Pop Fantastic

(Talkin’ College Rock Blues — my first Slumberland fave, Velocity Girl, circa ‘92)

For some reason the Guardian didn’t upload my profile of Mike Schulman to their site until a couple of days ago; I was very pleased to be able to write this appreciation of the man behind Slumberland Records and so wanted to make sure to post the link. I’m hard-pressed to think of another indie label of the 20-year vintage that’s maintained such a strong sense of purpose as Slumberland. Merge and Matador increasingly resemble Hollywood’s “specialty” studios (see “indiewood”). Drag City uses its remarkable roster of New American songwriters (Oldham, Callahan, Newsom, Berman) to proselytize on behalf of choice oddballs. K retains its geographic mandate & wooly production, but Schulman’s Slumberland is a uniquely well-defined “place.” The dispersal of music distribution continues to make the majors sweat, but smaller labels (whether original imprints or reissue outlets) have come to seem all the more important as arbiters of taste. The Aquarius liturgy records this phenomenon with reliable passion.

Joan Acocella offers an intriguingly pithy explanation of “cult” books in her piece on Draculas past and present in the current New Yorker: “But why does the book have a cult? Well, cults often gather around powerful works of the second rank.”

~ by maxgoldb on March 12, 2009.