MONDAY AMG UPDATE

Here are links to 15 new reviews:

The Accused, The Curse of Martha Splatterhead
Augury, Fragmentary Evidence
Brownout, Aguilas and Cobras
Creatures, I, Lucifer
Crucifist, Demon-Haunted World
Evile, Infected Nations
Kids Like Us, The Game
Laudanum, The Coronation
Pacha Massive, If You Want It
Skeletonwitch, Breathing the Fire
Skinlab, The Scars Between Us
SubArachnoid Space, Eight Bells
Vader, Necropolis
White Wizzard, High Speed GTO
Your Demise, Ignorance Never Dies

INCLUDES BONUS MATERIAL NOT ON CD

This is the same performance heard on Love Power Peace: Live At The Olympia, Paris 1971, but on the CD version, Bootsy Collins' solo is cut. I don't know why.

MEET MY NEIGHBOR

ONLY 24 HOURS IN A DAY, ONLY 12 NOTES THAT A MAN CAN PLAY

[The following is not meant as a personal attack on Joe Morris. I know Joe, I like him, I am a fan of his music. This is a statement about free jazz in general, with him as an example.]

Do relentlessly prolific out-jazz musicians sabotage themselves by tossing new CDs into a flood-tide of superficially similar releases? Today I listened to two upcoming albums - Fire!'s You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago, on Rune Grammofon, and the Joe Morris Quartet's Today on Earth, on AUM Fidelity. Fire! (punctuation in original) is a new project featuring saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (who also plays electronics and Fender Rhodes); this is but the latest entry in an intimidatingly deep catalog that includes work with the groups The Thing, Two Bands and a Legend, Original Silence, Diskaholics Anonymous Trio, and collaborations with Peter Brötzmann and equally session-happy drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. (All this was garnered from a cursory glance at the website for the Smalltown Superjazz label, which puts most of this material out.) The Joe Morris Quartet album is his eighth full-length release of 2009, his sixth as a leader or co-leader. (I've heard four of the discs he led or co-led, and the two on which he was a sideman. They're all very good.) He appeared on 11 albums in 2008, and has played on approximately 45 releases (my eyes may have glazed over while counting) since the turn of the millennium. Now granted, this doesn't come close to the audio diary-keeping of Anthony Braxton, but is Braxton really a model to be emulated in this regard? I guess what I'm wondering is, what's the business rationale for doing this? I assume that there must be one. Can it be pure fatalism - a conviction that one is destined to sell only a few hundred or a couple of thousand copies of each album, so frequent trips to the well (the well being the free jazz fan's wallet/bank account) are excusable? Is there a presumption that free jazz fans are, indeed, willing to subsidize a favorite artist to this degree? Because speaking from personal experience, I can offer a few reasons why I think this is an ill-advised strategy.

1) I just don't think there are that many people willing to buy five or ten Joe Morris CDs every year. I am a free jazz fan, but I am also a critic; therefore, I get albums in the mail, for free. As much as I enjoy these records, and have written favorable reviews of some of them, if I wasn't getting them for free I don't think I could be convinced to purchase more than one or two of them. Because...

1a) A flood-tide of material, to me at least, only serves to devalue each individual disc. Again, drawing from personal experience: I decided I wanted to hear all the Blue Note releases by Freddie Hubbard. There were eight of them (Blue Spirits, Breaking Point, Goin' Up, Here to Stay, Hub Cap, Hub-Tones, Open Sesame and Ready for Freddie - if I'm missing any, please alert me in comments). I found that totally manageable. Joe Morris's discography, by contrast, numbers in the dozens and is scattered across 26 labels, some of which no longer exist. Hearing all of it is pretty clearly an unmanageable task. And even if I was able to stack all of his releases up in front of me, how would I decide which to prioritize? Sure, each one is a beautiful and unique snowflake, but taken together they are a snowdrift. Each piece of the whole becomes insignificant, each album or CD no more than proof that a recording session occurred. In this way, the title of the new album, Today on Earth, appears heavy with irony. Today, Joe Morris went into the recording studio with some other musicians. In a week or so, he'll probably do it again. And on and on. When an artist puts out one album every two or three years, that album has a gravity, an impact, that simply would be lost if it were the third release to hit stores under his name that month. Which leads me to...

