I’m going down to the Bell House tomorrow to help prep for the Rarities From The State show, where cast members David Wain, Michael Showalter, and Michael Ian Black will show old show clips. Thing is, The State had a huge effect on my formative years. Without the State I would have never learned about Girls Against Boys or Shudder To Think, who co-wrote the theme song. I would have never started listening to Kerri Kenney’s band Cake Like, which led to discovering experimental music (they were signed to John Zorn’s label).

So to celebrate I thought I’d post half of my State zine along with some transcribed quotes. This zine contains my first “interview” ever, a Q&A conducted over AOL mail with Michael Ian Black when I was 13. I then interviewed him again when I was 23, then again for Paper Thin Walls aobut a year ago. I believe my interview technique has remained stable, and remains still better than 60% of the Q&A’s I read from grown men and women.

Click on the pictures for full-sized pages.

Page 1 notes:

• My zine was called “Squiky Clean,” because my principal’s one stipulation for distributing a zine on campus was that it be “squeaky clean.” The misspelling was intentional, as I was intentionally lazy when I did the layout in Quark.
• I describe Michael Ian Black as “amazingly talented, amazingly attractive.” He looks pretty much the same now, so I stand by that.
• I wrote a sidebar about how how protecting the environment, and charity in general, was stupid. This was during a brief objectivist stage that I got over quickly. In 8th grade I joined the young socialists.

Page 2 notes:

• This is a continuation of the Michael Ian Black interview. I have inserted things like “Good answer” and “I agree” after his answers, to make it seem less “over email Q&A”-like.

Page 3 notes:

• This page includes quotes from Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, which I think I got from searching a quotes database for phrases like “revenge.” Revenge was, for me, like many nerds in middle school, a big daily concern.
• The second part of this page is called “Let’s play a game,” basically a list of fantasies like becoming an intern at MTV, front tickets to REM, shopping on Southstreet in Philadelphia, and getting “smashed on Yeagermeisters [sic] while hanging out backstage with Tim and the rest of the guys in Rancid after their show at CBGB’s.” I have still never had a Jagermeister. Or ever went to CBGB’s. Or hung out with Rancid.

Page 4 notes:

• “New York is unconditionally, undeniably, the coolest city in the world.” Reasons I list were: invention of moshing, Greenwich Village and Soho, and the Hard Rock Cafe and House Of Blues. The latter two must have symbolized some sort of famous-cool to me, otherwise I can’t believe I held them in the same regard as CBGB’s. But, I did predict that they would be one in the same some day.
• “Take this from a future New Yorker.”
• I also explain what six degrees of separation is, because I had just seen the movie “Six Degrees of Separation.”

Page 5 notes:

• I review Cake Like, mentioning that the CD was $22 dollars on import, which is like $30 after inflation and like $2,455 to a kid in middle school.
• “Their sound is raw, edgy, unique and powerful.”
• I also talk about their “chunky guitars, sporadic bass and lyrics about crushes.” This is, still, mostly what I’m looking for.

Check some things off the middle school wish list: As a 13-year-old comedy nerd in Yorktown, Virginia, I thought endlessly about moving to New York, writing for magazines, and going to shows. So for the most part I’ve done alright.

I’ve gotten really bad (for whom, for what?) at posting recent work and clips and stuff, so I’m going to try to do this on a weekly basis. So, this week.

I subbed for ABC’s Dan Harris over at his weekly online indie rock interview show, Amplified. I got to watch a great, rooftop performance by the Noisettes, and talked to them a little bit about how their lives have changed since “Don’t Upset The Rhythm” went to #2 in the UK:

I wrote a new Progress Report on the Go! Team for Stereogum. My favorite quote was right at the end:

Even though it’s album three and the tradition is to mature and all that bullshit I have no desire to clean up the sound.

Spin just ran my review of Sian Alice Group’s Troubled, Shaken, Etc. Such a good record. I called Sian Ahern “a singer with Nico’s presence and complexion.” Just look at her (photo from Ahmed Klink):

And this was last week, but I’m still very proud and thankful to have a chance to talk to These Are Powers about touring China. Before they left they had to record a “performance” for the cultural officials in Shanghai:

We actually had to record it in our practice space, and we pretended like it was a show, so we all clapped and said, “Thank you!” at the end of it. It was really silly. It was by far the most awkward I’ve ever felt playing a set of any music that I’ve been a part of. We’re like, “Hey, Chinese government! Here we are performing for you on video!” I guess it worked.

Pitchfork’s internal editing system lets me see my past review scores all in one place. Since I don’t review stuff very often for them, I was a little surprised to see the numbers all in one place like that. It turns out I’m a high grader. Or rather, when I write about things I know I like (because that’s what I want to write about, if I can), then I tend to give it something in the 6-8.8 range. That makes sense to me. But it’s harder to make sense of what makes an album truly terrible. So I wanted to go down some things that most music writers have internalized, but that I feel like a lot of Pitchfork’s audience still can’t recognize when they scan a review.

Here’s Robert Christgau’s old grading system explained:

An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.
An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.
An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn’t provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.
[… further explanations, then …]
A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.
It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.
E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.
An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.

(taken from 43 Folders)

After having written about music for a few years, and having attempted to write and play music myself, I can say for sure that putting out music is like putting out babies: every one deserves to be born.

What does this mean? I believe that creating music is inherently good and positive, and using criticisms like “this band should just quit” or “singer x would do well to pay her label back for this mess,” is lazy and unfair.

However, this does not mean your music shouldn’t be judged. My mom sews curtains and pillow cases, but she’s not trying to sell them or be Martha Stewart. By making and selling records you have agreed to the critical process.

So what is a sub-4 record to me? I believe that good people can make really bad music. Bad people can make really good music. But when bad people make bad music, they get sub-4.0, two stars, whatever, because when bad people make bad music, they are usually making harmful music, stuff that did not deserve to be born. They are usually also making music in a way that rings false with their personalities and reeks of desperation or pandering.

This is music from a band like Louix XIV, who began as an alt-country band, then switched to doing vaguely racist, totally misogynist sleaze rawk (Nick Sylvester rightly called them spineless in his review). Or lately, it’s bands like Brokencyde or Millionaires, kids so careless and attached to their own privilege that they feel fine picking and choosing tropes from hip-hop without acknowledging where they came from or why they exist (it is okay to brag about getting paid when your parents have always paid your bills?).

These are easy targets for sure, and it gets harder once I think about the genres I usually write about or that Pitchfork usually covers. The problems there are less about big red flags–racism, violence, etc–and more about authenticity. Now, I once had a track review cut and replaced (it was of “Intervention”), because it felt inauthentic to me¹ , and my editor said I could never judge the “motives” of the band, because I couldn’t know what they were thinking. I say it’s hard, but not impossible, unless your internal sensor is just totally off. Anyway, that’s sort of like saying you can’t judge bad acting (hey, maybe they wanted to be unbelievable on purpose). Inauthentic music is the worst because it’s a rift between who you are and who you want people to think you are. And isn’t that hard enough to cope with in real life, with our friends and boy/girl friends and jobs, without writing it down, practicing it, committing it to tape, packaging it, and selling it? These records and songs, these are the ones that should have never been born and they’ll always be the ones most critically savaged.

I’m losing track of what I wanted to say here, so it’s basically this: I hardly ever give low ratings to albums or hate bands, but when I do, it’s because of a falseness that crosses from the artist over to their music. But I try to not judge music on whether it should have been made in the first place–the answer is nearly always “yes,” though sometimes “no.”

I like finding computer-based ways to do my job cheaper and faster. Most of these methods are to cover up for my natural procrastination: using hotkeys, text inserters, autoresponders, and capture tools helps make up for the time I spent Googling “child riding boa constrictor.” I really, really love finding this stuff, but I never get to talk about it. Today I’d like to talk about recording and transcribing interviews.

I do 1-4 interviews a week. That’s a lot of audio to deal with, and, for just a little feature, that’s a lot of hearing some guy or girl you used to think was pretty interesting talking about how “melodic” their new record is (a lot of interviewers are terrible, but people forget that lots of bands don’t know how to talk to people either).

I use several things to make doing and transcribing interviews easier: Skype, Audacity, Express Scribe, and a program from Ecamm called Call Recorder. Skype and Audacity are free, and Call Recorder costs $14.95.

