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.

Talking Back to Punk Rock, #3

"Yeah, those record companies, they like to release singles. Kind of what they do. I mean, I get why you're mad, but why you thought CBS Records was going to be an artist-oriented organization is beyond me. This isn't exactly Dischord we're talking about."

-The Clash, "Complete Control"

Talking Back to Punk Rock #2

"See, it seems to me that you do know what you want, this being to destroy passersby, but since I haven't seen you, you know, do that, I'm going to have to conclude that you don't know how to get it."

-The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

Talking Back to Punk Rock, #1

(With a Tip of the Hat to Protein Wisdom)

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

-The Ramones, "Blitzkrieg Bop"

Things I Learned From Reading Fluxblog

This bears the earmarks of a continuing series:

• Knowing what you want is usually a lot more exciting than having no idea at all.
• Capitalism as a terrible boyfriend.
• The best LCD Soundsystem songs tap into the ineffable.
• The Liars are the kind of punk band that makes people think of Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.
• Robert Pollard just put together together an appealing tune and song structure with a gentle emotional epiphany that comes across as earnest and true, but he's just phoning it in.
• "Peacebone" is the worst title for an amazing song, ever.
• A line like "an obsession with the past is like a dead fly" doesn't make sense, and it totally does.
• Although Fol Chen creates danceable pop music, they don't feel they belong in that genre.
• To enjoy a Phosphorescent song requires alcohol and loose gravity.
• An accordion lends a song a peppy oompah, yet not so much that precludes the woozy sentimentality or gentle enthusiasm that allows the song to be blown off course by some light springtime wind.

The Greatest Punk Rock Mix Tape Ever

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

Why We Fight Returns:

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

When it comes to taste, we're all amphibious: We can keep our feet in different places, enjoying different things. Get people talking together, though-- put us in some sort of context-- and you start noticing desires, sometimes collective ones. It's never as simple as a particular sound or trend. But it can be a mood or sensibility you're drawn to in lots of things-- like the kind of glowy, stoned escapism you might get from chillwave, disco edits, breezy Scandinavian pop, woozy L.A. hip-hop, or any number of other places. Or a sudden craving for metal and noise or something that feels sick. Or the search for something "smarter," or more aggressive, or more adult, or more political. Gravitating to the reptile instead of the boring old fish happens when one kid decides to dress more like this and less like that, and another kid's attracted to hanging out with these people instead of those.

It's beyond refreshing to read something that talks about what we want in terms of what we actually want instead of how we've been told to want it. Which itself folds into the theme, so read the whole thing.

Success leads to stagnation...

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

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

Now, I've got my review of Disraeli Gears about 50% done, enough so that another afternoon's work will be sufficient. And the Box Set doesn't fit in the CD tower with the rest of Category 1 stuff. But What else am I supposed to do? I'm not going to cull away a new category for greatest hits and the like, and I'm going to have to review it at some point. So I'm just going to have to review Legend next, whenever I'm ready to do that.

In the meantime, what's out there I can snark about?

My Wife Loves Me...

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

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

I Feel Like Buying Stuff

Been re-reading John Savage's excellent England's Dreaming, which tends to inspire to me to again return to the well of 70's punk and proto-punk. So today, I feeling like scrimming Amazon to pick up some new tunes. Haven't bought anything new since February; gave it up for Lent and then had to manage some money issues from the wife's change in employment and taxes. But now I've got the spare cash. So I want some Vibrators and Flamin' Groovies: cheap, obscure, and good.

RIP Malcom McLaren

There was a time when could never have imagined myself writing those words. There was a time when I considered McLaren the reason that punk died. IN this, I had largely absorbed John Lydon's version of events, which, as I came to understand, is a deeply conflicted one.

Then I watched the Classic Albums DVD for Never Mind the Bollocks, and damned if I didn't find the elder McLaren a hilarious and utterly likeable old coot (especially in comparison to the incessantly crochety Lydon). In fact, I went so far in the opposite direction that I wrote this about Lydon in the earlier iteration of this blog: