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I originally wrote this piece for the FUCKIN’ RECORD REVIEWS print fanzine that’s yet to come out (though as I’m sure you know, they’re very much alive otherwise). The editors there gave it a snazzy French title, which I liked. This “data” has a bit of a shelf life – apps and music consumption being a bit of a moving target – so I thought I’d post the piece here.

Au
Courant in the Car

Or, modern man’s musical sublimation to the
machine

by Jay Hinman

It says more about me than
I’d like it to – but I’ll come clean and admit that I’ve fully succumbed to a
nearly 100% digital lifestyle when it comes to the consumption of music (the
occasional 45 or LP purchase notwithstanding – as these are purchased for
ultimate digitization purposes). This really doesn’t even involve compact discs
any longer. Everything I listen to, it’s on my phone. Yeah, my telephone. Who among
us would have imagined such an abomination, even a couple of years ago? I
listen to upwards of an hour or two of music every day, and most often more.
Much of this is done in the car, as I’m one of the unfortunate cogs in the
great, grinding corporate deathburger who commutes a great distance to work.
I’ve outfitted my chariot with an auxiliary hook-up that lets me plop the HTC
One smartphone or my iPod Touch into a cradle, and then run whatever comes out
of it through my car’s speakers. Perhaps you’ve seen, or have yourself
experienced, such a get-up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it has been
culturally life-changing, and totally has opened me up to entirely new ways of
getting clued in about radical new sounds.

I thought I’d pull together the music apps that I whole- or at least halfheartedly
recommend for you. You’ll probably heard of most of ‘em. Granted, this is
mostly an Android conversation, so I apologize in advance to any lingering iPhone
users out there who haven’t jumped ship like I did a couple years ago – though
I’m pretty sure most of these are available for you holdouts, too. If you’re
still rocking a StarTac or a Razr, I’m sorry, but I do admire your stance on
many levels.

SPOTIFY – Perhaps no application or
service has so upended the way music is consumed and delivered as Spotify has.
Some might say for ill – perhaps musicians themselves, say – and I’m
certainly sympathetic to the argument. That said, wearing my pure consumer hat,
I happily pay them ten bucks a month to listen to the app, ad-free, on mobile –
in fact, I have never actually experienced Spotify as a “free”
customer, since I rarely use a PC to listen to music. The catalogs they pull
from run incredibly deep, and often include brand-new independent and deeply
underground 45s and LPs the week they’re released. Not everyone’s on there, of
course, but seems like 9 out of 10 things I hear about and want to try are
easily found within the app, especially the weirdly experimental music often
written about in publications like The Wire.
The mobile app lets you subscribers store stuff for offline listening, kinda
like you “own” it – which makes it easy to listen to in poor coverage,
or when you’re off the wireless grid entirely. And despite aforementioned
grumblings from a few artists about meager paychecks, I’m chastened to know
that every song I stream deposits at least a couple hundredths of cents in the
musicians’ bank accounts. Totally essential app for the modern music doofus,
and I have to say it’s getting better every update.

FLICKTUNES (now called CARTUNES) – This iTunes alternative
could better be classified as a “public safety” app, as it’s probably
kept me from plowing my vehicle into those in front of and on the sides of me
on far too many occasions. You know how when you’re playing a song or even a
downloaded podcast or radio show in iTunes, you’re only able to
“scroll” though a song – but not advance it 30 seconds forward or
backward? I know – horrifically lame, right? (they call that bar the
“scrubber”, by the way. Thought you’d like to know that). That doesn’t work
when you’re driving, even when your iPhone or iPod is mounted right in front of
you there on the air vents. FlickTunes lets me use a “two-finger
swipe” to easily advance 30 seconds in any song, which works especially
well when I’m listening to a radio show and I don’t wanna hear a particular
song or songs. There are other cool features as well, but that one in
particular is a lifeline both for me and the people who drive near me.