Here’s why this trio is an interviewer’s dream:

Skype / Skype Out: I purchased a Skype Out number for $2.95 a month. This allows people to call me from a land or cell line, and lets me call regular land/cell lines. I also get free calls in the US and Canada. I don’t usually have to call overseas, and Skype Out lets you pay as you go for international calls, at reasonable rates. Lately I’ve been using Google Voice for this, because their rates can be even cheaper. Sure it doesn’t have the portability of a cell phone, and you might have to look like this, but the call quality is usually great and it allows you to use the next tool.

Ecamm Call Recorder (for Macs).

This program’s amazing for two reasons:

1) You can set it to automatically record any call if it lasts more than 30 seconds (or any time length you want), so you don’t end up with a bunch of automatic recordings of your boyfriend asking if he should buy cat food or rings where no one answered, nor do you ever forget to turn it on when Cat Power calls you.

2) If you loathe the sound of your own voice and your pathetic questions next to the sound of Chan Marshall purring lazy answers at you, then Call Recorder will allow you to split the sides of the conversation. Cat Power purr on one file, your voice on the other. Now you can transcribe without cringing or crying. This is especially great if you’re grabbing quotes for a feature where you don’t need your questions at all.

3) You can add markers during the call, so, if you’re sprightly and sly, you can add markers like “Question about Scientology affiliation” and “Where he called me a genius,” and they’ll show up as chapter markers in Quicktime. If you convert the file, you can still export your markers (with the timecode) to a text file for easy reference.

4) I said two reasons. There are actually four. You have a visual meter, so you can make sure it’s recording and that it’s recording at a volume loud enough to hear later on.

Audacity (free, open-source sound editor):

Or even better, convert that .mov audio file to mp3 (you can do this with Call Recorder’s built-in scripts), then fire up Audacity and cut out the parts where you were asking questions (it’ll appear as silence on the interviewee’s file). Then you can use Change Tempo to slow it down. I find that -42% keeps the interviewee’s voice clear, but is slow enough to transcribe without having to pause. Hand that edited crap over to your transcriptionist (or intern, or boyfriend). If you’re paying someone and you’re a cheap-o, you could probably get away with editing out your voice, and speeding it up slightly, thus saving on those transcription-per-minute fees. Then you can spend your transcriptionist savings on artificial tears or a conscience.

Express Scribe (free)

If you’re transcribing files yourself and you have a Mac, I recommend using Express Scribe along with your own foot pedal. I just got mine, and it’s excellent, especially when I use it with Express Scribe. The program lets you set universal hot keys, slow down or speed up audio tempo on the fly, and add in time stamps automatically. I usually listen to audio at around 150% speed until I get to quotes I like, then I slow it down and just transcribe what I need.

What about typing during the call?
Some people can do this. I can’t. I usually stare at my own questions, or Google artists or locations they’ve mentioned while they’re talking, so I can come up with smart follow ups. I’ve just never been able to do more than write down the time or scratch a note whenever I’m interviewing someone. I lose my train of thought, or lose the flow of the conversation, if I try to transcribe while talking on the phone.

Oh yeah, also.
Get a headset. No way you can type or Google things or, I don’t know, trim your nails? Eat dinner? During interviews without one. Don’t you want to look this cool:

What about recording on your cell phone?
I have an iPhone, I believe there’s a program that can record your phone calls now. I also used to have one of those attachments from RadioShack that lets you connect your cell phone to a recorder. Me, I use drop.io. For the cost of a single upgrade on a “drop,” I get a conference number where I can place conference calls. The same number will also automatically record the audio and upload it as an MP3 file to your account. The $10 also gets me storage space and outgoing faxes. Not a bad deal. When I need to record an interview on my cell phone I just call my drop.io conference number, then call my subject for an awesome three-way.

How about in-person interviews?
I’ve got an old iRiver IFP for this. It’s about five years old, but it still records to MP3, sync with my Mac, and has super clear audio. The best part? It’s really small. I haven’t recorded to tape since I had my old mini tape recorder in college, but I remembered how interview subjects’ eyes would also glance over at my recorder. I think seeing the thing makes people subconsciously self-conscious. My iRiver player is small enough to keep next to my hand, under the table, hidden behind a salt shaker at a diner, etc., so that the subject knows it’s there, but it’s small enough to forget. Loose lips make for the best interviews.

