Introducing Lucid Culture’s New Sister Site, New York Music Daily

As regular visitors to this site have no doubt realized, there’s been a decline in activity here over the past ten days or so. The reason is that Lucid Culture’s co-founder and main contributor at present has been busy getting our new sister blog New York Music Daily off the ground. To give you the lowdown on how this will affect Lucid Culture, here’s an uncensored interview:

Q: First of all, what differentiates New York Music Daily from Lucid Culture?

A: Let me explain first what the two blogs will have in common. Like Lucid Culture, New York Music Daily will cover music from all over the map – both stylistically, and globally. But some of Lucid Culture’s coverage overlaps with places like NPR, and other blogs. With the new blog, I want to get back to what I was doing five years ago, covering great music that nobody else on the web or in the media was paying attention to because it was too smart, or confrontational, or just plain weird. I’m going back to my roots, in small clubs and the distant corners of the web where all the action is. What this means for fans of Lucid Culture – and I really appreciate your support over the years – is that the New York-centric features here will be migrating to New York Music Daily starting in September. The monthly live music calendar is going to make the move, and so will a lot of my live music coverage. The rest of the content – the more lucid, cultured stuff – will stay put.

Q: There must be a thousand music blogs in New York. Do we really need another one?

A: Yes. Why? Because New York doesn’t have a blog that consistently covers music that’s intelligent, and fun, and transgressive, and shifts the paradigm a little further to the left. I’ve been doing that since I first started writing about music for newspapers and magazines, then with the e-zine I published for seven years, and then at Lucid Culture. Since my days as a college radio disc jockey – notice I didn’t say DJ! – I’ve been fortunate to be a magnet for good music. I think it would be pretty irresponsible if I didn’t share what I know with the rest of the world.

Q: You mean to say that there isn’t a single other blog in New York, Lucid Culture included, that covers music which is challenging, and fun, and intelligent?

A: I want to create a blog that does something new and interesting every day, across all conceivable boundaries – like European pirate radio. There are plenty of blogs where you can find out about good music, but most of them seem to specialize in one particular style. It seems to me that there are three kinds of music blogs out there. First the specialists – who can be really excellent. In my opinion, those people are the heroes of music on the web. There’s blogs for Afrobeat, desert blues, punk rock, Greek psychedelia, oldtime gospel and pretty much every other style of music ever invented. I owe a lot to all those bloggers and I intend to draw on everything I’ve learned from them at New York Music Daily.

Q: But how about people who like more than one single style, Afrobeat, desert blues, punk rock, or whatever?

A: That’s exactly the audience that New York Music Daily is designed for. People tell me that my taste in music is pretty eclectic, but I don’t think I’m any different from anybody else – when you look at pretty much everybody’s ipod, you see a very wide variety. New York Music Daily is aimed at intelligent listeners – some who are obsessed with finding out about new music, some who aren’t – who are open to new ideas and sounds.

Q: Don’t all the Bushwick indie blogs already do that?

A: LMFAO. The Bushwick blogs, most of them anyway, are about clothes, and grubbing for status, and pretending to be a celebrity. It’s I Love Lucy all over again – they all wanna be in show business. Those bloggers don’t have anything to share with anybody except their crappy photos and videos – and they only make those to prove they were somewhere that’s been pre-approved for their peer group. It’s all about conformity, not about having fun. And that brings me to the corporate bloggers, because they’re not exactly obsessed with music either.

But they are obsessed with selling advertising.

And to sell advertising you have to convince advertisers that you get a lot of web traffic. How do you do that? The same way content farms do, with keywords and popular search terms. Because they’re going for the broadest audience possible, the corporate music bloggers’ coverage is pretty much identical to what’s on free tv – Journey, American Idol, Lady Gag, Justin Bieber. There are plenty of people who listen to that stuff, but most of them are still in grade school.

Q: You’re ranting.

A: Damn right. I intend to do a lot more of that. One of the reasons I wanted to start my own blog is that I’ll be able to address some issues that Lucid Culture hasn’t covered much lately. After all, music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a reflection of society as a whole. On one hand, I am very much aware that people don’t like strident political screeds. On the other hand, this is an incredibly exciting time to be alive. What started in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, and Greece, and now the UK is going to start happening stateside, and I’m not going to miss the boat. Sometimes people need a kick in the ass – and I do too. So I’m not going to hesitate to give people one if I have to. Besides, right-wing politicians are a 24-hour source of good comedy.

