of songs that do? That he's at times a fantastic storyteller, a creator of beautiful and unexpected melodies, and sometimes, in the ether, they merge, and you get a line or maybe a whole tune that leaves you wondering when it ends if it is not indeed true that we walk in heaven every moment we walk the earth, if only we could see it all the time?


You will say: but you go out of your way to say that they suck. I might. But not for the reason you might think, maybe. The other day I was talking about this very humble and most insignificant blog, and what I don't do. I don't post songs or records (for the most part, anyway), I'm not interested in being deliberately provocative, stirring up shit, and certainly not self-aggrandizement or just making conversation in the typical (well, and I guess if I'm saying that, my idea is dated but whatever) blog sense of saying hey, I did this, I did that, here's a link to something I thought was funny. In spoken and written language, I probably have not used "cool" as an adjective ten times in my conscious life.


No, my aim here and in life, the universe and everything is to get to the heart of the matter, in exactly the right way. That would be my way, meaning that I make no pretensions to understand how anyone else sees the world, and if I do for the sake of argument, I'll probably say so. One pretension that I will make: that it is a common and unspoken assumption that Paul Simon is a brilliant musician whose work deserves contemplation, consideration and regard. Because of this, and assuming that you believe this to be true, it might take a little bit more than saying, oh, I don't know, I see why people like them, they're ok, but they're not my favorite.


But I know that's a pretension. Why is it interesting to me to say that I find Simon and Garfunkel to be the personification of the suburbanization of folk music in the worst way, with pretensions to art and truth and justice and getting it, and mostly the navel-gazing of some rich white kids with afros? That if that's what we're taking, I'll take the Kingston Trio any day? And that The Boxer, while having some pretty guitar, is a clunky and ugly tune that is Gaudily embellished with all the trappings of an attempt at purchasing authenticity by throwing in some banjo and Jew's harp and a beat of a knocked guitar, yet still whores itself so crassly commercially to the Hamptons with its ugly synthesizer and schmaltzy strings? And that the story of The Boxer itself is this very story of falsehood?


That's not interesting, and that's really how The Boxer sounds to me, and it does not raise the joy index of the world one bit. And I wouldn't even want to say that because that's some dimestore psychoanalysis, and worth half as much, though your humble author would believe that most that would attempt to sell it would be asking in the dollars when they should be perhaps be doleful even to give it away. It probably speaks a lot more of the speaker, their experience and their assumptions about the world, and I wouldn't want such an ugly speaker to be me now would I?


What does it get you? What does it get me? And does it even mean anything if I say that I believe the above to be true, yet I believe that at least some of the time, when they were singing the songs or writing them, that they really did mean it? Or that I do not find it contradictory in the least to say that I believe that the fourth verse of the very same song resonates universally in the most boldly plain and naked way, and speaks a truth wiser than the singer's years in the best way?


I would add that it's not as if I haven't listened to every Simon and Garfunkel lp a dozen times in my own personal travels toward some kind of familial mythology, because my mom had them all, and for her to have all of someone's records meant something, because she had very few, and I understand the world a song at a time. Fuck Your Jetta will have you understand that we believe ourselves to have an educated opinion on the matter, which is this:


It doesn't matter, and I don't care, because I don't care about the band or the song, except to say that I like a couple of tunes, and would skip the rest. Some shit grabs you, some doesn't; sometimes you try for it to grab you, sometimes it gets in your blood and you can't figure out why; sometimes it's built to grab you, crassly, and sometimes its crassness makes you think it's built to grab you. This shit: don't grab me.


People are loud. Sometimes you have to yell to make yourself heard above the din. Sometimes you have to pretend you know what someone else is thinking to come up with a way to get them to hear you. What you're hearing right now is the story of me. If you want me to hear the story of you with respect to Paul Simon, you're going to have to tell me the story of you, and not attempt to tell the story of me for me, or how lots of people like a song or a singer or a record. If'n you want to talk about it, and sometimes, it seems like you do.


Let's fucking talk about Rocketship is what I'm saying, or any other band or artist or writer who did/does something completely out of the ordinary and out of step with what anyone in the crowd would agree with, and if they were trying to do that, happened to come up with something both unique and good. And even better, maybe what we call "genuine" or "heartfelt" when they weren't even trying and speaking right from the heart and don't give a damn. When we say out of the ordinary and out of step with what anyone in the crowd would agree with, we mean beautiful, in a world that sometimes tricks us into thinking it's ugly, and that beautiful thing opens our eyes again.


Whether we're talking Górecki or Ghostface or The Goslings or Goran Bregovic or Guided By Voices, that seems like it's a two way communication, because they made a record and you heard it, but let's not get the cart before your heart here: we're only talking about yours, and whether or not anyone else turned on their heartlight, let's talk about how yours shines wherever you go, and I'll listen. What anyone else ever agreed with don't make no nevermind; fuck all that noise, or we'll have to start speaking in terms of the number of people killed in genocides in the 20th century such that obviously worldwide, we continue to think that's a pretty good idea, by consensus, if tacit.


But if you call me a contrarian, motherfucker, I'll write a whole blog post about it.

DRMs and the Military Industrial Complex

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Some Dude wrote:

Dear Fuck Your Jetta,

You have touched on a subject near and dear to my heart. I love to debate the merits of artist rights, user rights, and business rights to music and other media. Digital Rights Management is simply a silly way for record companies to protect their interests in a dying business. The music business as we know it has obviously changed with the advent of file sharing and digital audio formats that do not require the purchase of an actual object. The 20th century was simply a golden age for capitalism as music. A mere blip on the radar of the history of music. It is after all just sound.

The ability to package and sell sound as a permanent object only came about with the advent of technologies such as audio recording and playback machines and the various storage media that accompany them. The great technology movement has continued and as quickly as it created novel ways for businessmen to make money from music, it has taken those methods away. I find that the record companies have failed to adapt their methodologies to the technology. I have been saying all along, that if CD's cost $5 instead of $18, I would sooner buy them and their cute packaging, than spend the time it takes do download things.

The funny thing is that DRM restricts music usage only for those of us who are law-abiding. If you were to acquire your music illegally from bittorrent or something like that, you could burn it as many times as you want, but if you purchase, it you can only do it so many times. So the music business again forces its good customers like Lauren to look to illegal methods. My opinion is this, fuck music companies and fuck huge bands like Metallica. If Metallica were starting today they would thank the internet for allowing them to make money without the interference of a record company.

But Metallica achieved success in the pre-digital era and therefore garnered a shitload of money, most definitely more than most bands today ever could. The internet has killed the record company, it's killed radio, and it's killed the super-group (there will never be another). But it also created a true free-market environment for artists and listeners alike. Artists can self-publish and self distribute and reach listeners they may otherwise have never had an opportunity to reach, without of course signing themselves into indentured servitude first, if they're lucky. I quote loosely from an interview of Aphex Twin I once read. When asked what he would think if file-sharing brought about the downfall of the music industry, he replied "I reckon that would be lush." Agreed.

I've heard of software that strips DRMs. It actually plays your tracks through your sound card and re-records them. It does this 4 tracks at a time at 4x speed. This actually creates a new recording and transfers the tagging info to the new file. I've heard the results and haven't noticed really any quality loss from the original files, but it is a good idea to run this software only when you are not planning on using your computer for anything else, cause any other sounds that play through your card will also end up in the recording. Of course you need to have acquired the DRM protected files legally because you will need permission to play the tracks in order for the software to re-record them. In this sense the software is somewhat legal.

Best Regards,

Some Dude

---

We are going to something way more fundamental than silly ways for record companies to protect their interests, and we are not talking about the fact that "supergroup" used to mean something as ridiculous as Audioslave, yet now encompasses Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, when interestingly the first supergroups were arguably Cream and Led Zeppelin. It's come full circle and heady stuff, just like our example of supergroups.

And were that it was that we could even say that music is sound. It's obviously not. Besides that fact that a digital sound file or music encoded in an analog format is either ones and zeros and electrons compiled in a novel way and played back with a clever symphony of hardware and software, and likewise for non-digital music, except with literal objects touching each other in novel ways, something that plays, encodes, or somehow has the means to hold music in some ephemeral way is not music. In the same sense that language is not sound, not your mouth, and not your brain, but a complex system of interaction and representation between systems (Mark Hale, if you are somehow reading this, send me your handout from your talk on Latin, written records, and what language is so I can swipe your neat diagram), what music actually is is something outside of this here humble blog post.

