CD Quality Vinyl: The Format Wars as Symbolic Form

David Bowie, Sound + Vision (Rykodisc, 1989)

Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (2009)

I.

I'm currently listening to my entire record library alphabetically by artist and have spent the last couple of weeks listening to David Bowie. I have a pristine vinyl copy of the 1989 Sound + Vision box set for which I traded a number of records back in the 2010s. I will still defend this generation of box sets that mixed well-known songs and recordings with the best of unreleased or rare stuff. The recent drive for completion (and, thus, more profits from artists' back catalogues) can often water-down rather than expand one's enjoyment of the original material. Just to stick with David Bowie, I haven't really dived into the multi-disc box sets of outtakes and live material the Bowie estate have been releasing every couple of years or so (Conversation Piece, Divine Symmetry, Rock'n'Roll Star). The old format of the box set (Dylan's Biograph, Miles Davis' The Columbia Years and, god help me, Clapton's Crossroads) was somewhere between satisfying the obsessive fan with unreleased stuff, but not alienating a newcomer who wanted a career overview that was more than just the hits. And while they were expensive for the time (Bowie specifically signed the rights of his RCA catalogue to Ryko because they promised no discounts on Bowie's back catalogue the way RCA had already been putting Bowie's 70s albums in the "Nice Price" line of cheap CDs with minimal artwork and no context), these early box sets did offer some amazing stuff that had been unreleased or was otherwise unavailable at the time. In Bowie's case, his classic 70s material had gone out of print after his contract with RCA expired and, if you can believe it, something as foundational as Ziggy Stardust was just impossible to buy. And as someone who had read a lot about Ziggy Stardust and Bowie but who had never heard the entirety of his arguably most famous album, the arrival of Sound + Vision was a godsend (although, tbh, I wouldn't actually hear that much more of Ziggy Stardust until Ryko reissued it a year or two later). 

However, what struck me this time re-listening to Sound + Vision was a fascinating and hilarious little graphic on the outside of the box set (the design of which is pretty nice in a late 80s graphic design sort of way) that says "CDQ: CD Quality Vinyl. Compact Disc Quality Phonograph Record" Now, for a person of a certain age and inclination this seems like a joke or a provocation: any number of Steve Hoffmann forums and reddit threads can allow you hours? years? decades? of fun reading through everyone's replies about the differences between CDs and Vinyl. I'm not interested in the "objective" facts of the differences. I tend to agree, again, with Steven Hyden who argues that albums should probably be listened to in the format for which they were mastered: albums released in the 1950s-1982 should be listened to on vinyl. Albums released between, say, 1983-2003 (?) should be listened to on CD. After that you're on your own. Instead, I'm interested in the history of the debate itself. 

As someone who has been buying music on various formats for almost the entirety of my life, I will offer a first hand account of how I see this particular history of the format wars: if you've ever encounter a record that was owned by a boomer in the 70s, unless it was held by a collector, it's going to be beat to shit. Scratches, skips, surface noise, whatever. This is why most "normal" people bought new copies of albums in the 1980s and used record stores were where the lunatics, haters and punk trash bought music. Because used records were generally not treated with the utmost care, a lot of labels encouraged people to re-purchase albums they already owned on CD. I distinctly remember Time/Life Records selling their oldies compilations CDs on TV on this very premise: if you buy this music on CD you won't hear skips or surface noise. 

Now, I'm conflicted on this: as a good music leftist I agree with John Peel that life has surface noise so why shouldn't music reproduction? And, consequently, cheap, noisy records allow one to explore all sorts of genres in a pre-streaming era. Yet, I also understand that maybe people might want to purchase a newer copy of the album that doesn't skip or crackle. So when labels were selling people on the idea that CDs sound better than vinyl in the 1980s this is generally what they had in mind. Yes, audiophiles will always be with us, but to the general public "better sounding CDs" essentially meant hearing your favorite records without the blemishes. By the late 80s, even though vinyl was being pressed, the general idea was that vinyl was on its way out since it could neither compete with the portability of the cassette, nor the durability nor sound quality of the CDs (which was mostly scratch resistant). Hence the curious CD Quality Vinyl of the Bowie set: this is a collection of LPs that we guarantee will sound as good as a brand new CD you might see advertised on TV. 

Throughout the 1990s I bought vinyl for two reasons: 1) if the record was only available on import vinyl or 2) the record was cheaper on vinyl and I could find it. It's crazy to think about this now, but there was a time when new vinyl was much cheaper than a new CD. By the late 90s if a label still released albums on vinyl they were often as much as $10 cheaper than a new CD. Most of the music that was still released on vinyl during this period were indie bands that knew there were lunatics, haters and punk trash that still bought their records on vinyl. Aside from this, I bought all my music on CD. Mostly this is because during the 90s and early 2000s labels went through a CD reissue boom that verged on parody (for a while I was obsessed with finding CD reissues of vinyl test records like Enoch Light's Persuasive Percussion series). In a pre-streaming world, the CD reissue boom was the way a lot of people discovered obscure music that would have been impossible to find on vinyl. Also, even in the early 90s, bootleg labels were distributing "unofficial" copies of LPs on CD. I first heard Silver Apples and Neu! on bootleg CDs sold in record stores. They weren't cheap, but it seemed like that would be the only way to hear these obscure records. 

And then the CD reissue boom reached the next level: even Neu! got reissued on CD with pull quotes from people like Thom Yorke. Silver Apples, too. Deluxe reissues of previous reissues came with extra cds filled with live tracks and demos. R.E.M.'s Warner Brothers albums, specifically mastered for CD, were re-mastered and packaged with DVDs. It all seemed like CDs would never die and would only grow in market share with the death of vinyl and the diminishing of cassettes as the portable music format of choice. The turning point came at the beginning of the 21st century as computer/laptop manufacturers put optical drives that could rip and burn CDs into their hardware. To quote my friend Bill: "optical drives turned CDs into data instead of art." Many people, myself included to a certain extent, started ripping their CDs and selling them.  Instead of furniture dedicated to shelves of CDs, it could now all fit onto an ever shrinking in size, growing in storage capacity, while simultaneously getting cheaper series of external hard drives. The files stored on those hard drives could then fill up Mp3 players that could portably play music in the same way Walkmen and portable CD players could in the previous decades. Yet, unlike those portable media, there was no physical component stored elsewhere. The final generation of iPod touch in 2019 could store up to 256 Gigabytes of music or, roughly, 50,000-70,000l songs. 

With these changes, however, came a loss of recorded music's physical component, something that had existed since the birth of recording sounds in the late 19th century. Now, a music file could be moved to an external hard drive without the listener having ever held the music in their hand. You could argue that terrestrial radio existed in this realm since its inception, but no listener of radio would delude themselves into thinking they "owned" the music they were hearing. A person who rips a CD or downloads a file from the internet ostensibly owns the music until they decide to put the file in the trash. It's not surprising then that the vinyl revival begins around the same time that music ownership becomes more ephemeral. In fact, the original revived interest in buying vinyl for me and many other people actually had little to do with sound quality, rather it had to do with the loss of album artwork and liner notes. If you are one of those nerds who has spent their lives pouring over album artwork and liner notes, it is definitely something that the experience of listening to Mp3 (and, later on, streaming) could never replicate. 

Now, I will say in the early years of ripping CDs and downloading music the bit rates were pretty dismal, while the sources for many of the files were compressed or corrupted. But this had little or nothing to do with CDs themselves. But around this time, either to justify buying albums on vinyl again or replacing CDs with vinyl, a narrative developed that "vinyl sounds better than CDs." To be fair, I do think that as the CD market expanded (especially in the late 80s and early 90s) there were a lot of CDs that were poorly mastered and sound bad in their original CD pressings. A good example of this is the Cure's Wish, an original copy of which I have owned on CD since it came out in 1992. It has always sounded tinny with almost no low end, something that since has been corrected by the recent LP and CD reissues. Also, I do think that a lot of the remastered CDs of the early 2000s do sound much better than often the first CD releases of albums. But, as people ripped their CDs onto laptops and iPods the general consensus was that the files would never sound good because CDs never sounded good in the first place. 

Ten years ago (!) one of the first things I published on this blog was a discussion of Stereolab's Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements (https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-in-sound-from-way-out.html). I began that essay with a discussion regarding how 1993, the year Stereolab's record was released, was the low point for vinyl sales. At the time I wrote that piece, the vinyl revival was still in full swing and I discussed how groups like Stereolab made vinyl collecting cool again thus anticipating the vinyl revival of the 21st century. The lunatics, haters and punk trash have known that it's cool to collect vinyl since forever, but when you overlay that subcultural capital aeternitatis with a record industry seeing the writing on the MacBook, the audiophilic aspect of the format wars legitimizes the return of vinyl with scientific "proof." The scientific study of audiology in this context more often than not is deployed to undergird common sense adjectives such as "warmth" and "presence" in describing the experience of listening to vinyl. "Presence," here, is meant to offer the listener that which they lack in their then increasingly mediated work and private lives. There's nothing envious or romantic in seeing a co-worker huddled over their computer listening to music coming out of their white, plastic speakers. Contrast this image with that of the vinyl collector, sitting comfortably in their chair at home drinking a whisky or beer while listening to their favorite piece of vinyl. 

