23. The Good, The Bad & the Queeen -- The Good, The Bad & the Queen
English music is known for two things: mirroring back American Rock n' Roll louder and harder, and expressing a profound romantic bleakness. Sometimes, instead of sucking deep of Yankee rhythm, the Pommies take the same instruments and play a raw yet gentle music full of the kind of un-nameable yearning that C.S. Lewis called Northern-ness, or Joy: a grey savoring of all the cold truths of the world. The Kinks, after the initial ramalama of their early songs, did this kind of music best, and you can also hear it in later songs of Kinks-revivalists the Jam (check out "English Rose" for an example).
The following artists have Top 20 albums on Amazon:
Susan Boyle (the top 2 spots, in fact. Maybe we're not an image-obsessed culture...)
Taylor Swift (never mind)
Josh Groban (continuing to labor under the delusion that the world needs someone to stand in for Bob Dylan)
Big Time Rush (no no no...we're supposed to have Boy Band nostalgia in about 8-9 years, not NOW)
Bruce Springsteen (because I know I want to pay 70 bucks to hear all the tracks that weren't good enough to make it onto Darkness on the Edge of Town)
Hannah Montana (if we put her in a room together with Taylor Swift, and they saw each other, would the rift in the Space-Time Continuum cause each other to freak out and faint for a year or so, like in the Back to the Future sequels? Cause that would be pretty rad)
Bob Dylan (see?)
Christina Aguilera and Cher (we comment on the one who's gained as much weight as the average college freshman, and not the one who bleeds botox. I hate the media)
Norah Jones (apparently she works with other artists! Who'da thunk it?)
"Okay, Henry. I get it. You're Damaged. As in, seriously soul-crushed. Utterly bereft in a way completely different from all other people and their damage. I'm entirely cognizant of the fact that you're spirit is in bound in invisible chains.
The Flamin' Groovies sit at a strange intersectionof American Rock music. They came along too late to be considered merely garage rock, way too early to be punk. You can't quite classify them as part of the Velvets-MC5-Stooges-New York Dolls proto-Punk crew: they've got too much country in them. But try to toss them off as just another early 70's Hard Rock Stonesclone, and all that feedback, that clear speedfreak-soul line tracing back to the Sonics and Little Richard, comes in and dances on your head. In the end, like the Cramps, the Groovies sit their own perch on the great tree of Rock n' Roll.
Teenage Head, their offering from that Dark Year of Our Lord, 1971 (Hunter Thompson never quite rose above the silly, did he?), exemplifies this straddle perfectly. There's a wonderfully Stones-y swagger to the opener, "High-Flyin' Baby" to the point where you could well believe this was a cut that some Under Assistant West Coast Producer Man decided to cut from the Sticky Fingers sessions (The liner notes even claim that Mick Jagger thought Teenage Head superior to that album). "City Lights," which follows, goes full country-blues.
"Governor Jerry Brown, huh? That's the problem with putting actual names in your songs; dates it rather quickly. I mean, it's not like Jerry Brown's ever going to be a force in California politics anytime soon.
“You listened to Starship?” the photographer said.
My wife said she had. The photog looked at me. “You a Starship fan?”
“No sir,” I said.
“Really? Aw dude, c’mon, We Built This City!”
“They didn’t build anything,” I said. “The idea of Grace Slick singing ‘they’re always changing corporation names’ when the band had three names is just the start of my problems, and ‘Marconi does the Mambo’ is the other.”
“Yeah, you’re right, it was Jefferson Airplane, then Jefferson Starship, then just Starship.”
“I hated them all,” I said. “‘White Rabbit’ is the Bolero of rock.”
“Okay well I can see you got opinions!”
Family by now is cringing. Yes, Daddy has opinions.
I always wondered who on earth ever liked "We Built This City". It surprises me not at all to discover they work at Disney.
The Book of Daniel tells a story (Dn 3) of the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar, conqueror of Jerusalem, destroyer of Solomon's Temple, building a Golden Statue and demanding that all his subjects worship it. Three Jews refuse to do so, and Nebuchadnezzar throws them into a fiery furnace to be burned to death. Instead, an angel of God comes to the rescue, and they stand in the fire unharmed, until the king notices. He then proclaims that the God who could do such a thing is the greatest of all gods, and showers the three Jews with riches and favors.
I mention this because the actual band the Fiery Furnaces seems unaware of it. In a deeply uninteresting "In My Room" feature in the October 2007 issue of Spin (Golly! Rock Stars have kitchens! With stuff in them!), Eleanor Friedberger claims that "Our band name comes from a line in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." Although other web sites have claimed a double-reference to CCBB and the Bible, this review of Rehearsing My Choir, the FF's 2005 album, sticks to the initial story. And while I'd like to believe that the Brooklyn hipster duo behind this album know obscure stories from Old Testament Prophets, somehow that first story rings the truer.
I never was the world's biggest Slits fan, but I've got a DVD copy of Punk: The Early Years, featuring a gloriously incompetent set from the early Slits and Ari screaming her fool head off to something like "Split": (Content Warning: Adolescent punks using dirty words)
Poor Kings of Leon. I wondered if they really did peak with Because of the Times.
Halfway through the album is also the point where you realize Come Around Sundown is simply too long. Right when you're thinking it's going to end, it just keeps going, becoming as worn out as the elastic on a really, really stretched pair of sweat pants. This makes it a curious contradiction; one would think it would be impossible to make an album that sounded completely thin, but looks dense in terms of its length. But Kings Of Leon have seemingly done the impossible here.
I'm putting myself on a new music diet until I finish at least one of my Rating My CD's categories, so Magnet's Which Album Are You Most Looking Forward To This Week? feature is utterly meaningless to me. However, I'd rather not consign myself to irrelevance, so I'm going to introduce a concept I've been meaning to discuss by making fun of the names of the bands in the poll.
Full Disclosure -- Aside from the first two, I haven't heard a note from any of these:
"You're not getting it. You can't ask someone to rape you. If you ask that means you're giving consent, which means it's not rape. It's one of those Catch-23 things. Or 22. I don't know; I've never read it. I already know the punch line, so what's the point?"
[Yes, this should be filed under P for Presley. I don't care. Over the decades Elvis has shed his surname.]
When Elvis died in August of 1977, a bereft fan asked his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, what they were supposed to do now. "Why, nothing son," replied Parker, "It's just like when he was in the army!"
