I noticed that my last blog posts have been really long (re: boring and stupid), so from now on I want to try and start keeping my entries more concise (re: short and stupid).
So speaking of short and sweet, every once in a while I will post a song that I like that is under two minutes. There is something to be said about a song that gets in, makes its point, then gets out. Or as one of my friends would so eloquently put it, “jackhammer her and bone out.”
I mean no one wants to hear “November Rain” over and over again, right? Well except maybe Axl Rose, who I suspect needs to keep it on repeat 24/7 to keep his ego humming along lest he self destructs over the fact that he now looks like this:
NOT an artist rendering.
So first some admittedly shaky ground rules: No instrumentals or spoken word passages. No interludes of any sort. No skits. And no songs from bands who have more under two minute songs than over two minute songs. Although further down the line I may lift that rule in order to list every Ramones and Wire song recorded. Ok that’s all I guess.
Guided By Voices – Teenage FBI
I love Guided By Voices. If you’re talking about underdogs, I can’t think of a better case than these guys. A bunch of school teachers who jammed in Robert Pollard’s basement, drinking beers and recording themselves on shitty tapes, they somehow found out that people were into their rickety and amateur hour style rock music. Anyways, Robert Pollard is the perfect old dude who wants nothing more than to rock out and pretend to be The Who on stage, totally unaware that he himself has become his own rock and roll archetype. A lot of their stuff is really hit and miss because dude tended to release every single thing they ever recorded (there’s a CD of just Robert Pollard’s drunken ramblings onstage in between songs. No music), but when they’re in their stride, you’d be hard pressed to find any better, solid power-pop gems. You can listen to the studio version on the music player to the side or enjoy this live performance.
The end.
(EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that this post, the one on which I said I would start shortening my entries, is actually kinda lengthy. Oh well. It’s because I was explainin all the rules and shit behind the idea, son! And ironically, I am making it longer still by posting this edit.)
I have about six more days until I have to go back up to San Francisco. Notice the “have to” in that sentence. Not to say I don’t want to – San Francisco is a cool place. Every time I’m there and have to go down to LA, I’m always like “maaannn I don’t want to go to LA, I’d rather just stay here it’s so much better.” Then when I’m down here and time comes I need to go back up, the song turns into “maaannn I don’t want to go to San Francisco, I’d rather just stay here it’s so much better.”
Why? On paper, LA sucks. It’s dystopia incarnate. But it’s my dystopia. Give me a self centered, fucked up, superficial, ADD afflicted, entertainment obsessed, smog-riddled metropolis over….actually that sounds pretty bad. Oh well, I still like it. Because I am those things. Whenever anyone criticizes LA, I’ll be the first to join in the hater party, but inevitably that conversation turns to “yea you’re right, LA is such a horrible place….where are you from? Yea…(insert sarcasm)…I wish I lived there…”
I feel a lot of people think the movie Crash is like a documentary about what it’s like to live in Los Angeles, and that’s unfortunate because that movie might be the most heavy handed, improbable, and simplistic (and I don’t mean simple in a good way, I mean simple in a retarded way) portrayal of race relations I’ve seen. Granted, I probably have not seen more than three.
"I'M SO SUBTLE!!!!"
It confuses depth and multi-layered characters with making no sense and being retarded. NO ONE ACTS LIKE THAT. According to Crash, nobody in Los Angeles is capable of carrying a conversation with anyone without running into a thick wall of racial tension and yelling at each other. In the movie, ordering a cup of coffee or getting your mail are important, racially charged actions. Everyone who acts like a racist really isn’t and everyone who says they are not a racist really is. I’m supposed to think the corrupt and racist cop has been redeemed because he has a sick dad and pulled a black woman from a car? That’s his job, he was supposed to do that. Ludacris complains about how white people think he’s dangerous because he’s black before sticking his gun in a white woman’s face to steal her car? What? That makes NO SENSE. Oh nevermind, that’s called “character development.” Except there are no characters in that movie, only personified racial propaganda “crashing” into ridiculous stereotypes and yelling at each other, resulting in violence and wildly comical cultural misunderstandings.
Seriously, the “real racism moments” in that movie are so improbable and the revelatory, “meaningful” moments are dirt cheap. If the point of it was “racism is everywhere you guys” then why did it feel like the most obvious and in-your-face and over the top movie about race ever? I bet it feels good to smugly uncover problems by reinforcing them.
Anyways, didn’t mean to go on about that. Although that movie does make me want to listen to Los Angeles’ favorite sons, Rage Against The Machine.
Why LA is better than your city.
