New Strokes Album

Again with the pink and blue. Did I miss a meeting?

Deep in the Night I'm Lost in Love

It became clear to me on my last birthday, when a friend suggested that I crank some Stooges on vinyl, that I don't have any vinyl Stooges. This unpleasant realization yielded another: I don't have any live Stooges either. So I've set my heart on picking up a vinyl copy of Metallic KO, because it seems so necessary.

But vinyl Metallic KO is like to be expensive. So I thought this might do. But Amazon only sells it in the pricey limited edition form. So I thought Thousand Lights might be interesting. But how many different versions of "1970" do I want to listen to?

The mass of unreleased/unofficial stuff intimidates me. Insight? Because at this point I'm prepared to just go home and listen to Raw Power for the 800th time.

Under the Radar Denounces Blog Hype, Slags Pitchfork

I love it when they fight.

It’s a story that has repeated itself far too often, and for every Arcade Fire or Bon Iver that translated blog momentum into near unanimous acclaim, there was a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Midlake, Voxtrot, Sound Team, Cold War Kids, or Tapes ‘n Tapes that received a strong push from the blogosphere and found that by the time their second album was released, a lot of people had jumped off the merry-go-round. Without the opportunity to develop a fanbase that would invest time and money in them, those bands found that the same listeners and writers who had championed them had either moved on or weren’t interested in watching a band go through growing pains.

The internet expands, but human memory does not. There's only so much room for so many bands in our hearts or our wallets. I haven't listened to any of those bands, because my music tastes are a lagging indicator. It's very rare for me to get into a band on their first disc; I usually wait until they've been around and have learned to grow. That way, I don't have to sit around waiting for the next record to drop.

The only time I stepped outside of this rule was in 2002-2004, when I made a point of jumping on the Rock Revival bandwagon. This led me to purchases as diverse as the White Stripes and the Vines.

If blogs were the gatekeepers for the indie rock kingdom, Pitchfork were and are the undeniable kingmakers, having essentially launched the careers of Broken Social Scene, Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, and others with one glowing review. The blogs might discover a band, but if that band is going to move beyond the blogs into the larger bloodstream, Pitchfork needs to officially confirm it with a “Best New Music” review.

They do? They are? Why Pitchfork particularly? Why not Spin or Magnet or CHARTattack or that plucky little Under the Radar? Is Pitchfork the hit-king?

Fear the Power of the Dove!

Look, I'm not saying that Powerdove is the worst band name I've ever heard. ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead would beat them out, as would Of Montreal. But Powerdove definitely has that "Really?" effect. It's not clever if its ironic, and it's painful if it isn't.

Cletus ain't amused by yer shenanigans.

I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself

I am actually sad that a band has broken up:

The White Stripes Call it Quits

I suppose this fits. They've made their mark, and Jack has a thousand other things to do. But still. Dammit.

And after all that righteous snark I've thrown at Spin for kicking them so much, Jack & Meg have to go and prove those trend-sucking bottom-feeders right. I am depressed.

We Don't Hear a Single...

Under the Radar reports that "Swedish twee-stars Acid House Kings" (just nod and smile) are going to prevew a handful of tracks from their upcoming album and let their fans vote on the single. This is either:

1. An awesomely awesome marketing move, which will soon be copied by everyone who's anyone!, OR
2. A sign that they have no idea if any of their songs are good enough to be a single.

Only time will tell. They look nice and non-threatening in the picture, though:

Dude? The Upturned Phallic Guitar? Could you BE more Rockist?

Rating My CD's: Let's Have a Partay!

28. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- Acme

If you had met me in the spring of 1996, and then the following fall, you would have done a double-take. In fact, a few people did. In between my sophomore and junior year of college, I had ditched my frightening tortoise-shell androgynous Birth Control Glasses and gotten contact lenses. I'd also bought some new clothes and cut my hair. Gone were the eye-disturbing blood-red-on-blood-red ensembles, the greasy mushroom fro, the general sense of "I don't know who the fuck I am, but you're going to see me, dammit."

I'd also started a strange kind of internet flirtation with a girl who lived in Kentucky, who shall remain nameless so as not to injure her reputation for ever getting herself involved with the likes of me.  Both of these have a connection with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in general and Acme in particular.

Rating My CD's: My Father Was Sister Ray

27. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- Orange

Back in December of 1999, when I still though The City Paper was worth reading, I came across one of the inescapable Best of the Nineties records, which is to say, three of them (because our authoritative critical voice must have a multiplicty of opinion!). And one of them had Orange somewhere right in the middle.

I already had Acme, and liked it, and had heard from the former internet semi-girlfriend who got me into them (more on that later), that their earlier stuff was better. I was still too young to roll my eyes at said cliche, so I schlepped into Center City Philadelphia on the train, and picked up this silver-leafed disc at the HMV on 15th and Walnut.

Motorhead. Conan. Giant Marshal Stacks.

Ariel Pink's Empty Graffiti

Via Fluxblog, this messy catchall, which Perpetua praises for it's "cheap glam Cobain look":



Bit of Suicide, bit of Bowie, and...something else...can't quite put my finger on it:

Ah...



Hurry that 15 minutes up, boys...

I Don't Know Who the Sam-Scratch Ray LaMontagne is...

...but I've wanted to buy this album since I saw it in Starbucks (Yeah, I go to Starbucks, and I look at music there. Because it's there).

Why? Because the album name is good. Also, the cover is nicely minimalist.

Packaging, people. It matters.

The X Most Blah of Whatever

I've made it this far without taking note of anybody's Top Ten of 2010 Lists. It's not that I find such exercises completely useless; it behooves to take stock of what has passed and what can be considered favorable and unfavorable. I just find them over-used: a cheap device to garner attention and controversey (which is to say, more attention).

Filter's Top 10, however, spares us no exhaustion. Not only do we get the Official Magazine Top 10, but the Top Reviewed Albums, the Publishers', Editor-in-Chief's, Associate Editor's, Layout Designer's, writing staff's and Guy Who Sleeps on Our Couch's individual Top Tens. By the time you're done, LCD Soundsystem would have implanted itself as a self-regenerating meme in your mindhead.



This totally changes my mind about irony.

Anyway, I thought I disliked Top Ten's because they were thoughtless and non-authorial, but it turns out I liked them even less when they're detailed and transparent. Maybe I only like the funny kinds. Let me know if you see any.

I'd Like to Feel Bad for Creed...

...I mean, it's 2011, and the hip still won't miss the opportunity to bash them, even for things they had nothing to do with.

