In the common age of automation, where people might
Eventually work ten or twenty hours a week, man for
The first time will be forced to confront himself with
The true spiritual problems of living…

–Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Lunar Bay”

…As machinery develops with the accumulation of society’s science, of productive force generally, general social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital. In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him…the worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital’s] requirements.

–Karl Marx, “The Fragment on Machines”

Sometimes, I really hate technology. Sometimes, I hate how intrusive it is. Sometimes, I hate how addicted I am to it. Sometimes, I hate that so much of our world is dependent on it. I hate how easily hackable databases can be. I hate that Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Uber, and a whole host of companies know me in ways that no government could. Yet, I’m unable to go full Sarah Connor and say: “Not today Skynet. Not today.” Why? Because even though I say I hate aspects of technology, I think I really love it, too. I’m still fascinated by how far innovations have come in a relatively short amount of time. Think about the last 30 years for a moment. Think about how fast technological innovations have progressed. In 1988, how thoroughly were computers, cell phones, and robotic technology integrated into our lives? Well, they were certainly there, but using them on a mass scale like today seemed fairly far-fetched because these devices were expensive for average consumers.

But business saw the potential to save money in the long run by investing in technology to boost profits through the simplification and automation of tasks that were done (sometimes rather inefficiently) by humans. Factories with robotic technology could quickly scale back the need to hire humans. Computers could simplify tasks and eliminate jobs in offices. Cell phones? Well, these portable devices meant communication wasn’t as limited as it was with landlines and answering machines. These trends accelerated as the technology got better and cheaper.

By the time the first iPhone hit the market in 2007, it ushered in a second gold rush in tech. Remember the mad scramble to develop killer apps vying for real estate on your iPhone home screen? The “app for that” craze combined with social media led to an “always on” culture where we were seduced with casino-like guile to be addicted to tech — while giving up a lot of our personal information so we could connect with others in the spirit of being “friends.”

Many of us now know the power of social media in terms of performers and an audience. For those dreaming of being stars, social media can feed that ego by providing a platform where one can post to their heart’s delight for that dopamine rush of affirmation.  And like the addicts we’ve become, we rush back for another hit many times a day (probably more than we’d like to know). I’m not immune to these addictions. I’m probably like most Internet users: always looking for stimuli. The type of stimuli depends on one’s mood.

In the post-2016 election years, it’s clear use of a certain kind of stimuli by foreign and domestic actors to shape opinion through the manufacturing and dissemination of propaganda was robust. Opinions can be easily shaped by appealing to people’s prejudices and tastes — which is why advertising works. We’ve bought into the taglines, the slogans, the faux folk wisdom of campaigns that get us to act on our impulses. We tend to believe opinion-makers because they are people we’ve come to trust to tell us what we want to hear. We support this or that politician because they cater to our political self-interest.

We buy smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, laptops, and even desktop computers because we’re told by the makers of these devices that we need these things. Having these devices will make our lives easier, more organized, and more fun because we just tell our devices what we want, and, for the most part, these devices deliver. We’re the Id, and the device is the Ego. Impulse and a realistic delivery method working together to satisfy our want for pleasure. When we are kept in a state of instant gratification via technology, it makes us less willing to come out of our cocoons. The silos are comforting because they reinforce our identities and make us less willing to see others who don’t share our views are nothing but hostile entities who wish to destroy the world we’ve constructed — or has been constructed for us. Yes, this dysfunctional, highly partisan and, at times, hostile culture was created by design. Tech isn’t entirely to blame, but they do share responsibility for accelerating it.

Well, now companies like Google — and to a lesser extent Facebook and Apple — want to change the more corrosive parts of the culture they’ve had a part in creating. Why? Because they fear regulation and media scrutiny —  so they are rolling out changes to fend off the power of governments and to appease the power of the press. This was evident at the recent Google I/O 2018 conference. Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to the stage at the Shoreline Amphitheater to tell a capacity crowd about how the innovations and improvements to Google products will make our lives better. None of this is new. Most of the big tech companies do these big “Ooooh…Aaaaah” presentations for rapt audiences and a fawning press corps. It’s the same dog and pony show we’ve been watching year after year after year.

