Or Maybe an Improved Version of How Songs Are Easy

How I Pass the Time, Or Maybe an Improved Version of How Songs Are Easy

At 28, I'm only starting to learn the things I needed to know at 17. How to sort of make a zine, how to silkscreen, how to write songs, how to not take any of it personally. I'm still not great at any of those callings, and I've never identified as an artist in any sense, though I do like the mythlore of being receptive to ideas and inspiration.

If I go for a stroll or a bike ride on Ashland, a miserable street for cycling and exhaust choked for walking, there's a passable opportunity to receive a song idea.


It starts by my whistling. I pair whistles with bits of phrasing I see, almost exclusively store slogans and grocery prices that have been painted on white butcher paper. A melody arrives and I record it onto my phone. I rush home and jangle it out onto guitar. I break into a sweat, play it over a few times. 

Outside people are dropping candy wrappers to the cement and waiting at red lights. They have no idea what's happening in my apartment. Incredible.

Four out of five instances my song's will have such a bad melody that I can actually hear my high school friends ridiculing it, "What're you gonna send these off to Walt Disney?" 

Etc. Then the occasional song will make it to Krayola practice. My accomplices, according to no grading system I can determine, will give it the pass or rejection slip. The rate of acceptability must parallel some sort of barometer. I can only knit my hands over my eyes and invoke the Lord's name many times until it's over and a new song comes.  

Everyday Barf

"Everyday Barf" is an essay by Eileen Myles. Better than that essay, though, is her poem "Snakes". 

Her book, Inferno, is pretty cool, too. It's a little scrambled, but there are some vivid NYC poet moments and fun takeaways. Takeaways like James Schuyler saying to Myles that she has to put objects in her poems -- real things, like cans of Pepsi. 

Anyhow, I've had barf on the mind. Yesterday, in the afternoon before a show (that's how the day seemed, leading up to the show), Brianna, with kindness, stopped the car because after Munchie's birthday event, I had to throw up. I'm a thirteen year old boy. I forgot to have a good dinner and did not take enough water. So I splashed all over the road with my whole core clenching up. It is so weird when I puke. Every part of my body gets involved. One of my eyes started watering, just one, and my crotch, if I even have crotch muscles, they also winced and lurched into the effort.  

So the sun was out shining on gray snow and I emptied myself out onto this angular slice of Kedzie with people passing and our friend Paul in the car getting a good view. That's OK. I like to watch my friends sing, and I don't mind seeing them throw up. As long as they're better afterward and don't do it too often. Just part of the getting-to-know-you experience. 

Paul and I just finished a song a few days before and called it "Everyday Barf". The song crept along to get ready for it's 9pm showcase. Since we had to write five songs in three weeks, I hustled the lyrics and the title together. If it were to be submitted to an institution I would count it as plagiarism.

The words come from the maxims of Herakleitos and one William Carlos William poem, "Pastoral", and the title is Myles. I like the circular quality of Herakleitos' phrasing, and WCW is just so cool in his knowing the neighborhood type of thinking. 

Some lines I took and rearranged and mashed to meet syllable requirements ("ingenuously", whoa), and messed with for setting purposes.  

• The river we stepped into is not the river in which we stand.
• The bow is alive only when it kills
• The little sparrows / hop ingenuously / about the pavement / quarreling / with sharp voices / over those things / that interest them. / But we who are wiser / shut ourselves in / on either hand / and no one knows / whether we think good / or evil. 

When I think of what I'm doing when I'm not sitting with my friends talking it is usually writing a zine. When I was 15 I remember wearing thick corduroy pants and my blue St. Rita polo. I was leaving school on some stupid February day with definite gray snow crusting the landscape and I kept telling myself, you are a bass player, you are a musician. After maybe 13 years I know bass playing is something I do but the comfort or patient carelessness I feel for zine writing I do not feel with songwriting. 

How good is a good song? A comic artist told me I should not think of ideals when I work on a piece. There are no ideal songs or books or paintings. Still, you play a set, another band goes on, you think, whoa, now that's a song. I get a little fussy about and start babbling in the 20mins leading into and out of a set, but I'm excited by the prospect of trying to not take it seriously. Most of the time, I think, the songs I shake out are accurate representations of where I am. 