Yes, this celebrity obsessed and solipsistic town can also pull off contemptuous self-righteousness and fury. Versatile indeed.
Someone tell me, in the history of recorded sound, has there EVER been a better closing line than “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me?”
That was a rhetorical question.
That’s it I guess. Oh yea, happy 2010 everyone. Hopefully less Michael Jackson deaths this year.
I wanted to make a “Best albums of 2009″ post. Too lazy.
I wanted to make a “Best albums of the decade” post. Too lazy.
It’s still not too late to do a New Year’s Post. But I don’t have anything to say about the new year besides resolutions and who cares about that, right?
This year, I promise to stop murdering people and robbing banks.
Plus, too lazy. And there’s no way I’m going to stop doing that.
So I’ll just make this a Winter Break post! Which will also be the last winter break post because come next winter, there will be no more school to take a break from! Which is. Very. Exciting.
I’ve been back in Los Angeles now for about a week now. It’s been a little colder than I remember, but that was to be expected. Barring one horrible/awesome weekend in the worst/best/(but actually worst) city of Westwood, it’s been a pretty relaxing break. Since I don’t have cable up in San Francisco, I’ve just been watching so much TV I can feel my brain turning into mush and leaking out of my ears. And I love it. I need to consume as much pop culture as I can before I go back up to the bay and hibernate.
Currently, I’m sitting on the couch watching That Thing You Do! In fact, I’ve seen That Thing You Do! like four times so far during my break. VH1 Classic just can’t stop playing it. I don’t know what it is about that movie, but it is incredibly easy to watch. It’s innocuous nature goes a long way towards making it so enjoyable. It doesn’t try and its easygoing charm helps it warmly recall a time and place. It takes you back to a simpler time when a “meteoric rise” of a band could still be attributed to a good song and a grueling tour and press schedule – still decades away from when the internet blog hype cycle could breathlessly praise, chew up, and spit out a young band within a couple months. Nowadays a band doesn’t even get to put out more than an album before being dismissed as a failure and disappearing, never to be heard from or taken seriously again. I mean Wavves’ first show should have been a talent show or a battle of the bands or a dingy basement with ten people in the crowd, not a rock club in front of hundreds of adoring fans who heard of him through online tastemakers. I mean really, Nathan Williams’ meltdown at that rock festival in Spain is no surprise in retrospect. But I’m sure I’m looking at it with more than rose tinted glasses, as the movie never really makes any bones about the suffocating nature of the major record label structure, personified by a great Tom Hanks. In fact, if I think about it, I guess I prefer the way it is now, with the big record companies collapsing under the weight of stubbornly refusing to change their ways and not being able to force feed us what they think we should listen to anymore. Cultural gatekeepers my ass! WE ARE ARE OWN GATEKEEPERS OF CULTURE! Oversaturation is just an unfortunate side effect we have to deal with. But enough on that. I just wrote a fucking 25 page paper on that, don’t want to talk about it again. Let’s just enjoy the tune!
Fact: Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne was asked to write The Wonder’s one-hit wonder for the movie. And he delivered. I wonder if he ever feels sad that he used up the only good song he ever wrote for a semi-forgettable throwaway (but good) movie. I mean that song is probably the best song ever written for any movie. Good enough that I enjoy it just as much after watching this:
It may suck, but look at JT shred on that bass! Haha.
Anyways, besides watching an obscene amount of television, being on break also means I get to do something else I love: listening to music in my car. And when I’m driving around I usually listen to boisterous rock and roll, but recently, and maybe because it’s wintertime, I’ve been in a more contemplative mood. Portishead does the trick very nicely. Just dour Brits making dour music. Very moody, depressing, devoid of any sense of fun, and absolutely fantastic. Every song is a slow burn. And since I’m posting this on my laptop which doesn’t have iTunes on it, I can’t upload any mp3s. But here are some great YouTube videos of them.
Man they look miserable. Their album Third, released last year and their first since like 97 or something, is in my opinion one of the best of the decade, and every bit as good as Kid A. Hey look at that I kind of slipped at least something of a “best albums of the decade” post in there. Good enough.
Have a great break everyone! And if you don’t have break, whatever! Have a great day or some shit!
Last time I mention Portland Thanksgiving Break, I swear.
But while I was there, we went to Powell’s, this gigantic bookstore (think Amoeba Music but for books instead of CDs and movies), and it was there that I spied this book called The Dylan Dog Case Files.
