PoMo Jukebox

Late to the Party--Ozzie, "The Parabolic Years: 1975-1982" (2010)

2011-12-23T15:01:00.005-06:00

It is easy to see why the Sacramento rock band Ozzie got lost in the shuffle in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They were from Sacramento, California, which is not typically recognized as one of the hotbeds of subversive rock music. Their moniker, Ozzie, might have been confused with that other famous OZZY, the one that was, at the time, Black Sabbath's lead singer. It is also hard to define them musically. I have a feeling that if they were from England, they would have been dubbed a "pub rock" band because of their versatility and their unwillingness to adhere to just one brand of rock music. Also, their quirky sense of humor rarely misfires, but it hardly ever lands either.

If one were to only hear "Android Love," the A-side to their one single (backed by mostly instrumental "Organic Gardening"), released in 1977, they would be unsure why critical or commercial success eluded them. The driving track is relentlessly catchy and possesses a provocative lyric--especially for 1977--about love between man and machine. In an alternate world, this song be talked about with the same reverence held for contemporary numbers like the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.," the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop," X-Ray Spex' "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" or Richard Hell and the Voidoids' "Blank Generation." With only one other EP credited to the band during their tenure, the bulk of the posthumous collection The Parabolic Rock: 1975-1982 consists of unreleased studio takes and demos.

The band is technically proficient, which allows them to flirt with a variety of styles. Tracks like "Android Love" and the bizarre "Child of the Reich" are glam-inspired numbers comparable to pre-Manifesto Roxy Music. There are prog-rock tendencies on display as well, especially on the aforementioned "Child of the Reich" and the overly long epic "The Ballad of Jack Ruby." Tracks like "Wall," "Faunamania," and "I Love a Tank" are firm new wave numbers. Rockers like "Cookies Rundgren," "Kung Fu Karate Man," and "Terror in the Streets" (which has a riff that Poison sounds like it must have nicked when they wrote "Talk Dirty to Me") obviously show the strong influence of Todd Rundgren. Because they never really settle into one sound, they can come across as dilettantes. The fact that they opened for bands like the Talking Heads and The Nerves makes sense. But it is also easy to understand why they only opened, and never headlined these gigs.

Still, S-S Records has done a great job with this two-record set. Though clearly drawing off less-than-pristine tapes (and a direct vinyl transfer in the case of the "Android Love" single), the records still manage to sound great. The liner notes provide an extensive history of the group and do an excellent job of shaping the context for how Ozzie arrived at their sound. Because of the somewhat steep price tag for this set (around $20-25), I would recommend it to fans of obscure 70s rock, proto-punk, and proto-new wave. While an uneven collection, it is always fun, and the band is tight. The Parabolic Years does make a mildly convincing what if? argument about their place in rock history.

Below is a clip for their Bizarro World classic "Android Love":

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: The Floaters' "Float On"

2011-10-04T19:21:00.006-05:00

LIBRA. AND MY NAME IS BRIAN.

When the members of Modest Mouse were still in short pants, the Detroit-based soul group The Floaters released a song for the ages called "Float On" in 1977. This thoroughly visionary track foresees the 21st Century's renewed enthusiasm for the accurate predictive process of Astrology, online dating, and an anonymous woman finding out how sweet it was to share her love with Larry.

After doing extensive research on astrology, I was shocked to discover that it was not--in fact--invented by Miss Cleo in the 1990s. Who knew?! It turns out that Astrology dates all the way back to the 1960s. A formerly agnostic astronomer by the name of Dr. Lowell Astor was employed at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The observatory is known for having some huge ass telescopes. He noticed that Mars, the Red Planet, temporarily entered the constellation Sagittarius. About two weeks later, a bit of good luck came his way. From this humble moment, the astrological arts arose, and became a phenomenon during the 1960s and 1970s. It's popularity started to wane during the presidency of Gerald Ford, for obvious reasons: he was a Leo. But thanks to the sexy powers of The Floaters (who were, collectively, "Aquarius, Libra, Leo, [and] Cancer" and "Ralph, Charles, Paul, [and] Larry," respectively), astrology came back into full force.

In the song, each member of the group reveals: 1) their astrological sign; 2) their first name; and, 3) what kind of woman they are looking for. By doing this, they set up the entire paradigm of online dating. More on this later. They continue their quest for the woman of their desires by "taking" their hand and inviting them to a place called "Love Land," which is presumably somewhere in the greater metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan. Finally, each member promises to show the lady how sweet it will be if she shares "her love" with him. The combined effect of this amorous barrage is that one will "float, FLOAT, float on." The light doo-wop singing of The Floaters, combined with the smooth funk of their backing band, amounts to a dulcet online dating profile.

Now, at the time this song was rising up the charts, the phrase "online dating" meant about as much as "snarg friltawog tigghol" did. Sure, matchmaking services existed. One such system is documented in the classic Bernard Malamud short story "The Magic Barrel" (1958). Some even utilized phones, newspapers, and computers. But by launching a full multimedia campaign, including TV appearances and live shows, The Floaters were promoting themselves across purposes: first, as great soul singers, and, most importantly, as all around good dudes who want to meet some compatible nice ladies for possible connubial relations and even a potential relationship. "Float On" served as their irresistible profile. Its continued play on the radio served as the contemporary online dating equivalent of men constantly bombarding women's inboxes with pervy notes. (Forgive the poor phrasing of the conclusion of that last sentence.) According to my in-the-know imaginary friend, Dr. Fred "Forklift" Quarg, the prototype for match.com's first profile page was based on this song. For instance, under the prompt, "Come with me baby to _______," you would enter the name of the place you would like to seduce your prospective date. Apparently, the standards and practices team at the aforementioned dating site thought that was pretty creepy.

Thanks to "Float On," astrology became a healing power of love, subverting the then-popular claim, made so eloquently by the female news broadcaster in the film Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), that it was meant "merely to support people who [could not] take responsibility for their own lives." Similarly, by providing a general outline for what online dating should look like, it subsequently replaced beer as the way most awkward people hook up. It never really helped Larry, though. All he needed was the glorious majesty of sweet sweet song.

*-For the purposes of full disclosure, I candidly admit that the name of the group discussed (The Floaters) and the name of the song discussed ("Float On") played no part in my selection for its entry in this series of song profiles, even if it very closely resembles my last name.

Here's a sexy clip of the song:

Book Review: 33 1/3 #63 XO

2011-09-10T16:27:00.001-05:00

One of my pet peeves in the 33 1/3 series of books is when author's writing with interesting angles suddenly break off their discussions to offer a linear song-by-song explication of the album. Typically, these song-by-song sections are boring and uninspired. They convey information that isn't particularly new, or interesting, or even necessary (which we see when the song-by-song sections devolve, bafflingly, into awkward, clunky descriptions of how songs sound--the music book equivalent of stopping to write a forty page summary of a novel for a piece of literary criticism). But just because these song-by-song sections are usually lazy and unnecessary, that doesn't mean they can't have any place in a work of music criticism. Enter Matthew LeMay's mostly interesting and well-written counter-analysis of Elliott Smith's XO. LeMay starts his book with a fairly straight-forward and inspired mission--to re-examine Smith's work outside of the cultural fetishes of mental illness, drug abuse, and suicide. LeMay argues that Smith has been taken too literally, and his work done a disservice by critics and fans who elevate the "singer-songwriter's" work because of the narratives surrounding him, not because of the exceptional quality of that work. In order to achieve this, LeMay approaches Smith's work on the level of craft--by providing both literary readings of the song's lyrics, and illustrating how Smith's songs evolved over time, it becomes clear that much of what fans believe to be autobiographical is not, and those songs about a tortured soul always on the verge of suicide maybe shouldn't be read quite so literally.

This is why LeMay's use of the song-by-song analysis is so effective. It isn't filler or fluff--the song-by-song is the book. LeMay treats his analyses as archaeological, in a way. We see how, as lyrics change and bend, their meanings and narratives changing with them, in effect exonerating Smith's music from being sentenced to the songwriter's past. While LeMay is in this analytical mode, his reading of XO is phenomenal.

Where LeMay begins to falter, if only a little, is when he begins dealing more explicitly with other writers' treatments of Smith. In a way, LeMay takes these bits too personally, and fails to recognize the broader context of the most-main-of-mainstream popular culture from which many of these critics were writing. LeMay takes issue with USA Today and Yahoo! Launch articles that describe Smith's sudden rise from "obscurity" to performing at the Oscars. I understand why this seems troubling to LeMay. We've all felt this way, when a buddy says "Hey, I just got this album called Good News For People Who Love Bad News by this new band called Modest Mouse." Just because a band or artist is "new" to the listener/writer/reporter doesn't mean it's new to everyone. But LeMay seems to expect that the primary audiences of USA Today and Yahoo! Launch--the people for whom their writers are writing--would be at all interested in Elliott Smith's past. In a way, LeMay's one failure with this book is his inability to separate the mainstream press from indie culture, and taking that mainstream press to task for trying to present an artist who defied narrativization to a fickle, and largely uninterested mainstream audience. At one point, LeMay is critical of a critic for referring to a particular club in L.A. as small when, in fact, it's a nice-sized club for nice-sized touring acts. Here's the problem--the majority of the audience for which the initial article was written would probably list their most recent concert experience as U2 or Celine Dion or Garth Brooks at Big-Ass-Fucking-Arena-United in 1996.

To this end, some of LeMay's argument feels a bit disingenuous because he doesn't account for the the real mainstream popular culture in the late nineties and early aughts when Smith was getting press. This does not, however, take anything away from LeMay's exceptional work tracing the evolution of Smith's songs, and the argument that he makes in separating Smith's music from the tragic narrative of the artist, himself.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #70 Facing Future

2011-08-22T10:43:00.003-05:00

I felt odd reading a book about an album I'd never really listened to. I checked out some of the songs through the magic of downloads and YouTube, but for the most part, I came to Dan Kois' volume on Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwo'Ole's Facing Future as an outsider. This is doubly fitting as, throughout my reading of Kois' volume, I felt like a cultural outsider--but in a good way. And that's what makes Kois' volume on Facing Future such a compelling read--the book is as much about Hawaii's culture, music industry, and values as it is about Iz's album. Truth be told, as a straight forward "album book," Facing Future is a bit pedestrian--Kois traces the history of the performer and the songs well enough, but where the book finds its stride is in its dealings with the specifics of Hawaiian popular culture. That is to say, before reading Kois' book, I never would have guessed or suspected how much of a local music industry Hawaii has, nor would I have supposed that this industry would mirror the mainstream (or mainland) record business, only in miniature. And I definitely wouldn't have dreamed of the existence of Jawaiian music (thank god). While this resulted in a bit of me "othering" a different culture as I read, that was through no fault of the author. In fact, every step of the way, Kois is sensitive to and respectful of the Hawaiian culture he is exploring.

In all honesty, Kois' empathy is the key to this volume. From the opening pages in which he tells the tale of Iz recording the famous "Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" medley in the middle of the night after a night of drinking and possibly drugging, to the treatment of Iz's desire for his family to be taken care of after his inevitable early death, Kois' prose is rich with a sincere pathos that brings Iz and the people surrounding him to life in ways rare for "album books." One of Kois' other strengths is his sincere even-handedness in dealing with local label "politics." For instance, Kois is willing to present Jon de Mello as both a hero in Iz's story, and a villain (or at least an unsavory opportunist) depending on who is talking. That Kois never really comes down on either side of the issue but merely presents the various attitudes toward de Mello is a nice change of pace from other rock books that are quick to label key players as heroes or villains and focus on those roles through the entirety of their involvement in the project.

So there it is--I don't have much to say about this book because I've never been terribly invested in Iz's music. That being said, Kois' volume was interesting thanks in large part to his ability to write well and bring Iz and the people around him to life while also painting a vivid picture of Hawaii and its culture. Sure, the book gets a bit tedious for a spell when Kois lapses into that oh-so-tired trope of the "song by song" analysis (stop it 33 1/3 writers, it's boring and lazy), but all in all, Dan Kois' exploration of Iz's Facing Future and Hawaii is well worth the read, whether your sick to death of "Over the Rainbow" or not.

==
Next up, the volume on XO, in which I admit to liking the song-by-song structure for once.

Late to the Party--15-60-75: The Numbers Band's "Jimmy Bell's Still in Town" (1976)

2011-08-21T15:39:00.003-05:00

While the music scenes based around Los Angeles and New York City get most of the press, Northern Ohio produced a healthy number substantial musical acts in the 1970s. Devo, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, Pere Ubu, and The Dead Boys all originated there, and so did lesser-known but no less brilliant groups like Rocket from the Tombs, The Electric Eels, Ex-Blank-Ex, Tin Huey, and The Waitresses. One of the hidden gems of the Kent, Ohio scene has remained 15-60-75, also known more simply as The Numbers Band. They formed in 1970 and are still active to this very day, primarily playing in small clubs in Ohio. The band has counted among its alumni Gerald Casale (later a founding member of Devo), David Robinson (who drummed in the original line-up of The Modern Lovers and in The Cars), Terry Hynde (Chrissie Hynde's brother), and Chris Butler (the leader of Tin Huey and the primary songwriter of The Waitresses, who had a MTV hit in the early 1980s with "I Know What Boys Like"). To most experts, their crowning achievement is their 1976 live album Jimmy Bell's Still in Town. It was recorded June 16th, 1975 at the Agora in Cleveland. Reportedly, The Numbers Band was the opening act for Bob Marley and the Wailers. When it was released in album form a year later, it appeared on their Water Records label, getting little distribution, and quickly falling into obscurity. Long since championed by David Thomas of Pere Ubu (who currently releases the album on his Hearpan Records label), it has maintained a small but loyal group of listeners.

Jimmy Bell's Still in Town is a remarkably tight set, and each of its five tracks flow smoothly into each other, as if there are no breaks between the songs. It is also rather difficult to categorize. Ostensibly, The Numbers Band are a roadhouse blues rock band. The title of the album even refers to an obscure blues 1958 song by Cat Iron called "Jimmy Bell." Their ten minute cover of the song, on Side Two, is without question the centerpiece of the album. While the stamp of the blues is all over this record, it is a remarkably off-kilter variation on the form. It hints at Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's 1968 Mirror Man sessions, but is far more cohesive. Similarly, the lineup and musical arrangement of The Numbers Band is highly unusual by blues band standards. They have two guitarists (frontman Robert Kidney and Michael Stacy), a bassist (Drake Gleason), and a drummer (the aforementioned David Robinson), which is not all that aberrant. However, their sound is augmented by three saxophonists (Robert Kidney's brother Jack, Terry Hynde, and Tim Maglione). Their ensemble playing is disquieting and discordant, their horns often slipping slightly out of pitch. When they solo, they owe more to Ohio native Albert Ayler than to, say, Jr. Walker or King Curtis. The guitar solos vary range traditional blues workouts to oblique motifs that foreshadow the playing of Tom Verlaine or a more restrained Robert Quine. As a result, Jimmy Bell's Still in Town is an album in which comparisons to the first two Bruce Springsteen LPs and later recordings such as Pere Ubu's The Modern Dance, Television's The Blow-Up, and Morphine's Cure for Pain are all appropriate. It is not an album that necessarily resonates on first spin, though. This is because the material is so uniformly constructed and tightly delivered that it's often difficult to distinguish when they are improvising or deviating from the structure of the tunes. Vocalist Robert Kidney's vocals are largely free from emotion or theatricality, which can give off the initial impression that he is not all that enthusiastic about the material. But once you recognize the powerful and unusual grooves they are able to develop and pursue, it becomes a thoroughly rewarding experience.

Jimmy Bell's Still in Town is available from Hearpan Records' website.

Below is an audio clip of "Jimmy Bell."

Book Review: 33 1/3 #71 It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back

2011-07-27T23:23:00.005-05:00

I had mixed feelings going into Christopher R. Weingarten's volume on Public Enemy's classic album, It Takes a Nation of Million to Hold us Back. On the one hand, I wanted to be blown away by the book because it is about one of my favorite hip hop albums ever. On the other, I was kind of dreading reading an entire book written by Weingarten, known around Twitter as a bit of a reactionary curmudgeon. While I am certainly entertained by Weingarten's antics on Twitter and the constant arguments he provokes through his, ahem, strong opinions (latest: complaining about the state of interviewing), I wasn't sure I wanted to read an entire book by the man. If you haven't read his tweets, you might have encountered the video of Weingarten's stunning rant about the state of music criticism in the age of the internet, given at a conference a few years back. Or maybe you've heard about his successful attempt to review 1,000 records via Twitter (which was later released as this odd artifact). But alright--so that's Chris R. Weingarten, and this review is about a book he wrote, not the man himself. Still, while I was excited to read about It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, I was also worried that Weingarten might fuck it up with his weird, angsty, reactionary music critic persona.

Well, Weingarten didn't fuck it up. In fact, It Takes a Nation of Millions... turned out to be one of the best entries in the 33 1/3 series. It gets off to a bit of a slow start as the author provides context that doesn't quite fit (yet, it makes sense soon), but once the book gets rolling, Weingarten's explorations of the various samples that make up Public Enemy's classic record are engaging--revelatory even. Perhaps the single most important factor in making Weingarten's book a success is his ability to combine narrative and analysis in conveying the history of the album's key samples. He doesn't simply identify a sample's source and move on, he recreates the historical moment of each sample and, in the process, shows us that It Takes a Nation of Millions... is a daring and political record through and through, not just because of Chuck D's lyrics and Public Enemy's persona, but also because many of the key samples were pulled from historically loaded cultural moments. In the process, we learn a little bit about James Brown, his bands, and his contributions to African American culture. We also learn about Funkadelic, Stax records, the Wattstax festival, early hip hop--the list goes on and on. What I find most surprising about Weingarten's discussion of this source material is, while I've always been aware of many of the sample's sources (though I was unaware of just as many), I've never considered their import so thoroughly until reading this book.

Eventually, Weingarten's volume runs out of steam a bit. The final chapter turns toward a discussion of how It Takes a Nation of Millions... has, itself been sampled and how it continues to remain a vital cultural artifact. Unfortunately, this last chapter feels more like an epilogue than chapter eight, or like the 80's movie that gives a brief summary of what happened to each character after the movie. After being immersed in Weingarten's fascinating historical narratives and analysis, I found the last chapter's rapid-fire rundown a bit unnecessary. Granted, the record's influence isn't really the book's focus, but why not put some time into telling more of the stories behind PE's influence on culture instead of just mentioning some times they were sampled.

Of course, that's just a quibble, and the lesser ending doesn't really detract much from the book as a whole. In writing this review, it occurs to me that Weingarten's volume can be a very useful book. In my comp/rhet studies, I've read a glut of material about "remix" culture, or the "rip, mix, burn" mindset. But in their discussions of sampling and digital culture, few of these scholars ever really address the potential for the intertextual methods they are describing. If I had a bit more money, I'd probably carry a dozen copies of Weingarten's book with me at all times so that, when someone uses sampling in the context of comp/rhet, I could give them a copy and tell them how much more exciting their ideas are than they even know.

So there--while I don't always agree with his reactionary woke-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed tweets, I have to admit that Christopher R. Weingarten has written one of the finest books in the 33 1/3 series.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance"

2011-07-14T14:12:00.006-05:00

Societies demand safety. That's a fact. Why do you think prisons exist? Long before Michel Foucault examined the prison as a metaphor and tool for authoritarian control of the populace in his highly influential study Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish) in 1975, America's first goth kid, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was making similar observations. In his cheery piece of fiction, The Scarlet Letter (1850), his narrator makes the following statement: "The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison." While this is unmistakably true, because Hawthorne was NEVER wrong, one thing Utopias have long overlooked, for some unknown reason, is dancing kids. According to our society's elders, these spastic little jerks have been wreaking havoc on the world since they first decided to swivel their hips and gyrate in sexually-suggestive ways. History is filled with examples of dancing kids messing things up. William Shakespeare's tragedy Romeo and Juliet is fully based on the notion of these fools and their disruptive, lascivious ways. Years later, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise brought this tale to the big screen in the form of West Side Story (1961), which filled with racist, finger-snapping kids with social diseases. In 1978's blockbuster Saturday Night Fever, dancing kids who are into disco get into more gang fights, have unprotected sex, rape a woman, do more racist stuff, commit suicide, and wear horrible shoes. Fortunately, the geniuses in Men Without Hats provided an alternative, a social salve, if you will, when they unleashed "The Safety Dance" on the great unwashed dancing masses in 1982. Because it championed safety in the art of the dance, it instantly became the greatest song of the 1980s, even better than Joe "Bean" Esposito's "You're the Best."

With its throbbing, minimal bassline and infectious hook, Men Without Hats, led by the great Ivan Doroschuk, found a simple way for kids to dance without unleashing their homicidal, herpes-infected ribaldry upon the poor proles who just want to go to their jobs in peace, drink the weekend away, and continually ruin their credit scores. Doroschuk's solution: an enclave for dancing kids away from the rest of society. He sings, "We can go where we want to / A place where they'll never find / And we can act like we come from out of this world / Leave the real one far behind." Furthermore, if you don't dance, then "you're no friend of mine." Soon, the powers that be took notice of Men Without Hats' brilliant scheme. By establishing dancing "zones," or what the Reagan administration would soon name "dance clubs," these "imbecile(s)" who are always "out of control," according to Doroschuk, could fraternize with each other, frolic, and basically do their thang all over each other. The most brilliant thing about Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance" is that comes across as pure anarchy in dance, giving it an edge for all those would-be nonconformist dancing kids. Really, though, the dance is all about safety, as the title suggests, because the main move in the dance involves "look(ing) at your hands." Clean hands help reduce sickness and The Safety Dance, with its insistence upon hand-looking, reduced instances of the common cold by one million percent, according to the Wikipedia entry on hyperbole. Because of "The Safety Dance," the tyrannical terrorism of dancing kids has been blotted out completely ... Well, unless you count Footloose, or the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #78 Pretty Hate Machine

2011-07-12T20:26:00.003-05:00

I don't know if this accurate and, if it is, what the circumstances behind it might be, but I feel like we've been waiting on Daphne Carr's 33 1/3 volume on Pretty Hate Machine forever. It wasn't a title I was particularly excited about as I haven't listened to much NIN since I stopped being seventeen, but I was curious to see what a writer as accomplished as Carr might do with the album. Turns out, this book was well worth the wait. Instead of setting out to "read" or "explain" Reznor's seminal album, Carr's project centers on locating Pretty Hate Machine in time, space, and memory. In pursuing this project, Carr provides important bits of Reznor's (and his family's) history, brief narratives of important cities in NIN's history, namely Mercer, PA, and Youngstown and Cleveland, Ohio, fan oral histories, and explorations of the sub(and mall)cultures to which Reznor's music was instrumental. That may sound like a lot of disparate material to cover in a 150 page (plus notes) book, but Carr's overarching focus on culture and her discretion in limiting each section to essential components keeps the book moving and developing in a number of interesting ways.

In a move that seems both bold and necessarily obvious, Carr begins her volume on Pretty Hate Machine with a discussion of the trench coat mafia, the tragedy at columbine, and the resulting media frenzy surrounding NIN and like artists. Why begin there, of all places? Because it was the point at which the culture that grew out of NIN's music was in the media spotlight, the moment when all of the kids in corners were suddenly dragged into the light in a flurry of paranoia and fear. In other words, it makes perfect sense to begin a book about culture with the moment when that culture was the most seen.

But Carr's book goes so much further than simply exploring that gothic/industrial culture. In her own words, by telling the story of NIN and Pretty Hate Machine, Carr was able "to tell the story of lower-middle-class white men in the Rust Belt through a narrative beginning with Trent's birth and leading to the album's birth, as a mirror of American transition from Industrial to Information Age labor" (10). This is where Carr's take on Pretty Hate Machine excels, and what sets it apart from other books in the 33 1/3 series. The story Carr is exploring is so much bigger than just an album--she's taking on class, race, economics, urban decay, privilege, etc...So thorough is Carr's exploration of NIN's impact on culture, and culture's reliance on NIN, that the books final chapter includes a brief history of Hot Topic and its intertwining with Reznor and his music.

Of course, what stands out most about Carr's book is her willingness to let her subjects speak for themselves. In the process, they say some insightful things, some intelligent things, some horrifying things, some tragic things, and some disturbingly unintelligent things, but Carr never really judges them. She let's them tell their stories and, through the context she provides, let's her readers come to their own conclusions (with only one or two fleeting exceptions). This, more than anything, is what makes Carr's book such a compelling read--it's not just about the culture of NIN fans, it is in part by them. Any author who trusts her subjects and her audience that much deserves some serious respect. So thanks, Daphne Carr, for adding a new highlight to the 33 1/3 series. My only regret is that I didn't read this book sooner so I could assign it for the class I'm teaching this fall.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #79 Chocolate and Cheese

2011-06-05T23:38:00.003-05:00

So here's a book about Ween's Chocolate and Cheese album, written by a musician and writer named Hank Shteamer. Not by any stretch of the imagination can I imagine a writer with a name more fitting to write about the very odd, very "brown," Ween. I have to admit, however, that the combination of subject matter and author name had me primed for a slightly more daring read. I know this is no grounds on which to criticize a book, but some bands' music practically begs for non-traditional treatment. Coming to Shteamer's book--just typing the name makes me giggle a little--I was hoping for something a bit irreverent, a bit unruly, and maybe even a bit offensive. Instead, Shteamer provides us with a pleasant-enough, by-the-numbers rock book experience that, despite being more gray than brown (Ween people know what I'm talking about) does a nice job of situating Chocolate and Cheese, in the context of Ween, as a pivotal moment of transition. While the selection of this particular Ween album as subject for a book might be surprising for some--there are at least two other Ween albums that seem like more obvious choices--Shteamer makes a compelling case for Chocolate and Cheese and got me listening to the album with fresh, more appreciative ears.