According to Germany's Der Spiegel newspaper, little Walter Eikrem was walking home from school in his hometown of Rakkestad when all of a sudden he found himself on the same path as a pack of wolves.
Instead of crying wolf and running away, Walter did what seemed to be the only logical thing to him: he pulled out his cell phone, took the ear buds out of it and turned Creed's "Overcome" up full blast while screaming and waving his arms.

And the wolf ran away. GET IT LOL C WUT I DID THR?

Then I remember how skull-scrapingly bad Creed's music is, and I'm more or less fine with it.

Self-Abuse

With all the crap I sling at the hipster doofii, it behooves me to tossa few wads at myself when I merit it.

I just got a Pandora account this week. For real. I've been listening for days, and I'm completely enamoured. How was I not aware of this?


So much for Irony being dead...



Irony is Boring.

I liked the first two editions of Pitchfork's Why We Fight, but I've missed every one since. I've read #3 and #4 just now, and while I thought #4 was an okay walk through the perils of MIA's playing with politics, I got three quarters of the way down #3 and was suddenly, un-utterably bored with the entire enterprise:

This idea of knowingness, though-- our relationship with it can get complicated. Right now, one of the internet's most successful bastions of knowingness is a blog called Hipster Runoff, a performance that's almost nothing but knowing: It shrugs, it takes an arch, pseudo-scientific tone, it puts every other word in scare quotes. Here you go, it seems to say: Here is your weird market of hipness and cool. The end. You can take it as withering satire, if you want to, because its skewers are dead on target. Of course, if its pseudonymous author really thought the market of cool were that pointless and vacuous, why spend so much time thinking about it-- why know it well enough to be savvy? It's not so much a satire as a whole performance of knowingness. And even if I don't often have the stomach for it, I can't pretend the performance isn't an immaculate one: it's knowingness raised to the level of poetry, free of the burden of "intent" or sincerity or any point beyond what the reader reflects out of it. It goes beyond "the author is dead" and turns the author into some kind of zombie.

When I was in college, REM had a rather large hit song with the line "You said that irony was the shackle of youth." At the time, I disagreed, saying that irony was the weapon of youth. We were both right, I suppose, but I don't care to examine the matter much further than that, because Irony, capital "I", is not that interesting. It's not really a thing, it's an act, a choice. That's why an analysis or discussion of Irony will always feel overblown. And it's why Family Guy will always be less than its competitors.

I say that because the article namedrops The Simpsons. But The Simpsons, however arch it seemed, always leavened its snark with a sincere heart. The show actually cared about its characters; even, or especially Homer. Homer Simpson serves the show as the butt of most of the jokes, but if something really really bad happened to him, fans would be heartbroken. Because Homer is not really a bad guy, just flawed and limited, like all of us are.



Family Guy, on the other hand, doesn't really care all that much. About anything. The show's evolved from an even arch-er version of The Simpsons to an endless On the Road movie with a drunken hipster dog and a gay baby standing in for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. It's breezy and stupid and fully aware of its breeziness and stupidity, and works them like Stevedores for every laugh. At the root of every Family Guy gag is the thought, "This is so completely retarded that I have no choice but to laugh."



And while such cheap absurdity is a well that may never run dry, it's a good distance away from the archness and intellect of The Simpsons, and light-years away from its great rival South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's show is a lot of things, but almost never ironic. Rather, it's bone-cuttingly satiric, to the point of being mad-dog mean:



The humor here comes from saying the unsayable, and while that sounds knowing, it's not irony, because it's meant with deadly earnestness.

My point is that irony is not worth the effort of hashing out, because it's by no means as central to our cultural narratives as people who wallow in it, or fuss about it, think it is. There's a time when we all love it, and think ourselves superior for being aware of it. It passes.

Robert Pollard is a Dork.

I don't care about Robert Pollard, or Guided By Voices, or any of that. I just don't. It's Stuff I've Heard of But Never Listened To. And I'm sure that his new disc, Space City Kicks, unleashes just as much awesomeness as Under the Radar says. I like that title so much, in fact, that I'm willing to listen to some samples on iTunes. But the cover...



Dude...


Why is he standing there like that? Is this some kind of kung fu position? And why isn't there anything spacey or city-y, or even kick-y (unless Robert refers to his badass two-tone shoes as "kicks" as the kids do these days)?

I mean, it's possible that some dippy photographer came up with this, and the record label went with it sans Pollard's approval, but this is out on Pollard's own label, so that answer's stupid. No, he thinks this picture is cool, from the understated tiny red heart on the king's-blue shirt to the guitar just hanging out next to the whatever-white building in the vacant lot down the street from the Bob Evans. Robert Pollard this the whole thing, including the "punch me in the jimmy! Do it HARD!" stance, is just too ineffable to be effed.

Ergo, he's a dork.

New Foo Will Kick in the Kicking Place, ChartAttack Assures Us

And we are meant to be excited by such. By the Foo Fighters. The fighters of Foo. No, really.

Look, Dave Grohl has enough grandfathered indie cred that he could play on a Justin Bieber record and still be cool. And as long as he whips out those drumsticks whenever Josh Homme demands it of him, he can do whatever the hell else he wants to pay the bills. And hell, the're one or two Foo songs I like. "Monkey Wrench" comes to mind.

But I'm never going to be excited by a Foo Fighters record. The Foo Fighters were the methadone we all needed to get over Nirvana's downfall. That's all. Sorry.

Then again, that little tease they link does sound pretty good.

2010: The Year "Douchebag" Jumped the Shark

At least, going by this meandering piece in the Village Voice, which claims that Kanye West and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem won "one for the douchebags," whatever that might mean.

Their fantastic lives begot fantastic albums. MBDTF was a delirium of influence, a recombination of musical DNA as varied as gothic East Coast rap classicism, '70s prog rock, and winsome '90s electronic music. In doing so, West paid maximalist homage to his own best work: the sped-up soul sampling of his early productions, the glossy thump of Graduation, the ornate orchestration of Late Registration, the sad robot pulse of 808s and Heartbreak. And he rapped better, too—a necessity on an album that featured historically grand competition, from a bloodthirsty Nicki Minaj to Raekwon to Jay-Z himself (twice!), a hip-hop fantasy camp basically unparalleled, in part because any other artist would've been afraid to try. Murphy, for his part, boiled down a decade of sarcasm and ironic dance-floor excess into a plainspoken kiss-off to the career that had cost him everything external to the band he found himself trapped in.

So I guess that means...we like them? We don't like them? They're douchebags? What the hell does that even mean anymore? Did we ever know? The word "douche" suggests feminine hygiene, or other matter gynecological, and George Carlin testified to its use to insult women only, at least among NY Italians of the 1950's to 1970's. But by some kind of post-modern inversion, it's come to be applied as an all-purpose insult against hyper-masculine bro-types. Joel McHale can't get through a bit about Tool Academy without using it.