Elvis fans act under an obligation to treat Parker as the villain of Elvis' saga, the grasping Svengali who trapped the King behind walls of money and pills. But time has proven him right. Thirty years has passed since the King's death, and a minor industry still labors to ensure that we never forget him, that we never quite put another onto his throne. As with the Beatles, repackages of the same hit songs reappear with predictable regularity. Considering that such made up most of his albums for the last decade or so before his death, it's hard to say hat Elvis' career arc has greatly changed. Like the villain in Gibson's Count Zero, his actual corporeal existence is largely secondary to the corporate life of his money.
Interpol's best work sounds enormous, making any room or car in which it's played instantly feel incapable of holding it. Interpol boasts "Barricades," an awe-inspiring song full of sweeping grandeur. It has palpable weight and size. Album closer "The Undoing" gives a sense of panorama, and both "Summer Well" and "Safe Without" succeed to a lesser extent, but Interpol doesn't threaten to blow the roof off. The size has always worked off the razor-sharp edges of the music, with Daniel Kessler's guitar leading the way. Interpol restores some of the shine, but the music still feels softer somehow, the cuts not as precise.
...then Interpol is all but done. The eponymous reboot is oftentimes a band's last shot at a sustained career; if you hose it, or don't immediately build on it, then you're toast. So Andrew Earles may have been right, again:
Interpol updated ’90s indie rock by brilliantly revisiting first-wave post-punk and the Church. 2003 was a heady time for the New York City foursome, when the world stayed oblivious to the fact that this was a one-and-a-half-album band. That reality slapped Capitol across the face four years later when Interpol delivered major-label debut Our Love To Admire, a small-scaleWaterworld for modern rock circa now.
But if some of the songs are as enjoyable, they may yet have a new lease. Don't make us wait, boys, sling that post-punk out fast!
I disagree with Anne Althouse, who sees nothing in Paglia's takedown of Lady GaGa but an old fart telling the damn kids to get off her lawn. In point of fact, I see a lot of blunt truth:
Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.
One doesn't need to spend a lot of time with adolescents to see this. Technology has empowered the self-absorption/self protection cycle of adolescence to the point of mindlessness. We will one day reach the point when people will wonder why dining tables and fireplaces even exist; when families will be nothing more than genetic flash mobs. The machine is in the ghost.
However, Paglia, like Marx, does not see the logic of her own argument. She does not see that every criticism directed at GaGa redounds to Madonna as well. The names themselves mirror each other; had they been switched, none could tell the difference. So when Paglia says:
For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…
I can only say, "did she miss the 1980's?" That sounds like every act my elementary-school psyche came to grips with on MTV: jaded, soulless hawkers of plastic decadence. I cannot understand why she believes that GaGa differs from Def Leppard differs from 2 Live Crew differs from Madonna. And when she says:
There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.
I have to say "Woman, please." As though Madonna was an indie act, bursting forth armed from the head of Avant-Garde, rather than a relentless self-promoter who cannily released her disco-pop from Sire Records, who by 1982 had, like everyone else in the music industry, ran not walked away from everything risky. Madonna's entire shtick has been an epater les bourgeois riff punctuated by exploding dollar signs from the beginning. It's actually kind of sad watching Paglia continue to play defense for a woman who has become as big an institution as Elvis ever was:
However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir.
That laughing sound you hear is me trying to figure out whatever it was the young Madonna did that could ever be considered "fiery." Was it the Go-Gos Lite of "Lucky Star"? The syrupy tedium of "Papa Don't Preach"? The lipstick-smeared, second-rate Vivienne Westwood fashion sense? Whatever the hell was going on in "Express Yourself" (truly a sentiment America had never encountered before)? What?
I suppose if I grew up in the 1950's and came of age in the 1960's, I might have considered Mdme Ciccone's disco-cancan act vital and novel. As it stands, I find the Ga of Ga's way less offensive than Madonna, who will not rest until she's acknowledged as the Queen of All Culture. Both are, at root, making a mint being drag queens with girl parts. The newer one, at least, has no notion of being anything more.
I first encountered Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, the man behind the Eels, whilst digging through my wife's iTunes collection, and enjoying "Novocaine for the Soul." I read somewhere that E was a bluesier, more introspective version of Beck, so in the first flush months of having my own iTunes, I downloaded Electro-Shock Blues, which has never been an easy listen. Given the subject matter it drew from (the suicide of E's sister and cancer diagnosis of his mother), it hardly should be, and it's leaden melancholy still makes for better listening than The Soft Bulletin, which I bought around the same time.
In all honesty, I'd really first encountered him in a Spin review of Shootenanny!, the content of which I thankfully do not recall. I liked the name (perhaps confusing them with proto-punk geniuses the Electric Eels), and liked the album title, and liked the none-more-black cover. So when I heard "Novocaine," I decided to delve more deeply, and thought an album called Electro-Shock Blues would be a good set of immersion songs. But Shootenanny! was always the goal purchase.
Back in January, when I conceived this, I hoped that I would have knocked out the first part of this plan by the end of the year. I should be elbow deep in the Rolling Stones by now, not struggling to come up with things to say about Echo and the Bunnymen. I shouldn't be promising reviews to my three readers. I should be delivering them.
So the last thing I need at this point, with my momentum flagging, is to double back into the B's just because I happen to have bought another Black Keys disc. Hell, I shouldn't be buying another Black Keys disc until I've finished cataloguing all the stuff I already have, sitting patiently, alphabetically by genre, waiting for me to tell all of you whether I like it or Like It like it.
Let's say you bought an entire album just because you liked one song. After listening to that one song on repeat for days, you ventured into the rest of the album. After listening to the entire album, you ran across the best song of your life. Well, that would never have happened if you hadn't bought the album, now would it? If you just bought the single, you would not have learned about any other tracks on the album. Forced consumption in the magazine format is the same. It leads you through a maze of possible favorites; whereas, online only leads you through what you already know.
He's not wrong. But the mags need a better tag line than "Forced Consumption: Because We Know Better, Sheeple!" Maybe ConsumptionPlus?
Boy, Brokeback Mountain really slipped down the memory hole like a greased pig, eh?
I was prepared to hate this. The Goodnight Loving is the kind of band name that makes me contemplate violence. It's nonsensical, fey, and dull at the same time. And their description hardly improves the impression:
the Milwaukee quartet takes on a musical time warp to beachy ‘60s garage pop, with twangy guitar riffs, psychedelic organs and vocal harmonies.
In other words, they sound like the Beach Boys. Which is good, as its been several minutes since I reflected on how the Beach Boys are easily the least interesting Important Band from the 60's.
