So it's been a while since I talked about music, but it's time. It's time to give out Dylan's "most overrated band" award. The award today goes to Spoon. That's right, Spoon, who just swept the Austin Music awards, who were introduced as "perhaps the greatest band ever" last night at the free show they played at Auditorium Shores. Yes, live they sound just like their album. The problem is their music is boring. So are the lyrics. There was at least one song that consisted of the same line repeated over and over again, at least half the songs finished with the lead singer/guitarist playing feedback, and the keyboardist seems to have just come out of a few weeks' worth of lessons, rather than playing with the same band for at least a year. The beats were repetitive, and while that's okay if you have other interesting instrumentation, it blows when the entire band is pretty much a rhythm band. As for stage presence, it was blah. Certain punk bands got away with repetitive music and bland lyrics by being fascinating to watch on stage; Spoon doesn't qualify. The lead for Echo and the Bunnymen was more interesting sitting down on a monitor to finish his cigarette than Spoon's frontman was the entire show. I haven't even talked about Blackalicious' amazing set, which was engrossing-including as it did a freestyle session and guest appearances. Perhaps if more rock bands were exposed to the kind of immediate criticism that is present at MC battles, we'd see some more creative work coming out. Instead, every rock critic in Austin seems to be offering Spoon self-esteem-building handjobs in the press, hoping for...what? That they'll suddenly turn into a complex, interesting band, rather than the next soundtrack for a frathouse weed-and-whiskey party?

I was thinking today about the common idea in literature that there are a finite number of plots/stories in the world. I was thinking about it and I realized that the distinctions are all arbitrary. It usually comes out sounding like "there are two things in the universe: matter and space," or "animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

"To Build a Fire" and The Old Man and the Sea may both be "Man against Nature" stories, to borrow from a common list of the limited number of plotlines, but they are very different works nonetheless. What upsets me is the need to limit creativity, or to suggest that true creativity is no longer possible.

Yeah. That's it.