Now I didn’t know anything about the Dylan Dog comics, I just recognized the art on the cover as Mike Mignola’s handiwork. Being a huge fan of Mike Mignola’s illustrations and writing (Hellboy ftw I have a Bureau of Paranormal Research & Defense sticker on one of my guitars), I assumed that Dylan Dog was a comic of his that I had somehow never heard of before and I impulsively bought it.
I have this on my guitar. I am a giant nerd.
Anyways, it turns out that Dylan Dog is not one of Mignola’s characters, but Mignola just did some cover illustrations for the comic because he’s such a fan. And it’s easy to see why, Dylan Dog is as witty and courageous as Hellboy, and is also an occult investigator. But I digress. The Dylan Dog Case Files is a collection of seven Dylan Dog comics, a popular Italian horror(ish) comic created by Tiziano Sclavi in the mid to late 1980s that started getting reissued in English by Dark Horse Comics, much to our benefit. I don’t know anything about Sclavi, but does it make me racist if I imagine him to be this Bela Lugosi looking dude who wrote comics?
Yes, yes it does.
No matter. The collection was 680 pages. I read it in a matter of hours. Seriously, it is awesome. Well, if you like comics that is. If you don’t already you probably won’t be that into it. But anyway, the main character, Dylan Dog, is a paranormal investigator who lives in London with his assistant Felix, a Groucho Marx caricature type guy. Right off the bat, you know that you’re reading a classic character. Dylan is a former Scotland Yard officer (is that the right term?) who left his respectable gig to start his “horror detective” agency for which he is ridiculed endlessly in the papers, is afraid of flying, is a recovering alcoholic, only wears dark jeans, red shirts and a black suitjacket (and like Doug, he has a closet filled with the same shit), plays the clarinet whenever he thinks, and drives an old Volkswagen Beetle with the plates “DYD 666.″
No context needed.
The stories are pretty old school horror yarns and should be familiar with any casual fan of that stuff, with Dylan fighting off zombies, paranormal murderers, and indestructible Bane-type villains amongst other things/dudes. And even though Mike Mignola didn’t illustrate them, the art is super awesome anyway and gory enough. But it’s not a total horror gorefest. Seeing as it is a comic book, there are some fun cheese elements that are harmless enough and keep things light, and Dylan’s playboy tendencies (he gets with a different woman in every issue. Those Europeans, ehh? Whaddyagonnado) is often highlighted to comedic effect. There’s also a surprising amount of variety in the collection. You’d think that being a horror comic series, it’d just be a collection of monster stories.
Which would be awesome in itself anyways.
But there’s a story in there about a guy who no one can see that really subverts the whole “invisible man” trope and makes it fresh and is surprisingly well-written, which was a lot of fun to read. There’s another one that features members of IRA as the protagonists and gets vaguely political/philosophical before taking a turn somewhere and diving into this Wizard of Oz on crack/fantastical and strange territory. Overall, Dylan Dog is action packed, funny, weird, and drawn very well. It seems every time I fall out of reading comic books, something like this comes into the picture and makes me want to grab as many comics as I can get my hands on again.
Couldn’t resist putting some Misfits on here for this entry. I could definitely hear this song (or really, any song by The Misfits) over the action parts of Dylan Dog, when he’s shooting zombies in the face or punching out someone or whatever.
More for the slower panels of the story, maybe when he’s walkin alone down a dark and rainy London street. Which he seems to do a lot of. That’s where all the prostitute killing takes place, after all. Alright that’s it. PEACE.
House road trip to Portland for Thanksgiving 09! Yes, it was awesome! What’s that? Oh no no no, contrary to popular belief, Maine is not home to the only Portland in the United States. In fact, there is actually another Portland in Oregon! How about that, little ol’ Oregon. Home of this guy.
Now I’m not really going to regale you with tales of the things we did (super cool things) or places we went (super cool places) or of the friends we made (super cool people) or show any (super cool) pictures because you should check out Jacob’s blog for all that good stuff. Although I will say there was some Four Loko involved. It did not end well for some (one) people (person).
No, this is a “Thanksgiving Portland 09 Road Trip Jams” post! The drive up to Portland from San Francisco was about 12 hours. That’s 12 hours of music. Naturally, some clear favorites emerged in the car. Since you’re basically sitting on your ass for long periods of time, the best ones are the ones that make you move. There were about 15-20 songs that we kept coming back to, but I will only post three. In no order of particular importance, just the first three that came to mind. And I will share them with your indifferent ass right now.
Weezer meets reverb heaven meets “whoa oh oh”s meets the Florida coast, and you can’t go wrong. If you’re not into the first three seconds, then don’t even try listening to the rest. Because you’re super lame.