1b) What is a neophyte listener to make of this? For decades, it's been pretty easy to trace your way through jazz if you so choose. Pick up an album someone more knowledgeable recommends. If you like it, make a list of the personnel, whose names will more than likely be on the back. Go find some more records they play on. Repeat as often as you like. And that can still happen. But it seems to me that the almost compulsive productivity of some in the free/avant-jazz community only serves to baffle and intimidate the new listener, who will gaze upon a shelf in, say, Downtown Music Gallery containing a dozen or more titles by a single musician and say, in effect, "I don't know...this one? That one? Ah, the hell with it." You know those scenes in movies where the immigrant from some impoverished nation arrives in America and is dumbstruck by the awe-inspiring variety of, say, the grocery store's breakfast cereal aisle? That's how a brand-new potential free jazz fan will feel, gazing upon the shelves in a record store that even stocks this stuff - or, say, the vendors' section at the Vision Festival or a similar event.

It may seem weird and counterintuitive, but I believe that if free jazz artists want to start playing to audiences beyond the already converted, they need to make fewer records, not more. Let people catch up, dammit!

MONDAY AMG ROUNDUP

Here's nine of the latest...

Ambassador Gun, When in Hell
Anvil, This is Thirteen
Bloody Panda, Summon
Colin of Arabia, Pain Machines
Liturgy, Renihilation
Chuck Mosley, Will Rap Over Hard Rock for Food
Oxbow, Fuckfest
Showbread, The Fear of God
Tyrant, Prepare for Devastation

I also wrote a review of the New Christs' Gloria that was unused (apparently, they double-assigned it), so here's that...

The New Christs
Gloria
Impedance
The New Christs aren’t as convulsive, as headlong, or as catchy as Radio Birdman were. But Birdman vocalist Rob Younger’s current band, an on-again/off-again aggregation of punk-informed rockers playing stripped-down, occasionally psychedelic music with a swinging backbeat and clear antecedents in everyone from the Hoodoo Gurus to Jim Carroll. Perhaps the clearest influence, though, is Iggy Pop’s early ’80s work on Arista Records; from its central riff to Younger’s elegantly wasted vocal delivery, “The Wheel” is practically a rewrite of Iggy’s “Get Up And Get Out.” There’s also a Berlin-era Bowie vibe on “Psych Nurse,” with its extended piano solo and buzzy horns. Overall, Gloria is a little too slow, not quite rocking enough, to keep a listener’s attention (a few songs, like “Daddy’s Calling” and “The Posse,” just seem to drift away). But there are some enjoyable moments, and it ends on a pretty high note with the revved-up “Bonsoir a Vous.”

DEVIL'S MUSIC

Heaven and Hell keeps the Sabbath unholy

[From the Cleveland Scene.]

Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice, who collectively recorded Black Sabbath's Mob Rules and Dehumanizer albums (Appice didn't play on Heaven and Hell; he joined for the 1980 tour), didn't reform as Heaven and Hell because they were afraid of pissing off Sharon Osbourne. Iommi owns the Black Sabbath name, after all. Rather, they did it so they could focus on the songs they recorded during the Dio years. You won't be hearing "Paranoid" or "War Pigs" at their concerts.

It's a wise decision. Dio-era Sabbath was a whole different beast from the Ozzy-fronted version. A lot had to do with lyrical perspective; Dio's mythic archetype-mongering was a far cry from the gloomy, occult blues of the early years, when bassist Butler wrote most of the words. Where the hyper-theatrical Dio came off like a wizard on a mountaintop, Butler's lyrics seemed to come from the perspective of a terrified peasant below.

"When we did 'Children of the Sea,' I think that was the first one we wrote together, and that showed that I was more than capable of doing it," recalls Dio. "And Geezer really didn't want to write. When I came in, he said, 'You're gonna write the lyrics, aren't you?' and I said, 'Well, I certainly hope so,' and he said, 'Oh, thank God, that's one job I never wanted.'"

In a relatively short time, Dio made Sabbath his own, ultimately mixing the heroic posturing with a dark and twisted worldview that persists to this day and has been hugely influential on generations of metal musicians and fans.

"I think lyrically I started to make the band a lot more cynical than it was before," he says. "And I kept the fantasy writing and the kind of mythic attitude for the Dio band. I let that be a separate compartment. And if you listen to the new album, there are a lot of cynical things in it, like the song 'Eating the Cannibals.' So at this point I'm staying quite away from the mythical end of it, with the exception of 'Bible Black.'"