Q: Can I ask you why on earth you’d want to abandon Lucid Culture? Millions of hits, popular blog, what’s up with that?

A: I’m not leaving Lucid Culture, at least for the time being. Lucid Culture will continue, and I’ll be part of that. But after almost five years at Lucid Culture, it’s time I had my own blog. Don’t you agree?

Q: Maybe so. Other than Lucid Culture, is there another blog that inspired you to create the new one?

A: Not really. My models for New York Music Daily go back before the days of the internet. One is European pirate radio. Some of their segues are ridiculous, but they take chances nobody else does. Pirate radio is fearless. For one, it’s against the law. And they don’t care about ratings, what people think, they’re doing it because it’s fun.

My other model is – you’re gonna laugh – the New York Times. Or at least some ideal Platonian concept of the New York Times.

Q: I am laughing. You’re going to imitate a dying daily newspaper? That is funny.

A: What’s always intrigued me is the idea of having a central, definitive record. New York Music Daily is designed first and foremost to be a source of information. And over time, that information becomes a historical record. The New York Times has claimed to be the quote-unquote newspaper of record – but that record is the version brought to you by the thieving dukes and abbots and the gentry of the land, or their 21st century equivalents. Official histories are always full of lies because they serve the ruling classes. Secret histories always have the juicy stuff, the real deal. One of the things I’m shooting for here is to create a reliable if somewhat incomplete People’s History of Good Music in New York.

Q: Isn’t that what Wikipedia is?

A: You’re kidding, right?

Q: Actually, yes. Um, where was I…Lucid Culture has a general policy of not doing bad reviews. Does this mean that you’ll do bad reviews along with good reviews now?

A: I reserve the right to do whatever I want at the new blog. I’m going to try not to be gratuitously self-indulgent: we’ll see how that goes. And I think that ninety-nine percent of the time, bad reviews are a waste of time. But they’re an awful lot of fun to write!

Q: How about the blog format? It looks like you’re sticking with a text-only format, just like Lucid Culture…

A: Yes! That happened with Lucid Culture, completely by accident, and I’ve grown to love it. It’s a distinguishing characteristic. It makes me different. It’s the furthest thing from trendy. Trendoids don’t read, they look at pictures or watch video. This format will scare off the publicists who represent all those lame twee bands, who are always emailing me.

Q: You mean you’re not going to post audio and video?

A: Just like Lucid Culture, there’ll be links to streaming audio and video and free downloads – more of them, I hope. But remember, not everybody has screaming broadband 24/7. The fewer bells and whistles on the page, the faster it loads, the faster you can get the information that New York Music Daily has to offer.

Q: But why not just upload a video?

A: I’ll link to the video so everybody can watch it. But in the time it takes for that video to load, and then play all the way through, you can read a couple of paragraphs at New York Music Daily which will not only give you an idea what the song sounds like, it’ll also give you insight into a particular band or artist and whether or not you might enjoy their other stuff.

Q: Aren’t you worried that if someone clicks off the site, they won’t come back?

A: That’s the freedom of the internet. Let freedom reign. If someone is freer away from this site, that’s fine with me. Let them leave. They’ll come back. Look what happened with Lucid Culture. We went from invisible to being a major force in no time at all.

Q: You know as well as I do that the circumstances that made Lucid Culture so popular don’t exist anymore. How do you hope to survive without Twitter and Facebook and…

A: Stop. You’re still on Facebook? That’s so 2007. Facebook lost sixteen million American accounts a couple of months ago, which speaks for itself. Outside of Asia, corporate-style social media is toast. Finito. I’m all for technology that empowers people – look at how Twitter has helped the freedom fighters in Iran, for example. But let’s not forget why social media was created. It wasn’t designed to empower us. It was designed to disempower us, to give corporations the kind of data on us that they couldn’t get otherwise, to sell us stuff we don’t need – or to deny us healthcare, or a job, or housing, because of something on Facebook. Look, I’m prepared for the eventuality that those of us in the US, along with the millions and millions of Syrians, and Greeks, and Egyptians, and British people who are doing genuinely heroic things to make their societies a better place, may all eventually have to go offline or find some alternative to the web. Maybe we’ll all end up in line at the mimeograph machine.

I watched Lucid Culture grow from barely a handful of pageviews a day to thousands, organically, without any publicity whatsoever. Other than my one upcoming publicity stunt at New York Music Daily, I’m looking forward to watching the new site grow, and to see where it all ends up. There’s a revolution taking over the world – this is the soundtrack.

Q: You’re doing a publicity stunt?

