It’s Ok To Admit You Don’t Know Things, Hank Rollins

Yes, yes, y’all, it’s not hipster, elitist hype — vinyl sounds better. Much better. There is actual music in those grooves. Technically speaking, there is no music whatsoever on a CD. Lots of information but no music.

Yes, yes, y’all, I know it’s supposed to be a metaphor and a commentary (unwitting or not) on the atavistic power we imbue objects with, but c’mon. Using that tortured line of reasoning his column isn’t actually language, just a computer spitting out numbers and stuff.

Add a text-to-speech program and it isn’t even reading.

To be fair, Hank is what he is and he is damn good at being what he is. And I don’t disagree about the power of youth, of objects, of the way things used to be, of taking care and control. But he’s also completely ridiculous, and probably not entirely unintentionally.

I think most music fans of the oldster variety would agree that walking up to their 12 year old (pre-internet, pre-mp3) budding music dork selves and saying “See this thing that looks like a deck of playing cards? There are hundreds of albums on this with no tape hiss and you can hear new music in seconds.” The only thing coming close to being more exciting than introducing the files-without-borders world of internet music distribution to our pre-internet selves would be introducing global pornography distribution to that same set of chronic masturbators.

Bruce Lamont – Feral Songs For The Epic Decline

I never dug Yakuza. Left me cold like an unheated meat sandwich.

But the lead singer channeling Michael Gira and Bill Laswell‘s Axiom Ambient saxophone moments? Fuck yeah.

And it’s six bucks from his myspace page for mp3s, which is what you’re going to listen to eventually anyway. Get on it already.