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.

I Like Max Tundra...

...and until Fluxblog quoted this from his Twitter...: (I'd re-tweet, but everything here goes to my twitter anyway)

Lady Gaga should perform a concert of wildly unpredictable, dazzling, psychedelic music whilst wearing drab, conventional clothing.

...I'd never heard of the chap. Now I think I shall check his music out.

MmmmmmmmFree Vinyl...

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.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Killed and Revived.

This is what I mean when I talk about the music industry double-helix:



Eight years ago, when the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion released Plastic Fang, Pitchfork had these words of encouragement:

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.

And now that they've got a greatest hits out, the kings of consistency appraise it thusly:

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.

The Third Man is a Fire Hose.

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.

This may not bode well, either.

Rating My CD's: Dream Brother

9.  Jeff Buckley -- Grace 

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.

Rating My CD's: WOO-HOO!

8. Blur -- Blur

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.

Guess Who's Still Alive, Part II

The following artists have Top 25 CD's on Amazon as we speak:

• Jimi Hendrix
• Sade
• Johnny Cash
• Jeff Beck
• K.D. Lang
• Peter Gabriel
• Ry Cooder
• Drive-By Truckers
• Gorillaz
• The Black-Eyed Peas

The last few are the only evidence that the last decade even happened. Unless you count Susan Boyle, and I don't want to.

Indie Hits the Wall

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.

Pitchfork Alerts Us

New Label Alert: Tri Angle

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.

The Greatest

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.

Opinions are Like Rocks. They're Everywhere, but You Can't Eat Them.

Andrew Earles hates Spiritualized and all things Jason Pierce, as he makes abundantly clear:

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.

Get Rythmn in your Melody

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.

Rating My CD's: Things Ain't Like They Used to Be, They're More So

7. The Black Keys -- Attack & Release

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.

Let's Get this Bloc Party Started

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.

The Tunes Roll On...

My next RMCD is in the pipe, but the busy has descended on me. By tommorrow I should have time to blog again.

The Third Album Hump

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.

Magnet's Over/Under: The Over/Under

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.

"King Rat" better than "Dance Hall"? Poser!

Ace Reviews "It Might Get Loud"

Slapfight in comments over which guitarist is the best ensues... I pretend to be above it all and then proceed to engage in it.

Rocking out with The Pope...

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.

Nikolai Broke the Zoom...

But apparently the Strokes will keep him anyway...



Here's hoping after four years everyone's willing to give them a chance again.

Rating My CD's: Around and Around

6. Chuck Berry -- The Great Twenty-Eight

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? 

I'm Having a ? and the Mysterians moment...

...over a band called Vietnam.



To buy or not to buy?

To indulge in the desire to swim vicariously through the mud of Woodstock, or to denounce the retro-hippie swill as retro-hippie swill?

I'll probably end up justifying it as part of my documentary on Insane Stupid Bloated Hippie Music that I'll never get around to writing.

And if you don't get the title, you need to read more Lester Bangs.

Rating My CD's: Relax, and Float Downstream...

 5. The Beatles -- Revolver

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.

Wait, I'm Not Supposed to Like This?

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.

Al Yankovic, Frances Bean Cobain, Other People....

...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.

The Wrong Reason

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?

Rating My CD's: They Won't See Me.

4. The Beatles -- Rubber Soul

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:

Light Blogging Today.

Due to some needed re-categorization of some of my discs, plus a variety of other scut-work.

The Modest Mouse I bought on Saturday is pretty darn good.

Music Fire Sale: A Winner Is Me.

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
• Liz Phair -- Exile in Guyville
• Alison Irahita -- Just Like You

The latter two were for the spouse. I swear.

All told, I spent about $50. Huzzah!

Rating My CD's: I Will Not Sell Five Copies

3. The Aliens -- Astronomy for Dogs

Indie music promises to be one of two things: either an aesthetic accomplished 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.

Grade: C

Rating My CD's: No, Walk This Way.

2. Aerosmith -- Toys in the Attic

Mainstream platinum album-sellers like Aerosmith that survive for more than ten years do so because at some point they've created something worth remembering, that draws from the most jaded critic the nod of satisfaction, that vinyl collectors and people who "like everything but country and rap" alike agree is classic rock (whatever that might mean). Whatever tedium they've cashed in on in recent years, Aerosmith met this criteria and earned the recognition of not sucking on their early albums.

Sure, their blues-inflected rock was, as Jon Savage put it in England's Dreaming, well past the initial point of inspiration, sure, even at their best, they made music best suited to getting drunk to. So what? Getting drunk is one of the human race's favorite activities; anything which enhances the joyous aspects of this and minimized miserable ones is to be commended. This is what the hipsters and haters refuse to get: not only is there wealth buried amidst the lowest common denominator, there's even merit in the mining of it.

As an example, Toys in the Attic, otherwise an unremarkable early 70's hard-rock disc, boasts "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion." Everyone who likes or doesn't like Aerosmith knows "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion." People who hate Aerosmith still like "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion." And well they should; these songs are an apotheosis of the genre: throbbing bass lines, slashing guitar, solid writing, and Tyler encapsulating every sneering horndog from Robert Johnson to Mick Jagger. You could bury these songs in a time capsule with the label "This Was Hard Rock" and leave it at that.