A: I’ll explain the whole thing tomorrow at New York Music Daily.

Irish-American Songwriting Legend Larry Kirwan Talks About His New Novel, Rockin’ the Bronx

For over 20 years Larry Kirwan has led ever-popular, literate, socially aware, soaringly anthemic Irish-American rock band Black 47, whose 2008 cd Iraq was ranked best album of the year right here at Lucid Culture. They tour America and Ireland regularly, including a special Ireland trip where fans of the band come along with the band and hang out during the whole tour, or at least part of it. Meanwhile, Kirwan has also managed to write a column for the Irish Echo, along with many plays, a memoir and two novels. His most recent novel Rockin’ the Bronx, just published this year, takes the reader on a wild, vivid ride through the world of hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-playing Irish immigrants and musicians in New York around 1980. As he did in the book, in this interview Kirwan took us back to a vastly more lively era in New York history:

Lucid Culture’s Correspondent: It’s not just a question of verisimilitude –  the book has more than just a ring of truth, in fact it feels suspiciously like nonfiction. I know this is the obvious question, the one that everybody wants to know, so I’ll get it out of the way. How much of it is true? The scary scene in the drug den on Avenue C? The perfect description of the scrungy North Bronx apartment where the protagonist lives, with the drug dealer neighbors? The way the Pack of Tinkers – the fictional band who bear more than a little resemblance to Black 47 – start to build a following among the immigrants on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx?

Larry Kirwan: Well, let’s say that the situations were all “true” but the story is pretty original. I lived on Ave. B and 3rd Street at the height of the heroin scene in NYC (in fact, I deal with it in a more literal way in Green Suede Shoes, a memoir). So, the scene in Rockin’ the Bronx is small potatoes to what I saw and experienced back in those days on B, C & D. I played in the North Bronx back in the late 70’s and early 80’s so I can smell the actual apartments that I describe in RTB, even as I’m answering this. Black 47’s experiences up there are very different to the scene described for the Tinkers. Perhaps, that’s because even though I was accepted in the Irish areas, I was still a bit of an outsider. However, even back then I knew that I could see Bainbridge/Kingsbridge in a clearer way than those who were actually living there at the time, because I had many other views of NYC to compare it with. So, let’s say I knew the scene, but the characters – for the most part – were not derived from anyone living there at the time.

LCC: Is it an accurate statement to say that this story could only have taken place when it did, since the Bush regime made it vastly more difficult for Irish immigrants to get on the plane?

LK: In a certain way, but it was more the times than the effect that any politician had on them. 9/11 changed that. Up until then, a blind eye was turned towards a lot of immigration. Irish were white, cops were white and often of Irish descent too, so there was little hunting down of Irish immigrants. I was here for 3 years myself illegally. Many Irish, however, left during the Bush era. They didn’t like the direction that the country was going in – on top of that, the Irish economy went into a boom mode so there was much well paid work “back home.” Many also disliked the American school system and felt their children would get a better education back in Ireland. There’s a real lack of the humanities in the basic American educational system and many Irish felt that keenly. The lack of value placed on World Geography was always particularly noted. Every Irish kid can identify most countries in the atlas. Although this does not take brain surgery, the lack of emphasis on it has always disturbed Irish people. Many Americans could make excuses for Bush, but to the Irish he seemed to be a dope – and a dangerous one at that.

LCC: You have a great ear for dialogue, in the black humor of the shellshocked soldiers on the Iraq album and also with the characters in this book, a lot of them real weirdos. Where do you get that dialogue? I know you always have your songbook with you: do you take notes when you hear something that might work in a novelistic context?

LK: I never take notes – a failing, no doubt. James Joyce would notate whole conversations. I have a good memory and sense of rhythm. I exult in the odd meters, rhymes and sayings of people of all races. So, I don’t need to remember conversations verbatim. Neither did Joyce, of course. He had a stunningly real “ear.” It’s just a matter of listening, though, and delighting in conversation. Delighting in characters too. Most people don’t really listen. You can tell by their body language – they’re already thinking of their response the moment they get the gist of what the other person is talking about. It’s such a turn-off. But I’ve also worked hard at playwrighting. To write a play you have to know how to cut the bejaysus out of every line you write. So, you’re constantly editing and by doing so, you’re forever making sure that the new line you come up with is “true.” In essence, you’re auditioning speech for many months or years while you’re polishing a play to the perfection it will never achieve.