I don’t really know anything about Neon Indian besides the fact that they’re from New York and that they have put to tape probably the best drum machine sound I’ve ever heard. It’s so simple but it just seems to penetrate the space in your head between your ears and punch its way down your spine. That snare, my God. Not to mention the brilliantly catchy synth lines that come in during the chorus and the breezy, laconic vocals. A future road trip must for sure.
Driving through Northern California and Oregon/Washington, the scenery will inevitably put you in a singer-songwriter mood. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pacific Northwest’s main export was English majors. Who’d want to study business infrastructure with all those damn trees everywhere? And though a lot of Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes and Bon Iver and the like were played in the car, no one can pull the lone-singer-with-just- a-guitar like Billy Bragg can. And unlike other singer-songwriters, he doesn’t come off as a quivering, vulnerable, feeble pussy. Besides, it’s fun listening to him sing “Oi am the milkman of yoomin koindness” during the chorus.
November 2009, for me, will always be the month associated with Four Loko.
Never heard of it, you say? Well. It’s an energy drink with 12% alcohol content that probably will be made illegal soon.
The devil's brew.
Now, alcoholic energy drinks are already a well-known contradictory concept. Halfway into the can (it was grape, by the way), my body was exhibiting the classic signs of drunkenness. I started moving slower, started slurring a little, and generally became more sluggish. I also have this weird thing where my head suddenly becomes incredibly heavy and my neck can’t keep it up anymore, but that’s for another time.
But while my body started coming down, my heart kept beating faster and faster until it felt like it was going to beat out of my chest. It was a very peculiar feeling. After entertaining the notion that this could not be good for me and that I should maybe stop drinking this shit for about five seconds, I chugged the rest of the can. Ah, fuck it, right? Besides, my friends were in town from Los Angeles and they all had a can each. Buddy system + solidarity is an unbeatable combination for those with low self-esteem.
I fold easily under peer pressure.
Now, I am not a violent person. I am in fact very calm and reasonable. But what follows is a list of things I did under the influence of Four Loko. All within about an hour time span between 2-3 in the morning. I think? The time is unaccounted for. Whatever.
A) Punched/kicked my friends so many times my knuckles were bruised. Maybe because my hit/miss and hit the wall behind them ratio was slightly off.
B) Got punched/kicked by my friends so many times my body ached like someone whose body aches a lot.
C) Get thrown down a flight of stairs.
D) Have another friend thrown on top of me while lying on the ground after being tossed down aforementioned stairs.
E) Be hit by a traffic cone in the back so hard it now has a welt on it.
F) Hit someone else in the back so hard with a traffic cone he was left a crumpled mess on the sidewalk for a good couple minutes.
G) Argue with a nocturnal construction worker about the pros and cons of infidelity using breakfast foods as an analogy.
Excerpt: “All I’m saying is, if you have eggs and toast for breakfast every day of your life, then at some point you’re going to want some hash browns!”
“Huh, it seems to me you’re speaking out of personal experience.”
“Young man, I’ve been eating hash browns twice a month for twelve years!”
I high-fived him after that. Still feel kinda weird about it. Drugs and prostitutes were also thrown into the conversation somewhere, though I don’t remember why/how/when/where.
The most guilt-ridden breakfast ever.
#G amount of things happened on Four Loko! That’s a lot of things. That’s, like, a ways into the alphabet already!
I also can see now that some things on that list are a direct result of the thing that happened right above it. Which means I could have made the list shorter. But then that would have undercut the whole point I was trying to make, wouldn’t it? So it’s staying the way it is.
Anyways, the point is, Four Loko is terrible. I can’t make up my mind to never drink it again or exclusively drink it from now on.
I check my hair. Still black, not graying or thinning.
I check my heart. Still beating, relatively strong.
I check my skin. Still taught over my face, no signs of wrinkles yet.
I check my joints. Still limber, no signs of arthritis or osteoperosis.
I check my teeth. Still there, not rotting, no need for dentures.
So what’s the deal? I am an urban, young, and relatively hip guy, right? So why, when I listen to some of this music, do I have the urge to wave a hickory cane around and yell at these kids to get off my lawn? I’m not old! The music I listen to should annoy old people!
I don’t, or shouldn’t, have to point out all the things that are hilarious/wrong with that video. The ridiculousness of ”Freaxx” has already been well documented. This is the scary thing, though: I used to think Brokencyde up there was just a curious anomaly, and that was comforting to me. We were able to isolate this one incident and study it, mock it, and be safe in the knowledge that it could not harm anyone else. But they are not alone. It broke free from the observation room and like some kind of HP Lovecraftian nightmare amoeba, this music is splitting up into new bands who are now independently horrible.