The band was a lot faster and more aggressive with Dio up front and Brooklyn-born Appice in back. Tony Iommi displayed an unexpected melodic flair and fleet dexterity on the fretboard, tearing through songs like "Neon Knights" and "The Mob Rules" with an almost punk-rock intensity. Behind his bandmates, Appice pounded the drums like a caveman, abandoning the almost jazzy grooves original drummer Bill Ward had constructed in favor of a thundering assault. This was welcomed by the group's remaining English members. "They never said 'Oh, don't play that' or 'Can you make it more like this?' They never said anything," says Appice.

After only a few years, of course, Sabbath V2 split, with Dio and Appice going on to form Dio the band. In 1992, they rejoined Iommi and Butler for Sabbath's underrated Dehumanizer and its attendant tour, then departed again as quickly as they'd arrived. Fifteen years after that, all four men came together once more, recording three new songs for the Black Sabbath compilation The Dio Years.

"I hadn't seen everybody in six, seven years, Ronnie in four or five years, and within five minutes after I walked in, it was like nothing had happened," says Appice. "We were still hanging out."

The group embarked on a short tour of Canada under the Heaven and Hell banner, then played (and recorded) a blistering gig at New York's Radio City Music Hall. It was only after all this that the decision was made to record a new studio album, The Devil You Know.

It's a crushingly heavy album, closer in spirit to early Black Sabbath than the previous Dio-era records. The lyrics are almost Old Testament sermons on sin and punishment, something Dio attributes to the influence of the outside world.

"It's not just the recession, but threat of nuclear war, the Middle East, the economy, what's going on in Africa — all those things you can't help but be part of and influence you somehow," he says.

Still, it's not totally despairing.

"None of the songs end with 'OK, and now we're going to die,'" says Dio. "My manner is always to let people know that someone out there feels the same, and luckily I've got a stage to speak for them."

And musically, it's brilliant. Songs like "Rock & Roll Angel" and "Bible Black" allow Tony Iommi in particular to stretch out, playing delicate acoustic verses and soloing in a subtly psychedelic manner reminiscent of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. "We could certainly do another album, without a doubt," says a justifiably confident Dio. "When and if that will be is something else."

HEAVEN & HELL RISE AGAIN

The Return of Dio-era Black Sabbath

[From this week's Village Voice.]

Black Sabbath aren't just one of the founding bands of heavy metal—they're also a landmark group in the history of English rock. So how did their early-'80s lineup come to include two Italian guys from New York?

Born in New Hampshire but soon relocated and raised upstate in Cortland, New York, Ronnie James Dio had been fronting bands (Ronnie and the Red Caps, Ronnie Dio and the Prophets, etc.) since the '50s. "When you start, you do cover material, and whatever happened to be around, we did it," he recalls by phone from his home in California. "We did a lot of blues, a lot of r&b material very popular back East—people like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, the Isley Brothers, James Brown, those kinds of people. You did what was put in front of you."

Dio moved with the times, of course, drifting toward a heavy blues-rock sound influenced by Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. Eventually, he and his band Elf were hired to back newly ex-Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. After three studio albums and a live disc with Blackmore's group Rainbow, Dio walked away and, in 1980, was hired to front Black Sabbath after Ozzy Osbourne's dismissal. Over the course of only two studio albums and a double-live disc, he completely reshaped the band in his own image. Whereas Osbourne sang lyrics (mostly written by bassist Geezer Butler) that dealt with war, drug addiction, and an almost medievally primitive Christianity, Dio's more operatic style was better suited to mythopoetic hyperbole. Behind him, the band grew faster and more melodically complex, exchanging the pounding Tony Iommi riffs and bluesy throb of the '70s for a pumped-up, arena-ready sound that let them compete with relative upstarts like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn-based drummer Vinny Appice was working his way up the industry ladder. Having grown up watching his older brother Carmine play with Vanilla Fudge and Cactus, a teenaged Vinny began hanging around the Record Plant studio in Manhattan and drumming for a funk-rock band. He popped up on some mid-'70s John Lennon sessions and spent several years backing Rick Derringer. Like Dio, though, he was drawn to heavier material: "I did listen to Black Sabbath, though not that much," he recalls. "I listened to Blue Cheer, Hendrix, Zeppelin. I used to put the turntable on at 16 and say, 'Listen to how heavy that is.' " He hears a direct connection between that sound and the metal of today: "Now, there's all these detuned guitars, with five-string basses and stuff."

