Last week, the song “Midnight City” by M83 was officially released as a single on the Billboard Hot 100 and is currently sitting at a modest #74 on the chart, not yet Adele-stellar but far from terrible.

If you somehow missed out on the massive outpouring of critical love for “Midnight City” last year, let me catch you up on why you should love this song: “Midnight City” placed at #1 on PopMatters’, Stereogum’s and Pitchfork’s lists of the Best Songs of 2011, at #2 on Paste’s list (after “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes) and at #4 on the Village Voice’s massively influential Pazz and Jop poll (behind three songs with far more mainstream pull). In equally important matters, it placed on my very objective list of ludicrously overplayed songs my iPod, and most of the music nerds I know developed an unhealthy obsession with it. A friend of mine claims to have logged over 20 hours listening to it, and I almost can’t challenge him on that assertion. It’s a natural reaction to such blissful musical brilliance.

M83 is a great band and has been putting out consistently stellar work over the last decade, notably the tracks “Graveyard Girl,” “We Own the Sky” and “Kim and Jessie” from 2008’s Saturdays = Youth and “Don’t Save Us From the Flames” from 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us. Although the latter is my personal favorite of their tracks — a song that I feel is arguably the track of that decade — none of these have quite struck a chord with listeners in the way that “Midnight City” has. The song is surrounded by terrific tunes on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, and the 80-minute, 22-track double album features the dance-party ready “Reunion,” the gorgeous ambience of “Steve McQueen” and the Zola Jesus-assisted “Intro.”

However, nothing quite stands out as starkly or as radiantly as “Midnight City,” a triumphant, almost symphonic tune that blends shoegaze, dream pop and New Wave with the current trend of electronic pop to create what will be remembered as one of this decade’s masterpieces. As Pitchfork mentioned, the song most recalls “1979,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1996 ode to youth—a song that really pushed the Pumpkins out of their alterna-rock niche to create a popular classic.

And like “1979,” which captured the mixture angst and hope of its generation in the same way that “Midnight City” does so perfectly, “Midnight City” has the potential to become a massive crossover hit. “1979” had incredible critical backing at the time, placing at #3 on the 1996 Pazz and Jop list and later at #21 on Pitchfork’s songs of the decade. Helped also by the band’s large and dedicated following and the wide support for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, this perfect storm of factors helped “1979” become a sleeper hit and break the Billboard Top 10, an impressive feat for introverted critical darlings.

However, such success for alternative bands was hardly unprecedented, as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Beck’s “Loser” had accomplished earlier in the decade, when they reached #7 and #10, respectively. Two of the most widely-acclaimed songs of they decade, they approached the summits of the chart during a time when R&B and ballads dominated the charts, churning out hit after hit by Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. In 1994, the year “Loser” landed in the Top Ten, the R&B/pop bands Boyz II Men and All for One spent a combined 26 weeks at #1. (For our friends counting at home, that’s half of the year.)

Other critically championed songs throughout the decade would show similar success, including Oasis’ “Wonderwall” (#2), The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” (#2) and Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” (#21). However, high-profile indie hits and critical favorites routinely underperformed throughout the aughts, despite the deafening buzz surrounding them. Although The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” went to #10 and Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” reached all the way up to #5 with critical backing—both landed on Pitchfork’s end-of-the-decade list—they performed far better than songs even more acclaimed than they were. Beloved tunes like Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” (#66), The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” (#76) and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” (#87) all failed to get even close to the top 40. Elsewhere, indie faves like Modest Mouse, The Vines, The Hives, The Strokes and Death Cab For Cutie found success in the Alternative, Modern Rock and Heatseekers circuits—but not on the Hot 100, the benchmark of crossover success.

However, the fortunes of critics’ bands and indie favorites have changed considerably in recent years. Although singles by Phoenix, MGMT and Animal Collective never quite got the wide mainstream recognition they deserved — Phoenix came closest with “1901” (at #84), which had been featured in a car commercial — Florence and the Machine, MIA, Fountains of Wayne, Cee-Lo, La Roux, Feist, and Mumford and Sons have all spawned tracks in or right outside the Top 20, while earning great reviews for their work. Of course, Adele is the mother of all of these cases, nabbing three number-ones off a hugely acclaimed album whose titanic sales basically saved the music industry. (Also of note, indie acts fun. and Foster the People have recently reached the Top Five with almost no initial critical buzz behind them, and their albums currently hold fine-but-not-great respective scores of 66 and 69 on Metacritic.)

What changed during this time span? You did. Although putting a song in a car commercial or covering it on Glee, a program I personally hate, but that’s no matter, can help a song reach a wider audience, it cannot continue to find success without wide listener support. Due to such outlets such user-driven outlets such as iTunes, Amazon, Sirius XM and music streaming sites like Pandora and Spotify, the ways in which we consume, share and raise awareness about music have revolutionized. With the recent inclusion of data from music-streaming sites in Billboard statistics, we (the listening public) have more critical power than we ever did. What we blog about on the internet, what we think about culture and what we choose to listen to matter; we vote with our ears, and if we choose to listen to songs we deem to be masterpieces, that’s what we will get back. (Surely, there must be room in the Top Ten for both the LMFAOs and M83s of the world.)

Thus, if you — like many pop-culture savants I know — adore M83, don’t just listen to “Midnight City” on your iPod a hundred times in a row. Share the video on Facebook or listen to it on Spotify. Make an M83 Pandora station. Tweet or blog about it. Start a Facebook group to help get “Midnight City” to #1 and ask others to join. Request it on your local radio station. Because however you are listening to music, you have the power not to listen in a vacuum. You have the power to change what’s on the radio and what America listens to, one masterpiece at a time.

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You’d fall in love with me if you saw me wearing my scarf. At first you wouldn’t know what it was that you were feeling. Just some vague sensation of desire. Then you’d say, “Oliver, I never say stuff like this and I do not know what’s come over me, but can I… touch your scarf?” And I’d say: “…No.” Then I’d say: ”Ahahahahaha, I was only kidding, you silly! …Of course you can touch it. Touch it for as long as you want to — or need to.”

I wear the Unisex Tri-Blend Scarf from American Apparel. Item number TR445 in the catalog – 50% Polyester, 25% Cotton, and 25% Rayon. …I wear it in the “Tri-Coffee” color shade. It cost 18 bucks.

Sometimes I feel as though the scarf is the best thing to ever happen to me. Kittens have grown into cats and then died. Girls have gotten sick of my passive-aggressive over-intellectual routine and then dumped me. …Brightness has fallen from the air. Queens have died young and fair. Everything changes. But still, my scarf remains.

_____

I saw it in an American Apparel store and love just happened. Sparks flew. Fireworks. I felt it all. I didn’t want to like anything in an American Apparel store. Usually when I enter an American Apparel store, I scream something like “JESUS CHRIIIIIST THEY’RE SELLING SILVER LAMÉ LEGGINGS FOR GUYS I AM TOO OLD AND FIVE PERCENT TOO HETEROSEXUAL FOR THIS STORE GET ME OUT!!!” I was in the store because I was bored as f-ck in Manhattan while waiting for my girlfriend to meet her idiot friend to discuss her idiot friend’s engagement. …Words like “discuss” and “engagement” make me itch and want to throw things. When I meet my friends, I meet them to, say, get drunk. I don’t meet them with a set topic of discussion. And if someone’s getting engaged, I say something like “Greeeeaaat you’re getting married yah moron.” But anyway.

I walked into the American Apparel store — since I wasn’t allowed to/ didn’t want to discuss the engagement — and there it was. The scarf of scarves. Ultima Thule. The last scarf that I would ever need. I had been OCD-ishly looking for the right scarf — online, in stores — for about three months leading up to this moment. But more than that, I’ve been searching for the perfect scarf for almost my whole life. …In college, I had a scarf that approached greatness; it was a vintage taupe number from Brooks Brothers that I found in a thrift store — it was almost the right scarf but not quite the right scarf. It was missing something by about, say, two percent, and this made me sad.

I picked up the Tri-Blend scarf and put it down again, as an inevitably sexy salesgirl approached.

“Do you need any help?”

“Oh, I don’t…. k-nnnooow.” I was still fingering the f-cking scarf. It was like seeing a stranger on the subway and falling in love with them. You see them, fall in love, and go through your imaginary first date, first f-ck, first fight, move-in, marriage, anger, children, divorce. Infatuation like this can be exhausting; going through it all in your mind like this. That girl on the subway is just sitting there, and you’ve already had to endure a 30-year mental relationship. Probably if the stranger girl got up to talk to you, you’d say something like “Oh, what is it now?” …So exhausting. I was enduring the same thing with the scarf. I had known it for years.

“…Okay,” the salesgirl said.

“Ha ha, I never usually shop at American Apparel; I dunno, I feel too old!” I said, and shrugged.

…This fell into the me over-explaining while the other person doesn’t give a sh-t category of conversation that I often fall into with service-industry employees. Like if I’m at a bar, and I randomly order a vodka and lemonade for some reason, I say something like, “Jeez, I usually just get Jameson on the rocks, I don’t know what my deal is today.” …I say these things because I believe in my head that if I don’t, the bartender will rush straight home after work and say to his wife, “Honey, this guy came into the bar today, and for a second I thought he was kind of cool, y’know? …Like he seemed like he was a regular whiskey-drinker; a regular guy, y’know? …But then he ordered the lamest drink ever. It was such a crushing disappointment. What a world; what a world.”

The salesgirl blinked at me.

“I guess I’ll have to think about the scarf!”

I left the store. The salesgirl knew I would be back, and so did the Tri-Blend Tri-Coffee scarf.

____

I’ll spare you the suspense. Reader, I went back to the store and bought the scarf! And ever since then, things have been Good, more or less. …Except for the one time that I lost my scarf in a cab. Oh, but that was a hard moment for me. I lost my messenger bag, a notebook, my scarf, and a bottle of vodka in a cab. I could have used the bottle of vodka to get over the loss of the scarf. What happened then was that I had to go back to American Apparel and buy the same scarf again — meaning that I paid $36 in total for two single-ply sheets of polyester/ rayon/ cotton. When people talk about the impending decline of the American Empire, they are probably thinking of me. Somewhere in the Third World, a child-laborer is making a 35 cent sheet of polycottonrayon. And then there’s me buying it for a 1,000% markup. And then the terrorists get us. Or something. Anyway, where was I?

But it’s all worth it because I look great in my scarf. Without my scarf, I am… not very much. I’m a pale standard white person who looks vaguely Irish. But with my scarf — looped casually over a t-shirt, or pressed beneath the collar of my Kenneth Cole duffel coat — I am so much more. The scarf looped over the t-shirt says; I am slightly twee, I have hidden depths, I enjoy the music of Death Cab for Cutie and you would enjoy sex with me; I am probably a writer for a trendy website with 22-year-old fan-girls who send me sexy emails; my scarf says all this and more.

Unfortunately, however, my scarf did not survive my move from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Well, it did, but it didn’t, in a way. Post scarf-purchase, I left New York and went to rehab for alcoholism in a small post-industrial Pennsylvania town; it’s the kind of town with a river with rusty bridges over it, and abandoned businesses that could have never made sense to begin with: Al’s Oxygen Supply, Kim’s Flags and More, Levittown Rubber Factory.

My scarf made the move with me, but in this working-class town, wearing a casually looped Tri-Blend scarf over a hipster t-shirt says something a little different. It says, hey, I AM A SUSPICIOUS-LOOKING ‘PUSSY’ WHO YOU MIGHT ENJOY BEATING UP. In fact…

In point of fact, I was wearing my scarf the other day, while walking back from my secondary, non-writing job. It was about 5 p.m., twilight around here, at this time of year. The world not yet totally dark, but blue-ish.

[T]he violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting…

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea…

I passed a 7-11 as I headed home from work; this 7-11 is right next to the bridge to Trenton, New Jersey, and thus serves as the locus for most of the town’s homeless people. Some dude asked me for money as I walked past; we were a couple blocks past the 7-11 proper, near a sort of pointless drainage ditch area. The dude asked for money. He said he had just gotten out of jail, and he needed money for a hotel room. “Yo man can you help me out?” No comma in the sentence. This seemed like a uniquely bad pitch with which to ask for money, in my humble opinion. Back when I was briefly homeless in New York, I certainly didn’t attempt to stay in hotels, and I certainly didn’t ask strangers for money so I could stay in a hotel. “How about staying in a shelter and asking for money for f-cking food?” I wanted to say to him, but didn’t.

Instead, I rummaged in my pockets for change. This involved unzipping my duffel coat and readjusting my awesome Tri-Coffee blend scarf. Such a nice scarf! I came up with fifty cents, which I handed him.

“‘S’s all you got?”

“Yeah.”

“You ain’t got nothing more?”

“Nope.”

“Come on, man, help a brother out.”

Saying help a brother out never really encourages me to do anything.

“Sorry.” I shrugged.

“Come on, guy.”

Oh, this was becoming fun.

“Nope; can’t help you.”

“Fuck off then, faggot.”

I said the next part instantly without thinking: “Screw you, white trash asshole.” I said it in a resigned tone, too. Like, great, this guy’s a jerk. That was when I got punched in the face, which happened really surprisingly quickly. I had time to think, Wait — is he? and then, lo, he did. Ow.

All of which was provocative enough, but then I got punched six more times in the face. Ow? Not the face, dude. Man, I’m certainly not walking near this drainage ditch area again, I thought. It didn’t hurt very much, not right away — because I was in shock, or it was happening quickly enough that my pain cells weren’t having enough time to react. I’ll say this for me: it never remotely occurred to me to hit the guy back. No, that would only occur to me fifteen minutes later, when I was sprawled on the grass. I didn’t even feel mad: I felt sad and afraid and angry with the guy for punching me, but I wasn’t really mad at him. I didn’t hate the guy, somehow.

The seventh and final punch smashed against my face. Suddenly I decided to sit down on the grass for a while. Yes, the grass. This would be good. Here on the grass, in a slightly crumpled heap. This would be a good place to be; to rest, for a while.

_____

…It might be edifying here to pause for a second with a short note about movie violence versus real world violence. Like, the last action movie I saw on TV was Watchmen. Now. In that movie, as I remember, there’s a brief scene where one guy tries to punch another guy, misses, and instead smashes his hand through a solid marble wall. And then just resumes fighting. Now. It might be good to mention here that if you smashed your hand through solid rock in real life, you would be in almost indescribable amounts of pain, and might, in fact, faint. I have been in — let’s pause to count — two fights in my life, and during both of them I have been highly struck by this difference. In an action movie, action heroes routinely suffer through bouts of heavy violence, but one percent of this violence in real life would cause you to probably die.

Which is to say that after getting beaten up, I decided to stay on the ground for a while, instead of, say, giving the guy a karate kick to the head like you would in a movie.

…Here is what I then said to the guy; to my attacker:

“Wow. That hurt… quite a lot more than I thought it would. Asshole.”

The problem is that I said it with style. I glared defiantly at him; I chuckled ruefully like I was Harrison Ford. The problem is that in real life, I believe that I am Indiana Jones. Though action movies are not realistic, I have this problem where I secretly believe that I’m in a movie. Maybe it’s the scarf’s fault. Maybe the scarf makes me feel extra… dashing. Movie stars and actors wear scarfs, and often I am just acting out my life, playing the role of “me.”

“Screw you, white trash asshole.” …Why’d I say that, even? It was the thing I felt I was supposed to say. In real life, I am a coward, and I hate pain. (“…I’m not like other people,” Daffy Duck once said. “Pain hurts me.”)

But the problem is, I’m a scarf guy. I see myself from the outside, not the inside. I see myself with my scarf fluttering in the wind, and I think I am brave and exceptional.

“Yeah that was really pretty painful,” I said to the guy, and then laughed again.

Then I passed out for about fifteen minutes.

_____

When I woke up, strangers were standing over me. Not homeless people but normal small-town people; kindly good Samaritan people. A man and a woman.

“Hey dude, are you okay?” the man said. He helped me up from the ground.

“…Nooo, I’m fine, fine, sorry,” I said; my chronic, pathological politeness reasserting itself. For all I knew I was suffering from a massive bleeding internal brain hemorrhage and was going to die within fifteen seconds. “No… worries. Sorry to t… rouble ever…y…one,”I slurred.

“Are you sure?”

I patted myself down, as if after a long journey through freakish weather. My wallet was still there. My jaw was swollen, my ear and cheek bleeding, and apparently, one of my teeth had been knocked out; there was a windy gap in my mouth where one of my teeth no longer was. Something else was missing too.

My scarf?

…Where was my scarf?

It wasn’t on my neck.

…Still there? Was it? Where?

It was still there. It was on the ground; crushed into the mud, somehow having been knocked off during the fight. I lifted it. Muddy, but not torn. Still intact. Machine-washable poly-rayon. No problem.

Everything was still fine. Everything was as it should be. I did a halfhearted sixty-second search on the ground for my tooth. Nope. Couldn’t find it.

Then I looped the dirty scarf around my neck. Its coils were wet and heavy and muddy. Squared my shoulders. Re-thanked the strangers. (“…You sure you okay?”) Straightened my jacket. …And then I started on the long wobbling walk back towards my home.

