it should surprise nobody that i didn't get out of the house until after 16:20 and missed the 16:30 bus by minutes, realizing the inevitability of it only once i got to the bank machine. so, i uncharacteristically bought smokes and headed down to the bus station to drink an untouched, non-alcoholic mountain dew (i decided i should save the little bit of vodka in my bottle until saturday, and that i'd just get an extra beer or two in or near the venue once i got there, early - intending to get there early).

the box office closed at 17:00, you'll recall, so catching the 17:00 bus over would have meant relying on the hope that there was somebody there between 17:00 and 19:00. otherwise, i was going to have to wait for the symphony to start and i was going to miss the prog show...

worse, i found myself in dire need of a bowel movement a few minutes before 17:00. maybe you've been in this situation, where you have to choose between squirming around on the bus and missing it altogether; i reasoned that it might even make sense to miss it at this point (because my chances of catching somebody at the box office were dependent on them being open for the friday night show), so i ran to the tim's, and did in fact miss the bus when i got out. at this point, i was no longer going to catch an early beer, so i ran around the corner to get a couple of shots of jager instead...

when i finally got on to the bus at 17:30, it was uncharacteristically packed, or at least had more people than i'm used to seeing, which meant a lengthy wait through customs that was even further complicated by a distressed transport trailer that didn't want to listen to the border cops in getting around the corner. so, i didn't get on my way until 18:00...

i got to the dso something close to 18:30, and did in fact get my beethoven tickets for sunday at 15:00. fait accompli. so, i'm off to this downtown bar i haven't been to before to see the psych show...

it's in a basement, it turns out, which i wasn't expecting. the floors are fluorescent and appear to glow in the dark; there's an arcade off to one side. beer is on tap and in plastic cups, which i don't like, but cheap, which i do like. the venue is broadly similar in layout to the shelter down the street. i looked around, but there was nobody outside to start, so i caught sacri monti without the aid of cannabis.

i can't be sure exactly, i'm new to the band, but i think they played their new record pretty much from start to finish in the roughly 40 minutes that they were allotted, which is roughly the length of the record. this is a five piece, with a moog/keyboard player and two guitarists in addition to the rhythm section. i mentioned that there's a dramatic mick ronson influence, but this is just the first thing that jumped out at me - it's, overall, a fairly good survey through early 70s british glam and prog, with multiple references to other seminal acts like hawkwind, pink floyd, king crimson and some genesis, too. this kind of thing seems to continue to go over well in california for some reason; there are contemporary california acts like mammatus and eye (well, ok. eye broke up.) that operate well in this space, while acts from pretty much any other place in the world seem to fall flat on it. maybe it's the angle of the sunlight hitting the ocean. i dunno.

this is probably an acquired taste, but if it is then i acquired it in the womb; i'm native to this, it just makes sense to me. i asked around and people were lukewarm about it, which is technically wrong, but not particularly surprising. every single person at the show should have been blown away by this set. if you get a chance to see this, don't miss it.

the next band up was called maggot heart, and i didn't spend a lot of time with them before i came in; i checked their bandcamp site long enough to conclude it was a lot poppier than the other two acts, and kind of left it at that. structure wise, they were essentially a corporate-style pop-punk band, and not particularly exciting, but, whether it was due to the bill or as a consequence of some other thing, they decided to extend the tracks a little bit, at least on this night. the result was a corporate-style pop-punk band with a jam band feel, which one could argue is sort of what the smashing pumpkins were, although the song structures were far more compressed than anything the pumpkins ever did. but, it ended up being some kind of alt. rock in that space, whether on purpose or not.

the songs were really not exciting, but the jamming saved the set. the drummer was especially useful in saving it...

the thing is that i don't know if what i saw was characteristic of them or not. i suspect it wasn't; i suspect that on most nights, you're going to see a more generic corporate pop-punk kind of set, something like nirvana, maybe. if they do the same kind of set they did on this night, though, they're at least worth not skipping. but, it didn't really speak to me, much - it's not a style of music i spend much time with anymore, at my age.

earthless headlined the show relatively early, and while i think the band is overrated, i was stoned enough to enjoy the set. i mean, listen - on some level you can't go wrong with this. you've got a drummer. you've got a bassist. you've got distortion on the guitar. you've got loud amps. so long as you don't try and sing, you can't fuck it up, right? well, if the audience is inebriated enough, anyways...

my technical nitpicking of the sound as less complicated than others might assume, and consequently sort of pretentious, is valid and everything, but it's secondary to the experience of actually listening to loud, instrumental music while baked.

