You can’t go a day without someone declaring that the book is dead, whether at the hand of the Kindle, the iPad, or social media. And while those technologies are certainly vying for attention with the printed book, a lot of social media users still read them–and are even using social media to complement their reading.

Read the full essay here

“This is like the quarter-million-dollar table,” says Columbia professor David Gerding, sitting in front of a modest conference table outfitted with six laptops that are connected to optical sensors. As Gerding speaks, an avatar of his face appears on the laptop screen before him. A click of a button, and beams of light appear to radiate from the eyes of his digital self. “It’s detecting the iris. Can you see the laser beams coming out of my eyes? It’s like Blade Runner!”

In a modest conference room in Columbia College’s Department of Interactive Arts and Media (IAM), we’ve stepped into what could pass as a set from the ’80s sci-fi classic. It’s a futuristic space where individuals interact on screen as small sensors track their eye movements, pupil dilation, and even facial expressions, all in the service of teaching machines to understand how people communicate and collaborate with one another.

Read the entire article at the DEMO site.

Photo by Drew Reynolds

I wrote this story for the 2nd Story reading series, and performed it at Webster’s Wine Bar last October.

This is the second in my series of short story podcasts. You can subscribe at iTunes or download directly below.

An interview with Balkan-fusion septet Beyond the Pale for the Santa Cruz Weekly:

Eric Stein, bandleader and mandolin player for Toronto Balkan-fusion band Beyond the Pale, didn’t grow up on the music of his Eastern European ancestors. He was weaned on rock & roll and folk. As his tastes matured, he developed into a bluegrass aficionado. But after a couple of years performing in the bluegrass style, Stein started feeling conflicted.

"I found with bluegrass there was something about it that didn’t feel quite honest playing it," Stein says. "I could do tons of practicing, I could get the technique required to play that music, but being a Jewish kid from Toronto, bluegrass wasn’t within my realm of experience or my own historical and cultural context to work within."

Read the full article at santacruz.com

From ‘99-’06, I was an active participant in my hometown of Santa Cruz’s music scene, and I have a ton of affection for it. In this retrospective for the

PUTTING a retrospective of the Santa Cruz music scene into print is probably asking for trouble. After accepting this assignment, I posted a one-line status update to Facebook: “writing a roundup of Santa Cruz’s most significant bands of the decade. Suggestions?” It didn’t take long for the responses to start coming in. “There have been significant Santa Cruz bands since Camper Van Beethoven?” wrote one local, illustrating the foolhardiness of trying to present a single overview of a decade of Santa Cruz music. For every resident who thinks the local music scene ended in the early ’80s when CVB signed to a major and left town, there’s a grubby teenager in a Soquel garage blasting through two-minute punk songs who has never heard of David Lowery.

Ultimately, the terms “Santa Cruz music scene” and “Santa Cruz music community” are only convenient shorthand: there are many local scenes and communities. They only occasionally overlap, if ever. But for as long as I’ve been following Santa Cruz underground music, the concerns have remained the same. The local scene, often tethered to the four-year UCSC academic cycle, is far too transitory; bands are too flighty and don’t stick around long. There aren’t enough places to play. The relative geographic isolation makes touring difficult. As someone who played music in the town for the better part of the decade before leaving for Chicago in 2006, I’ve heard these sentiments many a time. They’re echoed to this day by friends who continue to keep me apprised of what’s happening in my old home town.

I’d like to celebrate, from my limited perspective as a player in some of those communities and an outside observer of others, the bands of the past decade that have overcome the challenges facing all Santa Cruz musicians—the ones that have remained in town to become local institutions and those that have left to achieve wider notoriety.

Big Bang
If this decade was the one in which indie rock broke, Santa Cruz was an early bellwether. Linked by an underground telegraph that spiritually connected the local scene with those in Olympia, Wash. and Portland, Santa Cruz in the years 2000-2003 was a stunningly fertile place for indie rock.