However…

This time, there’s a slight variation on a theme. The mucky-mucks at Google are now concerned about time. That is to say, how we spend our time with the products the company creates. Take, for example, the dashboard that will be part of the new Android update. Ever wonder how much time you spend checking your phone? How much time do you spend on the apps that live on your phone? Well, Google will tell you in the next major software update to your phone. Once implemented, you can also try and break your device addiction by using Google Shush — which is essentially a do not disturb feature. You can even program your device to give you a limit on time spent on apps. You see, Google cares about your time. They want you to have more of it away from technology that keeps us addicted — or enslaved.

Speaking of which: do you ever feel like a slave to email at work? Gmail will soon have a predictive/smart compose feature that will autofill your email messages as you type. Yeah, pretty soon most of your emails will be written by a computer, and you’ll have more time!

What about making calls. There’s a sizable group of people under 30 who have a real fear of making an actual telephone call. They would rather text instead of having a conversation with another human. Well, if Google Duplex becomes a thing, just make your Google assistant book dinner reservations, hair appointments, travel arrangements, or any other interactions that require calling someone on the dreaded phone. Now you have more time to do what you want, and less time to fret about having to punch a few numbers on your device, listen to a few rings, and then tense up when someone on the other end says, “Hello?”

And then there the news? Most of us have heard the term fake news, but do we really know when some news stories on your feed are just flat out propaganda designed to appeal to your prejudices? I’m sure we all like to think of ourselves as above average consumers who have a high degree of media literacy but do we? For many of us, the answer is no. How does Google address that? Through revamping Google News. Now you have three tabs that populate your newsfeed:  Headlines, Local, and For You. The page defaults to Headlines that Google controls. For some stories, they will offer readers a news story (with fact checking) from multiple news sites; sites that — in some corners — are derisively called MSM, or mainstream media. The idea here, of course, is to get us out of our silos and see big stories from multiple points of view.

Will all this work? Well, we didn’t get this current state of the world overnight. It will take time to unwind what’s been wrought. However, tech companies like Google aren’t really known for their consistency. They like creative destruction and innovations that may or may not work (How’s life these days Google Glass? Anyone still on G+?  How ‘bout Blogger?). So, yes, I’m skeptical about their motives. While watching all these improvements to Google products being talked about, it looks a lot like a massive PR campaign — a PR campaign that has shades of Bill Murray as Frank Cross in Scrooged screaming: “I care!” He’s saying the words, but we don’t believe him.

I included a quote from the great political philosopher Frankie Goes to Hollywood at the outset of this post because the lyric really does ask us how we’re going to live when the computers automate our work lives — leaving us with very little or nothing to do. Karl Marx (Richard Marx’s great-grandfather. I know. Fake news. But is it?) clearly understands that the science that goes into making the machines isn’t about making life easier for the working class — or even the middle class. It’s designed to serve (and make money for) those at the top. Everyone one else not in that club becomes unnecessary, unneeded, redundant, superfluous, unemployed.

Marx is pretty stark in an either/or way when it comes to these views. The gradations in class (and the need to keep a vibrant consumer class in the kind of capitalism tech thrives in) didn’t enter into his views on capitalism in the notes he compiled in 1857 under the heading Grundrisse (aka “Foundations”).

How could they? Capitalism was more about production. The consumer-oriented capitalism that makes us want iPhones, Pixels, Samsungs, FitBits, and all that other stuff was obviously not a thing in the mid-1800s, so it’s difficult to point to Marx as some kind of socialist Nostradamus predicting the future with an uncanny knack for accuracy when reading and quoting fragments like this.

However, he was prescient about who the science is meant to serve — which brings me back to my sometimes love/hate relationship with technology. I love the science, the engineering, the aesthetics of design, the ease of use that goes into these devices and services. The pace of innovations we’ve experienced is staggeringly fast as well. That speaks to the nature of human creativity, problem-solving, and the ability to create something of substance from an initial idea.

