I'M MOVING TO SWEDEN

This story has, unsurprisingly, been making the rounds of various music-related websites I frequent.

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

Roger Tullgren, 42, from Hässleholm in southern Sweden has just started working part time as a dishwasher at a local restaurant.

Because heavy metal dominates so many aspects of his life, the Employment Service has agreed to pay part of Tullgren's salary. His new boss meanwhile has given him a special dispensation to play loud music at work.

"I have been trying for ten years to get this classified as a handicap," Tullgren told The Local.

"I spoke to three psychologists and they finally agreed that I needed this to avoid being discriminated against."

...

The ageing rocker claims to have attended almost three hundred shows last year, often skipping work in the process.

Eventually his last employer tired of his absences and Tullgren was left jobless and reliant on welfare handouts.

But his sessions with the occupational psychologists led to a solution of sorts: Tullgren signed a piece of paper on which his heavy metal lifestyle was classified as a disability, an assessment that entitles him to a wage supplement from the job centre.

"I signed a form saying: 'Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labour market. Therefore he needs extra financial help'. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper," he said.

The manager at his new workplace allows him to go to concerts as long as he makes up for lost time at a later point. He is also allowed to dress as he likes and listen to heavy metal while washing up.

"But not too loud when there are guests," he said.

Just as unsurprisingly, a tool of my acquaintance has responded with statements like "I hope the Swedes get their Thatcher/Gorbachev soon" and "Yeah, I 'wish' they had that in America, so I could be a lazy-ass motherfucker and leech off people who actually work for a living. Yes, I wish the entire world was like Sweden, so I could sit on my ass all day doing nothing, and still collect dole queue cheques."

Because people like this tool of my acquaintance (who, by the way, teaches English in Taiwan for a living, precisely because life is cheap, the hours are short, and he's got a fetish to indulge) internalized the perverse "Protestant work ethic," they can no longer see that people who work for a living are to be pitied. Not because there's something innately horrible about work in itself, but because there's something innately horrible about selling your life. Work for what you want, and do as little as necessary to achieve as much as possible. Pay-the-rent jobs are all shitty, all a waste of time, all to be avoided as much as possible. It's the work you do for yourself that's virtuous; all the rest is evil, because it steals time you could be spending doing something enjoyable. Life is a one-way journey with no do-overs. Every moment you spend doing something you'd rather not be doing, whether it's working for an asshole boss so you can pay an asshole landlord or talking to someone whose conversation is like a drill-bit in the brain, is time you'll never get back.

I admire this guy, because he's come up with a terrific scam. If I could talk my boss into that, I'd do it in a minute. And if you can look at him and not feel the envy one feels when witnessing an artist at work, but only the contempt a scumbag yuppie feels for a homeless person, then you're the one who's fucked in the head, not him.

THIS WEEK IN THE SCENE

Being diabetic fucks with my head a lot. It's instilled a real fatalism in me - I'm not gonna have kids, I'm probably not gonna see 60, so I might as well live the best life I can right now, which makes me work hard, write a lot, and buy all the books and movies and music I feel like having around me. But it's very difficult for me to get to any kind of understanding or psychological rapprochement with the disease, at least in part because I don't have anybody to talk to about it.

My dad was Type I, diagnosed at a year old or so, but he's dead - he died in his late fifties, a couple of years before I was diagnosed with Type II. And he never told me much about the disease - what it did to him, what he had to do to battle it - because I didn't have it and he was a private guy and we didn't get along that well anyway most of the time. I saw him injecting insulin a few times as a small child, but that's it. And once my parents divorced, and he didn't live in our house anymore, even that much exposure to the day-to-day reality of diabetes was taken away. So when I was offered the chance to interview Bret Michaels of Poison for the Cleveland Scene, and jumped at it, because (as you'll read in the story) he's diabetic, too; has been since he was six, and he's in his mid-forties now.