Two other tracks stand out. the title opener combines a pleasing rockabilly shuffle with some sharp production tricks, including some layered vocal fades, yielding a sound surprisingly modern and fresh. Less satisfying, but perhaps more memorable, "My Big Ten Inch Record" manages just enough self-awareness and spirit to be forgiven the lameness of its joke. The remainder settles comfortably into blues-rock competence, neither blowing your mind nor boring you.

I didn't buy this: my sister, a huge Aerosmith fan, gave it to me for a Christmas or Birthday present, thus handily winning the award for Best Unsolicited Gift Music (admittedly, the only real contender was a Blind Melon tape an aunt gave me). It doesn't make the rotation all that often, but I can't imagine getting rid of it. Sometimes a man just needs to hear "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion."

Grade: L

I Have No Idea Who Jay Reatard is...

...so I don't know if his death is a terrible tragedy that bespeaks a coming enshrinement as Great Dead Rock n' Roll Star or just one of those warnings to kids about the danger of drugs (yeah, first assumption, and Ted Leo may consider me suitably chastened if it turns out to be wrong. When a 29-year-old male in the music business dies in his sleep, it's the smart way to bet). I've been checking out some of his videos on Pitchfork TV, and I still don't have an answer.

I mean, I've heard of the cat, seen him sitting in a bathtub surrounded by 45's, but never heard him until today. "DOA" sounds good, "It Ain't Gonna Save Me," less so, but nothing I can fault. Seems a shame.

So I guess it would be really inappropriate to ask if his name is really pronounced like "retard," huh?

Pitchfork is Boring

I mean, I know I'm supposed to give a shit about Animal Collective and possibly even Badly Drawn Boy, but those names just want me to take a nice afternoon nap on clean new Irish Linen. And then soup for dinner. I like soup.

Good Lady GaGa review, though, by which I mean the actual review is provocative and timely.

Rating My CD's: It Begins.

1. AC/DC -- Back in Black

'Natch.


Grade: L

Argh.

Do I want the White Stripes box set? Yes.

Do I have $229? No.

Will I now fruitlessly scour their merch table, looking for something cool to buy in consolation, before giving up in a fit of fiduciary husbandry? Yes.

Rating My CD's: Grades Re-Post

[I'm giving this a seperate post so I can link it to each review instead of the apologia they were originally part of.]

Grades. Each CD will be given a Grade according to the following invented Scale:

C = Crap
OK = OK
L = Likes it
LL = Loves it
DI = Desert Island/Essential

Categories. These will conform to how I organize my CD's at home:

1. Rock/Pop/Country -- Honky folk music.
2. Jazz and Blues -- Non-Honky folk music.
3. Hip-Hop, Rap and Assorted Electro -- Stone Cold Rhymin' and Synchronized Beeping.
4. Punk, Metal and Assorted Alternative -- Angry Honky folk music.
5. The Rest of the Mess -- Movie Soundtracks, Classical, and other stuff I'm ashamed of.

And So Am I a Hypocrite...

After all the pissing and moaning I've done about the various mags, and especially Magnet, I had to go and defend them against the record nerds that pissed all over their 2009 Best Of.

It's not my fault. Honestly. They're just such a bunch of whiny little dweebs, all "you put obscure band X on your list instead of obscure band Q? Sellouts!" like they were solving the world's problems. Yet these same un-fathered dorkmats doubtless hold themselves above the sportsfags who argue with each other about special teams and the infield-fly rule.



Anyway: my contribution is as tasteless as it is futile.

I'll post an actual CD review tommorrow, I promise.

Just in Case I'm not Crystal-Clear On the Subject...

Is there anyone out there who actually remembers any of Magnet's Best of 2008? Aside from Vampire Weekend, of course, which won't leave the Target $10 aisle in my lifetime. I mean, the Rosebuds? Parts & Labor? Silver Jews? Come on.

Oh, Okay: I actually like the Whigs quite a bit.

So Here's the Plan...

Rating My CD's: An Exercise in Self-Criticism Disguised as a Shameless Attempt to Fill Space

Why? I (re-)started this with no plan, on a lark, because I felt like I had something to say. I don't know if I do or not, but as I said before, I've had the idea of expressing myself on the subject of music exclusively in blog format for some time. It doesn't fit into any of my life plans at present (I really should be balancing my checkbook right now). But I'm going to do it anyway.

But what does "doing it" mean? There's no way I can pretend that I'm going to be able to offer commentary half as authoritative, if that's the word, that all these trendhumping hipsters that run the mags can. They live for this shit, I'm just an amateur. Sure, I'd like to wander over to Record & Tape Traders and dig on Japandroids or the Thermals, or hell, lose myself in Built to Spill singles and pretend that I have some right to speak on them. But married suburban doughboys like myself have other shit to do.

So when I'm writing about music, I'm really writing about myself. All music writers do this; the honest ones cop to it. So what do I have to say about myself, through someone elses poetry and labor? How can I know, unless I look at what they've done.

Thus, one of the primary projects of this blog is going to be rating my CD's. I'm going to do them all, according to category, and (gulp) alphabetically. I'll do the stuff I love and the stuff I hang on to for no reason, and the middling medium-rotation seasonal stuff as well. I may or may not set myself up as an Amazon Associate so as I can put buttons and widgets on my CD's, depending on whether I decide it's worth the bother. Forthwith comes the breakdown:

Grades. Each CD will be given a Grade according to the following invented Scale:

C = Crap
OK = OK
L = Likes it
LL = Loves it
DI = Desert Island/Essential

Categories. These will conform to how I organize my CD's at home:

1. Rock/Pop/Country -- Honky folk music.
2. Jazz and Blues -- Non-Honky folk music.
3. Hip-Hop, Rap and Assorted Electro -- Stone Cold Rhymin' and Synchronized Beeping.
4. Punk, Metal and Assorted Alternative -- Angry Honky folk music.
5. The Rest of the Mess -- Movie Soundtracks, Classical, and other stuff I'm ashamed of.