The scene’s wise benefactor was local ukelele star Oliver Brown, the Jonathan Richman-indebted schoolteacher-songwriter who for four years starting in 2000 curated the 11-night annual Big Bang festival. Many of the bands on the Big Bang lineups have been forgotten, but viewed in aggregate, it’s stunning how accurately the festival predicted the decade of music to come. Out-of-town acts such as Sacramento-based !!! and Portland’s The Blow, destined to become certifiable underground stars within a few years, were complete unknowns when they played the Big Bang. These acts opened for local bands whose vision appears eerily prescient in retrospect—bands like the Lowdown, a three-piece specializing in an unholy racket that resembled Devo on a bender of bad meth and blown-out amps, a corrosive mixture of noise, speed and technology that predicted bands such as the Locust.

Much the promise of the scene was embodied in the band that seemed most likely to blow up at the time: the sweetly sci-fi, Pixies-referencing four-piece Sin in Space. Led by singer/guitarist Cassidy Meijer and anchored by drummer Greg Braithwaite, an able hand who has turned up in numerous bands during the decade (including the immortal Huxtables), the band enjoyed an incredible amount of promise and label interest. If an observer was to guess which Santa Cruz indie band would break through to greater things in 2000 or ’02, Sin in Space would have been it. Instead, that band was fellow Big Bang fixture Comets on Fire, the acid-rock-riffing four-piece that dominated many a house party for the first third of the decade before signing to Sub Pop Records and becoming the toast of Pitchfork and the indie-rock intelligentsia.

Heave At It
There was a ton of other activity in Santa Cruz underground music in the early decade, as well. While the UC art kids were helping define the blueprint for ’00s indie rock, the local punk scene—comprised of true Santa Cruz locals, as they would surely remind you—were growing restless. Diversion, a Soquel trio started by three preteen punks in the late ’90s, had morphed from a precociously smart-ass hardcore group into something more resembling progressive rock. Just as the emo craze was hitting the national spotlight, it was cresting in Santa Cruz, with locally anointed emo demigods like the Lonely Kings, Jetlag and Time Spent Driving selling out the Catalyst.

As that generation of local punk bands moved on, a new shoot emerged in 2004, nurtured by one of the heavyweights of 1990s Santa Cruz music. Roughly organized beneath the banner of Lorelei Records, an independent label founded by former Fury 66 singer Joe Clements, the new punks avoided the polished emo sound that had dominated Santa Cruz during the late ’90s and taken over MTV by 2003. Instead, the bands hearkened back to various strains of ’80s and early-’90s American punk rock. Clements headed up two of the most high-profile, if short-lived bands, Audiocrush and Crucial Unicorn, while Here Kitty Kitty mashed riot grrl snarl to Ramones-esque razorblade bubblegum. The most durable of the new guard, immortalized in Lorelei’s 2005 compilation Bombs Over Santa Cruz, was Los Dryheavers. A five-piece Mexican punk outfit from Watsonville, Los Dryheavers echoed the chunky fuzz of ’80s American punk rock while throwing in a extra-heavy helping of Guns-and-Roses-quoting riffage. With three albums under their belt and a number of tours and Warped Tour slots, the Dryheavers have effectively placed Watsonville on the Santa Cruz underground map.

The Folks Are In Town
It’s impossible to talk about Santa Cruz music in this decade without mentioning the Devil Makes Three. Admittedly, I’m a biased observer—I lived with the trio, played in other, far less notable bands with them and even poisoned the lead singer with undercooked chicken, an event immortalized in a song on the band’s latest album. But for the middle years of the decade the band clearly dominated the local scene, bridging the gaps between art-rock hipsters, body-building East Side locals and august KPIG listeners. The Devil Makes Three were far from the first to do what they did—lash bluegrass and string-band music to punk-rock populism—but they were one of the first to do it in Santa Cruz and possibly the first to do it so well. Today, the band tours the nation and gets attention in national publications, but from 2002 to 2006 they were the local band to beat, packing basements and the Catalyst with ease and drawing national attention to a lively local scene that has always deserved more attention from the outside world.

This era was probably my most active in the local music community. I played with the local cowpunk outfit Mule Train and organized two compilations, Someday Coming Down and Someday Coming Round, that documented the town’s fascination with viewing American folk traditions through a punk- or indie-tinted lens. It’s a spirit that can be found in a wide variety of local acts, from the born-and-raised rockabilly partisans the Chop Tops to the unholy howl of Steven Griswold’s disheveled country ballads.