and, yes, they made me laugh a few times with a series of absurd cliches. they just needed their little stonehenge, and it would have been spinal tap. but, that's fine, if you have fun...

i'm not going to see a band like earthless every night, but it's fun once in a while, if the bill has something more substantive on it. so, that's fine.

and, i had fun. i said that, right? maybe you'll have fun seeing them, too...

just don't actually take them seriously. they can do that enough for everyone else.

i was out of the show not much later than 10:00 - this was an early night - so i hoped to get down to another place i'd never been to before, namely the pop off world arcade over top of the checkers, right around the corner from the tunnel, in order to catch a local synthesizer player do a free set. hey, it seemed worth a beer. he said he'd either start at 21:00 or 22:00; i guess he started closer to 21:00, because i only heard 5-10 minutes before he stopped, and it was just kind of generic vintage synth music. i hope this venue does more things along these lines, because a synth bar is kind of unheard of, but perhaps overdue. i just had the one beer, and i guess i was out of there by 22:30-23:00.

i made it back to phog fairly early, with the intent to catch the late show there, which i largely did....

the first band was called 'of the pack', which is a local band that i've seen on a lot of bills around town but haven't actually seen play. and, i could've sworn that they were a bro-ish hardcore act, but it turns out they weren't; they had a kind of reggae-ish feel, on top of a pop-punk crux. i asked, and they claimed they were never hardcore. what can i say? i was more caught off guard than anything else. they did a cover of 1979 that missed the slur, which is a good way to describe them; it wasn't terrible, but they wouldn't bring me back for more, either.

i wanted to see bike thiefs, which were actually a bit more hardcore than i expected. based on the sound samples, i was expecting something roughly sonic youth-ish, but it actually came off more like very, very early thermals, with the kind of ranted vocals over the noise punk song structures. i found myself nodding off a little near the end of the set, and it's less because i was drunk (i wasn't.) and more because the sound was kind of hypnotic; it's more that they got me in a bit of a trance. so, i don't want to say i was disappointed. that's not quite right. but, it wasn't quite what i expected, either. if i were to see them again, i'd get coffee instead of beer....

i spent the rest of the night at phog, right until last call, got trolled by the friday night bartender about the use value of alcohol vs the use value of soda, and we'll talk about that through tomorrow's review, and stumbled out with a smoke at the very last minute. where's the party? nothing at villain's, which i learned earlier in the night was having a dungeons and dragons night (no joke.), but there's a whole lot of people at the strip club across the way....

i think i've mentioned previously that i've never been in a strip club. i certainly am not very interested about going into one at this point; you'd probably have to pay me to sit through it. i'd probably start crying if somebody tried to give me a lap dance. the whole thing's just insane, to me - i can't understand how these things still exist, in this day and age. but, they're around and there's people at them....

i'm actually hoping to bum a smoke from somebody, actually, maybe chat a little. yeah, it's like 3:30 or something - that's not late, for me. so, there's this guy that's like arab or something, and he's talking about how he's a law student. there seems to be an undertone to the conversation that the way we talk about immigrants in this country is backwards - they're largely upper class, in canada, because we screen them to be. it's the white trash that's poor. he's kind of sick of the racist narrative, is what he's trying to get across, and i actually agree with the point. his father's a doctor, his mother's a nurse, and they didn't raise him to be religious. well, he's out at 3:30 smoking at a strip club, i guess not, right? but, he is rich, though - they raised him to be that.

and, i'm finishing my smoke and about to leave, when these angry guys come stumbling out, and they're giving this guy a hard time because of where he's from. they're not drunk - i'm drunk; they're coked out. and, i've seen this before, actually. they blame bar fights on alcohol, but it's often not alcohol that causes these fights. i've seen enough of them. these fights have two primary causes - girls and cocaine. i think we've probably got both, here.

listen - i'm not going to stand up for some bigoted muslim that wants to nail me to a fucking tree because of my clothing decisions if he gets into a fight with an equally bigoted white supremacist. let them slaughter each other - we're better off if they're both dead. but, i'm not going to let these white trash frat boys rip this atheists' balls off just because of his ethnicity, either. i know what side i'm on, and what side i'm willing to fight for, and it's the side of non-believers and atheists and secularists. and i don't fucking care where you're from, or where your parents are from. at all.

so, they're getting up in his face....

"if you really want to get with the red and white.."

really? i don't know exactly what that means, but it was pretty clearly confrontational. so, i stepped in between them and asked:

"hey hey hey. is that really necessary."

see, in a situation like that, i'm white. i'm not always white, and i'm not particularly white, but, in context, i'm white. and, so that worried them, and you could see it in their eyes.

but, they look away, and they keep running their mouths off.