And true to form, most of their mix-tape selections are irretrievably middlebrow. Linda Ronstadt belongs nowhere outside of my mom's dusting record collection. Thin Lizzy is Rush for meatheads. Thomas Function has a name that causes the phrase "bowel movement" to appear in my head, and surprise, surprise, the song is called "Filthy Flowers." As the kids say, FAIL.
And yet. When he sais that people who don't like Born In The U.S.A. are terrorists, I'm with him. When he shouts out Link Wray's "Hidden Charms," I salute. And their songs?
"Look pal, you can want a suburban home all you want. Unless I see a 20% down payment and a credit history, you won't get lent the price of a Reese's Big Cup.
Though if you run to the store and get me a few of those, I might be willing to negotiate that percentage a few points."
The following artists have Top 25 discs on Amazon as I write:
Eminem (Stealing the Blues is Business, and Business is Good)
Iron Maiden (Dude! Most Triumphant!)
Brian Wilson (Apparently, we aren't quite full up on crazy yet)
John Mellencamp (I once thought that Cougars don't like him, either. I was apparently wrong)
Sheryl Crow (Is it just me, or does she look more like Butt-Head every album?)
Los Lobos (Back from the 80's and hungry, hungry like the wolf!)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (The Rolling Stones of New Wave ride again)
Gov't Mule (The Rolling Stones of Jam bands ride again)
The Black Crowes (The Rolling Stones of their tepid imaginations ride again)
The Kidz Bop Kids (Because all that keeps a Katy Perry song like "California Gurls" from being age-appropriate is an infinitesimal shift in vocal pitch)
17. Echo & the Bunnymen -- Songs to Learn and Sing
In my library/office, where I compose these deconstructions, I have a small paperback edition of Verse by John Updike, published in 1965, which I paid a pittance for in my favorite secondhand books & music store a few years ago. Every now and again, I flip through it idly, seeking knowledge and understanding, and finding only cleverness. For John Updike was a clever poet who poetry says clever things. A brief example, from A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects:
Apple
Since Time began, such alphabets begin With Apple, source of Knowledge and of Sin My child, take heart: the fruit that undid Man Brought out as well the best in Paul Cezanne
You see what I mean. The poem doesn't so much enhance my understanding as flatter it, with the wink that of course I know who Paul Cezanne is, and if I can't quite place his art, I remember him as an Important Artist that Educated People know about, so I assume that he painted apples. Damned witty, Wilde!
Will someone please tell me what version of "Tobacco Road" that was at the end of the episode? All those TV critics keep mentioning the song's name but not who's singing it. There's about 15 versions on iTunes right now. Help a brother out!
The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.
I should probably stop wailing on the girl. That "Born Free" video really got under my skin somehow.
But something about Echo and the Bunnymen has defied giving me a hook to write about, and I've had other projects looming. You know how it is.
Here's Album-a-Week Talking about the XX album that everyone's all gaga over:
Negative space, purposeful hesitation, simplicity and raw awkward understated talent are what make this album brilliant. Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim and Jamie Smith have birthed a masterful and original debut.
I suppose that's true. To me it sounds like a band sitting in it's bathtub and farting. But I haven't been in the most creative mood of late.
[A new design on a struggling blog merits a new feature. So from time to time, Genre Confusion will feature Genre Breakdowns, an explanation of why various "genres" of popular music exist, and why they shouldn't exist. Herewith is the first entry, one near and dear to my heart.]
All right, trendsobbers, it's time to spike your hair, rip your shirts, and unlearn everything you have learned about what makes rock n'roll good. We're going to jump into the most unfunky, amateurish, and loudmouthed subspecies of rock ever to lay claim to popular imagination. Behold, Punk Rock.
1. Where the Name Comes From
The word "punk" is of indeterminate origin, and had a dual meaning in early American culture. In the first place, it referred to any prepared substance that will smolder when ignited, so that it may be used as tinder, to light firewood, etc. This had a connotation of something rotten that could be used. In the second place, and as early as 1596, it denoted a harlot or prostitute, and in prison culture referred to those on the ahem, bottom. By the early 20th century referred to a young hoodlum or troublemaker, often an associate of an older criminal.
The musical movement focused on the troublemaker aspect and largely ignored the homosexual undercurrents (although it was the first movement in rock to be even remotely gay-friendly). As Legs McNeil of the influential Punk Magazine put it:
The word "punk seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked -- drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side.
Somewhere along the way, this tiny, curly-haired white boy from Goditscold, Minnesota became the Voice of a Generation, when such a title meant something beyond achieving a certain level of music-industry investment. Well before the Beatles promised them endless youth or the Rolling Stones gave them a window on their darkness, Bod Dylan enshrined in the Baby Boomers their founding myth; that they were righteous, that the world was going to shift into their hands without effort, by the aligning of some cosmic alarm clock. Hunter Thompson called it "that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or on theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautifulwave . . . ."
And there more or less, lies the reason I cared not a whit about Bob Dylan for the longest time; that sense of inevitable irrelevance to anyone born after 1960. I missed that high and beautiful wave; and have since seen little in it high or beautful. Just because I can dig on Cream's thundering romanticism doesn't mean I'm buying into the notion that sex and drugs and raucous music were something my parent's generation invented. Rather, like Howdy Doody and Social Security checks, it was something provided for them, and they claimed it as theirs.
A few months ago I shot a quick dart of snark at Sri Lankan-born rapper MIA over her intentionally-infamous "Born Free" video. I did so without a whole lot of knowledge of anything about her other than her popularity amongst the hipsters, and Andrew Earles' tart dismissal of her:
It’s amazing the lengths to which music consumers, makers and critics will go to avoid appearing—gasp—racist. If the Sri Lankan-born M.I.A. had instead hailed from Tulsa, Okla., with the exact same music in tow, well, she would still be there right now. I call it TV On The Radio Syndrome: If they were white, one-eighth of the press and attention would’ve come their way. Music critics are terrified of facing this fact. M.I.A. provides lazy listeners with an easy multicultural accessory, the equivalent of traveling through India by way of seeing The Darjeeling Limited.
And so I would have let the matter rest, had not Ace of Spades linked the NY Times' skewering of her radical pretensions. Which he goes on to lambaste:
Basically, M.I.A.'s rule seems to be that if you're talking about her being a terrorist as if it's a chic, fashionable, daring, awesome thing -- i.e., as a good thing -- then she is a terrorist, precisely as she herself often claims. But if you're saying it's a bad thing to be a wannabe terrorist jocksniffer, then she's not, and you are just being an unfashionable dolt who doesn't understand her sly humor.