As for the book's structure, again, it's fairly conventional. After a compelling first thirty pages, which find Shteamer considering Ween's time before and after Chocolate and Cheese, the book spins into familiar territory with sections dedicated to "The making of...," "The songs," and "The artwork." While there is plenty of entertaining material imparted along the way, the structure keeps us at arm's length from the chaos and absurdity that Ween are associated with. It's fun to read about the trashed studio in which they recorded, and the bits about how newer recording technology complicated Ween's approach to recording as well as simplified it are interesting, but the attention to recording specifics gets a little bit tiring after a while.

Though it sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of minutiae, Shteamer's over-arching theme of Chocolate and Cheese as a moment of transition for Ween and their fans is quite compelling. When, in the book's conclusion, the author contemplates Ween's ability to "evolve without selling out" as well as the band's relationship to its fans, I found myself wanting these avenues to be explored a bit more critically. This desire was nowhere more apparent than with Shteamer's assertion that the album's great lesson is, "Be as weird as you want, but work hard and make the final product presentable. Any artist in any medium operating at the purely recreational, anything-goes level at which Freeman and Melchiondo began could benefit from this wisdom" (152). But because this assertion is presented in the book's final paragraph, Shteamer never grapples with the implications of it. Ween got to be Ween by, well, being Ween. They worked at the anything-goes level for quite some time, and actually made just about anything go. If there's one thing we learn from Shteamer's book it's that Chocolate and Cheese worked for Ween because it was an album that they arrived at in their own time, on their own terms. So why, then, would the author suggest that presentability is a thing these anything-goes bands should strive for?

I'm not sure there's an answer for that, but I suspect we'd have no Chocolate and Cheese without The Pod or Pure Guava. We'd have no The Soft Bulletin without Telepathic Surgery, no Before Today without The Doldrums and no Daydream Nation without Confusion is Sex. What I'm getting at, then, is Shteamer seems to go against everything the rest of this volume teaches us, and unnecessarily problematizes experimentation for the sake of, perhaps, defending a beloved album? I'm not sure of his motives in the conclusion, only that his assertion confounds what is an otherwise generally pleasant and informative read.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Spandau Ballet's "True"

2011-06-02T11:21:00.008-05:00

It was 1983. People drove to work in horseless carriages. They used telephones with wires attached to them. They wondered how Ronald Reagan's hair got so darned black. It was also the year that we learned the truth about truth. Spandau Ballet's tasty piece of "sophisto-pop," "True," is easily one of the most mind-blowingly brilliant singles ever committed to any recorded media. Gary Kemp, the song's writer, penned the perfect melody for the group's baritone singer, Tony Hadley, who articulately communicates, to his audience, the essence of truth. In the process, he makes a mockery of Western philosophy with brilliant ease.

Philosophers had been contemplating truth for years, from the Platonic ideal to the Nietzschean will to power. A breakthrough occurred in the 1930s, when philosopher Alfred Tarski gave the following example: "Snow is white if and only if snow is white." You can't argue with that logic. Well, Spandau Ballet decided to revise this precise if nonsensically coined formula by way of a fruitful combination of British New Wave and Yacht Rock. Tony Hadley seemingly non-verbal singing during the chorus actually packs plenty of meaning. "Ah ah ah ahhhh ah," he sings, in sexy croon-breaths. What most listeners fail to realize upon first listen is that this utterance is the crystallization of all truths. He explains, "Why do I find it hard to write the next line? / Oh I want the truth to be said," continuing, "Ah ah ah ahhhh ah / I know this much is true." What could quite plausibly be understood as an admission of writer's block is really a profound, mind-blowing truth in and of itself: "Ah ah ah ahhhh ah" is truth and truth is "Ah ah ah ahhhh ah." Suck on that, Alfred Tarski.

The key to understanding the perspective of Spandau Ballet is hidden within its chorus as well. Hadley sings, "I bought a ticket to the wor-or-orld, but now I've come back again." Clearly, Spandau Ballet was collectively abducted by a super-intelligent race of skinny tie-wearing aliens who taught them their culture and all of their knowledge. The only thing they couldn't teach Spandau Ballet was how to alleviate homesickness and how to give up the desire to feel sexy. So, after some time spent in space, probably in the months between their 1982 album Diamond and the one this appears on (clearly also titled True), they purchased tickets to return to Earth. Fueled by this new knowledge, as well as months of pent-up sexual frustration, they were inspired to tell us "this much is true" as well as include one of the decade's hottest slow-burn sax solos during the bridge.

It cannot be denied, ever, that "True" has fundamentally changed both the perceptive and linguistic truths of humankind. In the years since, we've had Madonna's "True Blue," P.M. Dawn's "Set Adrift of Memory Bliss," as well as The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Probably the most telling way it has affected culture, at least in the United States, is that when a witness has to take an oath in the courtroom, they now just sing, "Ah ah ah ahhhh ah."

Book Review: 33 1/3 #74 Song Cycle

2011-04-25T00:05:00.004-05:00

It would be an understatement to say this is merely sad. Even the Wikipedia page for the album provides very little information or insight into an album that, by all means, is one of the best of the 60's. This isn't surprising, of course, as Song Cycle was barely purchased upon its release, and its praises rarely sung by any but the most well-informed critics in the decades following the album's entrance into the world of popular music. As such, the task of anyone choosing to write about an album like Song Cycle might be a bit daunting. In his entry into the 33 1/3 series about Parks' album, Richard Henderson largely rises to the occasion with a volume that is very purposeful and thorough, if a bit dry at times. Of course, saying the book is dry "at times" might also be a bit of an understatement. In all honesty, Henderson's volume, while well written on a technical level, is a bit of a slog because the author is so dedicated to the album's (and Parks') history that it's easy for a reader to get swallowed up in the dense torrents of information. Henderson occasionally tries to get playful--especially in the book's first section, which happens to be a highlight--but ultimately, while full of outstanding information, the volume is a bit of a drag to read.

But that's okay for this book. In past reviews of 33 1/3 books I've been quite critical of overly-traditional approaches to the featured albums. Song-by-song summaries and analyses, chapters that compartmentalize the various facets of an album's production and reception, loads of facts without any fresh ideas--these are all elements of 33 1/3 books I've taken issue with in the past, and all of them are present in Henderson's Song Cycle. But while a plethora of books have been written about, say, AC/DC and plenty of articles written about and interviews conducted with My Bloody Valentine, Henderson's work on Parks is filling a glaring void. We see this even more when we look at the bibliography at the back of Henderson's volume and see it filled with books about Brian Wilson, 60's pop music, California pop music, recording studio histories, record label histories--but nothing about Van Dyke Parks. So yes, Henderson's Song Cycle is dry and even a bit banal, but the author had little choice. Many authors of 33 1/3 books have had the benefit of a rich and varied body of writing about their chosen albums from which to draw, which ultimately frees them to approach said albums from interesting and unique angles. Henderson did not have this luxury.

And of course, there are some fascinating and engaging moments throughout the book. In particular, the opening chapter, in which Henderson describes how he came to the album, is fun and engaging, and the section dealing with the controversial marketing of Song Cycle is a wonderful case study of the 60's music industry and the tensions that arose between "big business" and "counter-culture" art.

But by and and large, Henderson's Song Cycle is more the type of book that fans and scholars of pop music should read rather than one they'll necessarily want to read. And that's fine--because they should read the book. They just shouldn't expect to have their socks knocked off with the exciting prose and new insights that the 33 1/3 series has been so good at providing as of late.

=======

Next Up: I don't know--my stack of unread 33 1/3's has grown immensely. I might pick one at random.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: USA for Africa's "We Are the World"

2011-04-20T09:58:00.002-05:00

There has never been a song in the annals of history that has fused egoless philanthropy with pure pop-songwriting chops the way USA for Africa's mega-hit "We Are the World" did in 1985. This supergroup, this X-Men of musical acts, reminded us who "we" are, that WE are "the world," and that it is indeed a heavy burden, literally. According to Wikipedia, the Earth weighs over seven gajillion tons. And that's heavier than two stoned hippies* having a conversation about how "we are the world." So how are we the world exactly? That is the question Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, the song's composers, set out to ask. And, fortunately for us listeners, they answer the question with ease. They also make us feel good for solving what had previously seemed to be a problem without a remedy: WORLD HUNGER. Through sheer hope, starpower, and the insane amount of cash money generated by the song, the people of Ethiopia were able to forget about an unforgiving climate--which provided the region with a historically devastating drought and subsequent famine--and the long history of European colonization of the African nations surrounding them. I bet you never did anything that cool. Seriously. I know I haven't. Feeling special because I once helped out my grandmother during her walk for Breast Cancer Awareness just makes me feel like a great big jerk in comparison. Perhaps the song's greatest achievement, though, is that it presents a universal, timeless picture of who "we" are.

Who are we, then? Well, we are a bunch of popular musicians from the mid-1980s, that's who! We are Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, Hall and Oates, The Pointer Sisters, Kim Carnes, Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis and the News, Steve Perry, Sheila E., and James Ingram. We are pop-rock legends Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Harry Belafonte, Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, the living half of The Blues Brothers, and Lindsay Buckingham. I think we can all relate to that. As an added bonus, the presence of the British musician Bob Geldof (the brainchild of Band Aid) on the track lets every listener know that one of the goals of "We Are the World" was to make the world forget about "Don't They Know It's Christmas," the most religiously presumptuous song ever recorded (well, except for Carrie Underwood's "Jesus, Take the Wheel").

The song also speaks generally to the human condition. There are most certainly always times "When we heed a certain call / When the world must come together as one." Since we are the world, we are also "the children" as well as "the ones who make a brigher day." Because, ultimately, this is an existentialist "choice we're making," as we are a part of "God's great big family," there is only one choice: to "[save] our own lives." Cool beans. Most people can't handle the responsibility of their own job, let alone feeding and clothing the entire populace and knowing that their actions are, essentially, the actions of all seven billion people on this planet. Therefore, "We Are the World" is the most reassuring song ever recorded. Whenever we slip up--like, say, we forget to pick up our kid from school because we were deep into a game of World of Warcraft--we can realize that we are just a microcosm of this world that we also are, that for every mistake, we are actually our own lives, and we are curbing world hunger while we're at it. And for those critics who think this message is convoluted, well it's not. You are. Get me? Or, rather, get we? Are the world?

The knowledge that we are all helping goes down so much more smoothly with great vocal performances. And "We Are the World" has 'em by the boatload. The song is highlighted by that most dulcet of crooners, Bob Dylan. When he sings, "There's a choice we're may-can / We're saving aaaahhhh own liiiiives / It's trooooo we make a bedduh day / Just yooooooo and meeeee," you can literally feel that same burning passion in in the pit of your stomach. Similarly, Bruce Springsteen feels so committed to this message that apparently he didn't have a bowel movement for two weeks before he recorded his take. It meant that much to him. And with that kind of focus and determination, USA for Africa's "We Are the World" was and will always be a song that changed the landscape of human thought and understanding.

*-I'm fully aware that the phrase "stoned hippies" is redundant.

Below is the rousing video for the song. Try not to shed a tear for our greatness:

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

2011-03-29T12:38:00.004-05:00

Last Friday, my office-mate Jill told me she had to go home in order "to let the dogs out." Ergo, in true Jeopardy fashion, "Jill" is the answer to the notoriously prickly question asked in 2000 by the Baha Men in their riddle-for-the-ages anthem "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Rebecca Black's "Friday"

2011-03-24T09:22:00.007-05:00

People make a really big deal about certain days of the week. Nobody likes Mondays. Out of the seven days in a week, most die on a Tuesday. Wednesday is rather perversely known as "hump day." Thursday ... well, I honestly can't tell you what the hell is Thursday good for. But we all know the one day of the week that undoes the previous four days and gets us ready for the next two: Friday. Thankfully, thirteen year-old Rebecca Black reminds us how much this day of the week totally dominates in her 2011 smash hit aptly titled "Friday."

Friday hasn't always been the most popular day of the week. In fact, it is common knowledge that Saturday was THE DAY throughout most of human history. This changed, however, in the 17th Century, after the first performances of William Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It, when it appears that Fridays and Saturdays became tied as the favorite days of the week. In it, Orlando commands Rosalind to "love" him. Rosalind replies, "Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays, and all." From this point until the release of the double-whammy of the 1975 television comedy show Saturday Night Live and the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, it appeared that people still preferred Saturdays. However, the following year saw the release of another disco classic, Thank God It's Friday, and the tables forever turned. From this point on, Fridays were King. The film itself is solely responsible for this exultation. Subsequent studies have in fact proven that Friday itself is absolute proof of a Judeo-Christian God, hence the very phrase "Thank God it's Friday," and, of course, that glorious chain of fine dining establishments, whose food has more product in it that Guy Fieri's hair. Plus, would the formerly most pissed-off rapper in the world Ice Cube have made THREE films about the day if it wasn't so inherently excellent? I think not. When he says, "Damn it was a good day," it's of course Friday he is talking about, not lame ass Tuesday. Seriously. Besides, who would ever eat at a place called Thank the Absence of a Deity It's Friday? TTAOADI Fridays just doesn't roll off the tongue well at all.

Like blue moons, or people who have watched Showgirls all the way through sober, Friday's are rare. They only happen once every seven days. As a result, we need to be constantly reminded about them and their genius. Fortunately, Rebecca Black reminds us, and how. Nestled over a Euro-dance groove, Black's mixolydian dulcet drone of a voice presents Fridays for what they really represent: possibility. According to Black, Friday's present all kinds of crazy options. Should one be "kickin' in the front seat," or perhaps decide on "sittin' in the back seat"? "Everybody's looking forward to the weekend," she sharply observes. She points out how strong desire really is, in ways no other human has so directly expressed. While people have "fun, fun, fun" and like to go "partyin' partyin'" on the weekends, looking forward to all this fun and all this partying is far more cathartic. The weekends become, to evoke the theorist Roland Barthes, a pleasureable text, a jouissance, as our desire for revelation is intrinsically more pleasurable than the revelation itself. Also, because Friday's are so rare, we often forget "yesterday was Thursday" and that "tomorrow is Saturday" and "Sunday comes afterwards." It's that intense of an experience, this Friday thing.

In short, we should all not only Thank God It's Friday, or Tell God to Shove It Because It's Not, but we should Thank Rebecca Black for Reminding Us How Awesome Fridays Are. Even if that creepy rapper guy who makes a cameo toward the end of the song seems way too thrilled about passing a school bus.

Here's the brilliant promotional clip for the song:

Book Review: 33 1/3 #77 Tusk

2011-03-22T12:16:00.006-05:00

Rob Trucks opens his volume on Fleetwood Mac's classic album "Tusk" with a warning of sorts: "There's a character named Rob in this book who functions in ways that may or may not clearly relate to Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, and if you don't feel like you can handle that, then by all means put this book down." Trucks' "warning" does two things for me--first, it really kind of annoys me. Okay, so you wrote a not entirely conventional piece of music journalism. So what? So some boring readers don't like it when music journalism has things like "personality" and "style" and only want to read the same boring facts and anecdotes presented in the same boring way over and over again. By "warning" these people away from a book, you're essentially apologizing to them for not writing the book they would have written. Never apologize to those people. Odds are, what you've written is better than what they would have written. Odds are, what you've written is better than they're ideal of what should have been written. Second--the warning made me more excited about the volume than I had been. Tusk has always been my favorite Fleetwood Mac album, but then, I've never been a huge Fleetwood Mac fan, so that doesn't mean much. Trucks' "warning" sent a clear message to me that said, "hey, this book could be a little bit bold--I like bold, let's read."

And read I did.

And to be honest, Rob Trucks has some serious chops. He does a nice job of navigating dueling stories about the creation of Tusk with moments from his own life which, at times, hardly seem relevant to the album, but which ultimately add up to some sort of psychic and/or spiritual homage to the album's creation and themes. What makes this even more impressive is that Trucks never condescends to his audience, never feels the need to explicitly explain the connection between the bits of memoir and the bits of Fleetwood Mac history. He lets us intuit the relationship. Let's us feel our ways in, around, and through his experiences and how they play off of Tusk. The end result is not just a book that is engaging and smart with a clear emotional core, but a beautifully written, ecstatically felt study of subjectivity and art that might even deserve a second read.

Of course, not everything is perfect in Trucks' take on Tusk. A few of the "What We Talk About When We Talk About Tusk" sections--in which Trucks interviews musicians about the album's influence on their careers--feel a bit tacked on and completely unnecessary and/or uninteresting. Avey Tare's insight into Tusk is about as interesting and relevant as his latest solo album (burn!) and the Walter Egan section, though only a few pages, is pretty boring.

All in all, though, Rob Trucks has delivered a fine volume in a run of great volumes for the 33 1/3 series. His prose is crisp and fresh and I enjoyed learning about Rob Trucks' relationship to Tusk as much as I enjoyed learning about the album itself.

=======

Next up, Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle.

"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks": Vivian Girls - Share the Joy

2011-03-18T08:51:00.005-05:00

Ever since the Vivian Girls got their big break (relatively speaking) in 2008, they have been extremely busy. They have gone through two drummers, Frankie Rose (now with the Dum Dum Girls) and Ali Koehler (who subsequently joined Best Coast). They cut their vastly underrated second LP Everything Goes Wrong. They have also formed a record label (Wild World Records) and engaged in numerous side-projects. Cassie Ramone has recorded and toured as The Babies along with Woods bassist Kevin Morby. Kickball Katy Goodman has been especially active, releasing an EP and a 7" (including last year's most delicious shoegaze moment in "It'll Come Around") with Gregg Foreman as All Saints Day as well as a full-length, eponymous LP as La Sera, featuring two of the coolest videos made in the last eight months (check out the grim yet free-spirited clips for "Never Come Around" and "Devils Heart Grows Cold"). Oh, and it should also be noted that they have toured constantly in the meantime. So how did the Girls find the time to write songs and record their latest album Share the Joy? And is it any good?

Share the Joy is the Vivian Girls' third studio LP, their first for Polyvinyl Records. On it, they retain their jangly approach to pop and hardcore punk which is, as always, loaded with tasty girl-group harmonies. There are a few noteworthy developments here, though. Cassie Ramone's songwriting skills continue to improve. The group's harmonies are as lush as ever. Lastly, Cassie Ramone's guitar leads are more assured, more adventurous, often confidently straying away basic melody. It also boasts the best fidelity of their three albums thus far. While for most listeners this would appear to be a good thing, Share the Joy does lack the zestful naivete of their generally over-hyped debut (Vivian Girls) as well as the crisp immediacy and fury of Everything Goes Wrong. Lastly, new drummer Fiona Campbell lacks the precision of the recently departed Ali Koehler, but is still a vast improvement over Frankie Rose.

The album opens with the stunning "The Other Girls," the Girls' longest track to date (clocking in at six-and-a-half minutes). Cassie Ramone's simulated twelve-string jangle, along with Kickball Katy's insistent, thumping James Jamerson-inspired bassline, carry the listener on a journey that includes Ramone's most impressive guitar solo thus far. The album's first single, "Heard You Say," finds them in minor-chord pop terrain, highlighted by their hallmark vocal harmonies, especially during the chorus, and a guitar solo that sounds like it was played on a twelve-stringer. Songs like"Lake House" and "Trying to Pretend" retain the angst of the previous album with cleaner production. Share the Joy's most overt nod to 1960s girl groups comes by way of "Take It as It Comes," which has a spoken-word dialogue between Cassie Ramone and Kickball Katy that recalls the opening of The Shangri-Las' 1965 masterpiece "Leader of the Pack," albeit far more lighthearted, as its focus is on "boy problems" rather than, say, a fatal motorcycle crash. As a result, it is the most fun cut on the album. They don't stray away from the topic of mortality, though. They re-record "Death," which previously appeared on their limited edition 2009 7" for the song "Moped Girls." The album closes with another six minute track in "Light in Your Eyes," which essentially re-delivers the single "Heard You Say" with far more seriousness and scope. Share the Joy benefits from having the most variety of a Vivian Girls album to date. There is plenty to like here for fans and neophytes alike. While it lacks the sizzle of their previous album, Share the Joy reveals a group that is continually growing and redefining their aesthetic.

--Share the Joy will be released on CD and vinyl courtesy of Polyvinyl Records on April 12. It is currently available for MP3 downloading at Polyvinyl Records' website.

"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks": Colin Stetson - New History Warfare vol. 2: Judges

2011-02-13T21:14:00.005-06:00

If there is any justice in the world of music criticism, a good deal of the coming months' digital ink is going to be spent covering saxophonist Colin Stetson and his new album New History Warfare vol. 2: Judges. Of the reviews that will be written, many of them will, undoubtedly, hone in on the album's apocalyptic themes, others will talk about his impressive resume (he's played with Tom Waits!, The Arcade Fire!, Lou Reed! etc...), and everyone (and I mean everyone), will marvel at the dude's chops. While all of these are impressive in their own right, I find myself intrigued by another facet of Judges. Before I go on, let me provide some context. In a recent interview with Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal, Stetson talked about how, in lieu of using loops or effects in his recording, he relied on creative microphone placement to achieve the fantastically layered, rich sounds that populate his album:

"I didn't want to just put up a stereo mic in a room and try to get some two-dimensional snapshot of an instrument. The set-up allowed us to capture it in three dimensions so we could then spread out and reshuffle and make our own surreal representation of that performance. There are mics inside the instrument, a contact mic on my throat, and countless mics clustered around the air of the horn and throughout the room. I wanted to make something that was specific to the medium of recording. I want to make albums that are like a Murakami novel or a Terrence Malick film-- something that explicitly states its own world." (Dombal)

Now, in addition to referencing one of my favorite novelists and one of my favorite filmmakers, what intrigues me about Stetson's approach as described in the above quote is his use and definition of space. Stetson's own description of the process as being captured in three-dimensions is compelling, but almost doesn't do justice to the scheme. My own initial thoughts on how to describe this process found me comparing the approach to the creation of bullet-time for The Matrix. But even that doesn't seem to convey the complexity of how this sound is being produced. What I've settled on, then, is that Stetson's album is recorded in four dimensions. Not only is his album "stating its own world," but it is creating a new form of sonic space that accounts for both the placement of sounds in a room, as well as the necessary time for sound to travel to those various microphones. We hear sax moans echoing through the room and more present, immediate growls from the musicians throat fighting for space and the imperceptible gap between each sound's creation. The resulting sound is that of time and space piling on top of each other, of the artist-subject spliced into disparate sounds and forms only to be reassembled into a single performance.

The end result is an utterly engaging and powerful sonic document. Stetson's got chops, and they show. He's also got big ideas, which also show. The sax lines, vocal hums, and pad-slap percussion of "Home," slide into and through each other to produce a haunting and surreal recording. Elsewhere, Stetson's saxophone rumbles, flits, dances, dredges, and moans. Sporadically throughout the album, his performances are complemented by haunting narration--both spoken (Laurie Anderson!) and sung (Shara Worden!)--telling a vague story about end-times. While these moments are equally haunting and surreal, and by no means detract from the album, I'm fairly certain that Stetson's vision and skill would have been enough to carry this collection of songs. Still, the narrative is a nice touch and adds some extra mystery to an already engaging piece of music.

==

You can pre-order the album from Constellation Records It comes out on 2/22/11.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #76 Kid A

2011-02-11T16:35:00.005-06:00

For some reason, I've never really stopped to think about the relationship between music and time. Really, my failure to think about this relationship is a bit odd, surprising even. After all, as Marvin Lin points out in his well-researched, beautifully rendered exploration of Radiohead's Kid A, music is made of time, is time. Music notes themselves--not their placement on a staff, but their shapes and sizes--are nothing more than symbolic divisions of time. To be fair to myself, I know I'm not the only one who hasn't made this connection until now. Many people haven't. And why not? Perhaps because we take the relationship for granted? Or maybe thinking about the relationship between music and time seems like it might be kind of like thinking about the relationship between ice cream and milk--in other words, the connection seems so obvious on the surface that there shouldn't be much to talk about.

Of course, that's not the case or Marvin Lin wouldn't have written such a compelling analysis of Kid A, and I wouldn't be reviewing his book right now. To begin with, I should point out that Lin's entire book isn't about time. Lin does a nice job of balancing an exploration of the album's various contexts, including downloading culture, politics, band dynamics and, capitalism, to the point that, while his conversation of time is certainly the most compelling, Lin sells us on the notion that Kid A is a creature of its contexts. Such a bold assertion might be hard to swallow for some--in particular anyone who champions the notion that great art is timeless--but Lin convinces us so thoroughly of both the timeliness and timelessness of Kid A that the question becomes moot. And what...wait...what just happened there? Ah, of course--see, this entire book is about time but we don't always know it.

Even when Lin isn't explicitly writing about something like music's attempts to subvert linear time by complicating rhythms and challenging traditional song structures, he's writing about the album in its time, and how we have come to understand the album through time, and perhaps most importantly, how spending time on the album can be transcendent.

Lin's book is, without a doubt, a top-tier entry in the 33 1/3 series. Were it not for a few missteps--too much retreading of the talked-to-death Napster years, and an oddly misguided (but well-intentioned) paranoid rant about genetically modified foods--this book could have rivaled Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste for the "best in series" crown. As it stands, Lin's inventive approach to music and time is still one of the series' more compelling entries and one of the few that sent me to the library to track down some of the books and articles quoted within.

Although, a note for the future, Continuum--a works cited list would have been pretty helpful this time out. Why'd you leave us hanging?

"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks": Toro y Moi - Underneath the Pines

2011-02-09T13:56:00.004-06:00

I want to try to think about this new Toro y Moi album divorced from its context. After all, while I kind of enjoyed 2010's Causers of This, and had heard plenty about Toro y Moi mastermind Chaz Bundick's contributions to that whole hypnagogic pop thing, neither of those things are going to help us make sense of his latest album, Underneath the Pine. That's not to say the album needs to be made sense of--it doesn't really. It's not obtuse, lo-fi, difficult, obscure, or any of those others terms that are often attached to the hazy brand of pop that Bundick has been rightfully associated with until now. Instead, Underneath the Pine is a lush and finely wrought pop album that combines 70's dancefloor glitz with the warmth of that decade's MOR, singer-songwriter fair with results that take a bit to sink in, but are ultimately both fun and haunting.

