Greatest. Indie-est. Band. Ever.: Music "I suppose you don't like sports, do you?" This is what Stephen Malkmus—the enigmatic architect of Pavement—asks me as he sits in a Thai-sandwich restaurant, waiting for his bacon. He is casually pawing at a local Portland alternative newspaper that features Trail Blazer Greg Oden on the cover; it's the day before Thanksgiving, so Oden's patella is still unexploded. Malkmus seems slightly (but unspecifically) annoyed—his wife's parents are in town for the holidays, he's just spent the last ninety minutes at a school party for his 6-year-old daughter, and now he has to waste two hours with some bozo who probably doesn't know why Greg Oden is interesting. He keeps his head down as he speaks. "I said, I suppose you don't like sports." After almost an hour has passed, I realize we need to start talking about music, partially because that's the motive for this story but mostly because Pavement is a band worth talking about. "Of course it does, in a way. 1.
The Strokes' Is This It anniversary: Why it's the best album of the past decade Photograph of the Strokes by Flickr user Mrmatt. By now, everyone from NPR listeners to Slate readers to, bizarrely enough, Republican presidential debate viewers has heard that this September marked the 20th birthday of Nirvana’s grunge monolith Nevermind, the record that brought alternative rock to the newly flanneled masses. Even a lifelong Nirvana agnostic like me—at age 11, I’ll confess, the anarchic fury of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video had me quaking in my Zubaz—must admit that the attention is deserved. But this tidal wave of tributes threatens to overshadow the 10th anniversary of another towering rock classic, an album that, if not quite as influential as Nevermind, is every bit as dazzling, significant, and stylistically accomplished: the Strokes’ masterly debut Is This It. Given the Mariana Trench-like depths to which the Strokes’ reputation has plummeted in recent years, this comparison undoubtedly has Nirvana fans struggling to suppress a giant collective gag.
In defense of Paul Simon - Music On Sept. 11, Paul Simon sang a solo acoustic version of “The Sound of Silence” at the 9/11 memorial service in New York City, and for a few days afterward, the YouTube clip of the performance became a viral sensation, shared among fans and listeners as a commemoration of that horrific event 10 years ago. It was remarkable how dramatically both Simon and the song had changed since the early 1960s. His face had grown gaunt with age, his hair colorless around that baseball cap that has become his post-baldness trademark. “Sound of Silence” had developed new melodic currents, and Simon punctuated it with a few ominous strums. Simon’s legacy remains bound up in “Sound of Silence,” which he had been playing and sharpening on tour for the past few months leading up to the 9/11 memorial. Despite that hefty release schedule, Simon, though beloved by fans, remains generally underrated if not perennially disregarded by just about everyone else. Stephen M.
Joe Henry: Engage music's history, don't worship it - Music “Reverie,” the 12th album by the singer-songwriter-producer Joe Henry, includes one song about the African-American folkie Odetta and another about the late Georgia eccentric Vic Chesnutt. Neither sounds musically influenced by its subject, yet like all of Henry’s songs, both are heavily indebted to the past and the array of artists who came before him. The weight of American pop history weighs on every note and every word. Throughout his quarter-century career, Henry has learned to shoulder that burden of history gracefully. Henry brings the same acumen and range to his production work for a wild array of artists, most of them with careers twice as long as his. “Reverie” sounds much looser and rougher than some of your previous albums. Absolutely intentional. Did you have an idea of how that would sound, or were you working to figure that out? You seem like someone who flourishes within strict parameters, such as the rule about your band only using acoustic instruments.