Their fingers smell delightful. Delightful.

Here's Andrew Earles, my muse, two years ahead of the curve: as usual:

“Douchebag” is perhaps the most overused slang in the parlance of the under-50 set. It’s so damn effective, and I love nothing more than to latch onto slang that’s either showing its expiration date or recently expired altogether.

That was in 2008. So now that it's ubiquity is secure, and it has passed from meaning whatever it meant to "something not desirable," I'm going to quietly retire "douchebag," and it's little bro, "d-bag" from my parlance. You may consider this official:

Question:

Do I find the idea of listening to the Decemberists boring because band names that refer to long-dead Russian political movements are just too precious to be taken serously, or because I'm afraid I'll start confusing them with the Arcade Fire?

Rating My CD's: You've Made a Fool of Everyone

26. Jet -- Get Born

I first reviewed this CD on the old version of this blog, The Notion, back in 2003, when everyone had discovered that rock n' roll was not, in fact dead. I had some notion in my head of a New Rock Quadrifecta of the Strokes, White Stripes, Hives, and Vines. I made a generalized statement about Australian bands not bothering too much about their appearance:

Unlike the The Strokes' rich-boy bum ensembles, the Hives' neo-mod uniforms and the White Stripes' peppermint chic, The Vines were the only band of the origonal "new rock" quadrifecta that didn't have a ready-made look (which may be why they've slipped off the radar screens). Australian boys play rock n' roll, unapologetically, and they know it ain't their job to look pretty. That's for the wankers from Pommey-land and pretentious Yanks.

Blissfully ignorant of my misspelling of "original," I go on to say that Jet rocks satisfactorily, but also brings the moody piano balladry, and that this was a good thing.

Eight years on, I'm tempted to search up a Where Are They Now file, but I'm almost positive I know the answer without Googling. They enjoyed copious amounts of cocaine. Their sophomore record stiffed. They bled members back to Australia, where those who haven't sunk into drug-induced uselessness are dreaming of a comeback [Corrections to this prognostication will be welcomed].

But what of Get Born, their two-hit wonder (the second hit being "Cold Hard Bitch")? Has repeated listenings changed my original estimate? Have I discovered deep tracks which make "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" and "Look What You've Done" seem overrated? Is it time to revisit Jet?

No.

They had a song so genius-simple and bluntly-horny that it became a hit. They had another that wasn't half as good but fed into fear of the female, and it was less of a hit. They had a pretty good ballad that still sounds good today. That's it. They weren't as fantastic as their fans hoped, nor as bad as their bashers quipped.

So Hail and Farewell, Jet. For that little moment, we were all your girl.

Grade: L

Xan McCurdy Preaches the Gospel of Bass

At Magnet, the Cake multi-instrumentalist talks up the importance of the low-end:

I’m not talking about these chest-pain-causing bass-frequency fanatics, but the subtle melody-enhancing, rhythm-keeping, ass-caressing bass-guitar sounds. Put on any Marvin Gaye and turn up the low frequencies on your home or car stereos or your mp9 player (or whatever) just a tad, and I promise it’s a little bit better. And kiss your local bass player. He works a lot harder than you think.

This is all true. As I've said, I used to play the bass, and it may be an easy instrument to fake along with, but it's truly difficult to play well. And if you do, people are unlikely to notice.

Even punk bands need good bass players. My favorite punk bassis? Paul Simonon of the Clash:

Animated History of the Beatles

Kind of awesome, albeit cliched:

BEATLES Rock Band from alberto mielgo on Vimeo.

When you think about it, the Beatles kind of were a cartoon.  Everything about them seemed to follow a script, and the image and sensation of them grew to be larger than the four men in the band could actually fulfill. Since they broke up, they have apotheosized into cultural symbols that cannot be killed.

The more cartoony of them seem to be dying last, anyway.

Kung Fu!

I Agree With Fluxblog

If I tease Fluxblog occasionally, it's done out of love, or at least, respect. Perpetua's career is testament to the value of passion and determination, and I don't begrudge him a bit of the success he's earned.

And sometimes, we manage to oddly mirror each other. For example, his post about the Replacements expresses my thoughts entirely. I've been sort of wanting to get into them, but I haven't yet, and I'm not sure why. I think it's because they seemed redundant to me. "Ah, sure, punk rock," I'd think, "I know punk rock. What's that you say? Then they 'matured'?"



But now I'm more okay with letting bits of 80's rock past my nose, so I think I'll give them a fair hearing. Suggestions as to Replacements songs/albums to start with will be welcome.

Mark Your Calendars, Fools

Record Store Day is April 16th this year. One Day after Tax Day, which works for me for some reason.

Who is this Kate Moss Person?

In the process of getting the news out that the Kills will have a new album hitting the shelves in April, Pitchfork lets out this piece of fatuousness:

In the time since the Kills released their 2008 album Midnight Boom, the oozing blues duo have been busy with other things. Alison Mosshart has been kicking it with Jack White in the Dead Weather, and Jamie Hince has been racking up low-grade tabloid fame as Kate Moss' boyfriend.

Ignoring, for the moment, the gee-golly-goshers aspect of being told that musicians do other things when not in the studio or on tour, why in the name of all things holy am I supposed to give a snowball in hell about who James Hince has been fornicating with? Are they really trying to coat this trivia with some kind of lovers-reunited meme?

Blue and Pink Sets Indie Hearts A-Flutter, Wallets A-Open

Scrolling through Pitchfork, I find the following two album covers, right on top of each other:

Title shortened from "Gimme Some Plastic Surgery,
For the Love of God."

Irony and fatuousness mix in one complete package.

What happens when the collective unconscious becomes self-aware?

iAlbum

While I've steadily lost interest in Gorillaz over the years (if there's anything less self aware than a rock/hip-hop supergroup, the most carrion-like of music acts, whining about trash, I haven't percieved it), and probably won't buy The Fall whenever it comes out, I am intrigued by the fact that Albarn recorded it on his iPad while touring. If an iPad can do that, then who needs a studio?

We aren't all digitized yet.

2.8 million vinyl records were sold last year, the highest since 1991. The Beatles sold the most, but Arcade Fire and Black Keys did respectable sales.

Personally, I can't get enough of the stuff.

Rating My CD's: Are You Trying to Tell Me "Purple Haze" Says Something?