This shit goes back to Gutenberg. Used to be whoever pressed a book owned it, meaning the "content" (please lord, give me the strength to step back from hyperbole yet again) until they ran out of copies or oil or ink or whatever. You don't like it Mr. Writer, get your own damn printing press. Multiple people printed the same shit in various bootleg, counterfeit, and badly copied forms all over the place, and everyone wanted a piece of the pie; ask Bill Shakespeare. Motherfucker who wrote it? Pfff, a mere inconvenience, because people have this funny habit of being creative anyway, this being a basic part of humanity.

Or the very life force or essence or whatever you care to call it, if you wanna get mad orthogonal and be all like Darwinian evolutionary theory is simply a metaphor for the ongoing creative act that encompasses Bach, cancer cells, dolphins having the remnants of hind legs, and how you said that shit weird a second ago just to be funny, just to get a laugh, just that one time.

We get the rats for free, we feed them to the cats, we skin the cats and feed the cats to the rats, and we get the cat skins for free, you feel me?

Intellectual content laws were invented because dudes like Leadbelly could and would play anything, and then Son House and Memphis Minnie and Scott Joplin were like, how come I don't get any dough when they play my shit on the radio or this fucker plays my tune to a packed house and they came and all paid a whole dollar just to hear that shit? That's my shit! Wait, they weren't saying it; in a couple hundred years they got themselves some middlemen between the printing press and the dude who came up with it, and now the dude who like introduced you to the printing press is like, hey, someone owes me some money, I just can't figure out a way how yet.

We now can only debate what the first jazz or blues or whatever song was because some rich white dude with a printing press (let's call him the Military Industrial Complex) printed sheet music, an abstract reproduction intended to aid people in reproducing the music, which if you think about it has nothing to do with music, and everything to do with who controls the means of production, what they do with those means, and what technology is available at the time. Yet at the same time it has everything to do with music, because how did you ever hear anything, unless someone played an original composition for you directly? And still at the same time, do I doubt for a second that whoever printed up Maple Leaf Rag loved ragtime piano music, that the crazy natural dance of those keys made him go off the hook?

You see where I'm going here? Artists' rights never had a goddam thing to do with it. The Man threw out Metallica as a stand in to make suits look cool for protecting the interests of some lawyer who hates music who works for a multination conglomerate that markets liquor, cigarettes, entire television networks, components of nuclear warheads, and gummi worms to a global audience. They know they're full of shit; you think for a second a metalhead, who in my humble opinion (as a metalhead) smells bullshit a mile off way more than your average pop music listener, especially one into any particular thing that you would say has a "scene" thought they would say that shit for any reason besides they feel hugely indebted to like their A&R guy who signed them and turned them into millionaires when they turned into overnight sensations (and now a full on brand in their ubiquity; I'll bet you the very word Lars conjures specific images and references, even if you've never heard them) 10 years after they started? There are literally a million people who think they're cool because they heard of them on CSPAN and maybe a little badass just because in their Lawrence Welk circle that passes for a middle finger to the man. That's not accidental, and it's not because Metallica wrote Trapped Under Ice or Call of Cthulhu.

The Man has always been interested in and only in how yr money can get got as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Technology? You know what a DRM is? As far as my (extremely basic and limited) understanding goes, it's a string of text embedded in the media file, like the magnetic strip on any card in your wallet contains some trivial amount of data. But, and big but, just enough to make it a lot different than a stack of money for all intents and purposes. That's why it's so easy to beat, just like your bank card; your piece of software doesn't play it through the sound card and rerecord it (that's messy on so many levels, least of which is that you would need a sound card to do it); it just goes, humm, what's a 0 or a 1 that isn't quite like the others that only by a coincidence way wilder than the big bang could happen to resemble the hexadecimal representation of the string, "da, da DA, baby I got your money?"

In the 70s they didn't give a damn that the recently much cheaper home cassette player (which had existed for a decade and change, but the box you needed was a million dollars, and the blank tapes were $3000 apiece), because who would go to the trouble anyway? Hell, old dictaphones cut acetates, you could have theoretically hooked up your office hardware to the record player at the Christmas party and made copies of that new Miles lp for all the hepcats afterhours in 1961. Not incidentally, the introduction of the video cassette recorder actually brought this very issue to court, with a large Hollywood movie house bringing I believe Sony to trial saying hey, let's not dance around the subject that this very thing was invented to circumvent our distribution system and takes away our control, and the US Supreme Court said, hey, just because you can use it for that doesn't mean that's what it's for. Then suddenly when cassettes were manufactured for fractions of pennies in Asia seconds later, instead of pristine labs in Germany and New Jersey, Home Taping Was Killing The Music Business.

All that to say, all that retooling and formats and shit is expensive for everyone. 2 seconds of some coder dithering with the thing that pops out mp3s that would be enough to stop most people? Who cares if it's trivial to beat, we're talking about the Average Consumer here who just wants to rock out to that new jam in the iWhatever commercial; we own the process, the guy who came up with it is on staff (as a contractor!) and his waiver cut him out of any dough, and we own the distribution system on the most popular piece of music software in the world that we have worked very hard to make hip and somehow succeeded with our slick brushed metal appearance and iconic logo that echoes the origin of sin and modernity.

To touch on this idea that DRMs punish only innocent consumers who would actually buy this shit, frankly, here in these United States, I was irritated the first time I saw one of these new FBI warnings on a cd that I was buying:



I was in fact buying the newest Built To Spill record the week it came out as an impulse buy at a rare visit to a non-independent record store. I'd downloaded it, it had an annoying voiceover on it to suggest that you buy the record, and that was so irritating that I decided to just hear it the old fashioned way, even though the sounds I did hear suggested that the band were far past their prime, or at least the prime that I very much enjoyed on their early singles and their first Reprise lp.

Shall we consider for a moment that the manipulation of the album with the annoying overdubs had to have been made and distributed by someone with access to the master tapes, as this was leaked before even the standard pre-release leak time of a couple months or so? And that it's slickly contrived annoyance made it a prime candidate of the record company themselves creating and distributing it, attempting to beat the pirates at their own game and "flood the market" so to speak so that it would be difficult to find a proper pirated copy?

Then I have this shit staring me in the face. It's offensive, and not only for the most obvious reasons: suggesting that I may face a quarter million dollar fine for having up/downloaded an album (assuming that downloading is defined specifically as unauthorized reproduction or whatever in Clinton's Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is simply insane if you consider that committing vehicular homicide in the State of Florida under the influence and fleeing the scene has a maximum fine of ten grand, and only half a deca g-note for a 4th or greater DUI offense combined with grievous physical injury to another person, not to mention the same prison sentence for downloading that record (btw, feds: I downloaded it 2 years ago, in Canada, and owned the record).

The FBI isn't going to persecute anyone for downloading music. They might be in corroboration with 3rd party private interests who might not want you to, but that's another matter. And you don't see signs on steak knives or assault rifles or hammers saying, don't forget, murder is a felony and is kind of unfriendly, and by the way, bag yourself a real fine duck with that automatic assault rifle! You do see signs on booze saying hey, if you're pregnant, maybe you should consider your alcoholism and sulfite consumption. Or on cigarettes. Or MADD suggesting on highway billboards that maybe you shouldn't pilot a vehicle intoxicated. And on every food package you'll find in a normal USA grocery store: "You do see that primary constituents of this here box or can or jug of what you're considering eating are things that you should probably never eat anyway, and see these percentages? That's the maximum you can (possibly) safely consume without this killing you softly." That's from the side of a box of Delicious Healthy Honey Nugget Taco Shapes.

The big difference here is that the above are stupid things that people are just going to do anyway. We know they're going to do them. They know it's unsafe, and they're just going to fly in the face of reason and eat those microwave hamburgers anyway, fuck it, baby's hungry, and then wash it down with a bottle of Night Train and then light up a light cigarette and drive over to the kielbasa factory for the afternoon shift, because motherfucker, it's been a long day, and I just ain't got the time, you dig? In fact, this is why we make drunk driving ads visible on highways, to see while you're driving under the influence. Or on the side of the bottle you're probably drinking out of. Or the side of your cigarette or snack cake pack, and so on.

These stupid things though, may end up with an end result of death for the user, or potentially uglier, in even dumber and reprehensible case of drunk driving. Maybe, just maybe, some nervous Nelly ripping open another pack of whatever might stop for a second and reconsider. These warnings on records however are for the people who likely aren't doing it. Assuming the spirit of propaganda is to instill fear in and control people who aren't doing nor inclined to do the thing propagandized, that federal seal on your compact disc is for something else.

(And not just any compact disc; you think if for some reason Load Records or American Tapes went to the feds with ip address and traffic stats of someone uploading a Yellow Swans or Hair Police record it would matter for a single second?)

But we digress.