The CD was seen as the harbinger of the downfall. It was/is a more laborious process to rip vinyl to a computer, so with the ease in which a person could rip a cd to a computer it was only a matter of time that the CD would be dispensed with altogether and we'd just receive our music from some megacorp ladling out slop to a lazy audience too stunned and sedentary to seek out music from other sources. And, lo and behold, we eventually got Spotify. And, indeed, the CD went away and, for most of the population, vinyl, which had already gone away, stayed away. Except, of course, for our lunatics, haters and punk rock trash who now had families and disposable incomes and started buying or continued to buy vinyl because they wanted something "real" they could actually own that wasn't just simply going to be ripped for data. I remember the parent of one of my kids friends asked me if I was going to rip the vinyl I owned to my computer and sell the records I owned. It was the weirdest thing anyone could have asked me, even as I was ripping and selling my CDs at the same time. I just didn't value my CDs the same way I valued my vinyl. 

II.

In 2009 Greg Milner published the excellent Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. His work both anticipated and diagnosed the vinyl resurgence starting around the same time his book was published. Tracing the history of skepticism towards digital reproduction of sound, the book concludes when our modern listening world begins: 

        When music on a CD is converted to MP3 or AAC (the [then] iPod default), between 80 and        90 percent of the music is simply discarded [...] High fidelity barely exists today, not so much        because recordings don't attempt to document reality anymore but because the                            fundamental ethic governing recorded music has been reversed. Presence implies capturing        everything. Today we try to capture as little as possible while fostering the illusion of                    everything. We don't want everything. We want just enough (Milner 358).  

Compare this to what Milner says about the sound of the CD: "As for their sound, the problem for me isn't so much the harshness, a common complaint. It's more the sensation of distance I feel between me and the music" (Milner 233). In fact, for Milner, the history of the digitalization of music is the devolution of music's conveyance through media, concluding that the debate over digital audio in the 1980s, as paraphrased by a contemporary cybernetics professor whom Milner sites, "revealed how one person's enhancement could be, for someone else, a corruption of something natural and real" (Milner 198).

I don't want to reduce Milner's well-researched, 400 page book to a couple of quotations simply to make a point: Milner argues throughout his book how aural notions of "presence" are manufactured in the studio and the mix as much notions of "distance" are as well. Rather, I quote Milner here to offer the slippage between CD, digital file "presence" "distance" and, ultimately "absence." Moreover, he mentions a "fundamental ethic" governing recorded music as having been reversed with the increasing ubiquity of digital recording and playback devices: as the devices "devolved" their sound, the listener came to expect less from their listening experience. 

It's not revelatory to note that what Milner is talking about here has to do less with audio fidelity (Milner wisely points out the etymological connection between "fidelity" and truth elsewhere), a "truth" about the original recording (Milner certainly understands that there is no "truth" to a recording made in a studio as well as mixed therein), and more to do with audio re-evaluation: what value does a recording have ultimately. The digitalization of music de-values it with each successive iteration. Milner lists some physical attributes of the CD that he hates besides the distance of the sound: "the flimsy jewel-cases" "the death of cover art," which demonstrate the lack of care put into the package as music in its medial form becomes devalued. Add to this devaluation the "antitheft bar-code," "the shadowy embedded layers of anti piracy code," that exists in the CD format and it "[a]ll seem[s] symptomatic of a culture of mediocrity and utility slipping into a surveillance state" (232). The resistance to increasingly digitalized recorded music is both ethical and political insofar as it continues to place the presence of everything as necessary to the recording itself. 

You can see how this dovetails nicely with a vinyl boom: not only does vinyl represent the largest canvas in which to represent recorded music physically, but the adjectives most often associated with the sound of vinyl are "warm," "dynamic" "full" "presence" suggesting the largest sonic palette as well. What people were really yearning for was that something they value (music) would be treated as something the music industry would value as well. Once the music distribution entities co-mingled with the technology companies already established (Apple) and those looking for venture capital to grow upon (Spotify) the familiar process of (to cite Cory Doctrow's well known term) "entshittification" started for all recorded music. Sticking with then, seemingly, obsolete media was a way to resist the devaluation of all media and, frankly, all life in the second decade of the 21st century. 

Of course, labels quickly picked up on that interest and realized whereas they had little idea what one million downloads/streams might mean profit wise, they certainly knew how much a new LP that lists for $30 would net them. By 2018 Sony fired up the old vinyl pressing plants and before you could say "I didn't order Santana's Abraxis on LP" you could order Santana's Abraxis new on LP again. (This would be the part of the essay wherein I rail against Record Store Day but, while I don't really participate any longer, I did spend many years going to RSD with friends in the morning and spending the rest of the day drinking and listening to music. These are memories I cherish which wouldn't have been the same without independent record stores taking part in the event). Then things grew even bigger than that as the biggest musicians on the planet realized that they had millions and billions of fans who wanted more merchandise from their favorite pop star and started having their albums pressed on vinyl. 

Although the numbers will suggest that vinyl sales are still growing or at least plateauing, it was the introduction of these huge artists into the vinyl pressing pool that killed the vinyl revival, due to the fact that labels either couldn't or wouldn't build more pressing plants to meet the demands. Then COVID hit in 2020 and pretty much shut down all vinyl production. When things started back up the backlog made it difficult for smaller musicians to get their albums pressed. With the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, his insistence on tariffs made the cost of pressing plants overseas prohibitive. It's not that people (or I) stopped buying vinyl reissues, it's that it was no longer seen as something that had the same ethical reasoning it once did. Nor the same economical reasoning either: around the same time used record stores, no doubt squeezed by higher real estate prices, started raising prices on their used vinyl. 

I'll offer an anecdote: one day in 2019 I went to a record store with a friend and overheard the owner discussing what I would call the "Rumors economic theory of used record pricing." The owner mentioned that one day he put out a vinyl copy of Fleetwood Mac's Rumors for $5 and it sold within the hour. Next used copy he got in he put it out there for $10 and it sold in the same amount of time. Next copy $15, etc. He realized that the demand for a vinyl copy of Rumors was so great that he could pretty much set the price. I was fascinated by this because growing up in the 70s and 80s, Rumors was as ubiquitous as the air I breathed. Songs from it were always on the radio, the album was often on the turntable (along with the follow up Tusk) and it felt like something you could always get your hands on if you needed it. Indeed, as of a decade ago, it has sold 40 million copies worldwide. It's the opposite of a record you could put any price tag on. 

And that was why the vinyl bubble has been slowly deflating since COVID: not only is it getting harder to press vinyl due to lack of pressing plants, not only are the materials used to press vinyl getting more expensive, but used vinyl, that trusted format of people who don't have a lot of money but would like to own a music collection, is getting expensive as well. This is especially true if you're going to take an album as readily available as Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and try to convince people that its greatness as well as cultural relevance demands a high price. This is the mirror of streaming music: if streaming de-values music by distributing songs for hay pennies on the dollar, then collectors de-value music by tying its value as art to its monetary value. Of course, the market has always done this to art, encompassing the entirety of recorded music as well. However, the used record, in this case a record that is one of forty million plus at this point, is the mechanically reproduced object that ought not to be valued out of its consumption. It was this fallacy that deflated the used market as well. 

III.

We need a new fundamental ethic of format consumption: 

I've been thinking about my friend Andrew's record collection that he had in grad school. This was the late 90s to the early 2000s so a decade before the vinyl boom starting in the late 2000s. He had thousands of records, multiple copies of many, most of them 70's R&B, classic jazz and rock records but encompassing far more than that. A great many of them came from this record store in St. Paul. MN named, appropriately, Landfill. It was a place for the remainder records that Cheapo Records, record store chain in the Twin Cities, wouldn't sell in their regular stores. I moved to the twin cities in 1995, but, according to Andrew, in the early 90s essentially all vinyl was being marked for Landfill because the Cheapo owners, like everyone else, thought vinyl was going the way of the 8-Track tape. So Andrew decided to buy up every good record at Landfill in multiple copies and create one of the most awe inspiring collections I had ever seen.