One last thing.
Don’t forget to check your state’s laws on taping conversations. My state, New York, allows for one-party consent. When I do phone interviews I don’t tell them I’m recording, I assume they know what they say to me is on the record. I usually make clear that I’m recording interviews when I do them in-person, just because they don’t always know everything’s on the record, and I’d rather avoid problems later.

EDIT:

Here’s some tips from some friends:

From Yancey Strickler:

the trick i always use is just having the internet transcribe my interviews for me. costs about $18 an interview. well worth it: http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_turk/

From my awesome ex-editor Reid Davis:

Also, when I’m away from my computer, I used MacAlly’s iVoice pro hardware plug-in for my iPod along with Griffin’s iTalk Pro software. You can record through the built-in mic, or plug in another device, like a landline phone (Radio Shack telephone recorder, about $12.)

From writer / Tucson friend Curtis McCrary:

also, fyi, google voice will record incoming phone calls for you (but not transcribe them). but it’s an easy shortcut to getting an interview recorded and in easy-to-listen-to form on the computer.

The “not of this world” talk around Michael Jackson makes me run the other way, toward finding things that prove he was of this world. Not sure what that impulse is. Certainly it wasn’t all tabloid created– he spent a lot of time thinking about and creating a persona that was untouchable, unrelatable. Whatever we wanted before, it’s obvious that we now want pop stars who speak to us (Kanye West is probably the best example of someone who wants it both ways, to be both untouchable and to speak to his audience directly). Would MJ have been better-liked these last few years if he had his own YouTube channel?

Anyway, here are some things I’ve been re-watching/listening to lately, if only to remind myself that, yeah, he could be a regular dude too.

Michael Jackson wants to go to the Salvation Army. Best line: “You find good stuff, don’t you Tito?” It’s been a minute since MJ was in the Salvation Army, it’s been minutes since Tito was in the Salvation Army.

Michael Jackson, Magic Johnson, and KFC. This just happened, so not much to say, except this is the single best reason to kill the KFC grilled chicken campaign. Nobody wants that crap.

Michael Jackson dancing to R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” in the back of an SUV. Which is more unexpected, the dancing or the trucker cap?

“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough (Demo)” First of all: what as he, like 20, when he wrote/recorded this demo? And all the essential ingredients are here, the beat, the 500 hooks. That’s the not-of-this-world part. Jackson recorded this with Randy and Janet on glass bottles and shakers, and it starts out with the family giggling like children. I read that Katherine Jackson was pretty horrified when she heard the title was “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” because it meant “don’t stop ’til you get enough (sinful sexual union).” The family convinced her that it could be anything, which is maybe why Jackson sings “keep on, with your heart..” instead of “keep on, with the force..” Maybe they were giggling because they were recording something sexy right under their mother’s watch. And that’s sort of sweet.

Three years ago, which was about five months into my “professional” music writing career, I personally put a manila folder of clips into Rob Tannenbaum’s inter-office mailbox at Blender. A few days later he emailed me some nice comments, and also a little critique:

You’re writing within the biosphere of your enthusiasms and subjects; the reviews communicate in a code that’s shared by a coterie that only feels large when you’re in a rock club.¹

Now imagine that club is 20 clubs, and imagine they all line a couple of connected streets.

There’s been some mention of how the recession doesn’t seem to exist down in Austin right now; parties are just as huge, gift bags just as gross, bands just as plentiful. And while there’s something sweet and anachronistic about that, part of me thinks that it only proves that this, smaller world, is still in the business of making itself feel large, talking to itself at the exclusion of everyone else, no matter what it costs. A lot of time is spent laughing at bonehead moves made by major labels, but I wonder if these labels/publications/bands are making the same moves.

CMJ, as poorly run as it is, still has a clear purpose to me: it’s a way for small-town college radio kids to visit New York and see bands that would never make it to their city.

