:: Permit me this moment of sincere, very un-funny, navel-gazing ::

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

The Ratio #3:

The problem is that when Destroyer's songs aren't busy being pop music gems, they're full of words and meanings that I don't understand and that I can't ignore. This can make listening to Destroyer uncomfortable; unprotected by hooks, you feel either in or out of the literary loop.

GQ's John Heilemann:

Larry and Sergey, both in the midst of pursuing their Ph.D.’s in computer science, surmised that it would be better to base searches on relevance; they believed popularity mattered - that the more often a site was linked to, the more relevant it was likely to be. Using complex algorithms, they devised a system they called Page-Rank, after Larry, and they put it at the heart of their search engine, first dubbed BackRub and soon thereafter, Google.

"Creative process" is a vague and hackneyed phrase, just as apt to characterize the design of a thumbtack or writing of an amicus brief. It has a soft normative neutrality agnostic of scope, ambition, audience, effort, and result, and makes no distinction between the origination and realization of an idea - whether we are sitting idly in a bar thinking of uses for a lathe or using that lathe to produce some of the finest cedar bar stools this side of the Hudson, we are engaged in a creative process.

Being so commonplace and ubiquitous, it's not often I personally stop to ponder specific instances when a concept is born or actualized. Rarer are the times when I return to ponder over and over without losing a sense of appreciation, the times when I think to myself: "I could never, given all the time and resources in the world, replicate this - as it is, I barely understand it. This is qualitatively beyond my capability to produce, and perhaps even to comprehend." One is a one-man band and the other an information indexing service, but there are times when I listen to Destroyer or use Google and get that same exact sense of awe - that, present adoration accounted for, I'm still underestimating the genius behind them.

Certainly each has a blemish or two. Destroyer drips with pedantry and Google is forever accused of being a petulant child. Neither makes any bones about being too wrapped up in their own cult of genius to care whether the mainstream "gets it" or not (despite, as noted in the above quotes, one's writing "pop" songs and the other's basing search results on popularity), but the core of their work is so appealing these faults become endearing. Upon seeing the two sites above almost back-to-back and noticing an eerie similarity in my compulsion to devour them immediately I realized just how much I'm drawn to and baffled by the process and the people behind it all.

Posted by morland @ 01:57 PM

:: Comments ::

Although it most certainly does take creativity to write music or determine which websites should come up when you search for them, there is one undeniable difference: Destroyer sucks and Google does not. Destroyer was (by far) the worst of the 25 shows I saw at SXSW last year. I can't deny that it takes creativity, but not all creativity results in something good. I would definitely not use the terms 'genius' and 'destroyer' in the same sentence, unless that sentence is, "Genius is not a term I would use when talking about the music of Destroyer."

Posted by: a superhero by night on March 2, 2005 06:51 PM

as much as the last sentence of your comment makes me want to fly to colorado and take you down, i can't fault you. i don't know if there exists a more fanatical destroyer fanatic than yours truly, but (as morland can verify) i saw him live and was very very disappointed.

i blame it all on the backing band (frog eyes - a band that's pretty ok on their own, when they aren't ruining dan bejar's songs). but listen to thief all the way through a couple of times and re-evaluate.

DESTROYER!!!

Posted by: dr. glasses on March 2, 2005 08:12 PM

cristina reminds me that we saw him on the post-streethawk tour, and he was incredible. so it is. frog eyes is killing my destroyer.

and morland, that ratio site is like, so totally awesome.

Posted by: dr. glasses on March 2, 2005 08:39 PM

I can't say that I've heard a ton of the studio stuff from Destroyer, but studio work is only half the equation to being a good band. This also reminds me that I once saw Beth Gibbons (of Portishead) and was expecting such an amazing show because her solo album (not to mention her Portishead stuff) is great. It was a terrible show and I was pissed. But that's life.

I've always subscribed to the concept that, even if your band sucks live, you need a totally bad ass name so that the music-goer can't ever feel totally ripped off. I'm starting a band soon, and I'm more than certain that our name will be the best part of our live show.

Posted by: a superhero by night on March 3, 2005 10:57 AM

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