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Have you ever seen a 1,000 CD Case Logic lying on the sidewalk? It’s upsetting. It’s like finding a corpse: someone made this, someone raised it, loved it, fed it, enriched it and, in return, was enriched by it. And now it’s lying here, unzipped, its contents spread over the sidewalk. When it happened to me over the weekend, I felt like the shmuck who finds the body at the beginning of Law and Order.

I did find an actual body on the sidewalk once, I think. I was walking home from work and saw a guy lying on his face. Nothing remarkable about that, except that I was at 11th and A, and you don’t see that kind of thing much around there these days. Plus he seemed young — mid-20’s, maybe — and his clothes looked clean and relatively new. Also his neck and arms were bent at strange angles, like he was frozen in the middle of a bad Michael Jackson impression. As I passed I turned and saw that his eyes were open: pale green, and clouded over. I kept walking. In a few steps it hit me: was he dead? Did I just pass a corpse? Should I keep walking? Or, more to the point, should I stop walking? I heard sirens and looked up as a fire engine rounded the corner heading towards me. Dead or not, someone was coming to deal with this guy. I didn’t even break stride — just walked home. But later I felt strange: should I have felt or done something differently than what I had felt and done, which was nothing?

A year later, here was this CD collection, and for the CD collection, I stopped. It was a poetic corpse of a CD collection, lying open at about the middle page with a stream of unorganized CDs — the ones you don’t bother to put in pockets and just cram inside the zipper — vomitted out of it.

I’m a child of the 90’s. I remember what it meant to build a CD collection: spending hours at Sam Goody or FYE or Tower or some other vaguely intimidating mall record store buying albums one at a time for $16 a pop, reading the back of the jewel case for 10 minutes, trying to decide if the band’s other nine songs were as good as the one you heard on the radio, knowing they probably weren’t, and buying it anyway. Building a collection took years and cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

And if you lost a whole case, you never recovered. Even if you could remember all the CDs you had lost, and even if you were willing to pay for new ones, it was back to Sam Goody, pawing through the supposedly alphabetized racks until you discovered that a new copy of a five year old album was still $14. Plus, even if you replaced your CDs, the new ones weren’t your CDs. You could get a new copy of Parliament’s Tear the Roof Off: 1974 – 1980, but it wouldn’t be the one with the scratch on the label of Disc 2 that you listened to on the bus to all of your sophmore year away games after buying it over the summer from a used record store in Utah because a camp friend clued you in that all of Dre and Snoop’s music was ripped from one legendary funk band. If you lost that, there was no getting it back.

So what could explain this collection of at least 500 CDs lying abandoned in the middle of the sidewalk? There were a few VHS tapes next to the CDs. I didn’t even read the titles — VHS tapes suck — but seeing the tapes made me think that the CD’s were part of a larger stuff-moving operation. I thought of two possibilities: either someone had been packing the car for Christmas and the CD collection had been mistakenly left behind, or the CDs had been collateral damage of a bad break-up, thrown out by an angry partner. I glanced at the CD’s on the open page: two Pixies albums and two Portishead albums. Not bad.

I looked around. No one was on the block. Two girls were sitting on the stoop across the street, chatting. I kneeled over the CD case and began flipping pages until I came to the Forrest Gump soundtrack, a mid-90’s give-away, but right below it was a Feist CD. How did those two end up in the same case on the same page? And there were other surprises: four Jeff Buckley albums, Howlin’ Wolf, Slim Harpo, Ibrahim Ferrer. Whose CD collection was this?

I stood up and decided to leave it. Someone might come back for it. I took a few steps and turned around. Someone might come back for it, but it was far likelier that a homeless person would either use the CDs to decorate a shopping cart or sell the whole collection for $10. I turned back and stood over the CDs, vaguely aware that the girls across the street were noticing that I was being weird.

My pocket buzzed — a text from my fiancee: “Headache. My head feels poopy. I have a poop head : ( .”  New York wears her out. She works too hard, she’s sick of her job, and she wants us to move back to L.A., like I promised. We’re moving next year. It’s not that I don’t see the upside — beaches, nicer home, a bunch of our friends already there — it’s just that in L.A., you’d never find someone’s entire CD collection on your walk home.

I leaned down and tried to zip the Case Logic, but the zipper stuck. I picked it up. The girls across the street, if they noticed, didn’t react. I walked home with the closed, unzipped case logic cradled across my arms like a wounded animal.

