When I look at my iTunes playlist for all the music to come out in the year 2007, I try to start to group it all by sets of trends, and act like the conclusions I reach have more to do with music being produced this year than my personal tastes. I view certain sounds as signifying cultural trends, rather than small subcultural scenes- a few years ago I was thinking that all of the aughts would be defined by these cyborg sounds of the electronic and organic coexisting, either as a utopian dream or as a war breaking out.

So No Age and Deerhunter are droney rock bands with poppy, almost surf beats behind them. The new Liars record is like this as well. This doesn't mean anything. I like the new Magik Markers record- That's got songs on it, rather than the noise jams they made in the past that bored me when I caught the tail end of their set opening for Sonic Youth- The singer shouted "Do something!" and a crowd that had no reason to do so, because there was nothing outside of that shout that would encourage it. I kind of think that Magik Markers are dumb, based on that and the quote from the frontwoman found in The Believer music issue. Sonic Youth have the same kind of dumb, this invocation of sex-drugs-rock-and-roll as the be-all end-all of everything, that ends up being attributed to different kinds of work- it works great for vaguely arty rock music, but is tiresome as hell in the type of poetry that a Thurston Moore will write. But I guess that's not the actual point, and the actual music is the end of it? That makes sense, as a self-fulfilling prophecy- that the rock music will be better than the experimental work meant to glorify it. Like, if you look at John Cage as being punk, and that's what makes him good, it still stands to reason that an actual punk record will be closer to the point than a John Cage performance.

Um, the new Thurston Moore record is pretty good too, despite a few missteps, like ending with a tape recording of Thurston at age 13, recording the sound of Lysol. Or, you know, lyrical atrocities like "Wonderful Witches."

I have made pancakes for breakfast like every weekend since moving into this new place. If you live in Olympia and want pancakes, you should come by. Last week I made waffles instead, but the separating of whites from yolks and then beating the whites into stiff peaks is too much of a hassle, so tomorrow it's back to pancakes. I really need to work it out so the music I choose to listen to is played when I'm doing this, it's too frequently my roommates music, which, in general, is music not meant to be played at high volume being played at really high volume, and then sung along with, poorly. Usually when this happens I can be found playing music in my room, so I can run back to hear the sound of like Lightning Bolt's "On Fire" in the time it takes for the batter to bubble, and then running back to flip it over to brown. I listen to a lot of music I suspect would sound better loud but play at reasonable volume just because it has an element of obnoxiousness that other people wouldn't be prepared for. Take, for example, "Boyz" off the new M.I.A. record, which I was listening to just now. I wanted to write a post all about the new M.I.A., the new Eric Copeland solo record, and the new Oh No record, but this is the type of thing that I conceived of after only hearing little bits of each and hoping there'd be considerable aesthetic overlap, based on the way each addresses the idea of world music. I don't know, I still think it might be possible to edit a playlist that's just those records, shuffled up with some stuff removed- like, for example, the M.I.A. song "Jimmy" which played as I wrote the rest of this.