Brokencyde, who hail from “Albucrazy” New Mexico, have got mysoginistic scream-club bangers covered. But has anyone dared to delve into the unmanned depths of trance/techno screamo? No, you say. But yes, they have. Behold Attack Attack’s “Stick Stickly,” which is awful awful. But I didn’t need to tell you that did I? Brownie points if you can hold out for the incredible euro dancebeat that introduces itself a couple minutes in.
Would it help if I told you this was a religious song? Because it is. Can you say misguided?
One more. I’m so proud of you for holding on. If I’m drawing a venn diagram, and one of the circles is “The Postal Service” and the other circle is “Things I Wish Hadn’t Raped My Ears,” then in the middle where the twain shall meet lies Confide’s cover of “Such Great Heights.” Don’t let the first 40 seconds or so lull you into complacency. You’ll be weeping for the youth of America soon enough.
Ugh. Part of me wants to laugh. Part of me is angry that this exists. Part of me wants to learn how to play a guitar while scooting on the floor like a dog with worms (actually, Attack Attack is considered to be the genre of “crabcore” which alludes to the way the members move like the titular sea creature). But another part of me is desperately trying to rationalize this music – to give it some sort of socially redeeming value.
I tell myself that rock and roll used to be thought of as the instrument of Satan – that it could literally make the youth commit mindless acts of sex and violence. That hip hop and rap was thought of as nothing more than a passing fad, a novelty for talentless black kids in the ghetto. I remember that punk was initially thought of as tasteless and musically deficient. Maybe in 10 to 20 years, crabcore too will be the norm, and will share the familiar story of a much maligned genre that fought for acceptance and blossomed in the face of naysayers like me, who shook a fist at it.
“You damn kids and your rock music.”
I think the difference though is, while those aforementioned genres were born out of social unrest and economic struggle, this new unholy hybrid is being birthed by bored, privileged suburban kids with nothing to rebel against so their musical efforts come from a really superficial, contrived, creatively barren place. Yielding this shit.
Brokencyde create art as a means of escaping oppression from people who unfairly demand that music be listenable.
But maybe this music is just as much a product of the times as blues music was. Maybe the confused members of Brokencyde, Confide, and Attack Attack are just inadvertently crying out for better arts programs and better music education in schools….or at least better record collections.
But then again, maybe this is just a sign that the end is nigh and we’ve reached critical mass with the idiocy and unbelievable retardedness of our times. The downfall of Western Civilization. Again. I don’t want to seem like one of those idiots who claim “all the good music was back in the 60s and 70s, man” or “hip hop died in the 90s” or “punk is dead” because those are all untrue and the people who say that are boorish and arrogant at the same time. I’m just saying, we need standards here, people.
For now, I think we’re still safe. It’s a fringe movement. It’s not on the radio or on television (I hope) where it can reach us without our consent. But they are growing. I mean, both the Brokencyde and Confide videos have 4 out of 5 stars on Youtube. When this becomes mainstream, I’ll throw up my old person hands in defeat and return to my old person house and rock in my old person rocking chair and complain about how my old person back hurts. But I feel like I’m already there.
I haven’t updated in a while because frankly it gets in the way of my getting fucked up, dude, and it’s the last thing I want to do after a day of working for The Man. And by “The Man” I mean my father. And by “The Man” I don’t mean it in an insinuating sense but in the “you’re the man!” sense. Because my dad is the man.
Being at work with him and meeting his clients and whatever inevitably brings up the question “So you’re a senior, huh? What do you study?”
“I’m a media studies major and a journalism minor.”
“Oh, what are you doing to do with that?”
And then I stew in the realization that I picked the worst areas of study at the worst time.
It’s basically another riff on the “I don’t know what I’m going to do after college” quandary that all privileged (read: spoiled) kids share, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter or it doesn’t apply to me. The two industries I am interested or have a chance of working in, music and news, are the two industries that are collapsing under the weight of everyone deciding they don’t have to pay for them anymore.
Couple that with the recession, and I’m convinced I should go back to The Little Chihuahua
One of the (obvious) perks of writing for a music website is discovering new bands. I came across Darlings while browsing the new mp3s section at betterPropaganda.
Darlings are a band from New York who reminds us of the simple pleasures that can be had from just banging on shit really hard. Over sleepy pop melodies, shitty recording quality, and disheveled presentation, of course. But that’s part of its rickety charm.
If you want to read my song of the day write-up for “Teenage Girl,” and/or download the mp3 for the song, you can here.