The entire town seemed to be in a folkier mood during the mid-section of the decade. As a large number of bands tweaked various forms of American folk music, artists such as Whysp, Emily Jane White and Ben Chasny were unearthing a more meditative form of acoustic music. Carrying a torch for the nearly-forgotten ’60s psych-folk of Vashti Bunyan and Bert Jansch, this trio of local artists played an important role in defining the then-nascent freak-folk scene ignited in San Francisco and LA by Devendra Banhardt. Unassuming and quiet, former Streetlight employee Chasny and White remained on the fringes of the local music community, and the work they recorded in town—Chasny as Six Organs of Admittance and White with the Diamond Star Halos—can be best appreciated in retrospect, long after they left and became critical favorites the world over.

Beachcombers
For sheer visibility and impact on the outside world, the Devil Makes Three’s success was rivaled by the Expendables, a four-piece that dominated the stage like an 800-pound gorilla. Cribbing notes from Sublime and the Long Beach Dub All-Stars, the Expendables whipped up reggae, dub and metal into an amalgam that typified the sleepy beach-town vibe that draws so many people to Santa Cruz. Since the day in 2002 that the Expendables—Adam Patterson, Geoff Weers, Raul Bianchi and Ryan DeMars—were crowned the winners of Your Music Magazine’s first Battle of the Bands, the quartet has been on an upward trajectory, first dominating Santa Cruz before becoming a dependable touring act and even turning up on the soundtrack of Guitar Hero World Tour—the surest indicator of having made it by the end of the decade.

If the Expendables typified one side of the town’s beachtown vibe, SamBaDa exemplified its musically diverse, ebullient, polyglot complement. Formed in 1998 by local Brazilian expatriates Papiba Godinho and Dandha da Hora, the band has proven to be one of the town’s most dependable and venerable acts, specializing in an intricately percussive sound that spans the Americas in its influences. By 2007, the band was recording with a Grammy-nominated producer (on the record Salve a Bahia), and serving as goodwill ambassadors to the world, of not only to multitude of cultures the band encompassed, but of a uniquely Santa Cruz sound that has inspired a generation of local world music artists.

Decade’s End
Yet as the Expendables and SambaDa came to embody Santa Cruz’s laid-back beachtown vibe, a crew of snot-nosed art punks sought to expose its id. On the heels of the promising yet short-lived Gross Gang, the New Thrill Parade dominated the town’s underground art scene in ’05 and ’06, lurching through Birthday Party-indebted noise-rock with the weight of a hundred hippies on bad tabs of acid. It was a restless time all around, as city noise ordinances grew tighter and the underground house show scene all but disappeared. The response of bands such as the New Thrill Parade and the celestial noise-rock band Residual Echoes was to turn it up even louder, tossing defiant cacophonies back at a City Council that preferred its local art scene to be safe for tourist consumption.

As the latter third of the decade rolled around, the underground’s twin obsessions of noise rock and psychedelia united. Indulging in opulent acid-rock excess, Sleepy Sun and the Vox Jaguars became the new standard-bearers for the local underground community. Both bands signed to indie labels in ’08 and have garnered the attention of the global psych-rock underground, once a niche movement of ‘60s revivalists that has become legion in the globally connected age of social networking. On the sleazier end of things is the Groggs, dirty-humping garage-rock sleazebags who strip all the art from the art-rock in favor of a primeval yawp.

Emboldened by the success of the Devil Makes Three, indie- and punk-inflected folk music has become something of an institution of its own in town: witness the success of Birds Fled From Me, featuring Rachel Williams of Sleepy Sun, or the success of last year’s The Sounds of San Lorenzo compilation, organized by JJ McCabe of Mylo Jenkins and Tether Horse and Dustin St. Wright. A two-disc sampler split between local rock and folk acts, the compilation remains a striking taste of what’s to come in Santa Cruz music while also being perhaps one of the most exhaustive single-project overviews of the diversity of the local community.

A decade later, few of the players are the same. Yet the local underground music community remains as vibrant as ever, ever-vigilant in the face of too few venues, UC student turnover, the high cost of living and the other difficulties facing musicians in Santa Cruz. The new guard, headed up by the likes of Fire Whiskey, Sourgrass, the Spurts, and countless others, enter the new decade unbowed by the eternal challenges. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more active, supportive and diverse set of local music communities incubating such a wide array of bands and genres. As the world grows smaller and Santa Cruz’s renown slowly grows, some of these bands are destined to be the new decade’s next big thing.

