People love labelling things as many times as possible, so there are a ton of arbitrary sub-categories, and one of the easiest ways to help people figure out which category you belong to is with your band name. Certain kinds of names pop up all the time, and if you have just the right one, you and James and Sasquatch will have an automatic leg-up when it comes time for the industry showcase. The press will heap praise upon you as the best new thing in (insert sub-genre), and once someone tells you what particular brand of indie music you’re actually playing, you can get around to the timeless art of vehemently resisting categorization…but all in good time. Let’s name you!

Like I said, every band name sends a different message. Certain words become very popular from year to year, and if you use them, you will seem superlatively trendy for the shortest amount of time imaginable. For example, last year you were almost guaranteed fame and glory if you had the word “Crystal” in your name. That’s probably played out by now, so if you use it, you’ll look like a loser. That is the nature of the beast. Speaking of, animals are also popular. If you use an animal in your name, you seem woodsy… people will find folksy undertones in everything you write. Sometimes, everybody uses the same animal like they use the same word. (Around 2005, you might have noticed that everyone was “wolf” crazy.) You can also usually get away with just picking an animal that everyone thinks is cool (like Grizzly Bear) or if you have a name that makes absolutely no sense, throw an animal in there and people will think, “Oh, it’s cool. They’re just doing the animal thing.” (Like Department of Eagles).

Buzzwords and animals are nothing compared to the ease of using geographic locations in your name. There is only one rule, but it’s sacred: you can NOT be from the place that you use in your name. (Trust me, that is band name kryptonite. Boston? I rest my case.) After that, it’s all just simple science: your band name already has tons of identifiers associated with it. Places are rich and evocative – everybody knows something about any given place, and even if they don’t, that’s even better because it’s all the more exotic. And because you obeyed the first rule of indie rock band place-naming, you’re not actually FROM the place, so you’ve satisfied the second rule of indie rock band place-naming: irony! It’s worked for countless musicians: Of Montreal, Beirut, Portugal, The Man, Brazilian Girls, and many others as well. Just try counting them – you can’t.

All of the names I’ve suggested so far are typically associated with not-so-intense brands of indie rock. “Post-rock” is more out there. It’s kind of a weird term – it generally means that you’re using rock instruments but you’re not using rock song structures, and there are two basic pathways here: orchestral post-rock (like Sigur Rós) or heavy post-rock (like Explosions in the Sky). I can’t really help you with the former, because I don’t trust those people, but if you’re ready to get heavy, picking a band name is as easy as going outside and picking your favourite thing. It helps if it’s huge because it implies your sound is also huge. It might help to use this simple formula: more huge = more good. Think simple: Tree would be a great name for a heavy post-rock band. Don’t be afraid to get “too big” either. There is a “drone metal” band from Seattle called Earth. You could call yourselves Solar System and one-up them, but if you’re going to play that game, you might as well go whole hog and call your band Universe. In your face, Earth.

There you have it. You could also mix and match and maybe even create a new genre entirely. You’ll be thanking me when everyone refers to you as the next “indie post-freak folk rock buzz band.” And now that I think about it, “Me, James, and Beardy on the Bass” is actually kind of a good name. You’d better let me use it though; it’s not very ironic if you use your actual names.

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I remember three very clearly: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Genesis’s creatively-titled 1983 album Genesis, and Prince’s Purple Rain. The latter probably made the biggest impression on my tiny mind, and I spent many a Saturday afternoon running around with my portable cassette deck set to fast playback, tickled that I could made Prince sound even smaller and freakier than he already was.

(Tangential side-note: two of the last three Super Bowl half-time shows have featured two of the three aforementioned artists. Either I was blessed with some kind of prodigious foresight when I was eight, or the Super Bowl is keenly marketed to the musical tastes of people in my parents’ demographic. I’ll let you be the judge, but I think it’s the first one – and if a Phil Collins-led Genesis plays next year, we’ll know for sure.)

Purple Rain was – and is – an extremely popular album. I presume it was something of a requisite purchase for couples who were young in 1984. It’s also really sexual, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, and since I had only the vaguest notion of what sex was when I was eight (kissing naked, right?!?), I probably had a difficult time putting its racier moments in proper context. Specifically, “Darling Nikki” might as well have been in Navajo, and the sexy dialogue before “Computer Blue” where Lisa asks Wendy if she’s ready for her bath was simply understood as a cooperative variant of my own (then obligatory) nightly cleansing ritual.

