On the day after CBGB’s closed, it seems appropriate to try something new and dance a little jig to architecture – by which I mean, to write about music.  Not that I’m going to expend a lot of sympathy over the closing of a rock club in a neighborhood that is currently dominated by luxury supermarkets, biodynamic wine bars, and breathtaking, gorgeous NYU dormitories.  If anything, it might speed up the realization that the East Village is now mostly the domain of undergraduates and young lawyers; far from possessing the DIY ethos of a marginal area, it’s a place full of pre-affixed brand names, kind of like Whole Foods.  And this is not necessarily a bad thing – but let’s not pretend a punk music scene is gonna spontaneously re-emerge where a studio apartment costs two thousand dollars per month.  Anyway, I don’t want to imply that lamb shank-eating lawyers are any less authentic than heroin-snorting hipsters; they’re not.  It’s just that it feels a little strange for the Times’s front page to eulogize the place.  What’s next?  A new, Renzo Piano-designed CBGB’s, putting the encrusted old space “in dialogue” with a new glass enclosure?  Multimedia exhibits featuring Mike Bloomberg telling the story of New York indie music, from Television to TV on the Radio?  Lou Reed’s Tomb?

Definitely, though, the issue of authenticity is at the heart of contemporary popular music, which, it seems to me, contains two opposing strands, neither of which needs New York particularly.  One tries to restore it, sort of, the other questions its meaning.  The first is the current folk revival, now at least five years old, including your Devendra Banharts, your Will Oldhams, your Iron and Wines, your Decembrists, your José Gonazalezes.  The rough animating principle for a lot of this music is the idea that the dyad of the acoustic guitar and the confessing subject comprise the simplest approach to the self-expression, like the bedrock of identity.  Not that this idea is by any means new, of course.  This music is a descendant of Romanticism; maybe the best possible description of it would be the Wordsworthian “Lyrical Ballads”–lyric here meaning the singing self, ballad here alluding to a tradition of itinerant musicians.  The songs, of course, are about not having love, finding love, and love going wrong.  When the self confesses, it’s so often the ironic confession that you can’t always get what you want. 

The other strand includes records made by DJs who create almost no original music.  It’s a pretty nerdy genre.  I include mash-ups here, probably most notably The Grey Album, the mixture of Beatles White and Jay-Z Black by the guy behind that song “Crazy” that you’ve probably heard ten million times.  But I’m thinking more of music that combines many pieces of music instead of just two, like that of The Avalanches, who probably employ hundreds of East Village lawyers just to clear their samples, or Diplo’s remixes using samples from tracks like “Walk Like an Egyptian” or “Papa Don’t Preach.”  This strand can be represented in state of the art form by the recent Girl Talk (actually a guy from Pittsburgh named Gregg Gillis) record, Night Ripper.  Imagine listening to every notable riff, every memorable drum beat in your memory mixed together.  It’s hard to explain what it’s like to listen to (yeah, sort of like doing the cabbage patch in front of the Seagram Building), but I’m gonna try.

Okay, here’s about fifteen seconds of track 5: you’re hearing a rap vocal over heavy, crunching Nirvana guitar, then suddenly the guitar dies away, and the classic drums from “Scentless Apprentice” (In Utero) kick in.  Four beats of just the drums alone (they’re worth it).  Then, over the top of that drum, comes a “whoooo, whoooo” from The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde (can’t remember which song).  One measure, and in comes… the piano riff from Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”  Nirvana drum is gone, “Tiny Dancer” and the Pharcyde sample trade off one more time, and then, deliciously, “I let my tape rock/ till my tape popped”: the most endearing voice in hip hop, Biggie Smalls, from “Juicy.”  In comes the Pharcyde bassline, now trading with the other sample and the Elton John piano, and now we’re getting a sped-up, chipmunky beatmatched version of the Elton chorus (“Hold me closer tiny dancer/Count the headlights on the highway”), with Biggie presiding over it all:

It was all a dream,
I used to read Word Up magazine:
Salt ‘n Pepa and Heavy D up in a limousine
Hanging pictures on the wall
Every Saturday Rap Attack Mr. Magic, Marley Marl
I let my tape rock, till my tape popped