Tags will conform to the Category of CD's. Hence, anything tagged "mycd1" will  be all the stuff from category 1, and so forth.

If I can get these done by the end of the year, I might move on to Rating My Vinyl and then, in grim desperation, to Rating my iTunes, at which point my wife will likely sneak up behind my and put an end to my misery with a ball-peen hammer. No jury on earth would convict her.

I also changed the template, as I'm sure you can see.

 

Another Year, Another Show...

...another ten minutes wasted trying to figure out what the fuck Magnet's Best of 2009 is talking about.

The End of the 00's: Whatever

Fluxblog led me over to The Awl's End of the 00's Retrospective, and I wearied of finding a single essay I liked. Indeed, it was a chore to find a single essay I read. None of them seemed to really be about the 00's at all, but about competing for Most Un-Related Introduction to a Historical Retrospective. I mean, this one almost worked for me, but decided to throw itself off into nowhere at precisely the point that M.I.A.'s career did.

This one, on the other hand: Pure Awesome.

Lady GaGa, Because one Ga Just Isn't Enough

Ace of Spades stepped out of politics to express opinions similar to my own regarding Her Ladyship, the Ga of Gas, which can be summed up as "Huh. That's...interesting..." The comments are overwhelmingly anti-Ga, and I can't come up with very much pro-Ga, but like I say, I don't hate her, which for young pop stars is an achievement.

Maybe I just like "Poker Face" more than I am prepared to admit.

Demetri Martin & Sarah Silverman Have a Show

Because they aren't tepidly amusing enough on their own.

And His Suit is Made of Liquid Metal

So I saw Adam Lambert's other performance on SYTYCD (DVR's do not bring about a sense of urgency in TV watching), and it was so meh-tastic as to deserve a word that rhymes with meh-tastic that I don't feel like inventing right now. For one thing, now that it's 2010, my patience for invoking the fashion sense of 1986 is officially at an end. I'm prepared to start wearing a striped vest over a T-Shirt over my shorts n' Docs with a jaunty Cat n' The Hat hat if need be, just so I never again have to see a grown man dress up a shiny Vietnamese pimp suit with poop on the shoulder while not wowing me with lyrics warbled over a Kajagoogoo beat.

Each of these guys would give Adam Lambert a wedgie.

 

I don't know what Lambert's record deal involves, but I get the strange idea that he's perfectly content with the kind of glam-pop his handlers are squeezing out of him. And while that may sell for a while, he's only got so much timbe before the next Idol season and America finding another rubber-faced yowler to make its Gay Boyfriend.

Sisqo's Sadness Now Seminal

I don't know who the loons are at the 20th Century Masters, but they are breaking all ankles to ensure that no artist falls so rapidly from omnipresence to obscurity that he cannot have a repackaging passed off as a "Best of." Not even Sisqo.

But do you know what's really sad? I mean aside from vainly trying to recall any track on here that's not  "Thong Song". Aside from "Home Wrecker" instantly making you think of "Gold Digger" and then making you laugh really hard at how "Gold Digger"-like it's not. Aside from an album cover seemingly unsure whether it's a crime scene on a snowbank or a freeze-frame for So You Think You Can Dance.

 

WTF?

What's really sad is the fact that two of the tracks aren't really his. Apparently Sisqo can't even fill out a Greatest Hits without accompanying tracks by hip-hop powerhouses Mya and DMX. You'll remember them when you click on the links. The latter fellow liked dogs.

I am Become Phlegmatic...

Got a rather nasty cold on New Year's Eve, and then spent the weekend either in bed or running around to Southern Maryland. So the musicing, it has been light. I've a few things in embryo, but am, as they say, craploads of busy. More later.

And While I Won't Give the Album a Full Review...

...I will say that Them Crooked Vultures is the kind of album that makes you pop open a Miller High Life and rock the fuck out to it. And saying that may be the truest review there is.

I've Gone Crazy! With the Music! And the Listening! MMGLAVIN!

Must be an end-of-the-year/start-the-blog rush, but I've been buying tunes like a record executive this last week or so. Here's what I've acquired since Christmas:

• The aforementioned Them Crooked Vultures (vinyl)
• The aforementioned Dr. No's Experiment (CD)
• Muddy Waters' Electric Mudd (CD)
• The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz! (CD)
• The rest of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (iTunes)
• The All My Friends EP by LCD Soundsystem (iTunes)
• LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" (iTunes)
• Two tracks from Zero 7's Yeah Ghost (iTunes)

If I had any intention of being as trendy as these selections indicate, I'd promise to blog about them soon. As it stands, I'll get to them when I bloody well feel like it.

Happy new year.

I Can't Wait For the Decade to Pass...

...so the hipsters will finally go away.

So My Crazy Music Blog led me over to POPSENSE led me over to the Hipster Wife Hunting blog, and I'm about ready to hurt someone. Or make rude pictures all 4-Chan style. I got Photoshop Elements today; I'm not afraid to use it.

Memes apotheosize lameness and mental masturbation.

Now get off my lawn.

Did Jack White Punch Someone at the Spin Office?