I had a similar experience moving to Portland in 2018. I had pretty much stopped collecting CDs at that point and mostly listened to vinyl. Once I started shopping at Everyday Music on Sandy Boulevard I noticed that rare albums that would have cost me a ton on vinyl were available relatively cheaply on CD. While I still believed that vinyl sounded better than CDs (I no longer believe this) I thought both sounded better than streaming with the added bonus of physically owning the album itself. CDs had reached the point vinyl had reached in the early 90s: a format that no one wanted. Vinyl had the "fidelity," streaming had the convenience, but what did CDs have? Didn't they get us into this problem in the first place? Don't they sound worse than vinyl? Why would we buy something that we could either stream for free(ish) or spend a lot of money on to hear in its "ideal" state? 

I think rather than trying to figure out what is the "best" format on which to hear music (as I write this, Rhino is trying to sell you on a reel-to-reel revival) why don't we try to "clean up" the formats we've already cycled through before we start producing new plastic and polyurethane to put out into the world. Yes, there's still a lot of used vinyl out there (and some of it is still cheap! https://www.discogs.com/shop/item/1697238637), but I know there's also a ton of CDs out there too and before we demand some company produce more detritus for our dying planet to deal with when we're dead based on our notions of audiophilia, we might consider picking up some used CDs first.  

June 2026 (Playlist)

I don't have anything special to say about this month's playlist of music I've been listening to lately. This one plays tribute to the late, great Sonny Rollins, has a couple of Death Grips songs, some songs from early Disney animation and music related to other films I've watched this month. Enjoy! 

Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now/ The Hour Is Getting Late

Bob Dylan, 06-09-26 Cuthbert Amphitheater, Eugene OR 

I took my daughter this week to see Bob Dylan live in Eugene. Originally, I had purchased a ticket for myself but when I mentioned I was going she wanted to go as well. Of course, this made my heart grow three sizes that day. I've never wanted to push my music on my children: when they're young you can't help but play what you like for them in the car, unless you want to live in some hell of children's songs. I'll never forget the time my oldest developed an obsession with a very atonal live recording of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in 1975. But two years ago they made a Bob Dylan bio-pic with her favorite movie star (her option was mixed on the movie) and she started listening to Dylan. Young people who discover Bob Dylan in 2026 are in a very interesting position. They have no knowledge of Dylan's eras (and, yes, that is explicitly meant as reference to Taylor Swift) and, therefore, have no pre-conceived notion of what is and is not a "good" era for Bob. They are listening to Bob based on what his "top tracks" are on streaming services. On both Spotify and Apple Music, "To Make You Feel My Love" has more plays than "Highway 61" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." "Things Have Changed" has more plays than "Maggie's Farm" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." Before she had heard all of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde On Blonde, she had heard "Most of the Time" because of the Bear. To her, and to most of her cohort I imagine, good Bob Dylan music is whatever songs she vibes with. Unlike her father who had to understand Bob's entire catalog to really, certainly, think about what might be my favorites, my daughter hears a song on her music streaming apparatus, decides whether she wants to skip it or not, and then continues on. 

I think this appreciation of Bob's music serves a fan well in these most recent years. The versions of songs (some more than 60 years old) that he currently plays are aren't faithful to the originals. They're riffs on the originals, they vibe with the originals, they fuck with the originals without ever being copies of the originals. I'm not the first to point out that this sets Bob at odds with many of his contemporaries for decades who have felt that they need to reproduce their famous songs as faithfully to the originals as they can. As recently as last month this aspect of Dylan's uniqueness was brought up by none other than Sir Paul McCartney: 

"I've been to see a couple of shows of Bob's, and I couldn't tell what song he was doing. Now that's a bit much because I know his stuff. I get it if he doesn't want to do 'Mr. Tamborine Man.' Maybe he's fed up with that, but I would like to hear it. And I've paid." 

We can debate whether or not Sir Paul McCartney needs to pay to see Bob Dylan or if he might be able to score a comp. Even so, I believe the current price of $80--120 a ticket to see Bob might not break Macca's bank. Certainly not compared to the $122-570 per ticket he charges his own fans. But, Macca's not wrong in that many people who go see Dylan shows these days don't really know the songs he's singing: either because they are more obscure than his most streamed songs, or the songs they would know have radically different arrangements now. 

Take, for example, "All Along the Watchtower." According to bobdylan.com, Dylan has played this song 2,376 times including his most recently played date of this writing. I agree with the music critic Steven Hyden that there's the version of the song on John Wesley Harding and then there are most live versions of the song. Hearing this song live has, again for the most part, has been hearing Bob Dylan and his band do some variation of Jimi Hendrix's cover of the song. Honestly, I can't blame them because, you know, it's arguably the greatest cover of any song. Between 2018-2024 Dylan didn't play the song, so it was a surprise when he brought it out during the Outlaw Tour. Listening to that version, he sticks very closely to the Hendrix version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cmqK1prgHY&list=RD2cmqK1prgHY&start_radio=1 

However, when he brought it back for the 2025 Outlaw Tour he completely rearranged it: most of the song (the verses before the "businessmen they drink my wine" verse as well as "but you and I have been through that" verse) follow the melody of Van Morrison's song "I Forgot That Love Existed" from the excellent Poetic Champions Compose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toq0wiBsMlA&list=RDtoq0wiBsMlA&start_radio=1. You can hear the similarities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlKbyPvVWww&list=RDqlKbyPvVWww&start_radio=1. He played "All Along the Watch Tower" at my show as well, but he's tempered the Van influence a bit, although he's kept the kick drum entrance of the two aforementioned lines that really enliven the song. 

It's fascinating to think about the history of this song: it's 59 years old. Bob Dylan originally wrote it as a man in his mid-20s. It's a fragment of a story: a conversation between two characters who we'll soon never hear from again. Did they find a way out of their predicament surrounded by people who feel that life is but a joke? Are they the two riders who are approaching at the end of the story? The whole thing also feels like a parable: the only names we're given are "joker" and "thief." The great irony, of course, is that the thief tells the joker that there are "many here among us who feel that life is but a joke," excepting the joker apparently. Given that the joker is a figure who will follow Dylan either wittingly or unwittingly ("Jokerman"; he appears allegorically as "the jester" in "American Pie") it's significant that his (i.e. the joker's) fate is to not feel that life is but a joke. In the long history of the jester being the one who, forgive me, speaks truth to power, he cannot ironically feel that life is a joke. And you can argue that as much as Dylan loves to perform "the song and dance" man, the carnival barker, in the early days "the little tramp," he has never treated life and the musical as well as lyrical meditation thereupon as a joke. But it's clear that he has always known that we shouldn't talk falsely because the hour, every hour, is getting late. Yet, it's one thing for a 20 something year old to write and sing those words, it's something completely different for an 85 year old man to sing those words to me and my daughter. 

This month as Bob was coming to a town near you to sing and play piano, the NYT published an op-ed penned by Bob (perhaps while sitting in the very tour bus he might be sitting in right now) about turning 80. The momentous occasion for such a request was the 80th birthday of our great, dear leader Donald J. Trump. The paper of record, whom the great leader is currently suing, would like to win the leader's good graces (or at least a greatly reduced settlement) by offering sage wisdom by a bevy of well-known octogenarians. I have no idea what the people at the NYT told Dylan to get him to write this (Dylan's been notoriously cagey about his politics) but, regardless of the cause, I'm glad they did. I'm just going to reproduce it in full: 

"The best thing

The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.

The worst thing

The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move."

If anyone tells you that Dylan didn't deserve the Nobel Prize for literature just share this with them and then cut them out of your life for good. Dylan's "the old king from a vanished country" now, evoking the same world as "princes" "barefoot servants" and unnamed riders. For the characters in "All Along the Watchtower" the hour might have been getting late, but it doesn't matter now: the country, along with the wildcats, jokers and thieves, are all vanished. Those are just clocks from a world long gone that are no longer chasing you. Finally, there never was such a thing as an hour getting late: we were the ones always afraid of the movement of time while all the while we were moving through time. And while that realization affords the speaker/writer/singer of such wisdom some clarity, it only makes the unalterable events of your life that much more painful. 

Dylan ended the show with another 59 year old song: "I Shall Be Released." These aren't the only 59 year old songs Bob's been playing on this leg of his tour: "You Ain't Going Nowhere" and, everyone's favorite Basement Tapes deep cut, "Baby, Won't You Be My Baby." I was shocked to discover that Bob hasn't played this song in 18 years. Although it's not a cover, I would say that the author's version of the song (in all its performances) is only the third best version of the song at best. My favorite version of "I Shall Be Released" is Nina Simone's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV8KskUf3lQ&list=RDYV8KskUf3lQ&start_radio=1 It goes without saying that Simone is one of the greatest interpreters of song to have ever lived so it's hardly controversial to say her's is the superior version. Also, clearly, the titular phrase has a much different valence coming out of Simone's mouth. The other version that beats Dylan's is, of course, the Band's with Richard Manuel's haunting falsetto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpiXfumGf9k&list=RDbpiXfumGf9k&start_radio=1

Listening to the 85 year old Dylan sing the song with my daughter sitting by my side on a blanket in the grass, dear reader, I did indeed get choked up. It wasn't the first time I cried seeing Dylan. The first time was hearing him sing "Every Grain of Sand" also in Eugene in 2022. I got choked up again hearing him cover "Stella Blue" in Rochester, NY 2023. Also when he played "Under the Red Sky" in 2024. I guess I do it a lot. But this time it had a kind of poignancy that those other times didn't in my memory. All of those other times I was moved because I never thought I'd hear Bob play those songs. Now I know (having seen him many times live) that, frankly, I could hear any number of Bob Dylan songs I imagine I never would (including some, like "Baby, Won't You Be My Baby" that I didn't even know existed)!

