psychedelicatessen

Brian Cross - It's Not About a Salary

2012-01-20T07:27:00.000-08:00

I've got all these half-finished posts, including the Best TV of 2011 post, which I said I'd be posting soon but is maybe 1/3 done. This always makes me nervous, because whenever a blogger starts saying he's gonna post something and then it never happens, it's a sign that the blog is about to go dead. So anyway, I'm going ahead with this book review, just to get something out there. There will be more of these coming. And I will get to the TV post, eventually.

As a young hip hop fan, I broke more than one turntable attempting to scratch. When one considers that most records that I have scratched are hip hop vinyl, and that scratching actually damages the vinyl, it becomes clear that Grandwizard Theodore taught us to abuse our most highly prized possessions. He taught us the real possibilities of the commodity (its eventual unplayability/destruction) and made us appreciate its ephemerality.

-Brian Cross (B+)

I heard about this book when the author, Brian Cross, was on Oliver Wang's podcast--a great listen that I highly recommend. It's Not About a Salary is out of print, but I easily picked up a copy from the LAPL. Brian Cross presents a unique take on the history of hip hop in L.A., citing precursors in Central Avenue bebop, scat singers like Slim Galliard, The Watts Prophets, and the vein of spoken word folklore and rhyming that runs through African American culture in the form of toasts, signifying and the dozens. Toasts like "The Signifying Monkey" can be heard in dozens of different forms through the years, and surely informed developing rap.

Toasts come from "the life," which is understood as the occupation of hustlers - people (generally men) who make their living and live a lifestyle related to illegal and semi-legal activities, prostitution, gambling and narcotics...The subjects of toasts are the con, the profession of "turning out" whores, and tales of "the life." These stories are often related to the truth, but more often they are signifying. It seems ironic that the vernacular poetry of an oppressed people should be so concerned with the attributes of the wealthy--clothes, jewelry, cars and a sense of diminished necessity. Today the comic art of the dispossessed outrages with a show of being consumed by the signs of possessions, distinguishing a new generation of popular culture with a frank acknowledgment of the importance of the commodity.

You can see from that paragraph how he's building these connections. Hip hop is rather different from other musical forms (say, bebop or punk or even rock-n-roll--at what exact point do blues or swing become rock?) in that it can be traced to a very specific time and place, but at the same time, it doesn't come out of nowhere. So INAaS attempts to establish a lineage here. It's a very personal, subjective history, but those are always the most interesting kind.

In May 1988 approximately 150 of us were lucky enough to be present for an amazing show at McGonagles, a tiny sweatbox in Dublin. By some amazing chance a small-time local promoter had secured the largely unknown Public Enemy. Both Chuck and Flav offered insight on the similarities of our situations (read Irish and African American) and said things on stage that night that no Irish group would have attempted. Chuck's heavy rhetoric was offset by Flav's jester behaviour: Flav gave a talk on Irish Spring soap and Lucky Charms, two products I personally wasn't aware of until much later.

Cross has a long essay up front where he talks about the history of hip hop and related music in Los Angeles, followed by an alternate take by Ruben Guevara on the Latino culture and its relation to hip hop. Then come the oral histories: some 30 interviews, beginning with bebop drummer Roy Porter, The Watts Prophets, Horace Tapscott, continuing through the early West Coast rap scene (Toddy T, KDAY music director Greg Mack, etc.), Ice-T, Ice Cube, Eazy E, Dr. Dre, Cypress Hill, House of Pain, The Pharcyde, Freestyle Fellowship, and on and on, each giving an account of the music scene in L.A. (and lots of industry rule #4,080) up to the time of the interviews (shortly before the L.A. riots).

A lot of anglo kids copied not only the styles (hair, dress) but the dances, the most popular of which were the Pachuco Hop, Hully Gully and the Corrido Rock...the Corrido was the wildest, sort of an early form of slam dancing. Two or three lines would form, people arm in arm, each line consisting of 150 to 200 people. With the band blasting away at breakneck rocking tempo, the lines took 4 steps forward adn 4 steps back, eventually slamming into each other (but making sure that no one got hurt).

-Ruben Guevara

Of course, the true test of a good music book is how many records it sets you on. And INAaS set me on quite a few. For instance, I had no idea that Slim Galliard had recorded a track with Dream Warriors (the Canuck rappers most famous for "My Definition (of a Boombastic Jazz Style)"):

At one point, Cross references "Was (Not Was)'s "The Freaks Come Out at Night" (also covered by Whodini)," and I got very excited. "Freaks Come Out" is a cover? Of a Was (Not Was) song? No way! Well, he got it not exactly right. It's a different song, but it's pretty nice:

Here's a funky Roy Porter jam. I'd actually heard this song before, but man, dig that guitar solo!:

Cross also mentions Charles Mingus' album A Modern Symposium on Jazz and Poetry. Here's a cool track from that album:

From The Comments: a Brag and a Bleg

2012-01-13T11:11:00.001-08:00

A couple quick updates from my comments section. First, something awesome. I got a comment from Milo, the lead singer of my favorite early 80's Florida punk band, Gay Cowboys in Bondage. I had posted about their discography CD, and also mentioned them when posting about a couple local punk shows I saw circa 1984, but for some reason he posted the comment in my recent post about Public Enemy. Anyway, he informed me that one of the details I had written about (in both posts) was incorrect, so I edited those posts with his correction. But the main thing is, how awesome to get a comment from Milo!

Secondly, I have a bleg. It seems there are some problems with DivShare, and that some of the items I uploaded long ago are no longer there. Specifically, the Jimmy Swaggart and Lester Maddox albums I posted are, for some reason, no longer accessible. I've gone through my external hard drive looking for the files and I can't find them. It's possible that I deleted them, thinking that I was never really going to listen to them again, and that at any rate, I could always just download them from my own DivShare account. I don't have my digitizing setup together right now, so I'm going to throw this out there in hopes of making my rare commenter Muff Diver happy and saving myself some hassle: does anyone out there have those files? If someone could get them to me, I'd be very grateful, and would put them right back up, maybe on Mediafire or something.

Oxford American Winter 2011: Mississippi Music Issue

2012-01-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

The Firstborn is Dead, Nick Cave's second LP with The Bad Seeds, comes with liner notes that seem to be based on an interview with Cave explaining all the songs. "Tupelo," it explains, is based on John Lee Hooker's song of the same name, about a great storm that hit the town of Tupelo, Mississippi in the spring of 1936 (the storm also caused intense damage in Gainesville, GA, the same city where my father died a few months ago). "The Tupelo tornado, the fourth deadliest tornado in United States history, slammed into Tupelo, Mississippi at around 8:30 P.M. It was an F5 on the Fujita scale, causing total destruction along its path. The tornado missed the downtown business district. The tornado moved through the residential areas of Tupelo, destroying many homes, and killing whole families who had little or no warning. When the death toll of 216 was announced, over 100 people had been hospitalized in three states. The final death toll was set at 233." So sayeth Wikipedia.

