The philosophy of xiu

[kitchencabinet]

Let me premise this, for those who don't already know, by saying I live in Alaska. Perceptively, a geographical area not affected in the same ways as the lower 48 states in the U.S. by modern culture....art etc.

I went out tonight for my girlfrirends brother's birthday, he ended up going home early. I met two people that were here for the summer and we started talking about music. He said that he had seen Deerhoof in Florida and were surprised that they were a 3 piece band. I mentioned that they had once been a 5 piece and he was intrigued....He said the person in Deerhoof that impressed him the most was the bassist. In my buzzzed and xiu xiu centric state, I was like Greg Saunier?? (he was probably thinking about John Dieterich). This led into a conversation about Greg Saunier and Xiu Xiu. When we started talking about xiu the two question were.

1. Are you sure it's shoo shoo?

and

2. Didn't he used to be a school teacher or something?


These questions made me sort of realise the kind of popular status they have reached and how people view them. One person I talked to said he hated xiu xiu and that he had seen them at bottom of the hill and that Jamie stopped and asked people not to laugh during the show. His take was that xiu xiu was kind of ridiculous and selfish....

So I am wondering about the sympathy and philosophy behind what encourages us towards this music. IF some people are so turned off by it, why do we check this message board on a daily basis to fill ourselves with the ideas that surround it?

[dolphinous]

i just come on here hoping to find cool pictures of caralee.......

[todd]

"Listening to grim music, veiled or not, can make you feel less alone if you are feeling grim yourself. Everyone says this, but it's true. Perhaps there's more hope in there than we want to cop to." - Yvonne Chen

I think that sums up my attraction to Xiu Xiu.

[emilyrose]

i think i like xiu xiu because they're always changing. and how you can chart their progression as musicians. i was reading artaud last week, and i feel like the band has achieved a language within the way they use instruments, and that through their usage of instruments and words, they have sort of created some sort of new construction that is transcendent of language. or something.

[paulmceldowney]

knife play

[lester]

todd said:

"Listening to grim music, veiled or not, can make you feel less alone if you are feeling grim yourself. Everyone says this, but it's true. Perhaps there's more hope in there than we want to cop to." - Yvonne Chen

I think that sums up my attraction to Xiu Xiu.

wow, yeah, I must have read that at some point because that's how I feel too.
Do you feel that the post-"A Promise" era has lost a certain amount of that feeling, replaced with something of possibly equal but different value?
I was talking to kitchencabinet about this at one point and I realized that what made me love the band before Fabulous Muscles came out was based on the fact that all I knew about them was from the liner notes and stuff found on the KRS website. (Where the band which was like the old line up basically responded to slim moon's question about "why so sad?" by uncompromisingly saying that everything really is this bad paraphrase from memory) I at this point, there weren't (for people like cabinet and myself who live in the sort of isolation of Alaska) too many images or extra bits of real information about what kind of people Jamie and company were. Now there are tons of photos of Jamie and Caralee and whoever having an awesome time on the road while making great art. It's paradoxical, but i felt more connected to them, and perhaps more of the "hope" that Yvonne Chen refers to when I barely knew what Jamie looked like, and certainly didn't have the kind of hi-resolution window on their touring life that I feel (accurately or inaccurately) we do now. Which is not to say I want to feel close to artists or bands who are important to me. But the vague, intense grimness that everything about my pinhole perception of them exuded before allowed me to feel what Chen is talking about in a way that doesn't exist now. And if that means getting more hot hot Jamie Stewart pictures on the internet, then I suppose that's a price I'm willing to pay.
PS I'm definitely not one of these people who think none of their albums except for Knife Play are any good, in fact, I love each album to death. Here's my review of Air Force media.www.thenorthernlight.org/media/storage/paper960/news/2006/09/19/AE/music.Review-2542682.shtml
if you care to read it.