Thanks to the following for their suggestions, feedback, criticisms, and much clearer memories, transmitted via the wonder of the social web: The Santa Cruz Underground Music wiki, Siobahn Barry, Oliver Brown, Hiram Coffee, Mykle Hoban, JJ McCabe, Nick Meo, Pete Saporito and Hiya Swanhuyser.

In addition, I spent much of November working on a couple of giant articles, one for Columbia College’s DEMO Magazine (not yet published,) as well as a decade-long retrospective of my hometown’s music scene for the Santa Cruz Weekly. There’s a piece I wrote for community-minded tech site Shareable.net that is in their hopper–not sure when it’s going to run, but I’ll post a link when it does. I also attempted, and failed, at NaNoWriMo, stalling out at 12,000 words.

In other big news, Is Greater Than is re-launching on December 30th. It went on an unannounced hiatus around the middle of the year, due to a sense that I needed to re-focus the site and find a way to re-engage with it. With the help of fellow editor Brigid J. Barry, I’ve figured out those issues, and I’m really excited to get it up and running once again. It’ll have an increased literary and cultural focus: one of my realizations of the past year has been that I just don’t have the stomach to run a politically-focused publication, and that if I wanted to continue working on the site, I needed to focus on topics that gave me a sense of personal satisfaction in addition to the ulcers. There’s a ton of great political work in the archives from many great contributors, and I’ll always be grateful to them. It’s not what the new incarnation will be, though: instead, we’ll be focusing more on cultural criticism, fiction and creative nonfiction. If you’d like to pitch or submit a piece, please take a look at the submissions page for details.

Call it the curse of consistency: any band can take a long hiatus before being welcomed back with open arms upon the release of a so-called “comeback” record. On the other hand, you have the unassuming bands that create strong work, album after album. Bands like Yo La Tengo who never get their comeback record because they’ve never gone away. Some start taking these artists for granted. But as Yo La Tengo demonstrates on Popular Songs, that would be a mistake.

Read the article

Dan Sinker’s Cellstories project is finally live

I’m honored that my story “Life on Mars” is second up to bat during Cellstories’ launch week: it’ll be visible from your iPhone/iTouch/gPhone/iClone today (Wednesday, September 2nd) and again this weekend. Head over to Cellstories on your phone to read it. If you’re without a fancy phone with a decent web browser, you can listen to me reading the story on this podcast.

The service has been getting a ton of great press, including from Publisher’s Weekly, the Chicago Reader, Reuters, and the WBEZ Chicago Public Radio blog.

Also very exciting: I’ve been invited to join Serendipity Theatre Collective’s 09-10 season of the 2nd Story storytelling cycle. I’ve long been an admirer of their work, and I can’t wait to collaborate with the prodigiously talented writers and directors already involved in the project.

In other news: I interviewed Nathan Maxwell of Flogging Molly about his new solo project for the newly-launched Verbicide Magazine (which looks great,) and am working on a piece about the challenges facing indie publishers adapting to the web for Utne Reader. In-between those projects, I’m rethinking Is Greater Than and have some exciting ideas to re-launch it, and I’m blogging with a number of IGT peeps over at 12 Pt. Plan.

As always, thanks for reading!

Last year, I accomplished something unlikely, if not quite impossible: during a six-month road trip around the entire United States, I continued to work my full-time publicity job, and did steady freelancing work on the side. It wasn’t easy, and I can’t say that I accomplished every task to the best of my abilities, but I learned a ton (the hard way) on how to work while taking an extended trip.

Read it here

Illustration by Mott Jordan

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle-as-Rick James, “Internet’s a hell of a drug.” Like James’ drug of choice, the web is addictive and alluring, its benefits debatable.

I speak as someone intimately familiar with an addictive drug: two years ago, I quit smoking. To this day, I find myself smoking in dreams, and occasionally sneak them from friends at the bar. The rest of the time, the Internet serves as a proxy.