Nick Cave's version borrows from John Lee Hooker's account of the storm, but adds a mythical significance: the storm was a harbinger of the birth of the messiah in the town of Tupelo, the newborn king being Elvis Aaron Presley. It's a logical connection to make (although factually a stretch: Elvis was born some 16 months before the storm), and Cave milks the mythical resonance out of it, including references to Elvis' stillborn twin:

In a clap-board shack with a roof of tin
Where the rain came down and leaked within
A young mother frozen on a concrete floor
With a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw

Well Saturday gives what Sunday steals
And a child is born on his brothers heels
Come Sunday morn the first-born dead
In a shoebox tied with a ribbon of red

(Again, not perfectly accurate, as all accounts I can find say Elvis' twin was born dead.) The lyrics have a strong strain of that Old, Weird America running through them, the way biblical prophecies and local legends and bits of old Childe Ballads get mixed together in these old folk songs. I've always loved this song, but I hadn't really thought about it in a long time, until this year's music issue of Oxford American magazine arrived, with a CD dedicated to the music of Mississippi, and it included this song (coincidentally, I got this song again the following week when I downloaded the first disc of Fire in my Bones: Raw + Otherworldly Gospel from eMusic).

The liner notes to the Nick Cave record mention the John Lee Hooker song, which is surely influenced by Henry Greene's earlier recording, but I find it impossible to imagine that Nick Cave could have come up with his version of "Tupelo" without having heard Henry Greene's "Storm Thru Mississippi." Like Cave, Greene cast the storm as the judgement of an angry God, and begins with "Well, Tupelo, MS was a mighty sinful town." It's a powerful song. I love the part where he sings "Well, people you might not believe it, but there is a God somewhere." In any other song, these words would be comforting, but Greene's God is not a God of mercy and love, but an Old Testament deliverer of wrath. "He can wound, he can heal, he can do just how he feel." God don't give a FUCK, y'all!

So I guess what I'm saying, as I say every year, is go out and buy the Oxford American music issue. Hell, get a subscription. That's what I do, and at $20 a year, the CD alone is worth it. But you also get what amounts to several pages of liner notes on each song, and several supplementary articles. (Then the other three issues are just gravy!)

The highlight, for me, of this issue was an essay by Elijah Wald on the blues' roots in "the dozens." It seems Wald is expanding this idea into a book, which comes out this year, and I have to say I'm looking forward to reading that as much as I'm looking forward to any movie or album coming down the road.

To finish off, one more idea that this CD has me thinking about, regarding two of the songs included. Jimmy Donley's "Radio, Jukebox and T.V." is identified as pure, honky-tonk country. Joe Henderson's "Snap Your Fingers" is identified as smooth soul music. Listen to them with your eyes closed, and it sounds to me like they have it backwards, which I believe illustrates how much these "genres" overlap.

90's Hit Parade: So What Have We Learned?

2012-01-03T17:42:00.001-08:00

Well, for one thing, we've learned not to take on big projects like that. I'm glad that's over. But I guess I'm glad I did it.

My primary goal was just to practice writing about music. It's something I feel I'm not very good at, because of the way I listen to music. Like, I can analyze the hell out of a movie or T.V. show or book, any kind of narrative art form, but I don't really listen to music with an analytical ear. It's more intuitive: I either respond to it or I don't. Asking me why I like a certain song or band is like asking me why I'm attracted to Salma Hayek. I mean, I just am. (Actually, that's a bad example, I could probably explain Salma pretty easily. Maybe it's like explaining why I have a crush on Aubrey Plaza.) Besides which, I don't really pay much attention to lyrics, at least outside of rap, so that makes it even harder. When I look at how someone like Matthew Perpetua can write about a song, the way he'll analyze the lyrics, and the state of mind of the character they're singing about, and how the sounds of the instruments augment, or comment on, the lyrics...the guy's just clearly listening on a much deeper level than I am.

I've also come to the conclusion that I lean too much on autobiography. it's an indulgent tic, one that I tend toward naturally, although it may have been encouraged somewhat by reading Ain't It Cool News in the late 90's. It's not always a bad thing--most of Lester Bangs' best essays incorporate autobiographical anecdotes, and Roger Ebert's review of La Dolce Vita is one of my favorite pieces of film writing. But I lean way to heavily on it. There's a bit of a dilemma here, though: the purpose of this blog is, partially, to allow me to be completely self-indulgent in my writing. Otherwise, why am I not trying to get paid for it? Anyway, I need to make an effort not to lean on that crutch too much. And even beyond that, I'm noticing a lot of tics, cliches I keep repeating, that I need to get past. This is something I resolve to work on in 2012.

My goal with this was to come up with something interesting to say about each song. I think I succeeded with about 2/3 of the entries. And I got a lot of thoughts out of my mind. Now I just have to finish up the films of the 00's reviews! There will be a post coming about my favorite T.V. shows of 2011, but it's going to take a while, expect it next week. I leave you with this...

Music 2011

2012-01-02T09:28:00.000-08:00

Alright, kind of a mish-mash, which indicates how I've been going about listening to music lately. I reckon I spend a lot more time finding "new old" music than "new new" music. But to start off with, my top 5 albums, beginning with The Best New Band I Discovered in the Last...I Dunno...Five Years, Maybe?

tUnEyArDs - w h o k i l l ?
This band hits so many of my personal fetish-points that it would be impossible for me not to fall for them. They're weird, funky, catchy, experimental, DIY, femme-fronted, and their sound incorporates post-punk, hip hop and Afrobeat. In fact, once you hear the African influence (and I have to admit, it took me a couple listens to zero in on it for some reason), they don't even sound all that weird. Tuneyards (let's put the cutesy typography aside) are the brainchild of Merrill Garbus. She recorded their first album on a voice recorder, looping drums, vocals and ukelele, and released it on recycled cassette tapes. She has a touring band to fill out her sound now, but she still primarily relies on herself and a couple delay pedals to make loops of her voice, and accompanies herself on ukelele and a standup pair of tom-toms. And she write great songs. Nothing complicated, just good, catchy, and kinda weird tunes. She's wisely been putting "Gangsta" out there as the single, but I personally prefer "You, Yes You." Both great, happy dance songs.

Another thing worth mentioning is that Merrill does not look like a rock star at all. There's something really cool about someone who looks so normal fronting a band, with no hint of glamor. Merrill Garbus may be the most un-rock-star-looking rock star since Bun E. Carlos.

I don't really have a top 10 albums to list, so here's the rest of my top 5, and a handful of honorables. I don't listen to enough new stuff, I guess.

Jay-Z and Kanye West - Watch the Throne

You almost have to admire the sheer depth of Kanye West's egotism. This is a guy who makes Jay-Z look humble. In fact, you know what this album reminds me of? Marc Maron's podcast. It's two self-obsessed people sharing the mic, constantly trying to turn the subject back to themselves. All those bits in "Otis" where one will pick up the other's last line and flip it? That's the musical equivalent of saying "Oh yeah, that's like what happened to me last week, see I was at Macy's and..." Like that one where Jay says "I got five passports, I'm never going to jail," and Kanye replies "I made "Jesus Walks," I'm never going to Hell." THIS MOTHERFUCKER THINKS GOD OWES HIM A FAVOR.