This owning the means is something way bigger than companies named after fruit selling songs on the internet or that band that used to be good when you were in grade school. It might be true that some bands live entirely under the radar of the mainstream music distribution system (for the tip of the iceberg, you can check out whether your favorite band or label is a member of the Recording Industry Association of America or the British Phonographic Industry), but that has always been the case; it's even sort of sophisticated these days, with an entire industry sprung out of the 70s and 80s DIY underground that has now replicated their own miniature major label distribution system for independent bands such as Merch Now and Blue Collar Distribution, old school and indier-than-thou distros like Midheaven, Important, Revolver and so on; it's not by accident that bands like Dashboard Confessional and such could be found in any WallyWorld despite having no affiliation with a traditional major, even before they were huge, and even less of an accident that the new Eagles record is available exclusively in WallyWorld, and I'll bet you a buck that Radiohead in all their supposed thumbing their noses at the System aren't bummed out that the biggest sources of record revenue for them are through channels such as Amazon or WallyWorld.

Let's for a moment though imagine that there's a real distinction we can make in principle between a "true" independent artist and one who simply operates on a sphere that is too small for the majors to bother with. By this I mean something like a band like Caroliner who doesn't give a fuck, makes only art for art's sake on their terms and never cared whether you bought it and don't expect to get paid vs. say the fact that it's $25 to see Dimmu Borgir and Behemoth at the Troc, and the average merch dough dropped per head at that show will be like thirty bucks or more. Of course we can't truly compare them, and I'll take Behemoth over Caroliner any day, and the debate over whether preferred means of distribution should have nothing to do with artistic merit, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax.

Could Dimmu Borgir conceivably take over the world? Cradle of Filth are a damn popular band, and let's imagine for a moment that they're in fact comparable. For those who might not be familiar with theatrical technical death, they're both basically extremely slick and produced metal bands with a strong image/outfit/makeup component, but pretty much only kids would agree that they're "extreme" metal, where extreme means something like heavier and more threatening than Metallica; some might argue that this is not a true comparison because Dimmu is a black metal band (say, their new album is called something like "in direct contact with Satan" in Latin) and Cradle merely has leanings in this direction, like their tee shirts saying "Jesus is a cunt." Cradle of Filth got signed to Sony and have most of their stuff currently issued by Roadrunner, who's RIAA affiliated (and home of Nickelback), Dimmu was always indie. Cradle of Filth got their tunes put in movies, video games, video channels, and played stadiums; Dimmu didn't. In my humble opinion, they're pretty similar, and both are sponsored by numerous energy drinks and that kind of bullshit.

But Slipknot sold a minimum 5 million records, also on Roadrunner. Nickelback sold millions more on the same label. N'Sync sold a minimum of eleven million legitimate copies of just one of their records. (all of this based on the RIAA's own database, and of course they're the only ones counting or who could care, right?)

What does this have to do with the distribution system and the Man?

We have to compare apples to apples. Fuck Your Jetta imagines that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has experienced popularity and financial success beyond their wildest dreams without having a label. But step back for a second; that's only in the US - they're on Universal worldwide. Oh wait, you heard of them in the NYT literay supplement or some shit? Yeah. I remember reading perhaps ten years ago that in the first five years of its release, Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain sold a half a million copies (somewhere in Louisville, Bob Nastanovich is patting a horse and laughing), but during nearly all of that time, their label had affiliations with two of the largest record conglomerates in the world. A million bands operate under the radar or outside of the system of the majors and make a living, and a million more do the same and don't make any living at all.

But I mean, Metallica or Madonna or whatever level of financial remuneration and worldwide exposure? Not a chance. Ever. The theoretical ability of a band to get their shit out their because of the preponderance of the internet, cheap big processors and ubiquitous computers is completely independent from bands making a living off of their art outside of the system.

Waiting in line in Lush to buy some overpriced if amusing crap for a present for someone, I heard an extremely abrasive Guided By Voices song, a Belle and Sebastien song, and an Orange Juice song back to back, none of them from the last ten years. There's no chance that a big and pricey yuppie chain store like them is just playing cds or something; consider that organizations like ASCAP and BMI actually have people going around to dingy rock bars to see if they're paying royalties on shit they're playing (e.g. if they have a subscription based system or a license) and return with subpoenas if they find the Khyber playing mix tapes, that must mean that they're paying for that shit, and in some way or another (hopefully anyway, if the bands have good lawyers and managers) the bands are getting paid.

And that means there are a million ways the Man has to sell you something you don't even know you're being sold. Orange Juice was on a major, but outside of England, except for maybe a second when frontman Edwyn Collins' A Girl Like You was a hit, they were a blip on the radar and a twee kid's wet dream. Belle and Sebastien's been gone for some time, and all their RISD fans of the day now have homes in the Hamptons. GBV, that's for the normal folks. That's some hip shit. Somebody's playing that game, even your favorite and most staunchly independent artist.

Let's immediately discount every band that is doing something with extremely limited appeal; you will never hear Black Pus in Lush. But wait, have you heard of Times New Viking? I'll bet you have, one way or another, and it's not because they're a little poppier than Black Pus. It might be because they're a better band (I mean, they just are), but it's probably because they're on a label, if a complete indie (and god bless Gerard Cosloy, I got nothing but love) that has wide distribution, a full on promotional wing, and spends lots of money on making sure you have heard of them, they are listed on Rolling Stone, their record is reviewed both in Spin and in your 'zine, and so on. I'm comparing these two because they're both extremely noisy, poorly recorded, and independent, and in the case of TNV, self-described rank amateurs in terms of musicianship and songcraft (nobody better say that Brian Chippendale, who is Black Pus and used to be half of Lightning Bolt is anything less than a virtuoso, and dude, we are waiting with baited breath for you to join a metal band for a record and a tour just to line your pockets a bit, because that shit would smoke).

This shit isn't by accident. If you ever heard something on the radio, excluding community and college stations but not NPR (you don't hear Nissan or Budweiser ads on the CBC, infidel), that was brought to you by the man. Myspace: the man, specifically News Corporation, owning Fox, among others. Any musical venue with an exclusive contract with say Clear Channel (noticed that R5 never has shows at the Khyber or the North Star?). Man. Heard a surprisingly good song in the Gap or in a commercial with a clown and a giant purple marshmallow or something selling you hamburgers? Or dog food commercial, or egad, Modest Mouse shilling for fucking Jettas? (you know that Fuck Your Jetta isn't playing hip on you, and it's not by accident that they own copies of all of MM's records pre-Sony). That's The Man for you.

Tay Zonday's relentless awfulness/genius has only ever been available for free distribution by a Creative Commons license. Can you think of something that "everybody" has heard that didn't make anybody any money besides that?

Oh wait, YouTube is owned by Google, and I'll bet you another buck that you watched that video at work, probably for The Man, because if you didn't work for Him, you wouldn't be watching music videos at work. Google's server farm in Oregon will consume seven times the 80 gigawatts that the aluminum foundry that previously existed there did, and it is in The Dalles, Oregon exclusively because of proximity to cheap/free energy courtesy of the state, tax breaks from the state and federal government, and zoning for heavy industry.

You don't think of googling something or hearing of the Chocolate Rain as being heavy industry. That's not by accident either, my digital friend. And we're not even touching the fact that the very mp3 itself is created and played back with proprietary algorithms, and how wackos who are really into the GNU and stuff will try and sell you on .oggs and .flacs, but lest we forget, like the folks in Generation X imagining that in their home of Palm Springs, every time someone used a paper clip or a staple, someone there made a penny, every time you encode an mp3, someone made some money, somewhere, somehow, in an insidious and deliberately concealed way that makes it no accident that you've never even heard of an Ogg Vorbis even if you're all hating on Apple's formats, and nevermind that if you did it in Philly, you literally burned a little coal from the electricity you used.

Military. Industrial. Complex.

When 50 Miles is More Than 50 Miles

There is an upside though. It used to be that riding to and from work and running errands was most of my cycling life. Between May and October, maybe 2-3 times a week 2-3 courses up and down the mountain on the way home from work, if I left early enough and had enough left in the tank, not to mention the call of The Horse being faint enough to resist for the day.

Now I don't have to do a damn thing. Roll out of bed, turn on the IM and pretend to work? If you want. Never one for the easy way, once I got settled in and I hadn't really ridden for a month or so, my legs got itchy, and I hit the road.

Now, I'm not bragging or nothing, but when you're riding just to ride, you tend to get in some more miles. That said, I'm by no means a serious trainer or an athlete. At my best, I remember to breathe as deeply and evenly as possible while maintaing something just under 3/4 of my max threshold of bonk. Or stuff like back straight, arms bent, toes up, heels down.