I don’t see that with SXSW. I think it should be the reverse: big city publicists/labels/writers come down to check out the bands that can’t afford to do big tours, so everyone can come back with something new to followup on. Right now, I’m digging through Twitters and blog posts to find those recommendations and observations. But 90% of coverage I’ve read online has been devoted to bands that have already been covered heavily in the past.²

So this is what I want to see from SXSW coverage: What’s new and what’s good? And from the panels: What’s going to change, or what has to change to keep people reading about and buying music? Hiring one less photographer or skipping the free t-shirts in your gift bags this year isn’t going to save your label or website or magazine. It seems silly to me that anyone would know where the best tacos are found, but couldn’t tell me where their industry will be in a year.

Or maybe I’m reading the wrong sites. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

About six months ago someone asked a question on Metafilter that made me feel 200% closer to a normal person. The question was basically of the “So, does this happen to anyone else?” variety, but it was so random and so precise that it got tons of responses:

When I think of / remember something embarrassing from my life, I compulsively make some kind of noise. It seems to happen unconsciously, before my censor can catch it and stop myself (it even happens when I am in a quiet or inappropriate place).

It’s not especially loud, in fact it’s often under my breath. The sound is usually just a quiet grunt, or a word/syllable or two. If I remember an embarrassing conversation, I tend to blurt out a random word of the conversation (as in, I’m replaying the dialogue in my head but then all the sudden one of the words pops out of my mouth). If it happens while I’m reading, I tend to blurt out one or two of the words that happen to be under my eyes at the moment.

It usually only happens when I’m remembering something palpably embarrassing or humiliating from my life — not for mild everyday kind of stuff. (Again, I had a fairly happy childhood and have nothing particularly traumatic in my past — I don’t think my embarrassing memories are any worse than the average joe’s)

I’m one of those people who does this and thought they were the only one. My usual utterance takes the form of a short, pointed laugh—literally a ‘ha!’ or a noise close to ‘ack!’ Basically, when I remember something embarrassing I turn into a comic strip.

But someone else revealed another habit that I happen to share (and thought no one else did):

If an embarrassing memory comes up (along with some sort of “oofy” noise or clutching my body like I’ve just been covered in slime) if I’m in the car I have to change the radio station or the track playing on my iPod. I don’t know what that has to do with it but the song must go, right now…
posted by Brainy at 12:25 PM on July 23, 2008

This is something I do even more than the embarrassment utterance. If I start to think of a bad memory, I have to change the song I’m listening to right away. It doesn’t matter what the song is or what’s up next. I just need something, a new thought really, to distract me, even if it’s “This Pink Mountaintops songs is terrible.”

But sometimes it’s the song itself that triggers a bad memory that I have to change. Like, when I’m unhappy with how the Pinkerton thing’s going, I cannot listen to Pinkerton, which makes writing a book about it much harder.¹

I thought about that again when Nick wrote about Merriweather Post Pavilion and mentioned the hard-to-describe feeling certain music can give you:

There is this cold and dizzy feeling that overtakes me sometimes, when a song or a passage of a song happens to gun it to my heart.

I know that feeling. But what happens when the song triggers the wrong cold and dizzy, like the feeling/memory of the worst thing you did or said, the declaration you should have kept to yourself, the third drink past the one you should have left the bar on? I can name songs I can’t listen to anymore because of this. And they’re not “THIS WAS OUR SONG”-type jams that I’ve shared with a boyfriend. Nor does it have much to do with the lyrical content. They’re usually songs I was listening to when I did something regrettable. The songs have nothing to do with me, they don’t remind me of myself or hold any memories on their own, but they act like containers. They’re like looking at bad photographs of myself. And just to be clear–these aren’t songs that remind me of bad memories, just embarrassing situations that I had control over.

One of the worst songs for me is the New Pornographers’ “Testament to Youth In Verse.” I’m not going to tell you why. But, if you do this (either the noise or the song-changing thing), please come forward. You’re in okay company. I’d love to hear what your trigger / utterance / song is.

Yesterday I skipped having drinks out with Mark to watch the Wildcard episode of American Idol. We have a DVR, which I’ve used to postpone the Grammys, the Superbowl, and the Presidential debates, but I’m so obsessed with the show right now that I have to see it as close to live as possible.