The fun comes largely from the song's beats and arrangements--"New Beat" bounces with a faux-funk disco groove, while "Still Sound" lands a bit more in the early 80's post new-wave camp. But one of the things that sets Toro y Moi's latest apart from some of its other retro grab bag contemporaries is that Bundick goes beyond the dance floor in seeking out his points of reference. Take "Before I'm Done," for instance, a gentle psych-lite, pop-folk ballad that works primarily as a mood piece, a brief detour from the glitzy, slick dance pop arrangements that anchor the album, but not the only detour scattered throughout the album. In fact, I might go so far as to argue that, while the detours don't tend to be the album's highlights, they are perhaps the biggest reason that Underneath the Pine holds together so well. "How I Know" is a bit more of a pop tune than "Before I'm Done," but reaches back to less dancey, almost naive brand of sixties pop for its rhythms and harmonies. The arrangements are still characteristically out-of-time, but the song's melody and accompanying harmonies paradoxically manage a rare marriage of sunny pop and haunted nostalgia.

And that is perhaps, regardless of what Toro y Moi does with his production and arrangements, the one reason why Underneath the Pine is an unqualified success, and we have every reason to think that Bundick will remain a relevant force in off-kilter pop music for some time. What Bundick does with melody here, with the subtle textures of his arrangements all while decade-hopping, and with pristine production, is no small feat. In a year that is already starting to characterize itself as the year of the well-executed studio sheen (James Blake? Destroyer? Cut Copy?), Toro y Moi can hang at the top of the heap.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: David Geddes' "Run Joey Run"

2011-02-02T12:44:00.005-06:00

In his classic text Politics, the philosopher Aristotle correctly observes, "The notion of a city naturally precedes that of a family or an individual, for the whole must necessarily be prior to the parts, for if you take away the whole man, you cannot say a foot or a hand remains." If this is indeed the case, then we all must live in pretty dysfunctional cities. Aristotle's idealistic view of the family's role in society illustrates an unassailable fact: that it wasn't until quite recently in human history that the family unit became such a source of complete befuddlement for its sharpest psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. A cursory examination of literature and film prior to the 1950s will reveal that ALL families ran swimmingly. However, thanks to Natalie Wood's role as Judy in the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause, that all changed. Her father's rejection of her in the film created the perfect conditions for father-daughter dissent globally. In its wake, popular music responded strongly. Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" (1986) and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's gender-neutral masterpiece "Parents Just Don't Understand" (1988) appropriately reflect this new era of fragmentation in the family structure. However, no song better illustrates this rapid devolution of the family unit than David Geddes' "Run Joey Run," a Top Ten hit that took the entire universe by storm in 1975.

"Run Joey Run" relates the story of an Oedipal triangle of desire featuring the narrator Joey, his, um, ex-girlfriend Julie, and Julie's abusive father. After finding out Joey has gotten Julie pregnant, Julie's father vows to kill Joey. However, because of one of these things--a) fate; b) the father's lousy aim; c) a faulty firearm; d) Julie's secret martyr-complex, or; e) a soul-crushing way to learn about the concept of irony--the father misses his intended target, killing his daughter instead. To keep this story from bumming out an entire generation of teenagers, David Geddes--who was, oddly enough, a law student at the time the song became a raging success--successfully deploys some Socratic method (just kidding!) and a little 60s girl-group melodrama to build up tension within the track. The addition of an unidentified female voice in the role of Julie along with a crescendo rivaling The Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" (1965) make "Run Joey Run" a cautionary tale about how a combination of abstinence-only education and an asshole dad can lead to fatal shootings. David Geddes' achievement with "Run Joey Run" is to signal the unfortunate shift in family relations in the years after James Dean made straight men lust for him in Rebel Without a Cause in an accessible manner. Its heavy story and violent conclusion are completely undermined by its "I'm going for a hard jog" musical backdrop, and for that it is a brilliant achievement. As Matthew Slaughter (acted by Martin Donovan) says in the film Trust (1990, dir. Hal Hartley), "A family is like a gun. You point it in the wrong direction, you're gonna kill somebody."

I don't mean to make light of the serious subject matter of this song. If you or anybody you know is being physically, sexually, or emotionally abused, please check out the following links:

The Hotline: The National Domestic Violence Hotline
Prevent Child Abuse America

Recipe for Yuck

2011-01-30T18:56:00.002-06:00

2 Tablespoons Dinosaur jr.
1 Cup 90's spacerock (think Hum or Siamese Dream era Smashing Pumpkins)
1/2 cup of mid-nineties emo (Sunny Day Real Estate/Mineral brand, preferably)
1 1/2 teaspoons of Weezer's Blue Album

Melt the Dinosaur Jr. in a small frying pan. Mix in the 90's spacerock and stir until lightly browned. Toss in mid-nineties emo and add Weezer's Blue album to taste:

Yuck is pretty tasty when it's all done, but you won't ever quite be sure if its delicious on its own merit, or gratifying because it reminds you of so many familiar, comforting flavors from your youth. This problem may never be resolved.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #48 Rid of Me: A Story

2011-01-19T00:24:00.004-06:00

Kate Schatz's Rid of Me: A Story is a tricky entry into the 33 1/3 series. Most volumes deal with albums in a fairly straightforward manner providing a direct set of criteria through which to evaluate them. These criteria generally look to a book's insight into the album, its clarity of purpose and vision, the quality of the prose, and the various strategies an author uses to explore said album. Schatz's entry on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, like the volumes on Meat is Murder and Music from Big Pink before it, is a little trickier in that its fictional. What makes Rid of Me: A Story more complicated, however, is that it never explicitly deals with PJ Harvey or her album. That's okay. I like the boldness of the approach. Whereas Joe Pernice and John Niven ground their fictions in the experience of listening to the album and a fictionalized telling of the creation of the album, respectively, Schatz's volume focuses instead on the themes and mood of Harvey's album as invoked through a dark and, at times, sexy narrative. Because I'm a fan of the idea of a book of fiction being about a rock album, I wanted to love this book and bury it with praise. And, while much of Schatz's volume pays off, I find myself distinguishing between the volume's two aims: its ability to capture the essence of PJ Harvey's album, and its ability to tell an engaging story.

As an exploration of Rid of Me, Schatz's work is a surprising success. The narrative's grim tone and damaged, but strong characters read as if they were ripped right out of Harvey's album. Schatz's desolate nature imagery and her protagonist's desperation, anger, and longing all bristle with the same energy that Harvey brings to her compositions. Through the protagonist's odd romance and flight from those who wronged them, Schatz is able to explore the raw, thrumming pathos that underlies every distorted guitar and pained howl on Rid of Me.

So what is holding the volume back? Well, it doesn't quite work as a story. At least to this reader. I'd like to qualify this, though. The prose in this book is mostly excellent, and the ideas seem pretty compelling, but neither of these are enough to carry the narrative beyond its simple lack of grounding. Ultimately, Rid of Me: A Story aims to be a non-conventional narrative told through points of view that shift between unreliable narrators, and which are so grounded in the sensation of the moment that I had trouble finding stable footing at times. While this ethereal approach to storytelling works wonderfully in capturing the mood of the album, I found myself struggling to stay invested in Mary and Kathleen, the story's protagonists. Even now, as I think back on the story, the details are a bit hazy--I know Kathleen and Mary escape from shitty patriarchal surroundings, find each other, and forge a darkly erotic relationship. Then, while little happens in the story's present, the women are besieged by paranoia, fear, and bad dreams as we learn bits and pieces of their pasts through hazy flashbacks. In the end, my connection to these characters is about as foggy as the ways their backstories unfold. I wonder if the story might have benefited from some stronger grounding in the present, and perhaps a bit more present-tense friction to help drive so much uncertain remembering.

Still, I feel as if my own fiction writing and workshop mentality (which is begrudgingly branded into my brain) is getting in the way of my fully enjoying Schatz's story. I want to love this book--its approach and attitude is everything I look for in fiction, but without enough footing to stand on, I ended up feeling lost and aloof.

Regardless, I'm thrilled that Continuum and Schatz took the risk with this book. Despite my problems with it, the volume is still interesting and worthwhile, I was just hoping for a little more.

=======

Next up, Marvin Lin's book on Kid A

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Glenn Frey's "You Belong to the City"

2010-12-21T12:14:00.005-06:00

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, much of the global population has left rural spaces for urban ones. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, "a whole shitload of people live in the City now." Of course, there are major differences between the City and the Country. Where the Country is full of self-reliant, weather-beaten figures who live off the fat of the land and generate home-spun wisdom like Creationism, the City is filled with "Street Smart" people who can't live without cell phones, public transportation, or Whole Foods supermarkets. These are not stereotypes, but unfalsifiable facts. Where the Country might get you eaten by bears if you're not careful, the City will literally eat you alive. If the City was a person, it would be a cannibal. The growling stomach of this metaphorical cannibal actually produces a soundtrack of city sounds: car horns, corkscrew gusts of wind winding their way through high-rise buildings, subway trains, bass-heavy music, jackhammers, and the intrusive voices of self-delusionally important people talking on their iPhones. But for the real City person, the ultimate soundtrack of the urban existence is the slow-burn saxophone solo. You City folk know EXACTLY what I'm talking about: When you're walking down a poorly lit street in a sketchy neighborhood, brooding and lost in thought, those pesky, puppy-dog sounds of the the slow-burn sax solo follow your every footstep until you step into Starbucks. It took nearly 150 years for a musical genius to put this urban reality into a brilliant pop song. We can thank Eagles veteran Glenn Frey for realizing this in his 1985 classic "You Belong to the City."

Glenn Frey, one of the tortured angels behind the 1970s supergroup the Eagles, proves his solo bona fides once again with "You Belong to the City," as truthful a song as has ever been composed. Completing the career trifecta begun by "The Heat is On" and "Smuggler's Blues," this track is his tour de force and a definitive moment in the history of song. Sure, it's not the first song to prominently feature a sexed-out saxophone lead. We must not forget another one of the 1980s' most fabulous songs, "Careless Whisper," by Wham. The lead that begins that sultry track, played by Steve Gregory, literalizes George Michael's poetry when he sings, "Guilty feet ain't got no rhythm." Truer words have not been spoken.

However, in "You Belong to the City," underrated saxophonist Bill Bergman takes the slow-burn saxophone lead into a whole other dimension of sheer awesomeness. Thanks to Frey's great skills as an arranger, the listener is initiated into this musical cityscape by Bergman's sax. The tone is sensuous yet menacing, approximating the film noir reality of city life, except now it's rendered in glorious Technicolor and stars Don Johnson. Then, brilliantly, Glenn Frey turns on the sweet sounds of the drum machine, which is perfectly timed to the speed of feet walking on city concrete, creating the perfect urban rhythm. I can't even begin to tell you how genius this is. Frey's voice, soothing as lotion, spins a seedy narrative about a man probably not unlike himself, unable to express himself in words--or not without double negatives--a wandering soul, "movin' through the crowd," an apparition, anonymous in the hustle and bustle of the city night. He lives "in a river of darkness / beneath the neon lights," while being "on the run." The only way for him to express himself is for saxophonist Bill Bergman to literally follow him around aimlessly as he broods about the city being "in [his] moves" and "in [his] blood." I think we all know exactly how he feels. After listening to this great cut, we all belong to the city, even if we literally live in vast wilds of Australia or in Wasilla, Alaska. It is exactly Glenn Frey's knack for generic melodrama and 80s music-by-numbers studio wizardry that makes "You Belong to the City" such a universal listening experience.

Here is the monumental video for this song:

PoMo Jukebox's (and friends'!) Top 25 Albums of the Year: 5-1

2010-12-17T01:00:00.000-06:00

Welcome to PoMo Jukebox's first ever Album's of the Year List (2010 edition). By now it seems pretty evident that 2010 was all about excess. We had Kanye West's excessive production and ruminations on celebrity, Sleigh Bells' excessive volume, Joanna Newsom's excess of material, The Arcade Fire's excessive everything, and Sufjan Stevens' excess of feeling and whatever the hell else is going on with The Age of Adz. Oddly, through all of this excess 2010 ended up being a pretty incredible year for music. While excess has traditionally been a dirty word when talking about music, all of a sudden our excess of excess ended up giving music fans an excess of exciting, larger-than-life albums that managed to mix raw enthusiasm with their unchecked ambition.

At long last, here they are PoMo Jukebox and Friends' top 5 albums of 2010. You listened to them. You loved them. You voted for them. Now read about them one last time, and give them one last listen before tucking them away on your shelves and turning your attention to 2011.

Ah, but I kid 2010. One more time, this has been an outstanding year for music, and I look forward to seeing many of the albums on this list show up on decade lists in 2020. I hope you've enjoyed our trip down music's short-term memory lane. Next week we'll resume our regularly scheduled sporadic updates.

5. Sleigh Bells - Treats
Label: N.E.E.T. / Mom & Pop

After generating a killer bee swarm of buzz in 2009, the duo Sleigh Bells delivered on it this year with their aptly-titled debut CD Treats. Singer Alexis Krauss and guitarist/keyboardist Derek Miller create the ultimate party-rager’s music, influenced as much by late 1980s techno and industrial as by early Andrew W.K. Miller’s aggro-beats are offset by Krauss’ comparatively ameliorating vocals. The juxtaposition of these two musical counterpoints has the effect of seeing Sigur Ros perform live in downtown Baghdad the night the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom. For as anarchic as this all may sound, Sleigh Bells are great because given sheer amount of volume they produce, they are exceedingly accessible. This is music equally suited for peaking trippers as well as cheerleading competitions. Sleigh Bells is packed with entertaining numbers like the opener “Tell ‘Em,” the hit “Infinity Guitars,” and metal-stomp of “Crown on the Ground.” The group also displays a knack for effective sampling on “Rill Rill,” cribbing Funkadelic’s psych-gospel masterpiece “Can You Get to That,” creating the most chill moment on the album. Sure, one could criticize Treats for being slight, but so is some rock’s best music (“wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boo” to you). —Brian Flota

4. The National - High Violet
Label: 4AD

More than any National album before it, High Violet is immediately accessible and moving, and for a band that released a contemporary classic like Boxer, that’s saying something. Similarly, “Bloodbuzz Ohio” may be the tightest, strongest song The National has released to date, and it stands as one of the best singles of the year. Like the rest of the album, “Bloodbuzz” is catchy yet complicated, with all the instruments and voices coming together in a perfect and unified whole. “Bloodbuzz” also serves as a good representation of the album’s major themes: love, loss, the search for a solid plateau to place one’s feet on. Other highlights include “Terrible Love,” “Afraid of Everyone,” and “Runaway,” though High Violet has no truly weak tracks. From first note to last, it is a tightly crafted, beautiful album that deserves all the commercial success and critical recognition it received this year, and then some. --Joshua Cross

3. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
Label: 4AD

Over the past few years, Bradford Cox has become one of the most important voices in indie rock, both with Deerhunter and his solo project, Atlas Sound. Halcyon Digest stands above all of Cox’s prior releases as the most coherent, beautiful, and devastating work. In short, this album is his masterpiece to date. What sets it above Deerhunter’s past works, and many of the year’s other best albums, is its cohesion, the way it functions as a proper album, not just a collection of great songs. While the first two singles, “Revival” and “Helicopter,” are both excellent songs on their own merits, isolating them from the rest of the album makes any of the songs seem somehow out of place, a quality usually found exclusively in proper concept albums. While Halcyon Digest is not necessarily a concept album in that it does not tell a story from beginning to end, the themes of isolation, aging, and coming to grips with one’s mortality form one harmonious whole that forces us to consider the album as an entity. And a powerful entity at that. The move to 4AD exclusively (the label had previously distributed Deerhunter overseas) brought a slightly higher budget to the album’s production. But somehow the band managed to retain their signature bedroom recording feel, psychedelic dreampop sound, and DIY aesthetic while benefitting from the production, rather than losing intimacy and immediacy. All told, Halcyon Digest is a hallucinatory dream that catches the listener the moment the needle drops and doesn’t let go until long after you hit the run-out groove. --Joshua Cross

2. LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening
Label: DFA / Virgin

I was not entirely sold on LCD Soundsystem until their latest effort, This is Happening. James Murphy’s overt debt to David Bowie and his very hit-or-miss attempts at humor in some of his songs always struck me as a weakness. For every stunning track like “All My Friends,” there has been a “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” to undermine it. On the new album, these moments are kept to a minimum (even the record’s most troublesome cut, “Drunk Girls,” possesses irresistible pop hooks). The album moves briskly; few hour-long albums seem this brief (this is a compliment). Beginning with the slow-building opener “Dance Yrself Clean,” James Murphy’s focus is sharp. The first three minutes of the track are barely audible. Then, the drums kick in, along with a sick blast of Atari 2600 keyboard goodness, and the song instantly becomes legendary. “All I Want” is his one direct stab at Bowie, drawing heavily from “Heroes,” with its intermingled, atmospheric guitar lines. The lyrical self-reflexivity of “You Wanted a Hit” is as playful as its propulsive beat. Unlike most of the great European/American dance music of the past twenty years or so, This is Happening is largely free of drug-fueled pretensions, aesthetically speaking. This is direct, minimal dance music, driven by a “motorik” drumbeat, bass, guitar, synthesizers, and vocals. There are no samples, overdriven drum machines, or disorienting keyboard textures. This approach makes it one of the strongest albums of the year. —Brian Flota

1. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Label: Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella

After the initial fervor surrounding the release of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy died down, I've been trying to figure out the perspectives of those who can't get into it. While this year's Kanye West earthquake (measuring a 10.0 on the Richter, erm, I mean Pitchfork Scale) may have been a surprise to many, especially coming as a follow up to the interesting but heavily flawed 808's and Heartbreaks, not to mention West's status as Most Hated Celebrity in America, the album makes perfect sense for our time and place. That time and place, of course, is somewhere adrift in a distorted, fragmented version of pop culture that permeates our every move and leaves us always a bit suffocated by its ubiquity. Enter Kanye. I get how people can be alienated by My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy--the absence of commas from the title alone is enough to make me want to punch a nun--but, in a way, this album is about alienation. Not just West's alienation as he grapples with fame and identity, but the alienation we feel in our relationships with spectacle.

That's why West's excess works, here. It doesn't matter that he doesn't have the best flow, or that the songs are all six-plus minutes long, or that production is over-blown, or that the Chris Rock skit goes on a bit too long. Those are all details, ill-considered quibbles thrown against a juggernaut text that sets out to do nothing less than put Kanye West and the idea of pop spectacle in an outhouse together then blow them the fuck up. And that's just what My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy does. West alternates between euphoria ("can we get much higher" from album opener "Dark Fantasy") and self-hatred ("I'm a motherfucking monster" from, of course, "Monster") in an exploration of the fame and the sense of entitlement with which it comes. One of the album's more controversial moments, the extended vocoder outro on "Runaway" also manages to work as the album's cathartic core--after putting himself on the line, turning himself inside out and more often than not finding a repulsive, angry, arrogant man, we are offered that man's soulful, but mangled pleas for inner peace.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy isn't a masterpiece because it is relateable, or because it is all about Kanye (it's not either of those things). The album is a masterpiece because it's about the way we relate to pop culture and celebrity, and the ways we forge our identities through interactions with that very culture. Now, thanks to West, we have been confronted with just how fucked (and fuckin' ridickahliss) that culture is. Still, that shouldn't keep us from coming back for more. --James Brubaker

PoMo Jukebox's (and friends'!) Top 25 Albums of the Year: 10-6

2010-12-16T00:30:00.000-06:00

Pomo Jukebox's (and friends'!) Top 25 Albums of the Year: 15 - 11

2010-12-15T00:50:00.000-06:00

Pomo Jukebox's (and friends'!) Top 25 Albums of the Year: 20 - 16

2010-12-14T00:00:00.001-06:00

PoMo Jukebox's (and friends'!) Top 25 Albums of the Year: 25-21

2010-12-13T13:16:00.000-06:00

Book Review: 33 1/3 #75 Spiderland

2010-12-12T18:54:00.000-06:00

As I've been reading all of these 33 1/3 books, I've noticed certain approaches that work better or worse than others. One of the less successful approaches is the historical approach to an album. I'm not talking about the books that attempt to situate an album within a broader socio-political context--in fact, those books tend to be among the best. I'm talking about the books that just give us a straight-up history of a band and/or album. The problem with many of these books, it seems, is that most of these histories have already been told. This is why, I suspect, I've been getting particularly excited about several of the 33 1/3 books that deal with albums from the 90's. These albums haven't been discussed to death the way so many 60's and 70's classics have been. We are left with plenty of room to explore and learn new things that we haven't already pieced together from dozens of biographies, decade lists, and reviews of reissues. This is why, despite being an almost entirely historical account of Slint's formation, recording, and dissolution, Scott Tennent's 33 1/3 volume on Spiderland is an entirely engaging and entertaining read. Not only is Tennent writing a pretty great and interesting book about a seminal album, he's documenting the foundational history of that album in a way that I'm not sure has ever been done before.

To be sure, the first three-quarters of Tennent's Spiderland are easy to love, and easier to get lost in. Tennent gives us a fairly plain play-by-play of Pajo's, Walford's, McMahan's and Brashear's pre-Slint days, explains how they came together, then discusses the band's early history leading up to and including the recording of Spiderland. To say it like this almost makes the book sound a bit underwhelming. It's not. By staying out of the way of these stories, and simply reporting the twists and turns that brought the Slint boys together, Tennent allows their stories to come to life in ways that will be fun and exciting for anyone who has ever been an active participant (or spectator) in any kind-of-sort-of punk scene. The early history is full of drama and excitement. We get the excitement surrounding Squirrel Bait, but also the lesser-known, but equally important (to Slint) weirdness surrounding Maurice. Tennent's treatment of Slint's prehistory is so effective because it speaks to what it means to be youthful and optimistic. In describing Slint's history, Tennent is tapping in to something electric and fun--the feeling of being young and either in or surrounded by good bands. There isn't a feeling quite like it, and here Tennent does a nice job of bringing that excitement to the forefront in his book.

Tennent's prose shines the most when dealing with the history of Slint. The only place where this volume stumbles is in the thirty page section dedicated to analyzing Spiderland the album. Tennent makes attempts to give the song-by-song analysis a through-thread by arguing that, though Slint were primarily known for their dynamics, those dynamics are only interesting because of the music's overall complexity. Unfortunately, Tennent isn't quite able to pull this argument off, and we're left with an occasionally interesting, but largely descriptive chapter. Tennent brings us back to the riveting tale of Slint, however, by closing the book with a description of the band's oddly abrupt and frustrating dissolution. I won't spoil the plot for anyone who doesn't know how it ends.

All in all, this is one of the more exciting and fun volumes in the 33 1/3 series. Tennent does some very difficult things very well in this book--he manages to portray the 1980's Louisville punk scene in vivid detail, and put his characters--Slint--in the middle of it all. At the same time, we get brief glimpses of adjacent places (Cincinnati and Chicago are both mentioned at times, the later more frequently) and supporting players (Will Oldham, to name one). The result is a history of Slint, and ultimately Spiderland, that feels like a living, breathing thing. And of course, it doesn't hurt if you knew enough guys like this that you kind of, sort of feel like you could've been there, even if you weren't.

===

This week we'll be rolling out our Albums of the Year list for 2010, so stay tuned. After that, I'll be looking at Kate Schatz's volume of short stories based on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me.

James's Runner-Ups!

2010-12-09T16:51:00.000-06:00

Next week we'll begin rolling out our Albums of the Year list (voted on by us, and you). For the time being, I thought I'd drop a preview post featuring a few of 2010's best albums that didn't make our list. Sure, each of these albums could whip The Suburbs to death with both arms tied behind their backs, but the public has spoken. And apparently, the public doesn't love the following albums as much as a I do...

I'll admit, I was stunned to see that I was the ONLY PERSON who voted for Robyn's Body Talk album. Maybe nobody else put it on their lists because they were bummed out that the tracklist for the full LP wasn't as tight as it could have been, or maybe everyone was pissed that "Cry When You Get Older," a standout from the Body Talk pt. 1 ep, was somehow left off. Or maybe not enough indie-snobs know how to love a good pop album when it comes along. Here's the thing--Robyn has one of the biggest personalities in pop music, and every one of her songs is bursting with that personality. The songs are catchy and well produced, the lyrics endearing and clever, and the whole album is built on sick arrangements perfect for dancing and singing along to. If you haven't checked out Robyn yet, please, please do. You owe it to yourself.

Here's the video for "Hang With Me":

====================================================================================

Okay, so Erykah Badu's New Amerykah pt. II: Return of the Ankh isn't quite the heavy, impassioned soulful scream of part one, but it wasn't supposed to be. pt. II was like the chill counterpart, the collection of songs--still brimming with quiet Badu's heavy love and quiet anger--we're supposed to celebrate with after the close of the last world war. These are soul songs, love songs, space songs, spirit songs, friend songs, and Badu never misses a beat, coming off as bogglingly playful and serious as ever.

Here's a video for Badu's NSFW video for "Window Seat":

=====================================================================================
This album was a bit of grower--soft psychedelia with warm production and an almost early-Shins like penchant for melody. But as soon as the album gets fired up, Wild Nothing come into their own, mixing textured layers of synthesizers and atmosphere into every track. Odds are, a few months from now, this will be much higher on my year end list. That's the dangerous of making these lists early though.

Check out "Bored Games" from Gemini:

=====================================================================================

In a word, something about Four Tet's There is Love in You sounds haunted. It probably has something to do with that opening track, "Angel Echoes," with its splintered human voice yearning over miles of unobtrusive beats and confused bells. While the album's opener is the most overt example of these ideas, the mood and tone pervades the album, leaving us a little bit dizzy and surrounded by ghosts at every turn. There is Love in You is, without a doubt, one of the prettiest albums of 2010. Give it a try.