"Otis" is pretty much the jam of the year, no? God, the choppy beat, the screams, the way it abruptly ends (and shrinks into the relative calm of the opening of "Gotta Have It"). When Kanye complains about fools "actin' like this summer ain't mine," he's absolutely right. (If you have more taste for R&B/pop than I do, you probably think the summer belongs to Beyonce, but for my tastes, "Otis" is the one.) I like this meta approach to the idea of a summer song, announcing on the very song that it's going to be the song of the summer. A bold move, but Kanye is prepared to back it up.

It's not really Kanye's boasting that sets him apart in the megalomaniac sweepstakes--that's pretty much what rap is all about. It's his thin-skinned defensiveness. Like on "New Day," which is supposedly a track about how they're gonna raise their kids. And for Jay-Z, it's just that, promising to teach his son right from wrong, to never abandon his son as his father abandoned him, and so on. For Kanye, it's a chance to complain, in the most passive-aggressive manner, about how terrible his life as a rich celebrity is. Maybe he'll even make his son be Republican, so everyone knows he loves white people. Or, in the most pathetic line, "I'll never ever let him hit the telethon/Even if people are dying and the world ends." Dude, the problem isn't that you went on a telethon, it's that you showed your ass once you got there. Own the fuck up! Besides the obvious point that (a) what Kanye said on the telethon was completely true, and (b) he never suffered any real consequences for it, other than some people talking shit about him on TV! But to Kanye, this is a rough life. He's still not over the South Park thing, which pretty much proves he's a douche bag. I mean, for anyone who isn't a douchebag, if South Park makes fun of you, the correct response is "AWESOME! I'm being spoofed on South Park!" You know what, Ye? If you want to make the world a better place for your offspring, maybe you could start by not calling the very next song "That's My Bitch."

Which is an awesome song, by the way. Probably my second-favorite after "Otis." Such a 1990 throwback, with that Native Tongues-style beat, and the Public Enemy "Bat-Badyo, Bat-Badyo" loop, and the Monie Love reference. I liked My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy, but for my tastes, it had too much syrupy R&B. Watch the Throne is mostly hard hip hop beats, and the flow from song to song is so smooth. To my ears, Watch the Throne is the better album.

So, back to Kanye's ego, "New Day" is not even the peak. On "Made in America," the second-last track, Kanye actually compares his travails (being stalked by paparazzi and made fun of by T.V. comedians) to the martyrdoms of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Jesus! (I can't figure out how Betty Shabazz gets elevated to "Queen" status, but Malcolm is still just "Brother".) But you know what? I'll stick with Kanye, because for all his bluster and bitchiness, he's a funny guy. Seriously, who else would come up with that break in "Niggaz in Paris," or that line about "My other other Benz," or even "I paid for them titties, get your own." Kanye is in the great tradition of highly entertaining assholes. And he makes some great beats.

Wild Flag - s/t
Carrie Brownstein's new all-grrrl supergroup sounds pretty much like you'd hope they would sound, all rock-n-roll fun and attempts to be everyone's Joey Ramone. I don't think anyone's going to deny that this is the kick-ass rock-n-roll album of the year. I will add a slight complication, though. Songs like "Racehorse" were clearly composed with live performance in mind, and I can't help but feel like their holding back just a bit in the studio. Compare the excellent recording of "Romance" with the version they performed on Letterman, and there's a pretty big enthusiasm gap. This isn't always a bad thing, as these songs have lots of 80's pop subtleties to bring out, but I think they could have brought it a little harder.

Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee, Part 1
You can take this album's inclusion with as much salt as you deem necessary--I'll listen to pretty much anything these guys do--but this is the album the Beasties have been moving toward for decades. Starting in the late 90's, they seemed to pull apart their sound, to concentrate on each aspect for a whole album: punk rock on the Aglio e Olio EP, sample-based hip hop on To the Five Boroughs, and funky instrumentals on The Mix-Up. Now, they've finally fully integrated all these aspects into one sound. The band mostly rap over their own live instrumental tracks, and they've developed an arsenal of effects and sounds that harken back to late-80's indie sludge, but sound much more lively than any of those bands. Even the one punk rock track here, "Lee Majors Come Again," sounds fully integrated into the greater body of work. Like all their albums besides License to Ill and Paul's Boutique, they run out of "A material" well before they run out of room on the album, but for a bunch of old fogies, this is pretty sweet stuff.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Mirror Traffic
This album actually goes well with the Wild Flag record, being a fairly straightforward, un-deconstructed rock-n-roll record. And it turns out Malkmus is pretty good at writing simple, cool rock songs like "Senator." He's maybe even better at the odd ballads like "No One Is (As I Are Be)" (maybe my favorite song title since...um...ever?), but even these seem clearer than any he's done before.

A few other albums I enjoyed:

R.E.M. - Collapse Into Now
I was confused when, earlier this year, R.E.M. announced that they were calling it a day. For one thing, I always figured that R.E.M. would just be making music forever. Back in the 80's, they seemed to have an advantage over bands like the Butthole Surfers or Fugazi in that their was nothing about their sound that required being young and full of energy. There was no reason they couldn't be writing their strange, beautiful songs just as easily at the age of 100. For another thing, in this moment when pretty much every band I listened to from 1986 to 1995 is on a reunion tour somewhere, it seems like a huge drama queen move to make a big, public announcement that you're breaking up. Why not just quietly go on indefinite hiatus? Does anyone really doubt that these three (or four) guys are gonna be making music together again within a decade?

At any rate, this album obviously has a bit more significance for me for it being the official swan song, but it's a good way to end things. After the pleasant-but-forgettable Reveal and the boring-but-boring Around the Sun, they sort of kicked themselves back to life with Accelerate, their hardest rock album, and they maintain some of the energy here (about half the songs on Collapse are fast rockers), but play more to their own strengths, which are always in the quiet moments. Collapse is easily the best of their post-Berry albums (and I'd also rank it above Out of Time, which I've never liked much for some reason).

My favorite track is "Every Day is Yours to Win," which feels to me like a nice send off for the band, a pretty little melody conveying the eternal message of R.E.M.: stick with it, kid, you're gonna be fine. They released a final single in October, "We All Go Back Where We Belong," and the two songs together seem to tie a nice little button on their career. Maybe it is best that they quit here. As much as I like these songs, I have to admit that none of them match their early material, and you can hear Michael start to slip into some familiar melodic tics that sound a lot like recycling old material.

Shabazz Palaces - Black Up
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this album. In theory, I love it. Palaceer Lazarro (fka Butterfly from Diggable Planets) is continuing his experiments in jazz-inflected hip hop, and going much further out. There's a loose sound to all these songs, like pieces of different tracks pulled apart and reassembled haphazardly in unexpected ways. It feels genuinely spontaneous and collaborative in a way that hip hop rarely does. But much of the album fails to engage me. Possibly the biggest problem is that the weakest material is frontloaded, so you get tracks like "Are You...Can You...Would You? (Felt)" and "A Treatease Dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)," both of which wear on my nerves a bit, right up front. For best results, maybe skip to track six.

Bjork - Biophillia
Can someone please explain to me how Bjork manages to get weirder every year? It's very frustrating to us hipsters, as it prevents us from rolling our eyes and saying we liked her early stuff.