I'm kind of curious what causes a particular magazine to start a vendetta against a band. I mean, was there something actually wrong with Icky Thump, that Spin let loose Brian Rafterty for a whiney, B- half-hatchet job two years ago? What manner of nerd hears the delicious boogie of "Rag & Bone" and dismisses it as something "he could have written while slumbering away on his color-coordinated pillow" (completely unacceptable in garage rock, don'cha know)? For my part, I don't consider myself a "die-hard Meg fan," but I don't really have a problem with "St. Andrew, the Battle is in the Air," because 1) it essentially builds off of "Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn," which immediately precedes it, and indeed functions as an outro to that song, and 2) it's short. The whole review reads like a mass of projection: Raftery woke up pissier than a bladder stuffed with Boone's Farm and decided to send in his hangover reaction as a review. In the same issue, some genius decided that he could be dismissive by pretending that it was relevatory to link Jack White's guitar style with that of Jimmy Page (so how does it feel to get scooped by Guitar World?)

Of course, when year's end came along and the damn thing had peaked at #2 and spent 32 weeks on the billboard 200, they decided Icky Thump belonged on their Top Ten albums of the year, calling "Rag & Bone" in for particular praise. Because they're a bunch of whores.

So why on God's Green do I bring this up now? Because When it came time to cobble together this year's Top 40 (Kiss? Really?), they couldn't let Dead Weather's album by without snarkily insinuating that "Jack White is just trying to distract us from the fact that the White Stripes have faded to black." Oh, they have? Is that why they're releasing a live box set from their '07 Canadian tour this month? Is that why they're tossing out Beck-produced EP's? Are they really expected to poop out a new record every brace of years just to keep you from going all "so five minutes ago" on them?

I mean, I realize you're riding the tail-end of a Merriweather Post Pavilion - inspired electro-folk frisson, but that's no excuse for deciding that garage rock suddenly sucks. The Stripes haven't changed, and probably never will. If you dweebs weren't so busy riding the music-industry double-helix like the Rebel Yell at King's Dominion, you'd know that.

Full Disclosure

Like a lot of people who enjoy the ebbs and flows of popular music, I've read and subscribed to my share of music magazines, and learned to find them all more or less tedious. Rolling Stone mixes its unreflective leftism with equal parts pretension and onanism; Spin performs its namesake to its wheels not being as cool as it wants to be; Magnet bores; Maximum Rock n' Roll flails. Each one is ridiculous for its own reason.

That said, I still pay attention to them, because I live in the suburbs, and they closed my local Record & Tape Traders, and I need some way to keep my ears to the underground (whatever that means). So whatever excrable things I say about mags like Filter, I still use them to guide my purchases, as yesterday, when I ordered the Them Crooked Vultures album and the latest by Oh No. Or last week, when I snagged No Age's Nouns on iTunes. Or any of the buys I've made over the last year or so.

Which means that economically speaking, they've done their job on me as surely as any trendhumping teenybopper. And if pop culture class warfare was a goal of mine, I'd suppose I'd feel bad about that. But since I'm way more interested in finding good stuff to listen to and urinating on the hysteria that surrounds it, it actually works out nicely.

So thanks for the tip, Filter. Now stop being a bunch of hipster doofii.

Guess Who's Still Alive?

Each of these, inexplicably, has a top 100 album on Amazon right now.

• Rod Stewart (He pooped his pants, though)
• Darius Rucker (Regrettably, the album is not called "Learn to Live With People Thinking Your Parents Named You Hootie")
• Tom Waits (For No Man *rimshot*)
• They Might Be Giants (Shouldn't we know by now?)
• Yo-Yo-Ma (I can't make fun of him. He's a cellist. There's absolutely nothing funny about cellists. They're like actuarial tables or Whoopi Goldberg that way)
• Lyle Lovett (No, really)
• Barbra Striesand (Looks like she's been to Cher's plastic surgeon, though)
• Whitney Houston (Bobby's college money is still not for bail, though. She ain't playin')
• Kris Allen (Who?)

It's Official: The Flaming Lips are Your Old Favorite Band

I distinctly recall my first exposure to the Flaming Lips: It involved orange hair, the words, "I know a guy," and a great deal of laughter. It later became one of Beavis' best music video rants (would someone tell Mike Judge that the videos were the best part of watching B&B? The episodes are just bare and peurile without them).

Somewhere 'twixt then and now, the Lips became America's answer to Radiohead, the kind of band whose every album meets with the kind of critical rhapsody that smells of the hungry sense of record-industry zeitgeist (I'm sorry, I meant "rebellion and creativity").

I'm basing all this on the fact that The Soft Bulletin occupies a Black Hole in my iPod: its density is the result of the thick faux-gravitas of the overarranged and excessive elements, not out of the layers and structure. I've been trying for near two years to attempt to figure out what's so mind-blowing about it, but I never get there because my mind keeps getting blown away by the desire to listen to "Canadian Idiot" again.

So when Filter decides that hey, the new FL disc is a return to form, full of "a grittier energy one would expect from a band just starting, as opposed to one in their third decade," let us say that I am sceptical. There's return to forms and there's return to forms. Is this going to be Beggar's Banquet or is it going to be Guero? Any artist is allowed to make a Guero every now and again, to go back to square one and pretend you haven't already written those songs. Beck had to do this so he could get to Modern Guilt. But since I never gave a damn about "She Don't Use Jelly," let alone any song from Yoshimi Hits to Death the Pink Mystics, or whatever, this particular return to form just sounds like a bunch of gueros doing the same thing.