“I found someone’s CD collection,” I said, walking into the living room.

“Ughhhhh,” said my fiancee, lying on the couch in the dark. Right — the headache.

“Are you gonna want food?” she asked. Ah, the dinner conversation: she’s never hungry, I never know what I want. But tonight we had some raw chicken in the fridge that we had to use. I told her I was hungry. She said she would make fried chicken. Are you sure? The headache’s not too bad? No, it’s ok — just come keep me company.

I love fried chicken. My dad used to get it for us all the time as a kid. Then, for a long time, I never ate it. Now I eat it constantly. I think it’s a response to stress. Like cinnamon toast. I used to eat cinnamon toast all the time as a kid, and then, after not eating it for years, I had an overwhelming need for it while studying for the bar exam. I would do a set of practice questions and then look at the answers: “So, how’d we do?… HOLY UNDERWEAR! Ok… cinnamon toast break.” After the bar exam, I stopped eating it again.

She started frying chicken and I started unfolding the mystery of the CD collection.

Page 1: Abba, Gold; Ace of Base; the Tribe Called Quest Anthology and a burned CD labeled “Arcade Fire EP.” But under the Arcade Fire CD was the soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides. This was clearly a 90’s collection, but what was Arcade Fire doing in there? I understand that people move on — we all moved on, but we got iPods. Why have Arcade Fire on CD at all?

Page 2: Some Beatles greatest hits thing, and a reasonable assortment of Dylan — Another Side, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde, all fundamentals. But also a copy of Before the Flood, a double CD live album recorded with the Band. Nice. Sorely lacking Bootleg Series 1-3, but not bad.

Then it got wacky: Blondie, Bjork, the Breeders, Bright Eyes, Beck, Blind Willie Johnson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, a bunch of Bowie, the Clash, Ella Fitzgerald, Mississippi Fred McDowell. Pretty impressive. And alphabetized.

“What do you think, baby?” I asked my fiancee. “Boy or girl?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Put something on.”

How to choose? I started flipping pages and found more blues. Do girls like blues? I love the blues, but it’s pretty misogynistic. Not only are most of the singers men, but sooner or later even the nicest blues man will tell you that his woman stayed out all night so he shot her.

And there were other boy cues: Franz Ferdinand, a bunch of punk, a burned CD labeled “Johnny Cash – The Man Comes Around.” That’s not Chili’s commercial or “Jaoquin Phoenix is cute!” Johnny Cash. That’s late Johnny Cash, dying of cancer, quoting Bible verses and growling about the end of the world.

I was stumped. What do you make of a collection that has Muddy Waters next to No Doubt, the first Raconteurs album next to three Rilo Kiley CDs, and a mix CD with a track list in boy’s handwriting that includes the Silver Jews, Jonathan Rice, and a bunch of Dolly Parton? Whose CD collection is this? Musician? Music student?

“Just pick something, baby,” my fiancee said.

“I don’t know some of this stuff,” I said. “Like… Paris After Dark?”

“You don’t know Paris After Dark?’” she said. “Put it on!”

A minute later we were ballroom dancing in the kitchen to a post-war recording of Charles Trenet singing “La Mer.” Headache: gone. Man, this is a good CD collection. I dipped her a little too close to the range and her hair almost caught fire on the gas stove. We were better dancers when we were single.

Chicken was done and I still hadn’t figured out anything about the person who owned this collection. Boy? Girl? Inherited the collection from an older brother? Shared it with a girlfriend?

Finally, I crossed the gulf of empty pages in the middle to the back of the case: the classical music CDs and… the mix CDs. Boom.

It was soon obvious that this collection belongs to Justine. Justine studied abroad in Germany (Written in sharpie on a CD: “Gluckischer Geburtstag, Justine! [Heart], Jared / ‘Hildegard Knef sings Cole Porter’ ”). Also, Justine is (was?) either very good friends with, or dating, a girl named Ellen.

My favorite mix CD in the collection is labeled, “Happy Birthday Justina! Love, Julia & Aaron.” This is either a very nice gift from two people, or the most passive-aggressive mix-CD ever: “this is a gift from both of us… because we’re together now… as in dating… so stop hitting on my…” Hard to finish that without knowing if Justine is gay.

So, Justine, I have your CD collection. It’s a beautiful collection, and I can’t believe you would abandon it on the sidewalk. If you want it back, please email me.