This time, hearing "I Shall Be Released" I was moved because I don't know if I will hear Bob sing this (or any) song again. On the one hand, Bob seems to be in fairly good health, with a decent voice, and he seems game to go out and tour whenever he can. But 85 is 85. My grandmother swam every day in her pool in her 80s until one day she had a stroke and never swam, or saw, again. Bob wants to still say yes to everything but the world is moving without asking. "I Shall Be Released," now in 2026, sounds like the illusion of life is coming to an end. Bob isn't worldly now, as if he ever was, he no longer has to become anything (not that he won't continue until his dying breath because what is life if not a constant state of becoming while time stands still), rather he simply is.  

May 2026 (playlist)

My monthly playlist of music I listened to throughout the month. I'm going to try a new thing this month where I write a few sentences about some of the picks. I might not do this every month. Enjoy!

Rosali-"Other Side" 

Rosali is one of my favorite musicians working today. I loved her last album Bite Down and have been eagerly anticipating something new from her/the band for a while. This is a great song, and hopefully a sign of more material to come. 

Tatsuya Nakamura- "Locus" 

Continuing my Japan trip-inspired exploration of J-Jazz, I discovered this album from BBE's great J-Jazz compilations. They reissued this album separately and I was lucky to score a reasonably priced version stateside. If you wanna know where mid-70s Miles mind melting fusion went after Miles' semi-retirement, look no further than this album. 

Death Grips-"Guillotine" 

Jokermen have started a series on Death Grips after the Beach Boys so I'm listening along. I have never heard a note of this band's music before this series. Not what I was expecting: both more experimental and catchier than I thought it would be. This track is a gas. 

Tirez Tirez- "Dreams"

I love that the people at Numero can still unearth music I have never heard of from previous decades that manages to sound like an instant classic. 

Portishead-"Magic Doors" 

Is Portishead underrated at this point? They have a perfect discography (three classic studio LPs and a classic live record), had a huge impact on music in the later half of the 90s (and beyond) and haven't tarnished their legacy with bad solo records or needless reunion tours. Every time I hear a Portishead song out and about (as was the case with this Third deep cut) I am reminded again of their awesomeness. 

Cass McCombs-"Opposite House" 

I heard two McCombs tracks out and about this month (the other being "Dreams Come True Girl") and was reminded that I haven't spent enough time listening to his records lately. One of my favorite contemporary songwriters. 

Young Miko-"WASSUP"

I know nothing about Latin trap music but I heard this and really dug the production, beats and flow. 

Stevie Wonder-"Saturn" 

Celebrated Stevie's birthday this month. This is from the 7" Something Extra E.P. that came with Song In the Key of Life LP, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. I'm going to go deep on that record closer to its release (two days after my birthday) as a second part of my Miles/Stevie essay. 

Bob Dylan- "It Hurts Me Too" 

Bob celebrated his 85th birthday yesterday and the Never Ending Stories podcast has been going deep on the fascinating Self-Portrait double LP. 

Szabor Gabo- "People" 

If you ever wondered what would happen if psych rock and Barbara Streisand were ever smushed together. 

 

Life Is For the Living

 The Beach Boys, We Gotta Groove: The Brothers Studio Years (2026)

I.

The great Jokermen podcast ended its two-year survey of every Beach Boys album from Surfin' U.S.A. to That's Why God Made the Radio along with many solo albums as well as an entire separate section on Van Dyke Parks' discography. This follows a similar, thorough, years long analyses of both John Cale/ Lou Reed/Moe Tucker/the Velvet Underground as well as Bob Dylan's discographies. After both of those series, the Beach Boys presented a fascinating conundrum for the podcast: both the worlds of the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan remain firmly within the realm of art. Though, Bob Dylan has had enormous success in his career, he's never completely given himself over to exclusively commercial enterprises and had retained enough of his own idiosyncratic persona that even his most crassly commercial stuff ("Tight Connection," Hearts of Fire) can't help but be artistic in its own way. Lou certainly had his dalliances with commercial success in the 1970s but, famously, used his artist trump card to follow his most commercially successful LP (Sally Can't Dance) with his most notoriously non-commercial (Metal Machine Music). John Cale is most widely known for a cover of a Leonard Cohen song that was used in Shrek.

The Beach Boys, on the other hand, recently sold their "brand" and "likeness" to Irvin Azoff for an undisclosed sum (to be fair, Dylan sold his music catalog for a hefty sum to Sony but, last time I checked, Bob Dylan owns the rights to his "brand and likeness"). They could do this because, for all intents and purposes the Beach Boys have been a "brand" and "likeness" for the majority of my life. I've already written about the Beach Boys during the pandemic (https://languageoftheonagainoffagainfuture.blogspot.com/2020/09/teenage-gymopaedia-to-god.html), focusing on the digital-only compilations of both the Friends and 20/20 sessions (both of which still haven't been released in a physical format). However, I didn't really go into my history with the band. My parents weren't Beach Boys fans, so I rarely heard them growing up and my first exposure to the Beach Boys as a contemporary band (I had probably heard "classic" Beach Boys songs on the radio) was their collaboration with the Fat Boys, "Wipeout." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-kAnNgqN9o&list=RDr-kAnNgqN9o&start_radio=1). If you've never heard that song or watched that video, then I apologize in advance. It's terrible. I'm shocked how many people on the internet, just based on briefly searching for any information about the recording of the song, will defend it. Oh well. The song was the Fat Boys' attempt to recreate the success of Run DMC and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," and it worked: the song was a top 20 hit (Apparently, the single was originally supposed to be recorded with Run DMC, but Mike Love made a deal with the Fat Boys instead. Brilliant move, sir!). As an artistic statement, "Wipeout" is a tragedy: it heavily influenced my desire to never listen to the Beach Boys on purpose if I could. 

The success of that single led to the even greater success of the 1988 hit "Kokomo,"  their first number one hit since "Good Vibrations" in 1966. I have very ambivalent feelings about "Kokomo" today: it was the first Beach Boys song my kids liked independent of me saying anything to them about the group. "Dad! The name of the group is the Beach Boys and they're singing about beaches!" Honest to god that's what my youngest said when playing the song in my car for me. I had to point out that they've been singing songs about beaches since 1962 and cued up "Surfin U.S.A." which they loved for many of the same reasons they loved "Kokomo." So I'm going to say, in terms of gestalt, we're dealing with the same aesthetics here. However, once you listen to all of their songs in their proper contexts, "Kokomo" only shines because there is very little surrounding it that could even compete with its mediocrity, i.e. the aforementioned "Wipeout." But in 1988 I was discovering Pere Ubu and the Pixies and Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground and Joy Division and why the fuck would I want to listen to the band that recorded "Kokomo" even if their earlier stuff was good. As Anton Chigurh would say, "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

It all changed when I met a guy who worked in my mom's office who was only slightly older than I was. I found out that he was an R.E.M. fan like I was and made an awesome mix tape of R.E.M. bootlegs and rare singles that I hadn't heard before. He asked me what other music I liked and named some of the bands above. He asked me if I ever listened to the Beach Boys and I was kind of surprised. At this point in the early 1990s the Beach Boys were well ensconced in the Disney period of their career: happy to be wheeled out on Full House or Dick Clark's New Years Rockin' Eve or some Disney park celebration. Happy to play "Fun, Fun, Fun" until the end of their or our lives. The one exception to this was Brian Wilson's solo album from 1988. Brian had pretty much left the group by this point for many reasons (most of which are ugly) and started a solo career in fits and starts. His first solo album was universally praised and even I couldn't resist the lead single "Love and Mercy." This was the first inkling I had that maybe the Beach Boys (or at least Brian Wilson) could write wonderful songs. As with many singles I bought when I was young, I liked the B-side even better: "Couldn't Get His Poor Old Body to Move" was written with Lindsay Buckingham and was weird and fun and incredibly catchy. Not sure why I didn't get the whole album when it came out but I loved the single. 