When we were finishing the set list for last night's show, I kept thinking of the Bob Dylan interview in a 2012 issue of Rolling Stone. I'm not a true or devotional Dylan fan, I only know his hits, but I love to hear longtime artists talk about songs and music. If Diana Ross or Joe Strummer would go on record about these topics, I'd read that, too. 

RS - Before we end the conversation, I want to ask about the controversy over your quotations in your songs from the works of other writers, such as Japanese author Junichi Saga's "Confessions of a Yakuza," and the Civil War poetry of Henry Timrod. Some critics say that you didn 't cite your sources clearly. Yet in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. What's your response to those kinds of charges?BD - Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It's true for everybody, but me. I mean, everyone else can do it but not me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get – It's an old thing – it's part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.

RS - Seriously?BD - I'm working within my art form. It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.

Music Reviews - Razorcake

The fine folks at Razorcake, a magazine that covers punk culture, made me a reviewer a few months back. Every 60 days or so I get a package in the mail full of records and tapes and CDs. Then I review 'em! I'm new to the genre, so they still feel a bit overwritten: an extra word, an excessive sentence. Right now, I think they are testing the relative searchability of their database and material. I was asked to repost the reviews here as part of a Google-ing experiment.

Jim Joyce – Reviews for issue 77

STABLER:

Squadroom: Cassette  

Stabler’s 10 track “Squadroom” is an 8 minute 10 second pal. To me, Stabler’s Squadroom recalls Black Flag’s loose rush of power, akin to Damaged, minus Greg Ginn’s jazzpunk solos but very much with the rush and crash of a band that only pauses for the bass to dig out a jagged groove or to allow silence until the next track. To compare with something more recent? Maybe Chicago’s Weekend Nachos. Stabler songs like “Torture” and “Self-Disgust” offer uplifting lyrics, encouraging the listener to challenge mediocre shit – to be humbled, to be aware, and to take responsibility for life choices. So the content is there for lyric lovers like me. Sonically, the rapid swipe and chug of these tracks is ideal for smashing chairs to, or for powering through rough spots that Minor Threat tracks like “Seeing Red” and “Filler” just can’t clean. You can grab Squadroom off of Stabler’s Bandcamp (check out the vaguely titled “…preview…” song there, too) or procure a Cassette from their label, Reality is a Cult. –Jim Joyce (Reality Is A Cult, realityisacult.blogspot.com) 

BREAKUP SOCIETY, THE

So Much Unhappiness So Little Time: CD

Fans of power pop can get behind the Breakup Society’s new release pretty easily. Lead songwriter Ed Masley writes tracks that could’ve been featured on a Left of the Dial Rhino Records compilation for their similarity to ‘80s and early ‘90s alternative rock (think Hoodoo Gurus) that they recall. Despite the crotchety album title, So Much Unhappiness So Little Time is upbeat. These are songs written by someone who’s likely an old hand at crafting hook heavy pop rock, laden with glittery sustained chords alongside sweet and sour garage rock vocals, only maybe the nicer garage of a guy who remembers to cut his lawn. The result reminds me a bit of Superchunk or Spoon in a good way, though the shimmer and omnipresence of Masley’s voice kept me from falling into the songs completely. Not exactly my thing, but plenty to like for fans of power pop to check out.  –Jim Joyce (Get Hip Recordings, gethip.com) 

CHALLENGED, THE

Basically: CD

The soul of Squirtgun and Digger style pop punk persists on these nine tracks. Tight guitar and drum work with bass playing of the cleverly understated Mike Dirnt variety lifts the group above the waterline for sure. The Challenged might get tired of being compared to the pop punk classics of the 90s, but they flourish within that sound, writing songs that I’d like to hear five tracks at a time, while driving across town by night with streetlamps brushing overhead – thinking about integrity, romance, and ambition, all that stuff. But I don’t have a car. And I’m sitting at a sticky wooden table surrounded by quizzes and paperclips. In sum, Basically is a definite success in the pop punk form: tracks like “Go Fuck Yourself” carry the torch. But I’d like to hear the Challenged reach out and bring their distinct view of the world to the genre, too, like they do on “The Director” where the lyrics are a storyboard to a movie about the song. Which is inventive and cool. More of that, please. –Jim Joyce (Self-released, no address listed)