Enjoy "Love Cry" from this album:

=====================================================================================

I don't really know what this album is or where it comes from, only that it's a low key, soulful, slightly sexy bit of indie pop. The album offers plenty of 80's attitude and production flourishes, but without ever succumbing to the unquestioned and unearned nostalgia that so many of their peers traffic in. As far as I can tell, the only way Twin Shadow manages to avoid that trap is by keeping the songwriting easy and free--there is never a sense that the band is trying to hard to recall a past era, they're just playing their songs with a knowing nod backwards about twenty-five years.

Check out "Castles in the Snow":

=====================================================================================
With Black Noise Pantha Du Prince have made one hell of a lovely electro-trance-techno-pop-whatever-you-people-call-it record. Oddly enough, I somehow forgot to include this on my own top 40 list. That happens sometimes. Anyway, the beats bubble with life, the synths are bright and fizzy, and even Noah Lennox drops in for a visit, but not in any way that draws too much attention away from the album's rich textures and chill tones. Black Noise is both full of motion and ruminative, a blissful collection of thoughtful, rewarding arrangements.

Here is "Stick to My Side" (w/ Panda Bear singing):

=====================================================================================

See you on Monday with our (and your) Albums of the Year list.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Jingle Cats' "Silent Night"

2010-12-08T15:03:00.001-06:00

There's no greater time of the year than Christmas, or, "the holiday season," as God-hating philistines refer to it. Christmas brings us many great things: ridiculously long lines in stores filled with cranky employees and impatient customers, pointless gifts from faceless relatives and co-workers, that neighbor with the gawdy Christmas decorations that brings traffic in your neighborhood to a stand-still, all those delayed flights and lost luggage, as well as the endless tears of spoiled children who got tons of gifts but didn't get that one ultra-expensive toy all their friends got. Clearly there is no better way to illustrate Jesus Christ's eternal and peaceful philosophy of free-market capitalism than through these joyous hallmarks of "the holiday season." But one thing that makes this part of the calendar year even more fantastic is Christmas music. Thankfully, it is played on a loop from Thanksgiving to New Years Day. These great tunes have been performed over and over over the years by every great artist, from a place deep within the heart known as "the holiday spirit." No artist has ever recorded a Christmas song because it would be an easy way to generate a quick buck at the end of every calendar year. No. These songs are recorded to pay tribute to the great Baby Jesus and his pagan, apocryphal saint brother, Sir Santa of Claus. There have been many great Christmas songs over the years, including "Feliz Navidad" by Jose Feliciano, "Little Drummer Boy" by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, and, of course, my favorite, "Funky, Funky Xmas" by the New Kids on the Block. There is, though, one breathtaking performance that transcends the holiday, and humanity, in fact.

In 1994, some groovy cats, LITERALLY, got together to record a version of the Christmas classic "Silent Night." The resulting sessions were pure magic. These cats, realizing this hot cut had potential, instantly dubbed themselves Jingle Cats and cut an entire album of classic Christmas carols known as Meowy Christmas. The rest is music-making history. There are several obvious reasons why people responded so posivitely to the Cats' version of "Silent Night." First off, cats are singing the song. We all know that everybody simply loves cats. They are like soft, fluffy pillows that purr and sleep, a lot. However, if you rest your head on the pillow incorrectly, it will scratch the shit out of you with its razor-sharp claws. Plus, cats cannot talk. So to hear them sing, and to sing so wonderfully, is not only surprising and damn near scandalous, but inspiring. Secondly, the gentle acoustic guitar and keyboard accompaniment perfectly complements their soothing little kitty-cat voices. This becomes entirely obvious during the second verse, on which the little tigers modulate their voices. The lyrics in this verse are completely inspirational, especially when the little furballs sing, "Meow meow meow, meow meow, meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow." So what if their voices sound like they were generated by a state-of-the-art late-1980s synthesizer. These lines give full meaning to both the birth of the Baby Jesus as well as to the joyous "holiday season" he envisioned all those years ago when he was just gleam in his Daddy's eye. As the Jingle Cats so wonderfully remind us, "Meow meow, meow meow / meow meow meow, meow meow." Truer words have not been spoken.

Here's the CUTE video. On a scale of one to ten, it's a BONKERSxINFINITY:

Book Review: 33 1/3 #73 Highway to Hell

2010-12-06T17:23:00.000-06:00

Let me begin by disclosing two pieces of information: first, I don't really like AC/DC and second, I won a signed copy of this book from a contest on the 33 1/3 blog. Ideally, these two bits of information will cancel each other out so that this review comes off as fair and even-handed. That being said, I don't mind reading about bands I don't like, and in order to win this book I spent a good forty-five minutes writing and revising a paragraph on why I kind of hate AC/DC, so it's not like I got the book for nothing. So maybe I didn't need to disclose anything at all. I have to admit, though, that I feel a bit funny about sitting down to review this book with the author's signature looking back at me from the cover page. He even wrote my name in the inscription!: "Hey, James--" it says. And now, here I am sitting down to write about his book that has a little more aura than all of the other 33 1/3 books I've previously reviewed. A such, I wish I could say that Joe Bonomo's Highway to Hell is a smashing success. The book certainly has its fair share of successes, but it also falls into some common 33 1/3 series traps, and misses a couple of brilliant opportunities in the process. But let's start by talking about what Bonomo does right.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Bonomo's Highway to Hell is the author's consistently tight and easy prose. Outside of the occasional clunker like, "...Angus reaches deep into his love of blue-styled playing and offers affecting, evocative playing," Bonomo manages to capture the raw excitement of AC/DC and what it meant to be a fan of the band. Bonomo is also particularly successful at providing a reasonably thorough survey of AC/DC's early days, up to Bon Scott's death, and manages to provide a brief overview of what came next (and really, isn't that all we really need?). I'll admit, my lack of familiarity with AC/DC made the book's historical elements particularly interesting and rewarding. Bonomo's passion for the band and the excitement with which he tells their story convinced me to go back and check out some of those early albums, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fresh and exciting some of the songs sound. Along with providing a brief history of AC/DC, Bonomo also discusses the problem of classifying the band (including some early classifications as punk!), the occasional guilt resulting from listening to some of Scott's more misogynistic or violent lyrics, the disconnect between rock critics and AC/DC fans, the raw enthusiasm of AC/DC fans, the album's cover art, youthful bad behavior and AC/DC, growing old as an AC/DC fan, a selection of photos of AC/DC, production history of the album, sales figures, etc... etc...

And there in lies the biggest flaw in Bonomo's Highway to Hell--while each section of his book is interesting, as a whole it is unfocused. Early in the book, Bonomo takes to a track-by-track discussion of Highway to Hell using each track as a point of entry into discussions surrounding the band--"Shot Down in Flames" leads to a discussion of the band's self-satirizing and machismo, "If You Want Blood (You Got It)" to a discussion of social issues in Scott's lyrics, and "Night Prowler" to a discussion of the serial killer of the same name, and the uncomfortable violence that sometimes crept into the band's songs. The book's movement from one song to the next, and the brief exploration of each tangent, makes the book feel more like a series of blog entries as opposed to a clearly focused book. This isn't uncommon in the 33 1/3 series and it can end up being frustrating at times.

Bonomo's Highway to Hell is a little extra frustrating as, in the book's last quarter, the author hits on particularly fertile grounds for exploration--the passion of AC/DC fans, and how the fans grew up with the band's songs. In these sections, Bonomo discusses Heavy Metal Parking Lot, contacts old school friends for their reflections on Highway to Hell, and talks about contemporary AC/DC fans. Bonomo's exploration of AC/DC fandom through the decades is where his book finds its strongest voice, and its heart. Even the volume's jacket copy highlights this angle in its first sentence: "Joe Bonomo strikes a three-chord essay on the power of adolescence, the durability of rock & Roll fandom, and the transformative properties of memory." Once the book turns to these topics, it is essential 33 1/3. Until then, despite Bonomo's solid prose, the book struggles to find its focus, trying to move in too many directions at once and too often settling to be a report about AC/DC's past instead of getting at something new.
=======

Next up, Scott Tennent's take on Spiderland. I've been dying to read this one. Look for my review in a few weeks (the end of the semester is crazy, and we'll be posting our AOTY lists soon).

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: The Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha"

2010-12-01T09:33:00.000-06:00

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the concept of "the wish" dates all the way back to the 1992 Disney film Aladdin. Wishes can manifest themselves in many ways. In some religious cultures, they are very similar to prayers. For politicians, they are very similar to hopes and aspirations. If you happen to be goth-rock icons The Cure, Wish is damn-near your "jumping the shark" moment. The point I'm trying to make is that wishes, over most of these last twenty years, have been characterized as coming from a place of universal goodness. Look at these sample wishes that my fictional daughter wrote down six years ago: "I wish there was no more cancer." "I wish there were no more wars." "I wish my head was a big round orange ball." Precious! All of these are a testament to the courage of the human spirit, as well as a not-so-subtle piece of advertising for makers of big round orange balls. However, with The Pussycat Dolls' transcendent 2005 hit, "Don't Cha," the concept of the wish comes from an unwholesome place of jealousy and amorous competition. Wishes would never be the same again. Ever.

The lyrical premise of the song seems relatively simple on the surface: anywhere between one and all six of The Pussycat Dolls desire a male subject ("you") that now has a girlfriend. Apparently, each member of The Pussycat Dolls thinks pretty highly of themselves, as they boast of being "hot," "a freak," "raw," and, last but not least, "fun." What's interesting is that the desired male object in the lyric appears quite happy with his present girlfriend, leaving The Pussycat Dolls to wish he felt otherwise. The lines also imply that the desired male object also prefers women who are cold, cooked, dull, and vanilla -- like a refrigerated wafer. The dynamic present in the lyric recalls René Girard's concept of "the triangulation of desire" as first posited in his 1966 study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. However, this simple geometry transforms into aeronautical calculus if we consider all six of The Pussycat Dolls, which would make this more akin to something like an OCTAGON OF DESIRE, the ultimate cage-match of jealous lust wherein one or multiple subjects of its powerful geometrical grip may have to tap out under a wide array of sloppy near-kisses, malicious hair-pulling, and sweaty submission holds. To top it all off, the track is magnificently produced by Cee-Lo and features a blistering, but thematically unrelated rap by Busta Rhymes. To accomplish the staggering degree of wish fulfillment in this song, anywhere between one and all six of The Pussycat Dolls would need to magically make their male object of desire actually wish his girlfriend WAS them instead of her, then ditch her for between one and all six of them. This would make him look quite base and shady, and render The Pussycat Dolls as bigamous home-wreckers. Because of "Don't Cha," peoples wishes have become increasingly vicious, bringing to the surface humanity's long-repressed darker impulses. In fact, my fictional daughter's Christmas wishlist includes "an iPad," "a 'water-shaped' water bed" (how messed up is that? especially since water can only take the shape of its container), and, most puzzlingly of all, "death to auto-tune." Where did this desire for violence and destruction come from? The Pussycat Dolls. "Don't Cha" represents our long-awaited fall from grace, from a simpler time, when all we had to do was ask a blue, Orientalized Robin Williams to grant us our benign wishes. Now my fictional daughter's big round orange ball head has turned itself upside down.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #52 Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

2010-11-28T22:58:00.000-06:00

A few years ago I wrote record reviews for a small music website that doesn't exist anymore. For whatever reason, the editors had this bizarre policy against the use of first person in our reviews. For most of the time I wrote for this site, none of them really enforced the rule, though I tried to keep my authorial intrusions subtle. For the last year, or so, of the site's existence, the editors started cracking down on writing ourselves into our reviews. I never really got a good explanation as to why. Even in freshman composition courses many instructors are moving away from the hard and fast rule that the first person has no place in academic writing. Let's be honest--the entire question is a bit of a sham anyway, isn't it? When we write essays or reviews or conference papers, we're expressing our own ideas, and the impulse to avoid first person grows out of a misguided notion to make our ideas seem more objective than they actually are. If we're to think about our writing as entering into a larger conversation, doesn't it only make sense that our written words connect back to our selves? Shouldn't we be highlighting our subjectivity so as to more clearly delineate the space in which this conversation is taking place? Our faux-objective ideas don't just drift from our bodies to play with other disembodied ideas in some academic arena, no. These conversations are happening between people and the more we begin to accept this, the better off we'll all be. Carl Wilson makes a similar point in his impressive entry in the 33 1/3 series, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. For anyone who might be reading this review who isn't at least familiar with this book (I'm guessing no one), here is the premise: Carl Wilson, like many rock critic types, hates Celine Dion, but rather than writing a book about how awful her music is, he uses his own taste as a gateway into an exploration of how tastes are made, how tastes are relational, and why so many people sincerely love Celine Dion. It's a bold premise, to be sure, and Wilson pays it off at every turn, but there are two moments in particular--not surprisingly as the book enters its home stretch after Wilson has laid a solid foundational understanding of Dion, her work, and her reception--that stand out as being particularly important.

The first (well, actually its the second in the book, but it's the one I'm going to talk about first) is something that Wilson argues--both implicitly and explicitly--throughout the book, but which really comes to full fruition in his penultimate chapter, a traditional record review of a hypothetical re-issue of Let's Talk About Love. Throughout the review, Wilson at times plays the part of the traditional music critic, talking about producers and particular moves that Dion and her team made throughout the album. But then something funny happens--as the review progresses, Wilson integrates more of himself into his critique. This leads to his telling of the one time "My Heart Will Go On," made him cry--when it was used in the episode of The Gilmore Girls when Michelle's dog dies and Zack plays the song at said dog's funeral. At first, this is an incredibly bizarre move for something that is meant to be a "traditional" record review. Here we are, reading about George Martin's production on "The Reason," and the bland ubiquity of "My Heart Will Go On," and suddenly, we encounter a page long synopsis of an episode from a defunct TV show and how Dion's song, in that context, made the author cry. Once the initial shock of such an out-of-place bit of authorial intrusion subsides, I became convinced that this is one of the most brilliant moves I have ever encountered in a record review. Through his "intrusion," Wilson captures exactly what "My Heart Will Go On," is to many, many people, while making clear his own resistance to the song. It is through the inclusion of his personal experience that we, the readers, are allowed to understand that, yes, this song is over-the-top schmaltz, but there's something to it, and one day it might just sneak the fuck up on you and stuff its fist in your gut over and over again until your a sniveling mess on the floor. Over the last decade, I've read countless message board complaints about music reviews that get too personal. to hell with those complaints. Music reviews can only be personal. We need a point of reference to understand how a writer is critiquing and rating an album. This is why we follow particular writers instead of websites, why we trust certain friends' opinions over others, and why an idea like record label allegiance exists. Without the writer's ethos, all we are left with is false objectivity, writers' attempts to universalize that which can not be universalized.

The other point that Wilson spends a great deal of time on that I'd like to briefly mention (I was going to say more, but I've gone on too long, already) is his semi-defense of sentimentality. In fiction workshops, we toss this word around like a racial slur. If something is sentimental, it's bad, it's trite, it's Hallmark, it's Hollywood. Just last week I was commenting on a particular type of sentimentality in an excellent draft of a story written by a close friend, and I got these looks as if I was high to even suggest the piece was sentimental. Admittedly, my use of the word came about because of what I was reading in Wilson's book. After developing a sound working definition of sentimentality, then debriefing us on key figures and texts in the debate about sentimentality, Wilson decides that maybe, just maybe, sentimentality has gotten a bit of a bad rap:

Perhaps the dream content of the sentimental is today in need of liberation, the way that in the early twentieth century, Freud and the surrealists realized western society needed to bare and scratch the sexual, violent underbelly of concsiousness. With inhibitions against them removed, the tender sentiments might unveil their unsuspected splendors. (133)

And reading this, I sense the immediate tug of truth. I think of strange moments from my life, from my interactions with culture, where texts that are lame, cheesy, manipulative--they, well my body up with something like tears. The sensation is deep and rich and sometimes scary. It goes like this: I'm watching this beginning of this fucking Harry Potter movie (spoiler alert?) and the girl wizard erases herself from her parents' lives--waves her wand and is gone from their memories and photographs. I like the Harry Potter movies, but I've never been all that invested in them, but for whatever reason, this sentimental moment guts me. I shudder and laugh because I'm afraid I might cry. This is why I know Wilson is on to something here.

Really, I've gone on far longer than necessary about this book. It's already the most talked about book in the 33 1/3 series, and the most loved. I can't really add to that except to say--everyone who loves this book has good reason to love it. I read a blurb on some website or another saying something along the lines of, "I wish this book could be assigned to every incoming college freshman." As soon as I am able, I will assign this book.
====

Up next will be reviewing Joe Bonomo's recent volume on AC/DC's Highway to Hell.

Year End List Happenings

2010-11-22T10:59:00.000-06:00

Dear Friends of PoMo Jukebox,

It's almost the time of year when the internet is full of blogs and websites listing their favorite albums of the year. Usually, these lists either come from individuals, or the combined lists of several individuals. We here at the 'box like lists that are the result of a lot of smaller lists averaged together as they convey a broader sense of consensus. This presents us with a problem--there are only 3 of us who contribute here with any regularity.

As such, we're opening our year end list process to all of you. If you'd like to contribute to our year end list with a list of your own, helping to make our own list bigger and more interesting, here is what you need to know:

Due Date: 12/1/10
Submission method: You can submit your list as an email, or as an attachment by emailing us at wedestroymyths _at_ gm__l.c_m (you know how to fix that up). Please make sure to include the artist and title of each album.

Lists: Your list should include at least 5 albums, but no more than 25. Any more than that will not be counted. Please rank albums in order of preference (1 being your favorite, the lowest number being your least favorite). For unranked lists, we'll tally the number of total points for the number of albums listed, and distribute those points equally to each album on said list.

Methodology: On each list, the scoring will look like this:

#1 album - 35 points
#2 - 30
#3 - 26
#4 - 23
#5 - 21
#6 - 20
#7 - 19
#8-25 etc... etc...

Ties will be broken by numbers of votes an album receives.

Once the list is tallied, we may ask individuals for blurbs of albums we aren't as familiar with.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)"

2010-11-17T07:11:00.000-06:00

Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)" is such a dynamic and challenging song that it's literally impossible to write about (at least in the United States). In fact, parts of this text have been redacted by the government, who invoked the infamous Too Soon Clause, an obscure part of the USA-PATRIOT Act of 2001, to legally censor the apparently offending passages. So I hope this will not be too difficult to read.

For decades, the Secret League of Wealthy Ass Female Feminists had conspired to make a massively popular song about having their CENSORED CENSORED. They had met severe resistance, however, from the pious yet hypocritically lecherous Super Sausage Team of Money Printing Gentleman, who thought discussing CENSORED CENSORED was in poor taste. Ironically, this was the same Team who allowed The Beatles' "Please Please Me" to be a huge hit in 1963. In that song, John Lennon sings, during the bridge, "I do all the pleasin' with you / It's so hard to reason with you / Oh yeah, why do you make me blue?" Clearly, Lennon is singing about how he CENSORED CENSORED on his female love-interest who refuses to CENSORED, leaving him with an annoyingly painful case of CENSORED CENSORED. Within days of its release, teenage girls around the world were screaming and CENSORED CENSORED for their favorite Beatle no matter where they were. The Super Sausage Team of Money Printing Gentleman was please please pleased (forgive the pun), and they decided to print more money and get the older gentlemen on the team to public slander the lovable Moptops to fulfill the dynamics of Marx and Hegel's dialectic.

Fast forward to 2002. The United States was still emotionally reeling from the terrorist attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 that took over 3,000 lives. A little over six months after the tragedy, the Secret League decided to stick it to the man while he was down, with his massively CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED metaphorically CENSORED in New York City. Their secret plan: release Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)" to a wounded public that needed to forget about the tragic events of that day and hear a brilliant, witty song about a woman demanding that her CENSORED and CENSORED get CENSORED.

The plan worked effectively. Khia's song, which begins rather minimally with simple percussion and speakerbox-rattlin' bass, quickly transforms itself into serious, polyrhythmic, sexual anthem Marvin Gaye would have been jealous of. Khia's insistence that her man "put your neck into it" and "to suck it off til I shake" is completely direct. At first, it appears that she is demanding that this objectified male (much to the chagrin of the Super Sausage Team of Money Printing Gentleman, who had historically only been concerned about their own pleasure) lick her neck, her back, her "pussy" (i.e. feline, or kitty cat), and her "crack" (i.e. her stash of cocaine-infused with baking soda-rocks). But that makes no sense. Cats clean themselves by licking. Cats already hate being washed by humans, tongue or no. And why would you lick a crack rock when you're supposed to smoke it (or so I've read) to get the desired two-minute high? As the song slowly builds, it becomes apparent what she is really telling this soon-to-be-duped Lothario is to CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED and CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED until she's "makin' faces 'n stuff." This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase CENSORED CENSORED. When she tells her male love interest to "get on your knees," she proceeds to liberate all CENSORED from the tyranny of the Super Sausage Team which had insured that rap music over the previous fifteen years would be male-dominated. While two big CENSORED in the CENSORED were nothing but CENSORED in the heart of CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED, Americans of all shapes and genders of consenting age could now get licked wherever they wanted and get on their knees and lick whatever they wanted, except for that kitty cat. There's nothing more embarrassing and potentially incriminating than a face full of claw-marks!

Redacted by CENSORED CENSORED.

Our 100th post!

2010-11-15T10:58:00.000-06:00

We're going to be gearing up for our year end album list. Keep your eyes peeled and ear to the ground as we'll be calling on our readers for help.

"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks": Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

2010-11-12T10:25:00.000-06:00

On 2007's Graduation, Kanye West seemed to have learned something important about making great albums: focus is key. Unfortunately, that album suffered from a soft second-half and, despite the album's focus and unified sound never managed to reach the heights of West's first two albums. And let's talk about those albums for a moment--The College Dropout and Late Registration are both fine albums, classics even, but they suffer from too many skits and lame jokes that don't quite add up to anything. Kanye's first two albums, it seems, are prime examples of made-for-iPod albums and the song-is-God mentality of many contemporary music fans. Fortunate for us and Kanye, most of the songs are good enough that we keep going back and sitting through the fluff to get to the meaty stuff. Then of course, in 2008, Kanye released 808's and Heartbreaks and album full of drum machines and autotune. An album about loss and heartache and misogyny. Okay, sure, misogyny isn't anything new to hip hop, but the confessional nature of 808's and Heartbreak made the violence and hatred a little more real than was comfortable. Unfortunate, as sonically, this was easily Kanye's most unified, engaging moment.

So why the history lesson? Well, it's because the dirty version of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy made it's way on to the internet last night, and I'm going to make a pretty bold claim about how it stacks up to the Kanon. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, pound for pound, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is Kanye West's best album. But how can that be, you say? It doesn't have the firepower of those first two albums' highlights. While "Power," "Runaway," and "Devil in a New Dress," are all stand-outs, they don't quite match the immediacy of old jams like "Spaceship," "Through a Wire," "Jesus Walks," "Golddigger," "Touch the Sky,"...etc... etc...you get the point. So how can anyone possible say that MBDTF is Kanye's best album? Because it is a tight, focused album in which every song pops on its own, but
which flows as a unified whole. The dirty guitars and distorted vocals of the Nuggets-esque "Gorgeous" are exquisitely crashed by the percussive chants of "Power," which ends on a King Crimson sample that gives way to the quiet elegance of "All of the Lights (Interlude)" which explodes into it's own magnified echo that is "All of the Lights," the actual song. The album's pacing and transitions are impeccable. Despite the long run times of most of the tracks ("Runaway" is 9 minutes long), each song's moving parts keep us moving and pushes the minutes by faster than they have any right to move.

As for thematic content--this is a lot of album to digest, and I'm not sure I'm ready to do this heavy lifting yet. But I'll offer this: as we might have guessed, MBDTF is an album about celebrity, about indulgence, but mostly about self-interrogation. We still get those misogynistic moments ("I slapped my girl/she call the feds")but rather than coming from a place of anger, they're now rooted in odd moments of self-loathing. "Runaway" is probably the best example of this, in which West famously notes that he "sent this bitch a picture of [his] dick." And while this line is dark, and weird, and dripping with sexual harassment, because the rest of the song is fairly self-critical ("Baby I got a plan/Runaway as fast as you can") the end result is almost cathartic. We get a sense that West is trying to exorcise his demons and while he isn't always successful, by drawing this battle out in big, vibrant strokes for everyone to see he has made one of the most impressive hip hop albums of the last ten years.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy will never be confused with a quiet or small album. To borrow a phrase from the album, this thing is a "motherfuckin' monster." It's big and brash and exhilarating--everything hip hop can and should be. Hell--it's everything pop music can be. And maybe that's why MBDTF is such a success, it feels like another shift for pop music, a move beyond the current mainstream toward a bigger, fuller idea of what the mainstream is. As such, MBDTF is a flat-out masterpiece and will be hard to top one most year-end lists, and will most likely be in the top 5 conversations 9 years from now when we're all older and border and making out best of the 10's lists. Welcome back, Kanye.

Late to the Party: Vulcan's "Meet Your Ghost" (1981)

2010-11-11T15:12:00.000-06:00

Vulcan's self-released 1981 album Meet Your Ghost is another one of those legendary vanity recordings that has long been sought after by hardcore vinylhounds. What makes this particularly hard-to-find LP so intriguing is how out of time it sounds. Though it is generally considered to be an example of psychedelic rock, this description is inadequate and really only pertains to the "E.X.P."-like "Prelude" which opens the record (as well as its dedication, in the liner notes, to Jimi Hendrix). While its influences clearly draw from 1960s psychedelic rock, it is, at heart, a bar-rock album, the kind of music one could enjoy on a Saturday night, drinking one cheap domestic beer after another, at practically any roadhouse in America. In and of itself, this doesn't strike one as particularly interesting, because there are thousands of capable, hard-working, but mediocre bands that play every night throughout the country. What makes this record so different is its extremely lo-fi production quality.