25. Jimi Hendrix -- Smash Hits

I've bought this CD twice. The first time it was a stocking-stuffer/sub-gift for my brother. He listened to it once or twice and then gave it back to me. I sold it to Record and Tape Traders with a pile of other stuff I didn't listen to, and bought something hipper instead. Because, Hendrix was such a cliche, man! The inevitable #1 on lists of rock guitarists made by people who can't think for themselves! The Sheeple!

The second time it was homework for the first and only gig I've ever played, an event sponsored by the College of Southern Maryland Guitar Club at a coffee shop. I never went to CSM; I ran into the director at a production of Beauty and the Beast that wifey was involved in. He saw me in my Miles Davis T-shirt and chatted me up, found out I played bass, and asked me to come jam. So for an evening I was Noel Redding to a trio of honkeys who all wanted to be Hendrix and were way better musicians than I've ever been (the only black member of our impromptu group was the drummer, in a neat inversion of the racial makeup of the Jimi Hendrix Experience).

Rating My CD's: EEEENNNNNNHHHHHH

24. Ilad -- The Spoon

I do 90% of my CD-listening in the car. Radio is lame, and I buy music for a reason. So I'm that guy: constantly switching out the CD's in my car so I can listen to new stuff. If a CD stays in my car longer than a couple of weeks, I'm very busy.

And that's a strike against Ilad, because this CD doesn't play in my car very well. It's one of a handful that I call "skippers". If I drive over a pothole, it skips. If I drive over a manhole cover, it skips. If I drive over a rise in the earth higher than four inches, it skips. So the most consistent sound I get from The Spoon is stereo whirr.

Sure, I could listen to it on my stereo at home. But that's where I listen to vinyl. Besides, my stereo has taken to turning itself on in the morning and blaring Ilad from the basement, so I feel as though I've gotten a good exposure to it.

What it sounds like is a pleasant, tepid soup of jazzy non-jazz. I don't know if jazz musicians enjoy themselves far more than anyone listening to them, because I like jazz, but I do kinda get that feeling from this record. Like there's some kind of deeper sophistication that the band itself is totally digging, but which is utterly lost to me. I hear guitars, and drums, and bass, and rythmic switches that more or less fail to arouse anything in me. I'm not getting it, and I don't care.

Grade: C

Rating My CD's: Northern-ness

23. The Good, The Bad & the Queeen -- The Good, The Bad & the Queen


English music is known for two things: mirroring back American Rock n' Roll louder and harder, and expressing a profound romantic bleakness. Sometimes, instead of sucking deep of Yankee rhythm, the Pommies take the same instruments and play a raw yet gentle music full of the kind of un-nameable yearning that C.S. Lewis called Northern-ness, or Joy: a grey savoring of all the cold truths of the world. The Kinks, after the initial ramalama of their early songs, did this kind of music best, and you can also hear it in later songs of Kinks-revivalists the Jam (check out "English Rose" for an example).

Guess Who's Still Alive: Advent Edition

[Because it's not Christmas until Dec. 25th.]

The following artists have Top 20 albums on Amazon:

• Susan Boyle (the top 2 spots, in fact. Maybe we're not an image-obsessed culture...)
• Taylor Swift (never mind)
• Josh Groban (continuing to labor under the delusion that the world needs someone to stand in for Bob Dylan)
• Big Time Rush (no no no...we're supposed to have Boy Band nostalgia in about 8-9 years, not NOW)
• Bruce Springsteen (because I know I want to pay 70 bucks to hear all the tracks that weren't good enough to make it onto Darkness on the Edge of Town)
• Hannah Montana (if we put her in a room together with Taylor Swift, and they saw each other, would the rift in the Space-Time Continuum cause each other to freak out and faint for a year or so, like in the Back to the Future sequels? Cause that would be pretty rad)
• Bob Dylan (see?)
• Christina Aguilera and Cher (we comment on the one who's gained as much weight as the average college freshman, and not the one who bleeds botox. I hate the media)
• Norah Jones (apparently she works with other artists! Who'da thunk it?)
• Buddy Guy (Good for him. No snark)

Talking Back to Punk Rock #11

"Okay, Henry. I get it. You're Damaged. As in, seriously soul-crushed. Utterly bereft in a way completely different from all other people and their damage. I'm entirely cognizant of the fact that you're spirit is in bound in invisible chains.

[NSFW below. You have been warned.]

Rating My CD's: I'm a Monster

22. The Flamin' Groovies -- Teenage Head

The Flamin' Groovies sit at a strange intersection of American Rock music. They came along too late to be considered merely garage rock, way too early to be punk. You can't quite classify them as part of the Velvets-MC5-Stooges-New York Dolls proto-Punk crew: they've got too much country in them. But try to toss them off as just another early 70's Hard Rock Stonesclone, and all that feedback, that clear speedfreak-soul line tracing back to the Sonics and Little Richard, comes in and dances on your head. In the end, like the Cramps, the Groovies sit their own perch on the great tree of Rock n' Roll.

Teenage Head, their offering from that Dark Year of Our Lord, 1971 (Hunter Thompson never quite rose above the silly, did he?), exemplifies this straddle perfectly. There's a wonderfully Stones-y swagger to the opener, "High-Flyin' Baby" to the point where you could well believe this was a cut that some Under Assistant West Coast Producer Man decided to cut from the Sticky Fingers sessions (The liner notes even claim that Mick Jagger thought Teenage Head superior to that album). "City Lights," which follows, goes full country-blues.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #10

"Governor Jerry Brown, huh? That's the problem with putting actual names in your songs; dates it rather quickly. I mean, it's not like Jerry Brown's ever going to be a force in California politics anytime soon.

Oh, wait..."

-The Dead Kennedys, "California Uber Alles"

NATO Causes Arcade Fire Show Cancellation.

In other news, NATO is awesome.

Okay, I don't hate Arcade Fire. But I feel like I should.

"And They Sucked at Altamont, Too!"

Lileks confronts the Beast:

“You listened to Starship?” the photographer said.


My wife said she had. The photog looked at me. “You a Starship fan?”

“No sir,” I said.

“Really? Aw dude, c’mon, We Built This City!”


“They didn’t build anything,” I said. “The idea of Grace Slick singing ‘they’re always changing corporation names’ when the band had three names is just the start of my problems, and ‘Marconi does the Mambo’ is the other.”

“Yeah, you’re right, it was Jefferson Airplane, then Jefferson Starship, then just Starship.”

“I hated them all,” I said. “‘White Rabbit’ is the Bolero of rock.”

“Okay well I can see you got opinions!”

Family by now is cringing. Yes, Daddy has opinions.

I always wondered who on earth ever liked "We Built This City". It surprises me not at all to discover they work at Disney.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #9

"Race Against Time? More like Race Against Diction, amirite? LOL C whut I did thar?