And some stray songs I dug this year. As is always the case, much credit to Fluxblog, which is pretty much my source for keeping up with new music (to the extent that I actually do that):

Jonathan Richman - "These Bodies That Came to Cavort" I think this album actually came out in 2010, but I didn't hear it until this year, so I'm counting it. There was some footage of Jonathan performing it on Jimmy Fallon, but it looks like the web police removed it, so the best footage available is this. One of the best songs Jonathan ever wrote, it sounds like classic doo-wop, but it's impossible to imagine anyone but Jonathan having written it.

The Kills - "Future Starts Slow" These guys should be huge, just because this song NEEDS to be played in a packed stadium.

Radiohead - "Separator" I liked King of Limbs better than most people seem to (best album cover I've seen in years!). This song is definitely the standout. I thought it sounded familiar, couldn't quite place it, then I went back and listened to this Beastie Boys track, and...oh yeah, there it is!

The Drive-By Truckers - "I Do Believe" and "Pulaski" I wrote about these two songs here.

Bjork vs. Omar Souleyeman - "Crystalline (Omar Souleyman Remix)" I'm not sure if this is an official remix, or just a mashup, but it takes the best song from Bjork's excellent new album and kicks it up several notches.

Scissor Sisters - "Nightwork" This song is hysterical. When I picture what people listen to at gay discos, I imagine it sounds pretty much like this.

Lloyd w/Li'l Wayne and Andre 3000 - "Dedication to my Ex (Miss That)" Sure, anyone can write a funny, profane song. The trick is to make it sound good, and I think Lloyd and the gang managed to do just that.

Mr. Muthafuckin' Exquire - "Huzzah! (Remix with a bunch of other rappers)" I'm always down for a good posse cut. Most of the rhyming on here is juvenile and silly, but I still have fun with it. I especially like El-P's inversion of Beyonce's countdown in his verse. That video, though...sheesh. I never imagined that El-P looked like a fucking Teddy Ruxpin.

Flaming Lips - "I Found a Star on the Ground" I actually did make it through the first two hours of the Flaming Lips' six-hour jam, and that was without even staring at a strobe light. You have to hand it to these guys, nobody takes a more experimental approach to music these days.

Favorite old stuff found on the internet:

Gil Evans Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix. Especially the tuba-driven version of "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)."

Gumbo for Colombo, a nice little mix of "global bass" from Mixtape Riot.

Dark Sweets, a beautiful mix of old 78's from Holy Warbles. I LOVE that first song, "Night Owl."

"Reach Out and Touch" by The Souls of Unity, a gorgeous gospel song that I became obsessed with during our Hawaiian vacation, from Soul Sides. While I'm on Soul Sides, let me also recommend Oliver Wang's podcast. Excellent interviews with guys like Quantic, Thes One of People Under the Stairs, and Sasha Frere-Jones. My two favorite episodes: Brian Cross (B+), which inspired me to hunt down Brian's book It's Not About a Salary, and Aaron Copeland, who discusses his 33 1/3 book about Aretha's live gospel album, especially the "bonus beat" section, where Aaron picks some of his favorite gospel recordings, including this one, guaranteed to MELT your speakers:

And my favorite, the mixes of early 20th Century recordings posted by Jonathan Boggart at Just One Song More. I especially like Jonathan's examination of minstrelsy in this post.

And a few random things:

The Stooges at the Palladium
I almost can't believe I saw this show. Seeing The Stooges play is something I've dreamed about for over half my life. And it never seemed like an actual possibility. Now, seeing the 21st century reunion tour is not the same thing as seeing the Stooges on a good night in 1970, or even on a bad night in'74 (not knowing which you were gonna get before the show started was probably part of the appeal), and furthermore, I would have preferred to see them a couple years ago, when ron Asheton was still alive (I'm a Funhouse partisan. In fact, my ideal Stooges set would consist of them playing Funhouse in its entirety, with maybe "1969," "Search and Destroy" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog" for an encore), but still, to see Iggy backed by James Williamson and Ron Asheton, with Mike Watt (the world's greatest rock bassist) and the guy who blew sax on Funhouse? Yeah, it was pretty awesome. The set list was a bit weird: they started with 6 of the 8 tracks from Raw Power, and they ended their encore with "Cock in my Pocket," of all things. But as soon as Williamson started cranking those licks out, and Iggy stood on the edge of the stage striking those Frank Frazetta poses, I was in heaven.

The opening act was Le Butcherettes, a Mexican girl punk band. The singer, Teri Gender-Bender, out-Iggy'd Iggy. The drums were so hard and loud that you could feel every beat in your chest. Damn cool band!

Niki Minaj - Pink Friday
The disapointment of the year? I dunno, I downloaded it for Bobbie (she being as taken as most everybody by Niki's verse on "Monster"), and neither one of us was able to get through it. Considering our age, maybe that's proof that it's awesome. I went back and listened to "Super Bass" since it appeared on everyone's year-end lists, and while it's definitely the standout, it's still pretty far off from what I wanted. I guess I didn't expect her to go all pop diva. Clearly she's aiming more for being the 2010's Madonna than a female Busta Rhymes, and that's probably a good decision, just not what I was looking for. It's kinda like that moment when it became apparent that Soundgarden were aiming to be the 90's Whitesnake rather than The Melvins-with-songs.

The Best Old Movies I Saw in 2011

2012-01-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if I'll do a post about new movies. I've barely seen any. My favorites so far this year were all documentaries (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Beats Rhymes and Life, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Tabloid), so I'll probably post at least about those. But hey, I've been watching a hell of a lot of old movies, so here's a nice little list of some of them.

1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976) I first heard about this film from the documentary Z-Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Subsequently, Mario Batalli has frequently invoked it on his cooking show for its depictions of Italian feasts. It's been in my Netflix queue for a long time, but I kept moving it down because I was intimidated by the idea of watching a 6-hour movie. I finally decided to just treat it as a miniseries, and watch it in one-hour chunks.

1900 tells the story of two childhood friends growing up through the early 20th Century on an Italian farm. Robert DeNiro (along with a couple younger actors) plays Alfredo Berlinghieri, son of the patron--the owner of the huge farm and estate on which they live--and Gerard Depardieu plays Olma Dalco, a son of poor peasants working on the farm. Throughout their lives, they continue a complex friendship. They fight, compete and bond, and eventually come to embody the two sides of a great political argument, with Olma supporting Communism and Aflredo fighting to retain control of his land, as Communists and Fascists battle for control of the country. Both men deliver fine performances in a movie with no shortage of good acting. One standout is Donald Sutherland, who plays a psychopathic Fascist named Attilla. Sutherland's performance is so over-the-top that it reminds me of Nicholas Cage's most unhinged performances. His level of villainy is almost absurd, except that we know that such men existed in Fascist (and Communist) regimes. His partner is the equally sadistic Regina, played by Laura Betti. The film begins with the aftermath of Allied victory in WWII: Attilla and Regina being attached by a mob bearing pitchforks. It's a brilliant move--if this scene had been saved for the end, the audience would have seen justice and catharsis in that action, but placing it before we see their crimes, we see the brutality of this lynch mob clearly.

The real star of this film is Vittorio Storaro, the director of photography. 1900 is probably the most beautiful film I've ever seen. Storar and Bertolucci manage to turn every scene into a museum-worthy painting of sunlight and landscape. If it had no plot, characters or themes to speak of, 1900 would be a success based on its visual appeal alone. As it is, I'd call it a masterpiece.