Have You Been Living Under a Rock For the Last Forty Years?

Completely unaware that there was this popular rythmn group called the Beatles (clever, I know)?

Devoid of the necessary affluence to slowly buy the Beatles albums you like on CD at somewhere between $12-15 a pop?

Missed the thousandfold re-issues? The album of their No. 1 hits? The soundtrack to the movie based on their songs, which contained tribute versions of their songs? The various albums of tribute versions of their songs?

Fear not, my antideluvian friend. You too will be spared the agony of seperation from the loving embrace of Beatles fandom. All you need is $175.

Casting Around the Blogosphere...

1) The aforementioned Andrew Earles has a book out about Hüsker Dü. I pretend to like Hüsker Dü, so I'll pretend I might buy this. Maybe If I had something other than Zen Arcade, or if I felt the need to listen to Zen Arcade more than once a year, and that out of an obligation similar to what Lester Bangs felt for The Who's Happy Jack, I could maintain that pretense through a paragraph. Nevertheless, I wish him good sales, as this is the sort of project a writer goes into with reverence.

2) A quick scan of Fluxblog yields the following knowledge:

• Charlotte Gainsbourg working with Beck is an "enigma in itself."
• Anxiety comes in two varieties, good and bad.
• A member of Portishead has a side project called Beak.
• For the Fiery Furnaces to perform crowd-pleasing rock shows is abnormal.
• Bands that are about to get all over the coming wave of 90's nostalgia are giving themselves appropriately Zen-bizzarre names, like "Boat."
• People are fixating on R. Kelly yodeling in a song.
• I can't read anything about a band/artist named Gigi. It just sounds too stupid, no matter how many laudatory adjectives are sprinkled like M&M's in it.
• It is possible to say that a band that consists of "super-hard working veterans" has put on "a very enjoyable rock show" and yet worry about being condescending to them.

3) A woman who looks like one of the members of Monty Python in drag can record an album of all covers with a tautology for a title, and it can become #1 on Amazon.

Longest. Lull. Ever.

Ultimately, if I really really wanted to never post here again, I would have deleted it. Since I don't want to do that, I am bowing to reality.

I have been thinking about a Music Blog for a long long time, even to the point of considering putting down cash money for a unique URL. But before I lay down cash money, I have to be willing to write.

Two things convince me that I can:

1) I'm working on a Master's Degree in Professional Writing. So I'm kinda laying down cash money already.

2) It's the most useful thing I can think of doing when I'm not working.

So the Notion, my first blog that I got bored with, is now the Place wherein I shall write about music. I will pose many a query here, such as:

• Why the hell doesn't Magnet update Andrew Earle's column on the website when its the best thing about the Magazine?
• Why is Andrew Earle's blog so boring?
• Is my complete indifference to Lady Gaga a sign of my withdrawal from awareness of modern music or my new willingness to stop saying "that was so much better twenty years ago, when it was called __________________. Now get off my lawn."?
• Why do I suspect Adam Lambert to be a cyborg? And one of the 600 Series, at that?
• If I listened to Death Cab For Cutie from now until the Second Coming, would I ever care?

Send angry emails to bobama@whitehouse.gov

"Repeater," Indeed

Or, Why Ian MacKaye is the Lost Del-Tone


Reading Mark Andersen's often insightful, often irritating, always passionate Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capitol, one gets the impression that DC Underground stalwarts Fugazi, fronted by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and backed by other veterans of that cities early-to-mid 80's hardcore scene, has created a form of music altogether new in America, at once powerful and gentle, beautiful and raucous. Having listened to Fugazi's popular Repeater this evening, I can find little to dispute. I hear gentility, and power, and violence, and moments of beauty.

But that ain't new.

Gah, I've started with the most prevalent of current rock criticism cliches, that All New Rock Rips off Old Rock. Man, I'd hate to have to be a new rock band today, to have all your efforts reduced to your Influences, with snide commentary. As if this makes Mooney Suzuki somehow less than the MC5. As if Nirvana didn't steal from every 80's underground band from the Pixies to Big Black. As if the Ramones didn't arrive at their entire sound by throwing together the Stooges and the Beach Boys. As if the Beatles were anything other than a bunch of Buddy Holly wannabes singing show tunes. And if you're wondering about Elvis, ask a black dude.

Now, I'm not going to argue about Fugazi's influences. As far as I can tell, Fugazi is the logical progression, not to say departure, of Ian and company's respective musicalities from the fasterlouder sheets of thrashy hum that Minor Threat exemplified. I don't think a one of their songs was deliberately patterned after anyone else's, indeed they seem to have taken great efforts to avoid such. Nobody deliberately names a tune "Song #1," unless they're interested in working from a clean slate.

But wanna do something fun, something that would probably annoy Mark Anderson until he found a point from his back notes that would cover him?

Load Repeater into your stereo so that it plays after The King of Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale and His Del-Tones. Then pick your jaw up after you discover how oddly alike they sound.

Now, this might upset some people who want to believe as Anderson does, and won't have the Holy Fugazi left on a plane similar to the Strokes, who hardly get mentioned without being alternately compared to the Velvet Underground and Television. But that's only because certain loud people in the underground possess a bizzarre, obsessive compulsion to reject any music they deem as "not relevant," to which we can add as a matter of course anything more than five years old. To such as they, Dick Dale is that guy who did that song from Pulp Fiction. Yeah, it's cool, but it's old, and we have a moral obligation to listen to the new Go-Kart release, because that's about today, man.