"i said, is that necessary?"

it was enough of a break that the arab guy was able to slip away, and i followed not long after him.

so, i got home after 4:00, made some pasta and crashed at something like 7:00. day two coming up....

we started last week on friday night, and the primary intent was actually to go down early to get some beethoven tickets. everything else kind of developed out of this.

when i first looked at the weekend, i was mostly just turned off by the weather. sub ten degrees on friday night, and rain on saturday night? well, it's october - i might at least get out for a double matinee on sunday, though, with the 5th followed by the lpd. it also looked like i could maybe catch a late show at phog on friday night, if i could stand the weather.

i had a loose plan, though. there was a late party at marble on saturday, and a punk show at trumbullplex on the way there, so maybe i could essentially come down early and dance before the beethoven show, if i could convince myself that the punk show was worthwhile. it ended up working the other way around, when i realized the show at marble was a drum 'n' bass dj, which is rare in detroit; this then became the focus of the weekend.

so, i bought some tickets for the marble show on friday morning, only to initially find myself stonewalled by the dso. sold out? well, it's the fifth, i guess. after changing browsers (and operating systems), i did realize that there were still tickets, but i'd need a credit card to buy them online. i didn't want to wait until sunday morning, or even saturday night. could i get there on friday, then?

i had in fact been looking at a show on friday at a bar i hadn't been to before called delux fluxx, which is right downtown. for all the time i spend in detroit, i only ever really transit through the core. what was the last show i saw in the downtown core? not corktown, not midtown, not the eastern market, but right downtown? it might have been as far back as early 2017...crywolf at the shelter. i think. the only show i've seen at st. andrew's is swans, and the only other show i saw at the shelter is son lux. you might catch me dancing at a few after hours spots right in the core once in a while, but i otherwise am only downtown for as long as it takes to get out of it. there's just not much there for me, generally.

i had initially ruled the show out, because the headliner (earthless) didn't really grab me, on inspection. i'm generally looking for a level of abstraction that just wasn't really present in the sound, which was more of a cliched kind of throwback. neither the drumming nor the guitar playing seemed that impressive, and rumour had it they were starting to sing, too. ack. so, i had scratched that off, only to notice that the opening band was on teepee - and if somebody from teepee comes to your town, you should always at least check to see if they're any good or not. it turns out we've got a prog band here with a big early bowie or spiders/ronson feel to it. score.

still, i wasn't sure i was going to go until the ticket issue came up, at which point i decided i should go down early and do a few things in midtown. for example, maybe i could drop off some recycling at the depot, finally. it's piling up. but, oddly, the depot was closed on fridays, so i resolved to just go down early to get the tickets. according to google, the box closes at 17:00; if i catch the 15:00 bus, i should get there before 17:00 for sure....

yeah. i don't think i've seen lazer/wulf before.

i think i probably was doing research on either the fest they recently did in detroit or the fest they recently did in toronto.

this is the kind of thing i would have checked out at the trumbullplex back in december of last year, under normal circumstances.

hrmmn.

lazur/wulf + war on women is a good show, in itself. i wish it wasn't so far away....somebody tell them to split off and do their own show downtown....

this sounds like fun, though.

i've seen the name before, but i can't entirely place it. i may have even seen them before.

so, we've got two strong opening bands. that's a show, if the weather (and my health) allows for it.

https://retrofuturist.bandcamp.com/album/the-beast-of-left-and-right

so, this band is playing here on friday, and i have to admit i've never heard of them before. again: i was listening mostly to idm and post-rock at the time. i found the punk of the period to be pretty awful, and largely just tuned entirely out.

this is supposed to be their space-rock/post-metal/post-hardcore opus. is it any good?

it's pretty boring pop music, if you ask me. the singer is fucking terrible and largely unnecessary. they sound like they should be doing 80s rush covers or something. not punk; more prog. so, no, i wouldn't have liked it, if i'd have heard of it, and it's not surprising that i've never heard of it.

my interest in the show is actually related to one of the opening acts, war on women, but i'm not going to make it to ferndale to pay $25 for what is probably going to be a short set. tell war on women to play at the ufo or something. why are they opening for this shit? that doesn't make a lot of sense.

https://cavein.bandcamp.com/album/jupiter

it would actually be more like napster, which nobody remembers anymore.

you'd sign into the site and look for music, all of which would be independent. this music would be hosted on the computers of random people, like torrents are. you could then stream the music over the distributed network the same way you use spotify.