So when this guy who seemed to have good taste told me that the Beach Boys was his favorite band I think I said something like "the 'Kokomo' band?" He of course told me he didn't like that song that their new stuff wasn't very good but that I should listen to Pet Sounds and that as I got older (again, this guy was a few years older than me) I might enjoy it. So I did what I often did back then and went to the Needham Public Library and took out the Pet Sounds CD. Of course I knew "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" and "Sloop John B." and "God Only Knows." I wish I could say that I instantly fell in love with it but I didn't. I thought it was mostly fine, a few of the songs stuck out, but I didn't feel particularly interested in investigating their whole catalog. Over the course of the early 90s Capitol Records released a number of Beach Boys albums as two albums on one CD or cassette. I had read about the lost masterpiece Smile and was curious enough to buy a used copy of the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey cassette with bonus tracks for $4. 

This is where I found my entry point into the Beach Boys. Smiley Smile isn't Smile instead, now having heard the original Smile, it's variations on motifs in Smile as performed by some very stoned men in a sandbox. I think, given its availability since the late 60s, that its influence on music is underrated. In the liner notes to the first Faust record, producer Uwe Nettelbeck concludes, in English, "I like the Beach Boys!" and its impossible to hear some of the music on that first Faust record and not think of Smiley Smile. I also hear its influence on the early work of the Residents and other outsider groups throughout America in the 1970s. In many ways, as I'll discuss with regard to Love You and Adult Child it's clear that if he didn't have a supernatural gift for harmony and arrangements, Brian Wilson would most certainly be an outsider artist himself. 

I'm not sure if it's their best period, but the decade from Smiley Smile (1967) to The Beach Boys Love You (1977) is their most interesting period to explore. During the first half of that decade the wreckage from the Smile project would resurface over multiple albums alongside new material written by various members of the band. The second half of the decade finds Brian Wilson expressing hope while battling personal demons. Since writing that early essay regarding the unavailability of the 1968 and 69 sessions, there have been several exhaustive box sets in physical formats chronicling the Beach Boys in the early 70s. This series continues with a three cd/five LP box set dedicated to the recordings they made in the mid 70s. 

II.

We Gotta Groove covers three albums recorded in the mid-70s: 15 Big Ones, The Beach Boys Love You and the unreleased album Adult/Child. All three of the albums were part of an effort to get Brian Wilson writing and recording (and ultimately touring, though he never did much of that to begin with) music again. As the recording sessions for Smile fell apart in 1967, Brian stepped further away from recording music with the band. Some albums, like Smiley Smile and Friends, had significant contributions from Brian. Others, like Carl and the Passions 'So Tough' and Holland, had fewer contributions. Brian was suffering from depression and drug addiction during this time, making the act of writing and recording music difficult. There was the pressure to live up to an album like Pet Sounds, something Brian felt he couldn't do in his current state. This difficulty was compounded by the Beach Boys albums not selling as well as in the 1960s despite the band spending lavishly on things like a new, mobile studio in the Netherlands to record Holland. 

In 1974 the band compiled the perennial bargain bin stalwart Endless Summer, which shows up so often in dollar vinyl bins because it sold a ton of copies. Endless Summer is an undeniably great collection of songs, but its massive success ensured that people awaiting new Beach Boys music would always be focused on the sun-drenched nostalgia of the past. Interestingly, one of the projects the band announced they would be releasing was a finished Smile, although it never materialized. In the middle of all this Murry Wilson, Brian, Dennis and Carl's abusive father, passed away. This affected Brian deeply and furthered his already depressive state. The liner notes to We Gotta Groove, as with so much of the "official" band history, gives a general overview of the recording process without any of the obvious tension, addiction and general sadness that existed in the band. It's pretty clear, as with so many of the Beach Boys projects, the Wilson brothers remained on one side and Mike Love remained on the other. Brian apparently had enough original material for an album but Mike Love wanted to include a mix of oldies they had recorded in the studio as warm up sessions along with some originals. Love won out, despite Dennis and Brian's resentment, and the resulting album 15 Big Ones is the weakest material on the We Gotta Groove set. In fact, the collection doesn't even include the 15 Big Ones album, just outtakes. 

The two standout tracks on the original 15 Big Ones album are one original, "Back Home" and one cover "Just Once in My Life." The latter is especially significant given that the original version of the song was produced by Phil Spector, a figure who haunts all of Brian Wilson's music. The Beach Boys version features cigarette-damaged lead vocals from both Carl and Brian, giving an older, more desperate feeling to the lyrics. A decade out from Pet Sounds and nine years out from the Smile failure, hearing Brian Wilson sing: "Just once in my life/ let me hold on to/ the good thing I found/don't let me down" is to hear an artist nakedly addressing his failures. "Back Home" is the flip side of this: evidence that Brian could still muster the energy to record a memorable song with a great opening lyric: "Well, I'm going back this summer to Ohio" (the song is an old one that had been recorded a few times by the band before finally being released on 15 Big Ones). 

Perhaps because he felt guilty about forcing the covers on Brian and Dennis, Mike gave pretty much total control over to the Wilson brothers for their next album: The Beach Boys Love You. Brian had named this album (along with Pet Sounds and less often Friends) as his favorite Beach Boys release. Engineer Earl Markey (who also worked on 15 Big Ones) described the album as "frighteningly accurate" to Wilson's personality and, indeed, listening to the record it sounds like the audience is privy to Wilson's random everyday thoughts an experiences ("the solar system is cool," "I like Johnny Carson," "I'm honking my horn while driving down the gosh darn highway.") Within the Beach Boys own catalogue, these types of songs could be compared to "In My Room," "Vegetables," "Busy Doing Nothing." 

As I mentioned earlier, this type of songwriting can be found in a lot of what gets classified as "outsider music." This term, coined by the DJ and journalist Irwin Chusid in the 1980s, and catalogued through a book as well as several CD compilations in the 1990s. What's fascinating is that Brian Wilson isn't an outsider artist: whereas most of the musicians championed by Chusid were often working on the margins or even outside of what could be termed the music industry, Wilson was a famous artist who had previously found great commercial success. What Wilson shares with many of these artists is a diagnosed mental illness. In 2006, Wilson gave an interview to Ability magazine with a licensed therapist discussing his schizoaffective disorder https://abilitymagazine.com/brian-wilson-a-powerful-interview/ It's worth reading the whole thing but here's an excerpt of Wilson talking about his symptoms: 

"[F]or the past 40 years I’ve had auditory hallucinations in my head, all day every day, and I can’t get them out. Every few minutes the voices say something derogatory to me, which discourages me a little bit, but I have to be strong enough to say to them, 'Hey, would you quit stalking me? F*** off! Don’t talk to me—leave me alone!' I have to say these types of things all day long. It’s like a fight."

With regard to The Beach Boys Love You Brian says in the liner notes to We Gotta Groove: 

"That record [Beach Boys Love You] was bottled inside my soul somewhere way back in there, and it came out like butter. I didn't have to really try very hard; it was just so natural...I wrote some songs that were about how I felt in my 30s, the same way that Pet Sounds was about how I felt in my 20s. I wanted to make a record to help everyone around me feel better...the title was my idea. It told the listener that they're admired."

Wilson understood Beach Boys Love You as a sequel to Pet Sounds, however, whereas Pet Sounds reflects the universal hopes and fears of its listeners, The Beach Boys Love You is one person's hopes and fears after living with schizoaffective disorder for a decade, which, by its very nature, cannot be universal. And, yet, even if they don't express themselves universally in the way that "Wouldn't It Be Nice" or "God Only Knows" do, the songs on Beach Boys Love You communicate the joy Brian Wilson experiences in everyday events that can be translated into an ethical posture: every one of us can find joy in simple things like watching Johnny Carson and receiving wisdom from the solar system. 

To that extent, the other artist that Wilson reminds me of on this record is Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. In 1977, a few months after the Beach Boys released the Beach Boys Love You, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers released Rock 'n' Roll with the Modern Lovers. With song titles like "Ice Cream Man," "Summer Morning" and a "Shortnin' Bread"-like stab at "The Wheels on the Bus," there's a theme and execution that makes both records spiritual kin to one another, not the least of which is the listeners inclination to ask whether or not the songs are meant as jokes. This is in no small part due to the fact that both Brian Wilson and Jonathan Richman are/were responsible for foundational recordings in the history of popular music. Richman's "Roadrunner" birthed punk in the same way that Wilson birthed so much pop music in the 1960s. To hear both of these trailblazers sing songs about "Rockin' Rockin' Leprechauns" and "Johnny Carson" respectively must have been disorienting to the listener in 1977. And, yet, as we mark the 50th anniversary of punk as a widespread musical and cultural movement, what's more "punk" than subverting your audiences expectations? If punk was also a reduction of musical and lyrical complexity, then what could be simpler than "Shortnin' Bread" and "the Wheels On the Bus" both of which are sincerely sung by grown men? 