His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951) Robert Mitchum made two films noir set in Mexico in 1951 (I caught them back-to-back on TCM). The first, Where Danger Lives, is a textbook example of the film noir: a doctor gets involved with a beautiful woman, and the next thing you know he's on the run for murder, his whole life unraveling. Hollywood dreamed this recurring nightmare over and over again for about 15 years. What does it mean? Well, I'll leave that question for another day, because the one I really dug was His Kind of Woman. In this film, Mitchum is paid to fly to a private estate in Mexico for mysterious reasons. Once there, he finds himself waiting in a purgatory that looks like an exclusive country club, where an oddball cast of characters, including Jane Russell, Vincent Price and Jim Backus have an ongoing party. Now, I'm always up for some Vincent Price, and here he's playing an egotistical, hammy actor (a role that's probably not much of a stretch for him), and he just chews that fucker up! Seriously, this is maybe the funniest role I've ever seen him play. As the film goes into its third (or fourth?) act, things get very weird, and noir, comedy and action get all mixed up. Vincent Price's character arc in this last part reminded me a bit of Hemingway's The Short, Happy Life of Francis MacComber, and just as I was thinking that thought Price actually made a reference to that story!

Dance, Girl, Dance! (Dorothy Arzner, 1940) I first read about this movie in...let's all say it together...Danny Peary's Cult Movies. Dorothy Arzner was one of the few female directors working in Hollywood in her time, and her movies have a reputation of having remarkably feminist content for the era. TCM aired this as part of their Summer Under the Stars celebration of Lucille Ball, who plays a tough cookie, seen-it-all dancer who is frienemies with Maureen O'Hara. Lucy played a lot of these roles in the 40's (she's also great in the boarding house drama Stage Door) before she settled on her daffy housewife persona, and I think I like her better in this mode. Arzner's vision makes itself clear in the character's motivations. O'Hara has a romance going on, but she's much more concerned with her dancing career (and this is not shown as a vice for which she must be punished). Men are mocked for their indulgence in burlesque shows. And the two leads share a relationship that is odd but feels very real, as best friends who want to kill each other. It's an offbeat script, but in its own way it makes a lot of sense.

Drive-In (Rod Amateau, 1976) The only movie on my list that I saw in the theater, Quentin Tarantino showed this at the New Beverly as the first half of a double feature with Dazed and Confused. It makes a lot of sense: this movie was made in south Texas in 1976 (with a grant from the Texas Film Commission), the same time and place that Dazed and Confused takes place, and it follows a day-and-night at the local drive-in movie theater and the roller rink, so the two movies are a great comparison case. Drive-In gives you a crystal clear window into small-town teenage life in the 70's, and it's a lot of fun. The soundtrack is all country music, with the Statler Bros. "Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott" as the theme song. It's a funny, reactionary song that reminds us that, as much as we now revere 70's cinema, there were plenty of people who hated the shit at the time (and the once-again-relevant line about True Grit got a good laugh from the audience). I didn't stay for Dazed and Confused, because I'd just watched it in my backyard as part of a similar double feature with Van Nuys Boulevard. Not on DVD, but maybe it's coming? This was a freshly-struck print.

Hellzapoppin' (H.C. Potter, 1941) OK, I first heard about this movie from reading Dennis Cozzallio's interview with Joe Dante. I guess this is one of Joe's favorites, and there's this clip on YouTube that has Slim Galliard doing a musical number which erupts into an amazing swing dance performance. I guess I had the misunderstanding that this scene was indicative of the whole movie, that it was maybe one of those all-black musicals like Stormy Weather. As it turns out, aside from that one scene, Slim Galliard is nowhere to be seen, nor is any other black face. But it's an interesting film in its own way.

Hellzapoppin' stars the comedy duo of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, based on one of their stage shows, and it's just jammed with gags, much more so than any Marx Bros. or W.C. Fields movie you've ever seen. Now, they're not particularly good gags, mostly just silly (stupid might be more accurate) shit, but the sheer frequency of them is kind of amazing. I wonder if the Zucker Bros. watched this movie before they made Airplane? Also, Martha Raye is very funny in her scenes here. I've never seen young Martha Raye, I mostly just know her from denture commercials. Well, Hellzapoppin' doesn't seem to be available on official DVD, but you can watch it on Amazon Instant for 99 cents, or order a DVD-R of it from Amazon for some small amount of money.

The Exiles (Kent McKenzie, 1961) I'm not 100% sure I saw this in 2011, but let's go with it. This film was put on my radar by Los Angeles Plays Itself, where it was touted as one of the great works of L.A. neo-realism (along with Charles Burnette's Killer of Sheep). There's a great you-are-there feel to this documentary-like footage of young, rockabilly-obsessed Native Americans living in Bunker Hill. Good soundtrack, too.

The Cockettes (Bill Weber, David Weissman, 2002) I'm including this documentary because it helps confirm my theory that punk rock evolved, to a great extent, out of gay culture. Not mainstream gay culture (if such a thing could be said to exist in the 60's and 70's), really, but...well, John Waters always talks about Divine going to drag shows in the 60's, when all the drag queens were dressing as either Jackie O. or The Supremes, and Divine would show up in gaudy thrift-store dresses and fake scar tissue carrying a chainsaw. So, uh, THAT part of gay culture, which would perhaps also include Warhol's Factory, the films of Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar Bros. and Jack Smith, Charles Ludlum's Ridiculous Theater (from which the New York Dolls stole a lot of their act), and The Cockettes. John Waters, as it happens, is a player in this story, so it fits quite well.

The story begins with a commune in San Francisco (for some reason, everyone in the film pronounces the word "commune" with emphasis on the second syllable), where a bunch of gay guys and a few women live, and where these hairy, bearded guys would take LSD, dress in thrift store drag and sing showtunes. And then there is the Palace Theater, where Stephen F. Arnold hosts his Nocturnal Dream Show, a midnight movie series where he would show old musicals and underground films (Anger, the Kuchars and Jack Smith all included) to audiences that weren't going to be sleeping anytime soon anyway. Eventually, the Cockettes begin performing their drag lipsynchs as a floor show before the movies, a sort of predecessor of the audience participation rituals that go with midnight showings of Rocky Horror and such. Maybe you don't agree with me, but it seems to me that seeing a bunch of bearded, tripping hippies in unconvincing drag lipsynching showtunes to an audience of acid heads fits perfectly into the early punk rock aesthetic of the Velvets, Mothers, Stooges and Dolls. And it's perfectly appropriate that when John Waters' gang of misfits began making movies (heavily influenced by the above-mentioned underground filmmakers, and by Warhol, but with an aggressive edge that I believe defines the punk aesthetic as much as Lou or Iggy ever did), they would find their first real audience at the Dream Show, and a spiritual alliance with the Cockettes.

Angel Angel Down We Go (aka, Cult of the Damned) (Robert Thom, 1969) This is on Netflix Instant under the latter title. I love me some wacky, psychedelic rock-n-roll cinema, and while this is not as awesome as Head or Beyond the Valley, it's got to be at least as good as Wild in the Streets. Hillariously weird hippy worldview, with a rockstar/cult leader helping overweight heiresses and closeted millionaires dig themselves, baby! And some awesome songs, too!

