muzak: an update

A while back I made the reckless public announcement that I was going to try to write and record a new song, like, every single day. As it happens, I haven't written and recorded a new song since. However, I have continued to update the relevant site, which has turned out to be sort of a dump for old music.

For instance, I recently recovered a tape I feared was long lost, and just yesterday I got it back from this midtown camera shop that converted it to CD for about $15; on this tape, and now miraculously on my computer—and from there onto the goddamned Internet!—is the music of Lost Cause. Why is this meaningful? Because for years I've felt that I spent most of high school in an embarrassing fog of musical pretentiousness: very much a teenager, I guess I found the subjectivity of taste to be highly distressing, and as a result I settled on a foolproof formula of what objectively was good, which basically amounted to: difficult to play. As such, I wound up listening to a lot of stuff that I can't even stomach for 30 seconds anymore. But before that I liked stuff that today I still like, and I was very eager to hear the music I made back then, before the nosedive into pretentiousness.

Lost Cause (1993)

a slightly more beefed-up incarnation

(photo via Headfoot)

In 1992, when I recorded "Cage" with Lost Cause, I was in the ninth grade, I'd been playing guitar for I think a little less than a year, and my favorite bands were Nirvana, Guns N' Roses, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (up to and including Blood Sugar Sex Magik). A year later I'd look back and think, "I didn't know what I was doing!" And that was true: as it happens, when I didn't know what I was doing, I made better music than I did when I did.

[Of course, "Cage" is not half as good as the sophisticated boom-punk of Sham-poo, who in 2004 when they were barely in their teens were spraying fiery joy all over their bemused eighth-grade talent show—but then, to be fair, those kids came of age in a neo-post-punk age (the Strokes were already huge by the time they were in the, like, fifth grade), and besides, Jonah's from the Lower East Side and I'm from the relatively cred-impoverished Upper West. So.]

Other songs that have gone online since Jan. 2 include but are not limited to:

• "Wei Zhongxian," a somewhat They Might Be Giants-inspired deal (see "James K. Polk") that I wrote as a freshman in college using "lyrics" from Jonathan Spence's Chinese History textbook,
• some song fragments (e.g.) from an even later incarnation of my high-school band (this one with a name I'm much less excited about—by then I'd taken that pretentious nosedive), focused on my own guitar playing because I'm a goddamned narcissist,
• "Janie Ow," a kind of love song that I wrote in my sophomore year of out-of-college (as I used to half-jokingly say) and that contains trace elements of awesome, and
• "Chinese Eyes," for which I have an inexplicable and unjustified fondness even though I wince every time I hear the lyric, "The readiness is all, I guess"—yeesh.

Wei Zhongxian:

the most powerful and notorious

eunuch in Chinese history (via)

But I'm most excited about "Cage." Lost Cause! Forever 1992! Respect!