Nevertheless, I got the impression that something was going on between the lines, and for that reason I can retrospectively credit Purple Rain for providing me with the first contact I ever had with both critical listening, and the “freakier” side of life – a realm where men wore high-heels and women publicly pleasured themselves with periodicals. I like to imagine my parents sitting around, concerned and wondering if they’d made the right choice by letting me pilfer through the storage room (Dad: “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.” Mom: “Are you crazy, the eighties are in there!”) They might then have decided that certain forms of exploration were important for my development, but I suspect that they’d simply forgotten what Purple Rain was about after owning it for 11 years.

All this to illustrate the boring and obvious point that, whether in the case of cassette tapes exiled to the shed or the more timeless fare that’s actually allowed in the house, our parents’ musical tastes are more influential than we might be comfortable admitting. You’ve probably had the distressingly Pavlovian experience of hearing a song or album that your parents played all the time when you were young and beginning to salivate (what, just me?) – or at least you might have been swept up in the sort of musical appreciation that stems from nothing more than boring old conditioning.

Do you ever wonder how much of the stuff you like you actually discovered on your own, and how much of your musical appreciation simply refers to those early years of conscious listening? I’m personally helpless in my adoration of Harvest Moon by Neil Young, Rubber Soul by The Beatles, and most James Taylor. If pressed, I would admit that most of Rod Stewart’s music inspires feelings of warm nostalgia rather than blind ire, though I would never admit this to my mother, whose affinity for Hot Rod I have derided for most of my young adult life. The point is, I can’t separate my nostalgic feelings of home from my capacity to critically engage with any of the music I’ve mentioned in this article. What if all of our personal tastes in music are formed during these crucial early years, and we evaluate new music by simply comparing it to an immutable template of appreciation developed in childhood? And what if, despite my most honourable intentions, I love Rod Stewart on a much deeper, much more primal level than I’ll ever love The Roots? Frightening.

In summation, Purple Rain is a great album, and an ideal gift for the 8-year-old in your life.

Check out future installments of Zachary’s column, Stuck on Shuffle, every second Monday in the Culture section.

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In case you totally ignore pop-culture or you’ve never watched vh1 for more than 15 minutes, Vanilla Ice was a Caucasian pop-rap star who was fantastically successful from roughly 1990 to 1991. He came packaged with a totally fabricated back-story about his early life in the mean streets of Miami Lakes, Florida – which, when discredited, somehow helped pop music audiences sober up and wonder how they ever bought into the whole icy fiasco. Ever since, Vanilla Ice has been desperately attempting to stage a comeback, first in 1994 with Mind Blowin’, and then with the equally irrelevant efforts Hard to Swallow, Bi-Polar, and Platinum Underground.

Platinum Underground is especially amusing. In a display of shockingly limited self-awareness, Vanilla Ice’s fourth comeback album title was comprised of two words, neither of which described him at all. The record was released in 2005, at the dawn of an age where almost no one could go platinum anymore, so it was pretty safe to say that Mr. Van Winkle didn’t have a vanilla ice cube in hell’s chance of selling one-million albums. (This despite song titles like “Trailer Park Mullet Wars” and the highly anticipated follow-up to “Ninja Rap,” “Ninja Rap 2”). Tragically, thanks to Ice’s perennial whipping-boy status, his antics and his feeble comeback attempts have been widely observed by folks who care (on the Internet), allowing for maximum shaming (on the Internet). So as much he might sometimes wish, he’s not exactly “underground” either. A more realistic album title might have been something like Everybody Knows That Only My Mom Bought This.

The “pop-culture whipping boy” phenomenon is interesting, though. I think the main reason why people get really mad that a formerly huge pop star like Vanilla Ice still exists is a collective feeling of guilt and shame. He was a big white gimmick used to sell rap music to a pop audience; he had those lightning bolt racing stripes carved into the sides of his hybrid fade/pompadour, and those shiny pants – and he rapped about Ninja Turtles.

For a year or so, we really ate that shit up, allowing “Ice Ice Baby” to make history as the first “rap” song to top the Billboard Hot 100. Well, I didn’t because I was four. But maybe you did.