8TRACKS – I’ve been singing the
praises of this app for years in my various online blather forums, and my
enthusiasm hasn’t diminished in the slightest. 8Tracks is user-programmed and
-curated mix tapes, effectively. It has attracted some incredibly knowledgeable
experts across all sorts of sub-genres: 60s french pop; KBD-style punk;
pre-WWII Latin music; C86 pop; female-created electronic music of the 60s; and
loads of indie bands of every stripe. Wind it up and let it go. It’s the next
evolution of radio, if you think about it, and about the only downside is the
inability to skip more than 5 songs in a row – which has nothing to do with
8Tracks, and everything to do with
keeping things kosher with the labels and publishing houses. Some curators I
recommend over there are Isitanart, SpaceBunnySounds, the13thTrack, fuckinrecordreviews
himself, ohanaorsomething, urbankill,
Wub-Fur Internet Radio and hey, me.
I’m at DynamiteHemorrhage, and I
have a page full of mixes for the streaming-minded. The whole thing works
just as well, if not better, on your laptop, and there’s a cheapo premium
version if you don’t want to see ads, which I don’t.

SOUNDCLOUD – At first it seemed like
this site was all about people uploading field recordings of bird sounds &
such, but music fiends being music fiends, it morphed into a hosting site for
mp3 files, and now it’s become one of premier locales for underground music
from the independent and/or totally unaffiliated. The difference between mp3
blogs of 2015 and those of, say, 2008, is that the latter truly gave away mp3s
as downloads – hey, I did it myself. Today, almost everyone posts them on
Soundcloud, which makes artists happy, and makes it more difficult for you to
“acquire” a track without paying for it. (Yes, I certainly know about
the workarounds, god love ‘em). It also means that, if you still follow what
few music blogs exist, you need to click the little heart icon on the song
that’s been put onto Soundcloud, which then saves that song for you to listen
to later. I’m always creating these playlists of songs I read about, then
listening later on SoundCloud. The app still needs to evolve a bit, but it’s
very useful & seems to be the place where mp3 uploads of all kinds have
settled the past couple of years.

BANDCAMP – This one comes with
some major caveats. Bandcamp became the platform of choice for independent
artists to store their recorded music over the past 24-36 months, displacing
MySpace entirely. It’s 1,000 times better than MySpace ever was, which
obviously isn’t saying a goddamn thing. There used to be something cool called
Bandcamper, an app that applied a “presentation layer” over the
broader Bandcamp universe, but it had some gaping holes (like maddening search
functionality) – and it seems to have been hounded out of the app stores
entirely. Along came Bandcamp’s own app a little over year ago, and it’s
beautiful. If you’ve bought something on Bandcamp – and who hasn’t – it’s
available in full for streaming from the app with a touch of a button. It’s
cloud-based storage for everything you’ve ever purchased there, like, ever. That said, if you downloaded
something for free from Bandcamp, or even if you willingly gave a few sawbucks
to a “name your price” album or 45, it won’t show up here. Why not? Hell if I know. There are also discovery features where
you can find out what other people are buying, and then stream 1 meager song from each of their albums
(that’s all that’s allowed) – but I do miss Bandcamper’s smorgasbord of music compiled
from the entire Bandcamp universe. (Note:
it looks like they may have sorta addressed this in a recent update, so stream
away…!)

MIXCLOUD – A total up & comer that started really delivering just the past
few months. Initially it was much like 8Tracks: a place to upload your curated
modern mix tape, just not nearly as good. Recently it’s found a new niche as
the place where “disk jockeys” from the world’s terrestrial and internet radio
stations and from laptop-based phony
radio shows upload their recently-finished programs. This is a profoundly
important development if you’re not already a leading expert on every known
corner of the underground music universe, and lean heavily on clued-in curators
the way I do. Given the newfound ubiquitous matching of cool radio sets and
Mixcloud, I’m able to subscribe to sublimely righteous radio shows emanating
from Belgium to Bellingham, and these shows simply pop up in my feed every
week. It beats setting an alert to listen to the thing in real-time (old school!) by well more than a mile.

iCRATES – This really isn’t a
car app and is therefore a bit of an outlier to the broader article, but it’s a
terrific iPod/iPhone app. iCrates is for those of us/you who still buy records
and CDs, and who would like an aggregated peek into where you can find a
particular piece on vinyl or a given disc. It looks into the Discogs, eBay
and Amazon databases and presents you with who’s selling what, where. Far be it
for me to do anything to hurt traditional record stores, which I love, but this
is their worst nightmare unless they’re hot on the draw and are presciently selling
their wares in these forums. Used vinyl prices in stores can be easily undercut
with a quick search on iCrates for that same vinyl at a far better price. Capitalist
porker? Guilty as charged. Besides that, it’s totally fun to mess around with,
as it has the amazing Discogs.com database, with photos and sleeve scans, right
there at your proverbial fingertips.