Thanks,
Adam

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Musically, OK Go and Erykah Baduh have little in common; the artists’ core audiences, even less. But their recent, much-discussed videos are cut from the same cloth. As anyone with an open browser knows, OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” records an elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction, which unfolds in an unbroken sequence over the song’s four-minute length. What keeps you watching isn’t so much the mechanism’s can-do engineering as the knowledge that a single untripped wire or errant bowling ball would require starting from scratch. (In theory, anyway: YouTube user “freddiew” has pinpointed digital edits that suggest, like the band’s paint-splattered jumpsuits, the number of attempts involved.) Badu’s “Window Seat” also documents a notionally unrepeatable real-time stunt, as the singer strips to full nudity among unwitting passers-by on a stroll through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, in what appears to be an uncut six-minute take. (The location is a clue to the surprise ending, which I won’t spoil further.)

Neither video’s conceit is original: Badu’s is an acknowledged “cover” of Matt and Kim’s clothing-optional “Lesson Learned” clip, while OK Go’s emulates the Japanese children’s show Pythagoras Switch – though also see Trashcan Sinatras, below. Their appearance at the current moment, though, counterbalances the (not-really-a) hermaphrodite in the room: Lady Gaga’s “Telephone.” That featurette’s celebration of its own artifice (and the hype around its rollout) hearkens to MTV’s Reagan-area peak, with its world premieres, blockbusting effects budgets, and multi-clip imagery-arcs (though Beyoncé’s getaway pickup is no Eliminator). For all that Lady Gaga stakes out pop-celebrity’s cutting edge, these haute-‘80s qualities give “Telephone” a retrograde, even nostalgic feel. With the role of traditional broadcasting increasingly subsumed by YouTube, the high-concept, constraint-driven video may be better adapted to the way such content now passes from eye to eye: “You’ve got to see this” versus “This is what our programmers have decided you’ll see.”

The style is au courant, but not new. Just as “Telephone” nods to Thelma and Louise, Natural Born Killers, and Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle, the cinematic pedigree of the one- or few-take video includes Hitchock’s Rope, woven from ten sequences, each roughly a film-canister long, and the 96-minute unbroken Steadicam shot of Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Other inspirations lie at the margins of commercial movie-making, notably the “structuralist film” underground of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which explored the elements of cinema with an unyielding rigor, and the low-cost video documentation associated with Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and other performance artists of the period. The back-to-basics impetus of Lars Von Trier’s short-lived Dogme 95 manifesto-cum-movement also informs many of these works.

That last connection may help explain the mode’s present resurgence. At a moment when few listeners count the use of studio gadgetry — from ProTools micro-editing to pitch correction — against artists’ credibility, these videos transfer old arguments about “integrity,” in the root sense of “wholeness,” from the auditory to the visual plane, with Badu’s forthright presentation of her own body as the clearest case. With the notion of a “sell-out” sounding ever more archaic, much the same applies to the kind of integrity involved in artists’ increasingly internecine business dealings. “This Too Shall Pass,” for example, marks OK Go’s ability to call their own shots since buying themselves back from Capitol/EMI, but the video’s production was underwritten by State Farm Insurance. Make no mistake: Formal devices notwithstanding, the videos below are no more (or less) real or authentic than any others, serving the same promotional functions and projecting their artists’ images – even those that never appear onscreen — no less self-consciously than Gaga’s saturated palette and frame-dropping jitters. Even so, they form a minor counter-tradition to the rapidly-edited, slickly art-directed norms of the genre. While music video remains, in Greil Marcus’ memorable phrase, “the pornography of semiotics,” many of these examples are, if nothing else, closer in spirit to Andy Warhol’s Blowjob than the Dark Brothers’ New Wave Hookers.

Though it hints at narrative elements purged by later, purer practitioners, one of the seminal works of structuralist cinema is Michael Snow’s 1967 Wavelength, comprised of a single 45-minute zoom-shot that moves at a mechanical rate toward one wall of a nearly-abandoned loft space. The Replacements’ variant inverts Snow’s central move: the clip’s sole shot is a slow pull-back from a stereo speaker into a milkcrate- and ashtray-littered living room, its most prominent “action” the speaker cone’s pulsations. It’s likely that they hit on the strategy independently, as a way of raising a middle-finger to “corporate” manipulation of their images – and consolidating their own.

