Thought Dump : Music Edition

First ever reading of Azerrad's "Our Band Could Be Your Life" has me revisiting a bunch of the bands he covered in the book. A few thoughts:

1. Read this book.

2. Acoustic Blowout version of "I Felt Like a Gringo" by Minutemen is the best shit ever. Also, Minutemen in general are the best shit ever.

3. "Signals, Calls, and Marches" by Mission of Burma is so perfect... maybe even better than Vs.

4. The Ed Stasium remix of Tim is as good as the critics say it is. Makes that great album even greater.

5. If I were to try to describe the type of music fan I am, I’d point to the (possibly apocryphal) story of Frank Black, in his efforts to form what would eventually become the Pixies, taking out a want ad in the classifieds for a “female bass player who is into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary.”
That ad is brilliant for the way it tracks as weird irony, but plays much better as weird sincerity. Upon reading that line, a (I assume) typical train of thought will take one to “how could somebody be into those two things, so seemingly different and sonically unrelated?” But my brain immediately goes to “how could anybody NOT be into those two groups?”

6. It's so weird that I spent my entire life never listening to "Flip Your Wig" by Hüsker Dü. How did I miss that album's existence?

7. Richard Hell is the best godfather of all of this. I love him. Obviously everybody knows how perfect Television is, but more people should dig into The Voidoids. Bob Quine was incredible.

LOfuckingL

Whoa

undo wrote:I was under the impression that Chicago was home to a uniquely big goth subculture.

Whatever Crobar was or still is, all the industrial music that Q101 would play deep into the night back in the 90s, etc

I routinely conflate "industrial" and "goth" in ways I probably shouldn't but I guess I'm trying to speak to something I feel like I was witness to for a brief moment and can always feel like people are trying to redefine in hindsight in ways that doesn't reflect the messier truths of the pre-Internet world. Or something.

It was fairly big in Chicago, mainly because of Wax Trax. But, with that said, I still feel that it was more of a trend which is why you don’t see as many people living the lifestyle. On the other hand, there are a lot of German and Latino Goths and that is likely because there is an element of the culture itself which leans toward the macabre. Just a thought, I have no data to back this statement up.

fwiw my 11-year-old niece calls everything we associate with goth "emo". I imagine this is My Chemical Romance's fault.

Little Neddy goes to war wrote:LOfuckingL

I bought this shirt like a dipshit and I'm gonna wear it to the Lauryn Hill show tonight.

That show was sick as a motherfucker. It didn’t go how I expected it to go… like with Fugees “opening” and maybe having Ms Hill join for like the last 2 songs or whatever. Instead, the headliner opened it up and rocked through the Miseducation album then Fugees joined on in and the busted out the hits and then some. She showed up characteristically late and I didn’t get home till a dumb ass hour, but they didn’t skimp on the set list. Rad ass show. Also, the chick next to me who bought my extra ticket that I put up for sale when Mrs Braden pulled out was fun. She lit up a spliff like two songs in and kept whipping her titties out. Said she was a poet/single mother looking to get nuts on the rare day off. I bought her a couple booze drinks and we vibed. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m tryna be an honorable man and shit, I’d have nailed her. Oh, also, I just saw the Darkness and it was bonkers ass radical. Made me think of that thing where Cobain talked about being envious of Freddie Mercury for how much the Queen singer clearly reveled in the act of performing for a crowd. The Darkness, and frontman Hawkins in particular, were so very much 100% in it. It was one of the best shows I’ve seen. So much good motherfucking ass energy.

undo wrote:

undo wrote:I went back to look for the Solid Little Rock James reviews of albums by The Band but I haven't found them yet

So no one ever wrote any reviews of this at all anywhere on the blog.



Yet I vividly recall a review where someone (Garrett?) said that the album was shit, just like the brown color on the cover. This review did a lot of work in assuring me that I never needed to give this album any of my time!

https://solidlittlerockjams.blogspot.com/2009/12/band-band-despite-recognizing-greatness.html?m=0

What if this was the path rap rock was supposed to take?

https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/10/1/21496345/radiohead-kid-a-20th-anniversary

Describing anything I enjoy as a "dorm room" obsession just triggers me, I instantly presume the worst about the author and their intentions.

undo wrote:

undo wrote:

undo wrote:I went back to look for the Solid Little Rock James reviews of albums by The Band but I haven't found them yet

So no one ever wrote any reviews of this at all anywhere on the blog.