No but seriously, can't understand a word. Oh, you're Scottish...never mind then."

-The Exploited, "Race Against Time"

Rating My CD's: The Squarest Thing On the Jukebox

21. The Fiery Furnaces -- I'm Going Away

The Book of Daniel tells a story (Dn 3) of the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar, conqueror of Jerusalem, destroyer of Solomon's Temple, building a Golden Statue and demanding that all his subjects worship it. Three Jews refuse to do so, and Nebuchadnezzar throws them into a fiery furnace to be burned to death. Instead, an angel of God comes to the rescue, and they stand in the fire unharmed, until the king notices. He then proclaims that the God who could do such a thing is the greatest of all gods, and showers the three Jews with riches and favors.

I mention this because the actual band the Fiery Furnaces seems unaware of it. In a deeply uninteresting "In My Room" feature in the October 2007 issue of Spin (Golly! Rock Stars have kitchens! With stuff in them!), Eleanor Friedberger claims that "Our band name comes from a line in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." Although other web sites have claimed a double-reference to CCBB and the Bible, this review of Rehearsing My Choir, the FF's 2005 album, sticks to the initial story. And while I'd like to believe that the Brooklyn hipster duo behind this album know obscure stories from Old Testament Prophets, somehow that first story rings the truer.

RIP Ari Up

I never was the world's biggest Slits fan, but I've got a DVD copy of Punk: The Early Years, featuring a gloriously incompetent set from the early Slits and Ari screaming her fool head off to something like "Split": (Content Warning: Adolescent punks using dirty words)



They may have got better than this, but they were never more punk. She ought bury Lydon, not the other way around.

Chart Attack! ...um, Attacks

Poor Kings of Leon. I wondered if they really did peak with Because of the Times.

Halfway through the album is also the point where you realize Come Around Sundown is simply too long. Right when you're thinking it's going to end, it just keeps going, becoming as worn out as the elastic on a really, really stretched pair of sweat pants. This makes it a curious contradiction; one would think it would be impossible to make an album that sounded completely thin, but looks dense in terms of its length. But Kings Of Leon have seemingly done the impossible here.

Ouch.

My new favorite web comic

Ah, punk rock:

Bad Band Names: a Drive-By Commentary

I'm putting myself on a new music diet until I finish at least one of my Rating My CD's categories, so Magnet's Which Album Are You Most Looking Forward To This Week? feature is utterly meaningless to me. However, I'd rather not consign myself to irrelevance, so I'm going to introduce a concept I've been meaning to discuss by making fun of the names of the bands in the poll.

Full Disclosure -- Aside from the first two, I haven't heard a note from any of these:

Talking Back to Punk Rock #8

"You're not getting it. You can't ask someone to rape you. If you ask that means you're giving consent, which means it's not rape. It's one of those Catch-23 things. Or 22. I don't know; I've never read it. I already know the punch line, so what's the point?"

-Nirvana, "Rape Me"

It's Sasquatch! Stop It Before It Gets the Children!

James Murphy is a hairy, hair man. Who appears to have just eaten a hipster:

Get in mah belly!

Rating My CD's: Ain't No Room for a Guitar Man

20. Elvis Presley -- Elvis 75


[Yes, this should be filed under P for Presley. I don't care. Over the decades Elvis has shed his surname.]

When Elvis died in August of 1977, a bereft fan asked his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, what they were supposed to do now. "Why, nothing son," replied Parker, "It's just like when he was in the army!"

Elvis fans act under an obligation to treat Parker as the villain of Elvis' saga, the grasping Svengali who trapped the King behind walls of money and pills. But time has proven him right. Thirty years has passed since the King's death, and a minor industry still labors to ensure that we never forget him, that we never quite put another onto his throne. As with the Beatles, repackages of the same hit songs reappear with predictable regularity. Considering that such made up most of his albums for the last decade or so before his death, it's hard to say hat Elvis' career arc has greatly changed. Like the villain in Gibson's Count Zero, his actual corporeal existence is largely secondary to the corporate life of his money.

Interpol is Arrested.

If this review is accurate...

Interpol's best work sounds enormous, making any room or car in which it's played instantly feel incapable of holding it. Interpol boasts "Barricades," an awe-inspiring song full of sweeping grandeur. It has palpable weight and size. Album closer "The Undoing" gives a sense of panorama, and both "Summer Well" and "Safe Without" succeed to a lesser extent, but Interpol doesn't threaten to blow the roof off.
The size has always worked off the razor-sharp edges of the music, with Daniel Kessler's guitar leading the way. Interpol restores some of the shine, but the music still feels softer somehow, the cuts not as precise.

 ...then Interpol is all but done. The eponymous reboot is oftentimes a band's last shot at a sustained career; if you hose it, or don't immediately build on it, then you're toast. So Andrew Earles may have been right, again:

Interpol updated ’90s indie rock by brilliantly revisiting first-wave post-punk and the Church. 2003 was a heady time for the New York City foursome, when the world stayed oblivious to the fact that this was a one-and-a-half-album band. That reality slapped Capitol across the face four years later when Interpol delivered major-label debut Our Love To Admire, a small-scale Waterworld for modern rock circa now.

But if some of the songs are as enjoyable, they may yet have a new lease. Don't make us wait, boys, sling that post-punk out fast!

Paglia on Gaga on Madonna

Camille Paglia does not overhear herself.

I disagree with Anne Althouse, who sees nothing in Paglia's takedown of Lady GaGa but an old fart telling the damn kids to get off her lawn. In point of fact, I see a lot of blunt truth:

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.

One doesn't need to spend a lot of time with adolescents to see this. Technology has empowered the self-absorption/self protection cycle of adolescence to the point of mindlessness. We will one day reach the point when people will wonder why dining tables and fireplaces even exist; when families will be nothing more than genetic flash mobs. The machine is in the ghost.

However, Paglia, like Marx, does not see the logic of her own argument. She does not see that every criticism directed at GaGa redounds to Madonna as well. The names themselves mirror each other; had they been switched, none could tell the difference. So when Paglia says:

For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over… 

I can only say, "did she miss the 1980's?" That sounds like every act my elementary-school psyche came to grips with on MTV: jaded, soulless hawkers of plastic decadence. I cannot understand why she believes that GaGa differs from Def Leppard differs from 2 Live Crew differs from Madonna. And when she says:

There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.

I have to say "Woman, please." As though Madonna was an indie act, bursting forth armed from the head of Avant-Garde, rather than a relentless self-promoter who cannily released her disco-pop from Sire Records, who by 1982 had, like everyone else in the music industry, ran not walked away from everything risky. Madonna's entire shtick has been an epater les bourgeois riff punctuated by exploding dollar signs from the beginning. It's actually kind of sad watching Paglia continue to play defense for a woman who has become as big an institution as Elvis ever was:

However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir.