Now it seems that the only way we, as a culture, can make amends for these prior indiscretions is to publicly shame Vanilla Ice for the rest of his life, which is probably unfair because we’re more responsible for his existence and former success than he is. Unfortunately, we can’t all line up in the public square and flog ourselves, so we have to gang up on poor Robert, whose backward flexfit hat seems to get pulled lower and lower with each successive album cover – lest a lightning bolt escape from underneath, revealing his tough-guy transformation as an elaborate ruse.

While I don’t think the position of pop-culture whipping boy is the most enviable one to occupy, it doesn’t render a person impotent. In fact, the most impressive folks who’ve shouldered this noble burden sometimes manage to turn their public shaming into a joke unto itself. There are few things more satisfying than seeing a public figure play along with some self-awareness. Actually, it makes us impotent in a way: once the star is in on the joke, things aren’t so funny anymore.

Rick Astley, who sang “Never Gonna Give You Up” in 1987 and is a genuine champion, did this brilliantly when he appeared in the flesh and “Rickroll’d” the Macy’s Day parade this Thanksgiving. Rick and Rob really aren’t so different, when you think about it. Both of them were massively successful nerds who we’re ashamed of having once appreciated. Except Rick didn’t have a manic compulsion to stay popular, and faded quietly away and had kids. Rob, by contrast, has remade “Ice Ice Baby” on almost every album he’s released since his heyday in the early nineties, in a series of extremely confusing attempts to reinvent the very reason people hate him.

But I think I’ve figured it out. In the age of sarcastic, hyper-ironic post-appreciation, the line between detesting something and genuinely enjoying it is so blurred, I suspect most people in the coveted 18-24 marketing demographic honestly can’t tell the difference. Vanilla Ice and his “Ninja Rap” are cultural artifacts that people in our age bracket don’t really understand because we weren’t really there. We know that Vanilla Ice is supposed to suck, but if you throw “Ice Ice Baby” on at a party, people will lose their minds anyway, because “omigod so funny!” right?

So, Vanilla, I might respectfully suggest that you’re coming at this the wrong way. Your ticket to newfound relevance is as simple as a North-American campus tour – not as Vanilla Ice, the super-insecure, weed-smoking, tough-guy rap-rock sex-fiend, but as Vanilla Ice with the lightning bolts and the glitter suit. Do it valiantly and earnestly and I guarantee that you will be met with ambiguously unbridled enthusiasm. It’s irrelevant if people come to your concerts to be ironic, because they probably won’t be able to tell the difference. And if we can be a little bit honest about your self-awareness track record for a second, I don’t think you will either.

If you read The McGill Daily and have any further questions, Mr. Ice, or if you’d like to get together and hammer out the specifics of your comeback, please have one of your ice-ssociates contact me. My email address is zachary.shuster@mail.mcgill.ca. Word to your mother.

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Curious chili lover: Yeah…man, I love the Police, but I’m usually too embarrassed to say that out loud.

Zach Shuster: Really? Last year I spent the bulk of my accumulated summer earnings to fly from my home in Honolulu, Hawaii to Manchester, Tennessee to see a Police reunion concert.

My dominant fandom thus established, I was suddenly shocked to see that most people in the room were grimacing. I came to a terrible realization: Being a really huge Police fan might not be cool. For the sake of addressing this unfortunate social reality, I hereby present to McGill Daily readers, skeptics, and believers alike, three reasons why the Police are the greatest rock band ever – past, present, or future.

Reason 1: Tantric Sting

The lead singer of the Police is Sting. Sting is proficient in a number of areas: he can play the bass (can you play the bass?), he has golden vocal chords, and he is a celebrated practitioner of tantric sex. In fact, he is frequently the subject of parody due to the candor with which he discusses his sex practices. What many people don’t know is that Sting is also a world-renowned practitioner of what I like to call “tantric conversation.” Allow me to explain: most interviews of music personalities delve only briefly into intimate discussions of personal sexuality. Clinical findings suggest that the subject occupies perhaps seven to 13 minutes (on average) of overall interview time, before reaching a climax and trailing off into a refractory period of variable length (this is usually when the celebrity professes a dedication to preserving the environment). Sting, by employing an arsenal of synchronized breathing techniques and refusing to break eye-contact, can maintain a discussion on the topic of tantric sex for up to 14 hours, leaving the interviewer thoroughly, transcendently informed.