Not only does Biggie catch up with and repeat the snippet of himself we’ve already heard, but he does it over the nostalgic climax of the Elton John song.  The vocal itself is nostalgic; it’s the story of the boy B.I.G. dreaming of rap stars (Ahhh!  Heavy’s fade! Yellow shirts with giant black circles!), and now remembering clothes circa 1992 or so: “Way back when I had the red and white lumberjack/With the hat to match” (coincidentally the same year Nirvana hit).  So that’s about fifteen seconds of the album.  It’s like eating a one-pound bag of sugar while looking at pictures of yourself from 1985.  It’s so danceable, playing the album in the daytime sounds weird somehow.  And don’t think the moment I picked is uncharacteristic.  The whole record is this way: Neutral Milk Hotel, Beyoncé, M.I.A., The Beatles, Outkast, James Taylor, Naughty by Nature, C+C Music Factory, Panjabi MC, The Verve, 50 Cent, Phil Collins, PM Dawn, Sir Mix-a-lot (“Double Up!”), Rob Base, Michael Jackson, whatever.  It’s in there (did you think of Ragu?).

The cumulative effect is strange, as though someone has colonized your mind: your musical familiarity, your seemingly particular emotional responses to songs, it turns out, are anything but unique.  Instead, thanks to mass distribution, we all share this “inheritance” of cultural material: pop.  Fred Jameson once wrote that pop songs contain nothing but nostalgia for the last time you heard the song.  That seems true here, but in a good way.  When we all have the songbook in our heads (or at least, most Americans of my generation), a DJ can use it as formal material for a weird collective bricolage.  The best thing about this approach is the fact that it leaves no room for snobbery about pop, or arbitrary line-drawing between genres.  The worst thing about it is it can seem slightly too intellectual (even as I challenge you not to bob your head to this record) and, well, inauthentic.  No one plays any instruments.  (This actually brings up a third strand, where people play instruments but in ways that recognize the computerization of music, but no time for that.)  Girl Talk messes with the idea of authenticity, but can’t replace it, and actually, just sets the stage for cyclical revivals of yearning musical simplicity.  And I wouldn’t want to be Gregg Gillis’ lawyer, for any money.

Night Ripper doesn’t respect the distinctions between musical genres, but it treats them differently.  The catchiest or most well-remembered bits (synth, drum, guitar) get used, but over the top is always a rap vocal.  Hip hop is modernity.  The idea that you can retreat to the hills with a guitar and your Self?  Sure, go for it, but from Girl Talk’s vantage, that’s no more real than downloading beats from a suburban cul-de-sac.  (Or Pittsburgh.)  There’s no connection to any landscape here, except the radio.  Late in the album, there is a delicious exchange, starting with 2 Live Crew’s (be warned) vulgar call and response:  “Heeyyyyyyyy!  We want some pusssssy!!!  Heeyyyyyyyy!  We want some pusssssy!!!!!” which gets put into dialogue with this crooning, absurdly sentimental proposition from Paul McCartney:  “I… looooovvvve… youuuuu!”  This repeats a few times, touchingly but hilariously. It’s worth pointing out that the effect isn’t to devalue McCartney’s “sincerity” and value 2 Live Crew for “keeping it real,” but to question the possibility of either being exactly true.  Both are serious stances, both are ironic poses.  You gotta listen to both.  Truth lies somewhere in between.  (Not to sound too much like Stanley Fish.)  I let my tape rock… till my tape popped.

See my other Dispatches.

Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, makes a shockingly good living by writing books and newspaper columns about etiquette. She dispenses advice on such things as the best way to discourage troublesome relatives from ruining your wedding, how to acknowledge the embarrassing medical conditions of your friends, and whether or not to invite the male, teenage lover of your sixty year-old father-in-law to Thanksgiving dinner. In an airy, archaic voice, she responds to her dear readers’ questions with light humor and cultured superiority, and whenever I read her I can’t help but think what a shame it is we don’t all live in her world. If only we had progressed to a stage where the finer points of etiquette that she addresses–properties of conduct established in a community, with a stress on ceremony and formal observances–were the main source of our behavioral troubles. Unfortunately, we haven’t. Instead, we continue to struggle with a more fundamental aspect of human interaction, namely courtesy, which can be defined simply as polite behavior. Basic courtesy distinguishes itself from manner of speech, appearance and cultural taste in that it is a social indicator that transcends socioeconomic status, formal education and intelligence; what it describes best is the degree of one’s humanity. Courtesy, at its most fundamental level, is about respect–for the presence of others, for their sensibilities, and for the peaceable working of society as a whole.