That  laughing sound you hear is me trying to figure out whatever it was the young Madonna did that could ever be considered "fiery." Was it the Go-Gos Lite of "Lucky Star"? The syrupy tedium of "Papa Don't Preach"? The lipstick-smeared, second-rate Vivienne Westwood fashion sense? Whatever the hell was going on in "Express Yourself" (truly a sentiment America had never encountered before)? What?

I suppose if I grew up in the 1950's and came of age in the 1960's, I might have considered Mdme Ciccone's disco-cancan act vital and novel. As it stands, I find the Ga of Ga's way less offensive than Madonna, who will not rest until she's acknowledged as the Queen of All Culture. Both are, at root, making a mint being drag queens with girl parts. The newer one, at least, has no notion of being anything more.

Rating My CD's: Love of the Loveless

19. Eels -- Shootenanny!

I first encountered Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, the man behind the Eels, whilst digging through my wife's iTunes collection, and enjoying "Novocaine for the Soul." I read somewhere that E was a bluesier, more introspective version of Beck, so in the first flush months of having my own iTunes, I downloaded Electro-Shock Blues, which has never been an easy listen. Given the subject matter it drew from (the suicide of E's sister and cancer diagnosis of his mother), it hardly should be, and it's leaden melancholy still makes for better listening than The Soft Bulletin, which I bought around the same time.

In all honesty, I'd really first encountered him in a Spin review of Shootenanny!, the content of which I thankfully do not recall. I liked the name (perhaps confusing them with proto-punk geniuses the Electric Eels), and liked the album title, and liked the none-more-black cover. So when I heard "Novocaine," I decided to delve more deeply, and thought an album called Electro-Shock Blues would be a good set of immersion songs. But Shootenanny! was always the goal purchase.

Rating My CD's: This Isn't Supposed to Be Here.

18. The Black Keys -- Brothers

It's September. I'm in the damn E's.

Back in January, when I conceived this,  I hoped that I would have knocked out the first part of this plan by the end of the year. I should be elbow deep in the Rolling Stones by now, not struggling to come up with things to say about Echo and the Bunnymen. I shouldn't be promising reviews to my three readers. I should be delivering them.

Remember my one-word review of Back in Black? Good times.

So the last thing I need at this point, with my momentum flagging, is to double back into the B's just because I happen to have bought another Black Keys disc. Hell, I shouldn't be buying another Black Keys disc until I've finished cataloguing all the stuff I already have, sitting patiently, alphabetically by genre, waiting for me to tell all of you whether I like it or Like It like it.

A Lament for "Forced Consumption"

Album-a-Week laments the fall of music magazines, as represented by the end of Paste:

Let's say you bought an entire album just because you liked one song. After listening to that one song on repeat for days, you ventured into the rest of the album. After listening to the entire album, you ran across the best song of your life. Well, that would never have happened if you hadn't bought the album, now would it? If you just bought the single, you would not have learned about any other tracks on the album. Forced consumption in the magazine format is the same. It leads you through a maze of possible favorites; whereas, online only leads you through what you already know.

He's not wrong.  But the mags need a better tag line than "Forced Consumption: Because We Know Better, Sheeple!" Maybe ConsumptionPlus?

INCOMING!

My plan is to have not one, but two, new reviews up by tonight.

Until then, savor the awesomeness of this:

Jazz is the new black, y'all.

I Just Can't Quit You: The Goodnight Loving Redeems Itself

Boy, Brokeback Mountain really slipped down the memory hole like a greased pig, eh?

I was prepared to hate this. The Goodnight Loving is the kind of band name that makes me contemplate violence. It's nonsensical, fey, and dull at the same time. And their description hardly improves the impression:

the Milwaukee quartet takes on a musical time warp to beachy ‘60s garage pop, with twangy guitar riffs, psychedelic organs and vocal harmonies.

In other words, they sound like the Beach Boys. Which is good, as its been several minutes since I reflected on how the Beach Boys are easily the least interesting Important Band from the 60's.

And true to form, most of their mix-tape selections are irretrievably middlebrow. Linda Ronstadt belongs nowhere outside of my mom's dusting record collection. Thin Lizzy is Rush for meatheads. Thomas Function has a name that causes the phrase "bowel movement" to appear in my head, and surprise, surprise, the song is called "Filthy Flowers." As the kids say, FAIL.

And yet. When he sais that people who don't like Born In The U.S.A. are terrorists, I'm with him. When he shouts out Link Wray's "Hidden Charms," I salute. And their songs?

Their songs are pretty damn good, actually.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #7

"Look pal, you can want a suburban home all you want. Unless I see a 20% down payment and a credit history, you won't get lent the price of a Reese's Big Cup.

Though if you run to the store and get me a few of those, I might be willing to negotiate that percentage a few points."

-The Descendents, "Suburban Home"

Guess Who's Still Alive, Part IV: The Revenge

The following artists have Top 25 discs on Amazon as I write:

• Eminem (Stealing the Blues is Business, and Business is Good)
• Iron Maiden (Dude! Most Triumphant!)
• Brian Wilson (Apparently, we aren't quite full up on crazy yet)
• John Mellencamp (I once thought that Cougars don't like him, either. I was apparently wrong)
• Sheryl Crow (Is it just me, or does she look more like Butt-Head every album?)
• Los Lobos (Back from the 80's and hungry, hungry like the wolf!)
• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (The Rolling Stones of New Wave ride again)
• Gov't Mule (The Rolling Stones of Jam bands ride again)
• The Black Crowes (The Rolling Stones of their tepid imaginations ride again)
• The Kidz Bop Kids (Because all that keeps a Katy Perry song like "California Gurls" from being age-appropriate is an infinitesimal shift in vocal pitch)

Rating My CD's: Come on Down to My Rescue

17. Echo & the Bunnymen -- Songs to Learn and Sing

In my library/office, where I compose these deconstructions, I have a small paperback edition of Verse by John Updike, published in 1965, which I paid a pittance for in my favorite secondhand books & music store a few years ago. Every now and again, I flip through it idly, seeking knowledge and understanding, and finding only cleverness. For John Updike was a clever poet who poetry says clever things. A brief example, from A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects:

Apple

Since Time began, such alphabets begin
With Apple, source of Knowledge and of Sin
My child, take heart: the fruit that undid Man
Brought out as well the best in Paul Cezanne

You see what I mean. The poem doesn't so much enhance my understanding as flatter it, with the wink that of course I know who Paul Cezanne is, and if I can't quite place his art, I remember him as an Important Artist that Educated People know about, so I assume that he painted apples. Damned witty, Wilde!