WFMU, WMUA, KFJC, RADIO
VALENCIA, HOLLOW EARTH RADIO etc. – Finally, there are the many
college/pirate radio station apps. I recognize that there are aggregators like
Tune-In out there that work really well, but I personally prefer an easy-to-see
icon on my device that I can punch whilst driving, rather than the extra three
clicks it takes to find what I want there. That could be the different between
a mellow drive home and Hamburger Highway.

The best radio station
apps start playing immediately upon launch, and provide song identification in
big letters on the screen. WFMU’s app goes those one better, and not only
streams all of their podcasts and show archives, but even lets you
“favorite” individual songs so you can check up on them later (or buy
them on iTunes if they’re available there right now). Absolutely the best radio
station app, from a station that’s always one step ahead of everyone else. I
personally also enjoy the quasi-legit pirate stations Hollow Earth Radio,
BFF.FM and Radio Valencia, along with college stations KFJC, WMUA,
KUSF IN EXILE, KEXP and KDVS. This is where time and patience
finally meet the limits of my commute – we’ve arrived at home, and seriously,
there are no other radio stations I’ve even got the time to investigate on this drive – so we’ll stick with these old
favorites.

Now some folks have
informed me that people even “listen” to music on “YouTube”. YouTube! As if. What’s wrong with you
kids? Keep your eyes on the goddamn road, and stop watching music videos – I’m futzing
with my smartphone over here.

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Derek Bostrom, who drummed and (as I’ve learned) originally sang for The Meat Puppets, uploaded a host of early 1980s demos of the band, some made even before they started getting proper gigs.

Not only will you hear feral early versions of “H-Elenore”, “Unpleasant”, “Blue Green God” and “In A Car”, they do a host of wild and surprising (and contemporary) covers that range from Vom’s “Punkmobile” to The Flesh Eaters’ “Sleeping Sickness” to Wire’s “Outdoor Miner”.

Check it all out here.

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(I wrote this review ten years ago for another blog. Still one of the best music books of all time).

“LEXICON DEVIL: THE FAST TIMES AND SHORT LIFE OF DARBY CRASH AND THE GERMS” by Brenden Mullen and Don Bolles…..

About three months ago I finally devoured this book in a single 6-hour plane trip to New York, and at the conclusion of my journey I declared it to be one of the Top 5 rock and roll books I had ever read. I was so excited about this oral history that I was going to write a 10-paragraph oratory of my own about it for Agony Shorthand, imploring you to read it and enumerating all the reasons why you should do so immediately. Well, I plum forgot what I was going to write, and don’t have the book on me right now to jog my memory, so here we are.

I think the reason I didn’t jump on this when it came out a few years ago is because it was released mere months after BRENDEN MULLEN’s LA punk scene oral history “We Got The Neutron Bomb”, a large chunk of which concerned The Germs and their effect on Los Angeles and the greater American punk movement. Reckoning that “Lexicon Devil” would be a mere expansion of the stories told in “Neutron Bomb”, I resolved to read it in a couple years’ time. Maybe that made “Lexicon Devil” that much better, I don’t know, but where “Neutron Bomb” was merely an adequate retelling of the greatest punk rock scene in the history of the form (Los Angeles 1977-83, baby!), this book is sooo much more.

“Lexicon Devil” takes the story of Darby and Pat (Jan Paul and George) and positions it against the broader freakiness of the 1970s, and does so masterfully. The very best chapter in a book packed with incredible stories is the tale of their alternative, Scientology/EST-like high school-within-a-school at University High during the mid-70s, an experience so warped and beyond comprehension you have to figure those teachers would be behind bars if their tried their hippie mind-control BS on the school kids of today. But it sure made a man out of Jan Paul Beahm, hunh? He took these formative learnings, combined them with massive amounts of drugs & alcohol, and a deeply-repressed homosexuality that, in 1977, was definitely very uncool, and created the “Bobby Pyn” and “Darby Crash” characters of legend.