90's Hit Parade #1

2011-12-31T08:02:00.000-08:00

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

I.

OK, first of all, no, this isn't actually my favorite song released between January 1990 and December 1999. But it's a great song, it makes my list, and where else could I put it? Can you imagine making a list of 70's songs and putting "Stairway to Heaven" at #8? No, with a song like this, you either have to have the guts to leave it off, or commit to putting it at #1.

And I've been, over the years, as much a naysayer as any punk rock snob about Nirvana's importance. I see them more as a band who was just in the right place at the right time with the right song. If anyone gets the credit, I'd go with Jane's Addiction, for putting on Lollapalooza. It was that tour in the summer of 1991, and the hefty bags of cash it generated, that convinced the big labels that there was gold in them thar indie bands. Whomever the next "alternative" band signed to a major label with a great single was, they were going to get the push from their label that had been denied their predecessors, and they would likely have a hit. Given the same circumstances at an earlier time, it could have been Sonic Youth with "Teenage Riot," or the Pixies with "Debaser," or Dinosaur Jr. with "Freak Scene," or Husker Du with "Makes No Sense At All," or maybe even Soul Asylum with "Sometime to Return." As it happened, Nirvana were signed to Geffen (thank you, Sonic Youth, for engineering that situation), and had Nevermind in the can, so it was Nirvana who walked into that breach.

But "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is still probably a better candidate than any of those songs. It has a physical force that none of them can match. "Teen Spirit" rocks like The Who's "My Generation," or Alice Cooper's "Schools Out," or The Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," or whatever your example of a song that rocks is. It's simply one of the great kick-down-the-door, we-are-HERE-motherfucker! album openers ever recorded.

It's strange, when I think back to hearing the song on WUOG in those first weeks of late September-early October 1991, it almost seems like two different songs. It sounded so raw and powerful, so unlike the tired, heard-a-million-times classic rock track I hear now (as I said earlier, I strongly associated it at the time with "Jesus Built My Hotrod"). Then it slowly started playing on the rock and pop stations, which actually didn't surprise me. I figured it was a fluke, but "Teen Spirit" is such a commercial song, how could it not be a hit? For comparison, a few years earlier Living Colour had a huge hit with "Cult of Personality," which, whatever else you think about it, is a much more unconventional song than "Teen Spirit." In fact, earlier in 1991, Nine Inch Nails were getting plenty of airplay with "Head Like a Hole," also much more sonically radical than "Teen Spirit." (The Red Hot Chili Peppers, at almost the exact moment as Nirvana, had a significant his with "Give it Away" and a huge smash with "Under the Bridge," but since the latter is a soaring ballad influenced by Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and maybe Elton John, we don't count it.) The moment when I realized something was up--and I remember this very clearly--was when I was driving out of town, listening to the radio--not one of the college stations, not even 96 Rock, but Power 99, the top 40 station (which, in a few years, would transform into 99X, the "alternative rock" powerhouse)--and I heard "Lithium," a song with a chorus that's basically just Cobain screaming. And I said to myself, "what the fuck?"

II.

Every now and then you'll hear someone tell you that Nirvana's best album is Bleach, their 1989 debut. Look, I'm prone to dropping "I liked their early stuff" as frequently as anyone, and especially with hard/garage punk bands, but that's just silly. Bleach is a good, solid punkish hard rock record, but consider the field in the late 80's: Fugazi, The Pixies, Pussy Galore, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and probably plenty more that I'm forgetting, were all hitting their artistic peaks. I'm sorry, Nirvana just didn't measure up. Yes, Nevermind cleans up a lot of the rough edges, but it also brings out Nirvana's real strengths as a band: pop hooks, stadium riffs, and Kurt Cobain's emotionally wounded voice. Nevermind is where Nirvana become Nirvana.

But if you want their best album, you have to go with their third LP, In Utero. In Utero is their harshest, noisiest album, with the band at their songwriting peak. Steve Albini's production brings out the abrasive clatter of the band, and Kurt's lyrics settle in on a level of self-loathing that would be comical if his voice didn't sound so convincing. They let it all out on "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," a full-speed mess of feedback and distortion which became their opener for their final tour. In the chorus, Cobain repeats the mantra that I find running through my own head far too frequently: "What is wrong with me?" It's possible that I've never related to any piece of music as closely as I do to that five-word chorus.

III.

I remember hearing the announcement on the radio on April 5, 1994. I guess the news was still a little vague, so the DJ was trying not to say more than the police actually knew at the time. So the announcement was something like "Police have not yet identified the body of a man found dead of a shotgun wound to the face in Kurt Cobain's home this morning." And I thought, "Holy shit. He killed someone."

Over the years, I've frequently heard the explanation that Cobain killed himself because he couldn't deal with success. He came up in a punk scene that was defined by obscurity, and looked with suspicion, if not contempt, on commercial success. And yet, his band had become the biggest rock stars in the world. It was something that he couldn't reconcile, and that eventually led him to take his own life, his own success proof of his own failure. Looking back now, I realize what a load of horseshit that is. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that situation fucked with him, and he may well have lost many nights' sleep fretting about it, but the idea that this troubled him deeply enough to take his own life...well, that idea seems based on a very dumb Kurt Cobain. It's really not a mystery. The guy had severe clinical depression. This was common knowledge. He had a heroin addiction that he seems to have been powerless to kick (he killed himself right after bailing on rehab). He was plagued by intense stomach pains for which the only relief seemed to come from the needle. And...I hesitate to add this part, because I don't want to participate in the kind of misogynist Courtney Love-bashing that leads to conspiracy theories about her murdering Kurt...but his domestic life could not have been much of a respite from the drama, right? I can't read Kurt's mind, and he can't speak for himself any more, but it seems to me that if the concern that he had "sold out" played a part, it was a minor factor at most.

Somehow, that night, even as I was making irreverent jokes about it, I felt like Nirvana had become a more important band that day. Maybe he died a martyr, and his death would ensure that this moment of good music entering the mainstream would become permanent thanks to the romantic, live-fast-die-young legend he left behind. I'm not sure if that's correct. The window of me being able to listen to the radio ended around 1998-99, with the arrival of the three-headed monster of bad funk metal that was Korn/Limp Bizkit/Kid Rock, but those bands still seem part of the whole "alternative rock" milieu. The following decade, the story of music became the story of the dissolution of the whole idea of "mainstream," so the question becomes rather meaningless. But in some way, maybe the barriers that came down around 1991 contributed to the barriers ceasing to exist over the last decade.