Well before "lo-fi" was a calculated aesthetic, Vulcan, fronted by Spencer, Iowa musician Lyle Steece, seemingly patched together this album from cassette tapes recorded in cramped garages and local clubs because, presumably, this is all they could afford. As a result, Steece's guitar, the central musical focus of these recordings, is wildly distorted, his power chords and solos rendered almost-inaudibly fuzzy or highly compressed. The combined effect of these rudimentary recording conditions is a sound that at times foreshadows the fuzz-drenched, catchy riffs of late 1980s/early 1990s grunge music as well as the type of heavy metal pioneered by groups like Kyuss and Boris. The chronology of the album's release attests to Lyle Steece's limited budget. Approximately 500 copies were pressed in 1981, many without cover art (according to the liner notes to the 2010 reissue, it was originally titled Hard As Rock [Volume 1]), and credited to "Lyle Steece: of Vulcan." Interestingly, the record has since been bootlegged numerous times on vinyl.

So what's all the fuss about? Well, for many listeners, Meet Your Ghost will hardly pass the smell test. As I have already noted, the sound-quality is amateurish at best, its source-tapes likely normal bias TDK C-90 cassettes. Numerous times throughout the record, the instruments are slightly out of tune, tape cut-outs are clearly audible, bum notes are hit, notes are missed, and the rhythm section falls out of sync with Steece. Steece is at best an average vocalist. All of these things alone might turn off listeners. Despite these rough edges, what makes this record so fun is, along with the (probably unintentional) aforementioned dirty distortion of the guitar throughout the LP, Lyle Steece's guitar workouts. Nearly all of the tracks on the album are anchored by Steece's lead guitar playing, which is sturdy and searing, though far from being virtuosic. His commitment to the material is unquestionable, especially as he plays through some of his backing group's mistakes. At its best, Meet Your Ghost is like much of the mainstream guitar-oriented rock of the time, except Steece's exuberance far outdistances his bloated corporate-rock peers. Several of the tracks are hypnotically groovy, especially the proto-grunge pulse of "Lightning," the horn-throwin' majesty of "Untitled Instrumental" (which opens a rumble that drone-masters like Earth and Sunn O))) hadn't come close to dreaming about yet), or the album's sizzling eight-minute highlight, "One Nighter." This is the kind of rock music you can listen to at a party, talking to friends and barely paying any mind to, or the kind you can bang your head to alone in nothing but your underwear on some un-social weeknight. Meet Your Ghost is like that tape of the band your cousin's in that she recorded on her $20 boombox, but way better. Clearly, there are limitations to the quality of a release like this, but for those willing to give it a try, it makes for a very refreshing listening experience.

Meet Your Ghost has been re-issued by Lysergic Sound Distributors in a limited, numbered edition of 600 on 12" vinyl. This re-issue contains an entire second disc of previously unreleased material. Though none of this material is as strong as nine tracks that make up the original release, it is nearly as entertaining. The boasted psychedelic qualities of Vulcan's music are on far greater display on the bonus tracks, especially on "Nightmare," "Raven," the instrumental track "The Devil's Birthday Party," and (yet another pseudo-"E.X.P."eriment) on "Interlude/Drugs Can Kill" (whose latter half shows the folkier side of Lyle Steece).

Below is a YouTube clip of "Untitled Instrumental":

Copies can be purchased at the online store Forced Exposure.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Mike Reno and Ann Wilson's "Almost Paradise"

2010-11-05T20:00:00.000-05:00

Ever since the first moments when humans were able to realize that life on Earth can sometimes be a severe pain in the ass, they have tried to imagine PARADISE. For the Fourteenth Century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, "paradiso" was the ten spheres of Heaven. Similarly, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) concerns the fall of man from Paradise, the Biblical Garden of Eden, because of that big-time jerk and perpetual muse to heavy metal musicians everywhere: Satan. Milton writes, "To all delight of human sense exposed, / In narrow room, Nature's whole wealth, yea more, / A Heaven on Earth: For blissful Paradise / Of God the garden was, by him in the east / Of Eden planted." Sounds much better than this window-less office where I write this on the company's dime. Still, in the historical moments following the invention of the light bulb--and, henceforth, all great ideas--many musicians have tried to describe paradise for us in song. Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses, in their song "Paradise City," describes it is a place "Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty." This could be nice. But what if one is allergic to grass and doesn't particularly fancy pretty girls? Then it would be a nightmare. For Meat Loaf, on his epic cut "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," paradise is bangin' in the car when you're seventeen, preferably as a longtime baseball color-commentator provides innuendo-laden play-by-play. Because of abstinence-only education, though, this is no longer a possibility for seventeen year-olds. Since paradise is inestimable, we can only approximate it. It took two great titans of song, Mike Reno of Loverboy and Ann Wilson of Heart, to bring us to this simple but profound realization. Thanks to their song "Almost Paradise," we now have a firmer understanding of this thing poets and philosophers have been trying to describe to us for centuries.

For nearly three decades, the mysteries of Mike Reno and Ann Wilson's "Almost Paradise" have puzzled literary critics. It was long thought that paradise in the song referred to being an oppressed white teenager in a small town who overcomes a variety of obstacles in order to dance and listen to rock music with impunity. But years of scrutiny have revealed that it is about a man and a woman, presumably, who love each other something fierce and can "see forever" when they look into each others' eyes. Now that they "hold the future in their hands," they realize the love they share is not paradise, but "almost paradise." This realization, though, brings with it another, more profound one: that we can only reach paradise when we die. How stupid is that? Reno notes, "in your arms salvation's not so far away." Then, Wilson, now recognizing Reno as her magic man, chimes in, "it's getting closer, closer every day." Reno and Wilson's voices fuse into a sweaty bandana of sweetness. Even if they concede the point that paradise on Earth is unattainable, they persevere knowing their compatible and complementary love for each other is good enough, and that when they die, they can dance all they want [pending they: a) were decent enough human beings to be granted some sort of beneficent afterlife; or, b) invest in the rather expensive technology that will enable their crusty, feeble, old, decaying, dead bodies to dance forever]. Either way, by proving that our mortal selves can only arrive at a place called "Almost Paradise," what they really manage to do is create a living paradise ... FOR OUR EARS!

Here's the video for this unparalleled piece of brutally brilliant music:

Book Review: 33 1/3 #64 Illmatic

2010-11-01T11:24:00.000-05:00

As most of you know by now, one of my biggest consistent critiques of Continuum's 33 1/3 series rests in many of the books' piecemeal approach to their subject matter. Instead of providing a focused, unified analysis of an album through a particular lens, many books in the series work like buckshot. These books work from a mess of scattered ideas in the form of half-formed mini-analyses, histories, and interviews. Thankfully, these weaker books are the exceptions rather than the rule, and with Matthew Gasteier's book on Nas's Illmatic, we get another fine example of the rule. Rather than trying to tell his readers a little bit about everything related to Illmatic, Gasteier focuses his effort on a searching analysis of hip hop's various narratives.

In a series of chapters named after the album's various tensions ("Youth/Experience," "Death/Survival," "Fantasy/Reality," "Tradition/Revolution" etc...), Gasteier expertly blends historical accounts of New York hip hop and details of Nas's life and rise to hip hop fame in service of his literary reading of Illmatic as a sort of hip hop coming of age story, or in Gasteier's own words, "a portrait of the artist as a young black man" (29). Gasteier's reading of Illmatic relies heavily on the idea of narrative. In particular, the author focuses on identifying ways that Nas buys into that coming-of-age narrative while at the same time subverting the dominant narrative of 90's urban culture: "Hip hop, because of its obsession with the 'before' picture of its stars, depends almost entirely on the origin story" (30). Gasteier's discussion of origin stories in hip hop sheds light on the way the hip hop narrative works, and why so many people find it so appealing--the narrative is about authenticity and escape to a better life. Gasteier's discussion of inner-city violence--he points out that, in the late 90's "15-year-old black males in Washington D.C. had a staggering 1 in 12 chance of being murdered by the time they were 45" (36)--furthers his treatment of this theme through the assertion that "While there is certainly a great deal of violent and masculine posturing in hip hop, it is balanced with a deep reverence for the dead, the constant presence of those who have passed, and a strong if commercially muted commitment to ending the cycle of violence" (36). Although Gasteier's reading of Illmatic and hip hop in general sometimes feels like the thoughts of an outsider looking in, his characterization of the many tensions running through the album and genre help provide the art form with an often times overlooked gravity. Maybe that gravity is overlooked because it's taken for granted, or because we're desensitized to it, or because of sheer ignorance.

Following through on the promise of the context he provides, Gasteier ultimately makes some extremely optimistic claims about hip hop's ability to transform socio-economic realities through its decades of consciousness-raising:

Once [the contradiction that we are individuals with dreams, stifled by social, historical, and political bindings] is recognized, it does not seem so hard to understand where Nas's persona comes from, and how easily it can shift and bend at will. Nor does it seem unlikely to imagine that all of those kids who do understand that contradiction, no matter where they come from and how easily they personally can achieve the American dream, would have a perspective on their country that is far different from their parents'. This is the true revolution of hip hop, the one that has yet to play itself out. (80)

While I appreciate Gasteier's optimism, I find this assertion a bit difficult to completely buy into, especially considering, as Gasteier also points out, that much of mainstream hip hop has shifted away from realism to escapism. To these ends, Gasteier's Illmatic almost functions as the naively optimistic companion to Nas's Illmatic in that they both pull at the threads of hard-lived lives in a celebration of survival, only Nas comes off sounding world-weary and a bit desperate, while Gasteier sounds starry-eyed and hopeful. There's nothing wrong with hope or optimism, but Gasteier's reading, here, almost seems to undercut Illmatic's intensity and realism. That is to say, while Gasteier's analysis is expert, the conclusion ultimately draws from it feels a little too pat, too easy--the feel-good answer to Nas's (and hip hop's) perplexing questions.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Focus's "Hocus Pocus"

2010-10-22T15:37:00.001-05:00

You are reading this right now because the Danish progressive rock group Focus made you. Don't believe me? Well, listen to their monstrous 1971 hit "Hocus Pocus" again and you'll find yourself right back here, reading this.

Popular music has long been interested in supernatural forms of magic. Influential acts like Olivia Newton-John, The Cars, Pilot, and America all have songs devoted to the topic. Similarly, Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" (i.e. "hoodoo" you love) and The Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra" have, like Screamin' Jay Hawkins, tried to "Put a Spell on You" with some of their songs. But no group before or since has maximized the ratio of magic to kick-ass rock as much as Focus does on their epic cut "Hocus Pocus." And this doesn't even come close to qualifying the song's importance. It is also one of the few instrumental hits of the pop-rock era. Its existence unquestionably brought about the mainstream popularity of other instrumentals like Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F." and Perry Botkin, Jr.'s "Nadia's Theme (The Young and the Restless)." Of more importance, though, is the undisputed fact that Focus reclaimed the art of "yodeling" from the Americans. American acts, such as Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Sly and the Family Stone, had co-opted the yodel from Europe for their own financially self-serving purposes. Focus corrects this wrong by including yodeling on their incantatory hit*.

Focus's mesmerizing song begins with a seven-chord riff that will literally tear your pants right off your grandpappy's ass. Why he would be wearing your skinny jeans is an issue for you work to out with your therapist. The first two instrumental breaks--and several that follow--feature keyboardist Thijs van Leer's immortal yodeling, communicating a powerful spell that has led you to this very place. Making the song even more magical is that it attempts, within seven minutes, to incorporate as many aspects of traditional European-derived folk forms into its futuristic progressive rock frame as possible, including solos on accordion, mock pan flute, scat singing, whistling, and, of course, vicious guitar leads (by the song's writer, Jan Akkerman) and yodeling. Not only was this song a profoundly important hit that was internationally famous, it magically leads more people to read my writing!

*-Never mind the fact yodeling originated in the Swiss Alps, which are some more than half a day's drive from the Netherlands.

Below is an audio clip of the song. Keep reading ...

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Van Halen's "Right Now"

2010-10-12T10:52:00.000-05:00

In her 1986 treatise "The Greatest Love of All," philosopher Whitney Houston argues, "I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way." This child-first, future-centric ideology ruled our world for half a decade, and the results were disastrous, because otherwise intelligent people thought they heard her sing, "I believe the children are our present." As a result, every new day was a birthday for the children. National and personal debt soon ballooned. All of our streets were littered with discarded R.O.B.s, gilded rattles, and flattened Pogo Balls. Traffic was THE WORST because kids on their damned Big Wheels were clogging up all the freeways with their insufficiently slow (albeit environmentally friendly) form of transportation. Thankfully, the adults reclaimed their fault-proof logic (example: "Why can't I play with Timmy?" asks unnamed child. "Because I said so," replies fully-grown adult parent, expertly!). And the inspiration came from a most unlikely source: Van Halen's 1991 triumph "Right Now."

For a small sliver of the 1970s and all of the 1980s, no band's music was the soundtrack to every kegger you went to more than Van Halen's. They screamed PARTY. Anchored by the greatest single guitar player in the history of human beings playing guitar in Sir Eddie Van Halen, the group knocked out hit after hit, including "Running with the Devil," "Panama," "Jump," and "Poundcake." Lingering behind this facade of inartful debauchery, the casual spreading of sexually transmitted diseases, 50-yard marker-sized lines of cocaine, and warehouses of zebra-print clothing was our salvation from this Ritalin-happy generation of Whitney Houston future-kids. Apparently, Eddie Van Halen composed the music for his most important anthem during the David Lee Roth years. But it wasn't until deep into his tenure with the Cabo Wabo man himself, Sammy Hagar, that this gorgeous melody would be served by such insight into the human condition.

"Right Now" is great because it least represents Van Halen's usual musical strengths. The track is not frivolous: it is absolutely serious and heart-felt; Eddie Van Halen's tapping and whammy-bar drives are pushed far into the background, substituted by a Bruce Hornsby and the Range-style piano figure geared toward latte-drinking progressives; and Sammy Hagar isn't actually singing about his boner for a change. Instead, Hagar's lyric is a direct subversion of Whitney Houston's philosophy. "Right now is everything," he yelps, passionately, during the chorus, adding, "It's your tomorrow." By actually paying attention to the present, Hagar tells us, we can "catch that magic moment and do it right." Translation: We don't need to wait for no stinking kids to do it for us when we are old, covered with uncomfortable bed-sores, and being totally ignored by them in our smelly and understaffed retirement homes. No truer words have ever been spoken. We were so brainwashed during the reign of the Whitney Houston's enlightenment that we couldn't see the signs in front of us. For example, in the 1989 Peter Weir film Dead Poet's Society, the "children are our future" mindset was subtly subverted when John Keating, played by the venerable Robin Williams, pleads, "CARPE DIEM." But we were too busy tearing up our books to notice. Sammy Hagar's lyric is empowering and immediate, emphasizing that we "turn this thing around" and "do it right." "Why wait another day?" he asks us. Exactly. Thanks to Sammy Hagar and the rest of Van Halen, children no longer ruled, and we were able to become self-centered again, leaving our destructive and extremely expensive legacy to them to repair. Neenerneenerneener.

Site Update and Coming Soon -- The Fiddleback.

2010-10-09T17:07:00.001-05:00

We've slowed down around here, lately. Part of that is due to the reality of school starting back up in the fall. The other, cooler part has to do with a couple of us--Joshua Cross, and I--taking a gig as co-music editors of brand new online arts journal The Fiddleback.

The first issue isn't quite up and running, yet, but it will be soon. In the mean time, We'll keep posting fun stuff here, but some of our reviews will be shifted over to The Fiddleback.

Also--The Fiddleback is shaping up to be pretty great. The journal's founder, Jeff Simpson, has assembled a crack team of fiction, poetry, art, non-fiction, and music editors to bring together exceptional content. Once the first issue goes live, come enjoy our take on the arts and maybe even submit your own work.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #72 Pavement - Wowee Zowee

2010-10-07T23:35:00.000-05:00

Bryan Charles' author blurb on the back of his book about Pavement's Wowee Zowee is short and direct: "Bryan Charles is the author of the novel Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way." That's all the ethos we get going into this book. We don't see any affiliation with Pitchfork, or The Village Voice, no ties to the actual music business. All that the blurb tells us is that Bryan Charles is a novelist, a writer. As such, fans of hardcore music journalism might be a bit hesitant in approaching Charles' take on Wowee Zowee. Let's hope they aren't, though, because Wowee Zowee is a fun, compelling read, and is easily one of the best books in Continuum's 33 1/3 series. This is a bold claim to make, I know. What, with a writer penning the book instead of a rock critic, not to mention the fact that this is the seventy-second entry in the series, usually a sign that the good albums and ideas are all-dried up. Rather, Bryan Charles' Wowee Zowee is a perfect example of why the 33 1/3 series is so successful and has had such long legs--with every volume there is the chance at greatness. Not every volume is great, and a few are downright boring, but Charles' sharp writing, self-referential framework, and measured earnestness make his book one of the series' biggest successes, and a great piece of rock journalism.

On the surface, Charles' Wowee Zowee might sound like any other 33 1/3 book; the volume combines personal fandom, band interviews, analysis, and a brief track-by-track walk-through in its attempt to get at some sense of truth or understanding about the album. What sets the volume apart from its peers, though, is Charles' engaging prose, and his ability to wind the book's disparate parts into compelling narrative threads. What are these narrative threads? First, we get the author's story, how he came to Pavement, how he, more reluctantly, came to Wowee Zowee, and then how the album unfolded throughout his life. Not always gripping subject matter, but in the hands of a sharp writer with an unique eye for detail and a fiction writer's narrative chops, the memoir elements of the book pop. Second, we get a research narrative, of sorts, complete with a thesis that Charles sets out to either prove or disprove: "Underdog rock record greeted with head-wags and confusion stands the test of time to become fan favorite and indie rock classic" (22). With this thesis in mind, the author digs up old reviews and articles, then sets out to interview band members, label heads, and studio technicians. Rather than delving into straight rock journalism, however, a funny thing starts to happen--Charles' Pavement fandom, the importance of the record to the man, begins to bleed into the research narrative. We read as he stalls on his project due to nerves, chuckle at his frustrations dealing with Matador Records' curmudgeonly Gerard Cosloy, and feel awkward for him when he trips up Stephen Malkmus with a question about lyrics.

Charles' volume on Wowee Zowee is so successful because he strikes the perfect balance between fan enthusiasm and rock journalist curiosity. Nothing is too giddy, or too factual--both of these narrative threads bleed together as one man's attempt to get at the heart of an album he loves. Even the song-by-song, a pet peeve of mine in many 33 1/3 volumes, is handled admirably. The section closes the book, not with section headings and dry explication, but with a stream of conscious rant that ties each song to moments and ideas from the author's life--moments and ideas that tie back to early moments from the book, heightening the ethos that the jacket blurb only hints at. The book is at turns touching and funny (try to read the side-by-side comparison of Billy Corgan and Stephen Malkmus without losing it), and encompasses the best qualities of 33 1/3's finest moments.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: James Blunt's "You're Beautiful"

2010-09-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

Within the matrices of heterosexual romance, good words are hard to come by. The burden placed upon three simple words--"I love you"--to communicate verbally the unarticulable feelings one has for their betrothed has rendered the phrase dull and meaningless. For those in the process of courtship, a well-chosen love sonnet can be a confusing symbol as well. If one were, for instance, to recite William Shakespeare's most famous example of the form, Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"), the intended audient might complain of its archaic language and accuse the speaker of plagiarism and unoriginality. Similarly, if the choice was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," the recepient might claim that Barrett Browning was plagiarizing from Shakespeare. When old fashioned forms of courtship fail to impress, one can always resort, during the process of initiating a relationship, to the even less-impressive "pick-up line." For men who are not "cunning linguists" like James Bond, the pick-up line can be distastrous, as the deliverer often confuses "wit" with "sexist belligerence." It's just down-right embarrassing for a man to say stuff like "You're like a bass drum / I can see myself banging you hard," "Are you from Nashville? / 'Cause you're the only 'Ten-I-See,'" "Do you wanna see something swell?" or, my personal favorite, "What time is it?" Thankfully, James Blunt solved all of our problems when he released his mind-blowingly genius love song, "You're Beautiful," in 2005. Scientific research suggests that the two-word compliment "You're Beautiful" works every time.

The song begins with an inviting four-note figure played on acoustic guitar, later to be joined by a steady rhythm section and swelling sounds of strings and piano. Blunt has one of those high, thin, sexy British voices that sounds like he had just run for ten miles and smoked a cigarette at the same time before he entered the studio to cut the vocals. While the lyric is essentially a shaggy dog story of unrequited love about a man who sees a beautiful woman "on the subway" with "another man" ultimately to never see her again, nobody ever really notices it. What they do hear, however, is James Blunt's soaring, triumphant repetition of the phrase "You're beautiful!" And that's the most brilliant thing about the song. It is a tragic tale of heartbreak, a classic example of a missed opportunity, masquerading as a self-help book for the verbally-challenged lover. According to the greatest creative thinkers and philosophers in the history of mankind, all women (and many men) want to be told "You're beautiful" AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE ... in a high, thin sexy British voice coming from a speaker who has just been running for ten miles while smoking a cigarette at the same time. Even though some in the Thespian community, like Christina Hendricks, think it's passe, suggesting we tell our betrothed "You are radiant," James Blunt was clearly a pioneer of Amorous Studies for singing one of the greatest songs of this young millenia, refreshing our language with a simple, effective, sexy, and classy compliment that will NEVER become stale, no matter how many times it is repeated in a span of 200 seconds.

Late to the Party: Debris' [1976]

2010-09-24T17:40:00.000-05:00

The pre-history of punk rock is usually based around hip, cosmopolitan urban areas. The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, and The Dictators were based out of New York City; the MC5 and The Stooges in Ann Arbor, Michigan (just outside of Detroit); Pere Ubu, Devo, and Rocket from the Tombs out of Cleveland; and The Modern Lovers in Boston. These groups, who were far from popular during their own time (with the exception of Devo), have subsequently been elevated into the realm of the legendary thanks to a perceptive group of rock historians and cultural critics who were heavily influenced by these vibrant, perceptive, and prophetic artists. Thanks in part to texts like Lester Bangs' posthumously published anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988) and Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me (1997), these otherwise obscure groups have been unwittingly canonized and are now casually mentioned by some rock n' roll aficionados in the same company as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath. One group, however, that you will not read about in these histories is Chickasha, Oklahoma's Debris' (yes, there is an intentional apostrophe after the "s" in their name). Their self-titled debut, released in a private pressing of 1,000 copies in 1976, makes the argument that they should.

For those that don't know, Chickasha, Oklahoma is a small city located about forty miles southwest of Oklahoma City. Prior to the success of The Flaming Lips, the pride of Oklahoma City, in the early 1990s, the city was not exactly known for its punk rock bona fides. With this in mind, the mere existence of a group like Debris' should seem like some sort of proto-punk rock miracle. Helping advance this thesis is the relatively high quality of the music and just how many similarities it shares with the more legendary acts of that time period. Consisting of Charles ("Chuck Poison") Ivey, O. (Oliver) Powers (both assuming various duties on guitar, bass, and synthesizer), and drummer Johnny Gregg, the trio--with help from a session saxophonist, drummer, and female background vocalist--reportedly, as per the boast on the album's back cover, pumped out this well-rehearsed material in "Six hours and 59 minutes." In this relatively short period of time, spread across two different sessions in December 1975 and January 1976, they incorporate their influences (which the group notes on their myspace page include "The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Captain Beefheart, and English glam rock") and produce sounds vocal yelps comparable to Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Alan Vega of Suicide (both of whom had yet to release anything), and David Thomas of Pere Ubu. The stuttering rhythms of their guitar playing, the free jazz textures of session musician Richard Davis's saxophone, and the sharp bursts of noise that emanate from their synthesizers draw immediate comparisons to the aforementioned Pere Ubu, Robert Quine of the Voidoids, early "hardcore" Devo, and The Silver Apples. Thanks to record collector Karl Ikola, the founder of Anopheles Records, Debris' was re-issued (and re-christened Static Disposal, the name of the group's short-lived record label) for the first time in 1999 on CD (with numerous bonus tracks) and again on vinyl in 2008.

As exciting as this all sounds, let us not confuse the historical importance of this album's anomalous existence with the quality of the material on it. As an album, it is more often than not good, sometimes great. It often meanders, especially on the longer tracks. Similarly, some of the material is just not that strong ("Witness" and "Boy Friend," for instance). That being said, there is plenty to like here. The opener, "One Way Spit," begins with Charles Ivey retching into the microphone as he counts off the track. This is a fitting introduction to the album, foreshadowing the spastic sounds that would follow, insuring their obscurity, especially as an Oklahoman rock act, in 1976. Another highlight is the sludgy "Tricia," as desperate a love song one is likely to hear, complete with a power tool to create added texture (and long before Eddie Van Halen, it's worth noting!). Side One ends with another favorite, "Leisurely Waiting," which features a pulsating two chord sequence that is rendered all the more unsettling by Ivey's vocals. Side Two begins with the most accessible track on the album in "New Smooth Lunch/Manhattan," a fun romp that foreshadows something like "Gut Feeling" from Devo's debut LP, and manages to stay surprisingly catchy despite spazz-skronk guitar runs worthy of inclusion on Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. After two decent cuts in "Tell Me" and "Flight Taken," the album unfortunately ends with its weakest number in "Blue Girls," which is also, not surprisingly, the slowest number on the album. Ultimately, Debris' may come across as a novelty to those listeners with an inflexible conception of proto-punk. However, it is more than just a curio. It is an interesting piece of outside-outsider music that is refreshingly relevant, far more so than it was for the Oklahomans who were (un-)lucky enough to hear it back in '76.

===

Listen to Debris' on their myspace page.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #16 The Replacements - Let it Be

2010-09-20T11:36:00.000-05:00

As far as I can tell, Colin Meloy's 33 1/3 book about The Replacements classic album, Let it Be is one of the more popular entries in Continuum's series. This probably has as much to do with the fact that the book is less academic--it's a memoir--as that it was written by lead Decemberist Colin Meloy. Written by Meloy when the series was still young, and before The Decemberists had moved from fun to exhausting, the book is a quick and easy read that does a pretty nice job of infusing the author's experiences growing up in Montana with the type of rock and roll heart that comes from growing up listening to the Mats. Meloy does a nice job of capturing the pop atmosphere of the 80's, describing universal scenes of watching 120 minutes with the volume low, interactions with metal kids whose religious parents have thrown out their tapes, being turned on to boatloads of music by a hip older relative, and playing in a made-up cover band without real instruments. In these moments, where Meloy explores the interactions between his younger self and pop culture, Let it Be is a smashing success.

