Genre Confusion is Dead

Future updates on all subjects will occur at andrewjpatrick.com. If wish to know why, go here. Or just go to the new blog and check out that action.

It will remain here, and provide much ammunition for anyone who wishes to call me a hack writer desperately envious of his betters.

But otherwise ...

The Black Keys are Back. And Presumably, Still Black.

Under the Radar:

Each song is its own piece of soulful groove. Hurling forward at full-throttle, this is The Black Keys' most direct and consistent album yet. With the new audience the two have garnered from 2010's Brothers, expect to hear these songs on everything from car commercials to the nearly extinct rock radio. There isn't a bad song in the bunch, nor a moment to relax until you've ingested El Camino in full.

That sounds perfect, and indeed, exactly like what the album was promised: a full-on, rocked out stack of Clash-meets-Cramps stew. Only problem, and this is minor, is the album cover:

That is not an El Camino. That is a minivan (a '91 Dodge Grand Caravan, unless I miss my guess). And showing a picture of a minivan and deliberately mislabeling it an El Camino is about as funny as the generic labelling that accompanied Brothers. Which is to say, it's not all that funny at all.

Unless of course, it's some kind of trash-culture riff on how an El Camino is really just a glorified mom-mobile. In which case, they couldn't be more wrong. I like the look of the picture, and I like the lettering. But  I don't see how having an actual El Camino would not have made a better picture.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #16

"Do whatever you want; just stop calling me 'Mommy.' There's a fine line between goth-metal-punk, or whatever you are, and just being fucking weird."

- The Misfits, "Mommy, May I Go Out And Kill Tonight?"

Rating My CD's: That's How Strong My Love Is

50. Otis Redding -- The Very Best of Otis Redding


Otis Redding is awesome. This is known. Those who don't know it haven't really heard the man. Maybe they've heard "Sittin' By the Dock of the Bay," and are off-put by the whistling at the end. But they haven't heard "These Arms of Mine." They haven't heard the original "Respect" (Aretha was an ovarian interloper!). They haven't heard "Mr. Pitiful."

James Brown may be the Godfather of Soul, but Otis is Soul. Which makes no sense, because They were both around at the same time. But while James Brown had funk to spare and could get on the good foot for the big payback, Otis didn't need no purple cape to hold a crowd. Like Howlin' Wolf, Otis was all presence.

Pajamas Media's Generic Punk List

"So You Think You Hate Punk Rock? 5 Bands That Will Change Your Mind" sounds promising. It has precisely one band that most mainstream music fans haven't already heard of and associated with Punk Rock: Radio Birdman. The rest are the Damned, The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash. All of which are fine (with reservations on the Clash that I'll go into later), but hardly a fresh look at the (non) genre. I would have added instead:

• The Voidoids
• Television
• The Misfits
• The Buzzcocks

All of which are second-tier bands of slightly less renown, and all of which bring a slightly different element. And as Glen Reynolds points out, there's a lot of good ground to be covered in Proto-Punk like the MC5 or the Stooges. That may not be Iggy Pop in the picture atop the article, but it's someone actively copying him.

C for effort. F for execution.

This Rolling Stones Video is Pretty Cool...

But I'm going to do a better one for my Apologetics Class as an intro to reading The Screwtape Letters. Look for it sometime in the spring. Bit busy at present.

Rating My CD's: The Sound of the 90's

49. Radiohead -- The Bends


When the history of 90's rock is written, two bands will dominate it, bookends of the decade. The first band everyone wanted to be, and copied shamelessly. The second band everyone stood in awe of, and dared not imitate. Nirvana was the band that inaugurated the 1990's, and for many fans and musicians defined the sonic landscape of that decade. But by any objective standard, Radiohead owned that landscape, and expressed the zeitgeist for jaded critic and gushing fanboy alike.

For myself, I never much cared about Radiohead. I mean, we all heard "Creep" a hundred thousand million times back in the day, enough so that we began to sing along to it by sheer cultural osmosis. It hit the same sweet spot as "Comfortably Numb," allowing you to wallow in the melancholy that permeates late adolescence/young adulthood like water. But their titanic fin de siecle trilogy of albums -- OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac -- made no dent on my consciousness. To date, I still haven't listened to the last two.

The Earth Done Swallowed Me Up...

NOM NOM NOM

Radiohead review to follow later this week. Then, Otis Redding. And Then I can finally do R.E.M.!

There's Actually a Band Called We Were Promised Jetpacks

Magnet's long-delayed print issue arrived today.

Their letters page was blank (get it?), but in the Spin-esque mini-review section I found that We Were Promised Jetpacks has been around for 10 years.

Suddenly this decade seems entirely different.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #15

"Yeah well, I'm living on doppio espressos from Starbucks. Don't have to put nothing into hock to pay for 'em either. Advantage: Me."

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, "Chinese Rocks"

Rating My CD's: There's a Thin Line

48. Pretenders -- The Singles


I vividly remember the day I picked this up. It was late in the fall of 2001, and I was at Potomac Mills or one of those gigantoid malls with my folks. They were shopping for some manner of housewares, and I was shopping for music. I'd just started teaching and finished paid off my credit card debt. I was writing punk rock reviews for a now defunct web site. So I had disposable income and desire; the twin engines of capitalism.

This was back when a good-sized mall had two or three places to buy CD's. I wandered about with great abandon, but didn't find the kind of music I was looking for. CD versions of albums by first-generation punk bands were still kinda hard to come by at stores. But I had read John Lydon's autobiography Rotten, in which Chrissie Hynde figures prominently. So this was deemed an acceptable substitute for L.A.M.F. or Blank Generation.

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