2011 Hit Parade

2011-12-29T09:15:00.000-08:00

My favorite songs this year:

1. Jay-Z and Kanye West - "Otis"
2. Wild Flag - "Romance"
3. Jonathan Richman - "These Bodies That Came to Cavort"
4. Bjork - "Crystalline" (Omar Souleyman Remix)
5. tUnEyArDs - "You, Yes You"
6. The Kills - "Future Starts Slow"
7. The Drive-By Truckers - "I Do Believe"
8. Lloyd w/Li'l Wayne and Andre 3000 - "Dedication to My Ex (Miss That)"
9. Radiohead - "Separator"
10. Mr. Muthafuckin' Exquire - "Huzzah! (Remix with a bunch of other rappers)"
11. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - "No One Is (As I Are Be)"
12. The Drive-By Truckers - "Pulaski"
13. Scissor Sisters - "Nightwork"
14. R.E.M. - "Every Day is Yours to Win"
15. Niki Minaj - "Superbass"
16. The Flaming Lips - "I Found a Star on the Ground"

Favorite Albums:
1. tUnEyArDs - w h o k i l l ?
2. Jay-Z and Kanye West - Watch the Throne
3. Wild Flag - s/t
4. Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee, Part 1
5. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - Mirror Traffic

More detailed post to follow next week.

90's Hit Parade #2

2011-12-29T07:59:00.000-08:00

Public Enemy - Welcome to the Terrordome

I wrote about this song last year, so why don't I just recycle that:

Public Enemy had managed to get some attention in the mainstream press over the summer of 1989. First of all, they had recorded "Fight the Power" for Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing, and released it as a single and video. I've always thought of Spike's movie and PE's disc as companion pieces. Can you imagine any other song in that movie? The film almost feels like it grew out of PE's music.

The other incident that got them some press coverage was an interview that Professor Griff, the group's Minister of Information (nobody seems to be able to properly explain what his job in PE was, but he did give interviews)gave with the Washington Times, wherein he went off about the International Jewish Conspiracy and shit. A media shit storm, an apology from Chuck D and the firing of Griff followed. "Why do you think they call it the Jew-elery business?" isn't a place anyone wants to find themselves, but I'm not sure how you avoid ending up there when your starting point is "Farakahn's a prophet." What happened to Public Enemy was a rare thing among political musicians: they got called on their bullshit.

I don't think pop music is really the best medium for getting across a substantive political message. (In terms of actually making a coherent political expression, I actually think Ice-T does a better job than Chuck, KRS-1 or Ice Cube, but that's a post for a different day.) But that's not really what political music is about. It's about expressing the urgent fury of a cause, and no one has ever expressed that fury more vividly than Chuck D. There's a reason they call themselves "Prophets of Rage," not "Prophets of political reform."

This situation must have seriously fucked with Chuck, clearly not prepared to be on the defensive, especially not at such an early point in their career. Chuck's whole thing was so tied up in being unapolagetic that it must have driven him nuts. And from this confused, tormented mind state was born "Welcome to the Terrordome."

"Welcome to the Terrordome" was dropped in advance of the album, and my expectations immediately went through the roof. This was by far the best thing they'd ever recorded. More or less in the same vein as "Bring the Noize" and "Night of the Living Bassheads," but on those songs you could see the seams where the whole thing was stitched together, you could sense the hand of the craftsman. "Terrordome" was seamless and organic. It was an unrelenting blast in the face for 5:40, from the opening fanfare to Flav's "Boiiiing" ending.

Chuck's inner turmoil, trapped between righteous fury and self-examination, is expressed from the two opening lines: "I got so much trouble on my mind/ReFUSE to LOSE!" Contradiction is one of the recurring themes of the album, and Chuck circles back on himself again and again, the most obvious example being "Polly Wanna Cracka," where he spends two verses attacking the mentality of black people who date outside their race, only to have his narrator flip the script in the last verse and basically tells himself to shut the fuck up.

As "Terrordome" continues, Chuck starts spitting out two-syllable jabs like a boxer working the speed bag: "The CREW to YOU to PUSH the BACK to BLACK/AtTACK so I SAT and JAPPED/Then SLAPPED the MAC." Tyson used to come out to this song. Think about that: this was the song Mike Tyson used to make himself seem SCARIER. Jesus, I could go through line by line, but just take this one: "Snakebitten." One word jutting out at the front of it's bar, delivered with a whiplash. Or this: "Check the record and reckon an intentional wreck/Played off as some intellect." Who can match that?

The second verse starts off with the reckoning over the Prof. Griff situation, with no apparant desire to let the flames die down, starting off with two troubling rhymes: "Crucifixion ain't no fiction/So-called Chosen frozen." I take the first line to be more "I got crucified by the press" than a Christian rebuke of Judaism, but I'd bet he made the calculation that it would get under people's skin. The second line, I have no defense.

Apology made to who ever pleases
Still they got me like Jesus
I'd rather sing, bring, think, reminisce
'Bout a brother while I'm in sync
Every brother ain't a brother cause a color
Just as well could be undercover
Backstabbed, grabbed a flag
From the back of the lab
Told a Rab get off the rag
Sad to say I got sold down the river
Still some quiver when I deliver

That last line really does make me quiver, the way it drops out of the narrative to just let out a well-earned brag about his rhyme skills.

When I finally got the CD, I was pissed off just reading the track sequence. How could you have a song like this, and not start the album off with it? It was track 5, as if it were just another track. For the first few days, it annoyed me to death, but in the end I realized that PE were smarter than me. The whole album is constructed as a series of peaks and valleys, and "Terrordome" is the first peak. From the opening sample montage "Contract on the World Love Jam," through the mid-tempo "Brothers Gonna Work It Out," Flav's upbeat hit "911 is a Joke," The taut beat of "Incident at 66.6 FM" (a recording of Chuck on a surreal radio call-in show), and THEN into "Terrordome," which itself builds up steam as Chuck's verses go by. By the last third of the song, my blood is racing through my veins.

Caught in the race against time
The pit and the pendulum
Check the rhythm and rhymes
While I'm bendin' 'em
Snakes blowin' up the lines of design
Tryin' to blind the science I'm sendin' 'em
How to fight the power
Cannot run and hide
But it shouldn't be suicide
In a game a fool without the rules
Got a hell of a nerve to just criticize
Every brother ain't a brother
Cause a Black hand
Squeezed on Malcom X the man
The shootin' of Huey Newton
From a hand of a Nigger who pulled the trigger
Come on DOWN!

By the time it gets to the final stretch, if I'm listening to the whole thing in sequence in my car, I am literally compelled to scream. There's just no other way to express the excitement it gives me. There is one other point on the album that I have the same response to, the segue from "B-Side Wins Again" into "War at 33 1/3."

It's weak to speak and blame somebody else
When you destroy yourself
First nothing's worse than a mother's pain
Of a son slain in Bensonhurst
Can't wait for the state to decide the fate
So this jam I dedicate
Places with racist faces
Just an example of one of many cases
The Greek weekend speech I speak
From a lesson learned in Virginia (Beach)
I don't smile in the line of fire
I go wildin'
But it's on bass and drums even violins
Watcha do gitcha head ready
Instead of gettin' physically sweaty
When I get mad
I put it down on a pad
Give ya somethin' that cha never had controllin'
Fear of high rollin'
God bless your soul and keep livin'
Never allowed, kickin' it loud
Droppin' a bomb
Brain game intellectual Vietnam
Move as a team
Never move alone
But
Welcome to the Terrordome

90's Hit Parade #3

2011-12-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

Dee-Lite - Groove is in the Heart

I mean...come on! Just listen to it!