After which, he links to the following (Content Warning: Real corpses and violence):
There's a whole swath of music that came out in the decade past that I cannot relate to in any way. I fundamentally don't "get it." Most of it falls under the rubric of "indie" rock or pop. Now, I am aware, as is anyone who's ever used the word "indie" in any piece of writing about music for the last fifteen years, that "indie" doesn't mean anything specific. It's an umbrella term that describes music bubbling up from the so-called "underground" (the pop culture's minor leagues). In this way, it's basically short for "independent" and can cover a wide variety of sounds (for purposes of clarity, I'm not going to get into the fact that the original "independent" labels, like Atlantic Records, were those that lacked their own distribution channel). And that's all perfectly fine.
14. Dick Dale -- The King of Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale and His Del-Tones
Somewhere out there, beneath the clear moonlight, some kid is looking at this disc for the first time in his uncle's CD collection and asking himself, "What's a Del-Tone?"He is afraid that there is no answer, and begins to wonder if he can ever relate to something when he has no frame of reference to it. Someone, somewhere, must have known what a Del-Tone was at some point. Someone must have thought that it was a good idea to name a band that at some point. But, as regular viewers of Mad Men know, then the Sixties happened, and we were left, like the Simpletons of a post nuclear-apocalypse, hunting for meaning amid the ruins of a culture that made sense.
I first heard Dick Dale the way the rest of you did, five minutes into Pulp Fiction, my mind blown by the juxtaposition of blistering surf guitar, Tarantino's screwball-comedy-esque dialogue, and the threat of impending violence. The first ten seconds of "Misirlou" (which means...?) shows up the the Beach Boys, and the Byrds, and the Doors, and any other California rock group for the posers they are.
"Um, do you want me to touch you to verify that you're sick? Because you seem pretty sure of it. I'm willing to take your word, if you know what I mean."
When we were kids, my brother and I would make fun of Eric Claption, and our dad for presumably liking him (Dad had a Clapton Greatest Hits, but preferred early Elton John and Grand Funk and such). We did this without having really heard Clapton, in the fashion of juveniles everywhere: we made fun of him because he was old, and a honky, and had the kind of name that a bank executive or CPA might have.
Later on, when my brother actually sat down and learned to play guitar, he came to a 180 on this position, and briefly went through a period where Clapton was the man, coinciding with a period of digging the Beatles. I never went through this period, preferring always Jimmy Page to Clapton, and I’ll have loads to say about this when I get to my Zeppelin collection.
In a lot of ways, Johnny Cash was just like Elvis. Both were sons of the Mississippi Delta; both grew up poor as dirt; both wandered in to Sun Records in Memphis in the middle of the 1950's hungry and talented; both achieved international fame and became legends in their own time. Up until 1968 or so, their career arcs show suprising similarity.
After that, they break apart to an almost perpendicular degree. The King's '68 Comeback ended up not re-vitalizing Elvis' career so much as eulogizing it nine years ahead of time. He sank down into drugs and debauchery and became just another sacrifice offered on the altar of Fame, apotheosized in mystic sightings and velvet portraits. Only now, 30 years after his death, are the cognoscenti prepared to take him seriously again.
"So, are you in favor of sex and violence, or opposed? Because the repetition of that lyric over and over again, it leaves room for either interpretation, friend."
...I never get tired of watching the South Park Goth Kids burn down the Hot Topic. I like it so much, it almost makes me want to listen to Goth music. But that's a genre, aside from some Misfits and Joy Division discs, that I haven't really checked out (and I don't think they count).
I won't make you wade through their list-by-numbers of the most 125 best records of the last 25 years. It's every record you'd expect to be there. The link goes directly to the No. 1. The commenters all hate it. It's designed to be annoying. Indeed, that's how these list consider themselves successful. If they'd just put Kid A or OK Computer in the top slot, like they'd really like to, no one would care. But if the list "starts a conversation" (i.e. invites flames from across the internet), then Spin has justified its online budget.
"No, no, no...you see, if you were a surfer, you'd have a surfboard, not a skateboard. If you were trying to surf with a skateboard, you were more wasted than you realize."
Here's a link to Album-A-Week Blog, my latest twitter buddy, while I absorb the Johnny Cash Box Set. We've nerded-it up over LCD Soundsystem, and he likes the Pixies:
The lyrics are rough and informal. They, like the music, bounce between stories and statements making the lyrics slightly hard to follow. It doesn't really matter though because they flow with the staccato nature of the music. Their shared lack of unity creates an unexpected cohesiveness.
...or I've finally read enough of his blog to get it. I mean, the recycled Cracked list of Failed Fast-Food Mascots is funny enough (scroll down to find it), but the Record-Store Day takedown is pretty epic, especially coming from a guy whose entire schtick revolves around being able to direct disdain at 7" records that most of us will never see:
I’m especially jazzed about the History of Maverick Records 18LP box set, the one-sided 10″ by Les Claypool & the Three-Mile Island Prosthetic Antelope Vagina Recovery Group, the set of 4 hot-garbage-colored 7″s by Surface-to-Air Prairie Dog, and the reissue of Photo-Collage & the Senior Projects’ timeless “WTF…My Portfolio Ruptures For You” on freshly-paved parking lot-colored 12″ (one-sided and etched)...
I mean, "Prosthetic Antelope Vagina Recovery Group"? That's just funny.
Here's who's sitting comfortably in Amazon's Top 25:
James Taylor and Carol King (Hope she knows how to duck)
Natalie Merchant (Never have so many bought so much for 10,000 Maniacs)
The Cast of Glee (four, count 'em, FOUR discs in the top 25. I can't imagine something I'd be less likely to buy)
The New Pornographers (who rely on close readings of smut, irrespective of authorial intent)
Melissa Etheridge ("Fearless Love," eh? I wonder what that refers to...)
The Deftones (Music by 2001. Album Cover by 1986.)
Toni Braxton (answering the long-asked equation: Whitney Houston - Amy Winehouse + Mariah Carey - Anyone interesting = ? )
Godsmack (never understood whether God is doing the smacking or being smacked. I suspect both.)
The Rolling Stones (with an album that was first released in 1972, and is not actually available for another two weeks. Whoever negotiated their deal with the Devil earned a bonus.)
"Yeah, those record companies, they like to release singles. Kind of what they do. I mean, I get why you're mad, but why you thought CBS Records was going to be an artist-oriented organization is beyond me. This isn't exactly Dischord we're talking about."
"See, it seems to me that you do know what you want, this being to destroy passersby, but since I haven't seen you, you know, do that, I'm going to have to conclude that you don't know how to get it."
