Catherine and I ran into some hippies in Georgetown on Saturday, right in the middle of DC's Republican heart of darkness; it was weird. We had been biking on the Capital Crescent Trail and decided to catch the Circulator back home. At Wisconsin and M, there they were: dirty, dirty hippies. Actually, I had run into these same two guys before, over by Farragut North. Both times they were hawking t-shirts bearing the slogan "Stop Bitching, Start A Revolution", and trying to interest passers-by by asking, "Would you be interested in some revolutionary art?"

This sat the wrong way with me. The "Stop Bitching" slogan is something we've all seen on somebody's crazy aunt's bumper, right next to "Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History". I wouldn't call it revolutionary, per se, although I'll grant that technically speaking it is of or pertaining to a revolution. Anyway, it seemed very weird to see two twentysomething guys selling these and only these little swatches of banality. Don't they know the astounding advances in clever t-shirt technology that our ironic-silkscreenologists have made over the past decade?

But today I followed the URL on the shirt — zendik.org — and it turns out that these shirts are probably the original medium for the Stop Bitching slogan. Apparently they're sold in support of an "artist's community" in West Virginia called Zendik Farm. So it's just a bit dated, not really the colossal catchphrase miscalculation that it at first seemed to be.

Shit like this still puts the members of this particular commune on my bad side (Zendik's deceased patriarch sounds a little like L. Ron Hubbard without the paranoid schizophrenia). But at least it's all a bit clearer now. Has anybody else run into these guys?

I've been listening to the Bloc Party remix album, and it's pretty good. "Bluest Light" and "This Modern Love" get new arrangements and end up sounding like what you'd hope to hear at a show: interesting and different — but basically faithful — variations on the originals. Death From Above's remix of "Luno" uses a previously unreleased vocal track and fuzzed out guitars to fairly rockin' effect. And the wolf-howl enabled version of "Helicopter" should be on every Halloween playlist this year. So it's a pretty good album, despite a few real clunkers (the remixed "She's Hearing Voices" sounds like a five year old methodically banging on a MIDI keyboard full of Bloc Party samples, for instance).

But the motivation for this post isn't to provide a review. It's much more boring — I just want to bitch about something Pitchfork said. The most prosaic form of internetery, I know.

But here's the thing. The review is highly positive. I don't object to any of its broad conclusions. The problem is that it's suffused with the assumption that the original Silent Alarm was somehow boringly conventional, and that this new, more techno-heavy version is more intellectually inspiring. The final sentence pretty well sums it up:

"...the band makes a rock-solid professional-sounding pop/rock record, and here come some folks with their computers to make it a bit more formally interesting as well: not a bad deal at all, right?"

What a fucking idiot. In contexts like this, electronic music is to rock and roll as Hooked on Phonics is to literature. Drums and bass and guitars and vocals makes... sound it out now... rock and roll, that's right! I guess I can see how having a song deconstructed and rebuilt with kindergarten clarity could make it more formally interesting — but only if you were too dumb to hear the individual pieces to begin with. This is especially true when the original is as precisely-constructed as Silent Alarm is. For all but the most musically retarded, electronic remixology's dully reliable layering — bass drum, then high hat, then bass line, then guitar riff, then vocal samples, each on the quarter beat with a few measures between the introduction of each — quickly becomes boring as hell.

Okay, okay. I'll stop now. I know I'm not really qualified to bitch about this stuff. Maybe Charles can provide a explanation of why Nitsuh Abebe is dumb that's better-grounded in music theory. But I can say with confidence that while this remix album is worthwhile, it's not more interesting than the original. Unless you weren't interested in well-constructed rock & roll songs to begin with, that is.

hmm. any coincidence that the guy who ignored dcist for credit is one half of a team that was blatantly lied to by bush's administration - an easily refutable lie - but didn't bother to, you know, fact check it or do any reporting and printed it in a highly visibile and important article anyway?

I DON'T THINK SO.

just kidding. mostly. but seriously...this is why i don't get people who worry about bloggers getting facts wrong. "real" reporters do it ALL THE TIME. it's everywhere you look; thank god for the blogosphere being a good watchdog.