Whatever. Anyone who uses the word "relevant" and means it is either unable to see that hunting "relevance" leads to the same kind of empty ephemerality as the record industry's business cycle, or they see it and ignore it. In either case, the position renders them blind to the truth: that Dick Dale is Rock n'Roll.

Rock n'Roll is dated. It's yesterday. Your mom and dad used to dance to it. We've all smelled that desperation in the recent issues of Spin, trying to sell the Music That Rocks, succeeding in selling the Music That Rocks, only to have the Music That Rocks still swamped like a tiny boat in the sea of Music That Goes Platinum. Hip-Hop is what lights MTV's fire, and Hip-Hop is what all the kids are listening to no matter what their melanin level. Rock is still there, but it just ain't the big dog no more.

So Rock is yesterday. It just so happens that yesterday is almost endless, today is but 24 hours, and the future doesn't actually exist in our frame of reference. And since we can't go four years without examining in excruciating detail all the cool and uncool stuff that happened in the previous decade, I say we drop, for good, any pretense of interest regarding what's going on "today." If VH1 has taught us nothing, it's taught us that whatever we think is cool today stands a real good chance of being embarrassingly laughable tommorrow.

Honestly, who cares how old music is? The first time you hear Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll", be it on your shiny copy of their fourth album or those formerly ubiquitous Cadillac ads, you're transformed, overwhelmed, and if you have any life in you, air-guitaring like a chimp on six espressos. The same goes for the most ancient of Rn'R: Link Wray's "Rumble" still swaggers mightily, as does the yob hopping of his cycle that anyone who hears this song thinks of.

So does "Run, Run, Run," or "Blitzkrieg Bop," or "Bad Reputation," or "Sabotage," or "Seven Nation Army," or any of a thousand others that have claimed neural space in our collective noggins. So who cares if Hip-Hop rules the Billboard charts? Let the industry pukes worry about such; it's their job. Ours is to cherry-pick what we like. What's worth remembering, from any genre, will be remembered.

Besides, it won't be long before H-H too becomes mostly retro, mostly reworkings of old forms. It may even be so already. Is it any secret that the best Rap steals from the best black instrumental music? Same with R&B, the genre for gospel singers who don't want to sing gospel. Sound-wise, R&B has always bowed to whatever else was hip at the time. That's why it sounded like jazz and blues fifty years ago, like soul and funk in the 60's and 70's, like disco in Michael Jackson's heyday, and today bears the description foisted on it by Chris Rock: "a bunch of people singing over rap beats." It's the only genre where people really are just interested in the vocals.

Anyway, back to Fugazi, the band that served as an escape for many from both hardcore and emo, the undiplicated punk band for grown people. If R&B is multi-genre-friendly, then Ian and the Boyz are a perfect marriage of genres: as distorted as Johnny Ramone's Mosrite and as funky as James Brown's pelvic bone. They manage to be exciting to listen to, and breathable at the same time. You could probably find a way to dance in a non-slam sort of way to them (and you'd better, at a show, lest you face the scorn of St. Ian of the Church of the Reformed Mosher), but you don't have to. The groove is enjoyable either way.

Whatever you pick, Fugazi's a lot more Rock n'Roll than they realize, and that's a good thing. They prove what can be done with Rock n'Roll if it's approached deliberately, with a mind for variation, for using the framework rather than bowing to it. Miles Davis achieved something similar with modal jazz in the late 50's with Kind of Blue (current Amazon.com Sales Rank: #167. So much for the tyranny of the present).

So for the truly avant-garde, for those who grok Ecclesiastes' dictum that all rivers run back to the sea, I suggest doing the twist, or some robotic form of jitterbug, at the next Fugazi show you attend. You'll be stared at, but that's half the fun, and ol' Dick will be proud.

Music Review: The Hives -- Tyrannosaurus Hives

Or, How to Serve the Master Without Eating Bugs


The moment that made me realize that Rock really was coming back into fashion was the moment I first saw the video to "Hate to Say I Told You So" by the Hives. It was perfection itself: perfect guitar riff, bass solo (!), Howlin' Pelle Almqvist screaming and preening and carrying on like Mick Jagger circa 1966. I liked the aesthetic of the video, too: Blazing white background, matching suits for the band, freezing members in mid-jump when their instruments dropped out. It was the best video I'd seen in years, and the best new song I'd heard in years, and it made me do something I hadn't done in years, if ever: run out and by a CD based solely on a music video.

Holding that CD in my hand made me see the direction the Hives had taken with the retro genre: Play like the Sonics, look like N'Sync: Bright and shiny and electronic. An Exploding Plastic Inevitable for the new Age. Sure, I dug the Strokes and the Stripes and Los Vinos for what they brought to the picture, and probably agreed that Jack n' Meg were the most artistically daring with their soulful, minimalist bump n'grind. But Pelle and the Boys had the "Makes Me Jump Up and Down" award, down pat.

That was then. A few years later, and how fare the New Rock Quadrifecta? The White Stripes knocked a lot of socks off with Elephant, a record that improved on White Blood Cells in the quality of the songs and the satisfying way they click together. The Strokes, more cautiously perhaps, followed up Is This It with Room on Fire, also an improvement, but far less obviously so. The Vines opened with a great deal of promise on their first album, but have come apart, as yours truly predicted, on Nicholls' drug issues and are presently swirling the drain. The Hives are the last in with their sophomore effort, and in Tyrannosaurus Hives, have given us what amounts to an enigma.