if you're an indie artist, you don't get paid by spotify, anyways. it's a waste of time. don't bother.

rather, the benefit of siphoning out a network for indie artists would be to get people out of the system and try to rebuild an underground. think of it more like tape trading...

somebody would have to police this, of course; you wouldn't want copyrighted music in the service, and people that want to share copyrighted music should just use torrents. but, i actually think this would be less difficult than you'd expect.

i wouldn't sign up for spotify, but i might sign up for something like this.

as it is, what we have is bandcamp, and the question as to whether it's sufficient or not is somewhat open.

that wasn't the essay i was looking for, was it? there might be an extended version of it somewhere, or i might be thinking of something else. it is nonetheless the basic truth, though, and i guess i have to extrapolate, myself.

that was what happened in the early 90s - independent labels started to compete with major labels. the precursor to this bernie sanders line about 1% of the wealth, which was maybe more relevant in understanding the way the world actually works, was that there were five major media companies that owned almost everything you consume. each one had a record label, before they tried to merge emi with warner, which was outrageous.

these independent labels mostly came out of the generalized punk scene in the late 70s (generalized punk would absorb industrial, techno and hip-hop - these things all happened around the same time and had very similar operating philosophies) and were built up over the 80s as an....alternative...to the mainstream music scene, which was obsessed with bad pop and worse metal. by the late 80s, the independent labels had begun to diversify in looking at art rock, prog, disco - the side of mainstream rock that wanted more artistic freedom, and less corporate oversight. so, people like peter gabriel (a big rock star, at the time, that did not come out of punk) and sting (a big rock star that sort of did) ended up on indie labels to get out. the result was that some of these indie labels started getting pretty big.

by the early 90s, the gen x kids alive at the time (i was a little young...) just basically all rejected the msm narrative, tout ensemble, which was maybe a little scary for some of the western oligarchs given what was happening in eastern europe. artists signed to major labels were all of a sudden unable to compete with artists signed to smaller labels.

so, the major labels did what you would expect them to do - they started buying out the smaller labels, one by one, and merging them together to form bigger ones, or dissolving them into the bigger ones. this process lasted roughly 15 years, from 1990-2005. it started with the big indies like geffen, but by the mid-90s they were just snapping up everything they could find. there was almost nothing left, by the end of it.

the entire concept of indie rock changed about 2005, and the buyouts were what was underlying it. in 1995, "indie rock" was still just synonymous with "artsy punk rock" and meant a band that sounded like sonic youth, or pavement. by 2005, the term had been co-opted and redeployed to refer to the kind of 80s pop music that indie rock was supposed to be the opposite of. that's not an accident; the genre was destroyed on purpose. meanwhile, the term "punk" got completely redefined to refer to the type of hair metal that was punk's antithesis in the mid 80s, by completely co-opting terms like "emo". this is no accident, either.

since then, we've been living in this backwards, co-opted reality, where we have fake indie labels run by majors and these words mean the opposite of what they're supposed to mean, and rather than push back on it, millennials have largely (not entirely, of course) bought right into it.

that means we're basically back to the same point we were in in 1975. we need the kids to take control of the means of production, somehow. and, by an accident of birth, all i can really do is stand back and watch.

i've ruled out joining a service like spotify; i don't want a better cut, i just don't want to use it at all. but, what if we could create a hybrid streaming/sharing model, where we share files like torrents but stream them like a streaming site? such a site would necessarily be free, and it could cut out the bourgeois layer. it would not be an end point, but it might be a start to get people out of the corporate system.

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

i want to clear up a point, though - i'm actually not arguing that pop music was better in the past.

i mean, you don't think that bohemian rhapsody was a big hit in the 70s, do you? or that hendrix was actually popular?

the pop music of the 60s was truly awful, too - and the 70s were dominated by disco and soul. if anything, 80s pop was actually an improvement over 60s and 70s pop.

what's different today is not that the pop music is awful; that's always been true. what's different is that the underground scene has largely evaporated, that there isn't any non-commercial music being made any more. that's what i'm looking for, that's what i'm hoping the kids can bring back.

courtney love actually write a kind of an important essay on this in the 90s (or early 00s), where she explained the problem as basically being that the major labels just bought out the underground. they just showed up in their bmws and started writing checks, and when they were done everything had been dismantled. i guess this coincided with a generation reared on neo-liberalism, that lost the plot and just bought into it. the underground never really recovered....

it's really up the kids to start from scratch, at this point, and i'm rooting for them and hope that they do.