I told the editor that he should give me the assignment, over another writer who really wanted it, because Michaels and me were both diabetic and I would talk about that with him. And Michaels was completely open and welcoming on that score. I've had pleasurable conversations with celebrities before, every journalist has - the ones where you come away thinking "we could probably be friends, if this wasn't an interview/professional context." And that's part of a celebrity's job - to massage the media (and by proxy the reader/viewer) to create that impression of intimacy. (And writers are, obviously, complicit in the creation of that illusion, and worse things too, sometimes.)

But this was different...more like therapy. The first person I'd ever been really able to seriously discuss my disease with, other than a doctor or my wife (who doesn't have it), was a celebrity - one who gave me his assistant's cell number in case I wanted to come to his NJ concert and meet backstage, one on one, to talk more about our respective diseases and how we were dealing with them. I was more emotionally invested in this piece, at least while the interview/conversation was underway, than anything else I've ever written that was nominally about music.

And for the record, I stand by all my assertions about the quality of Poison's music generally and the new album in particular.

[Read the story here.]

THIS MONTH IN THE WIRE

MICHEL LAMBERT
Unclouded Day
Ayler
Québecois drummer Michel Lambert has recruited some heavyweight companions for this disc. New York violinist Mat Maneri plays on seven of ten tracks, while guitarist Raoul Björkenheim appears on all but one, and vocalist Jeanette Lambert sings/chants the poetry of Emily Brontë on three. Things start off skittery and heavy, with Björkenheim crunching loud and metallic as Lambert rattles around his kit - one could be forgiven for misidentifying them as Han Bennink and Caspar Brötzmann, or perhaps something by the original line-up of Noxagt. When Maneri enters on the third track, proceedings get markedly more interesting. On "Blow West Wind," Lambert plays with brushes while Maneri offers Gypsy-like lines and Björkenheim sticks to the lower end of his instrument's range, sounding at times almost like a guimbri. On the next track, Björkenheim slides his fingers across the strings to create a cello-like sound, exploring some weird territory between classical, improv and prog rock.
Lambert's voice is relatively thin and her delivery is unconvincing. Nevertheless her presence on three tracks brings something out of the other three players, Björkenheim backing her with swaths of squalling noise, as Michel steps up his game. Ultimately, this is a winning live document of a group who are unlikely to reconvene anytime soon.

HERE COMES THE RAIN

Rain, from South Korea, is apparently the biggest male pop star in Asia. I was gonna go see him at Madison Square Garden on the 23rd, but the show's been postponed "due to production scheduling conflicts. As this will be Rain’s first U.S. tour, his team wanted to make sure that they had enough time to organize shows of the caliber that Rain fans are used to" (according to an e-mail from his publicist). I see their point; if you can't totally destroy the audience's mind, why bother, right? Especially if the actual music (I got his fourth and most recent CD, Rain's World, in today's mail) is high-quality but not all that challenging Usher-esque dance-pop, sung in Korean—though he occasionally speaks English, and some choruses are bilingual. Regardless, I'm still looking forward to the show, whenever it is. I have a feeling I'm gonna be one of very few white dudes in the audience, except for maybe a few baffled boyfriends standing uncomfortably while their Korean girlfriends shriek and bounce.

TODAY ON PTW

THE NELS CLINE SINGERS
"Confection"
from Draw Breath (Cryptogramophone)
The Nels Cline Singers have no singer; they’re, at least based on this evidence, a power trio with a thousand faces. Nels Cline’s shredding, Sharrockian reimagining of John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space (a duo with drummer Gregg Bendian) is perpetually fantastic, and 2006’s New Monastery, his tribute to recently deceased pianist Andrew Hill, was brilliant too. His work with Wilco pays the bills I bet, but it ultimately sounds and feels like sideman work. In any case, this latest Singers disc frequently brings Cline’s noisy side way out in front, as upright bassist Devin Hoff slaps and bows along beside him and drummer/electronics guy Scott Amendola whips the living shit out of his kit when he’s not emitting hums and buzzes and throbs like some kind of malevolent robot. [Read the rest here.]