Where Meloy's volume falters, however, is in the details of his young life. Meloy seems so intent on making his book universal that the day-to-day experiences of young Colin come across as generic--there are mean jocks, and embarrassing sports moments, and stuck-up popular kids, and etc... etc... In these moments, the book frustrates through its familiar generalities, especially when Meloy devotes entire sections to mundane events from his life just so he can tell us that at the end of the day he listened to Let it Be and fought back tears.
That being said, when Melody hits on something fresh and unique, this volume is outstanding.

Early in the volume, Meloy describes a camping trip gone wrong which results in the author and his male friend hugging each other, and trying not to cry, throughout the night. Later, Meloy describes a Spandex concert he attended, and how he stared in awe as the lead singer reached down his pants then licked his hand making the young Meloy's female classmates go wild. The specificity and urgency of these moments are fun and engaging, and go a long way toward making the book an exciting read. Nothing quite lives up to the book's closing section, though, in which a grown up Meloy, on his first tour with the Decemberists, arrives in Minneapolis and begins to imagine the young Replacements. What makes this closing so exciting is that Meloy's imagined Paul Westerberg blends and merges with his description of his younger self, giving us insight not just into the younger Meloy's fascination with the Mats, but also how grown-up Meloy got where he is today.

And in a way, this represents the volume's biggest success and failure--in the end, this entry in the 33 1/3 series isn't so much about The Replacements as much as its about Colin Meloy. There's certainly plenty of reminiscing about and listening to Let it Be, but that has more to do with how Meloy grew up than considering the album itself. As such, Meloy's entry in the 33 1/3 series will be most interesting for fans of Meloy, and perhaps those interested in what it was like growing up in the 80's. While not the most original entry in the series, Meloy's Let it Be is fun enough, and fast paced. I'd love to see more fiction and memoir entries in the series, but I hope that, if they come about, they're a little more exciting and specific than what's on display, here.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Air Supply's "Making Love out of Nothing at All"

2010-09-14T10:59:00.000-05:00

During the height of the Cold War, the Summer of 1983, when the threat of actual nothingness for animal- and man-kind was only one hydrogen bomb-blast away from possibly happening, Air Supply sang about the transformative powers of nothingness on their brilliant hit single "Making Love out of Nothing at All." Written by Jim Steinman, the mastermind behind Meat Loaf's monumental loaf of meatiness, Bat out of Hell, the song not only made Americans aware of Australians for the first time since the year before, when Men at Work popularized Vegemite, but delivered a profound message. In the song, Air Supply resuscitates existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of nothingness from the daaaaaaaarkly comic pit of despair he had characterized it as into a practical, empowering strategy for embracing life and possibly getting some ass in the process.

At the time, intellectuals criticized Air Supply's hit for "sounding exactly like Steinman's previous hit single, Bonnie Tyler's 'Total Eclipse of the Heart.'" Of course, these coffee-drinking philistines, smoking their clove cigarettes and listening to their Steely Dan, missed the message aimed directly at their demographic. Air Supply's tough-as-nails acoustic guitar and piano approach set the standard for the vanguard of "soft rock" a few years earlier with "Lost in Love." Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell, the geniuses behind Air Supply, in fact deliver "Making Love out of Nothing at All" as a sermon. Their smooth harmonies blend exquisitely with a twelve-note piano motif to convince the listener that they can make something out of nothing, literally.

In Sartre's Being and Nothingness [L'Être et le néant] (1943), the philosopher correctly notes the predominant view that, historically, nothingness had been viewed on a continuum with being, that nothingness can only occur once being reaches its end. Sartre concludes that nothingness is that "which is not." Therefore, when Hitchcock and Russell run through a litany of various knowledges in their song ("And I know just where to touch you / and I know just what to prove," for example), concluding it with the admission of "making love out of nothing as all," the duo contradict the tendency to perceive "that which is not" (i.e. death) as a negative and, instead, embrace "nothing" as, at the very least, an opportunity to have sex. Since the purpose of sex, ultimately, is to create life, Air Supply greet nothingness as a form of productivity. So, not only do Air Supply know "all the rules" and "how to break them," they also know how to embrace the nothingness of our miserable existences like a valuable opportunity ... to affirm the glory of existence ... and to possibly have some coitus while they're at it. Let's face it: there hasn't been a piece of Existentialist propaganda this effective since the black turtleneck sweater.

Here's the glorious video:

Book Review: 33 1/3 #67 Brian Eno - Another Green World

2010-09-12T18:15:00.000-05:00

Brian Eno's Another Green World is probably not the easiest album to write about, especially for 100 pages. There's a certain quality to the record--a dense mystique, an obtuse indirectness--that keeps the album from easily succumbing to words. At least words as music critics and scholars like to use them. One of the more interesting bits of trivia Geeta Dayal unearths in her 33 1/3 book on the classic Eno album concerns Eno's use of song titles and often times lyrics not as coded transfers of ideas, but as evocative tonal cues--in other words, Eno didn't have much to say, but he had plenty that he wanted his audience to intuit, perceive or feel. This bit of insight into Eno's creative process is particularly emblematic of both Dayal's successes and missed opportunities in her Another Green World volume--on the one hand, Dayal provides buckets full of insight into Eno's creative process while situating the album within the context of Eno's career; on the other hand, despite Dayal's explorations of Eno's unconventional and surprising-for-anyone-but-Eno methods, there's a certain air of boredom pervading the book's second half, as if the author was ecstatic to write the book but ran out of ideas too quickly.

To be fair, approximately the first half of Dayal's book ranks among the finest writing in the 33 1/3 series. Dayal deftly navigates readers through Eno's early career while introducing us to Eno's creativity flash cards, and relating a number of awe-inspiring anecdotes from the musician's art school days. This first half of Dayal's book is vital and engaging because of the way it approaches Another Green World through the lens of Eno's creative process. Up until somewhere around chapter seven, Dayal has a clear thesis and purpose in her exploration of Eno's work. Then, as happens with many 33 1/3 books, the analysis veers into an unnecessary and somewhat tedious track-by-track walk-through of the featured album. The problem with such sections in otherwise wonderful and interesting books, is that they stop reading like explorations of great albums, and begin looking like slightly glorified liner notes--I don't care that "'Sky Saw' incorporates Jones' fretless bass and Phil Collins' drumming, a searing viola solo by John Cale, additional bass guitar by Paul Rudolph, and various effects by Eno" (Dayal 60). If I wanted to know these things, I could look them up. This kind of information dumping comes across as, at best, filler and, at worst, a stall tactic trying to fill up the white space until the end of the book. This section is also laced with, for the most part, overly vague, uninteresting quotes about the recording process from people who were there. Here's one of Dayal's quotes from Jones:

He's taken that rhythm track and put all this stuff on top of it, and made it into a really strong piece of music. It was really interesting how he initiated the tune; he could have gone a million different ways with an introduction like that. (Dayal 60)

In other words, Eno produced the track...the way that producers generally produce tracks, by putting "stuff" on top of a rhythm track and, as long as the producer is pretty good, making a "strong piece of music." Somehow, the song-by-song analysis section, while brief, kills the momentum of the book's second half by making the album's creation, that had previously been described by the author as fun and daring, sound like an utter bore. The book closes with some more interesting context, tracing a line out through Discreet Music, but it never matches the intrigue of the books first fifty pages.

Now, to be clear, I really hate to rag on Dayal's book more than I've critiqued other 33 1/3 books in other reviews, because the flaws in her approach are quite common to the series, and the first half of her book ranks among the best writing I've encountered in the entire series. Perhaps the series wasn't designed to be read how I'm reading it (one after another, out of a mix of intellectual curiosity and fandom rather than one or the other), or maybe I've just read too many and I'm getting better at picking up on patterns that others don't notice. Whichever it is, the convention of walking through an album track-by-track rarely works unless its being done with a very specific goal in mind. Too often, interesting titles in the series devolve from focused explorations of an album's historical or social context into a hodge-podge of trivia and minutiae that is barely interesting. I love this series of books--shit, I've read 32 of them, and keep a pile of 2-3 new ones stocked and ready at all times--but let's hope that, as they continue to grow into this new decade, the conventions shift a little and we get more books as wonderfully engaging, unique and interesting as "Bee Thousand," "69 Love Songs," and "Live at the Apollo," and a bit less of the books that just sort of go through the motions.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Paris Hilton's "Stars Are Blind"

2010-08-30T10:47:00.000-05:00

When people say something hyperbolic like "That song saved my life," they mean that that particular song--whatever it may be--inspired them to change the direction of their life. Maybe it gave them the idea to quit doing drugs, to switch occupations, to be a better spouse, or to join the United States Peace Corps. NOBODY who says something like this, though, has ever had their life literally saved by a song. I know that I generally refrain from disclosing many details from my personal life when I write about the songs that changed the landscape of human thought and understanding. But perhaps you, the ever-so-gracious reader, would be willing to allow this one indulgence? I only ask because a song HAS saved my life. I was only a few seconds from dying when divine intervention intervened, giving me another chance at living this life. For I was resurrected like Lazarus by the dulcet tones of Paris Hilton's 2006 smash hit "Stars Are Blind."

The Spring of 2006 was a bad time for your humble narrator. I was fired from a prestigious, well-paying job, on a late Friday afternoon, because I was "not mean enough." Losing the job didn't hurt my feelings so much as the reason why I got canned. To make matters worse, I received a call from my ex-boss the following Wednesday. She told me that they would have re-hired me if I would have protested my firing and "showed a little chutzpah." Apparently, the cliche "Nice guys finish last" is actually true. To make matters worse, my mother saw a picture of me that I had recently posted on MySpace and said that I "looked way too skinny." My mother, usually a very nice woman, had never, and I sincerely mean this, never insulted me once in my entire life. And she knew I was insecure about being too thin. As a result, I gave up my life-long vegetarianism and began eating MickDonald's and Olive Oyyul's Chicken twice a day (that's right, both of them). I started gaining weight. My mother never even mentioned the weight thing again. Well, around this time, my mother was becoming as moody and erratic as I was. To make matters worse, out of nowhere, my girlfriend at the time left me. She left a note on the front door that read, "I'm leaving." That was it. All her stuff was gone, and, for some reason, she took all of my fishing gear (and nothing else of mine?!). Two weeks pass, and I've eaten nothing but fast food and, curiously enough, haven't heard a word from my mother, who used to call me every day. Then, out of nowhere, she calls, telling me she's on vacation at Niagara Falls. She tells me she has a surprise. She puts my ex-girlfriend on the phone who proceeds to tell me that she's in love with my mother and that they plan on moving to Massachusetts to get married. My pride and masculinity crushed, not to mention being totally weirded out by the Freudian smorgasbord of jacked up family issues at work with this whole scenario, I went to a Patrick Swayze Roadhouse near me and vowed to eat one of their 64 ounce steaks in a hour. Within twelve minutes, I was clearly full and had more than 3/4 of the steak to eat. I decided to jam one rather healthy hunk of the New York Strip down my gullet. I quickly realized this was a bad idea right as I started to choke. I tried to signal to the wait staff that I was choking, but they were all doing a line-dance to Big and Rich's "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)." As I almost slipped away, the song stopped and the PA system in the restaurant went right to the chorus of Paris Hilton's "Stars Are Blind," when she sings, "Even though the gods are crazy / Even though the stars are blind / If you show me real love baby / I'll show you mine," and, I kid you not, the song wrapped its arms around my diaphragm and thrust its fists, immediately ejecting the piece of grisly meat from my windpipe. I was saved, thanks to Paris Hilton and her amazing song. She is right on the money when she sings, "It could get physical," and, later, "This moment is critical." Without the physical application of the Heimlich Maneuver at that "critical" moment, I would probably be dead.

Because of that near-death experience, I now see that song in a totally different light. What she's saying is that we are filled with dualities, competing drives, and though we usually choose one over the other, these choices are never so easy, like when she sings, "I can make you nice and naughty / be the devil and angel too / got a heart and soul and body / let's see what this love can do." Before, I just thought the song's lyrics were told from the perspective of a person who was only using poorly-phrased rhetorical pleas to beg for sex. But now, I realize it is so much more than that, its tropical musical backdrop merely providing a mental vacation from the unconscious hard work of our conflicted minds. Even if, as the dead Lester Bangs points out, "There has never been a song that has sounded so much like Blondie's 'The Tide is High' since Blondie's 'The Tide is High,'" that doesn't dispel the true fact that "Stars are Blind" saved my life. Maybe it will one day save yours.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Meat Loaf's "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)"

2010-08-19T12:03:00.000-05:00

Love makes the world go 'round, literally. Every time a person utters the word, draws a heart, or puts "XOXOXO" at the end of a text message, it powers the rotation of our planet. It's science. It's true. It's been that way forever! Because of this, people have done some strange things for love. Wars have been fought for "love of country." People will occasionally murder somebody in "a fit of passion." But, thanks to Meat Loaf and his Wagnerian #1 hit "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)," we now know that there exists THE POSSIBILITY of things that people would not ever be willing to do for love. Here is just a brief list of some of the things Meat Loaf wouldn't do if we totally run on the assumption that his love-interest has some rather EXORBITANT demands:

--He wouldn't stick his left leg in a wood-chipper.
--He wouldn't get a large tattoo of a swastika on his forehead and walk around Jerusalem.
--He wouldn't eat human flesh marinated in Box-of-Wine puke.
--He wouldn't call his significant other 'Mommy Dearest' during sex.
--He wouldn't get a job as a telemarketer.

For nearly two decades now, people have wondered what Meat Loaf WOULDN'T do for love as they ponder the miracle of this song. During the chorus, when Meat Loaf initially admits, "I would do anything for love," we as listeners assume this is unconditional. However, mindblowingly, he immediately disqualifies the claim, adding, "But I won't do that." This is all just a part of the web that makes "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" so genius. The listener is forever left to speculate what "that" really is. Perhaps the most radical achievement of the track, though, is that it undid years of damage caused by the powerful jingle "What would you do for a Klondike Bar?" I'm pretty sure that if somebody did a mash-up of the two songs, a black hole would immediately form.

Marvin Lee Aday, nee Meat Loaf, rose to superstardom in 1977 with the release of his album Bat out of Hell. With its campy lyrics, over-the-top production, and Meat Loaf's dramatic vocals, it went on to sell over 14 million copies in the U.S. Success, though, eluded the Loaf in the years following Bat out of Hell. And by the early 1990s, he was more known, to the kids at least, for his part in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) than for "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." After patching things up with Bat out of Hell composer Jim Steinman, the two got back together at an unlikely time in music history. The year was 1993. Grunge had dethroned the likes of Michael Jackson and M.C. Hammer from the top of the charts. Bill Clinton was pissing off Republicans. The Clapper was in bedrooms all across the United States. What the world needed was a song that fused that old Meat Loafiness with one of the eight-minute songs from Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion II that made us, as human beings, rethink the power of love and its limitations.

The seven-minute song (the album version is twelve minutes long!) is passionately sung by the Loaf as he easily convinces the listener just how HARD he loves. I mean, shucks, he is willing to "run right into hell and back" for it. (Of course, this only seems extreme if one believes there is a hell. Literally running into "an abstract concept" and back suggests he is barely willing to do the minimum amount possible for love.) After making his case, he reaches the conclusion that there are some instances where indulging in outrageous actions for love are just not warranted. He just doesn't provide any specifics, though. The moral of the song is that people are prone to making bad decisions when they are in love (like the inability to recognize they have fallen in love with an utterly horrible person). Clearly, Meat Loaf's love-interest is using him because of his apparent gullibility, but he has been, up until now, unable to realize this dynamic. His love-interest (voiced by the otherwise obscure singer Mrs. Loud) gives Meat Loaf some rather esoteric exercises to prove his love to her near the end of the song, including "build[ing] an emerald city with these grains of sand," "colorizing" her "black and white" life, "tak[ing her] to places [she's] never known," and, weirdest of all, "hos[ing her] down with holy water." Meat Loaf is perfectly willing to do these things, which suggest that the guy is a total freak! However, after her un-named, specifically dubious demand, he now realizes how far he has gone and how much farther it will take for him to get back. I don't know what this means, but neither does anybody else.

The point is this: With "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)," Meat Loaf created the most ambitiously ambiguous song in the history of animal-, plant- and man-kind. I still maintain, to this day, she has asked him to punt a football made of broken glass barefooted to prove his love to her. It's totally in the lyrics ... somewhere ... I guess. What do you think?

"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks": Robyn - Body Talk pt. 2

2010-08-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest questions in twenty-first century pop music has to deal with North America's pop scene to greet Sweedish pop sensation Robyn with open arms. Not only does Robyn have some of the catchiest, best produced pop songs in recent memory, she also has the attitude and image of a star--almost. Perhaps North America's problem with Robyn--the thing keeping her from an acceptance of Aguillera/Pink/Timberlake/Gaga proportions--is that every facet of her pop star persona is just a half step off from the industry norm. She's got an unusual fashion sense, but not unusual enough. She's got a tough "bad girl" exterior, but also a warm, surprisingly human center that exposes the toughness for what it is, a facade. She brings killer club dance songs to the table, but peppers them with lines of playful bursts of midnight poetry. While these might be the reasons Robyn isn't massively successful State-side, they are also the reasons she is one of the most engaging and endearing pop starts making music at the moment.

On Body Talk pt. 2, the middle chapter to Robyn's alleged three mini-album Body Talk cycle, all of these idiosyncrasies are on full display, and work together to further illuminate just what makes Robyn so interesting. The album's songs veer from sincere pep talks like "In My Eyes," to the crude smack talk of "Criminal Intent," and "U Should Know Better," the later of which includes a surprising, and well employed guest vocal from Snoop Dogg. As usual, Robyn's ability to seamlessly blend the gooey bubble gum synths and heart-to-heart vocals of a song like "Hang With Me," with the electro-clash pulse and absurdly vulgar lyrics ("Even the Vatican knows not to fuck with me")of "U Should Know Better" is still the crux of the album's success, and points toward Robyn's biggest asset--her persona.

There are songs on Body Talk pt. 2, on both of the Body Talk albums for that matter, that shouldn't work. A song like pt. 2's "Include Me Out," with its overly earnest verses and nonsensical chorus should not work. But it does. And the reason it works is because of the balance Robyn maintains within her persona. She blends toughness with vulnerability, sincerity with knowing nods to pop artifice, and she does it all with an undeniable exuberance. Not many pop stars could get away with speaking the line "we dance to the beat of bad kissers clicking teeth," over a club-banging beat in a way that isn't embarrassing. Robyn does it, and the line is successful for the same reason Robyn is successful--it's fun and weird, a little bit awkward and a little bit sexy.

Like Body Talk pt. 1, this second entry is a solid collection of eight songs that sneak up on us, get under our skin, and don't leave us alone. Now with the first two installments of Body Talk to enjoy, let us wait with baited breath that pt. 3 arrives this year, as promised.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: The Buoys' "Timothy"

2010-08-11T05:55:00.000-05:00

Many things make us laugh. Like farts. Or platitudes. Or Crotch-shots on America's Funniest Home Videos. Or elaborate jokes involving three holes in a wall and a particularly vicious milking machine. These things are funny. And so is making fun of old people. One thing that's not funny, however, is cannibalism. Aside from incest or bestiality, humanity finds nothing more repulsive or terrifying than cannibalism. In fact, imperial powers often claimed the people they were colonizing were cannibals to justify their actions and to tame these so-called "barbarians" with bullets and poison-tipped arrows full of "civilization." Over the last sixty years, Americans have been morbidly fascinated with revolting mass murderers like Edward Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, both of whom ate some of their victims. If there is one instance, though, when cannibalism seems to be only slightly less disgusting, it is in the act of survival. This is why the travails of the Donner Party in 1846-7 or the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash of 1972, dramatized more recently in the 1993 film Alive (directed by Frank Marshall), have long fascinated many people. I'm sure many people wonder just how deprived of food they would have to be to seriously consider cannibalism as a viable gastronomical option. More mind-blowing than any of these facts, well-researched though they may be, is The Buoys' 1970 hit single "Timothy." To date, it is the only American song about cannibalism to crack Billboard's Top Twenty.

The man who wrote "Timothy" was preoccupied with flavors. Rupert Holmes, The Buoys' pianist and "Timothy"'s scribe, would later become an international superstar with his epic single "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)," the yacht-rock song that would go on to define an entire generation."Timothy" presents the narrative of a small group of miners, three to be exact (the narrator, Joey, and Tim), who become trapped. The Buoys' lead singer, Billy Kelly, with his competent, impassioned voice deceptively relates this narrative, coming off as a Summer of Love crooner singing about flowers in his hair and getting crabs. The shuffling rhythm work of the group's guitarist, Chris Hanlon, is backed by a tight rhythm section, a light brass section, and some of the most deliciously sappy strings you'll ever hear. It is against this bubblegum wash of diabetic infectiousness that Billy Kelly delivers this chilling tale.

What is so brilliant about "Timothy" is that Kelly never mentions cannibalism by name. Instead, he drops hints. Seriously. The lines "Me and Joey feasted on the delicious meat of Timothy down in the mine / He sure was tasty! / We now have a constant craving for human flesh / Where's the A1 sauce? / Because we're totally cannibals now" do not appear in the song. Instead, Rupert Holmes' sly lyric begs the question, "Do you like Can-ni-bal-ism ... and getting caught in a mine?" The track's brutal setting is a mine disaster. Three men are trapped. But when they are rescued, only the narrator and Joey are to be found. During the chorus, the group sings, "Timothy, where did you go? God, I don't know." God refuses to answer their question because He hates cannibals. Clearly. He also dislikes people who sell their souls for just a piece of meat, like Joey, who tells our hungry narrator, "I'd sell my soul for just a piece of meat." The narrator, however, has no qualms about being a cannibal, because, unlike Joey, he makes no such Faustian deal to survive. He proves that, yes, there can be atheism in a foxhole, so to speak.

What elevates the song above being a cruel joke is its potent commentary on the dispiriting nature of collective apathy. In the final verse, the narrator mentions that he has blacked out, waking up to find himself rescued from the mine disaster. Curiously, his stomach is full. How on Earth did that happen? Clearly, the narrator is a lousy detective, as are his rescuers. The narrator notes, "Nobody ever got around to finding Timothy." Perhaps if they would have noticed the narrator's bib or how his breath curiously smelled just like Timothy, they would have found out the ugly truth. BUT NOOOOOO!

What The Buoys' "Timothy" actually accomplishes is quite stunning. In the song, they manage to rail against apathy, criticize the betrayal of ones own humanity, and make cannibalism seem cute and funny, WHICH IT IS NOT. Cannibalism is serious business, and no laughing matter. As a result of this song, the bubblegum pop scene of the early 1970s got just a little meatier, if you know what I mean?

Here's a clip of the song:

"Talking Reviews: James and Joshua Talk About...": The Suburbs, by Arcade Fire

2010-07-30T11:17:00.000-05:00

Welcome to our newest series, Talking Reviews: James and Joshua Talk About.... This first review grew out of our complete inability to really wrap our heads around The Arcade Fire's enigmatic new album The Suburbs. Without further ado, here are James and Joshua talking about The Suburbs.

James: So, The Suburbs, the latest from The Arcade Fire, is something, isn't it? Thus far, I've found myself vacillating wildly on whether I like it or not. On the one hand, I like the more restrained approach, and less "we're here to change the world" attitude, but some of the production is lacking, the performances can be dull at times, and the album is a bit of a bloated mess. Also, the more I catch snippets of lyrics, I can't help but feel that Win Butler is being a bit too hard on the 'burbs. That being said, the album has me seriously thinking about seriousness and the importance of humor in pop music.

Joshua: That's a really interesting take. Can you elaborate on the lack of humor in this album?

James: More and more I find myself comparing the Arcade Fire to Bruce Springsteen due to the sense of urgency Butler tries to tap into with his delivery. What the Arcade Fire seem to be missing, however, is that such urgency and seriousness is only a part of Springsteen's persona. Even the Boss's darker albums, Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska are shot through with moments of humor. The Arcade Fire don't do that and the results are growing increasingly dour and preachy--even with the new album's more personal songwriting approach (less war and God, more old friends and sad memories), the album's single-minded anger is eating the life from the songs.

Joshua: That makes sense. On The Suburbs, Arcade Fire certainly seem to take themselves seriously, and the concept of this particular concept album does seem to come across as rather single-minded at times. Ok, suburbs are boring, sprawl is bad. This isn't anything groundbreaking. And there are plenty of opportunities for humor here, but they do seem to let those moments pass.

I think this brings up an interesting shift I've noticed in indie music. One of the problems with alternative music of the 90s was that so many bands took themselves so seriously, likely as a reaction against the playfulness of 80s music. Eddie Vedder thought he could save the world, and Chris Cornell never once laughed at himself. But now we're seeing a lot of bands that seem to be perfectly comfortable having a laugh. Look at Sleigh Bells, who are my favorite new band of the year. Treats is an amazing album, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they don't take themselves quite so seriously, even though they have that big, heavy sound. Ariel Pink is another good example, as is Surfer Blood. While these bands aren't going for the "ha ha" idea of humor, there is a playfulness that runs through those records. In this sense, Arcade Fire seem to have more in common with the alternative rock bands of the 90s. Has Arcade Fire missed the opportunity for humor entirely? Or do you think they would lose something if they were to take themselves less seriously?