Addictive personalities often replace one addiction with another. My new worst friend is the social web, the endless stream of information constantly streaming down Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “series of tubes.” Here’s a short list of Internet services that I use and check on a daily basis: email, Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious, Evernote, Twitter, Remember the Milk, Google Reader (tracking some 180 RSS feeds), and Yahoo News. I back up longer articles using Instapaper to read on the bus; at the home office, I work with two web browsers open at all times, 10 individual tabs loaded in each, spread over two monitors. While commuting on the train, I’m checking text messages via my Internet-enabled phone and reading archived blog posts on my iPod. At times, it seems like a type of digital schizophrenia, or if nothing else, a hell of a drug.

I’m what pencil-necked social media experts and Web 2.0 carpetbaggers would call a “power user.” I dine on a constant, movable feast of information. Scolds might suggest that this is a symptom of a larger Internet addiction, but when your day job involves managing web content and your night jobs are web design and freelance writing, it’s impossible to avoid spending 12 to 14 hours a day online. My habits are far from unusual; as we sit in offices for eight hours at a desktop computer, only to leave the office with iPhones, Blackberries and Kindles in tow, it’s clear that the moment futurists have predicted is upon us: the Internet has become pervasive, and it’s only going to become more so in the years to come.

With so much information streaming at once, most of it with all the panache of a poorly-organized corporate database vying for attention with hard news and gossip masquerading as political analysis, there’s little room for critical engagement; there’s barely enough time for basic reading comprehension. I could read 50 news articles in a day about the Middle East and return with no deeper understanding of what happened in Iraq on that given day. My mind has become a decontextualized database of ephemeral facts, equipped with only the most rudimentary of search functions. It’s not exactly cheering to realize that I’m not alone.

It’s a phenomenon that author John Lorinc bemoaned in his 2007 essay “Driven to Distraction” for the Canadian magazine Walrus. “We have created a technological miasma that inundates us with an inexhaustible supply of electronic distractions,” Lorinc wrote. “The deluge of multi-channel signals has produced an array of concentration-related problems, including lost productivity, cognitive overload and a wearying diminishment in our ability to retain the very information we consume with such voraciousness. It may be that our hyper-connected world has quite simply made it difficult for us to think.”

Lorinc’s far from alone in his alarm. In the past year, a cottage industry has sprouted up around the warning that Google—and the Internet at large—is making us stupid. The most infamous of the bunch has been Nicholas Carr’s cover story for the August 2008 issue of the Atlantic. Citing the work of Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, who warns that online readers become “mere decoders of information,” Carr editorializes that “our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains disengaged.” I’m dubious of the argument that Google is making us stupid, but Carr makes a key observation in the piece, writing that “deep reading . . . is indistinguishable from deep thinking.”

Binding Resolution

Feeling disenfranchised from that sort of deeper engagement, my resolution for this year was to step away from the stream—at least for an hour a day—and return to trusty old print. I decided to read more books—not on a Kindle or the e-Book reader on an iPhone, where the temptation for distraction via a rudimentary browser is a mere hand gesture away—but in bound, linear, paper form. It’s been a revelation. I’ve rediscovered an ethic of attentiveness, an intellectual silence and focus, that I lost in recent years as I jumped from one link to another, juggling countless browser tabs at all times. My process of reading had ceased being linear and had morphed into a cacophony of facts, data, opinions and animated Flash video. Since I’ve rediscovered slow reading, I find myself thinking more clearly, perusing linear paths of critical engagement with topics. It’s a relieving contrast to the multitasked intellectual inattentiveness that the online world encourages and demands.

One of the things I’ve been re-reading is the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, an author many consider a prophet of the discursive, hypertext era of the Internet. Borges’ work—elliptical, playful and rife with allusions—is stunningly contemporary in its meta-narrative and referential play. Yet even a writer as prescient as Borges demands the engagement of slow reading: those elliptical routes are far more rewarding when confined to the particular context of the linear narrative. His work demands a depth of engagement that cannot be replicated by reading his work on a web browser, just one in 10 tabs of content in a web browser, with billions of other off-topic distractions a mere Google search away.

