Talking Back to Punk Rock, #3

"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."

-The Clash, "Complete Control"

Talking Back to Punk Rock #2

"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."

-The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

Talking Back to Punk Rock, #1

(With a Tip of the Hat to Protein Wisdom)

"First of all, I'm not a ho. Second of all, we're not going anywhere until I get that breakfast I was promised. I don't care what the kids are doing."

-The Ramones, "Blitzkrieg Bop"

Things I Learned From Reading Fluxblog

This bears the earmarks of a continuing series:

• 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.

The Greatest Punk Rock Mix Tape Ever

And Two Fingers to you if you don't like it. I'm listening to it now, on my laptop, and it's awesome awesomeness defies excessive praise:

Why We Fight Returns:

This may be the best reason to read Pitchfork there is:

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.

Success leads to stagnation...

Mad music acquisition has punctured the otherwise orderly progression of Rating the CD's. Here's what's come my way:

1. The aforementioned Teenage Head by the Flamin' Groovies, which will probably end up in Category 1.
2. The aforementioned Pure Mania by the Vibrators, which will probably end up in Category 4.
3. XX by XX (easy to remember, ain't it?)
4. Transference by Spoon
5. 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?

My Wife Loves Me...

...I had the Johnny Cash Box Set waiting for me at work this morning. Awesome.

And the Vibrators and Groovies arrived yesterday. A week of new music! Huzzah!

I Feel Like Buying Stuff

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.

RIP Malcom McLaren

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:

Rating My CD's: I Hear the Train A-Comin'...

11. Johnny Cash -- At Folsom Prison

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.

Record Store Day is Coming!!

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.

Irony sells, man.

Rating My CD's: Somewhere Along the Way

10. Julian Cascablancas -- Phrazes For The Young

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.

The Worst Music Site on the Internet

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.