James: That question is where this conversation can get messy. The problem I run into at this point is that for me to say, "no, the band wouldn't lose anything," would assume a sort of arbitrary necessity of playfulness or humor in music, and that isn't the case. Historically speaking, Radiohead, Joy Division, Pink Floyd, Jeff Buckley, to some extent The Cure--were/are all deathly serious, and have secure spots in music history. To a point, the Arcade Fire would lose a lot were they to take themselves less seriously because their legacy, thus far, is built on sincerity and seriousness. That being said, the seriousness is beginning to fail on experiential grounds. Part of living is failing, accepting our failures, accepting the failures of others and soldiering on. The Arcade Fire certainly are not strangers to soldiering on, but on an experience level, isn't one of our most profound ways of coping with failure to laugh about it? To laugh at ourselves and each other and know that what comes next will be better or, if not, we'll at least be better prepared to deal with it? In essence, by continuing to maintain the seriousness of the Arcade Fire throughout The Suburbs, the band is failing to recognize an essential component of lived experience. As a result, the band begins to appear as more of a construct of the sincere, bleeding heart artist as opposed to a living, breathing creative entity attempting to explore real human experiences. The question then, is how does Radiohead get away with their somber image? I'd argue that it is because Radiohead is a band about a central idea--alienation. The Arcade Fire's central idea hinges on sincerity, but they're limiting their sincerity by refusing to acknowledge anything but their serious concerns. The Arcade Fire are so intent on exposing the ills of the world and creating some sort of ideal notion of beauty in their music that they forget that joy is an absolutely crucial component of their paradigm. Of course, the album also falters a bit because some of the songs just aren't very good. This forces me to wonder, then, were The Suburbs as passionate as Funeral or parts of Neon Bible, could the heavy handed navel gazing have worked?

Joshua: I think that, because of the subject matter, had The Suburbs had as much passion as Funeral, it would have come off as absurd, at least in part. You can only get so passionate about your feelings on suburban life without sounding ridiculous. The very concept of suburbia is its restraint, its economy. So, in a large way, the form of this album does match its content.

Which brings me to one of my first thoughts about this album: In order to truly appreciate The Suburbs, I think we need to accept that this isn't an Arcade Fire album. That sounds ridiculous, because of course this is an Arcade Fire album. Their name is right there on the cover, no matter which of the eight variations on the cover you get. But this isn't the same band that put out Funeral. It's not even the same band that put out Neon Bible, and that was a very different Arcade Fire than the one we met on Funeral. The principle players were all there, but it's hard to listen to these albums and see it as the same band. They've evolved. Their sound has changed from one album to the next, much like Radiohead has done with each album, though perhaps to a lesser extent. Perhaps the better comparison would be someone like the Cure. Boys Don't Cry, Pornography, Japanese Whispers, Head on the Door, Disintegration, Wild Mood Swings, all of those albums sound different -- some so different you wonder what Robert Smith was thinking -- but there's still something that makes them easily identifiable as the Cure. Do you think Arcade Fire has a similar something that allows us to see each evolution as the same band? And in what ways do you think, through evolving, their sound has changed for good and bad?

James: The only real thread running through each of the Arcade Fire's albums is one we have discussed at length already--their attitude. Even as the subject matter shifts, the band is still utterly serious about every facet of their image, writing, and performance. Even a potential palette cleanser like "Month of May," from The Suburbs, comes off as a bit of a chore. I'd also slightly disagree with the assertion that were The Suburbs to sound like Funeral, that the album would be absurd. I'd argue that, in a lot of ways, Funeral was already about suburbia, but without any overt soap-boxing. That album was about growing up stifled by social constructs and loss, and the ways that young people fight to forge relationships and identities in the soulless suburbs. While some of those songs directly address neighborhood and the family structure, there is no sense that the suburbs are being judged, but are treated more as a launching point of ecstatic young lives. To that extent, Funeral is about the same spaces as The Suburbs and does a much better job covering that ground.

As for the evolution of the Arcade Fire's sound, I do like some of the melodic restraint running through parts of The Suburbs. I appreciate that not every major song on the album wants to be an anthem. "Suburban War," is a good example of this, and one of my favorite songs on the album. The song's lyrics tell a story about a character grown detached from the place where he used to live, and the people who populated that space. Lyrically, the song draws on some succinct, but specific detail (hair length, for example which, now that I think of it, recalls "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)") to tell this story. Musically, the song keeps itself in check--the performance is one of the album's more exciting, but it never explodes into a full on Arcade Fire anthem. Previous attempts at this approach (the song "Neon Bible," for instance) have come off a bit dull, but here the restrained emotion provides the song with a key tension that propels it to its big (but not anthemic) conclusion. Similarly, "City With No Children," while featuring a huge melodic hook (probably the album's strongest), also manages to exercise restraint and might be the tightest, most simple pop song of the band's career. The band's ability to make big songs like these without a larger-than-life sound or in-your-face, raise-your-lighters and wave-your-flags song structures is a nice change. That being said, some of the new album's lack of energy, and some of the songs' lack of development feel a bit under developed. In a way, this almost feels as if the band was overcompensating for their previous too-muchness. What are your thoughts on the band's evolution on The Suburbs?

Joshua: The first time I heard "The Suburbs," the first track on this album, I thought I had downloaded one of the fake versions that were floating around that day. The music sounded nothing like Arcade Fire. But when Win Butler's distinct voice came over, I realized it was just a very different product than I had expected. On that first listen, I wasn't much for this new sound, with its restraint and polish. With each subsequent listen, I've come to appreciate it more as an album. But still, I can't quite seem to grasp it or evaluate it. I can't tell how it fits in the band's canon. It seems like one of those albums that will take some time to develop for me.

One aspect that I do like about it is that Regine Chassagne seems to be playing a larger role in the band, or at least contributing more vocal leads to this album. In past albums, she seemed to occupy the George Harrison role, contributing one or two songs as variation, but mainly playing a backing role. But here, her songs seem an integral part of the album rather than variations from Butler's songs. And I think her vocals, more than any other aspect of the band's sound, benefit from the more slick production.

James: That's an excellent point on Regine's contribution this time out. While I don't always like the production on her songs (the Blondie-electro-pop sound of "Sprawl II" is a bit tired), I do feel like she brings a fresh energy to the album with each appearance.

All in all, I'm a bit perplexed by this album, but I think, ultimately, The Suburbs is going to end up being an okay album, with some great moments that are diluted by indifference and some outright bad decisions. Songs like "Rococo," "Sprawl (Flatland)," and "We Used to Wait," are a bit embarrassing in how broadly they fail, while others like "Empty Room," "Ready to Start," and "Deep Blue," are so innocuous that, even after a dozen listens through the album, I can never quite remember what they sound like. That being said, "The Suburbs," is nice, as are "Modern Man," "City With No Children," "Suburban War," and the two part "Half Light" suite. Ultimately, though, The Suburbs isn't nearly as major or important as The Arcade Fire wanted it to be, not only because the themes and ideas behind it don't work, but because not enough of the songs click--or rather, in this case, maybe because too many of them don't click. A part of me wonders how this album would sound with five fewer songs--if the bad and boring songs were cut, would this album better serve its themes? Would those big, brooding ideas be easier to swallow if there weren't so many boring moments littering the album's landscape like so many strip malls and SUV's?

Joshua: I agree with your assessment of many of these songs. I seldom ever skip tracks when listening to an album, but "Rococo" tempts me to hit "next" every time it comes up. And you nailed my favorite tracks -- "Modern Man," "City With No Children," "Suburban War," and both parts of "Half Light" are the songs that have resonated most so far.

Ultimately, I think this is a nice record. It's a good summertime album, and good driving music, even if it lacks that anthemic fist-pumping. But for an Arcade Fire album, I'm still left wanting something more. I don't think they'll ever recapture the brilliance that was Funeral; as long as I continue to hope they will, I'll continue to be disappointed and miss what's good about albums like this one. So it's best to take the album on its own merits. While its thematic material will likely turn some people off, the musical aspect of the songs and the production feel a lot safer and more direct than they have before, so I can see this being a more successful album than their past efforts. It certainly has the hype built up. I see this making a lot of year-end lists, especially from mainstream pubs trying to increase their street cred by choosing "hip" bands. But from where I stand right now, The Suburbs doesn't measure up with the best of what's been released this year. A good album, but not a great one.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's "Islands in the Stream"

2010-07-29T15:22:00.000-05:00

Solipsism is a word used by eighteen year-old teenage males to make themselves appear to be more intelligent than they really are. It is a concept wherein one believes that only the self exists, or that knowledge outside of one's self cannot be proved. As a result, when the term solipsist is used as an epithet for an individual, it is usually referring to what the Webster's* Revised New Post-International Dictionary describes as "a totally self-absorbed fucking asshole." Fortunately, for most of humanity, solipsism is not a philosophy with much popular traction, thanks in large part to the British poet John Donne, who reminds us, in "Meditation XVII," from his text Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), that "No man is an iland, intire of it selfe." This without question proves that there is existence beyond the self. In fact, Donne elaborates, "Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." See? I told you so. However, despite Donne's convincing and well-phrased argument, there will always be naysayers. Two such doubters are Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, who communicate their point loudly and clearly on their legendary hit "Islands in the Stream," which was written by The Bee Gees.

Both Rogers and Parton had amassed a stellar backlog of hits by the time they decided to meet up in 1983. Rogers scored hits with "The Gambler" and "The Coward of the Country," while Parton had massive juggernauts with "Jolene," "I Will Always Love You," and "9 to 5." On this single, the lusty duo manage to brilliantly defy both the solipsists and John Donne's "no man is an island" notion of (human) being by asserting that THE BOTH OF THEM are islands, and that "everything is nothing" (actual lyric from the song) outside of them. Though Rogers and Parton had cut their teeth recording Country music, they jump head-first into the pop mainstream with "Islands in the Stream," thanks to Barry Gibb's knob-twiddlin'. Plunky keyboards and silky Stax-Volt horns bolster this exquisite tale of true love. In the process, the song redefines the art of lyricism as we will forever know it.

In the song, Kenny Rogers initially comes across as a stalker who feels "soft inside" after having looked hard "with a fine-tooth comb" for, presumably, a blond, busty, Southern belle. In Dolly Parton he finds this very woman, who manages to complete him. It soon blossoms into love ever-flowing. They confirm their unlikely union, singing, "We got somethin' goin' on." They quickly become sexually involved, as they "ride it together ... uh huh / makin' love with each other ... uh huh." Kinky! During the chorus, the illicit partners sing, "Islands in the stream / That is what we are / No one in between / How can we be wrong?" This chorus is INSANE. First off, an island cannot fit itself in a stream. It is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Second, they don't come across as selfish, but rather couplish. This is a word I've invented specifically to describe their mindset. And, besides, I have a Ph.D. in English, which gives me the license to just make up words. It's written in the fine print on the degree, in Latin. And here's another one: yuthresh--a verb meaning "to remove ones hands quickly from a blazing hot steering wheel on a sunny Summer day." And here's the word in a sentence: By pulling a yuthresh, the driver avoided suffering traumatic third-degree burns. But I digress. Nothing exists for Kenny Rogers or Dolly Parton outside of themselves, save for their steamy love. Their love is so large that, later in the chorus, they sing of traveling "to another world" that can hopefully contain it. Let us keep in mind that they sing this nearly thirty years before the release of James Cameron's 3D sci-fi epic Avatar (2009).

For better or worse, "Islands in the Stream" elevates solipsism to romance and contradicts John Donne by claiming that, indeed, man and woman can be islands, just so long as they are in streams. Do you ever notice new couples who are blissfully in love with each other, unaware of the world outside of their sensual glances? Of course you do. They're all over the place. And it's all because of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's masterpiece that this happens.

*-The Webster here does not refer to Noah Webster**, the man whose dictionaries have made the world easier to define (drumroll please). It refers to an imaginary, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic lexicographer named Kelly Webster who I just made up out of thin air to avoid possible litigation.

**-These wonderful dictionaries would make a wonderful addition to your bookshelf.

Book Review: 33 1/3 #68 The Flaming Lips - Zaireeka

2010-07-27T19:46:00.001-05:00

As I begin this review of Mark Richardson's 33 1/3 book on Zaireeka, I feel like I should be up front about a few circumstances and biases that make me particularly susceptible to coming off as a fanboy:

1. I really love The Flaming Lips, and have for quite some time.

2. My wife and I moved to Oklahoma about 2 years ago, heightening my previous enjoyment of The Flaming Lips and their music.

3. Mark Richardson has been my favorite Pitchfork writer ever since his essay discussing LCD Soundsystem's and John Cale's versions of "All My Friends." Since that time, he's one of only a couple of writers across the internet whose music writing I actively seek out.

With that out of the way, then, Richardson's contextual overview and analysis of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka is one of the better entries in the 33 1/3 series. The reasons for the book's success are simple--Richardson sets out to teach readers about Zaireeka, and his information is shared with an easy prose style. In providing a survey of Zaireeka's creation and reception, Richardson begins with a brief history of The Flaming Lips, up to the point where they began experimenting with sound through the Parking Lot Experiments. Through this context, Richardson deftly weaves the band's personal histories with the development of The Flaming Lips as a musical entity and idea as they hit their stride over a decade into their career. At the same time, Richardson does a fantastic job of exploring the significance of Zaireeka as a musical text, and a work of art. In particular, Richardson's discussion the album's explicit challenge to the ever increasing importance of portability and convenience in music are particularly enlightening, and help position the album, not just in the context of the Lips's career, but in the history of recorded music.

The book loses a bit of momentum in its last quarter, as Richardson attempts to address the album from every uncovered angle in a brief span of time, but thankfully, through the use of personal narrative--a story of his own relationship with the music of The Flaming Lips, 90's culture, and Zaireeka--ends on a compelling note.

On a side note, I've noticed that the 33 1/3 books written on 90's albums tend to be feature some of the series' strongest writing. The books for Bee Thousand, 69 Love Songs, If You're Feeling Sinister, and Zaireeka are all outstanding. Part of me wonders if this is because the authors are writing more out of their own era and experiences, or if its simply a case of fresh ideas growing out of albums that haven't been over-talked by decades of rock criticism.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Jim Lowe's "The Green Door"

2010-07-22T10:58:00.000-05:00

Prior to the late 1990s, when mainstream music and television was much less permissive regarding sexuality, very few radio-friendly hits actively made one think of pornography directly. Songs like Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby" (1975)--rife with its litany of Summer's orgasmic coos--the Andrew Marvell-like desperation of George Michael's "I Want Your Sex" (1987)--and Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life" (1977)--whose lyrical conceit is, of course, loaded with descriptions of borderline-nauseating hardcore kink (and, surprisingly, an ecumenical message of hope for our salvation)--were capable of establishing such a connection. But one song, one much older than the aforementioned hits, actually inspired the title of one of the most notorious pornographic films of the 1970s. Of course, I'm speaking of Jim Lowe's enigmatic 1956 classic "The Green Door," the song that served as inspiration for Marilyn Chambers vehicle Behind the Green Door (in 1972). The Mitchell Brothers, the notorious pornographic filmmakers, thought they had solved the mystery by intellectually exploring the possibility that a whole bunch of hardcore sex was going on behind that door. But as I will soon explain, this is but one of an infinite amount of things that could be going on behind it. What's so especially interesting about Jim Lowe's unlikely hit is that it could just as easily have been the inspiration for a children's film, a Biblical epic, or an undercover cop drama. The answer to the question "What's behind the green door?" is entirely dependent upon the whims of each of the song's listeners. The answer is, therefore, what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss refers to as a "floating signifier."

The world of art has been blessed with many powerful examples of the floating signifier. Examples include the smile on Mona Lisa's face in Leonardo DaVinci's famous portrait (~1506), Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel of the same name (1850), the White Whale in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), the monolith in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or the "Baby" referred to in Justin Bieber's important hit from earlier this year. Into each of these exemplary pieces, a receptive community can project their fears or desires. Yet each of these floating signifiers does contain a certain set of constraints. While generally perceived to mean "Adultery," the "A" on Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter could mean "Angel" or "Awesome." It could not, however, mean "Armadillo" or "Z" (unless the letter had an asterisk attached explaining "A=Z"), because neither of those really meet the conditions of the text. The White Whale or the monolith, similarly, cannot be said to represent concrete objects, like "a butterknife" or "Old Yeller" (unless the monolith was ACTUALLY made out of concrete, I suppose).

What's so exceptional about Jim Lowe's "The Green Door" is that, despite its apparent setting, it is a floating signifier that can only embody the listener's desires. It can be assumed that "The Green Door" opens to a club, because, behind it, there's a "smoky cloud," and "old piano," lots of "laughs," a fear of outsiders ("[thin] hospitality"), and a judgmental "eyeball peepin'" through a peephole requiring a "password." But, really, anything could be behind it, literally. And that is the supreme achievement of the song. There could be gambling going on behind the green door. Or Johann Sebastian Bach composing a sonata for violin. Or an orgy. Or the Oompa Loompas performing a ritualistic sacrifice (if that's what you're into!). Or Jesus hosting an indoor beach party with the Twelve Apostles and the Founding Fathers as guests. Or greedy carpenters building more green doors. Really, anything could be happening there. Jim Lowe's narrator is not fearful of what is behind the door. Rather, he's disappointed at the exclusivity of the gaze that denies him access to what's behind it. For these reasons, and so many more, 1956 should not be remembered solely as the year Elvis Presley broke through to the mainstream with his "Heartbreak Hotel": it should be remembered as the year we all began to wonder what was happening behind the green door.

What do you think is going on behind it?

Here's a link to the song:

"From the Archives": City Center - City Center

2010-07-20T01:05:00.000-05:00

So, the website I used to write for shut down and stopped paying their bills, meaning that hundreds of my old reviews are no longer accessible on the internet. In the meantime, I need a place to make a few old reviews available for a bit, so I thought I'd post them here.

This review was first published at www.30music.com in 2009.

Artist: City Center
Title: City Center
Label: Type
Format: CD/LP
Year: 2009

Let’s get business out of the way up front—City Center is the most recent project with Fred Thomas’s name attached to it. To some this might mean a lot, to others not so much. As with any new project or new album from an established artist, there are going to be similarities and differences with said artist’s previous works. In the case of City Center—the band being entirely composed of Thomas and long time collaborator Ryan Howard (not the behemoth first baseman)—it’s a safe bet to say that the immediate vintage pop/rock sound of Saturday Looks Good to Me, and the pop-folk of Thomas’s solo albums aren’t as immediate as some listeners might be used to. That being said, City Center's self-titled debut LP draws on Thomas’s propensity for strong melodies and engaging, lo-fi atmosphere to create a series of lush soundscapes with strong, pop hooks.

To a point, City Center revolves around the tension created between the two poles of melody and atmosphere. This tension is evident from the album’s opening track, “Killer Whale," through its opening juxtaposition of white noise with Thomas’s plaintive mumbling of a simple, but lovely melody. When, a verse deep into the song, a rich layer of acoustic guitar is dropped on top of the mix, the vocal melody—still a bit hesitant—comes to the fore. Once established, instead of riding out the strength of the melodic guitar and vocal combo, City Center allow the song’s melodic guts to drift just beyond accessibility, making traditional pop-melody the objet a to the fetish object of gauzy production. The result is both inviting and off-putting, but ultimately successful as the tension within the song’s space allows us to enter into the composition more fully, to lose ourselves inside its under-defined, yet meticulously designed boarders. While “Killer Whale” might almost feel like a toss-off table-setter, by establishing the album's primary sonic textures the song works as a thesis statement, of sorts, for an album that is equally obtuse and rewarding. Even on more immediately accessible songs, like the gorgeous and dreamy “Open/House” or the trippy, loop-driven “Bleed Blood,” melody never asserts itself as fully as we expect, or immediately want—it hesitates just beyond our normal expectations as the songs’ layers of sound simultaneously push us away from the melody, while pulling us inside the structure as a whole.

Of course, though “Killer Whale” is an excellent example for contextualizing the album as a whole, the album’s most stunning moment comes in the form of the almost nine minute “Cloud Center.” If “Killer Whale” is a preview of what’s to come, “Cloud Center” is the epic centerpiece, not quite the album's climax—that would be the one-two punch of the wild and textured “Summer School” and “Young Diamond,”—but the album’s heart. This is a bit problematic for vinyl enthusiasts as, due to side limitations, “Cloud Center” has been replaced on vinyl with “Teen” and “Gold Girls.” While both of these tracks fit the album well, and are both excellent in their own right, they don’t quite burn with the quiet, ambient intensity of "Cloud Center."

By the time City Center arrives at its conclusion, the stunningly stripped-down, mostly acoustic “Unfinished Hex,” listeners might very well find themselves overwhelmed. This album is full of ideas, and the choice to end the album with its closest thing to a straight-up folk-pop song will only make the experience that much more unsettling. By the time “Unfinished Hex” shows up, listeners are trained to enter into the songs, to explore their architecture. But here, at album’s end, is a song that almost sounds familiar. Of course, the closer we listen, the more we hear the imperfections and idiosyncrasies that provide the through-thread that keeps "Unfinished Hex" from floating away with the album's final moments, while at the same time allowing the song to resolve that tension between melody and atmosphere that continues through the album's full length. In the estimation of "Unfinished Hex," then, melody is the key to resolving those tensions, and while the album's arrival at the comfortable and accessible might feel a bit like a cop-out, the push-and-pull that brings us to that final moment are well worth the time and energy.

"From the Archives": TV on the Radio - Dear Science,

2010-07-20T01:01:00.000-05:00

So, the website I used to write for shut down and stopped paying their bills, meaning that hundreds of my old reviews are no longer accessible on the internet. In the meantime, I need a place to make a few old reviews available for a bit, so I thought I'd post them here.

This review was first published at www.30music.com in 2008.

Artist: TV on the Radio
Title: Dear Science,
Label: DGC/Interscope
Format: CD
Year: 2008

At first, TV on the Radio’s third LP, Dear Science, might seem a little lightweight. It’s not, and it’s foolish to think so, but the mistake is at least an understandable one. After all, when compared to the messy, brooding storm of post-modern gloom that was TV on the Radio’s last album, the appropriately celebrated Return to Cookie Mountain, it’s easy to see how Dear Science, might come across a bit on the breezy side. In fact, it seems as if many of the dense layers of murky fuzz and explosive rhythms have been replaced by an odd combination of funk based pop songs, and cavernous ballads with gorgeous production. That’s not to say that TV on the Radio has completely reinvented themselves—the songs on Dear Science, still mix stormy atmosphere with occasional glimpses of unfettered fun, and unhinged euphoria—only that the songs are more streamlined with more emphasis on melody and rhythm, while the atmosphere is scaled back. To speak of the change in metaphor, if Return to Cookie Mountain was a short story made into a novella with pages of atmospheric description, then Dear Science, is the refined, and concise short-form follow-up, the story is just as big but the final scene ends within 6,000 words of the first sentence.

With that metaphor in mind, maybe the biggest strength on Dear Science, can be found in its production. David Sitek has done a fantastic job in crafting every moment, of every song on the album. Whether it be in the deft touch brought to the Michael Jackson and Prince moves of “Golden Age,” or the restrained quiet of “Family Tree,” Sitek’s production gives each song a memorable identity while maintaining the vague but necessary ‘cohesion’ that critics require of ‘albums,’ a feat that even the masterfully atmospheric Return to Cookie Mountain couldn’t quite manage. On Dear Science, even the tracks built out of funk rhythms sound markedly different—“Golden Age,” is light and ecstatic, while “Red Dress,” is more aggressive, packed with horns, heavy percussion and hints of afro-beat.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Dear Science, is TV on the Radio's overt preoccupation with sex. Of course, sex isn’t new to the band’s repertoire, but in the past it has been fleeting, an afterthought. Most of Dear Science, is dripping with sex, especially the funkier tracks. The melody of “Crying,” slides in and over the vocals, twines itself between the rhythmic guitar line, settling into the song’s bleak imagery—which, incidentally has nothing to do with sex. Elsewhere, while “Crying” laments “the riots/And the races on fire,” the song’s sexy tone makes it a little easier to buy into the promise of building the song’s metaphorical crashed car “back up from the floor.” With this in mind, “Lover’s Day,” is allowed to work as the album’s ecstatic, escapist coda. The song, built on such violent expressions of passionate love like “I want to break your back,” and the more overt, “I’m going to make you cum,” is the final leaving behind of the grim world of culture, in favor of a love that “will get so hot it will melt our faces off.”

With Dear Science, TV on the Radio have managed to build the most focused and impressive album of their career. The album thrives on an economy of sound and words, always building toward exuberant release. After following TV on the Radio through an album’s worth of songs about the overwhelming nature of politics and culture, it’s hard to deny the album’s ecstatic closing call of “I’m gonna take you home” over a light drum roll, and trilling woodwinds that gradually explode into a full horn section, and choral outro. In uncertain political and economic times, its easy to dismiss such a notion as escapist. There’s nothing wrong with that though. It’s only human to dig into personal connections to find relief from the outside world.

"From the Archives": Portishead - Third

2010-07-20T00:56:00.000-05:00

So, the website I used to write for shut down and stopped paying their bills, meaning that hundreds of my old reviews are no longer accessible on the internet. In the meantime, I need a place to make a few old reviews available for a bit, so I thought I'd post them here.

This review was first published at www.30music.com in 2008.

Artist: Portishead
Title: Third
Label: Mercury Records
Format: CD
Year: 2008

In college, several of my friends dated women who forged an unnatural bond between sex and Portishead’s second, and most adored, album Dummy. A couple of these friends almost became conditioned to expect sex anytime the album started playing. A female friend conditioned herself to climax on her own at a specific moment, in a specific song through simple association. Needless to say, it was very difficult and uncomfortable anytime someone tried to play the album in the car or at a party. The strange phenomenon that linked Dummy with sex wasn’t particularly surprising. The album pulsated with sexuality, highlighted by its dark, trippy beats and Beth Gibbons sultry vocals. The combination of slippery, gritty compositions with Gibbons’ sexy voice not only came to signify sex, it became a sort of aural sex (zing!) on its own.

With each passing year after its release, Dummy became less mysterious, and more knowable—the spontaneity and sensuality were replaced with a sense of dull expectation. We knew every nook and cranny of the album. The thrill was gone. The album was, and is a classic, but that raw immediacy of discovery and surprise has long vanished. Now, a decade later, Portishead have returned, bringing with them a new album, the delicate and surprising Third.