It is indicated by something as minor as brief eye-contact, and by substantial personal sacrifice as well, often in the form of the suspension of one’s own satisfaction in favor of another’s. But even in its smallest observance its effect outstrips the effort required to produce it. In New York City, a reasonably sensitive person can move through his day and encounter a hundred instances of basic courtesy, and the same number of violations of it, too, and be psychically crushed or uplifted accordingly. Certainly, there is a great deal of rage here, much crude sexuality, and incessant pressure from sheer sweat-soaked density, but you’d be wrong to imagine that the city’s inhabitants are uniformly rude. In fact, Reader’s Digest found that New Yorkers are the most courteous among the residents of 35 cities around the world (one per country), with a remarkable 80% of them passing a politeness test. It should be said that this test is a blunt tool, measuring only three aspects of behavior–holding doors, helping to pick up papers dropped on the street, and the manners of retail clerks (this last, inexplicably, was tested only at Starbuck’s locations). But still, the point is valid. Just as New York abounds with opportunities to royally screw the next guy, so too does it offer the gentle among us plenty of chances to display our refinement. And, owing to the mercurial nature of human beings, the guy who lets the door slam in your face today may well be the one who holds it open for you tomorrow. We are, none of us, our best selves at every moment, and in this pressurized environment we won’t always pause to assist the smirking Reader’s Digest journalist who has just–oops!–let slide out of her hand a short manuscript (written in fourth grade-level prose) intended for publication in next month’s issue. What’s more, in New York even courtesy is a bottom-line transaction, negotiated with narrow eyes and balled fists, for which the city’s sidewalks are a perfect forum. You will find, as you approach someone walking in the direction opposite yours, that if you make no lateral move to afford him space, he will respond in kind, with (best-case scenario) a tensed brush of shoulders resulting. More often, however, actual cracking physical contact will come of it (and crude words exchanged for good measure): billy goats butting horns on a hillside. But should you feel generous that day, a minor indication of courtesy–the smallest lateral move, or even the suggestion of a lateral move–will inspire the same from your opposition, and you’ll share the sidewalk in relative harmony.

Courtesy is a double-sided behavior, fully loaded with both positive and negative implication: It is forceful in its commission, and equally so in its absence. We communicate primitive dominance as well as refinement through the details of our behavior, and in this respect courtesy is little different from style of dress or vocal timbre. Allowing a door to close behind you is a message and a sentiment no less than is holding it open for the next person; in both cases you express yourself and your respect for those around you. In this sense, courtesy, or lack of it, is a weapon. That most basic of urban prohibitions, spitting, is a fine example of the conscious and violent absence of courtesy. Much as someone can direct his voice to indicate unmistakably its intended receiver, he can spit on the street and manage to communicate, through the intensity of expectoration and the relish with which it is committed, particular and specific contempt. An act of this kind should not be mistaken for anything other than a conscious gesture of discourtesy, just as expressive, if not more so, as its gentle flip-side. And in fact even positive acts of courtesy can be freighted with negative messages. Courteous behavior directed to three out of four people in a group is expressive not so much of respect for those three who received the benefit of the positive act, but of contempt for that fourth who was ignored. The insult is especially weighty when considered in the context of the group dynamic, where the awareness of the other three people involved maximizes the disrespect, both as it is communicated by the committer and as it is understood by the receiver.

