local natives: getting the picture

i've realized over the last few days that i don't have the vocabulary to talk about some of the music that i love. not sure why this is exactly.

maybe it's because my reading has been somewhat limited?

i like a lot of what some friends might tease as "old" music (elvis, sergio mendes and brasil '66, june christy, blossom dearie, jobim). i've read greil marcus, peter guralnick, and a few brief "artist" bios online, but that's the extent of it.

i have read more about jazz (thanks to a terrific american studies seminar) than i have actually listened to on my own. i listen to a lot of disco--but not much journalism or scholarship on that, i don't think.

what else...i own practically all the everything but the girl discs, remixes and imports, but until sasha frere-jones wrote a piece about tracey thorn for the new yorker recently, i hadn't read anything about them. ever. i didn't need him one way or the other for him to render judgment, but i was really pleased to hear language put to it, other than my own (which is purely the language of love). there was some good jargon in there to hold on to. i've read a lot of mr. frere-jones, actually, but i don't listen to much of the music he writes about (recently: big boi, robyn?) so it's not really coming together for me.

over the years, i've read rolling stone--but in retrospect that was more for the politics and culture. (it was a while ago.) i've done my share of reading and collecting articles from other magazines--about tom waits, westerberg, bjork, etc--. but i think i was reading mostly to hear the musicians' own words, thoughts. i was looking for quotes. inspiration. the music journalists' input was sort of secondary.

so now i'm at a loss. i have a lot of music criticism to catch up on before i can talk much about these local natives.

but i have pictures...(a few here now, lots more where these came from)

all photos © anita aguilar