Even within the sanitized narratives of Beach Boys liner notes, the interviews included in the CD set have a hard time disguising Mike Love's ambivalent feelings about Beach Boys Love You: "I think you've got to admit (the album) wasn't commercial music--it didn't sell. 'Johnny Carson,' was bizarre (laughs) and it had nothing to do with top 40 success for sure!" That feeling with regard to this music persists to this day. The only physical version of this collection available in the United States is a three LP/five CD hybrid set that runs over $120, I had to get my three CD set in Japan. This is quite different from the previous two archival sets (Feel Flows and Sail On Sailor) which were widely distributed in multiple formats. Al Jardine has tried to sing the praises of Brian's songwriting at the time as he tours this material with the Pet Sounds band (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDnC-sRBtB4&list=RDEDnC-sRBtB4&start_radio=1). The song they're performing comes from the second disc of the three cd set, the first official release of the often bootlegged Adult/Child sessions. 

Adult/Child was to be the second album the Beach Boys would release in 1977. It was clear that Brian was on a creative roll. This time, rather than a stripped down "solo record," Brian brought in a big band and string section for arrangements. The highlights of this unreleased project might be the highlights of the entire We Gotta Groove set. "Life is for the Living" is a song that Brian wrote for Frank Sinatra, who, according to Brian, "didn't say yes to the song." Lyrically it hews close to a song like "You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone" from Carl and the Passions--"So Tough" with entreaties to avoid "sitting on your ass" or "smoking some grass" because that existence isn't living at all. Carl and Brian trade vocals on the song, with Brian singing the final declaration of "Life!" in what can only be described as a Cookie-Monster voice. It's an oddly touching song especially when you hear Brian imploring himself to eat "three times a day." Again, I have no idea what Sinatra must of thought about this song. He never struck me as a man who needed to be reminded to eat three times a day. 

The best song on the album is, indeed, the aforementioned "Still I Dream of It." It's a solo Brian vocal and lyrically it might be the most nakedly honest song Wilson has ever written: descriptions of being hungry (Brian's food addiction would be a constant source of difficulty for him during this time), whether he will learn the lessons of his life, whether he will ever find love. Again, in some ways he's been writing songs like this since the early 60s. It's the lyrical concern coupled with his smoke and coke ravaged vocals that make it so profound. Although he had to go through hell to get there, I'm glad that Brian was able to get the help he needed and surround himself with family who loved him as he got older. Still, I appreciate that for a brief period of time Brian was given the freedom to explore this musical terrain even if it took almost fifty years to be officially released. 

April 2026 (playlist)

 Here's my playlist for April 2026, featuring tracks from albums I bought in Japan. It begins and ends with two long pieces from Miles Davis that exemplify some of the recent stuff I wrote about Miles (https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2026/03/a-world-within-itselfa-language-we-all.html). Enjoy! 

Your favorite band is a psyop

 

Soundtrack for a Coup d'Etat (2024)

The Cradle Will Rock (1999)

Tom O'Neil, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60s (2019)

Grant McPhee, https://thevelvetundergroundmyth.com

Geese, Getting Killed (2025)

Tony Price, https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumexposureinc/p/you-dont-actually-like-the-band-geese?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

"The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop" (WIRED, April 14, 2026)

Negativland, True/False (2019)

I.

In the 1999 movie The Cradle Will Rock, based on the historical events regarding the staging of the musical The Cradle Will Rock not the 1937 musical itself, John Cusack plays Nelson Rockefeller who commissions Diego Rivera (played by Ruben Blades) to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center. The mural, "Man at the Crossroads," would eventually be destroyed due to the fact that Rivera decided to depict Lenin in the mural, as a counterbalance to Abraham Lincoln. Once this was discovered the New York World Telegram published an article labeling the mural as anti-capitalist propaganda. Rockefeller eventually had the mural destroyed and replaced by another mural American Progress, which remains on the west wall of Rockefeller Center's lobby. As Phillip E. Wegner writes in his essay, "The Ends of Culture or Late Modernism Redux" regarding the depiction of Rivera's mural's destruction at the end of the film: 

"The destruction of Rivera’s mural literally erases the artist’s attempted ‘appropriation’ of this space, reasserting the private nature of this apparently public domain. Even more provocatively, the film shows the destruction of the mural transforming it into something else altogether…. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the whole appears to have been transformed into something not unlike Jackson Pollock’s postwar abstract expressionist paintings. In the film, abstract expressionism quite literally comes to occupy the place held by Rivera’s ‘representational’ work'.” (251-252)

In another scene, Rockefeller, speaking with Mussolini's envoy played by Susan Sarandon, can be seen hanging a painting above his mantle, which appears to be far more abstract than the mural Rivera has been painting in the lobby of Rockefeller Center (I haven't been able to identify the painting but, given the fact that Mussolini's envoy has been gifting various artworks to the wealthy industrialists she's been in contact with while in the U.S., it appears to be an example of Italian futurism). This only underscores the point that Wegner makes above: the powerful, moneyed interests will no longer allow representative art to be hung in public spaces for fear that such realistic messages might penetrate the consciousness of the public and lead, as the great Philip Baker Hall fears throughout the film, real revolution. 

This suggestion, which is hinted at strongly though never explicitly mentioned in the film, was new to me when I first saw the film in 1999. Soon, however, it became an almost shibboleth within the academic world I found myself in to take as fact that post-war American painting, and to a greater extent post-war American culture, was supported and disseminated through the power and largess of the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as wealthy men like Rockefeller: https://www.artforum.com/features/abstract-expressionism-weapon-of-the-cold-war-214234/

This story is well documented and, as I stated above, is accepted as canonical history within academia: abstract expressionism is a weapon the CIA used to silence impulses of political artists who would use realism to depict the United States as it actually is. In other words, you could happily hang a Rothko in a corporate office without anyone being unnerved by what it was depicting. It would be easy enough to shame the average viewer into thinking they "didn't get it" and thus educating them into an eventual appreciation, than dealing with the message socialist art would clearly communicate to the masses. 

The film Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat tells a contemporaneous story regarding how the "jazz ambassadors," most famously represented by Louis Armstrong, were used by the CIA to provide cover for the United States' coup of the first democratically elected leader of the former Belgian Congo. The jazz ambassadors, featuring musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone and Dave Brubeck was a program the state department had set up in the early 1950s to promote American culture to a wider audience while simultaneously demonstrating that racism, while a real phenomenon in the U.S., took a back seat to the larger, celebratory, cultural impact black artists had made and continued to make. 

Though the film shows that Gillespie and Armstrong vehemently opposed what the CIA and the state department were doing in the Congo once they found out, it tells a similar story to The Cradle Will Rock insofar as it depicts how involved the U.S. government was in the production and dissemination of post-war American culture. Moreover, no matter much the artists in question might have distanced themselves from the aims of the state department in featuring their art, there is a residual taint to these art forms having been so entwined with the Cold War ideology and its real life political violence. Most of the musicians involved in the ambassador program, unless they forcefully broke from that particular ideology like Nina Simone (who was openly calling for violent revolution by the end of the following decade), were left behind as jazz moved into the 1960s (Armstrong and Gillespie especially).  

You could make the argument that the state department, Central Intelligence Agency and the United States imperialist ideology decided to be less overt in the following decades. Museum boards and cultural ambassadors were too forward facing to be effective covert weapons in shaping the hearts and minds of both United States citizens as well as those around the world who appreciated American culture. Thus, when "uncovering" the covert influence of the government upon cultural products, writers and cultural critics have had to rely on speculation and conspiracy to find connections between governmental control and mass culture. Additionally, as the culture became the counter-culture, one which was often in direct opposition to the explicit aims of the United States' government (most explicitly exhibited in the opposition to the Vietnam War, but also evident in the civil rights and, especially, post-civil rights discussion of racism), it becomes far more difficult to ascertain what is potentially directed from above and what genuinely grows out of unrest from below. 

Nothing makes this more manifest than the obsession surrounding Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murder. Tom O'Neil's book traces Manson's connections to the music industry in the late 1960s (specifically his relationship to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, producer Terry Melcher and promoter Gregg Jakobson), Manson and his followers' frequent visits to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical clinic, which was overseen by CIA informant Louis Jollyjon "Jolly" West, as well as the suggestion that Manson, who was often treated with leniency by authorities after being arrested many times, was a CIA informant himself. Or, as my friend Josh said after reading the book, "Manson was a psyop that went right, or a psyop that went wrong." 

However, the lack of concrete connections that might flesh out Manson's story, illuminates further odd aspects of the west coast counter culture that only adds to the conspiracy: the following passages posted by Jared Smith from his blog the Wax Museum in 2025 sums up many of the connections

"Some researchers push the theory even further, suggesting the rock stars themselves may have been willing — or unwitting — participants in a larger PSYOP. The military and intelligence connections are almost endless.