Reason 2: Fadeouts

The Police know they rock. They write songs that rock so hard that they don’t feel the need to write endings for them, because ending a song means admitting it needs to end. The Police don’t play your game. That’s why almost every Police song ends with a fadeout, implying that it’s still playing somewhere. You see, the fadeout is the rock song equivalent of awkwardly leaving a boring conversation at a house party. When “Walking on the Moon” is “finished” on your iPod, and “On Any Other Day” starts playing, that doesn’t mean the song is actually over; it just means it’s done with you, and it’s gone to do something better with itself. It’s probably made its way over to my iPod, where it will be appreciated by someone who’s willing to eat nothing but buttered pasta for weeks just so he can stand in a dirty field in the Deep South to see Sting from a distance.

Reason 3: A hundred million bottles

Jokes aside, the Police have written some of the most enduring pop songs of the last 40 years. (Which by itself is no big deal – even Journey cranked one out.) What sets them apart is the fact that most, if not all, of their most celebrated tunes deal with alienation, and not just in the “sexy people won’t talk to me” sense, but the “I always feel like I’m stranded on a desert island” sense, the “You don’t love me anymore so I’ll probably kill myself” sense, and, most popularly, the “I’m constantly watching you through your bedroom window because you’re my property…and God only knows what I’m up to in this tree” sense. (That’s “Every Breath You Take,” I’m afraid, and depending on how old you are, there’s a good chance it was played at your parents’ wedding.)

There’s something at work here that I happen to think is brilliant: Imagine tens of thousands of people in their eighties best, packed in arenas around the world; huge crowds of folks standing shoulder to shoulder, singing along about how lame they are, and how wretched it feels to be alone. The Police’s best jam, “So Lonely,” can be found on the 1978 album Outlandos d’Amour. Next time you’re feeling particularly shitty, I suggest you throw it on. It’s a buoyant pop/reggae number of the best variety, with lyrics about melancholic hang-ups against a backdrop of new-wave sunshine. Before you know it, you’ll be beaming along with a proud tradition of Police fans through the years who’ve known the value of translating the worst human preoccupations into radio rock staples. So lonely, indeed.

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I’m not as eager as Ehrenhalt to derive a coherent theory about human nature and the psychological ramifications of boundless choice, plus I didn’t read the whole book, but it seems true that the ability to choose in new ways is having some interesting effects on our culture. Naturally, pop culture and music are hardly immune.

Downloading has theoretically given us access to every song ever – or at least every remotely popular song released since 1950-something – and in exercising our newfound ability to choose, it’s as if we’d rather not choose at all. Instead, we choose everything (which is like choosing to choose by not choosing). Some people are open to more kinds of music than others, but I would suspect that the average McGill student has something from every decade since 1960 in their iTunes library. While having access to such a selection of musical history once meant owning a prohibitively expensive quantity of plastic or vinyl, now you can pull it off with an investment in a tiny box (or phone) that slides out of your pocket like a bar of soap whenever you sit down. So what happens when everyone has the ability to listen to every song ever made, every day? The phenomenon of everyone listening to the same thing at any given time becomes more and more of a rarity. And that has been an essential part of pop-cultural community building since Prometheus (Elvis) stole fire (rock ‘n’ roll) from the gods and died on a cliff side (toilet) while vultures (Dexedrine) pecked out his liver.

The effect is indeed disorienting. The individual is so personally empowered that he or she has access to a representation of any historical community of musical appreciation from the whole 20th century, but no access to an immediately definable musical community in the 21st, because such a thing, I think, is ceasing to exist. Innovation is increasingly reliant on compilation and the state of music in this decade reflects this evolution. Sampling calls upon the ingrained associations of a historically informed listening public to induce appreciation: Girl Talk takes roughly 40 years of pop music and shoots it all into your head like your iPod is on the world’s most transcendently coordinated shuffle cycle. Even the way we’re dressing, which seems distinctively 21st century, is a compilation of sorts. Yes, that bright t-shirt is very eighties, but that angular hairstyle looks like it crawled out of punk-era London, to say nothing of the mod-y suit vest and skinny pants. My, the sixties, seventies, and eighties are all back, and they’re all on the same dude, and he’s throwing verses in the crowd for Nas at Metropolis like he came up in Queensbridge in the nineties.