In 1980, Appice got two phone calls within a month of each other. The first was an offer to join Ozzy Osbourne's band; after consulting with Carmine about Ozzy ("I asked my brother, 'Isn't he crazy?' And he said, 'Yeah, he's pretty crazy' "), he said no. The second was a gig filling in for Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, whose alcoholism had worsened after Osbourne's departure and Dio's entrance, ultimately forcing his longtime bandmates to fire him. "We had like three rehearsals, and then we had to go play Hawaii, which was a big stadium gig," Appice laughs. "And Tony and Geezer had never played with another drummer other than Bill Ward. So it was an interesting situation there, you know?"

Only two years later, Dio left after disputes over the live album Live Evil. He felt his vocals were too low in the mix, and the album art minimized his role in the group. He asked Appice to come with him, and they set about forming the band Dio. "I decided, 'I know Ronnie, we communicate pretty well, we're both from the same part of the country, we're both Italian, this'll be fun,'" the drummer recalls. In 1992, of course, both men returned for Sabbath's Dehumanizer album and tour. Now, under the name Heaven & Hell (a decision made not—as some might suspect—at Sharon Osbourne's insistence that they avoid the "Black Sabbath" moniker entirely, but to indicate that the Dio-era material is the focus; don't expect to hear "Paranoid" or "War Pigs" live), they've recorded a doomy, raging new album, The Devil You Know, and are playing before rapturous crowds.

Somewhat ironically, given how fundamentally Dio altered the band's sound back in 1980, The Devil You Know is closer kin to Paranoid or Master of Reality than Dio-era Sabbath landmarks Heaven and Hell or Mob Rules. "I think you can hear phrases that have a little more blues, which is what Tony's influences were in the beginning," Dio says. "So, yeah, it harks back to the earlier things they did. It certainly wasn't a conscious effort by anyone—we just happen to write what we write. This is who we are, this is what you get."

There may be time to truly revisit the sound of Black Sabbath circa 1980, though—Dio seems to believe Heaven & Hell may have another album in them. He's making no promises, though: "We've tried to take this very slowly. Having had a history of not lasting terribly long at different junctures in our career, we feel like if we don't make too many plans for the future, everything will be a lot better."

In a similar spirit of keeping things light, Appice couldn't resist pranking his bandmates at the initial reunion. "I told [Ronnie's wife/manager] Wendy Dio, 'I just gotta tell you this, I gained a lot of weight, man. I had to get a special stool made for the drums.' So I arrive at Tony's house, and they were all in the other room, and they kinda peeked around the corner to see what I looked like, and I'd actually lost weight. They were like, 'Aah, you bastard!'"

MARDUK RETURNS TO NYC

From the Village Voice's Sound Of The City blog:

Black metal fans rejoiced (or whatever the black metal equivalent of rejoicing is) on Saturday night, as the legendary Swedish band Marduk returned to New York for their first performance here since 2001, preceded by a Friday night meet-and-greet at Duff's in Brooklyn and a pre-show listening session for their new album Wormwood, on board the tour bus. This was the final night of a three-show mini-tour booked after a co-headlining slot on the Blackenedfest tour, with the equally revered Mayhem, fell through back in May.

Two New York-area bands opened the Gramercy Theater bill. Tombs' short hair and lack of theatricality made their thundering drum sound and minimalist, dissonant riffs all the more impressive. Their bare-chested drummer raised his arms above his head regularly to muster greater force, even standing up at one point and pounding the kit like he was in Swans or Einstürzende Neubaten. Black Anvil were more traditional in their look (long hair, serious ink) and approach. Their most "black metal" moments were their weakest; whenever they got heavier and thrashier, betraying their hardcore roots (the members are also in Kill Your Idols), they were at their best. Withered plays black metal mixed with thrash - their almost Mastodon-ish two-guitar interplay and their dual vocals (one high, one low, trading lines on some songs) were another pleasant surprise. They closed their set with a brand-new song, "From Shadows," which didn't really sound any different from what had come before it, but that was a good thing.

Finally, after an eight-year wait, Marduk took the stage in corpse paint - the only band of the night to do so. With a taped intro, a militaristic/ominous semi-industrial loop reminiscent of Laibach, they emerged to roars and chants from the packed house. Founding guitarist Morgan Håkansson and bassist Magnus Andersson stood facing their amplifiers, arms behind their backs, as drummer Lars Brodesson took his place. Frontman Daniel "Mortuus" Rosten emerged, arms spread wide like a professional wrestler, inciting ever louder screams. They immediately launched into a blasting set that stretched all the way from their debut, 1992's Dark Endless, through later albums like 1998's Nightwing and 1999's Panzer Division Marduk and up to the present. Mortuus has a progressive, avant-garde solo project, Funeral Mist, that's clearly influenced recent Marduk efforts like 2007's Rom 5:12 and the forthcoming Wormwood, but his delivery on old-school blasts like "Burn My Coffin" and "Baptism By Fire" had an undeniable, even intimidating power.