The 'spontaneous' Laurel Canyon scene took root in 1965, the same year the Gulf of Tonkin incident — based on dubious intelligence — escalated the Vietnam War. Commanding U.S. Naval forces that fateful night was Admiral George Stephen Morrison, father of The Doors’ Jim Morrison. While one Morrison ignited a war, the other scored its soundtrack.

Frank Zappa’s story is just as curious. His father, Francis Zappa, was a top chemical weapons specialist at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal, a facility tied to both chemical warfare research and MKULTRA mind control experiments. 

Zappa’s manager, Herb Cohen, a former Marine, was among the first to arrive in Laurel Canyon. In 1961, Cohen was in the Congo at the exact time Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was tortured and killed in a CIA-backed coup — a moment when the agency was sending jazz musicians overseas as cultural cover.

Stephen Stills, one of the Canyon’s earliest stars, grew up in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama while his father worked on covert U.S. operations. These countries, perhaps not coincidentally, were all sites of American-backed coups during that era. John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas had his own proximity to power, attending the Naval Academy before winding up in Havana at the height of the Cuban Revolution. Jackson Browne entered the world on a U.S. military base in postwar Germany while his father worked for the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA.

The deeper you dig, the more the lines blur between the counterculture’s leading voices and the very power structures they appeared to oppose."

All of this begs the question to what end was the government involving itself in the counterculture of the 1960s. The answer echoes the argument The Cradle Will Rock and Artforum make with regard to the art world during the Cold War: 

"The early anti-war movement was disciplined and deeply political. But when psychedelics flooded the streets, protests turned into festivals and organizing was replaced by flower power and personal liberation. The CIA later admitted to helping spread LSD through various channels. Rock stars became the new spiritual leaders, and the revolution lost focus."

The explicit political motivation of the anti-war/anti-imperialist movement that could be found in, say, the folk music revival of the early 1960s gave way to the more abstract, psychedelic movement of the late 1960s. Devoid of any concrete political aims, and supplied with all the psychedelics the hippies would need, the "peace and love" generation would generally avoid being a real political threat to the hegemonic order, until it was eventually brought to a cataclysmic end by Manson and the family. 

II.

Regardless of how rooted in reality these narratives are, there's an undeniable similarity to these stories: an artistic movement with political leanings (painting, jazz, rock music) is co-opted by the government (state department, CIA, etc) for its own nefarious ends, selling that artistic movement back to its unsuspecting fans as a weaponized extension of hegemonic power. The difference in each of these examples is that whereas both painting and jazz have concrete examples of how these art forms were manipulated by actual government and government adjacent organizations, the story of 1960s rock being a psychological operation is filled with hazy conjecture and tenuous connections. The larger narrative which encompasses the counter-culture and music of the late 1960s lays out the ways in which artistic expressions of "freedom" adhere to an already established narrative in the West that artistic freedom is only something that can be achieved under a free, democratic capitalist society. Abstract expressionism is only something that can become a significant art movement if the government abstains from dictating which artistic movements are acceptable and which aren't. Jazz is an art form from a minority community that can only be allowed to flourish in a free society that recognizes the significance of that art form as such, Jim Crow laws notwithstanding. As the Prague Spring in 1968 demonstrated to the world, the counterculture of youth can only be safely practiced in a free democratic society, again, Kent State aside. 

Yet, with the last example, we see a shift in how the psychological operation is defined: no one would argue that abstract art or jazz was invented by the CIA or the state department, yet, in the narrative stipulated by the Wax Museum blog post and repeated elsewhere, would any of the shifts found in music and culture in the late 60s have taken place without the participation of the military or the CIA? You could argue that psychedelic music pre-dates the Doors, Haight Ashbury, Laurel Canyon and Frank Zappa, but the Brits have their own version of this conspiracy, the Tavistock Institute. This institute, founded in 1947 and tasked with the study of group psychology, has been accused of "inventing" the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd as examples of a larger conspiracy which by "'means of rock music and drugs" encourages society "to rebel against the status quo, thus undermining and eventually destroying the family unit'. In the 1940s and 50s the groups attempting to hijack extant cultural forms can be named. By the 1960s these forces shaping culture hide in the shadows, manipulating the culture and counterculture by secret organizations overseen by nameless people who can only be discovered going down rabbit holes. 

I think the end game of this type of thinking is evidenced by the "controversy" surrounding the band Geese. I will say upfront that I like the band Geese, that I enjoy their most recent record Getting Killed, that I find opening your record with a song in which the lead singer keeps shouting "there's a bomb in my car!" is funny and entertaining (while also being provocative and annoying at the same time), that the second song on the album, "Cobra," demonstrates that they can write decent songs and that their live show, as evidenced by the very good Coachella set I watched with my daughter this past weekend, is solid. Has all of this been determined by a start up company named Chaotic Good, which, in multiple interviews, explained the methods by which they have pushed Geese songs onto social media platforms? Maybe. I'm both old and jaded enough to know that we are shaped by things far beyond our acknowledgment (I am not a subject outside of ideology), while also realizing that if everything is simply PR than the ability of PR to actually do what people pay PR to do is as effective as ultimately doing nothing. Also, I've listened to enough music to develop individual taste so that there have been countless "good" bands shoved down my throat for which I have zero interest. 

It's the final point that those who view all of what gets "passed off" as culture as a long-running "psy op" would take issue with: to what extent is your taste your own? How much of your taste has been shaped by forces beyond your control? You can always fall back on the argument that you know what you like, but, in the last sixty plus years your "taste" has been heavily inundated with propaganda whipped up by men in lab coats who work for the CIA, state department, McKinsey, big capital, multi-national corporations and now, in the age of Artificial Intelligence, machines. What I'm fascinated by is how this discourse moved from "this band is an industry plant," a term that suggests, not without a long history of such things, that a band has connections to money and or someone within the recording industry, to "this band is a psychological operation" suggesting something much more sinister with the goal of mind control and manipulation. 

The endgame of this argument is well represented by two blogs, one of which I discovered after the Geese article in WIRED broke and the other I have known about for a little while. Tony Price, presciently, published a blog post on April 5th (nine days before the WIRED story was published) loudly stating "YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE THE BAND 'GEESE'(TM)." The piece doesn't actually begin with a discussion of the band Geese but of "the Sixties" in general and the band the Velvet Underground in particular. Much like the history mapped out in the first part of this essay, Price is sure that "'the Sixties(TM)'" [sic]:

"The common cultural narratives about 'the Sixties (TM)' that have been drilled into our skulls tells a story of a generation animated by a revolutionary impulse, a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of cultural offerings that propped up a paisley-patterned facade whose surfaces were littered with spray painted messages about hope, idealism and unification. 

The Sixties (TM) can be read as an index of mythologies: a laminated catalogue of icons, slogans, martyrs and spectacles." 

Interestingly, Price echoes the message of fellow sixties "psy op" Frank Zappa's famous LP We're Only In It for the Money which, as I've been hearing since the re-discovery of that record since the late 1980s, parodied the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers and "skewered" the peace and love bullshit from the Height-Ashbury crowd. As the Library of Congress, an institution which bestowed We're Only in It for the Money the honor of being added to the "National Registry" of recorded music in 2005 (during George W. Bush's presidency) explains:  in the original liner notes to the album Frank Zappa encouraged everyone to read Franz Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" while listening to the record. You see, we, the people indulging in the spectacle of the 1960s are "in the penal colony"--one assumes the same "penal colony" constructed by his dad and manager as part of their grand "psy op." 

Price in his blog post relates all of this to Zappa's great enemies, no not the hippies, but those other anti-hippy noiseniks "'the Velvet Underground (TM)'"[sic]:

"When it comes to music, no band from the Sixties (TM) has been so over-mythologized as the Velvet Underground (TM). From the moment I first encountered it, that Banana (TM) [a reference to the famous "banana cover" created by Andy Warhol, who would greatly appreciate Price's continued use of the trade mark symbol] consistently told me that, so long as I kept it near me, I could consider myself Cool (TM)." 

It is here that Price refers to Grant McPhee's 23 (!!!) part series on "The Velvet Underground Myth 1963-December 1967." I'll let Grant describe his important work: 

"Around four years ago I woke early with nagging thought that seemed to come from nowhere. Surely the Velvet Underground were far more popular in their own time than we've been led to believe? A quick bit of research confirmed it: they were far more popular than the myth suggests." 

You can read the twenty three part investigation for yourself to determine if, in McPhee's words, "this is huge." The basic conclusion is that the myth of the Velvet Underground started around the same time that Lou Reed's solo career was taking off and MGM reissued the first three VU albums as well as issued the Live 1969 album. There's probably a grain of truth to all of it, but it seems truly bizarre to me that a) you'd wake up one morning with the "nagging feeling" that the VU was more popular than you'd been led to believe and b) spend this much time trying to prove that although the Velvet Underground weren't that popular they weren't as unpopular as people think they were at the time. And that all of this is based around an offhand quote that Brian Eno gave sometime in the early 1980s. It's nice to have no other pressing issues in your life.