As someone who has cast his lot with humanists, I have great admiration for what we humans are able to create in art, science, politics, and all those foundations of what we call civilization. I also know that without capitalism, the pace of chance would probably be a lot slower — mostly because the incentives that appeal to human self-interest vis-a-vis innovation aren’t major parts of other paradigms. However, for me (and this circles back to that whole “Sometimes I hate technology” thing) there’s an American streak of personal freedom that feels it’s under siege as the matrix of tech makes longer and faster leaps toward a world where we will have to confront the true spiritual problems of living within the soul of the machine.

METAL DAD: THE BOOK IS AVAILABLE NOW. COLLECTS YEARS 3 & 4! Click here.

METAL DAD shirts! Click here to get yours.

I had fun at Three Tall Women–too much fun, I suspect. Its original Off Broadway production, which won Edward Albee his third Pulitzer Prize in 1994 after a dry spell, was more quietly lacerating than what’s currently at the Golden, dreamier, stranger. I mean, all Albee plays are strange, occupying their own fascinating space between his imagination and ours. But this one, with three women, A, B, and C, who seem to have assigned roles (aging dowager mother, dutiful daughter, lawyer) in the first half, then come to represent three ages of the same woman in the second, has a pull all of its own. The story of Albee’s own hated adoptive mother, shot through with pain, regret, and fear, should mirror our own reckoning of youthful idealism lost to midlife drudgery and senior decline, but director Joe Mantello pushes Albee’s rueful humor for laughs. In this he succeeds, with three estimable accomplices in Glenda Jackson (her Broadway return), Laurie Metcalf (returning after her Tony win last year), and Alison Pill successfully lightening the load. The cost, however, is to the play–a description of an act of oral sex as commerce, a weirdly chilling vignette Off Broadway, is now a punchline. And it doesn’t need the cosmic frippery of the admittedly eye-catching set, said to be based on the bedroom seen at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to be “universal.” In going for the funnybone, this revival misses the jugular.

Mostly crated over from the West End and the Menier Chocolate Factory is the Roundabout revival of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, a Tony winner in 1976. Surviving its passage without a scratch is its star, Tom Hollander, one part baggy pants clown and one part wonky philosopher, with a sliver of tragedy as the play recedes. Recedes as in flood–this is a verbose Stoppardian flapdoodle of Leninism, Dadaism, modernism, bedroom farce, and whatever was whirling around his febrile brain at the time, with Lenin, James Joyce, and Dada founder Tristan Tzara as supporting cut-ups. Hollander plays a burlesque of British consul Henry Wilfred Carr, who wrangled with Joyce when the author lived in Zurich, managing plays that Carr appeared in, unhappily. (Carr is parodied in Ulysses.) The comedy does rattle on, as Stoppard does at his most prolix, and the show will come down to a matter of taste. Director Patrick Marber (himself the author of Closer) manages a fine madness, however, and chances are the irrepressible Hollander will entice the skeptics to stay for the second act.

The best revival of the season, Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, will bolt you to your chair. Partly it’s the tiny seats at the (Helen) Hayes, the new Main Stem home of Off Broadway’s Second Stage–but mostly it’s the play, the closest the Manchester by the Sea Oscar winner has come to penning a thriller, and its outstanding production. An Off Broadway hit in 2001, Lobby Hero, with much trenchant observation (and humor) about class, racism, and sexism, is very much a play of our cultural moment.

The lobby, of an apartment building in Manhattan, is a cunning turntable design by David Rockwell, which shifts perspective along with the POVs of its four characters, the tightest ensemble on Broadway. Jeff (Michael Cera), who washed out of the Marines trying to emulate his difficult father, is now a night security guard, lorded over by the hard-headed William (Brian Tyree Henry, Atlanta‘s Paper Boi), who feels that his charge lacks ambition. Two cops, veteran Bill (Chris Evans) and rookie Dawn (Bel Powley) stop by, Bill to tryst with one of the tenants as Dawn looks the other way. Jeff hopes that Dawn will look his way, but as usual he garbles things, making him easy prey for the smugly self-assured Bill, who taunts him. “What do you see her as, a police officer or a piece of ass?” Bill asks. “I don’t know, a police officer piece of ass?” Jeff responds. It’s a funny line, but Cera, very much in his element, knocks it right into the balcony.