This has never happened before–my interest in American Idol usually dies after auditions and Hollywood week. I don’t root for singers, I just like to see them fail. But this year I’m crazy, like batshit, Google-image-searching, YouTube favoriting, Tweeting crazy for Indian American contestant, Anoop Desai.

It started early. He told the judges that he was a graduate student in folklore at UNC at his audition. The judges sort of immediately dismissed him (as did I) as a huge loser. Then he sang Boys II Men’s “Thank You,” and out came this weirdly soulful, totally earnest, not-perfect-but-pretty-great, smoky voice. I was totally in love¹ .

Really I think I fell in love during the auditions when the judges gave him these comments:

Paula Abdul: Didn’t expect that soulfulness. Anoop. Simon Cowell: It’s all a bit geeky at the moment though. You look like you just came out of a meeting with Bill Gates.

Bloggers have rightly pointed out how racist this is: why not wonder how the other white singers came in with “soul?” Why not question the other frat boy prepsters who look like computer programmers? Oh yeah, he’s brown.

So that bothered me and made me root for him, because so much of American Idol is supposedly based on how much you “feel it,” or how much you, as this EMP paper pointed out, “make it your own.” Desai doesn’t look like how he sings, and so it’s just that much harder for him to appear authentic and “real.” It’s not like when they tell little white girls that they didn’t expect that “big voice” to come out of them; that’s biology. And the soulfulness of the show’s white male contestants is rarely discussed. They have been getting a pass for years and years on American Idol.

Desai kept the R&B going by singing “My Prerogative” during Hollywood week. Then, for his first live song, Monica’s “Angel of Mine.” Dude loves his 90s R&B. After he sang there was this exchange:

Simon Cowell: Why did you chose that song, out of interest? Anoop Desai: that was the first R&B song i could remember hearing on the radio, and wanting to hear over and over. That song got me into R&B.

Hearing that song on the radio changed his life, really. I just want to quote something Anand Wilder, from Yeasayer, said to me during a Stereogum Progress Report interview:

There’s some music that can make you feel happy and good, and there’s some that can make you feel inadequate, like you’re not cool enough to be listening to that music. I want to go for that kind of style. If you listen to really hardcore gangster rap, it’s like, “Oh man, this is the real stuff. These guys are so cool, I’ll never be this cool. I can’t even seem cool when I’m listening to it.”

I think Wilder was talking about being a suburban kid listening to gangster rap. He’s Indian too, I think, but I think his point was more physical removal, rather than cultural removal, from something he loved. Wilder is okay with this removal–he’s not trying to become a rapper, he couldn’t authentically pull it off. But Desai decided, at some point, that he could be cool enough.

Let me just bring up that Merriam Webster definition of soul again too:

Function: adjective Date: 1958 1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of black Americans or their culture 2 : designed for or controlled by blacks

Another thing I love about Anoop is that he also reminds me of what it’s like to struggle with trying to become part of a culture you have no place in. When I was in love with TLC—my entry point into girl R&B and still my favorite, I’d dress up like TLC to go to school. Sometimes we’d “play” TLC during lunch. I always got stuck as Chili because she was of unknown, mixed heritage, like me (uh, except I know what I am). I didn’t want to be Chili, I wanted to be Left-Eye, but my two friends were black. I could pull off her rapping, but I didn’t look like I could.

So, I get that feeling, and I sympathize, in a small way with what he wants to do. Desai has to pass muster as an “American” for “American Idol” (just Google for the Anoop Dog Millionaire and “Harold and Anoop Go To White Castle” videos to see what America still thinks of Indian Americans), but then he has to prove that he has soul. And since he’s chosen 90s R&B as his thing, he further has to prove he’s believable as a guy that girls are dying to have sex with. I mean, what is Bobby Brown’s discography except variations on “fuck you, let’s fuck.”² He was pure sex, and now Desai has to be too. Of course, when I pointed out to Mark what a hard sell that’d be, he had the best answer: no one means it more than a horny college boy.