An elegantly-staged but otherwise standard multi-camera soundstage performance, with one crucial difference: Michael Stipe’s vocal is the one you see him singing, recorded during the shoot against the instrumental track mimed by the rest of the band. (For unknown reasons, currently available online versions substitute the original studio track.) This was a canny choice for a band heavily invested in their audience’s recognition of their relative autonomy, and whether R.E.M. made it out of annoyance with one of the form’s foundational fictions or to indulge Stipe’s uncertainty about his own lipsynching skills, one thing is clear from their later career: they got over it.

Chilly Gonzales takes the stage at the Pigalle Club, a Forties-style dinner and cabaret spot in London’s West End (circular tables, low ceilings, regular intervals of green velvet), and assumes his place at the piano. He is wearing a brown knee-length silk robe with matching trousers and a pair of generously cushioned slippers. His hands are encased in pristine white gloves. With shadowy deep-set eyes and slicked back hair, he is the very image of the brooding piano maestro.

He eases into a medley of slow, spare classical pieces. The music starts off somber and restrained, but his fingers move with such fluidity that they can’t resist adding little flourishes here and there. The embellishments begin to mount up. What opened with an air of great solemnity is now becoming increasingly comical. Now he’s playing a blues standard with one hand, a blur of white hammering away at the lower octaves.

He wraps it up and turns to confront his audience. “Hi, I’m Chilly Gonzales. If you don’t know me, I’m a Grammy-nominated producer.” This is true. He continues: “I hold the Guinness world record for longest continuous piano concert at 27 hours.” This is also true. “I’ve got a lot of famous friends.” He pauses for effect, then performs a modest raise of the shoulders. “In France, where I live, they call me un génie musicale.”

In 2004, Gonzales, who is neither French nor Hispanic but Canadian and whose real name is Jason Beck, released Solo Piano, an album of concise minimalist classical numbers in the vein of Erik Satie which gave substance to the génie musicale claim. Those who came to know Gonzales through that album – his best-selling by some margin – would have been shocked to learn that the author of those beautiful, delicate pieces had previously made, among other things, a gleefully profane lo-fi rap record called The Entertainist.

It’s not entirely surprising that a musician who rolls out his “unfuckwithable resume” at the beginning of a show, and makes unabashed reference to his musical genius at every opportunity, should dabble with rap. Rapping is, after all, the art of the inflated brag. The Sugarhill Gang were extolling their globally-endorsed sexual prowess and enviable motoring options as hip-hop drew its first breath, and given the amount of hot air that’s been blown over 4/4 beats since then, it’s no wonder the ice caps are melting.

Gonzales embraces the spirit of boastfulness on The Entertainist and its more lavishly produced follow-up, Presidential Suite, although in Gonzoworld the line between brag and self-skewering gag is always porous. Yes, he may be “the greatest entertainer of the year”, but he is also “the worst MC” who gets “more pussy than a priest”. He is “the prankster Frank Sinatra”, a “combination of Joe Stalin and Woody Allen”, whom you may address as “Fuckeye” or “the one-eyed Jew”. Or “Chilly Chaplin”. Or “Santa Klaus Kinski”, because he spent a few years living in Berlin.

“I am the worst MC” is at once a villainous sneer and an admission that Gonzales’ rapping abilities circa 2000 left something to be desired. In fact, as he demonstrates during tonight’s show, Gonzales is a pretty good rapper – stylistically derivative perhaps, but deft, playful and always entertaining. He spouts vast jets of nonsense in his rhymes but somehow manages to be more upfront than any other rapper you’d care to name.

Musicians rarely speak about, let alone lyricize, the shallow calculations that often underscore big career decisions, yet here is Gonzales on why he left Canada for Berlin: “I still remember when it first occurred to me./ Fuck it, I’m gonna move to Germany./ I don’t speak German, screw it/ But hey! I’m Jewish/ And I need a new press angle and that should do it.”

These kinds of outrageous proclamations make listening to Gonzales, or attending one of his shows, enormously fun. His almost pathological frankness presents an interesting challenge, however, when it comes to interviewing the guy. Any criticism you’d level at him has already been anticipated, and slyly underlined, in his music, or on other platforms. When he released Soft Power, his paean to Seventies soft-rock, in 2008, he posted a video online in which a Mercury label honcho begs him to take singing lessons to soften his harsh Montrealer tones. In the clip he circulated to promote his London dates, Gonzales tells a buffoonish interviewer, also played by Jason Beck, that although he “owns” France, he remains an underdog in England, adding: “I’m not a young man anymore. This could be my last chance.”

So why all the second-guessing?