New music has always drawn upon its forebears in innovating, but the level of self-awareness seen in the process today is unprecedented. This is also a function of the web – this time as a means of bypassing corporate distribution of media: copyright laws still impede unrestrained sampling in commercial music, but the online mixtape phenomenon is spawning a whole new, generationally integrative composition process. One of the most enjoyable listening experiences I had this year was Man In The Mirror, a collaboration between British producer Mark Ronson and Chicago emcee Rhymefest. It’s a hip hop mixtape made with uncleared samples of Michael Jackson songs, which simultaneously pays homage to and parodies the generation-spanning career of one of the most enduring figures in pop music. It’s a brilliant illustration of the debt hip hop owes to soul music of the sixties and seventies, and to MJ in particular, but the skits lampooning Mike’s personality quirks keep the thing from getting heavy-handed. The result is a piece of music that not only wears its influences on its sleeve, but exists to do so. Mixtape/mashup music, at its most intriguing, is consciously turning the transgenerational listening party into art.

So is the security and familiarity of a like-minded listening community something we want back? Do the benefits of choice outweigh the comfort of having the musical menu reduced to exactly what your peers are also listening to? When we reflect retrospectively on our youths, are we in danger of coming up with only that eight-second video of the intense-looking groundhog as an example of genuine shared experience? I suspect not. I suspect the mixtape phenomenon is a turning point. Maybe one day we’ll look back on ourselves as the first generation to have the ability to listen to, appreciate, and artfully manipulate a wealth of preexistent pop music, and recognize the start of something significant. And if that means the dude keeps wearing his shutter shades on the same head as his fifties pompadour, I say, bring it on. Elvis quit taking his pomp’ seriously and look what happened to him.

Stuck on Shuffle appears every other Monday in the Culture section.

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Their songs sound like a gang of whales fighting one another with lightning. They usually start out with ethereal vocals. These represent whale introductions, as far as I can tell. They build up from there, at a slow burn, as the whales become frustrated with one other. The singer will bend the pitch a little bit, which I guess is profanity in whalespeak, and when you hear the first sound that sounds like lightning, that means the fight has started in earnest. Judging by the band’s metronomic comfort zone, whales mostly fight in slow motion.

Sigur Ros comes from Iceland. Where, exactly, is Iceland? Is it technically part of Europe? Is it a Greenland’s geographical afterthought? Is it just part of…the ocean? I think the first Icelandic societies were either started by fishermen or Vikings (I didn’t have time to Wikipedia this part), and I think the band formed spontaneously one morning when the sun shone across a dewy, Icelandic meadow and made a flower happy.

Their lead singer’s name is unpronounceable to me because it contains letters I’ve never seen, and I suspect are made up, like “Hopelandic,” the language they supposedly sing in. I looked up their name and it means “Victory Rose.” Whaaaat?

Needless to say, I’m confused. They make appealing music, but I have no idea what the deal is, and I distrust anyone who says that they know for sure. My fantasy is this: Sigur Ros is as confused about me as I am about them. (I don’t mean me personally, I mean the whole deal: the society that you and I come from, our customs, our respective countries, our language, food, etc.)

They land in North America to play concerts, and they’re immediately shocked that no restaurant is serving squirrel. They suspect that there’s some logic to the major record label thing, but for the life of them, they can’t figure it out. All they know is they walk onto a big platform every couple of nights, interact with one another in the traditional Icelandic way (a simulated whale fight) and someone gives someone else they know a lot of smelly green paper.

They survive this way until somehow, by the grace of God, they make their way safely back to Iceland, where they go underground and transform back into to soft balls of light. Their lead singer doesn’t know that you’re not supposed to play a guitar with a cello bow. Sigur Ros has no idea what’s going on.

Edit: Alright, I saw them in concert and it turns out they speak English. Either they’re figuring us out, or this whole theory is bullshit.

Check out future installments of Zach’s column for more outlandish statements on music and pop culture. Look for Stuck on Shuffle every second Monday in the Culture section.

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