The first time I listened to it in my car, I was frankly disappointed with the first half of the CD. It sounded like them, but they sounded almost neutered, trebly and sparky, with none of the balls-to-the-wall explosion that propelled the first album. It wasn't until "B is for Brutus" that I found a song that stayed with me longer than it's playing time, and it wasn't until "See Through Head" I found a song I enjoyed, and it wasn't until "Diabolic Scheme" that I found a song I'd call good. After those three songs, everything melded slowly back to inconspicuousness. Aware as I was that the band was planning a more severe departure for this album, and aware as I was that their new label, Interscope, had balked, I concluded that the boys had taken the path of least resistance, got a few "different" songs on the record for the critics, and made the rest a half-assed retread of Veni Vidi Vicious.

Yet for some reason, I couldn't stop listening. At first it was for the three songs I'd deemed worthy, then I decided that the new single "Walk Idiot Walk" wasn't too bad, then I started bobbing my head to the other songs as well. Somehow, subconsciously, they'd wormed their way in and had their way with me. And here I sit at the keyboard, unable to explain how this happened.

When in doubt, I go to the cover art. The Hives have apparently decided that the best background for their slick ties-and-spats look is a sickly, scaly green (some connection here, no doubt, with the "Tyrannosaurus"). Instead of a picture of a band, they go for a drawn slight-caricature (others have noted that it makes Pelle look like a Clockwork Orange-era Malcolm McDowell). It looks deliberately ugly, and not in the typical punk-rock, it's-so-ugly-it's-cool way, but rather in the way that makes you not want to look at it. Why on earth would the Hives, who have made a name for themselves in cheery self-idolization ("This is your new favorite band" bellowed the sticker on their first album), go out of their way to mess with their image? It's not as though they've stopped bragging about themselves. Word has come quietly through the rock press that they're the best live band of all the NRQ. So what's the deal? Are they actually disowning their second album, as a label-ruined monstruosity?

I found an answer where I first found joy, in "Diabolic Scheme," a murky exercise in feedback and gloom. "They sound like vampires," I thought, and then it hit me. The Hives are vampires, the new vampires of rock. That is not to suggest any affinity with Alice Cooper/Misfits horror-core burlesque. I'm thinking of the vampire in an Ann Rice novel, shiny and beautiful and masterful, and empty inside. They raise undead sounds (channelling Jagger a hell of a lot better than Jagger himself, these days) to precise, almost machine-like precision (can you imagine these guys jamming?), and use it to say... nothing in particular (I haven't read the lyrics in the liner notes, have you?). They even dress like vampires, right down to the spats, eschewing capes probably out of diligence to the garage-rock aesthetic and not wanting to evoke the aforesaid Alice Cooper.

I'm fully aware that all this may be the result of too much caffeine, but I think it makes all the pieces click into place. How else to explain their aristocratic relationship with critics and fans ("Look into my eyes...We are your new favorite band..."), or the mystery man who actually writes the songs? As Dracula with Renfeld, so the Hives with Randy FitzSimmons. And like real vampires, they don't tell anyone, leaving only certain encodes signs for the wary. They hide their true face behind a shiny mask, sucking your twelve dollars away, and leaving you feeling wierd, drained, and for some reason hungry to repeat the experience.

Or was that all of mass culture? I get so confused sometimes.

Music Review: Sex Pistols -- Anarchy in the UK (Live)

I've been a bit disparaging of late of my favorite style of Rock n' Roll, so much so that in my last two posts on the subject, I've used not only the same arguments but phrased them the exact same way. I submit that I did so unwittingly. Nevertheless, that speaks of the disdain with which I view most of the music I enjoy most. Whether that makes me scitzophrenic or just a dedicated critic, I lack the self-knowledge to say.

A great deal of my affinity for punk is that it's a deliciously extreme form of Rock n'Roll, blending by speed and audio leakage the traditional guitar-bass-drums sound into a single distorted, psychedelic hum. It's that sound I love, not the sound as an instrument for certain social goals. I've stated before in many venues that I hold most of the lyrics in this genre at arm's length.

Most punks embrace a childish, narcissistic leftism, of the kind that will fight bitterly for their own "rights," and not give two hoots in hell for anybody else's. On the most recent Sex Pistols DVD, John Lydon argues vociferously in support of their band's album being named "Never Mind the Bollocks" by saying that "Bollocks" was a common working-class word, perfectly valid English. "How can you ban language? How can you ban words?" exclaims Johnny. I can never sit through that without feeling compelled to ask him "How about the word 'Nigger,' John? How about the word 'Bitch'? How about the phrase 'Half-Educated Limey Street Scum'? Those are all perfectly valid English words, too. Yet somehow I doubt you'd respond to them so favorably."

And that, boys and girls, is why Our Boy Johnny is the real tragic figure of punk. To hell with Sid Vicious and his scratchy-voiced girlfriend, two empty-headed drug fiends as boring as they were useless. Sid contributed nothing but a look to punk, and it wasn't even his look to start with, it was Eddie Cochrane's by way of Ron Asheton and Dee Dee Ramone. Beyond that, the wanker couldn't play bass, couldn't give an intelligent interview, couldn't write anything worth repeating. All he did was die. Woopty-crap.

But Lydon had a passion, an intelligence, a sense of self and a sense of theater that made his band worth remembering when so many of those that popped in his wake are justly forgotten. He encapsulated the strained mentality of a teenager, too smart to be a child, too weak to be a grown-up, and shoved that energy out of him in a manner nothing short of explosive.