Yet I vividly recall a review where someone (Garrett?) said that the album was shit, just like the brown color on the cover. This review did a lot of work in assuring me that I never needed to give this album any of my time!

https://solidlittlerockjams.blogspot.com/2009/12/band-band-despite-recognizing-greatness.html?m=0

Glad you were finally able to track that down.
That blog holds up. Solid fucking gold writing.

young paves wrote:I can't remember how any of the songs go, save for "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," "Jawbone," "Rag Mama Rag," "Up On Cripple Creek," and a few seconds of "Whispering Pines." Not all of those are even that great, though. This hookless crap is just a bunch of honky tonk pianos and dicks being slapped against butter churners. Makes John Wesley Harding sound like happy hardcore!!!

A+.  No notes.

Wild to think there are people that truly love The Band.

I don’t know if I’m advocating for some weird ass surveillance state back mirror shit here, but I wish there was some consolidated net worth list for musicians so that I could very quickly check whether an artist was super rich or whether they are somebody that I care about and want to support.

In this era of late stage capitalism failure I sorta see stealing as a moral imperative as long as it’s from trash corporations or rich ass folks. I also see paying musicians for their music as a moral imperative. But I felt super good about stealing albums from billionaires like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.

Ha, this is a really drunk post and my gut says I should just save it to drafts folder and forget that it exists but I’m gonna post it anyway cause I miss that freewheeling ass damn internet no fucks given no holds barred era when chrono would post a weird picture of a half naked chick in a cellophane Nazi tube top as a “happy birthday” card and it kept shit fresh, ya know?

Anyway, that mustache ass weirdo Donny Benét is charging more money than I feel like paying for his album, but if I had confidence that he wasn’t a multi millionaire I’d gladly pay double for the pre-order of his new LP and I’d throw in a t-shirt as well cause I like the cut of his jib and pretty much everything he’s doing (which is similar to what Ariel Pink was doing in as much as there’s a nice balancing act between irony and sincerity and that either of them could quickly lose my fandom by outing themselves as crazy rich or shitty human beings and those two things aren’t always a 100% ven diagram overlap but they correlate a bit).

Speaking of that “drafts” folder that I ignore basically as a rule holy crap! There are a lot of random ass posts in there and I forget at least 75% of them. An “I throw all my draft folder lists here” thread might be fun and alienating and weird. Maybe I’ll do that someday.

Guys tell the people you love that you love them as much as you can. I been a while since I told my dad I love him and that guy always pretends to be doing well but I’m pretty sure he isn’t and that scares the shit outta me!

If I could take an immortality pill that would keep me here forever I would do it in a heartbeat.

That’s the goal. Like… of all of living. Not even a second thought.

And yet I always feel like killing myself.

How can I reconcile this?

Human brains are complete assholes. That dork Vonnegut totally had it right with that Galapagos book. As I can recall the thesis was essentially that, fuck human brains them shits are the shits that made us miserable… and that drives the story to its inevitable conclusion which is basically that the “Darwinian” “survival of the fittest” case for human beings would, ideally, be for us to evolve in a way that shrunk the shit out of our brains so that we could rediscover the real joy in life which is to be warm often and to sometimes laugh at farts without even occasionally thinking about bombing Iran or raping a college sophomore.

Anyway, these sort of thoughts combined with the stupid human invention of makers mark brand bourbon are the reasons I will probably not be content with life anytime soon and will very likely drop out of old person college for dedicated, lifelong, real professional type failures. I was supposed to finish a chapter of my thesis tonight. Jokes on me, I didn’t!

Fuck y’all. I love you.

I was 14 when In Utero came out and I didn't really "get it" or I just didn't care or maybe I thought Nirvana was kind of scary or... man I will never live this down

Is any music still "hip" or has streaming just leveled that entire concept?

My experience of listening to music from 1998-2018 was one old genre after another getting a resurgence that would either be really popular (in an "indie" sense) or just really for 2-5 years before falling out of fashion. I can't remember the last time this happened at all!