Out of Office AutoReply

The Echo review is coming, I swearsies. but for the nonce, I am on vacation. I am soaking up rays and replenishing my system. Next week I'll be back.

Mad Men Season 4 Premiere

Will someone please tell me what version of "Tobacco Road" that was at the end of the episode? All those TV critics keep mentioning the song's name but not who's singing it. There's about 15 versions on iTunes right now. Help a brother out!

Kleptones Video Mashup

This is just awesome.


Kleptones - Come Again (Beatles vs Rare Earth vs Beaties vs Daft Punk vs Cypress Hill vs Boston) Video by Crumbs Chief from The Videotones on Vimeo.

Perpetua Sticks it to M.I.A.

At Pitchfork:

The record is a shambling mess, devoid of the bangers that characterized Arular and Kala, two of the stronger pop albums of the past decade. It aims to capture a technological and cultural zeitgeist in its over-stimulated, digitally degraded sound, but the songs are too flimsy to carry her bold conceit. Without compelling tunes, the obnoxious public antics, dubious political messages, and thin voice that had grated on her naysayers have become impossible for even dedicated fans to ignore. It's as if everything that was great about M.I.A. has been stripped from this music, leaving behind only the most alienating aspects of her art and public persona.

I should probably stop wailing on the girl. That "Born Free" video really got under my skin somehow.

Is it Just Me...

... or is "Band of Horses" sound like a name that was only adopted because someone's girlfriend didn't like "Band of Doom"?

UPDATE: Should I listen to a Band of Horses song before I make cracks like that?

I actually didn't mean to vanish...

But something about Echo and the Bunnymen has defied giving me a hook to write about, and I've had other projects looming. You know how it is.

Here's Album-a-Week Talking about the XX album that everyone's all gaga over:

Negative space, purposeful hesitation, simplicity and raw awkward understated talent are what make this album brilliant. Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim and Jamie Smith have birthed a masterful and original debut.

I suppose that's true. To me it sounds like a band sitting in it's bathtub and farting. But I haven't been in the most creative mood of late.

Genre Breakdown: Punk Rock

[A new design on a struggling blog merits a new feature. So from time to time, Genre Confusion will feature Genre Breakdowns, an explanation of why various "genres" of popular music exist, and why they shouldn't exist. Herewith is the first entry, one near and dear to my heart.]


All right, trendsobbers, it's time to spike your hair, rip your shirts, and unlearn everything you have learned about what makes rock n'roll good. We're going to jump into the most unfunky, amateurish, and loudmouthed subspecies of rock ever to lay claim to popular imagination. Behold, Punk Rock.

1. Where the Name Comes From

The word "punk" is of indeterminate origin, and had a dual meaning in early American culture. In the first place, it referred to any prepared substance that will smolder when ignited, so that it may be used as tinder, to light firewood, etc. This had a connotation of something rotten that could be used. In the second place, and as early as 1596, it denoted a harlot or prostitute, and in prison culture referred to those on the ahem, bottom. By the early 20th century referred to a young hoodlum or troublemaker, often an associate of an older criminal.

The musical movement focused on the troublemaker aspect and largely ignored the homosexual undercurrents (although it was the first movement in rock to be even remotely gay-friendly). As Legs McNeil of the influential Punk Magazine put it:

The word "punk seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked -- drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side.

Rating My CD's: She's an Artist, She Don't Look Back

16. Bob Dylan -- Bringing It All Back Home

Somewhere along the way, this tiny, curly-haired white boy from Goditscold, Minnesota became the Voice of a Generation, when such a title meant something beyond achieving a certain level of music-industry investment. Well before the Beatles promised them endless youth or the Rolling Stones gave them a window on their darkness, Bod Dylan enshrined in the Baby Boomers their founding myth; that they were righteous, that the world was going to shift into their hands without effort, by the aligning of some cosmic alarm clock. Hunter Thompson called it "that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or on theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . ."

And there more or less, lies the reason I cared not a whit about Bob Dylan for the longest time; that sense of inevitable irrelevance to anyone born after 1960. I missed that high and beautiful wave; and have since seen little in it high or beautful. Just because I can dig on Cream's thundering romanticism doesn't mean I'm buying into the notion that sex and drugs and raucous music were something my parent's generation invented. Rather, like Howdy Doody and Social Security checks, it was something provided for them, and they claimed it as theirs.

MIA = Missing In Action, in the Jungles of Hip.

 A few months ago I shot a quick dart of snark at Sri Lankan-born rapper MIA over her intentionally-infamous "Born Free" video. I did so without a whole lot of knowledge of anything about her other than her popularity amongst the hipsters, and Andrew Earles' tart dismissal of her:

It’s amazing the lengths to which music consumers, makers and critics will go to avoid appearing—gasp—racist. If the Sri Lankan-born M.I.A. had instead hailed from Tulsa, Okla., with the exact same music in tow, well, she would still be there right now. I call it TV On The Radio Syndrome: If they were white, one-eighth of the press and attention would’ve come their way. Music critics are terrified of facing this fact. M.I.A. provides lazy listeners with an easy multicultural accessory, the equivalent of traveling through India by way of seeing The Darjeeling Limited.

And so I would have let the matter rest, had not Ace of Spades linked the NY Times' skewering of her radical pretensions. Which he goes on to lambaste:

Basically, M.I.A.'s rule seems to be that if you're talking about her being a terrorist as if it's a chic, fashionable, daring, awesome thing -- i.e., as a good thing -- then she is a terrorist, precisely as she herself often claims.
But if you're saying it's a bad thing to be a wannabe terrorist jocksniffer, then she's not, and you are just being an unfashionable dolt who doesn't understand her sly humor.

After which, he links to the following (Content Warning: Real corpses and violence):

Rating My CD's: Indie-Pedant

15. Death Cab for Cutie -- The Photo Album

I tried with this one. I really really tried.

There's a whole swath of music that came out in the decade past that I cannot relate to in any way. I fundamentally don't "get it." Most of it falls under the rubric of "indie" rock or pop. Now, I am aware, as is anyone who's ever used the word "indie" in any piece of writing about music for the last fifteen years, that "indie" doesn't mean anything specific. It's an umbrella term that describes music bubbling up from the so-called "underground" (the pop culture's minor leagues). In this way, it's basically short for "independent" and can cover a wide variety of sounds (for purposes of clarity, I'm not going to get into the fact that the original "independent" labels, like Atlantic Records, were those that lacked their own distribution channel). And that's all perfectly fine.