They way Bukowski says the thing is to just type, I just ride. The first time I went for a loop around the Schuylkill path, I was a bit incredulous that I'd already ridden 10 miles, so I went for another loop just to be sure I did something, and that still wasn't enough. While retaining my rigorous drinking schedule, one loop in the morning and two or three in the evening 4-5 times a week became pretty standard and wasn't even wearing me out. I stepped it up a bit and occasionally added a second loop in the morning while riding up Forbidden Drive for the length of Wissahickon Park for a daily total of 40 - 48 miles a day. That definitely was enough to wear me out, but it's not like I'm completely paf at the end of it - Hey man, I'm even nearly psyched enough to hook up my cheapo MEC cyclocomputer to log my actual miles and average speeds, because by my watch, 26 miles in 1.5 hours means I'm averaging 17 point something mph on a fixed gear bike, 16 of which are on a rising and falling rock-strewn dirt path, so I'm going to say when I join a club in the spring (if I'm lucky, Tri State Velo, sponsored by Amoroso's Rolls and Victory Brewing, and what could be more Philly than cheesesteak rolls and beer?) that I may even be able to hold my own with the Cat 5 enthusiast riders out of the box, as least when it comes to endurance and power output.

That said, one go at the 2001 Tour de L'Île at 65km (before they shortened the course to ~50 to encourage more people to participate) was the longest continuous ride I'd done. I actually had little difficulty completing that at the time (I was so thrilled to be back on a bike that I was well into daily training runs by the early June ride date), but that jaunt is more like riding in traffic - 20,000 people, most of whom never ride at all, makes for a stop and start kind of ride. That clocks at about 39 miles (nearly on the nose - the start and finish that year was Parc and Mont Royal and I was living at St-Urbain and St-Viateur at the time). Later that year I was a bike courier for the summer, and the rule of thumb most bikers who've thought about it will tell you is that it's something on the order of 50-70 kms per day of riding. That was no piece of cake, and I spent many an evening wolfing down a pound of pasta and falling asleep before sundown before getting up at 7 to do it again, but 157 went from rank amateur to the top money courier at the worst company in town for the last 6 weeks (oooh, and I never noticed until now that my call number was all prime numbers - dope!), and while I'm sure it's done all the time, I never personally met anyone who topped my record of either 61 or 64 drops my last day at work.

Being a little cocky and in fair shape for someone who's not in shape at all (oh how cruel the cut of race bibs can be to hoagie-loving thighs), not to mention averaging mileage that was approximately that of Valley Forge and back, I didn't think much of going out and back this Sunday just for something to do. Leisurely like, enjoy the fall sunshine on the first day back to Eastern Standard Time; certainly no big whoop, as I'm already doing those miles anyway. Hell, with a hangover and after staring at a computer all day.

Let me be the first to admit that riding 50 miles in a day is not the same as riding 50 miles in a shot.

Now, it wasn't ideal conditions I was riding under - hadn't gone for a ride in 4 days, and spent 2 of them with my friend John Barleycorn and the other in the spacey state of dread that only a serious hangover can bring. But let's call that "rested" - should be a piece of cake, right?

Well, I'm not actually going to say it was hard. But let's put it this way: not 3/4 of the way there (plus a few extra miles - I took a wrong turn at the Plymouth Meeting path ) (or a wrong not turn; you have to make a right to continue on the path to Valley Forge, and I'd assumed that straight was obviously the way to go, since that was the main path, and despite being clearly in the wrong place when I went from a tunnel of foliage to Buick dealerships and riding right off of the path onto a construction site, and then had to double back), I got up to stretch and was startled to find a fast fit fellow drafting me. We chatted a bit, and then he moved on just ahead of me.

Now, this fellow was much fitter than me, on a fancier bike than me (a C'dale in Saeco colors), and was in a local kit for a hardware store, so certainly he was more of a "serious" rider than I am. After a mile or two though, it occurred to me that I must have looked fit enough to him too - he was taking a pull to return the favor of riding in my draft, and the way he was hanging back so that I was never more than 6 feet or so off his wheel, he was waiting for me to take one again.

Since I've never ridden with anyone, I wasn't actually sure of this, nor was I especially confident that I'd do it "right" at 20mph to pass him and take my pull. But he hung close for a couple more miles, and looked back a couple times as if to say, hey, are we riding or what? By the time I decided that he was indeed waiting for me to take the front, I gave a few good kicks to catch up with him and felt my thighs telling me: what, you want to go fast?

I simply could not.

I mean, I could have pushed it, I know I could have. But hell, I've ridden what, 20 miles, and I'm already feeling a wobbly stretch in my calves? And I have to pace a guy with shaven legs and that familiar horseshoe of muscle below the knee, that calf wallet throbbing? Jeez, and I have to get back too? Another mile or two and he effortlessly pulled off and I lost him in the distance until it got a little busier just before the bridge that crosses the river.

So, sorry Team Ace Hardware - next time, I swear.

The rest of the ride was somewhat uneventful - I saw a little hill just right of the end of the path, and I hoped that a rough little climb would reward me with a pleasant tree and some scenic fall colors to eat my tangerines and handful of trail mix with, and I was right.





Most definitely though, on the way back my swollen ego was now shrinking knowing that how tired I was, how many more calories I obviously needed in me to start, and how my numbing 'taint would no longer allow me to find a comfortable saddle position for any longer than a mile or two by the time I hit Mill Creek.

One of the best parts of the ride: passing by a couple walking down onto the path in Manayunk directly across the street from a coffee shop. For a mile or so, all I could smell was how wonderful and inspiring their hot and fresh coffee smelled - I thought my tires lifted off the ground for a second when I remembered my emergency twenty in my saddlebag and thought of stopping for a cup.

No rest for the wicked though.

Can I has milez?

Commutation Emulation

Fuck Your Jetta has been on accidental hiatus for some time due to technical difficulties (read: life, the universe and everything). We hope to return to providing moar internetz of pleasure by supplying the finest unedited 3000 word barely-edited rants on records and bikes.

In the meantime, just to whet your appetite for the great things to come, we will offer a few canapés of precision heartfelt and passionate rambling in a few hundred words or less each, which you well know is more than most of your favorites could hope to offer.

Commutation Emulation:

I wanted to buy a bike at Cycles Régis when I lived in Montréal not because they carried sweet Marinonis and Lemonds, but because the first time I got around to stopping in there a few years ago, I found they were not only closed Sunday, but their hand-written sign for Sundays read something like: "Dimanche: Sur la route." The cant of the hand-lettered sign distinctly said to me, "Jesus, it's Sunday, and you are shopping instead of riding? For shame!"

Pretending I'm anything more than a quotidian rider would be a sham. I'm a commuter first and foremost, and I loved the daily bread of having to ride my bike to work whether it was raining or snowing. In my cynical youth (like a couple months ago) I used a twist on the old half joke of the best part of the work day being leaving to be that the best part was riding in, closely followed by riding out. It was never a joke really; in all seriousness, I used to tell a certain someone that was having trouble adapting to a 30km round trip commute to Ville Émard from Villeray that I would be thrilled to have to ride twice as far to go to work.

However, here in the wilds of South Philly, deep in the heart of the total perspective vortex of working an office job from home when you indeed knew that the folks you were lucky enough to work with were certainly the best part of your job, there is no commuting. And I had no idea how much I would miss it.

It should also be known that I had no idea what a great utility Mont Royal really was to an urban cyclist - (mostly) car free (cop shop and CBC/SRC antenna at the top), 6 kms of gravel path on a gentle but demanding uphill rider is a great thing to have handy if you mostly like to go uphill.

Philly may not be as flat as they come (though I still haven't attempted the course from the yearly Manayunk Hill Climb Time Trial, and I'll probably eat these words later, but 1km that tops out at a max 17% grade (rises 170 feet for every 1000 feet of horizontal distance), I say pfff), so if you want to exert yourself and encourage some straining muscles and endorphin flow, you have to go for distance or exertion.

I would guess that many people would be thrilled both to work from home and to not have to ride a bicycle to work, but you know me, ever the contrarian and I wouldn't join any club that would have me. To the carbon-fiber-worshipping club riders, I'm probably a bearded fred or a doofster wannabe on my humble one speed steed, and to the doofster or the fred I'm surely one of those leg-shaving weekend Lances wearing a team kit whose team I don't ride for and whose $5K horsie spends more time on the Thule on my Jetta than touching actual asphalt. (Shrug). I've taken up the sport of 12 miles before breakfast around the Schuylkill River Path in Fairmount Park to emulate a morning commute. Yes, emulate. That's how far a home office job can remove you from real life. Next I'll be rubbing a swatch of fabric on the machines at Kinko's because I never get to smell toner anymore.