Or maybe I just don't acknowledge it when it does because I don't take anything that's "new" seriously anymore. Every "new band" is "extremely online" and proud of it and that's their gimmick and I'm just like

First we'll pick Priscilla up and then we'll stop for Jane
And Mary Ellen needs a ride, we're goin' by her place
We're goin' to a party, our friends will all be there
I got the directions, it's across the river somewhere

We rang the top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
The middle won't work
Ring the one under

Priscilla's in the kitchen, she's mixing drinks
She's mixing one for me, I think
And one for Mary Ellen and one for Jane
Priscilla, she knows how to use a shaker
She doesn't get up as early as a baker, uh-uhn

There's a muchacha, teachin' me to mambo
There's my buddy Pete eyein' a bowl of Combos
Ramona and a man do a tango dip
Cheek to cheek, hip to hip, come on

The window's open, it's the heart of the summer
More people comin' lookin' for the number
Mary Ellen sees them she has a little stutter, she yells
The top floor, bottom buzzer

Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
The middle won't work
Ring the one under, come on, woo

It was later it was after two
We found a bottle of good Chartreuse
The lights were green and gold, we played Latin soul
By the time Priscilla put the Al Green on
The bottle was gone

On the top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
The middle won't work
Ring the one under, come on, woo

^Maybe the world of adults and life after school has a dangerous magic to it for everyone of a certain impressionable young age but something about this song hints at the shape of a world that seemed "out there" somewhere at some point in time and

and

Of course it wasn't real but what is?

undo wrote:

First we'll pick Priscilla up and then we'll stop for Jane
And Mary Ellen needs a ride, we're goin' by her place
We're goin' to a party, our friends will all be there
I got the directions, it's across the river somewhere

We rang the top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
The middle won't work
Ring the one under

Priscilla's in the kitchen, she's mixing drinks
She's mixing one for me, I think
And one for Mary Ellen and one for Jane
Priscilla, she knows how to use a shaker
She doesn't get up as early as a baker, uh-uhn

There's a muchacha, teachin' me to mambo
There's my buddy Pete eyein' a bowl of Combos
Ramona and a man do a tango dip
Cheek to cheek, hip to hip, come on

The window's open, it's the heart of the summer
More people comin' lookin' for the number
Mary Ellen sees them she has a little stutter, she yells
The top floor, bottom buzzer

Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
The middle won't work
Ring the one under, come on, woo

It was later it was after two
We found a bottle of good Chartreuse
The lights were green and gold, we played Latin soul
By the time Priscilla put the Al Green on
The bottle was gone

On the top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
Top floor, bottom buzzer
The middle won't work
Ring the one under, come on, woo

Damn.

I don't think I've ever heard a song by Morphine in my life, this one included, but I just listened to it and it stomps.

WTF Google

90% of the music I think about is from the 90s.

Had a slow day at work yesterday and listened to In Utero and Screamadelica. Then on the way home I listened to a podcast where the hosts talked about "Bullet With Bullterfly Wings" and "My Hero."

First song I heard this morning was "Intergalactic" and now I'm thinking about "Life Is A Highway," I know I shouldn't worry about this but I never thought I'd be following the life script as predictably as this

undo wrote:90% of the music I think about is from the 90s.

Had a slow day at work yesterday and listened to In Utero and Screamadelica. Then on the way home I listened to a podcast where the hosts talked about "Bullet With Bullterfly Wings" and "My Hero."

First song I heard this morning was "Intergalactic" and now I'm thinking about "Life Is A Highway," I know I shouldn't worry about this but I never thought I'd be following the life script as predictably as this

I drive my kids all week and weekend for sports and their social hangouts. I listen to the SiriusXM channel Lithium more than anything else. Just 90s alternative rock in my ears constantly and it makes me happy.

To really love a woman
Let her hold you, 'til you know how she needs to be touched
You've gotta breathe her, really taste her, 'til you can feel her in your blood
And when you can see your unborn children in her eyes
You know you really love a woman

whoa, settle down

I can't figure out what the first sentence in this press release is supposed to mean.

The Hair Cuttery logo just lives at the top of my mobile display and I have no idea why. The app is not current running... I think???

undo wrote:I can't figure out what the first sentence in this press release is supposed to mean.

You are 100% right here. It sounds like Danny Brown has some kind of Midas curse where every time he speaks, his fans violently tumble down a mountain? Harsh realm for a rapper/singer to live in.

I see so much of this now. Spotify has these little artist bios that appear and they are about 50/50 shot between "weird and interesting blurb written by the artist or someone who cares a lot about their music" or "Burroughs cut-up nonsensical word salad."

Tons of mixed metaphors, meandering passive voice, sentences trying to stick their heads up their own asses... some of the worst repeat offenders include:

• "Spiraling downhill" (spiraling down + going downhill, this is technically possible but doesn't convey either idea well)
  
• Confusing the 800 pound gorilla with the elephant in the room
  
• POV used to mean the opposite of POV (this is becoming so common that English may ultimately turn POV into the opposite of what it literally meant originally)
  

Just a sampling. There's even worse out there.