Greetings from Maryland, the Advanced state

The View from Fort Miley has been quiet for a few days as I've been traveling, through two Eastern states and one non-state that is nonetheless represented in Congress. Please congratulate me on choosing the nicest day of the year to visit Baltimore, the City that Reads. I, for one, Believe. Will post photos soon.

I'm happy to announce a Fort Miley first: A total stranger has decided to link to me, apparently based on my oh-so-engaging content. It's the co-creator of the Advanced Theory of popular music, whose musings I noted a couple of weeks ago. (He is a friend of a friend, and will surely be my correspondent soon, but to date we have had no other contact save for our blogs bumping against one another.) I advise daily visits or even an RSS feed, for he supplies some of the best music content around. I am honored.

I have been wrestling with Advanced theory for a few weeks now. You have to wrestle with it. It is, of course, Difficult, because it is Advanced. I fear I may have wrongly applied the theory to Calexico, whom I think are a wonderful band but have not necessarily achieved the true heights of great art from which someone like Lou Reed has Advanced. So the question is, does the theory still apply on a smaller scale, when an artist Advances beyond his fans, regardless of how many there are or were?

This brings to mind Royal Trux, who never really sold a lot of records but were always fairly controversial among their own fans. I suspect a lot of their fans didn't even like their records, which would be just about the most Advanced possible state of affairs. The band claimed that one of their most critically and commercially successful efforts, 1993's Cats and Dogs, was created in an attempt to mock their audience, although nobody who actually bought it seemed to agree or care. The band said the same thing about "Shockwave Rider," which was possibly their most accessible song ever but was released only as the b-side of a 45, the flip of which I recall being fairly unlistenable. They are best known in critical circles for Twin Infinitives, which almost nobody has ever actually enjoyed from start to finish.

RTX straddled the Great Point of Inflection, when the typical career path of independent and/or critically acclaimed rock bands stopped moving from messy or noisy or Difficult to relatively radio-friendly (Sonic Youth, Husker Du, R.E.M.), and started going from fairly normal to self-consciously bizarre (Wilco, Radiohead). It's hard to pin down when the Great Point of Inflection occurred, but I think it had something to do with Eddie Vedder being on the cover of Time. Before the Great Point of Inflection, people who had already revealed their Difficult visions to the world were allowed, however begrudgingly, to meet the commercial audience halfway by watering down their Difficulty level. After the Great Point of Inflection, people who had already sold a lot of records without doing anything too strange were now obligated to explore their weird side or else be lumped in with the Goo Goo Dolls, a band that may have been credibly noisy in 1991 and worshiped at the feet of the Replacements, but soon became insufferably mushy and has now entered their tenth year of true awfulness.

The Goo Goo Dolls were technically pre-GPI, but emblematic of its necessity nonetheless. They may have even caused the GPI. Let me think about this a little while longer. I'm going to spend most of tomorrow on an airplane with an iPod, so I will surely have some additional findings soon. I may have to listen to In Utero, which is probably right in the eye of the GPI hurricane. Possibly an old calculus textbook will help too.

Anyway RTX's later, fairly accessible records didn't make anywhere near as much as a splash as its out-of-tune, out-of-focus, turn-that-shit-off records did. Strange band. Strange time they lived in. Possibly RTX and the Goo Goo Dolls are two sides of the GPI coin. I'll have to think about this on the plane too.

Were RTX Advanced? I guess they were neither popular enough nor great enough to satisfy the theory, but they definitely went over their audience's heads. I don't think they could be Overt, although they could be like Neil Young in that they built a career on having no rules. Then again, everybody understands Neil Young. And although I was among RTX's most loyal record buyers, and met and interviewed them twice, and was able to ask them exactly what they were doing and why they thought it was important, I currently have no idea what they were trying to do with music, despite more than ten years of careful analysis. If that isn't Advancement, I don't know what is.