LCC: One of the lead characters, the charismatic lead guitarist in the Pack of Tinkers is gay, and by the end of the book, he’s out of the closet for all intents and purposes. Yet the people around him, who are increasingly aware of it, don’t disown him – in fact it doesn’t seem to make any difference, they still love the guy. Remember, this is 1980 – we’re dealing with a Catholic culture here, not exactly the most hospitable place for a gay guy at that time. Or was the immigrant population here a lot cooler and more tolerant than the mainstream?

LK: As the saying would have gone back then, “He may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole.” These were very tightly knit communities. I was always amazed that the Puero Rican community down on the Lower East Side always accepted their transvestites. When drunk, they might have occasionally called them “maricón.” But, in general, they were considered part of the community and often hung with the women and talked fashion, and women talk. Gays were not accepted in the Irish community but within a group of friends, as in RTB, Danny, though not understood, would have been accepted. What else could they do – throw him out? Alcoholics, junkies, drunks, thieves were also accepted. They were blood. But no one outside the “fag’s” circle would have had any time for him. And that comes out in the violent scene at the Olympia Ballroom between Danny and the owner. The Irish scene in the Bronx was, and is, a very narrowly defined culture. When founded, ILGO (Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization) was a wonderful outfit – because for the first time, many Irish gays in the mid to late 80’s found community. My own feeling, and I was a friend and most definitely a supporter, was that ILGO more than likely saved a number of people heading for suicide. Such were the times.

LCC: How about the hottie roommate who works as a nanny until she meets the rich Jewish lawyer? Looking back, is that combination less unlikely than it seems?

LK: There was always a good connection between the Irish and the Jewish – it’s fallen apart in recent years because of some of the political and military choices of the Israeli state. But basically, many undocumented Irish married Americans – for love, money, or legal status. Many Americans also helped out by marrying an illegal so that legal status might be gained. That was common enough. So, marrying a lawyer rather than a plumber would have been a choice a more ambitious woman might have made. Which reminds me, one of Black 47’s first big problems in the Irish community was over a song called Green Card. It was a reggae song (and not a particularly brilliant one) that dealt with a a number of situations between Irish and prospective marriage partners. The verse that set nerves on end was an Irish girl marrying a Jamaican-American for legal status. I couldn’t believe the hostility this pairing invoked, particularly since the song was tongue-in-cheek and set to a reggae beat. There was very little sense of humor when it came to miscegenation in the Bronx.

LCC: As someone who remembers what New York was like in 1980, I can vouch for the fact that this book captures it exactly as it was – although I can’t vouch for Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx. Much of the book takes place during a hellishly ominous early- global-warming-era summer, surrounded by garbage and decay. Yet the characters in the book take it in stride, just as all New Yorkers did. Inasmuch as gentrification has had some horrible repercussions, are you really nostalgic for all that grit and grime?

LK: Not really. I couldn’t have cared less at the time, though. I had other things on my mind. NYC was just a very unlawful place back then – but that suited me, I was illegal myself and “living the life,” as it were. There was a saying then – “When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws can be free.” Seems a bit trite now but it had currency at the time. Cops didn’t bother you unless you were out to kill someone. Certain parts of the city were more than slightly out of control. I loved it at the time, and was involved in various escapades that make my hair stand on end now, but I wouldn’t want to go back. It’s a more boring city now, but I still keep my eyes open. You’d be crazy not to – the city will always bite when you take your eyes off of it. I can’t believe all the idiots walking around in a daze listening to their iPods. Apart from missing the distinctive, adrenalized pulse of NYC, they’re risking their lives – and for what, some dumb song that they can listen to at home.

LCC: Rockin’ the Bronx is a quintessentially New York book, even though it deals mostly with one particular neighborhood and immigrant population. Yet these people witnessed the same decay, and more importantly, the same opportunities that existed for all New Yorkers before the developers started to turn every neighborhood into a cheap copy of a New Jersey suburb. Is there a single characteristic, or set of characteristics, that defined the Irish-American experience at that time – or is it an experience shared with every other immigrant group?

LK: Booze, I suppose. We drank more than most. But really, all the cultures had their own central focus – themselves. No one cared about the others, except to make fun of them. Much is made of the melting pot, but that happened only in certain types of work; mostly people hung out and exulted in their own and the culture back at home. That’s why there was a marked response to Black 47 when we first formed, for we were in essence saying, “Don’t look back. We don’t need The Pogues or the Waterboys. We’re here in the greatest music city in the world. We’re mixing Irish music through that prism. Looking back is nowhere. We’ve got Miles, Bobby, KRS, Chuck D, Avenue B, Salsa, whatever you want.”