Rating My CD's: Let's Go Trippin'

14. Dick Dale -- The King of Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale and His Del-Tones

Somewhere out there, beneath the clear moonlight, some kid is looking at this disc for the first time in his uncle's CD collection and asking himself, "What's a Del-Tone?" He is afraid that there is no answer, and begins to wonder if he can ever relate to something when he has no frame of reference to it. Someone, somewhere, must have known what a Del-Tone was at some point. Someone must have thought that it was a good idea to name a band that at some point. But, as regular viewers of Mad Men know, then the Sixties happened, and we were left, like the Simpletons of a post nuclear-apocalypse, hunting for meaning amid the ruins of a culture that made sense.

I first heard Dick Dale the way the rest of you did, five minutes into Pulp Fiction, my mind blown by the juxtaposition of blistering surf guitar, Tarantino's screwball-comedy-esque dialogue, and the threat of impending violence. The first ten seconds of "Misirlou" (which means...?) shows up the the Beach Boys, and the Byrds, and the Doors, and any other California rock group for the posers they are.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #6

"Um, do you want me to touch you to verify that you're sick? Because you seem pretty sure of it. I'm willing to take your word, if you know what I mean."

-Mudhoney, "Touch Me, I'm Sick"

Rating My CD's: Sunshine of Your Love

13.  Cream -- Disraeli Gears

When we were kids, my brother and I would make fun of Eric Claption, and our dad for presumably liking him (Dad had a Clapton Greatest Hits, but preferred early Elton John and Grand Funk and such). We did this without having really heard Clapton, in the fashion of juveniles everywhere: we made fun of him because he was old, and a honky, and had the kind of name that a bank executive or CPA might have.


Later on, when my brother actually sat down and learned to play guitar, he came to a 180 on this position, and briefly went through a period where Clapton was the man, coinciding with a period of digging the Beatles. I never went through this period, preferring always Jimmy Page to Clapton, and I’ll have loads to say about this when I get to my Zeppelin collection.

Rating My CD's: A Boy Named John

12. Johnny Cash -- The Legend Box Set

In a lot of ways, Johnny Cash was just like Elvis. Both were sons of the Mississippi Delta; both grew up poor as dirt; both wandered in to Sun Records in Memphis in the middle of the 1950's hungry and talented; both achieved international fame and became legends in their own time. Up until 1968 or so, their career arcs show suprising similarity.


After that, they break apart to an almost perpendicular degree. The King's '68 Comeback ended up not re-vitalizing Elvis' career so much as eulogizing it nine years ahead of time. He sank down into drugs and debauchery and became just another sacrifice offered on the altar of Fame, apotheosized in mystic sightings and velvet portraits. Only now, 30 years after his death, are the cognoscenti prepared to take him seriously again.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #5

"So, are you in favor of sex and violence, or opposed? Because the repetition of that lyric over and over again, it leaves room for either interpretation, friend."

-The Exploited, "Sex and Violence"

No Matter How Many Times I See It....

...I never get tired of watching the South Park Goth Kids burn down the Hot Topic. I like it so much, it almost makes me want to listen to Goth music. But that's a genre, aside from some Misfits and Joy Division discs, that I haven't really checked out (and I don't think they count).

On the other hand, sensitive rebels...

Spin Pisses Everyone Off

I won't make you wade through their list-by-numbers of the most 125 best records of the last 25 years. It's every record you'd expect to be there. The link goes directly to the No. 1. The commenters all hate it. It's designed to be annoying. Indeed, that's how these list consider themselves successful. If they'd just put Kid A or OK Computer in the top slot, like they'd really like to, no one would care. But if the list "starts a conversation" (i.e. invites flames from across the internet), then Spin has justified its online budget.

So click if you must. But don't feed the troll.

Talking Back to Punk Rock #4

"No, no, no...you see, if you were a surfer, you'd have a surfboard, not a skateboard. If you were trying to surf with a skateboard, you were more wasted than you realize."

-Black Flag, "Wasted"

An Album A Week is bettter than I can manage...

Here's a link to Album-A-Week Blog, my latest twitter buddy, while I absorb the Johnny Cash Box Set. We've nerded-it up over LCD Soundsystem, and he likes the Pixies:

The lyrics are rough and informal. They, like the music, bounce between stories and statements making the lyrics slightly hard to follow. It doesn't really matter though because they flow with the staccato nature of the music. Their shared lack of unity creates an unexpected cohesiveness.

So do I.

Either Andrew Earle has Re-Discovered his Funny...

...or I've finally read enough of his blog to get it. I mean, the recycled Cracked list of Failed Fast-Food Mascots is funny enough (scroll down to find it), but the Record-Store Day takedown is pretty epic, especially coming from a guy whose entire schtick revolves around being able to direct disdain at 7" records that most of us will never see:

I’m especially jazzed about the History of Maverick Records 18LP box set, the one-sided 10″ by Les Claypool & the Three-Mile Island Prosthetic Antelope Vagina Recovery Group, the set of 4 hot-garbage-colored 7″s by Surface-to-Air Prairie Dog, and the reissue of Photo-Collage & the Senior Projects’ timeless “WTF…My Portfolio Ruptures For You” on freshly-paved parking lot-colored 12″ (one-sided and etched)...

I mean, "Prosthetic Antelope Vagina Recovery Group"? That's just funny.

Guess Who's Still Alive, Part III

Here's who's sitting comfortably in Amazon's Top 25:

• James Taylor and Carol King (Hope she knows how to duck)
• Natalie Merchant (Never have so many bought so much for 10,000 Maniacs)
• The Cast of Glee (four, count 'em, FOUR discs in the top 25. I can't imagine something I'd be less likely to buy)
• The New Pornographers (who rely on close readings of smut, irrespective of authorial intent)
• Melissa Etheridge ("Fearless Love," eh? I wonder what that refers to...)
• The Deftones (Music by 2001. Album Cover by 1986.)
• Toni Braxton (answering the long-asked equation: Whitney Houston - Amy Winehouse + Mariah Carey - Anyone interesting = ? )
• Godsmack (never understood whether God is doing the smacking or being smacked. I suspect both.)
• The Rolling Stones (with an album that was first released in 1972, and is not actually available for another two weeks. Whoever negotiated their deal with the Devil earned a bonus.)
• Sade (Throw it)

Lala Shuts Down

Lala Shuts Down

Weirdly, selling something below cost is not an eternal business model.

"Born Free! What an Original Title!"

What do you do if you're a soon-to-be has-been/never-was international music sensation?

Have you tried shooting a video over your un-interesting music showing U.S. soldiers/cops shooting a ginger kid in the head?

M.I.A. -- We should be so lucky.