America is, paradoxically perhaps, courtesy’s home-base and special flashpoint. Search the word on Google, and in the first two pages you’ll find websites for three car dealerships, a retail aircraft operation, and a motel in Eugene, Oregon. Courtesy is a marketing force in the land of the free, a hallmark of smart commerce, and a bullet point in every revolutionary book on business strategy. America’s most successful retailers (Starbuck’s among them) exhaustively train their employees to demonstrate courtesy in every interaction, and then give them colorful buttons to pin on their aprons in order to redouble the message: we are cheerful and desperate to please you! It’s no coincidence that two out of the three most courteous cities are in North America (the third is Zurich). Toronto, our little northern brother’s most American city, was right up there with New York in the survey. It must be due to America’s history of egalitarianism. We’ve had no regimented class system here, no landed gentry, and no kings to receive our fealty, thus courtesy, which is simply the most basic expression of etiquette, was never associated with abstruse rules of court or relations between nobles and their peasants. In America, every man deserves to be looked in the eye when spoken to, thanked for his patronage, and invited to come back again. We are the smiley-face nation, where everyone, by God, no matter what, should have a nice day.

Four people live on the 5th floor at 470 Flushing Ave in Brooklyn.  They either walk the stairs or use the freight elevator, and I suspect that based on the amount of freight in their home the elevator gets quite a bit of use.  Two of the residents are production designers and brothers, and they’ve strewn the apartment with power tools, bikes, furniture, mannequins, electronics, and general crap.  They’ve also built (along with all of the rooms in the space) a stage, and it too is crowded, covered in cables and pedals and drums and keys, and that’s where (the third occupant) Bryan Scary and his band rehearse, adjacent to a fifteen foot long painting of a bleeding Christ.  Scary seems unfazed by the mess, though his bedroom is terribly neat.  When I asked him this morning what he does with his days, when his band is at work, he said he gets ready for Halloween.  “The Shredding Tears,” his first record, will be released then.  It includes the single “The Blood Club .”

BRYAN SCARY: I listen to all kinds of stuff.  A lot of it is older, so I couldn’t have seen some important parts of the band, the performance aspect. I listen to music with the mindset of wanting to know about what was going on around it, historically.  With pop music, it’s just as much about the packaging and the world surrounding the music as it is about the music. 

JANE RENAUD: Who got you into music, got you exploring?

BS: My dad and mom.  They would play me music all the time.  My mom forced me to take piano lessons.  She forced me to practice.  She knew I wasn’t very good at tee ball.  There had to be something else. 

JR: Were you good at piano? 

BS: When I was younger I was good.  But then I lost the track of being professional, and now it’s my own style. I’m not that versatile of a player.

JR: The Shredding Tears is very versatile though, in terms of genre.  It really reminds me a little bit of that Jeff Lynne album –

BS: Out of the Blue?

JR: No –

BS: Armchair Theater?

JR: Yeah, Armchair Theater.  Every song is firmly placed in a distinct context.  But with The Shredding Tears there’s more of a melancholy throughline and some consistent jokes, too.

BS: That’s true, but the genre hopping isn’t that intentional. It’s just what happens.  I listen to so much that I can’t write the same stuff over and over again. It incorporates a lot of my favorite sounds and ideas in pop music. Glam rock to prog rock to psychedelic rock to musical theater. There’s some punkier stuff on there, and there’s some straight rock and roll.

JR: You did musical theater?

BS: I never really had any really big roles.  I was always playing a father or some secondary character.  There was the baritone in The Music Man quartet, which we made a quintet that year because there was not enough vocal power.  Agwe, the god of water in Once On This Island.  These were all in high school.  And that was a ridiculous show because we were in a white Jewish suburb.

JR: Did you ever seriously consider doing musical theater, as a profession?

BS: No, never.  But playing a character on stage, of course.

JR: What’s your ideal performance setting?

BS: I would want to play in nice theaters.  I don’t really like concert venues.  It’s like you’re crammed in, you’re standing up, you’re just supposed to be drinking, people are talking.  They can be good for certain purposes if there’s really like an electric energy, but it’s not the greatest way for me to appropriate music.  I’m often distracted.

JR: You mean appreciate?

BS: What’s appropriate mean?

JR: It means take and use for yourself.

BS: Yeah, appreciate.

JR: Maybe you did mean appropriate.

BS: It sounded good at that moment. 