Yet even for a print-native reader like myself, rediscovering the pleasures of slow reading and returning to the printed page is a struggle. Given an hour of free reading time, habit will compel me to the LCD screen rather than a book. I must make a concerted effort to sit down on the couch, book in hand. Once I open the book, keeping focused on that single linear feed of information is a constant challenge: I find myself twitchy, distracted, desperately in need of a reading discipline that I unlearned at some point in the past decade as my attention turned to online media. It’s as if I have not only forgotten an important mode of critical thinking, but basic reading comprehension. The state of concentration required to truly engage with the printed word can be attained, and is indeed rewarding, but it requires one hell of a concerted effort in this day and age.

Pundits like Jeff Jarvis, who collect healthy speaking fees by telling aspirational bloggers and new media entrepreneurs what they want to hear, might scoff at an appreciation of slow reading as being the rear-guard defense mechanism of a cultural dinosaur. They’d be half right. For all of slow reading’s continued rewards, it doesn’t take an oracle to acknowledge that print is doomed to a future as a niche product that will command a premium from a small group of enthusiasts, not unlike vinyl or free-range meat. Which is a damned shame, in a certain sense. Clearly the human mind benefits from a type of close, engaged reading that print encourages. And while there are a handful of services that attempt to replicate that experience on a screen, to varying degrees of success—Amazon’s Kindle, the web content archiving service Instapaper that accompanies me on the bus—the temptation of distraction is always near. Faced with that inevitability, something needs to change: either the way we consume content on screens or the way our brains process information. Futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that it may be our brains.

The Adaptive Brain

Speaking recently on New York Public Radio’s “On The Media,” Kurtzweil suggested that the human mind will evolve to synthesize this new form of information gathering. “Over time, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate, and that’s basically what we mean by the singularity,” he said. “When you get out to 2045, we’ll have multiplied the overall intelligence of the human/machine civilization a billionfold, and that’s such a profound transformation that we call it a singularity.” Kurtzweil considers the wired brain as an inevitable—and advantageous—next evolutionary step for the human race, one that is consistent with the development of our minds over time. “There is something unique about humans in that we’re the only species that we know about that actually extends our reach with our tools, ever since we picked up a stick to reach a higher branch,” he explained. “We’re already a human/machine civilization. Our tools are part of who we are. They always have been. And that’s what unique about human beings.”

Kurtzweil’s predictions have a good rate of accuracy, and I imagine he’s right. But even the over-clocked evolution of the mind that he speaks of is a slow process, and neither the Internet nor the brains we currently have are doing the trick. No matter how many lauded new web tools I use to pull disparate information together, there is nothing that can effectively organize and synthesize the sheer wealth of information, leaving me with discrete pieces of data in an endless stream of facts, statistics, news and trivia. This information may reside on our hard drives or in the cloud, but only nominal amounts of it reside in our brain. And until the mind takes that evolutionary leap Kurtzweil speaks of—or we begin injecting Google nanobots in our minds to better tie together the brain’s rudimentary search engine—this new system of thought does little to help the process of analysis, of synthesis, of pulling pieces of information together to reach an informed conclusion.

Kurtzweil’s singularity may be decades away, but I suspect that this change has slowly begun, if not through evolution or nanobots, then through a change in practice. Even after rediscovering the value of slow reading, falling in love with print all over again, I find myself drawn by the allure of the screen. At times, slow reading seems almost too slow, and that intellectual quiet unbearable. My mind craves that discursive frenzy—maybe, like any other hard drug, the Internet has rewired my brain.

Perhaps we’re missing the point harping upon some arbitrary distinction between how we read in print and how we read online. No matter the media, we need to rediscover the discipline of slow reading that has been lost in the frenzy of never-ending RSS feeds and social network life streams. No matter how we’re engaging with information—in print or on screen, in a web browser or on a phone—it is, as it’s always been, essential for us to read slowly, be engaged with what we read, to constantly challenge ourselves to re-learn how to think, to be critically engaged. That never-ending data stream isn’t going anywhere, and the fact is, we may need its addictive distraction more than it needs our attention.

I’m often amused, tickled, etc about things I come across while walking around Chicago, IL. This is a collection of pics I’ve too-long kept hidden on the private Facebook.

