Rating My CD's: I Never Cared

47. Pink Floyd -- Animals


Between 1976-1978, those bands of the 60's still surviving had to deal with the sudden rise of Punk. Each did so in a different way. Led Zeppelin tried to trade punches with the New Wave on Presence, an album whose very name seems to shout "Hey, we're still here!" The Rolling Stones flipped a contemptuous bird at the kids with Some Girls, a big sloppy drug-crazed funk-rock masterpiece. And Pink Floyd laughed at them from a great height, pinkies extended, with this record, which condemns even as it shrugs its shoulders.

I have long considered this to be among the more boring records Floyd ever put out. Listening to it with great determination over these past weeks has not changed that assessment. I hear a lo-fi acoustic nod to Punk here, but that's all I hear. Dogs, Pigs, Wings, whatever. It all flows together into one aural mush.

Others disagree. Over at Ground and Sky, a handful of Floydians praise it most praisingly. It's described as "a great disc, easily as good as Dark Side and Wish You Were Here," "their descent from the peak of the mountain," "the heaviest and harshest Floyd record." I suppose if Pink Floyd were my favorite band, I'd consider this album heavy and harsh, but they aren't so I don't. To be sure, there's an intensity to this music: that of a dog chasing its tail. If this album didn't have a famously bleak cover and obvious allusions to George Orwell's most famous book (besides 1984), no one would care about it. At best, it prefigures the thematic and musical ideas of The Wall; at worst, it fails badly enough to require the band to revisit those ideas.

Sometimes misery is exactly that.

Grade: C 

REM Breaks Up

The 90's are officially over.

Which is handy, as as soon as I finish with Animals, I'll be onto the boys from Georgia right quick. Or something.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #14

"Hey, yeah, clever metaphor, especially with the 1-2-3 thing. Only problem, and this is minor, is that nobody calls guns "repeaters" anymore. I mean, what the fuck is this, 1873?"

-Fugazi, "Repeater"

Rating My CD's: Remember When You Were Young

47. Pink Floyd -- Wish You Were Here

So, So you think you can tell

Heaven from Hell

Blue Skies from pain

Can you tell a green field

From a cold steel rail

A smile from a veil

Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade

Your heroes for ghosts?

Hot ashes for trees?

Hot air for a cool breeze?

Cold comfort for change?

And did you exchange

A walk-on part in the war

For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish

How I wish you were here

We're just two lost souls swimmin'in a fishbowl

Year after year

Running over the same old ground

What have we found?

The same old fears

Wish you were here

Rating My CD's: I'm Going to Knock You Into Next Week

46. Pink Floyd -- Meddle


I was hipped to this disc by one of my female housemates, when I asked for her favorite Floyd record. I instantaneously liked the fact that it wasnt Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall. At the time, I was only passingly familiar with either of them, but the 22-year-old me wanted very much not to run his plow through fields already well-furrowed. So for a while, this was my favorite Floyd record (before you ask, of course I own Dark Side and The Wall. But they're on vinyl, so I won't be rating them here).

Certainly, Meddle has a subtlety that the other records lack. Pink Floyd may or may not have been the proggiest of prog-rock bands, but at their noodliest they clung lived to a Go-Big-Or-Go-Home aesthetic. So the very non-operatic nature of a lot of these songs, the un-thematic-cycle of them, can throw listeners for a loop. Compared to Wish You Were Here, this is just a collection of songs. And not a mind-blowing collection of songs, at that. But there's a strange spirit to them all, that oddly binds them together without any lyrical or structural commonality (such as I have noticed).

Rating My CD's: Lime and Limpid Green

45. Pink Floyd -- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn


What I know about Syd Barrett can be summed up as follows: 1) he was Floyd's frontman in the making of this record, their first; 2) he went out of his mind, somewhat due to the copious amounts of acid he was dropping during the making of this record, their first; 3) he ceased being the front man soon after, and although the band never forgot him, he ceased to have any major part of the band after this record, their first.

So I'm not going to write about Barret. Yes, his story is sad, and yes, it can be argued that some kind of rock'n'roll genius was lost forever. So what? The greats burning out or fading away is an old tired script at this point. It's not interesting; it's not enlightening. It's just sad, and I'm not going to bother with it.

Because I also know that this record is one of the most self-consciously, determinedly, gloriously pretentious slabs of noise to escape from 1967. And that's saying something. This is the year of Moby Grape, of the Doors first record, of Sgt. Goddamn Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. And Floyd out-weirds them all, without even trying. Amid whatever was going on, this band threw everything but the kitchen sink out, and slipped halfway through, and somehow, even 40+ years removed from it's time and place, it still works.

Crazy Diamonds are Invited to Shine On

Today is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were, and so a fitting day to begin The Week of Floyd at Genre Confusion. In which, I shall do the following:

• Ponder the Insane Stupid Bloated Hippie Music that is Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• Pat myself on the back for owning Meddle
• Fulsomely Praise Wish You Were Here
• Scratch my head about Animals

For the nonce, enjoy this:

Rating My CD's: Grrrl Blues

44. Liz Phair -- Exile in Guyville


I don't have many female artists in my collection. I don't know why. I'm not conscious of any particular animus against female singers or songwriters. I like the way women sing. My wife sings beautifully at church, and she's not even in the choir.

But when it comes to women in pop music, I usually find myself underwhelmed to actively irritated. Bjork? Dork. Madonna? Don't wanna. Fiona Apple? Old Crabapple. And I can keep doing that.

Nor did the Riot Grrrl movement ever do anything for me. I'm sorry, but listening to ladies screech their victimhood while pretending to parody rock's macho stud postures is nowhere near as clever or transgressive as everyone seems to have thought.

Loutallica and The Insane White Posse

Okay, so Lou Reed and Metallica are doing an album. Fine. The guy behind Metal Machine Music hooking up with LarsCo should surprise no one. The album covers looks like something Tool left on the cutting-room floor, but whatevs. Good for them. Maybe it won't suck.

But Jack White cutting a song with the Insane Clown Posse? The news made me a little sad inside. And it's not because I consider ICP unworthy of the Hipster Sage of Nashville. The White Stripes are hardly cultivated. And it's not because I find ICP so repellent and loathsome that the very mention of their name inspires violence. Fat kids who can't read need music, too.

No, I find the ICP's self-conception completely at odds with what they actually do. If they were just another (c)rap-rock band from the sticks, then there would be nothing specifically objectionable about them. At the very least, they don't consider themselves sex gods like Fred Durst clearly does.

But ICP seems to think of themselves as artists, the leaders of a movement of the dispossessed, and speakers of a primal truth. They think that every thing they do, from their juvenile name on down, is terribly terribly clever. That annoys me more than any goofy makeup or sprayed Faygo.

But if you listen to the song, and you don't laugh, then there's probably something wrong with you. Because it's a cover of a Mozart song called "Leck Mich am Arsch" ("lick me in the ass," the German equivalent of "get stuffed"). Underground classical ditty about nothing? How can ICP not be perfect for that?

Insane Clown Posse - Leck Mich Im Arsch by Third Man Records