Knowing what you want is usually a lot more exciting than having no idea at all.
Capitalism as a terrible boyfriend.
The best LCD Soundsystem songs tap into the ineffable.
The Liars are the kind of punk band that makes people think of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.
Robert Pollard just put together together an appealing tune and song structure with a gentle emotional epiphany that comes across as earnest and true, but he's just phoning it in.
"Peacebone" is the worst title for an amazing song, ever.
A line like "an obsession with the past is like a dead fly" doesn't make sense, and it totally does.
Although Fol Chen creates danceable pop music, they don't feel they belong in that genre.
To enjoy a Phosphorescent song requires alcohol and loose gravity.
An accordion lends a song a peppy oompah, yet not so much that precludes the woozy sentimentality or gentle enthusiasm that allows the song to be blown off course by some light springtime wind.
When it comes to taste, we're all amphibious: We can keep our feet in different places, enjoying different things. Get people talking together, though-- put us in some sort of context-- and you start noticing desires, sometimes collective ones. It's never as simple as a particular sound or trend. But it can be a mood or sensibility you're drawn to in lots of things-- like the kind of glowy, stoned escapism you might get from chillwave, disco edits, breezy Scandinavian pop, woozy L.A. hip-hop, or any number of other places. Or a sudden craving for metal and noise or something that feels sick. Or the search for something "smarter," or more aggressive, or more adult, or more political. Gravitating to the reptile instead of the boring old fish happens when one kid decides to dress more like this and less like that, and another kid's attracted to hanging out with these people instead of those.
It's beyond refreshing to read something that talks about what we want in terms of what we actually want instead of how we've been told to want it. Which itself folds into the theme, so read the whole thing.
Mad music acquisition has punctured the otherwise orderly progression of Rating the CD's. Here's what's come my way:
The aforementioned Teenage Head by the Flamin' Groovies, which will probably end up in Category 1.
The aforementioned Pure Mania by the Vibrators, which will probably end up in Category 4.
XX by XX (easy to remember, ain't it?)
Transference by Spoon
The aforementioned Johnny Cash Box Set, Legend
Now, I've got my review of Disraeli Gears about 50% done, enough so that another afternoon's work will be sufficient. And the Box Set doesn't fit in the CD tower with the rest of Category 1 stuff. But What else am I supposed to do? I'm not going to cull away a new category for greatest hits and the like, and I'm going to have to review it at some point. So I'm just going to have to review Legend next, whenever I'm ready to do that.
In the meantime, what's out there I can snark about?
Been re-reading John Savage's excellent England's Dreaming, which tends to inspire to me to again return to the well of 70's punk and proto-punk. So today, I feeling like scrimming Amazon to pick up some new tunes. Haven't bought anything new since February; gave it up for Lent and then had to manage some money issues from the wife's change in employment and taxes. But now I've got the spare cash. So I want some Vibrators and Flamin' Groovies: cheap, obscure, and good.
There was a time when could never have imagined myself writing those words. There was a time when I considered McLaren the reason that punk died. IN this, I had largely absorbed John Lydon's version of events, which, as I came to understand, is a deeply conflicted one.
Then I watched the Classic Albums DVD for Never Mind the Bollocks, and damned if I didn't find the elder McLaren a hilarious and utterly likeable old coot (especially in comparison to the incessantly crochety Lydon). In fact, I went so far in the opposite direction that I wrote this about Lydon in the earlier iteration of this blog:
Johnny Cash is the Country Crossover King, the Miles Davis of the Genre. People who run from Country like it bore Bubonic AIDS still dig Johnny Cash. Kids who wouldn't know Hank Williams from Willie Nelson still think he's the bees knees. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that he got his start as part of the Sun Records rockabilly revue in the mid-50's; Cash never lost that boom-chika-boom R&B that highlights his early records, that cross between the plain rural folk of Country and a more percussive urban music.
A week from Saturday. I am excited. My plan is to hit up the Soundgarden in Baltimore. There's some stuff I really really want, and my plan is to photoblog the day's events.
As a general rule, I don't bother with side-projects. There's a particular alchemy of a band that I dig, and one or more members stepping out of the idiom is usually less a serious artistic statement that a documentary of down-time or a plateful of esoteric noodling disquised as an off-shoot of more popular material. Jack White is the exception that proves the rule; as he constantly drums into our media awareness, Jack doesn't have side projects. He just belongs to three different bands.
Julian Cascablancas, on the other hand, is not the first choice for a side-project that I had to just run out and buy. Unlike White, who draws off a seemingly endless supply of energy and passion to preach long and loud for all things rock n' roll, Cascablancas effuses ambiguity towards everything he touches, and has ever since the Strokes sliced "New York City Cops" from Is This It in the wake of 9/11. Critics have delved deep into his vocal performances (Here's Spin making no sense about First Impressions of Earth, after doubling-down on Room on Fire), but he remains opaque, as though keenly aware that he's putting himself, his bandmates, and his audience on, and not knowing why.
I give a lot of crap to the music trend mags, and they deserve it. So long as this blog stands, I will continue to do so, even if, as I have admitted, I am something of a hypocrite in doing so.
But there is a place that is worse than all of these, and for entirely different reasons. It's not bad because it's essentially a clearing-house for music advertisements, however cleverly disguised, or because its hipsterism basks in the so-five-minutes-ago that all hipsterism basks in.
Having slagged poor Pitchfork and Magnet enough of late, I thought to return to Filter and see what suckitude I could find there. Instead, I find serendipity: a free giveaway of turntable & records.
I mean, I've already got a turntable (two, actually), and already have It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back on CD, and am not super interested in any of the rest save Pavement and Bad Brains, but still. Free. Expletive. Vinyl. I'm so excited, I'm creating an all new blog tag.
In response to those failures, Spencer & Co. have returned to the basics for Plastic Fang: two guitars, a bag full of riffs, and frequent interjections of "Blues Explosion!" Never mind the tiny fact that the band's gimmick, if tired in the mid-nineties, is downright comatose these days. Nobody seems to have informed JSBX that the world's music warehouse has become overstocked on pale-faced blues, with the White Stripes, etc. improving the sound by keeping things quick and raw while dispensing with the ironic wink.
Dirty Shirt Rock 'n' Roll surveys the years between their 1992 debut and 2002's Plastic Fang. Unlike the consistently name-checked and beloved Pavement, another Matador band with a new retrospective in stores, the Blues Explosion seem ripe for re-evaluation. The early-2000s garage rock revival and the success of the White Stripes have given us a new context to hear these disarrayed blues-rock excursions, which similarly peel back the layers to get to rock's core elements.