JR: You know, I went to the recent Flaming Lips show here in New York and it was crazy.  It was the only show I’ve ever been to where I felt like I didn’t have to be watching the band to be getting the full experience of the show.  Everyone was in a great mood and there was shit going on all around. 

BS: That’s exactly what I’m talking about.  You go to a show like that and you’re not just going to watch music.  Rock music isn’t just about the music.  It’s a show.  The music’s not really complex enough for you to sit and just watch what the instrumentalists are doing.  Usually it’s not, for me.  But if there’s other stimulus, it’s nice.

JR: I’m always wanting to dance and am annoyed that it’s not really happening at a lot of shows.

BS: Around here it’s not, yeah, it’s not what happens.  It’s a New York thing.

JR: I have a hard time dancing to your record.

BS: Yeah, it’s not really dancey.  We have a dance song in our set though.

JR: You do?

BS: We have some surprises, yeah. You better dance at the show.

JR: I will definitely dance at the show.  [Bryan Scary and his new band, The Shredding Tears, are playing a show along side The Dozens and The Self Righteous Brothers this Halloween at 7pm at 470 Flushing.] What’s that going to be like, by the way?

BS: I have no idea.  It’s an experiment.  This band has never played before in front of people.  So I don’t know what’s going to happen.  But our set is awesome.  There’s lots of surprises.  And we’re playing with two other great bands.

JR: What’s it like to make a whole record in your basement and then suddenly there are all of these other people involved?  A band, a record label…

BS: It was really nerve wracking.  I’d already finished it. Having to put it in other people’s hands is nerve wracking. I originally did the whole thing myself, played all the instruments.  I used keyboard drums, fake drums.  Then I sort of spread that demo around, and I didn’t really want to go back and redo it.  It was more than a demo, because they were full tracks. But then the label [Black & Greene Records] expressed interest in it and I knew that I shouldn’t release it with the drums like that.  So we decided to have Jeremy Black, the drummer from Apollo Sunshine, to go back and redo all the drums.  It was really hard.  It’s like taking the spine out of a person and trying to replace it.  It’s like taking the whole heart out of the song.  We had to do that in like four days and it was really hard.  Non stop.  And it’s still not exactly what I want, but it’s pretty close, and Jeremy did a great job.  But anyway, we remixed it with Brian McTear at Miner Street Studios and mastered it with Paul Hammond and Paul Sinclair at Fat City Studios.

JR: So this record has been in the works for awhile.

BS: Probably three years ago, I wrote the first songs that I really wrote, and they were intended for this concept album.  Other distractions happened and I never finished it the way I wanted to. And then I wrote a bunch of new songs.  The latter half of the album is all the new stuff, or the newer stuff.

JR: Are you already thinking about your next record?

BS: Yes, the second record is totally written.  It’s different.  I’m going to record it soon with this new band.

JR: How do you see The Shredding Tears fitting into the music scene right now?

BS: There’s some acts out there, like The Fiery Furnaces, that are musically similar.  But I think we’re pretty unique.  And we’re lucky in that it’s sort of the Wild West right now in the indie rock scene.  In the sense that there is no real style right now.  There are certain sounds that people are into but I feel like anything is fair game.  There’s often a 2-3 year period where there’s a dominating style, like the garage rock revival.  But right now I think nobody’s really banding around a particular genre or style or innovation, so there’s a lot of room.  The rock press, the major labels, the fans…they aren’t just doing one thing, one scene.  New York City particularly. Obviously it’s a different story on the broader scale.  In the country at large, rock music doesn’t do much. 

At this point Jon, resident #4 of 470 Flushing, enters, zips his fly sheepishly, lights a cigarette with a  blow torch and switches on some Creedence Clearwater Revival.

JON: The Shredding Tears is the soundtrack for a twisted backwoods theater.

BS: Why’s everybody listening to Creedence right now?  You’re like the third person this week I’ve found listening to Creedence.

JON: It’s that time of year.  It sounds good.

“The Shredding Tears” hits stores on Oct 31. It’s available for preorder here.  Visit www.bryanscary.com to hear tracks and get more information about the release party.

Album artwork by Hunter Nelson and Albert Thrower.