And twenty-five years later, the dumb mook hasn't moved on. You can read it in his autobiography, see it in any interviews: bitterness. He's still pissed at Malcom McLaren, at the monarchy, at the world. Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock are all men in their forties, able to look back at their gloried past with detachment, recognizing their achievements and their mistakes with humor and regret. Not Lydon, who still spikes and colors his hair and spits invective. His wit, intellect, and lust for musical creativity, audible on any Public Image, Ltd. record, is swallowed by his terminal adolescence. He's so busy demonstrating how much smarter he is than everybody that the doesn't see everyone shaking their heads at him. That, too me, is true tragedy.

So why in the hell would anyone want to listen to any live Pistols show? The band playing to some tiny audience in some nondescript English Country town, on a crappy PA system? Why, so we can tell ourselves we're listening to "history"?

No. You don't buy a record to listen to history. You buy a record to listen to music. And you buy this record, the complete recording of the Pistols' September 24th, 1976 performance at the 76 club in Burton-on-Trent, so that you can hear the Sex Pistols in their pre-Sid glory (of course, the cover art has a picture of a later performance with Sid. Matlock just can't win). You can hear the tightness of Jones' guitar and Cook's drums, and feel the bottoming power that Matlock's bass added to the mix. You can hear how the Pistols took the brooding, menacing sound of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and added to it the flashpowder youthfulness of the British Mod sound, of bands like the Who. Not coincidentally, the standout tracks on the disc are their cover of the Stooges' "No Fun," and the Who's "Substitute." But the whole set, Pistols originals and pop covers all, is compelling, and exciting, and raucous, and everything Rock n' Roll is, was, and ever shall be, amen.

Lester Bangs once wrote that the future of popular music was as follows: "a small island of new free music, surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage." Most folks would agree with that, whatever their tastes, believing that whatever tickled their ear was the good stuff and everybody else's shit was just that. So, on a certain level, unless you're into Pun Krock already, there's no way I stand any chance of convincing you. If you beleive that Punk was an unfortunate episode in the history of music and culture, and that the Sex Pistols are but one of the "punk" bands that a lot of stupid kids fashionably embraced, you won't be interested no matter what I say. But if you're able to look beyond a label and appreciate hard, fast, slightly irritating Rock n' Roll, then give a listen. It won't hurt, and if it does, CD's make great skeet.

Sunk Pucks

My musical tastes tend to evolve in historical fashion. My starting point, the first time I really decided to get "into" pop music, was the early Rolling Stones, back when the thunder of the arena hadn't bleached their simple swagger. From thence, I have simultaneously gone forward and backward: Forward through 60's Invasion and Garage rock through to 70's Punk and now, 80's Hardcore (the move to Fugazi is tempting), backward through older and older blues (most recently I got into Big Bill Broonzy, a contemporary of Robert Johnson) and Jazz. Everything fits onto a gigantic Critical Tree in my head.

That said, I'm not getting a lot of what passes for punk these days. The music is starting to bore me. In the fight between the "arties" (music for creativity's sake) and the "social realists" (music for the revolution) that came in the wake of the Sex Pistols demise in 1978 and the DOA failure of the New York scene, the social realists won, hands down, driving the poor arties to New Wave and other excuses for bad hair. The social realists, meanwhile, insisted on making punk serve the call to arms of the New Tommorrow. The result has been as monotonous as Stalin-era Soviet painting. If a band's not emulating Black Flag, complete with screaming and stuffing every concievable musical phrase into a 3-minute song, they're emulating the Descendents, with trebly melodies and insufferably nasal and whiny vocals. Maybe I'm getting old, but it's all starting to hurt my ears.

Worst of all is the way the genre has marketed itself to oblivion. I refer to the hyphenation. Each sub-sub-sub-genre comes complete with costume, tune template, and ready-made audience. Reality overtakes parody: I used to joke about things like cow-core or emo-oi, only to see them sprout into being. Got a song about your sensitive side? Bang, you're emo, whether you like it or not. Got a riff lifted from Gene Vincent? You're punkabilly or psychobilly. Got a skull somewhere on your record? Welcome to horror-core. This is Glenn; he'll be making fun of you.

The point is, it's become as unlikely to hear something you haven't heard before on a punk record as it is on a Britney Spears disc. Punk, which was supposed to eschew the same old thing, has become the same old thing, dedicated only to cloning itself, with the same clothes, the same sounds, the same preachy solipsistic thug liberalism. Punks are the Teddy Boys of the Left.

The preceding is prologue to me adding Conservative Punk to the linksheet. I do so with a few caveats. The site has yet to really impress me. It defines itself as an antidote to Punk Voter, which is fine as far as it goes, but somehow insufficient. It's not enough to be negative, to define yourself as against the tide. Destruction may lead to creation, but, contrary to all those folk Jon Savage quotes in England's Dreaming, it is not creative in itself. Left to itself, destruction merely frees up space.

In other words, it's well past time for punk to learn how to praise, how to build, how to appreciate. Such things have worn the label of "uncool," for way too long. Snideness and gesture do not sustain: they must be followed up. This is going to require thought and effort, and openminded-ness (real open-mindedness, not the kind that leads you to what you already want to think).

And music. Let's not forget the music. Tell your truth with a smile and a swagger and they'll believe you believe it, and that's half the battle. Thunder in the night forever.