Now, I could go through a few more paragraphs of dudgeon, explaining that I always rather liked Plastic Fang, but I'm saving that for my CD ratings. So I'll give Pitchfork the same shrift I gave Spin: They're a Bunch of Whores.
I didn't get the last Dead Weather album, even though I'm a fan of Jack White in general and Alison Mosshart in particular. I did, however, buy their first single on 45 on Record Store Day, and I have dug it on repeated listenings. So when the news comes down the pike that There's a new album, I am both impressed, intrigued, and slightly worried.
Impressed, because White just keeps pumping out the product. This is the lesson Beck learned to climb his way back to relevance: three albums in three years. You're a musician, make music. Keep throwing it out there and the public is bound to like some of it. I concur.
Intrigued, and slightly worried, by the concept and cover art. I do hope that White hasn't decided to go political on us, or if he has, he's going to be slightly more nuanced than musicians usually are. But the Klan-ish imagery suggests he's going to go all Olbermann on us, and then I might have to stop being a fan.
Whatever I was doing in 1994 (graduating high school, working at Taco Hell, beginning college, etc), I wasn't listening to Jeff Buckley's Grace. Or much of anything else, to be honest; I approached the rhapsodized early-90's music scene with equal parts attraction, confusion, and mockery. My big purchase that year was Green Day's Dookie (on cassette, so it won't appear in this retrospective). I never even heard of the guy for nearly twelve years; when Spin put him on their Top 100 Albums of the 20 years they'd been in existence. I liked the cover art, which reminded me of a more grownup Sid Vicious, I liked the name, so I checked it out. And I didn't know what to make of it.
Every time I've listened to it since, I've had the same reaction. It certainly defies categorization, or even adjectivization. I want to call it Operatic Rock, by which I mean nothing like Rock Opera. I want to call it Dream Pop. I want to call it the Perfect Album to Take a Nap To, but I've never taken a nap to it.
The first time I heard Blur was sometime in college, during their Parklife phase, and I responded to them with active nausea. For some reason "Girls and Boys" was the most irritating song I heard that year, and I had no problem with making my feelings on this subject well known to any of my friends who were Blur fans. I'm still not a super-fan of the song; there's something in that rubber-band bass that just triggers the gag reflex, to say nothing of that wretched "always should be someone you really love" line, which can't decide if it's being cheekily naive or ironic. But where once was loathing has come now a kind of quiet understanding, if only because I endured far worse in the long dark rut of late-90's glam-disco sloppy-seconds.
Because I'm not that into "indie" music, I don't know much about Joanna Newsom. I've heard the name, sure, scattered about the mags like so much hipster detritus, but never bothered to listen. The name does not excite me and I've other things to do.
So it's something that Nitsuh Abebe, inaugurating Pitchfork's "Why We Fight" feature, draws me into an analysis of the elbow-throwing and hyper-criticism of the music world that centers on Newsom. The theme runs universal, I think, fandom puts pressure on artists to meet ever-rising expectations while limiting the range in which the artist can act on them. A typical band fan wants every record to sound like the one he/she fell in love with, and yet be different. The impossibility of this diminishes its ubiquity not one jot.
Besides, we want pop stars to be oversized and perverse-- often we want them to think they're more special than us. My question, though, is this: Don't we want the same level of imagination and confidence from indie acts? And if so, why do a lot of us seem slightly wary about the possibility? Why celebrate pretense and bold gestures in pop music, but get weirdly skeptical of them in the indie world? It's as if we've reached the point where one long-running indie value-- the idea that the performers are a lot like the audience-- has started eating up a much more interesting one: that indie can be a realm that embraces oddity and strangeness. This is the funny predicament of a lot of talk about modern indie. It's as if the audience doesn't think of itself as very interesting, and is skeptical of any band that comes out of its midst thinking it's any better. (Especially if people, somewhere outside of the indie world, seem to agree.) Successful, self-conscious strangeness in the mainstream is a triumph; the same thing in this fringe genre is, for some reason, sometimes considered pretentious, self-satisfied, laughable, overstepping one's station.
This sounds exactly like the problem that punk rock had/has: the grooves are so well worn, the visual and audio expectations so determined in the word "punk" that it's impossible to push the envelope without becoming something else, and thereby losing the audience. I'm as guilty as anyone else; most of what gets called "melodic punk" sounds overwrought and dull to my ears, while what gets called "77-style" sounds like a tedious copy of other bands work. There's something of inevitability to this process; rock music is deliberately amateurish and there's only so much you can do with 12-bar structure and pentatonic solos.
So maybe the answer is recognizing the un-originality of this and embracing the repitition, or at least, not being surprised by it. I'm rather moving in this direction myself; there's no pleasure in telling people "This was better 20 years ago, when it was __________" except as sharing _____________ as something cool. We don't need to reject the Raveonettes to save the Jesus & Mary Chain.
Overall, though, I'm intrigued by this series. Music meta-criticism is rather long overdue.
Tri Angle will exist to perform a genre with the working title of "drag" What's "drag" sound like, you say? Well...
It's like a witching-hour vision of Cocteau Twins dream pop, meshed with the roar of early-60's British skiffle and the soundtrack to a particularly angsty Gregg Araki film full of Gen X shoegazer atmospherics and industrial beats, sieved gently through Ukrainian disco-folk, the good kind, brought bang up to the date by the influence of raw hip-hop mutations like chopped and screwed and juke, at which point we take these bits, these sonic doodles if you will, and we play them raw over muted clips of old Laurence Welk or Sonny & Cher clips, while we strap the listener in and make him watch, Clockwork-Orange style. We're not joking about that. We've got the basement all set up, and there's a user-agreement that comes with the download, CD, or LP. The effect is a major drag, and the great thing about the name of the genre is that we're not intending that ironically. Irony is dead anyway.
That's not actually what the person said. I added a bit. See if you can guess where.
Lists are tedious. They just are. Whatever you include is wrong. Whatever you disinclude is wrong. It's why I don't write them. The X most Blah of Whatever format will never ever appear on the Notion. Unless I change my mind.
That said, sometimes it can be done right, and over at Big Hollywood, Ben Shapiro show the best way to write a list feature: extensively. First, he issued a 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time that had a few directors I quite like (Scorcese? Really?). Then in response to the obvious response, he put his money where his mouth was and gave us the Directors He Liked, including explaining why certain guys (it's a sausage-fest in here, ladies, sorry) didn't make the list. I don't know that I'm about to go rent the movies of William Wyler, but I'm appreciating the fullness of his thought.