Black metal can be trebly and unpleasant on disc, but Marduk's sound was a room-filling roar, with Mortuus's vocals chewing through the mix like a rabid bear. He tossed his hair with impressive ferocity when not glaring out at the chanting, horn-throwing crowd and bruising circle pit. Mid-set, he raised a goblet of cow's blood to his lips, drinking some but pouring much of it down his face and chest. Håkansson and Andersson were slightly more stone-faced, headbanging furiously, but mostly aloof. Perhaps they were thinking about the set list, which apparently was different at each of the three U.S. shows. Still, Gene Simmons (the father of corpse paint?) would have been pleased by the showmanship on display. Let's just hope they come back before 2017.

TONY JAA 33, ANONYMOUS HENCHMEN 0

THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN FROM CORWOOD

David Keenan blogs about the experience of touring Northern Ireland as Jandek's drummer.

Money quote:

What struck me the most is that the bulk of Jandek fans don't really seem to come out of experimental or improvised music. Most of them dig Jandek as a singer-songwriter - albeit a 'weird' one - and so listen to his music in an entirely different way to someone, say, who came out of listening to more avant garde music like Keiji Haino or Derek Bailey. Bailey's audience assumes intentionality, some kind of deliberate aesthetic or conceptual choice behind the use of new, awkward or unconventional rhythms, tones, harmonies etc. But for many Jandek fans, because they see him as someone who is 'trying' to play songs, they rarely judge the music as being intentional, it's more like he 'can't' play in time - because he's an 'outsider artist' - than he actually made the decision to play in a different time. It's not that his accompanists are 'unable' to play 'in time' with him, they're actually trying to work out new ways of relating rhythmically. Jandek is an artist, not some kind of dysfunctional musical savant. It is all about the music. That's how it's supposed to sound. He's not trying to get somewhere and falling short.

SHAMELESSLY PLUGGING A SECONDHAND PLUG

Simon Reynolds has a really interesting roundup of new books by folks he knows, and one of them is by me. Which is my excuse to remind you that you should buy my book, preferably as soon as you finish reading this sentence. It's really good, I swear, and I could use the money.

FRIDAY NIGHT AMG ROUNDUP

10 new reviews:

Ahab, The Divinity of Oceans
Greymachine, Disconnected
Keelhaul, Keelhaul's Triumphant Return to Obscurity
King Cannibal, Let the Night Roar
The Ocean, Fluxion (reissue)
Onslaught, Live Damnation
Swashbuckle, Back to the Noose
Syrach, A Dark Burial
Tenet, Sovereign
Various Artists, Si Para Usted: The Funky Beats of Revolutionary Cuba, Vol. 2

NO JUSTIFICATION NECESSARY, I HOPE.

THIS WEEK IN SF

Los Amigos Invisibles attempt "Commercial" success

In case you weren't aware, Los Amigos Invisibles are from Venezuela. It's a fact the band has mentioned in every one of its previous album titles. The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozadera, Arepa 3000: A Venezuelan Journey Into Space, and Superpop Venezuela — you get the idea. Not this time, though. With surprising candor, Los Amigos Invisibles' latest release is called Commercial.

Guitarist and primary songwriter José Luis Pardo explains the shift in titles rose from an awareness that "all the albums we have done have been kind of left-field for the market." This time he focused on creating something more approachable. "The word 'commercial' was bad for a long time, but we wanted to play with it, say up front what we want to do with this record."

Commercial is the band's most immediately listener-friendly release. The songs are distinct, rather than bleeding together as on earlier albums (and in the band's performances, which Pardo likens to DJ sets, with their seamless transitions). Latin rhythms mix with disco beats and funk guitars to inspire pure, hedonistic pleasure, a mood accentuated by the lighthearted lyrics. Commercial is unironically retro, creating a '70s cruise-ship vibe on "Vivire Para Ti" and the English-language "In Luv with U."

The idea of actually being a traveling Love Boat band appeals to Pardo, who'll play anywhere, anytime. "I'd love to go on a Caribbean tour," he says. "The farthest we've ever gone was Australia, and Turkey. You'd be amazed how much the heritage of Turkey has in common with Latin America."