Things deepen into even more of an ethical morass when William needs Jeff to support an alibi, in a murder case that Bill, a competent if underhanded officer, is sniffing around. In Lobby Hero, everyone has something on everyone else, and how the cards are shuffled, dealt, and played from scene to scene ratchets tension. The friction, as noted, also leads to some big laughs. It’s all embedded in Lonergan’s play, with the actors bringing out every tone. Henry, who played The General in The Book of Mormon, is gruffly avuncular, then desperate, as the would-be standard bearer who can’t get out from under Bill’s suspicions. The British-born Powley, the star of the fine indie The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), gnashes a fun “New Yawk” accent as a female officer determined to be one of the boys, whose principles are challenged since she’s stuck with the most indiscreet and swaggering of boys. That would be Evans, trading in Captain America’s shield for a badge, and clearly exulting in playing a bad guy (a shaded, Lonerganian bad guy, that is) in his Broadway debut.

With this and the excellent 2014 revival of This Is Our Youth under his belt Cera has become Lonergan’s go-to muse on Broadway, an unexpected but welcome turn for an actor who has been zigzagging since childhood. (He and Henry are up for featured actor Tonys this year, odd in that Cera is clearly lead. But awards bodies are strange entities.) There are depths in Jeff that the floundering security guard is struggling to find, and Cera hauls all of them up. Terrific–and we’ll see him again this fall, with Elaine May, in the Broadway revival of Lonergan’s Pulitzer nominee, The Waverly Gallery.

METAL DAD: THE BOOK IS AVAILABLE NOW. COLLECTS YEARS 3 & 4! Click here.

METAL DAD shirts! Click here to get yours.

Those who played along when I ran Popdose’s “Name That Tune” roughly a decade ago (*pauses, kneels over, takes a breath when he contemplates that those days were nearly a decade ago*) may see similarities with some of these theme shows that I’ve been doing lately. Yep, I’m recycling, but hey, it’s been ten years or so. I’d like to think that the statute of limitations has long since expired.

Much like the previous shows, I now have at least two more shows’ worth of ____ and ____ material already at my disposal, thanks to my awesome (read: much more knowledgeable) Facebook friends. I am not afraid to admit that the themed shows are better because my friends’ song suggestions are better than mine.

Many of the artists making their Dizzy Heights debuts this week, well, embarrass me, because they should have been played weeks/months ago. See if you can guess which ones I’m talking about: Adam & the Ants, Capital Cities, Death Cab for Cutie, Elle King, Joan Jett, John Mellencamp, The Ramones, Voice of the Beehive, Walter Egan, and XTC. That’s right – nearly all of them.

Thank you, as always, for listening.

Chicago singer-songwriter Andy Pratt follows up last year’s acclaimed  Horizon Disrupted album (reviewed here on Popdose) with a new E.P.,  Further Disruption, culled from the same Steve Albini-engineered sessions that resulted in the previous L.P.

To hear Mr. Pratt describe it, “”Lincoln Avenue” is a pop-rock love song in its purest form. With only four chords and a familiar verse-chorus-bridge structure, it tells the story of all-consuming, passionate love. The city (specifically Chicago), entangled in the affair, serves as a backdrop to the tale of longing and distraction.”

As always, we’d like to know what you think.  So please give it a listen and let us know!