To extend the sexual metaphor of this review a bit further, Third continues the Portishead experience in much the same way that a tryst between reunited lovers might work at redefining the nature of a decade long absence—there is a sense of the familiar, but the edges are softer, less sexy than comfortable. The biggest surprises are cosmetic—a new scar, a few extra pounds—and maybe everything is a little bit sadder and needier. That’s not to say that Third is tired, sad or needy—rather, it’s songs are more rooted in traditional rock and electronic music than the band’s earlier efforts, and the end result is still sexy, though the overall tone is darker and more somber than might have been expected.

Opening the album at breakneck speeds (by Portishead standards, anyway) “Silence,” sets the album's tone. The song focuses itself on texture and atmosphere, forgoing the trippy beats of Portishead’s past in favor of organic percussion and a smooth pulse that perfectly compliments Gibbons’ gorgeously sung, high-school journal lyrics (ie., “…wounded and afraid/inside my head…”). “Nylon Smile,” provides a hint of the familiar trippiness to the album, looping through elongated phrases and Gibbons’ plaintively delivered, “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you.” One of the album’s more stunning and surprising moments is the minute-and-a-half folk tune, “Deep Water,” which finds Gibbons accompanied by a ukulele, and otherworld interjections from tape-looped back up singers.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Portishead still sound a good deal like sex. Now, however, Portishead’s sexy nature is more rooted in a carefully crafted, dark tone than in slick beats and sultry vocals. In a lot of ways, Third manages to perfectly balance the comeback chore of exploring new musical territory, while maintaining enough familiarity for the band to still ‘sound like’ Portishead. If nothing else, then, Portishead should be congratulated for being a positive exception to the rule of come backs. Let’s hope all the rumored reunions that we’ll hear about in the next decade are taking notes and that they can all be half as graceful as this one.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Sisqo's "Thong Song"

2010-07-14T11:01:00.000-05:00

Nothing is more important to a culture than its clothing. As Diogenes Teufelsdröckh clearly explains in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1834), "The whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES." A culture's fashion sensibility says much about how it expresses itself at a certain moment in time. Popular music has paid tribute to many types of clothing over the years, from Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes" (1956, further popularized by Elvis Presley that same year) and Brian Hyland's "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" (1960) to KC and the Sunshine Band's "Boogie Shoes" (1976) and even David Bowie's "Blue Jean" (1984). But none of them really capture the essence of a specific article of clothing, or its psycho-sexual effects on the populace at large, as precisely as Sisqo's brilliant 1999 masterpiece "Thong Song."

According to a long line of fashionistas, the "thong" originally got its start as a sandal more often referred to as a flip-flop. Though practical, nothing is less sexy than flip-flops, even if the sound they make when in use is not too dissimilar from the awkward sounds produced during sex. Thong underwear and bikinis first made their presence known on the beaches of Brazil, and became immensely popular in the United States in the 1990s. Even if thongs are often tacky and give the women (and some men) who wear them intense wedgies, there is no doubt that they are a turn-on for many men and women, providing what Howard Stern* refers to as "a remarkable aesthetic improvement over granny panties." Rapper Sisqo turns observations like these into Shakespearean poetry in his "Thong Song."

In his brief monologue at the beginning of the track, Sisqo properly notes that men do indeed like "the finer things in life." Traditionally, the short list of these items has included Lamborghini Countaches, Mink Jackets, 1000 Thread Count Sheets, Twenty Year Old Malted Scotch Whiskeys, and a mouthful of Skoal. Thanks to Sisqo, we can now correctly add Thongs to that list. It turns out, actually, that prior to "Thong Song," women were relatively unclear about this. Atop a silky-smooth dance beat aiding by subtly synthesized strings, Sisqo dives right into a narrative about a provocative woman who dances at "all the hip hop spots" like she's "da ish."

Though Sisqo's narrator seems outwardly judgmental about her partying ways, it turns out that he is quite impressed by her physical "assets," especially considering she has "dumps like a truck truck truck." These "dumps" motivate Sisqo's sly narrator to request to "see that thong." These verses show Sisqo's remarkable knack for wordplay and popular cultural allusions. Not only does he claim she's "Livin' la vida loca," a reference to the wildly influential Ricky Martin single that was popular earlier in the year, he also transforms a rather unsexy piece of earth-moving equipment, the dump truck, into a simile in which the word "truck" is repeated to establish rhythm and "dumps" into a homonym for "buttocks." Though the word "dump" had long been a synonym for "the human act of depositing a rather healthy amount of excrement," Sisqo transforms it here, using cunning word play, into a complimentary term for a woman's posterior. Well done, Sisqo! As a result, Sisqo established a phrase in the global pop cultural lexicon that was in no way awkward, goofy, or disturbing. For that alone, Sisqo should be app-plau-plau-plauded.

*-I am referring to Howard Stern, a patron of a strip club called The Milk Jug in Mannford, Oklahoma, not to the talk radio personality, who probably has never uttered the phrase "a remarkable aesthetic improvement."

Review: Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises

2010-07-13T08:12:00.000-05:00

Mark Kozelek’s never been one for brevity. Even the first Red House Painters release, 1992’s Down Colorful Hill, ran over 43 minutes spread across only six tracks. Kozelek has made a career of long songs and lengthy albums, both as a solo artist and as the frontman for Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon. The previous SKM record, 2008’s April, clocked in at a sprawling 73:44. Yet in all these epics, Kozelek somehow manages to avoid the trap of the bloated, meandering “long album.”

Admiral Fell Promises, the latest from Sun Kil Moon, is no different. Its ten tracks run just over an hour, with more than half of the songs clocking over six minutes.

But Admiral Fell Promises does differ from prior Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters releases in a few key ways. This is the first album by either band not to feature drummer Anthony Koutsos. In fact, this is the first release by either band to feature no musicians other than Kozelek. This is also the first entirely acoustic record, with the accompaniment provided solely by nylon string guitars.

While Kozelek’s signature voice, atmosphere, and lyrical themes carry over, the music has quite a different feel. Gone are all the crunchy or gritty numbers. Instead, there are many clean guitar flourishes that sound almost classical or even, at times, flamenco. Maybe it’s the nylon strings, or maybe he decided to explore the range of his abilities as a musician. Regardless, stripping the songs down to nothing but Kozelek’s voice and acoustic fingerpicking makes his lyrics all the more haunting.

Perhaps none of these songs is quite as haunting as “The Leaning Tree,” in which Kozelek is visited by an apparition who appears to him in a wintertime dream. He describes her as having the perfect poise of a “statuesque queen” with “ocean blue eyes that bear the depths of your loss.” Eventually, the apparition disappears, thrusting him into an isolation even dreams cannot relieve. He calls for her, saying, “I long for one more day with you in my life,” and begs her to forgive him “once and for all, for all of [his] lies.”

The haunting qualities of dreams and loneliness are deepened by the album’s imagery. For a record released in July, winter imagery tends to dominate, especially in tracks like “Half Moon Bay” and “Leaning Tree.” Throughout “The Leaning Tree,” Kozelek refers to “the cold icy stream,” snow coating the “pines in the Sierra wintertime,” and his “mountain home.” “Australian Winter” describes the season differently, but even here the deserts and oceans represent loneliness and dreams, which seem to be the dominant themes of the album.

Even when “Church of the Pines” announces spring with blossoming flowers, jumping squirrels, and humming birds, Kozelek sounds no less lonely. In fact, all of this life bursting forth from nature seems to deepen the longing for some sort of inner contentment. Here he describes being alone in a room, loosening the strings on a guitar, looking for a specific tone. “And if it don’t come,” he says, “then I’ll put it down.” Overall, this seems to be the concept of the album, the isolated musician attempting to find some escape from loneliness and dreams, but facing frustration and further isolation if he can’t get the notes right.

This record may not appeal to everyone, not even all fans of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon. Those looking for the crunch of “Make Like Paper,” the hook of “Carry Me Ohio,” or the grandeur of “Tonight the Sky” will be disappointed. But those to whom intricate guitar work appeals should find plenty to love, as this album, more than any before it, showcases Kozelek’s musicianship. Combining this level of craft with haunting, chilling lyrics of loneliness and dreams makes Admiral, perhaps, the magnum opus in a long career of long albums.

Admiral Fell Promises is available now on CD from Caldo Verde Records, with the vinyl set to be released in August. Those who order the album from Caldo Verde will receive a limited edition EP called “I’ll Be There,” which includes covers of Stereolab, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and The Jackson 5.

"We're Not Above Reviewing Leaks": Best Coast - Crazy For You

2010-07-12T18:34:00.000-05:00

As Best Coast, Bethany Cosentino--with the help of Bobb Bruno--has quickly established a reputation for crafting sunny, infectious lo-fi pop gems like last year's wonderfully playful "When I'm With You." On Best Coast's debut long player, the aptly titled Crazy For You Cosentino pushes the Best Coast conceit--vaguely retro sounding beach pop about relationships--as far as it can go without breaking, while serving up some of the shiniest, most polished songs of the group's still young career. The biggest concern one has with Best Coast is that Cosentino's songs sound a little bland on paper--the album is another hazy summery album in a long line of the same, featuring nothing but lyrics about relationships, mostly failed. To make matters worse, Cosentino isn't just singing about relationships gone wrong, she's singing about relationships in what seems like a very juvenile manner, and that's where listener patience might stretch to its limits. How many ways can a gal really say "I miss you," before it all starts to sound the same?

Despite all these potential missteps, after a handful of listens, something funny happens--overly familiar lines like "I miss you, so much" fade into the background as creepier, more desperate lines like, "I want to go back to/the first time, the first place" bubble up to the surface. The trite surface sentiment, "I wish he was my boyfriend," from album opener "Boyfriend," gives way to the co-dependent creep-fest "Crazy for You," in which Cosentino sings such uncomfortable gems as, "I can't do anything without you/I can't do anything with you," and "I want to hit you but then I kiss you/I want to kill you but then I'd miss you." What begins to emerge from beneath the album's sugary facade is that Cosentino's songs aren't just typical pop songs about heartache, there's something darker and more desperate at work.

The desperation in Cosentino's songs is most apparent through her preoccupation with nostalgia. More than one song on Crazy For You invokes the ever popular age of seventeen: on "Boyfriend," Cosentino sings, "I dropped out when I was seventeen"; on "Each & Everyday," it's "I wish we could go back to when I was seventeen/and I wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't have been so mean," both marking that year as a turning point to be revisited. In a way, Cosentino isn't doing anything that hordes of indie pop dudes haven't been doing for years--think The Promise Ring--but rather than obscuring the nostalgia in obtuse turns of phrase, she owns the nostalgia resulting in an uneasier, sadder, but also more entertaining end product. Indeed, not only are the songs written from remarkably honest points of view, but they are also full of quirky humor be it an offhanded reference to how a character "freaks when she gets high," or another's list of complaints ending with a non-sequitor: "I lost my job/I miss my mom/I wish my cat could talk." Cosentino's real achievement with the songwriting on Crazy For You, it turns out, is her ability to make the songs sound simpler and easier than they are. Inside every whispy complaint exists an ocean of neurosis--less "Breaking Up is Hard To Do," than "The One I Love," or "Every Breath You Take".

But of course, the lyrics don't even matter if this album doesn't sound good, and sound good it does. The summery production is spot on, and every song is built on killer melodies and strong hooks. The only thing really holding Crazy For You back, and it's just a little, is that, after a spell, the songs start to sound the same. One wonders what a couple of stripped down songs, or some more outside-the-box production techniques sprinkled throughout might have brought to this album. Maybe some more of those lo-fi textures and and hints of shit-gaze aesthetic from Best Coast's earlier releases might have given the album just the right balance to keep listeners grounded in each song. That being said, while Crazy For You is a bit too easy of an album in which to get lost, it also illustrates that the key to Best Coast's disaffected energy and good-times vibe has more to do with Cosentino's songwriting than some might have expected.

===
Best Coast' Crazy For You is available 7/27 on Mexican Summer. Also, you can hear a stream of the whole album here...

Book Review: 33 1/3 #47 A Tribe Called Quest - People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm

2010-07-08T15:20:00.000-05:00

One of the reasons I love the 33 1/3 series so much is because of the diverse points of view that the series embraces. Books in the series have ranged from cultural studies, to historiography, to journalistic reporting, to criticism, to fiction, to the extremely personal. With this in mind, perhaps one of the more consistent ways to judge each 33 1/3 book is to look at how fully it commits to its premise. That is to say, most of the series's strongest books are those which work one specific angle from start to finish. Or, alternately, work from such a broad stance that we're getting a survey of the conversations and themes surrounding an album. Those that either stay broad, or stick to a single approach are, almost unanimously, the strongest books in the series. When books don't commit, what we end up with is a hodge podge of thoughts and ideas: here's thirty pages of band history, forty pages on recording the album, a ten page song-by-song analysis, three pages on the cover art, fifteen pages on critical reception, ten pages on cultural criticism etc... etc... And while good ideas and interesting material can arise from such a layout, the end result often times ends up feeling like the author didn't have as much to say as he or she initially thought, and so is scrambling to fill pages with any old bit of information.

Now, after that lengthy introduction, I need to be direct in saying that Shawn Taylor's entry into the 33 1/3 series, covering A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm does not stick to a single approach, and is a thoroughly unfocused entry in the 33 1/3 series. That being said, despite these apparent flaws, Taylor's volume is one of the more enjoyable entries into the 33 1/3 series because the warmth of his prose and his obvious passion for ATCQ and their work burns on every single page.

Taylor's book opens in strong fashion, throwing readers into a deftly handled mixture of cultural studies and memoir. In the book's opening chapters, Taylor weaves together elements of his childhood and teen years--including his mother's abusive relationship, his Oscar Wao like nerddom, his run in with a bully, his punk phase, and his introduction to hip hop--with hip hop history lessons, cultural geography lessons, and urban theory. Through these open sections, Taylor's prose is full of sharp ideas and lyrical execution: "Aside from giving us a new version of what a city could be, [Tribe] also gave us a means of locomotion: the rhythm--the engine that ran the psychosomatic megapolis--was our train, bike, cab and bus ride through the body metroplex." The first third, or so, of Taylor's book is driven by the marriage of memoir with these types of insights, and makes for a wholly engaging read.

Then something peculiar happens--Taylor gives the book's lengthy middle section over to walking through his personal 3 step test that he developed for albums when he was a teen. The "Three Trials" as Taylor calls them, involve listening to an album three times, focusing on a different facet of his own reaction with each listen, laid out as such: 1. Body, 2. Mind, 3. Spirit and Emotion. What follows, then, first, Taylor's own teenage writings as he subjected People's Instinctive Travels... to these tests, followed by an updated turn through the trials. Surprisingly, the teen version of the trials is a surprising and fun read. It reminds us that, even though many of us choose to study and write about pop music deep into life, there is something urgent in pop music that speaks to the young in ways that we don't always remember. Taylor's teenage self responds to Tribe's music with an immediacy and rawness that was refreshing, if at times a bit cumbersome to read. What is even more surprising, then, is that the the book finally starts to falter when grown up Shawn Taylor steps in to record an updated version of the trials.

It is here, in Taylor's redux of the trials that his volume gets a bit tired and dull. His insights get bogged down in the banal, and he begins making brief references to remixes that seem unnecessary. By the end of grown up Taylor's second trial, we're exhausted, having run through the album five times already, making pit stops at, often times, the same songs, over, and over again. But then something a little bit magical happens with grown-up Taylor's third trial--he gets on a train and rides into San Francisco, meets up with some young street toughs and introduces them to Tribe's music. While the scene should, realistically, read like an overly sentimental cross between Dangerous Minds and Boyz n the Hood, Taylor's self-deprecating sense of humor, self-critique, and raw enthusiasm give the scene a freshness that the book needs as it draws to a close.

Oh, and then there's a wholly unnecessary interview with Bob Powers--an engineer who worked on People's...--which is surprisingly uninformative and feels utterly tacked on. It would have been a short book, but Taylor would have been better off to let this book end where it wanted to end, with Taylor on his way home after his encounter with the urban teens:

I look at the city as it speeds by below, slowly rocking and swaying to the music, thinking about the first time that I ever heard Tip tell the tales of the city, not any particular city, but the one that the listener finds him or herself in at any given moment. Those stories were a social fact of my life . . . those boys that I hung out with [had] their description for the fools in their neighborhood. Hell, any one of them could be that fool, and thinking about this is like mainlining melancholy. My story is their story, theirs is mine and we are all on a quest.
Nostalgia sucks.

Apparently, books about pop music are a lot like albums--if you know when to end them, they're better off. Still, even with a slow bit in the middle, and a tacked on ending, Taylor's People's Instinctive Travels... is, while not one of the strongest, a very enjoyable entry into the 33 1/3 series.

Over Analysis: Nostalgia for a "Younger Us"

2010-07-02T16:48:00.001-05:00

One of the problems facing a band whose first release receives quite a bit of hype is how to keep that buzz buzzing, how to create brand loyalty and keep customers returning for that ninety-first frappuccino. For too many bands, the answer is to release the second album as soon as possible to try to keep the hypemachine hyping. This leads to many obviously rushed follow-ups that kill the band’s or artist’s sales (see: Cross, Christopher; Daddy, Puff; Doctors, Spin) and street cred (see: Ferdinand, Franz; Strokes, the; Yeahs, Yeah Yeah).

This was the problem facing Japandroids, whose 2009 full-length debut, Post-Nothing, received universal acclaim and found a spot on many year-end lists. How to follow this success? Japandroids’ hectic tour schedule—seriously, the only time these guys take a break from the road is when one of them is hospitalized—kept them from the studio, which saved them, for the time being, from the half-assed, rush-job, sophomore slump.

Japandroids instead opted for the buy-ninety-frappuccinos-receive-one-free-valium-prescription punchcard method, keeping their fans’ loyalty whetted by nonstop touring and one-off releases. The first such release, No Singles, a compilation of the band’s first two self-released EPs, dropped in May 2010. The Vancouver duo followed this with a truly brilliant stroke of marketing—a series of (ahem) singles. Throughout 2010, Polyvinyl will release five Japandroids 7” singles, all limited edition, all on clear vinyl. Each single includes an original song written during the Post-Nothing sessions, and a b-side cover of bands like X and Big Black.

The second installment in this series, “Younger Us” b/w “Sex & Dying in High Society,” is set to drop on 16 July, though “Younger Us” has been making the rounds on the Internet and satellite radio for a few weeks. In terms of sound, “Younger Us” represents something of a departure from the successful formula of Post-Nothing. As one reviewer from another little music blog put it, “Younger Us” shows “this band has more to offer than the angular, fuzzed-out frenzy that we already know they do so well.”

That something more Japandroids has to offer is equal parts power pop, garage rock, and—dare I say it—emo. While the guitars and vocals are still heavily fuzzed-out, the song structure seems more straightforward than much of their previous releases, with a melody more clear and catchy, and replete with “whoa-oh” backing harmonies. As my fellow PoMo Jukeboxer James Brubaker so succinctly put it after hearing this song, “Japandroids are emo for grownups who came of age listening to emo.”

This description is all the more apt when we consider the song’s theme, which is feeling nostalgic for “the good ole days” when you’re still too young to feel true nostalgia. In a sense, we have a speaker looking forward in time to a period when he’ll be able to look back on these youthful exploits and reminisce about his younger self. In a similar case of prolepsis, the speaker of Robert Frost’s most famous—and most grossly misunderstood—poem says he “shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” So too will the speaker of “Younger Us,” though his sigh, unlike the ambiguous sigh of Frost’s speaker, will most certainly be one of wistful pining.

Structurally, the lyrics of “Younger Us” are divided into two sections. In the first, the speaker asks an unnamed comrade to “remember” the glory days had by their younger selves. “Remember when we had them all on the run,” Brian King sings, “and the night we saw the midnight sun.” These first two events show that giddy energy of youth, the feeling of being indestructible. In this same vein, the speaker then asks his compatriot to remember, “saying things like ‘we’ll sleep when we’re dead.’” In addition to reminiscing for the good times of non-stop partying, this line reveals the naivety that accompanies youthful abandon, which is reinforced when the speaker reminisces for “thinking this feeling was never going to end.” While the “younger us” could be naïve enough to think the good times would never end, the “older us” have realized that they must.

After this first verse repeats, we have the song’s chorus, or the closest thing to a traditional chorus. Here, the speaker asks his friend to “remember that night you were already in bed / said fuck it, got up to drink with me instead.” These lines are central to the song’s thematic meaning, representing the difference between youth and maturity. The speaker’s friend had gone to bed, presumably because of the next morning’s responsibilities, something like work or school for which he would need to wake early enough to disallow drinking the night away. But while maturity would consider the responsibilities and remain in bed, here the youthful friend says, “fuck it” and gets up to drink with the speaker. This devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility is what the speaker asks his friend to recall with him.

This trope of asking the comrade to reminisce makes up the song’s first section. In the second, the speaker now asks not for remembrance, but for those “good ole days” to be given back to him. The speaker asks to be given, in turn: “that naked new skin rush” that comes from youthful merrymaking; “that you & me to the grave trust,” or the ability to trust one’s friends implicitly; his “girls learning love, wild and free”; and “swimming through the streets” with his boys. In each of these lines, the speaker asks to recapture these great times. Each line is followed by the request, “give me younger us,” which suggests it is the compatriot, and not the speaker, who has matured beyond the abandon of the “younger us.”

This movement from requests to remember, to requests for return represents the movement from reminiscence to true nostalgia, which always contains the bittersweet longing to recapture or reenact one’s memories. We see this transition still clearer in the repetition of the chorus, when the speaker asks his comrade not to remember, but instead to give him “that night you were already in bed / said fuck it, got up to drink with me instead.” The speaker is asking his audience to become the person he once was.

In this nostalgia for the good times experienced by a “younger us,” here we have a young adult, likely in his late 20s or early 30s, longing for the freedom and exuberance of youth. If, as Jay-Z, in his infinite wisdom, once said, 30 is the new 20, then here the speaker really has nothing to be nostalgic for, still being “younger” enough to say “fuck it” and get up and drink. However, the difference is that he’s old enough now to realize that the good feeling will end eventually. Nothing, especially thrills, can last. This naïve ignorance is what the speaker misses here, causing this premature sense of nostalgia. While “Younger Us” may differ sonically from earlier Japandroids songs, this prolepsistic nostalgia for the whimsies of youth are something we’ve heard them do so well on other great tracks like “Young Hearts Spark Fire” and “Sovereignty,” which suggests Japandroids are the quintessential quarter-life-crisis band.

Polyvinyl will officially release "Younger Us" on 16 July. You can pre-order the 7" single here. (I received my copy in the mail yesterday, so there are definite advantages to pre-ordering.) The release is limited to 2500 copies, so you better hurry.

Songs that Changed the Landscape of Human Thought and Understanding: Michael Sembello's "Maniac"

2010-07-01T08:32:00.000-05:00

Dancing is our greatest form of cultural expression, without a doubt. For, as Neil Young duly notes, "When you dance," you can, indeed, "really love." This is most definitely a fact, because when I think of dancing, Neil Young is the first person that comes to mind. The popularity of musical theater, Dancing With the Stars, the Riverdance, and Michael Jackson's video for "Thriller" quantifiably prove my thesis. If this weren't proof enough, highly-trained biologists, several of whom have respectable college degrees, have noted that dancing is humanity's primary embodiment of the mating rituals of the animal kingdom, and that the way a person dances provides plenty of information to a prospective suitor about how they, ahem, mate. But is it possible to dance too hard? Can one dance so hard that they neglect their duties as a human and become a detriment to society? Well, yes, if we are to believe--and we should--Michael Sembello's legendary new wave dance epic "Maniac."

In 1983, when "Maniac" was released on the soundtrack album to the classic Adrian Lyne film Flashdance, most listeners had fairly preconceived notions about what a maniac was. Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, or that kid down the street who blew his summer savings playing the Tron video game at the nearby gas station for three straight days in a effort to get inside the game like they do in the movie ... these were maniacs. Michael Sembello changed all this with "Maniac." Previously a session guitar genius who made substantial contributions to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, Sembello summoned all of his dynamic powers into the brutal force of nature that is "Maniac," including pulsating synths, decisive beats, and a searing guitar solo that would make Eddie Van Halen jealous, to communicate the tale of the lyric's female protagonist.

"Maniac" tells the tale of a "Steel Town girl on a Saturday night looking for the fight of her life." Clearly she is a maniac, because most people are simply looking for a good time on a Saturday night, not some epic battle with, like, say, the immortal, malfunctioning Mecha monster fueled by raw plutonium and the madcap ideas of competitive spirit practiced by the rogue scientist Dr. Headwound. Part of her charm is that "in the real-time world, no one sees her there." Despite being invisible to mortals, they still sense a priori that "she's crazy." So what's the source of her mania? Doy, it's the Love of the Dance! She dances so hard, in fact, that she enters a "danger zone"--and long before Kenny Loggins traveled on the highway there--where "a dancer becomes the dance." In other words, she has BECOME the dance, LITERALLY. Thank about that for a moment. What is your passion in life? Let's say, hypothetically, that it's fishing. Now imagine that you have fished the fuck out of the watering hole you are at and then you actually became a fish. At that point, not only would you be like Vardaman's mother in William Faulkner's tragicomic novel As I Lay Dying (1930), but you'd also, most definitely, be a maniac. You would also suddenly find yourself completely mesmerized by spinnerbait.

Michael Sembello's hit fundamentally reshaped our societal notions of the maniac. Where once this was the domain of serial killers, genocidal autocrats, and flesh-craving cannibals, now a veritable dance-floor of talented bodies fit comfortably into the category of the maniac. So when we say that Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Lady Gaga, Erin Andrews, and Napoleon Dynamite are maniacs, we don't mean that they are going to make human body suits out of the flesh of our siblings. We mean that they're dancing like they never danced before ...

quite possibly in a moonlighting gig at a strip club.

Here's the saucy video clip to "Maniac":