Fucked Up - Hidden World

Ok, Fuck Your Jetta isn't so impetuous that it talks about records before it's even listened to them, but listening to the newest record by Toronto's Fucked Up has me wanting, nay, needing to sit down at the old typer and get a move on to try and pull some kind of Lester Bangs go-man-go while I feed off the high of this insane rock and roll album on first listen.

You know how your friends don't understand that Appetite For Destruction is actually the best straight-up rock and roll record of the 80s because they somehow associate Axl and Slash with Brett and Bobbi and Gene and Paul and Jon and Richie? Not that they weren't part right, since G n' fuckin' R is and always was sort of a cartoon show, but there's just no getting around it - if you know what fucking rock and roll is, dangerous, joyous, dirty, and unapologetic, then you know that Appetite rules, full stop, no smirking and no winking, and if you think I'm wrong, you can fuck off and go listen to some more Black Sabbath or Zeppelin or whatever people who feel rock and roll in their brains and comic book collection instead of their balls and their hearts listen to.

And yet:




Now imagine trying to explain Fucked Up to them. Because you're convinced they will like them. You're convinced that everyone who's ever bought a record with distorted guitar will get into it. I mean, what you have here is a positively charged, major chord, mid-tempo band that has a lot more in common with the sound of the New Bomb Turks, upbeat Fugazi maybe, possibly Boyracer on a pissed off day. Yet they have the ultra-clean, ultra-compressed, ultra-loud and ultra-everything else production of most modern metal, and a singer who sings like he's out of one of the modern "hardcore" bands that all the kids love these days. To the punks this is going to sound like hard rock, to the rockers it's going to sound like metal, to the metalheads it's going to sound like weirdly chipper emo, and to the emo kids, it's going to sound like punk. I'm afraid that you won't get it, and if there's a record from the last ten years that everyone should get, hell, since the Pixies, it ought to be Hidden World.

The great thing is it's not for any of those folks - Fucked Up is for you. Blaze of Glory practically rerecords the dramatic part of Won't Get Fooled Again note for note, all windmilled chord hits while the empty space around it is filled with a bouncy bass line, practically grinning with fury. And then at the end screeches to a halt and finishes with strings that could be on a Tindersticks record; the next tune opens with a Casiotone for the Painfully Alone keyboard/drum machine riff until a starkly joyous major chord melody charges in and says, man, let's go!

I just don't even know how to describe it, that it sounds like the best in classic rock played with the volume and fury of hardcore, and before you balk, I know how bad that sounds. It's more complex than that; this record is so heavily repetitive, both in structure and in the melodies themselves, it could be a Suicide record sometimes. All the songs sound the same, and are unusually long, such that it's actually a blessing: it's so cohesive, in and of itself, it plays more like a 70 minute mantra chant than a rock record, and like meditation, you lose yourself in time. And for a rock record of any stripe, that's weirdly long - only technical metals of the death and Between the Buried and Me varieties, not counting all the flavors of doom, ever reach past 4 minutes. This fucking record has only two of its 13 songs clock under 4 minutes, and 5 are over six minutes long. I can't think of any rock and roll record worth listening to that's much more than half the length of this one, unless you count Lift To Experience's transcendental Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, which in fact may be the best comparison of this record in that they both reach out and want to fearlessly love life with an open heart, and play some songs along the way, but I dare not try and state the case of this band here and now; I promise faithful reader that you will hear from me about them yet.

Did I say that this was a metal record, a rock record, a Suicide record? Hell, it's so poppy that I'm sure the tough-guy hardcore kids have no idea how to get pissed off to it and get worked up to bust some heads, but the punks who might listen to bands with this kind of sound are more used to a wink and a nod and maybe even a reference that only a college kid would get spat out with a delivery that any mall punk could chuckle at while he shops for a new Emily Strange deck at Hot Topic to pick up betties with. You know, I'll see your NOFX and raise you a Turbonegro. Yet if you dug MBV's Loveless, and you were riding your bike past a car with this blasting, you might do an aural double take and wonder what they could be listening to, and how could the people listening to a band that sounds as thick and impenetrable yet immersing as My Bloody Valentine look like those kids from the suburbs who go to shows and leave with a matching hooded sweatshirt, tee shirt, ball cap combo? This is a hardcore record that is positively joyous, but will make the most earnest posis among you blush with its unapologetic positivity, and makes 'em all want to pound their fist in the air, bang their heads, and tap their toes like it's a Smokey song.

And I'm not talking about that praise-the-lord or fuck-emo-we're-smiling-and-going-bowling stuff that was popular "with the kids" a few years ago; we're certainly not talking blissed-out indiepop, though this is a metal band that put out a 7" of Shop Assistants and Dolly Mixture covers, and the latter are obscure enough that me, your humble know-it-all record nerd never even heard of them, and this band is probably ten years younger than I am, and if they are, they're way fucking smarter than I was when I was 21. It's sparkling and inspired by light and truth and the fiercest empathy I've ever heard on an LP, and I can't even understand the damn lyrics yet; my hardcore-to-English babelfish is in the shop, and as a grindcore lover, I know better than to pay attention to what the singer is saying, but I'm certain that this dude has something to say, and I'll happily hear him out once I get to it with a bike and a pair of headphones.

If there's only two kinds of music that we ever get worked up enough to write about, there's the stuff that needs to be described in detail because it's so odd and unexpected that you might not get past side one track one if you don't have a little context for where it's going to go and what it's going to do - Butch by the Geraldine Fibbers, say, or the Vibracathedral Orchestra if you liked standard indie rock for the former or standard "hippie noise" or just regular noise for the latter. Stuff like that, you just talk about it and are half descriptive, and half poetic, and hope your words are enough to get someone to put on one of those records with an open mind and see the light.

But the other kind, it's the stuff that actually sounds very familiar, it sounds so much like something else you know, and man, you know what I'm talking about? That kind of thing, articulating it escapes you, because there's something about this sound, this band, but jeez, I sure don't want to be the one who got you to listen to Phoenix's It's Never Been Like That because I convinced you it sounded like the first Strokes album, nor do I want to be the one who got you to listen to the first Strokes record because I couldn't say anything better than that there was some Marquee Moon in there, however tenuous. It's very rare that a record grabs you by the ears though, and then gives you a hug, and certainly not something this aggressive.

When you hear it though, you just know. And that's from someone who knows the difference between getting intoxicated on a melody for a couple of days or weeks, or when it's a balm to soothe or blister something festering, just a little passing music to soothe the savage beast. No, it's usually the case when you like a record right off the bat that you're probably going to get tired of it after a couple dozen listens at most. But there's also another kind of record, a very rare one, that from the first chords of the first song, you know it's going to be a keeper for the long haul, you're going to be pulling this one out ten years from now, and not even dusting it off, because you take it out often enough that it can't even be still long enough to catch a mote.

No, this inexplicably familiar yet incredibly resonant je ne sais quoi is the stuff of the best records if you're not one for genre records. You know, if you're into Nasum, you say "Swedish" and "grindcore" and you're going to be happy, from Skitsystem to Sewn Shut to Regurgitate to Gadget, and that's like, you know, saying the Swedish grindcore equivalents of Snapcase, Scum-era Napalm Death, the band that inspired insipid and sophomoric crap like Gut and XXX Maniak, and the grind equivalent of Metal Church or Dream Theater. Be that as it may, it's still going to be hugely melodic, well-produced, expertly played grind that you will check out just knowing that, and you will dig it, because, well, it sounds like Nasum.

But outside of genres in that sense, just why would you pick up a record because it sounded like X? I mean a) whoever said that is probably wrong, it's a sloppy shorthand that the reviewer or doofster overheard at a show doesn't even know she's using, because Spin and the Village Voice and Trouser Press and NME taught people my age that it's perfectly ok to believe that "Kathleen Hanna pistol-whipping The Melvins in bathroom at a Slits gig" is a satisfactory description of a Babes in Toyland record and b) if you want a record that sounds like X, you're probably not reading this review, you're going to see the video and download it or not download it and play it in your car for a couple of weeks while you drive to the mall or whatever you do, and likely if you're in the b) category, you can't even know about a) anyway, and even if you did, you wouldn't care.

So I'm not allowed to say that Fucked Up maybe kinda sorta sounds like the second coming of the New Bomb Turks, with a MacBook and a totally sweet studio suite instead of a 4-track, a two four of whatever was cheapest and some guy's apartment after the hardware store below closes for the night. It's so much more than that, and yet even if I try and describe it's most obvious and signature elements, what does that say? Major chords and upbeat progressions that recall the best of The Who and Therapy? Midtempo in much the same way that anyone from Husker Du to Mastodon is? Shouted hardcore vocals without either the faux he-man Madball shit or the whiny woe-is-me Orchid shit, a rage that believes in the good in everyone so hard it would make a gospel singer go damn, now those boys are into it.