PROLETAR / ANALDICKTION

Split: 7”  

Tonally, Proletar and Analdicktion are a worthy pairing. Jakarta based Proletar has been together since 1999, and they have been featured on more than 20 releases since that time. The band recalls a high-octane reinterpretation of Napalm Death, if the lyrics were addressing imperialism, outsourcing, and politics of the left; pretty cool topic matter to hear from voices outside of the US. Take that intellectual activity with the blizzard of serrated chords and Proletar’s three tracks and make for a fine A-side. On the B-side is Anadicktion, a recently defunct group from Singapore, who are a bit more of an anomaly for me. I’m intrigued by the brutality of the vocals that are so engagingly awry with effects they seem to boil up from the bottom of a swamp (or fly in from outer space on radio waves made of crude oil) but songs like “Fuck Artsy Indie Girl Bullshit” and “Trendy Hipster Castration Bloodbath” seem a bit like caricatures. But the goregrind vocals are so pleasingly spooky that I eagerly sleuthed around for more material. Analdicktion’s 2011 album, Sluts, is well-reviewed, but similarly hard to get down with due to song titles like “Semen Covered Butchered Whores” and “Severed Scene Slut” and from the abundance of rape jokes in a few reviews I checked out in my hunt for more material. I get that the gore misogyny is probably intended to be more goofball than machismo, but the outcome is normalization of creepy misogynistic thinking. Call me Tipper Gore, but it reminds me in part of why even at punk and hardcore shows in 2013, many of my female friends can’t pass a night without being groped or harassed by dudes in the scene, and how DIY, even though it’s implicitly left leaning, can still feel like an angry hetero boy’s club. In sum, this is an EP of rad grindcore sounds but ultimately mixed messages. – Jim Joyce (Suburban White Trash Records, suburbanwhitetrashrecords.com)

Reality Is A Cult Records / Nathalie Haurberg, 1693 N. Broad St. Galesburg, IL 61401

Get Hip Inc. 1800 Columbus Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15233

Suburban White Trash Records, PO Box 270594, Fort Collins CO

Art! and Culture!

Four years ago, maybe less, I was at an after party for a self-publishing event. I had just come back from the 7-11 with another person. Walking in the door, I was recognized by a stranger for the first and probably only time in my life. 
He came in from out of town to attend the readings and things. "Do you write Let It Sink?" he said. Yes, I told him, bewildered. "I really like your zine," he told me, even touching my shoulder, "but that zine writer over there changed my life!" And in saying this, he pointed across the room  toward a person who had been sexually harassing me for months and months. "Changed your life like in a good way," I asked, "Yeah!" he said. Then I reached into my bag for a 7-11 beer, and I drank it.

Last summer I took a pile of money I'd saved and turned it into plane tickets. Soon I was in Barcelona. Mostly I remember that there were Australians everywhere and none of them listened to Royal Headache. I saw palm trees and signs in Catalan, English, then Spanish, in that order. I went for walks and listened to London Calling and read Homage to Catalonia. 
At the hostel where I stayed, the two night staff workers, young people from Mexico City, were the only ones awake while I was trying to adjust to the new timezone. Talking, It came out that we all liked rock music and that I was in a band.
The next night, one of the staff, a guitarist who was about my age said that he searched online and heard my music. He liked my band, but had I heard of his favorite group of all time, also from Chicago, the great punk rock group, the best of them all, Mest?

Reading

Tomorrow night, this will be happening in my home. 

Let’s get spooky at our HallowZine reading fundraiser!

Featured readers include:
Brenton Harper-Murray (Dead of the Union: A Historical Zombie Novel)
Jim Joyce (Let It Sink)
Edie Fake (Gaylord Phoenix)
Dave Roche (About My Disappearance, On Subbing)
Gas Mask Horse (Start Your Own Haunted House)
Rosy Phinick (Bacterial Turned Viral),
scary songs performed by Dalice Malice (Curioddity)

This all-ages event is at 2110 S Halsted (enter through alley) & there is a $5 suggested donation. Bring extra cash for a tarot reading!