Further Disruption will be released on Friday, May 18th, 2018

www.andyprattmusic.com

From the early notes of “Failed Celestial Creatures” – the meditative, 20-minute-long title track to the unanticipated debut collaboration between guitar-composer David Grubbs and Japanese musician Taku Unami, out Friday via Empty Editions – you get the sense you’re listening to something special. While Unami paints with fuzzy clouds of electronic sound, Grubbs repeats wonderfully dirge-like, circular refrains on undistorted electric guitar; the piece, which has an amazing sense of breadth/breath, softly inhales and exhales. At its finest, the work is evocative of Grubbs’ collaboration with the master Loren Connors, and to compare something to a gem like their Arborvitae says a lot.

That lengthy track, unfortunately, gets a little muddied and lost in its final quarter as distortion enters the picture but, even then, it radiates an almost-unnerving calm. Improvised and pseudo-improvised music, which this Kyoto-recorded material clearly elicits, can have a kind of rawness and unexpectedness to it – it’s part of what makes being witness to it so magical – and Grubbs and Unami toy with this notion, citing in the text Japanese absurdist references to ritual sacrifices. Maybe I lean literalist here, but I experience more of a journey where you don’t know what’s lurking around the next river-bend. (Or not.) On Failed Celestial Creatures, Grubbs and Unami seem peculiarly in control, playing off each other’s fragile string-bending to the point where everything sounds carefully composed – in several senses of the word.

The rest of the record is good, has its moments, of course, but does not match the grand gestures of the opener. The four-song “Threadbare” suite is beautific and lulling, in a sparse, almost dream-seductive kind of way. But, sadly, on “The Forest Dictation,” Grubbs makes his points of reference – the tiger imagery from Nakajima’s The Moon Over The Mountain – a little too clear and ends up, at least in terms of the record’s only lyrics/vocals, sounding a bit like an impression of himself.

The distractions, in the end, though, are few and far between. For a debut, these two seem surprisingly comfortable in and complementing each other’s skins and fans, especially, of Grubbs gems like Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange will be rightly impressed.

There are two epic songs battling for your attention on Loam and Sky, the new EP from The Elephant Parallax out Friday, and either could launch a fit description of why the record is indispensable.

First, there is the opener, “The Conscious.” Though it begins with “Bloody Mary”-style drums and a pixelated, Battles-ish guitar onslaught, what comes to drive it is a mathy alt-metal crescendo in odd time signatures over which the band, frankly, scorches Earth. The 1-2/1-2-3 wallop is the type of anthem you want to shout at the top of your lungs and that’s exactly what the trio does, mixing well-placed, choral oohs-and-ahs with barks that match the bite. How these guys fit so much into four minutes is beyond me.

Then, there’s the closer, “Incenfeminalgia II,” a sequel-of-sorts to a math-minded monster from the group’s 2010 self-titled LP. This one takes time to catch fire, introducing the soundscape with three minutes and change of moody, cinematic, reverbed-guitar-driven post-rock, the vague sounds of crackling fire. But when it strikes, it strikes hard. Again, the band flashes prog allegiances as much as shows off its alt-metal chops; think Pelican covering Tool or Hella covering The Mars Volta as men with fine voices lament, “Where did our intuition go?” The eruption here, when it comes, is visceral and boil-inducing – when the band darts into double-time near the close of the song’s nearly-10-minute run-time, after a fiery guitar breakdown, the rhythmic interplay between bass, drums and guitar is to tight, your ears will play tricks on you and you’ll start hearing the explosions as a series of rolling tides. This is intense stuff, some of the most blistering alt-metal you’ll hear this year.

The rest of the four-song EP is an interesting lull, for the most part sparser and more loosely packed, a passageway between mountainous terrain. The tracks, including the moody “OhRei,” aren’t duds, far from it; there are just no ways the music can measure up to the brilliance of the opening and closing tracks.

The whole EP was recorded at Ocean Way, once a recording home to the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson, and the attention to hi-fi detail shows. Every guitar chord crunches just so, the vocals (especially the background chorale) are well-mixed, and the little details throughout, like the careful placement of vibraphone in the intro to the last track, indicate this thing was produced more than your prototypical alt-metal demo. It’s not overly polished or gross with studio goo but it works. And it works wonders.

Now, if I could only get those two songs out of my head.