LCC: Despite his punk image, Sean, the book’s somewhat wet-around-the-ears protagonist is apolitical – until the real life IRA member Bobby Sands goes on hunger strike and eventually dies in prison. To what extent was that event a galvanizing moment, politically speaking, in the Irish community? Was it in your own life, or were you writing songs like “James Connolly” already by that time?

LK: Bobby Sands changed Irish-America and continues to change it. Many of the young people who marched outside the British Consulate back in 1980-81 are now in leadership positions in Irish-America. That’s why the AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians) is more centrist and even a little Left now, as compared with 30 years ago. Same with the Irish-American media. Sands changed me, because he pointed me back to my roots – growing up with a Republican Irish grandfather. I had forsaken much of that when I came over and became part of the CBGB’s/Bells of Hell Village scene. Sands made me come face-to-face with a certain part of my heritage. I didn’t want to bomb the British or be part of any violence – but I wanted the return of Habeas Corpus, and proper representation for the Catholic Nationalist people. He influenced me in a very personal way by his saying, “No one can do everything but everyone has their part to play.” That changed my life and I still adhere by it – it gave a meaning to my life that I’ve never let go of since.

LCC: The Puerto Rican hoodlum who runs off with Sean’s girlfriend actually turns out to be a nice guy – at least in the beginning – who constantly tries to extend an olive branch to Sean, although he’ll have none of it. Was this a deliberate attempt on your part to illustrate the kind of cross-cultural, neighborly interaction between the Irish and the other minorities in the Bronx during that time?

LK: Not at all. But it was something that I personally came in contact with on Avenue B. I was friendly with many people like Jesus. It was just part of life and existence on the LES. I was always surprised at how polarized the Irish and Puerto Rican communities of the Bronx were. Both, to my mind, were similar shared very common bonds such as Catholicism, love of family and a deep loyalty to their own people. I was very aware of that on Avenue B. But in the Bronx, these cultures didn’t even look at each other except in disgust. And yet, there was the occasional Irish girl who “was turned” as the PR people called it by one of their own. Often, though, that had to do with drugs, and hence Mary/Jesus.

LCC: What’s the likelihood of the Pack of Tinkers – or Black 47 – getting an audition today with a big record label like they did in this book?

LK: Well, the character of Steve, the RCA guy who comes to the Bronx is based on Stephen Holden, now a music critic for the NY Times. Back then he came to the Bronx as an A&R man for RCA to see Turner & Kirwan of Wexford [that’s Pierce Turner, the extraordinary Irish singer and songwriter, who goes back years with Kirwan] – to a place with the nickname The Bucket of Blood, just off Fordham Road. So, it did happen back then. And, of course, Black 47 has been signed to two major record deals with EMI and Mercury. I don’t even know if there are major labels any more – and if there are, who would be interested in signing with them anyway?

LCC: I can’t think of anyone who would. Is there a sequel? To the book, I mean?

LK: I doubt it.

LCC: Is there any factual basis for the incident where the old, drunken fiddle player suddenly plays the gig of his life after one of the band feeds him a huge line of cocaine?

LK: I’m sure there is but it’s not based on any particular event. Remember, the amount of drinking back then in today’s terms was staggering. People would often go out on a Friday night and come home on Sunday evening. We drank and smoked for days on end and usually passed out someplace for sleep. If a player – no matter how old – has been doing that and someone placed a line of white powder in front of him, what do you think he did? Most Irish people back then didn’t have much connection with drugs of any sort. But when they eventually came in contact with it, the Irish loved blow, mostly because they could drink even more. But it wasn’t just coke – one summer while I was doing a residency at the Boardy Barn in Hampton Bays, liquid speed was introduced. All it took was one drop in your beer and you were invincible. We used to play on it and wouldn’t be able to sleep for 24-36 hours at a time. Amazingly hundreds in the bar were speeding their butts off, without even knowing it – as friends would slip a drop in their beer when they weren’t looking. Nothing quite like a couple of hundred cops and firemen tossing back booze while the white lightning was ricocheting around their brains.

Everything seems a lot more sensible and conservative now – and maybe that’s a good thing – but oh what times we had. We’ve been trapped in an age of irony for some time now. Back then, no one cared that much about anything – especially the future. The bosses and the establishment won the war, but it’s good to remember a time when it was still all to play for.

Rockin’ the Bronx is out now from Dufour Editions, at bookstores and online vendors.