White Noise

DON DELILLO

Every day, the things you eat, the shows you watch, and the drugs you take are all gathering in the darkened rooms of your suburban dwellings and hatching a plot to take you out once and for all. And what can you do about it, sitting there watching endless loops of buildings crashing in upon themselves and burying a small fraction of humanity beneath their weight? Nothing.

Funny, isn't it? You're a professor of Hitler Studies and you don't know German, you've got a wonderful nuclear family -- built from the strands of several previous marriages, of course -- and when you're short on spiritual sustenance, there's always the immanent transcendent supermarket or the consumerist makeover of the mall to prop you back up from a descent into murder and madness. If this doesn't make you want to red White Noise, well, read it anyway.

 

 

 

 

 


Motherless Brooklyn

JONATHAN LETHEM

Take your hardboiled detective, then give him a disability that forces him to warp and bend language according to his own obsessive impulses. Then take that detective and throw him in the middle of the polyglot, pop culture mecca of New York, and watch the pages fly right on by.

Lethem has already composed some of the most interesting narratives this side of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, but this novel happens to be the most potent one written in the last decade, signalling the vapor trail of that dying breed, the visionary author. If you pull this out of your stocking this holiday season, drop to your knees and build a shrine to Santa. Immediately.

 

 

 

 

 

BUY IT HERE

Pixies -- Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim
Ok, it may seem that we got sneaky and threw in two releases when we had only one to pick. But you can buy them like that! And what a lucky buy it was, because this version fuses two of the finest exercises in musical fury and finesse that we have ever seen, and are likely to ever see again. Without the Pixies, there would have been no Nirvana, and I'm not talking about the band -- although that would be true, too -- I'm talking about the state of mind. In Black Francis, music finally got its shrieking banshee, its primal scream, its guttural catharsis. In the Pixies' lyrics, one got a trip through David Lynch's Eraserhead, the Cinderella myth, the desolate loneliness of mastubration, lesbians and surfing, broken bodies and minds out in the water somewhere swimming.

To gauge the reach of this highly influential band is pointless -- like death and taxes, it's a given. The only question left is, why Surfer Rosa? Because it was technically their first album. Come On Pilgrim was really the Pixies' demo tape. That's how good they were. And while the polished sound of today's scene may make Francis and Co.'s dual masterpiece sound clunky, its dissonance, its minor chord anger, its pure, pop fury is unparalleled.

 

 

 

 



 

DJ SHADOW -- Preemptive Strikee
"The tracks go off in this direction," a Stormtrooper from Star Wars cracks during "Hindsight," one of many of DJ Shadow's trip hop classics found on this collection and recollection of past singles and present wanderings. And it is only Shadow who could so succinctly meld the dual meanings of one term as if by accident, suggesting that the footprints which lead to creativity are bound by the desire to create Giant Steps, all the while biting one of science fiction's finest cultural texts.

Whoever argued that postmodernism was depthless flash never sat down with Preemptive Strike, and listened to the four movements of "What Does Your Soul Look Like?" -- Shadow's ultimate calling card for canonicity. And whoever argued that hiphop is all about bitches and Bentleys hasn't absorbed the dense layers of one of Shadow's finest tracks, "High Noon," a light-speed journey through the organic and inorganic matter of expression. And whoever is still convinced that DJs aren't musicians -- well, they're just pissed because they had to sit through those hellish sax lessons. While Endtroducing is DJ Shadow's masterpiece, Preemptive Strike shows the Master in pieces. It's wonderful.

 

 

 



 

 

Three Mile Pilot -- Chief Assassin to the Sinister
Yeah, yeah, yeah -- you're tired of hearing Morphizm rant and rave about this band. You've read the Pall Jenkins interview and you're still saying, "So fucking what?" I got one question: what the hell is wrong with you? Chief Assassin floated in so far underneath the musical radar during the dead-as-a-doornail mid-90s that one would think that it never got made.

With a reliance upon bass for authority, vocals for noise and angst, and a distaste for guitar overkill, Three Mile Pilot's sophomore effort is a bracing dose of hurt and heart, filled with the finest writing this side of Pynchon. And although some may raise their eyebrows at the unconventional but sobering craftmanship of the band's signature sound, there is no questioning their passion and poetry. You want urgency? Then listen to the grinding teeth of "Inner Bishop" -- "You've got to turn yourself into something you don't like/We've known it all along/And it's all or none." You want poignant aggression? Try the multifaceted storm of "Circumcised" -- "I can't find a landing yet for all my crashing jets." There's plenty to go around. I can't say this enough, people -- this is the best band you've never heard of. And when you finally hear them, they might just be the best band you've ever heard.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Not since Star Wars has one science-fiction film so firmly planted its footprints on every other film that has come after it. Which is ironic considering how openly The Matrix wears its influences and foundational texts on its sleeves. Yes, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Paul Virilio run through that film like unleashed viruses; yes, its decidedly Eastern tinge has as much to do with Hong Kong's de facto wiremaster Yuen Woo Ping as it does with the glossy anime thematics that have been forming off the Eastern seabord like a tsunami for the last twenty years; and yes, Keanu Reeves gave another William Gibson-penned vehicle -- the awful Johnny Mnemonic -- his droning absence. But now it's pretty easy to see it: Gibson's seminal cross-genre masterpiece about a neurally neutered hacker who is wired into something entirely different than everyone else has entered the popular consciousness to the point that it has become yet another household product. After all, where do you think they got the term "matrix" from anyway? That's right, from the same book that invented the term "cyberspace." For a crash course on the past, present and future, read this book. It changed literature, film, philosophy, technoculture -- hell, culture itself. What, it can't change you?