Jason Pierce was a 32-year-old man when he decided it was a novel idea to present a limited number of 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space CDs in fake prescription-pill packaging. An 11th-grader blasted on Lortabs for the first time doesn’t have ideas like this; he has better ones....For some reason, telling the ugly truth about this aggressively mediocre outfit is the music-criticism equivalent of telling dead-baby jokes in a Planned Parenthood waiting room.
Matthew Perpetua, on the other hand, finds him damn fine:
Is there anyone else who can self-flagellate with as much elegance, wit, and grandiosity as Jason Pierce? “Come Together” is a masterpiece of over-the-top self-loathing, a thunderous mass of shrieking guitars, blaring fanfare, and gospel bombast all at the service of a scathing lyric sung by Pierce in the first person, tearing himself apart for being a junkie.
And me? I'd have to listen to the guy to make a descision, and I don't want to, because I hate the band name. At some point I'm going to have to go into the logic behind my band name contempt process, but for the nonce, I'm just going to make a tag out of it.
The author of this article on rythmn, melody, and pop music knows a hell of a lot more than I do. Or for that matter, most people who consider themselves "music" journalists. And he makes the argument that music is a moral force, that it is the expression of the soul. And as such, it ought to be submitted to judgment.
And even if we don’t forbid musical idioms by law, we should remember that people with musical tastes make our laws; and Plato may be right, even in relation to a modern democracy, that changes in musical culture go hand in hand with changes in the laws, since changes in the laws so often reflect pressures from culture. There is no doubt that popular music today enjoys a status higher than any other cultural product. Pop stars are first among celebrities, idolised by the young, taken as role models, courted by politicians, and in general endowed with a magic aura that gives them power over crowds. It is surely likely, therefore, that something of their message will rub off on the laws passed by the politicians who admire them. If the message is sensual, self-centered, and materialistic, then we should not expect to find that our laws address us from any higher realm than that implies.
I cannot argue. I freely admit that most of the music we listen to is deliberately primitive; it appeals to the animal instincts and not to the heart. Most of the music that appeals to the heart, in fact, bores me. For me, music is not a complement to my life, but a vacation from it. What that means about me, and modern music, will require serious thought.
In 1970, under the auspices of reviewing Fun House by the Stooges, Lester Bangs emitted a prophecy that I have quoted several times, including somewhere on this very blog:
Personally I believe that real rock n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.
While the argument about whether that "new free music" ever arrived (hip hop doesn't quite seem to qualify) may continue until the seven seals are opened, the rest of the prediction has turned out to be cannily accurate. Every decade rock finds a way to re-invent itself, and every decade it does so by picking up and polishing off an older style and gussying it up with some more reworkings, until its hard to tell what era a band really hails from.
Nothing dies a crueler death than trends. Bloc Party was hipped to the nines back in '05 by the cognoscenti, and has now all but vanished from their consciousness (who here remembers the laudatory reviews of Intimacy?). Which means it's now perfectly fine for me to get into them. Post-Punk revivalism may have had its hour in the moon already, but the techno-waves ridden by Lady GaGa and the ease with which Yeah Yeah Yeahs have souled their soul to electronica mean there's always a place to go, and go back to.
So I'll probably thank my friend that reminded me of them come easter time if I end up liking them.
poptartssucktoasted makes a good point about third albums in their review of a band I'll probably never listen to, and certainly not in the next month or so (gave up extraneous spending and video games for Lent):
The third record is an absolutely pivotal time in a band’s career. For two records you have steadily attempted to define yourself and build up an audience for you music and that third record is when bands tend to make it or break it for good. Either you become a lifer and get to make music for the rest of your life or you fall into reclusion resurfacing only when there is a call for a reunion.
A fellow might take an opportunity to look at third albums in major bands over the last twenty years or so and see if this rule works out. This would take a lot of work. I'm probably not up to it. But it's nice to think about while I get around to my next CD review.
Just about weekly, Magnet Magazine considers the seminal artists of alternative/underground music and picks five of their more well-known tunes to call Overrated, and five others to call Underrated, in a feature they call the Over/Under (due to the well-known connection between music and gambling). These picks are usually thought-out and well-argued, with what should be more than enough self-directed irony to make the medicine go down, and the invariable effect on the magazine's readership is analogous with pissing in their faces and telling them its raining. Below, the Over/Under on the whole enterprise.
::The Most Overrated Part of the Over/Under Feature 1. The Overrated Songs (Whatever Year This Started)
The essential argument goes like this: the most popular songs of hip artists are rather more liked than they should be, because they obscure other songs through the insidious practice of -- stay with me now -- being more popular. That such can only be underlied by one of two premises: 1) music fans, a.k.a "sheeple," know fuck-all about what is good; or 2) music critics are confused by the meaning of the word "popular"; is lost on the writers, and they must go to greater and greater apologetics every time they slag a beloved track. The poor fellow who penned the Nirvana Over/Under, bowed under with the obviousness of putting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at the top of the Overrated list actually utters the words "What am I supposed to do here?" (I don't know, write something you don't desire mercy for?) Way too much agita derives from these selections, which, as the editors point out, are inherent to the nature of the feature. I mean, it's not like some obscure song that failed to grasp popular imagination but was relentlessly hipped by the music literati could ever be considered overrated.
::The Most Underrated Part of the Over/Under Feature
1. The Underrated Songs (Yadda, Yadda)
About half of the objections to Over/Unders in the comment section are vengeance upon the writers taking the form of telling them that the songs they offer as better are in fact crap. A typical example, from the aforementioned Nirvana Over/Under:
And seriously, Marigold? Give me a break. That song was terrible. Why not pick some other totally obscure song that no one ever heard unless you were me at age 16 buying bootlegs for $49.00 from) the local head shop.
This attitude strikes me as wrong for a couple of reasons. For one, obscure and neglected songs are the reason we have music critics. It's the same reason you flip through your friend's record collection. If I didn't occasionally let my one housemate try to turn me on to the Dandy Warhols back in 1999, I never would have rented Dig!, never heard of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and never would have bought My Bloody Underground upon Filter's recommendation, and would thus not have what has become one of my favorite albums. Turning away knowledge, any knowledge, is inherently stupid and self-defeating. And while nothing is easier for a critic to write than "Hey, check out this deep track!" (except, of course, "your favorite songs suck"), there's also nothing as potentially rewarding to heed.