That's just too easy. Oh-it's-kinda-like-non-hair-band-80s-hard-rock-(think-The-Four-Horsemen)-with-90s-melodic-punk-flavor-(Millencolin-maybe)-and-sorta-hardcore? It's not enough. This band is passionate, and they soar with chords that could be straight from the rocking part of Come Sail Away, except without the pomposity or schmaltz, and yet in the same tune, they are as fiercely punk (meaning pissed off, self-righteous, and more importantly, right) as the NOFX doing Perfect Government, and still have a sound that could turn the head of a Nugent or a Husker or a Mars Volta fan if it were blasting in a Camaro with a T-top. At least if we were writing about the mighty and elusive Drive Like Jehu we'd be allowed to use the F-word (Fugazi that is) and not get sent to the corner to wear the dunce cap for the rest of the period; even by Yank Crime, Fugazi had inspired a whole generation of bands to be punk in a way that simple anger and angularity couldn't describe without saying Fugazi, and it sounded like Fugazi in some way, so that was ok.

This isn't like that. I mean, really, I'm picturing how great this will sound in my brother's car with his 300W speakers cranked and how amazed we will be that he thinks I like a band that could tour with Snapcase and he's willing to listen to a band that has more in common with The Hold Steady sound wise than they do with Unearth. Fucking Manqueller Man starts off so damn happy that I don't even know what to do with it but run out and buy flowers for a stranger and go volunteer at the old folk's home to read them their favorite books. And yet, not only is it immediately familiar, it's a riff that's identical in many songs, just like every single band has a song that uses what would be in barre chords 3rd fret -> 7th fret -> 8th fret, with variations of sometimes going to the 10th after that, or jumping from the 7th to the 10th, or going down the neck instead of up it.

The rub is that in the best possible way, you've heard this, and in most familiar way, you've never heard anything like this. In a town that had a decent rock radio station, this tune could be up there with the top songs of the week, back to back with the latest from Creed or Nickelback or whatever the latest incarnation of that kind of junk is, sandwiched between Black Hole Sun-era Soundgarden and Cheap Trick and you'd go, "Yeah!" and turn it up and tap your fingers on the door with your left elbow leaning on the open window of your 1990 Cavalier. And the poor kids that learn to like My Chemical Romance and Marilyn Manson because they saw Vito's kid in eye makeup and a spiked leather collar on the Sopranos last week, they'll get it too. Your old school punk buddy who bought Pistols records when the band was still around and now only listens to free jazz will perk up her ear and go, "hmmm" and you indie rockers who pretend to get into Four Tet, but have a secret stash of Aisler's Set records you put on when you're doing the dishes, you will want to glue your hands to your sides and pogo. And this is from a band with a whispered and twice repeated, "broken down and beaten down, another day we'll surely rise", and before you can roll your eyes and start typing "hardcore cliché", and trying to think of something nasty to say about Brampton or Etobicoke or wherever they're from, though you haven't yet understood a single shouted word through the whole first verse, you can't miss that the dude is screaming at the chorus, "the triumph of life."

And it's no fucking joke! Even better, you believe it. Because it's true, and they are not at all hesitant in making their joyful noise unto the lord, that just happens to have the volume and snarl of the best of metal and the hooks of every would-be Beatles on the Yellow Pills compilations of power pop unknowns.

It's the real fucking deal folks. It's the record that captivates you until the last of the reverb on the last tune fades out and them makes you get up and walk around the room going damn, damn, DAMN! I have no other way to tell you. My only recommendation in particular is that if you're going to check this out, listen to the whole album. I can hardly say I'd promise you the same if I was reading your blog, but when I first heard of these guys in an Exclaim review, I checked out a tune on their label's site, and while it definitely got my attention, I couldn't have possibly foreseen the force of this record from a single tune. This is a band that, at least by the torrents I started grabbing a couple songs in anticipating needing more before I'd even heard the whole LP, put out nothing but singles for years as if they were protesting the idea of a full-length album. Then they decided to make an LP, and the way that people who will espouse sitting and listening to a long-player all the way through as the only way to experience music, this record is definitely an LP and not a collection of songs. Now in the middle of my third straight listening of a fucking 70 minute record, I can not recommend this record enough. I promise I will report later and see if the wedding was hasty, but I'm confident, even hopeful that this record will continue to open up to me and me to it.

Whatever you do, seek the Hidden World; get Fucked Up.

Dear women grimacing when you spot me checking you out on the mountain

There is a popular notion that every glance is an act of aggression, a deliberate motion to dominate or otherwise battle for power. It is true that male hegemony and dualism runs deep in many of our societal norms; even if unconscious, the boys club works to keep women at a lower level of recognition, status, and dignity for its own sinister purposes, which is to make sure the boys club stays open for business.

You are jogging or riding your bicycle on the mountain to get some exercise. Out of necessity, you wear synthetic and trim-fitting clothing that doesn't restrict your movement, retain moisture, chafe, and so on. You live in town, so the mountain is really the only place where you can go for a good run or ride, the only place where you can go far enough and long enough with enough resistance to elevate your heart rate long enough to get some cardio.

Every day, you can't do a damn thing without men staring at you. Down your shirt as you fish for a metro token from the wheezing jerk behind the glass; an extra portion of chicken and a salad "I make special for you" from that greasy-haired sleazeball at Basha; those dorky coders who always sit down at your table at lunch and sneak sidelong glances at you, even though you have a book; that obnoxious guy in the elevator with the expensive suit smirking who tipped his sunglasses down and peered over them at you, and kept trying to make eye contact even after you rolled your eyes and exhaled with irritation.

People still make jokes about you not knowing how to turn on the computer, though your C is tighter than theirs and bug free. The guy who started at the same time as you was promoted to Senior QA when you have the same credentials, except him and the boss talk for hours about the Habs and Audi vs. Saab, and you do is do your job better and faster than anyone else. As if it weren't bad enough that all advertising, movies, television and magazines portray you as nothing but a body and a pretty face, even when it comes down to the proving ground of plain text log files and tuning reports, there's still no level ground.

Your autonomy is attacked if you wear a skirt or if you wear sweat pants; you can't win either way, a whore or a frump, judged by those unfit to judge the tying of a shoelace. Put on makeup and you're trying to impress someone, but if you don't, what, you're going out like that? You are routinely depersonalized and sexualized and rated and compared, and it's ridiculous, and unfair, and obnoxious, and thoughtless.

So Jesus Christ, will you filthy swine just give it a rest for a second and stop checking me out? Can I run my 5k in peace, can I please just get in a couple good runs and sweat a little without your filthy eyes all over me?

No, you may not.

First of all, I'm looking at you. Mont Royal is a public place. You go there to do as you please, so do I. Part of the rules of living in public is that there is no yours and no mine, it's ours. Within reason of course; there is such a thing as personal space, let's say a foot or so around your person, give or take. That is yours. By necessity, as you inhabit that space for only a moment, you can see out of it; I can see into it. It would be nice to be able to both be outdoors and have some privacy, but this is the tradeoff of living in an urban area. Unless you move to Gaspé, there will be other people around, and sometimes they will look at you, and sometimes they will make eye contact with you. Most of the time, they will not pay attention to you at all. I may look at you.

Make no mistake, I am looking at you. I am moving quickly on my bicycle, 21 km/h uphill after a long day at an unsatisfying job, and for the first and likely only time all day, I am free and completely within my body. There are others around, and because this is our space, and not mine, I am seeking the balance between how fast and hard I can reasonably go while respecting the pace and the space of the others around me. I am after all on a bicycle, and you are on foot and slower than me. I am dodging walkers and joggers and dogs and cops on horses and other bicyclists, and I am riding head on into your path, or you are running directly into my chosen trajectory. I am finding the best way from here to somewhere ahead while respecting your space and the space of others around me. You are in my way.

Once more, I am looking at you. You are on a bike, and you are descending quickly as I ascend, struggling against the slope. Or I am descending at a brisk but careful pace, and you are making a careful and effortful way up the grade. We are the fastest moving traffic, we are the most likely to lose control and cause somebody harm, or harm ourselves. We've all seen at least once a careless biker colliding with a hapless walker or an unsuspecting jogger on the mountain, but that's not you or me. I know how fast I'm going, how much space I need to safely stop, or to clear an obstacle or a fellow park user without causing them alarm. You appear to be reasonable, but I don't make any assumptions. You are in my way.