What I loved about the book, though, was just how well the interviews were threaded together to tell a much larger story than that of The Germs. Existing as it did on the edges of Hollywood flash and cash, there are many stories of the punks’ rubbing up against movie idols or mainstream rock folks and the sometimes inevitable troubles than ensued. The whole book is filled with the most seedy and depressing characters imaginable. Of the ones still alive, like the reprehensible “Gerber”, you get to read their puffed-up yarns from the old days, and almost feel drunk with enthusiasm for their heedless youth & reckless stupidity as a result. I mean, these kids were answerable to no one but themselves – very few had jobs, all were either alcoholics or drug addicts (with a few notable exceptions), and they rocked 24/7 to some of the great bands of all time – WEIRDOS, BAGS, GERMS, DILS, X, MIDDLE CLASS, FLESH EATERS etc. – and all had wild sex with each other and each other’s friends. Doesn’t that sound like a blast? Of course it does, except when you’re creeped out & repulsed by the goings-on described herein.

Characters who were very much in the center of things, like BLACK RANDY and DAVID BROWN, get their stories told better than any other account to date, and this in a book ostensibly about The Germs. Amazingly, Don Bolles comes across as the voice of reason and normalcy in this book, and as anyone who’s met the guy will tell you, those are not words that leap to tongue in his presence. But he’s a survivor, and as cliché as that might sound, once you read the accounts of the crazed lives the first-wave LA punks lived, you develop a newfound respect for the resilience of those who came out with their brains intact, and continue to play music or contribute in other ways to this day (hello, Alice Bag and Chris D.).

Darby, of course, did not, and this book does an excellent job letting others put him on the posthumous therapist’s couch to try and dissect what went wrong. I can’t recommend “Lexicon Devil” highly enough – it’s a riveting read, and can even be appreciated by audiences far removed from the rabid LA punk admiration society.

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I’ve been on a bit of a bender this year listening to sparse, cracked and echoey female folk/strum in the SIBYLLE BAIER / VASHTI BUNYAN mode, and my favorite discovery this side of MAXINE FUNKE is my most recent one – JULIE BYRNE.

Byrne is actively recording and touring, like, now. She’s the most Baier-like of them all, while retaining her own minimalist approach to ghostly closet folk, veering off into non-guitar experimental pieces at times as well. Start with the semi-recent 45 “Melting Grid” and the LP “Rooms With Walls and Windows” and go from there.

When I resuscitate Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio (soon) I’ll be playing Ms. Byrne and some of her progenitors. Until then – please listen here.

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DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO 2012-2015

The show may be on (potentially permanent) hiatus, but that doesn’t mean you can’t listen to several dozen past episodes of Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio, totaling roughly 64 hours of sub-underground rocknroll from the last five decades.

(Wait -why is in on hiatus? It’s simple: I’ve truly run out of great songs to play. The 61 shows I’ve made have maybe 10-15 songs that I played more than once, tops, so at 1,200+ songs overall, I feel like I’ve purged the best of the best already. It’s all out there to listen to now. If and when I cobble together enough interesting new material together, perhaps I’ll make another one.)

Grab episodes #18-#61 from iTunes right here.

Stream or download episodes #57-61 on Soundcloud right here.

Looking for episodes #1-17? I have CD-Rs of them and can upload any episode to this post here. Let me know which ones you’re looking for by sending me a message, and I’ll do just that.

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Currently reading this new book and am enjoying it greatly.

MacDonell writes a self-effacing story of his blurry punk rock coming-of-age in LA punk’s first wave, circa 1977 and beyond. He writes for Slash, he befriends Black Randy, he passes out on his own front lawn.

Read a full interview with the man here, and pick up the book here or here.

*** Update on July 30th: I got really tired of this book in a hurry. Never mind what I said earlier. Here’s what I wrote on GoodReads:

This started out with a bang, and I was all-in….and then quickly descended into a litany of “I was so wasted” drug stories, one after the other, ad nauseum. Really, is there anything more boring that someone’s drug memoir? It gets extremely tiresome about halfway in, by which point I’d lost all my interest and was totally deadened to this guy’s mistakes and motivations, which seemed to revolve around destroying himself as quickly as possible, while making everything into a “party” no matter the day or hour.

The connection to the ‘77-’78 LA punk scene – which is what I though this would be about – is tangential. MacDonnell’s PCP freakouts and blackouts take place at or near The Masque, Whiskey, Canterbury House and so on and so forth, but it’s more an insight into one man’s drugged-out stupidity than it is an illumination into anything new or different that we don’t already know about that scene or era. Music is barely existent in this book and resides in the background of dozens of drug stories. Huge yawn.