Commercial is augmented by several guest appearances, an idea that has been building for a while, according to Pardo. "Whenever we'd meet a musician we like, we'd say, 'We should do something,'" he says. This being 2009, the partnerships were handled via e-mail and file exchanges to FTP servers. The most notable cameo, a perky duet vocal on "Vivire," comes from Natalia Lafourcade, a cherubic art-popper who is rapidly becoming Mexico's answer to Björk. "She did what she did, sent it over, and we were totally freaking out, like, this is brilliant," says Pardo, who claims Lafourcade's new album Hu Hu Hu "will be a classic. It's gonna be the most important record in Hispanic music for a long time."

Though they didn't take the stage together, Lafourcade and Los Amigos recently performed in New York at the annual Latin Alternative Music Conference. Pardo isn't entirely comfortable with the name of the gathering, remarking, "When you say 'alternative,' it means something that's not for everybody." He admits to leading a band of outsiders, however: "When people think of Latin music, they think of Enrique Iglesias or Shakira or somebody like that ... mainstream music you hear on Telemundo." Los Amigos Invisibles definitely aren't mainstream, but they've been hipster favorites for a while, releasing several albums on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label before jumping to Nacional for the latest record.

It's unclear how important being known as a Latin act, alternative or otherwise, really is to music fans. Though the '90s generation of progressive Latin bands — Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Café Tacuba, Aterciopelados — prized regional identity, younger acts like the Pinker Tones have appeared ethnically ambiguous. Pardo sees the overall tide turning next to Latin self-identification. "Everyone goes through the phase of denying your culture and then embracing it through your music," he says. Los Amigos have always split the difference, emphasizing their nationality while making music that can be enjoyed by listeners internationally. Pardo says namechecking their country "seemed like a lucky charm for us," but there was a downside, too: "In record stores, they put us right into the world music section."

So now that they've gone Commercial, will the Venezuelan side of Los Amigos fade into the background? Pardo is blasé about the prospect. "People who know Los Amigos know we're from Venezuela," he says. "There's no need to say it anymore."

L'IGGY

French TV, 1977:

THREE IS THE MAGIC NUMBER

James Gang, 1971:

SEE YOU AT THE RECORD STORE

From today's New York Times arts section:

Every couple of years in hip-hop the party relocates. From Atlanta it went to Houston, then the Bay Area, then Miami, and then back to Atlanta. (New York? Not in ages.) During the last year and a half it’s landed in Dallas, which has become an unexpected hotbed of post-snap-music dance-craze rap, thanks to Lil Wil’s “My Dougie,” B-Hamp’s “Do the Ricky Bobby” and the GS Boyz’s “Stanky Legg.” All those synchronized moves? Dorrough will have none of it. A Dallas rapper with a pair of hits, “Ice Cream Paint Job” and “Walk That Walk,” that require no predetermined dance steps, Dorrough has more in common with the city’s rougher voices, like Big Tuck, Tum Tum or Fat Pimp.

How many New York Times readers will be running out to purchase Dorrough's album, do you suppose? How many have heard of Big Tuck, Tum Tum or Fat Pimp? How many know what snap music is?

I am not arguing that paying attention to Dallas hip-hop is beneath the dignity of the New York Times; I am arguing that if your readers don't care, you are not obligated to attempt to make them care, particularly when you're an elite-audience newspaper that's losing money and eyeballs at a prodigious pace. Concentrate on keeping your core audience satisfied, Timespeople. Write about jazz and classical and big-name Boomer-generation artists. Fifteen-year-old boys and girls (Dorrough's audience) are not reading your paper, and reviewing his album will not entice them to do so.

WHY I DID NOT ATTEND THE BRUTAL TRUTH/REPULSION/PIG DESTROYER SHOW ON FRIDAY NIGHT

• It was raining.
• It was in Brooklyn.
• While I enjoy Brutal Truth's new album Evolution Through Revolution, it was not as good as Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses or Need To Control or even Sounds Of The Animal Kingdom, and bands being how they are, the set was likely to feature as many new songs as songs from all those old albums put together.
• The same goes for Pig Destroyer, whose last album, Phantom Limb, was measurably inferior to Terrifyer.
• I do not like Repulsion's Horrified at all, so watching them play it in its entirety held absolutely no appeal for me.
• I am old and cranky and would simply rather stay home and watch Mad Men (Season Two) and The Middleman (Season Only) on DVD.