To be sure, I am looking at you. One trick both cyclists and pedestrians use to determine intent is to make eye contact with drivers, pedestrians and other cyclists; for most people, eye contact is an understanding and a contract, and once it is made, even if you are the type to commit horrendous acts against other people remorselessly, either in private or in the public sphere, we will understand each other whether we think so or not. You see I am faster, or I am crossing, you will wait for me; you see I am slower, and make a motion to cross my path, and I will cede to you; we see that we are moving abreast, and I will not cross your path or enter your space, and you will not cross my path or enter mine. It is obvious to you that you are going straight ahead, or about to cut through the grass, or stop and make a phone call, or run up the hill through the trees - it is not obvious to me. I will meet your eye. I am determining your intent. You meet mine. I am displaying mine.

Again, I am looking at you. People are never so much themselves as when they are finding their internal rhythm, feeling their footfalls, watching their cadence, feeling the tightness in their calves, listening to their elevated heart rate keeping time with their walkmans, for the first time today experiencing some true exertion, which is one of the purest joys of living things. You are irresistible in your grace and your effort, and we are kindred spirits, you and I, seeking that elusive 70% Vo2 Max, or maybe just the thrill of working muscles and passing air and sweat and movement. We are alive, for now. You are perfect, you and I.

How could I not look at you? You are a beautiful woman, and you have a beautiful body. The Lycra covering you can't cover the aching detail of your round and sumptuous ass, those wondrous upper arms and their perfect shape, the softness of your belly twisting under the heaving of your diaphragm and your lungs. Your face is grimacing with effort and exhilaration, beads of sweat clinging to the edge of your hairline, as if we are making love this very moment, lost in the throes of our passion. I am fantasizing about you, tasting the salt on you, our bodies slick. You are the sexiest woman alive, and I want you.

And I really am looking at you. I do have a thing for that 5'10" Brazilian goddess, the one with the ass-length hair and the running outfits more likely seen in a strip club, the legs that went all the way up, all of her taut that you would want taut, all of her jiggling that you would want jiggling. I'm pretty sure she's an experiential marketing campaign, because nobody who goes and jogs on the mountain looks like that, nor does anyone wear everything Nike from their socks to their headphones. But don't be fooled; it's you that I want. You, tiny and impish with those darling wisps of white-blond hair peeking out of your helmet, and starkly angular glasses over your wide-set eyes, you're so tiny that I may have to be arrested if you're a 14 year old girl and not the cutest Swede who walked the earth; your hips do not lie, but your orange full-suspension bike will thrash my meek Schwinn hardtail and you will send me home with my tail between my legs. You, pudgy Greek woman, I am charmed by your determination and your endlessly thick black hair that still can't hide your heavy gold necklaces that you wear even on a power walk; if you were my mother, I would surely have an Oedipus complex, but either way, I want to hug your enormous hips and lose myself in your womanly shape. You, funky and spindly Plateau lady, with your gray hair all over the place and your Salvation Army combo of 1989 fluorescent green men's running shorts and dyed magenta wife-beater that has the shapes of your fingers traced across it from when you were at your easel this afternoon; or were they my fingers, or an invitation to them to be wrapped across your chest as I bury my face in your neck? You, supposedly plain and supposedly out of shape young woman in cutoff jogging pants, looking as if you're not sure you're going to make it to the lookout, though you always make it; that outfit was meant to hide you, but you can't hide when your chest is heaving and your stretched-out collar falls to the side, showing off your powerful shoulder that makes a perfect line on your smooth skin to your delicate jaw, and I will trace it with my lips. It's not every woman I'm looking at - it's you. You are not too fat, too skinny, too mousy, too plain, too tall, too short, too old, too dark, too light, too muscular, too lean. I am looking at you and fantasizing about making love to you.

Though are you sure I'm looking at you, and not you me? I am after all ruggedly handsome, the more so unshaven with lines of sweat drawn across my face as I attempt to keep up 90 rpms to the top of the 6km climb in a pretty big gear. I am trim in Lycra and a snug jersey, and the strain of my effort in pedaling and keeping good climbing posture flatters me more than when I'm standing around in jeans smoking. You, pair of giggling McGill freshmen from Saskatchewan on your way back down to res, psyched at your first summer away on the pretext of getting ahead with summer credits; I know it's me you've got your eye on, because you caught my eye first, brown haired lass, then giggled to your blonde friend, whispering in her ear, and then she did, craning her neck to keep my gaze as I went by; don't got mountains in Regina, do you? You, middle aged lady with a short moussed haircut and a warm-up suit, you got my attention twice, once up, once down, and the second you made just the slightest sinister smirk; don't think I didn't see you looking for me on my second time up, you were staring right at me, trying to look cocky, but you couldn't miss the hunger in your eyes, and do stop me next time and let me know when your husband isn't around. You, chiseled jogger chick in a tube top and a tennis visor, you're used to people checking out your gym-shaped frame, and you want them to, and you seem a little vexed that I didn't; I hope your tongue in the corner of your mouth was you straining to get your HRM to give you the numbers you wanted, but it seemed to go distinctly with how you locked your eyes on mine. You are looking at me and fantasizing about making love to me.

I am looking at you, and I am not looking at you. I am looking at you in that way, and I am not looking at you in that way. I am looking at you as an object in my path, and as a sex object; I am looking at you because the precision of your cadence and the strain of your muscles sing in chorus with my burning lungs and the strain of arms pulling hard on my handlebars. I am making human contact to be sure you will not do something dangerous as I pass, and I am assuring you that your way is safe from me veering into your path.

But most of the time, I'm not even looking at you at all. I have no idea that you're there, and most of the time, even if I'm looking at you, you don't even notice, and most of the time that you notice, you don't care, because you've got better things to do, and so do I. And even if I am looking at you, and lasciviously, what have I done? I'm not accosting you; I'm not going to bother you or badger you or give you an extra pita and wink at you. I promise I won't talk to you, or smile, or lick my lips; I won't follow you or ride beside you or behind you, and I certainly won't touch you. I'm much too busy fighting against my poor legs and lungs and poor diet and smoking habit and 8 hours in front of a computer to even really be thinking about any of these things that I've detailed, at least 99% of the time anyway; I'm here to ride my bike after all, and maybe see the sun a little bit before it sets, and be reminded that there are places in town that cars can't go.

And the other one percent, the part that maybe you're taking issue with, and probably rightly so, is that so bad? In a club, in a bar, at a cafe, in the grocery store, on the dance floor, you're dressed up, or dressed down, or with your friends, or out on the prowl, doing your thing or doing someone else's, or thinking about how to solve that problem with log merging from database queries on multiple machines with different OSes, or wondering if this is enough to maybe write an essay about. You are being someone in particular, or someone else, or exactly yourself, but I will take you as someone in some context, and it will be incomplete or wrong. But when you are running, or biking, you are the simplest and purest you that you can be. Your intentions are irrelevant; out on the path with your muscles straining, you either do it, or you don't, and however you do it, in long strides in fluid motion, or bouncing and inconsistent and huffing and puffing, with even cadence pulling all the way around the crank and zipping by, or mashing in the big ring at 20 rpms as if you're unsure why bikes have shifters, it is right and a fine thing. You are the most perfect you, exactly you, elegant in your effort and your sweat, and even if I was checking you out, and I sometimes am, wouldn't the truest and most perfect you be the one I ought to ? I mean, you know you better than I do - could you resist?

I'm sorry if you felt uncomfortable, though I won't apologize for what I did. I am aware that my justification smacks of the same sexism and judgment that I supposedly oppose. I celebrate you, and I know that it's not for me to celebrate, but your perfection is impossible not to drink in for a moment. Obviously I must admit that despite my suggestions that I was possibly doing otherwise, and likely was, I may have been. It was innocent. I am not a threat, and I certainly don't intend to make you feel any way at all; two ships and all that. I mean no disrespect; quite the opposite, I mean to respect you in every way possible, protect you as much as possible, or at least protect me, and maybe, very rarely, but maybe, and with the utmost sincerity, praise you for the length of a glance, for your light and grace, for the goddess that you are, and for your beautiful, beautiful ass.

I hope we can still be friends.

Anyway, I'll see you on the mountain.

Suspension of Disbelief

Yes, loyal reader, it is 9:30 PM and March in Southern Quebec. Yes, it is truly 50 degrees. Yes, I did ride down to pick up a new-to-me disc brake in a short-sleeved shirt (Thanks Seb). Yes, I did take the goddam plastic off the windows and yes, yes, yes, they are open, and the winter gloom of this apartment is seeping out slowly like breaths in reverse.