The Official Vatican Newspaper releasing a Top Ten Albums List is bizarre, and it is not bizarre. It wasn't an official pronouncement of the Pope, it was some editors at the newspaper with space to fill, something fun to brighten up a section. In my days as an editor of a college newspaper, this kind of thing happened all the time. And I can't really fault them for putting Revolver at the top slot. Still, one can't shake the impression that this is worlds colliding, which seems to be happening a lot around the Vatican these days.
80+ years old, and takes a tackle like a champ. Best Pope ever.
But, as the video shows, everything will go on as before.
I like the 1950's. And when I say I like the 1950's, I'm not talking about poodle skirts or leather jackets or pompadours or Elvis. Nor is this about some bygone era when men were men, women women, children seen rather than heard, and everyone had a steady job and the Ten Commandments tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. That world only existed on television, and it was meant for children. Actual grown-ups did not need a bunch of beret-sporting hobos with track-marks on their arms and delusions of literacy to tell them that the world was more complicated than The Donna Reed Show let on. So let's just bury the cliche, shall we?
Imagine, if you will, a universe in which the Ramones actually had serious commercial viability, and did not require an endless touring schedule to make a living. Imagine a hip young manager took over the Ramones and made them into pop stars, and that the band went along with this, and basically turned themselves into the Jonas Brothers, perhaps dumping the drummer and replacing him with an amiable, technicolor-named journeyman in the process.
Then imagine that they became the biggest band in the world, provoking media insanity on two sides of the Atlantic, and every band wanted to be them, and everything they recorded turned to gold. Then imagine that they tired of this, and worked over a few records to transform themselves into Bends-era Radiohead, without sacrificing a jot of their sales. After this, they shifted again, to become Pink Floyd, and when the run was over, an odd halfway split between the Kinks and Fugazi. So that's Ramones to Jonas Brothers to Radiohead to Pink Floyd to Kinks/Fugazi. Improbable. Impossible. But it happened. That's basically what the Beatles did.
Magnet's Put Up Your Dukes feature seems awfully clever the first few times you read it: every argument about music you've ever had with your one friend that you never agree on anything with. Then you realize that it's every argument about music you've ever had with your one friend that you never agree on anything with.
This is totally not staged.
But whatever, the pressure of knowing that your mag is fishwrap for Andrew Earles' column must be intense. What's drawn my attention and ire is the latest installment, in which the Matthews argue about whether Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme belongs in the category of Formerly Great Stars Who Can't Write A New Song Worth A Damn, sinkng into the Stygian depths with Stevie Wonder, Paul Weller, and Michael Jackson (yeah, I said it. I spoke ill of the dead. When you all stop pretending that he wasn't a laughinstock on the day that he died, I'll stop pointing it out). And in the course of this otherwise paint-by-numbers slapfight (Era Vulgaris sucks; no it doesn't; Drummers are important; no they aren't; etc.), both agree that Them Crooked Vultures is somehow bad.
Let me be fair; not bad, "disappointing," a judgement that lacks the courage of detail. I'm guessing that they expected the combined efforts of the Queens, Zeppelin, and Foo Fighters would sound like something other than psychedelic-flavored hard rock. Maybe they were expecting Pet Sounds? Paul's Boutique? Kind of Blue? Maybe this was supposed to re-invent the genre? I don't know, because they aren't saying, and no review of it is on the web site.
So yeah, I don't know what I'm even complaining about. Unless I'm complaining about that.
...apparently made a record. That should mean something, and I'm sure if I sat here long enough, I'd figure out what. I do know that I won't be making a great deal of effort to acquire or listen to it, as the description indicates that it's going to be forgotten as soon as it drops. I can practically read the forced critical interest.
Andrew WK was one Red Eye last night, and he was funny. I don't normally go in for glam of any kind, barring some early New York Dolls, but I have a hard time believing that a fellow who's funny is also a shit musician. This is as illogical as it is compelling.
Besides, his new disc is called '55 Cadillac. What's not to love?
I've made a long habit of not particularly liking the Beatles very much, mostly out of sheer obstinate contrariness. Something about the media force-feeding of this long-gone group with only two members still above ground down the collective throats of those too young to remember them has always made me gag. It's easily the most galling manifestation of the Boomer Grief-Nostalgia Complex: every few years some corporate clown decides to repackage the same old songs we've heard a thousand times, cries "The Beatles!" and lets slip the dogs of Pavlov. Say what you will about the Rolling Stones, they at least have the decency to record some crappy new songs to summon us to hear the old ones.
So I used to make great show of denouncing the Fab Four with any one of the following epithets:
The FYE at the Waldorf mall is closing, and they were in full EVERYTHING MUST GO mode. 60% off on CD's, 70% off on other stuff. I got a cover for my Nano for about $2, and one for Wifey for another $2.50. As to the tunage:
Black Flag -- My War
Talking Heads -- Remain in Light
Julian Casablancas -- Phrazes for the Young
Modest Mouse -- We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
Indie music promises to be one of two things: either an aestheticaccomplished workout for the mind's ability to appreciate music, or a better mousetrap than mainstream sludge, rocking harder, being more danceable. The latter is the cachet of punk and electro; the former, the self-conceit of most of the un-listenable music of this decade.
A halcyon time existed in days of yore, when we all loved the Beta Band, equivalent to the period when Jack Black got second billing to John Cusack. It has passed. If pressed, I could summon the will to make myself buy whatever song that was in High Fidelity that made us sit back in awe of its masterful pop-ness, the song that birthed hipsterism as we know it. But then I might wonder why I wouldn't buy "Let's Get it On" for much the same reason. There's such a thing as being too complete in your collection.
All of which is prologue to and avoidance of discussing Astronomy for Dogs, by several reunited Beta Band members calling themselves The Aliens, because after two paragraphs of dull snark I can't think of any more apt description of this record than "boring." I got it free with my Magnet subscription two years ago because they were out of the Nick Cave album I really wanted, and I figured that at best it could inspire me to join the ranks of those who can say "Why, of course I have The Three EP's by the Beta Band. Don't You?" No such luck.
Oh, they're trying. This is the kind of disc that provokes It's-It's reviews: "It's Electro, It's Pop, It's Better Than Having Your Wang Smashed in the Door of a '79 Buick LeSabre Repeatedley While Listening to And Out Come The Wolves!" All kinds of vim and vigor romp gaily through the songs, and numerous genuflections to whimsy made by inserting "We are the Aliens...We are the Aliens..." into the holes of several tracks. But the effect, lying somewhere between "enh" and "huh?", does not warrant any more of my time.
23. The Good, The Bad & the Queeen -- The Good, The Bad & the Queen