At turns lyrical and fierce, the work of hip-hop poet Kevin Coval is intrinsically a product of Chicago. Coval’s latest collection of poetry, Everyday People, is a paean to the city where he earned his chops, attending basement hip-hop shows as a teen and honing his skills under the tutelage of hometown heavyweights like Reggie Gibson and Dan Ferry. Coval is as accomplished as a poet working in 2008 could reasonably be, but he stays true to his roots, still calling Chicago his home and encouraging the next generation of writers through Louder Than A Bomb, the youth poetry festival he founded. Before the Thursday release of People at Quimby’s, Decider spoke with Coval about his roots in the Chicago hip-hop community and how the city’s working-class drives artistic growth.

Decider: How did you first get involved in the Chicago hip-hop community?

Kevin Coval: I grew up in the suburbs and became aware that if I wanted to hear hip-hop music I would have to go to Chicago. I would get bootleg tapes at the old Maxwell Street—before it was paved over in University Village—and it was through some of the stores and vendors there that I began to hear about an indigenous music scene.

One of the first DJs I went to listen to was Jesse De La Pena. He had a Monday night set called Blue Group Lounge. That was one of the first spots I went to in Chicago once I got my fake ID at 18. That was sort of an entry into seeing Chicago hip-hop artists—MCs that are still around like Dirty M.F., they would freestyle some sets. At the end of the night, there would also be local MCs or other artists on tour—I saw Redman freestyle there, and other national artists. It was really that Monday night set that really became a regular mecca for me.

D: When you started out, were you trying to rap or was poetry always your focus?
KC: I didn’t know anyone who made beats, so it was all a capella. I was off-beat more than anything, so people called it poetry or spoken word. By the time I first read at an open mic in Chicago—this is about ‘96—I had left the idea of being a traditional MC and thought of myself as more of a poet. Some of the first spots I went to as an artist, knowing that I had verse in my backpack and if called upon, I could read at an open mic.

There was a set down the street on Monday nights that I started to go to at the Mad Bar, where Cans is now. They had a poetry night, and then after the poetry night they had hip-hop night. That was one of the first places I became a regular at. They sent a couple of teams to the National Poetry Slam, and I was on one of those teams. In some ways, that was my real entrance into Chicago’s spoken-word poetry scene.

D: What is it about Chicago’s poetry and hip-hop scene that keeps you coming back, even as you travel around and tour?
KC: I think the quality of the writer’s craft in Chicago is—I would argue—higher than anywhere in the country. There’s no real recording or publishing industry in Chicago, so if you are a writer or MC or poet in Chicago, you do it out of love and necessity. There is a growing audience in Chicago for Chicago-grown hip-hop and poetry, but the best MCs in Chicago are delivering mail or [are] school teachers or lawyers. They’re not driving in Escalades; they’re working like the rest of the city works. Being an artist in Chicago means that you are part of the working-class culture. Your art becomes a product of your labor, so if you keep working at that, you become better and better—writers are made, not born.

No one cares in Chicago that you do art. You tell someone in Chicago you do art, and they will encourage you to make their cheeseburger medium rare. No one really believes that you can make it as an artist. Theatre in Chicago is diverse because you have storefront theatres that will put out avant-garde or classical plays because they have a love for the form. I think the same kind of work ethic infiltrates the hip-hop and spoken word community too.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website.

The headline zooming around the blogs right now is correct on one thing: the album is dying*. But the statement should be more along these lines: the album is dead, long live the playlist. Or long live Random Shuffle. Or iTunes Genius. Trying to create a new product that locks users into one app, particularly given the iPhone’s unscalable app interface and Apple’s insistence on not allowing third-party apps to run in the background, is just another in a long line of failed attempts by the music industry to create a new bundled product that only a handful of obsessives would want.

* And yes, I realize that such a statement sounds contradictory coming a few days after I announced that I’m working on a new album, and to that I say: the album isn’t quite dead yet. The writing’s on the wall, but as long as there are olds who still have some emotional connection to the concept of the album, there will remain a continually shrinking market for it. In addition, the infrastructure just isn’t there to sell and promote single songs or short EP’s for an independent, unsigned artist–to get your music on iTunes, Amazon mp3, CDBaby, etc, it still has to be delivered in album form. This will no doubt change in the next few years, as the emotional attachment to the album continues to fade (I can’t remember the last time I had the desire to listen to a full album, and I’m 33, not 19,), but it’s certainly not going to change in six months or a year.