The world is open for business again. The snow is melting, the Montrealers are sitting outside at cafes in scarves and sunglasses, and the light of the sun warms instead of taunting, so it's time to get a few things straight.

The lack of light and dearth of warmth makes brains and hearts work differently; if you don't think the suns rays and plunging mercury have any effect on what makes humans work, check out these reviews of the new Explosions In The Sky record. I don't know a person who wouldn't freely admit that they experience to some degree symptoms consistent with Seasonal Affective Disorder, so I think maybe the record reviewers of the world might take note of this when they look in the mirror to shape their bedhead, groom their stubble, or adjust the angle of their plastic-framed glasses.

Now, let me make it known first and foremost that I am not an impartial observer here. I adore this band, and think they make some of the most beautiful, vital, and necessary music here in the early 21st century. More importantly, they do it without histrionics, without pretense, without outfits; they play music. That's something that gets overlooked pretty frequently, especially by people who write about music. The periphery, the backstory, the incidental Paul is deads and 16 years in the making and countings seem to take up so much space that there's little left when it comes to saying an actual thing about the music contained on a silvery aluminum and plastic or grooved vinyl disc.

And is that such a surprise? Not even getting to the blogosphere, RSS feeds from the Pitchfork newswire, or that so much of our entertainment and art is about entertainment and art these days, what real purpose does writing about music have? We use music in so many different ways, with nearly any possible purpose in mind - a wash of sound or a drumbeat to tick off the hours at work, to match a heart rate to on a treadmill, to blow up and let go or look inside and quietly implode, or combined with some trick lighting to set off an otherwise uninspired Shiraz and supermarket cheese with a refrigerator chill still clinging to it. And sometimes, sometimes we actually listen to it closely, let it permeate our senses, and let it be what we're doing, and sometimes, if the timing is right and the neurotransmitters and the moon are in the right balance, we might actually feel something about it.

If that's actually the case, what's to be said about it? Do I love Fidelity by Regina Spektor because I first heard it drunk having a lousy time during a night's drinking with my brother while he began to fight with his girlfriend, and it was a little light in the darkness of an otherwise rotten night in a string of rotten nights that made a rotten Christmas at home? Because the first and last verse happened to describe how I was feeling at the time about my own life? Because she's pretty? If it was that easy to figure out, it would be a trivial exercise to deduce that my reaction to and interest in this song has little to do with the song itself and the music it's made of, and a whole lot more to do with where I was, where I was at, and what I was doing.

Whether or not these are the "actual" reason this song hits me over the head with a club and drags me back to its cave isn't clear. And it stays that way because the suspension of disbelief a pretty powerful persuasion. Without it, we wouldn't get swept off our feet by a song as often as we do. I can't describe why the line in Samson from the same album, "and the history books forgot about us/and the bible didn't mention us/not even once" raises the hair on the back of my neck and gives me a chill every damn time I hear it. I like it that way. It stays mysterious and beautiful and makes me want to place my hands flat on her cheeks and kiss her on the lips, because I fall in love with something every time I hear that line, and the seconds it lasts endure for a depthless eternity and then are gone again in an instant; requited; perfect.

That's a great, great thing, sure. But why would you care? I mean you, cherished reader. Working hard at making that a good and memorable description of what I'm getting at was a bit of work, because I know whoever you are, you aren't me. Like it or not, Fuck Your Jetta is written with an audience in mind, and even if it's only me, it's not the same as the writer. It may not be apparent, but the whole reason I write this is so it reads good to someone who likes to read things something of the sort that I like to read. The parts where the writer gets carried away are obvious and humbling, make no mistake. I may have the benefit of having been the person to have written it, so I can see the bits that I couldn't resist leaving in because they sounded good in the writing of it, or that I just had to get in, but as the reader, they jump out and elicit howls of pain or frustration when I read them just the same.

So, we've got a tall order - extract that universal something from a piece of music, a record, a band, and render in words somehow the ineffable thing that touched you, and is bound to, or should, touch the other you, the you that means you and not me talking about myself. And all without actually knowing what thing in the song is doing the stirring, what reorders synapses to spell YES and makes you want to kiss strangers singing on the radio.

You suspend disbelief, and you run with it, and you write that songs leap tall buildings in a single bound and cause so many angels to dance on the head of a pin, and maybe, somewhere, that resonates with someone. Or they go out and listen to the record, or they nod and say you're right, or whatever the goals of writing about music are beside writing and music.

There's another kind of suspension of disbelief though; or it's the same, but it's looking through the glass from the other side, and this is what concerns me of what I perceive to be popular critical opinion of All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone. Explosions In The Sky make instrumental rock music, yes. Their songs tend to the longer side, yes. A label distributed outside of the big 4 (or however many major labels are left these days) puts out their records, yes. There is already in the recent history of independent music a certain number of bands that also make music without singing and put out records without mainstream distribution, yes. It's almost as if this band's problem is that they only thing they have to distinguish themselves in a seemingly bottomless pit of parallels with other bands from Tangerine Dream to Tarentel is that their music is beautiful and well-crafted.

They don't have haircuts. Rarely if ever do they date Kate Moss and cancel tours because they got caught by the fuzz scoring drugs in Hull. There are no extended "arty" parts in their songs where they plink plink plink randomly and "play" with "space" and "texture". There are no "found sounds", electronics, guest spots, cameos, or famous producers. They do not step up to declare a love either for some little-discussed genre or nearly forgotten artist that doesn't get its or their due, nor to put themselves in line with whatever the latest buzz is. They don't speak out against current trends in music, and they don't make soundtracks to imaginary films; probably to the detriment of their indie cred, they make soundtracks to actual films that work very well both in feel and in terms of movement and emotional bent.

No, EITS are not a Post Rock band, and since it's not 1997, we won't even get into Post Rock not being a thing at all. They are not Mogwai or Godspeed! You Black Emperor, and despite having no singer and song lengths that tend to extend beyond the 3 minute mark, they have little to do with this sort of band that unfortunately gets lumped together for no good reason besides that they too are instrumental and have longer songs. They have no art bent; there is no wankery, no improvisation, no nods to John Cage or 20th century classical or minimalism or musique concrete.

Not that any of those things are necessarily bad, but it seems to me that EITS's latest record, which is their greatest triumph and a cohesive and beautiful album as rich with color, movement and emotion as Degas' dancers, is getting dissed because it doesn't take any potshots, doesn't jump off of any buildings, and dares to just say something simply and humbly, and not say something about how it's saying it.

I haven't heard hardly any of the records Brian Howe has reviewed, but I find it strange that this record ties for his second lowest score for ones he's written about for Pitchfork. Even more so when in the second paragraph he practically complains that they make "elongated guitar shapes contort through various stages of dim shimmer and blinding incandescence" and that "the quiet parts, dominated by trembling strands of silvery guitar, are unaccountably tense, while the screaming guitar meltdowns they always lead to retain a pleasant lullaby quality, so that each mode holds the other in balanced suspension." Maybe I just don't have an appreciation for his use of their 1.0 to 10 rating scale, since he gives most of the records he reviews for them about a 7; maybe he's the type that says no one can ever get an A+ or a 10 out of 10 because that means perfection has been reached, and we ain't ever going to get there.

It sounds more to me that this fellow, and his comrade Mike Powell at Stylus, are suspending their disbelief in the music and focusing on peripheral elements. The words that they use sound not just like praise, but practically come alive in tripping over themselves in trying to find more synonyms for "beautiful" and "expansive", "breathless" and "soaring" to describe the music on this album, then turn around to condemn the band for it. Is the problem that there isn't any noodling? That they have forged their own aesthetic and shed any of the pretensions and baggage that their supposed peers dabble to revel in?

A record isn't supposed to do anything but play, and a band isn't supposed to do anything but play it. If you come to this album expecting finely honed melody expanded upon with tension and release, then piled with "experimentation", meaning sloppiness, or unedited meandering, you've come to the wrong place. This record is tight and full, and its only crime is that it's so good that it will be perfectly fine to listen to for another couple of years until they come up with another one, rather than being interesting for a couple listens and then having nothing else to get out of it.

Maybe a release date of February 20th is perfect for an Explosions In The Sky record, the better to pull you out of SADness - contrary to some opinions, even those of the band itself, this album and their last are not sad and brooding, but a soaring celebration, exploding with life and love. And maybe, just maybe, if you have to write record reviews by the weak trickle of winter light, the yearning that the record aches with echoes a little too much the yearning for the sun that has been absent for far too long. Our hearts and brains, after all, are just objects, and look out your window a month ago and you'd see grey and cold, and despite the warmth coming from the speakers that rings in our blood, it's easy to forget that the winter can make us say "ah Christ, what's the point?"

Well, winter's over.