Still, I didn’t believe it until last night. When Desai sang “My Prerogative” last night, girls screamed, they screamed at his microphone humping, shirt-pinching, and eye-winking. He’s still a little bit awkward, but he’s pulling it off. And he didn’t always. There’s old video of him singing “I’ll Make Love To You,” by Boys II Men (subtext: “let’s fuck”), with his UNC men’s a cappella group the Clef Hangers (wow), and girls are sort of giggling and laughing when he removes his tux jacket. He’s not believable, or sexy. But between then and now (probably through the intervening years of sexual experience, singing experience, and/or good stylists at American Idol), he’s a genuine and believable singer of hyper-sexual R&B. Girls think he is, as one anoop-dogg.com commenter wrote, “sex on toast.” Holy shit!

By choosing a song that is explicitly about stating who you are, and then making it his own, Desai’s shut down any questions of authenticity. In other words, having the balls to do it proved he has the balls to do it.

Paula Abdul called his dance moves “nasty.” Randy Jackson called him “Anoop Brown-Dogg,” then quickly added that Desai was “you know, like Bobby Brown’s cousin.” “Oh, because I thought you meant…” Desai responded and trailed off. I know what Desai was thinking: “Oh shit, I didn’t pull it off.” Because when they start calling you the Indian version of X (the best Indian singer, the best Indian dancer, the best Indian actor), you aren’t convincing your audience. It’s a weak compliment. I think he was relieved when he realized Jackson wasn’t making a comment about his race, or his “surprising” soulfulness. I was relieved too.

Desai made the top 13, by the way. I’ve been daydreaming about all the R&B songs he could do next. Silk’s “Freak Me,” anyone?

I’m a couple months into my column, talking to bands about recording for Stereogum. I enjoy hearing about their process, and what it takes them to physically start producing stuff.

I want to know because it’s something that I struggle with a lot. I think I’m fairly productive–I set a goal of completing and submitting one piece a day, and I track the number of pitches and ideas I sent to editors every week, too. But for things without a deadline or a vague deadline, I’m lost sometimes. I have a book due, I have a list of essays and longer pieces I want to research even before I pitch them, and a list of blog post ideas, but I keep putting them off. They fall off in the face of daily goals deadlines.

So how do bands do it? Their problem is somewhat similar: touring is their daily deadline–they must be somewhere, doing something, by a certain time. Their next album? That’s their book / essay that needs to be out there at some point. Now there’s one big difference: I could probably go a long time just doing my assignments, but I won’t improve my own work unless I start tackling the bigger pieces. Bands can’t just tour on one album forever, unless they’re Peter Frampton.

What I hear from bands is that touring can’t be combined with writing; they take two different types of energies. Touring is like muscle memory at some point, you’re going through the motions (those motions might be awesome), but it’s not, as John Vanderslice said, “making new shit.”

Writing reviews/features is “making new shit,” but in a lot of ways it’s making the same shit. I know how I write reviews, and I approach each the same basic way: the background/foreground listens, the same note-taking, the same way I pull in what I want to say and then push around words and edits. It’s fun and challenging, but it’s not always as creative as I want it to be (I already hear the response there, and thanks). It’s closer to touring than making a new record.

Now being on the internet, that’s also primarily a triggered activity, a gathering activity, I think. I read twitters and respond; I find links and re-post; I tag photos and videos and songs I’m listening to. This shouldn’t be mistaken for blogging or creating. Most people know this (and have Tumblrs for it), but I think there’s a danger in doing nothing but collecting without then trying to do some output. There’s also a danger in combining them. Dhould this long post be on the same page as a bunch of Flickr and Youtube favorites and what I finished on Goodreads? Probably not. But I’ve been doing that long enough to pretend I am “making things” when I have been just “gathering things,” often without any time set aside for processing.

I want to split that stuff up, and not pretend one is the other (though I do find both to be valid and useful activities). That’s why I moved my blog to /blog, and will use my front page on www.jessicasuarez.com for all that aggregated/gathered stuff. Part of my inspiration is Emily Gould’s blog, www.emilymagazine.com. For all the making fun she gets–probably mostly unfair–her long posts are consistently entertaining and smart. Her posts are also completely bare and on a default Wordpress template. I’m sure it’s all deliberate, I think she’s someone who thinks all the time about what things on the internet mean. When you have good writing you don’t need the clutter.

That said, I probably will spend too much time formatting / re-templating my blog and front page.