But this is where Price's current discussion of Geese comes in: if the Velvet Underground, the ultimate example of a "cool band," is the product of some marketing executive in 1974, then how can we trust that any band that anyone says is cool IS actually cool and not made to seem cool to you or I, the humble, average, music listener? And while we can discern the greatness of the Velvet Underground from just listening to their records versus, say, the records Geese has put out over the course of their short career, what happens when 'the system" becomes so all encompassing that they are telling you that Geese are the new Velvet Underground because of how cool they are. Which leads Price to the conclusion that "EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE" and, therefore, every band you've discovered on the internet is fake too. Of course, this has shifted from a conversation about music and the quality of music to a conversation about the internet, who controls the internet, who controls the conduits by which music is streamed on the internet, etc. All very good and important conversations to have but discussions that have nothing to do with the music itself. Or so those who are in control would like me to believe. See where we end up? As the source of music becomes more opaque and, potentially, less human, the conspiracy that you like what you like because of things shaped beyond your acknowledgment becomes darker and all encompassing while simultaneously becoming more legible through the technology we encounter every day of our lives. In this process a bunch of "nepo babies" become the immaterial conduit by which psychological operations bombard us in every micro transaction we partake in throughout our days. Geese aren't merely attractive white people with industry connections who release music, they are the machine by which we are controlled day in and day out. 

III.

The most important LP released in the last ten years is Negativland's True/False from 2019. Many think pieces have been written regarding the paucity of "protest music" in Trump's America, suggesting that as politics went from bad to worse, as they did at the end of the 1960s and 1970s respectively, music, setting itself up as something oppositional to those politics, would get better. Yet, popular music in the last ten years hasn't exactly been oppositional neither in message nor in sound. There are exceptions, of course, but many of those have come from older artists who are more established, often already committed to being oppositional figures within the culture (Neil Young, A Tribe Called Quest, Bruce Springsteen). Younger musicians have tended to remain mostly apolitical, with little interest in making music that sounds in opposition to dominant music within their particular genre. The one glaring exception to this rule is, unfortunately, Ye [Kanye] West who has made music and fashion in opposition to the mainstream of popular culture by adopting the aesthetics and symbology of National Socialism. I suspect that the arguments made by Price and others above are precisely why music has neither been overtly political nor oppositional the last decade: it's not that the musicians pushed by the internet are psy opps or industry plants, it's that, with dwindling resources available in the creation or art and music, a band can't afford to be labeled as political or oppositional. As we have experienced over and over again, it would be a relief to believe that artists are plants for brands to sell their goods online, we could suss out the authentic from the inauthentic, rather artists themselves have realized that certain things in opposition to dominant culture hinder the slight possibility a band or musician might become more successful. 

The entire ecosystem by which we consume media, whether it is real or unreal, true or false, is the main concern of Negativland's True/False. It's also been the main concern of the collective known as Negativland for almost fifty years. Back in the 1980s, Negativland participated in the earliest forms of hacking and jamming mainstream audio and video culture. They understood how to manipulate the media in an analogue age: on their 1987 album Escape From Noise they recorded a song called "Christianity is Stupid," created a fake press release stating that the song inspired the mass murderer David Bron to kill his entire family, and then subsequently recorded an album, Helter Stupid, which parodied the various news outlets that ran the press release unverified. A few years after that the band released an EP entitled U2, which sampled the band U2 as well as Cassey Kassem. They were sued by Island records and eventually in turn sued by their own label SST and the EP was withdrawn. They then spent several years documenting the ordeal as a way to discuss the insanity of copyright law, arguing for reforms in the U.S. Copyright Act. Negativland has always been a band that uses samples, radio transmission, press releases and other methods to parody and call out the media. In that sense, True/False isn't that different from their other releases. However, the context has changed.

In one sense, True/False is very much in conversation with the idea that the culture you consume is created and disseminated by forces controlled by capital and power. A voice (most of the "lyrics" are samples from all over the place) on the third track says "We'll manufacture, uh, a whole smorgasbord, of these events for the same purpose, so that our, are linking us up on the same, inner dynamics, yearnings, and needs on a deep psychological level." This certainly sounds like the manufactured monoculture railed against in Price's piece. But, as evidenced from the title of the album, the bigger question that Negativland are tackling has to do with the framework through that which we discern as "true" and "false" on an epistemological level, not uncovering that which is true and false. On the first track of the album, appropriately titled "Either/Or" a voice says: "And already you are separated into two camps. And you are on the point of fighting over absolutely non-existent differences." The engine which manufactures and names these differences is social media and the internet more broadly: this reaches an apex with "Fourth of July," a piece of music about the digital warriors fighting an imaginary civil war online. A completely deranged individual spends most of the track complaining about how people ineffectively post online, describing her own commitment to fighting the cultural as well as not yet real wars by posting all day long. Eventually, towards the end of the piece, she exasperatedly shouts: "You either believe in what you're posting or you don't!"

"Fourth of July" eerily predicts what political discourse and, more broadly, life felt like during COVID and lockdown: incapable of leaving our homes for a period of time, everything related to our social lives took place almost exclusively online: shopping, learning, political engagement as well as conspiracy theorizing was mediated entirely by our relationship to the internet. Of course, the track "Fourth of July" already anticipates the bigger problem with living through this mediation: the suspicion that everything you are experiencing through social media posts, YouTube clips, video podcasts, etc is potentially a lie or is potentially the truth and that which is outside of that domain is a lie. To paraphrase Arti Aster's great Eddington (a movie very much in conversation with this whole piece): "Your being, manipulated." 

The whole album concludes with the title track, a type of manifesto for the whole project. After a fanfare of horns, a woman's voice softly intones the words "true or false" before being replaced by another, less human voice repeating the same phrases over and over again:

 "If I say to you this statement is false, let's just think about this statement for a minute, if this statement is true, then, this statement is true. And, if I say this statement is false, then, this statement is false. Let's just think about this statement for a minute: if this statement true, then, this statement is false. And, if this statement is false, then, this statement is true. And we get into a loop which goes on forever." 

The statement itself, the content of what we might be able to discern as either true or false is never given, we are simply told over and over again that a statement is true when it is false and, conversely, a statement is false when it is true, eventually the voice concluding that there are statements which can neither be proved or disproved. The loop the voice keeps mentioning is eventually made manifest in the music with a catchy little rhythmic loop that turns into one of the more dance-like things the band has done. Eventually another voice emerges from the music loop and repeated "true/false" voice: 

"Conclusions? Whatever people want is true even if it isn't. How can you make a statement saying something is true even if it isn't? Who can say it isn't? Who can say what is? Feelings are facts. So who is to say what's a fact? There is no reality. There is no absolute. There's no objectivity. There's no right and wrong. There's no basis to criticize anybody. There's only people's arbitrary desires."

Negativland's point on this track is not to argue that something you believed to be true (you like the band Geese, the Velvet Underground were an underground band) is actually false (you don't actually like the band Geese, the Velvet Underground was more popular than you think) but that the very framework of uncovering the truth is part of a larger, cyclical process by which you cannot determine which of those statements are true or false. In the examples offered at the beginning of this essay (the jazz ambassadors, the state department's involvement in the elevation of abstract expressionism) the act of uncovering complicates our understanding of jazz and post-war art respectively, but it doesn't invalidate the idea that jazz and post-war art would exist independent of government involvement and manipulation. Price in his blog post explicitly states that "EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE" thus understanding that the medium by which such things may be uncovered has manipulated your being to the extent that anything you may encounter on it could be both true and false at the same time. And we get into a loop, etc. 

This is how Geese go from being industry plants, nepo babies, friends with other famous people, music critic darlings, etc basically all of the criticisms I've heard about (especially indie) bands my whole life to Geese is a psychological operation. Your enjoyment of the band Geese is part of psychological manipulation at the hands of those in power to get you to listen to them and agree to their genius. Asking to what end does this psychological operation known as project Geese exist is asking the wrong question (takes long drag of a cigarette), the praise of the band Geese is the end itself. We can make you think anything we'd like you to think by hyping it on the internet, through its multifaceted tendrils reaching out across social media. However, through the lens of true/false and True False, who's to say to what extent the truth uncovered by the great Geese PSYOP isn't the PSYOP itself: the continued erosion of belief and trust in one's own senses to enjoy music, literature, movies, art, theater all of the creative acts that make life worth living. Isn't it much more fun to scroll through articles telling you that it's all fake than to engage with the art you would be engaging in were it not already assumed to be fake?