90's Hit Parade #4

2011-12-23T09:45:00.000-08:00

Beck - Loser

Every once in a great while, a song comes along that captures the zeitgeist so perfectly that it is almost inseparable from its time. Like "Loser." Nirvana (or whomever you want to give the credit to) created this weird little window where, for a few years, you could have a major hit with just about any chunk of lo-fi strangeness, and there was Beck, the right guy in the right place at the right moment.

Everyone knew someone like Beck. If you lived somewhere like Athens, GA or Austin, TX, you probably knew several of him: a hipster/stoner/space cadet who spoke in Da-Da gibberish and pop-culture references, collected obscure records and was determined to be famous, or at least creative, despite an apparent lack of talent. Come to think of it, I think I just described myself at that time. He could have stepped out of Richard Linklatter's film Slacker, or maybe out of the pages of Douglas Coupland's Generation X (not sure, never actually read it), and the title of his hit song was taken from t-shirts distributed by SubPop, the Seattle-based label that Nirvana and Mudhoney were signed to. This one song seemed to boil down that moment of pop-culture and slacker subculture merging together into one three-minute art movement.

The thing about "Loser" is that it was taken, almost universally, as a novelty song. Nobody expected to ever hear from this guy again. Like I said, we could all picture this hipster pothead recording this song on his 4-track, and it seemed like he just got lucky, came up with one demo that just FIT in that moment. Listening to Mellow Gold didn't do much to change that perception. There were some decent songs on there (I especially like "Soul Sucking Jerk"), but no real evidence that the guy had anywhere to go from there. Certainly, nobody saw Odelay coming. But we'll get to that in a minute.

The thing I find most notable about "Loser" is that it's the first song I can think of that features a white guy rapping, who is neither (a) making any attempt to sound "authentic" (ie, black), nor (b) making a joke out of the fact that he doesn't sound black. He's just Beck, doing what Beck does. This may have to do with his age (only two years younger than me, but perhaps two important years?), young enough to have grown up listening to rap, to have internalized it and to consider it just another element to include in his music.

Bonus Beat:

A few words about Odelay...

Once, back in the 90's, a friend told me that the first time he heard Rage Against the Machine, he thought "Yes! This is exactly what I've been waiting to hear!" I had a similar reaction the first time I heard Mudhoney. I was hearing on vinyl a sound that I had been hearing in my head for years, as if I had wished the band into existence. On the opposite end of the spectrum are bands like Sonic Youth and The Minutemen (Captain Beefheart is another example), whose sounds were so alien that they took me a while to adjust to. In fact, it took me the better part of a decade before I could completely "grok" either band.

Odelay is somewhere in between those two extremes. Around 1995-96, I had the feeling that music had to go somewhere else, that things were getting played out. I wanted someone to build on the experiments the Beastie Boys had done on their recent albums (I do believe the Beasties are a primary touchstone for understanding Beck), but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what that would sound like. When I heard Odelay for the first time, I immediately recognized it as the fulfillment of that wish. Beck and the Dust Brothers had cracked the riddle. And remember, NOBODY expected this. At least, I certainly didn't expect much more than a maybe-entertaining record. Come to think of it, I remember feeling the same way about the Beastie Boys. I was actually pissed that they were recording a second album! And, come to think of it, it was the Dust Brothers who helped them pull it off. But I digress.

I'm adding this bit because Odelay is one of my favorite albums of the decade, but I didn't include any songs from it on my list. The songs work better when taken together. But if I had to single one out, I'd probably go with "Novacane." As a piece of music, it's probably the highlight of the album, with Beck in full-on rapper mode and the band/producers delivering funky breaks of every sort behind him. The lyrics seem to describe some weird, lost 70's exploitation film about a convoy of genetically-modified truck drivers ("chromosome cowboys") on a secret government mission or something. It doesn't make sense, but you could kind of imagine it existing, especially if you grew up watching weird 70's movies when your brain wasn't quite old enough to process them. In other words, it's totally Beck.

90's Hit Parade #5

2011-12-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

Jungle Brothers - I'm In Love With Indica

"I'm in Love with Indica" may be the perfect hip hop song. I'm not sure I can explain why. It's not because it's a love song to marijuana, nor is it because it samples the Stooges' "Dirt" (and a little bit of "T.V. Eye"). There are no kind of impressive verbal gymnastics, and the beats keep to a simple, mid-tempo groove. Maybe that's the point: it's the simplicity of the song that makes it so memorable. It almost seems like a throwback--could this really have been released as late as 1993? It's such an old skool party jam! Great to sing along to, great to dance to, great to listen to.

There's something so in-the-pocket about those raps on the verses. The beat seems to get funkier with each verse, but of course that can't be true--it's a sample, the same loops repeated over and over (with the funkier bassline recurring in certain places). There must be some strange kind of voodoo emanating from the MC's, their rhymes actually creating the illusion of an ever-funkier beat. This is the magic of hip hop.

90's Hit Parade #6

2011-12-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

R.E.M. - Nightswimming

My favorite R.E.M. song, "Nighstwimming," is a gorgeous piano ballad, similar to their early song "A Perfect Circle" (another favorite) but somehow even more beautiful. It's a song about growing up and losing that intensity of feeling that goes with being young, which is the ultimate source of nostalgia. The narrator of "Nightswimming" is driving at night, his mind drifting back to a night when he went skinnydipping in a river with some friends, maybe as a child or maybe as a teenager. It was a wild night, and he remembers it in a blur, and knows he could never explain it to anyone. "I'm not sure all these people understand/It's not like years ago/The fear of getting caught/The recklessness of water/They can not see me naked." When people talk about how much better, for instance, the music of their youth was, what they're really talking about isn't the music itself, but how they felt when they first heard it. No music will ever sound as good to me as the first time I heard KISS, or Van Halen, or the Dead Kennedys. It's not that these bands were so great that they could never be equaled--they might not even be very good--it's something that occurred in my nervous system, and every time I listen to them I'm chasing some kind of fix, hoping to feel that intensely about something again. I never will. I'll never get as high as I got off my first joint, or feel the rush of adventure from my first road trip, or feel the yearning heartbreak that I experienced in my first breakup. "All these things go away/Replaced by everyday."

"Nightswimming" is also a summer song, but of a rare subclass, the end-of-summer song. It's the kind of song that takes place in late summer, when the fun and games are lent an air of desperation, the first day of school is always there in the back of your mind, lurking like the Grim Reaper on the horizon. When Michael sings "Septembers coming soon," the line stuck somewhat awkwardly into its stanza, like a desk shoved katty-cornered to fit into an odd-sized room, the phrase is infused with foreboding. He lets it sit there for a beat. He could have just stopped there, and it would be an amazing line, but instead we get this: "I'm pining for the moon/And what if there were two/Side by side in orbit/Around the ferris sun?" At which point I simply run out of words to describe this song.

Bonus Beat: Vic Chesnutt - Panic Pure

Biggest problem in making this list: I'm still finding new stuff from the decade. I got this Vic Chesnutt album when I was halfway through the list, and realized that this song really deserved to be on the list somewhere, but didn't want to go in and mess it up. Chesnutt, more than R.E.M. or even the B-52's, embodies the idiosyncratic spirit of that little Georgia college town where I lived for five and a half years, in ways that I probably can't adequately explain (I believe I saw Chesnutt perform at the Earthfest the first time I visited Athens). But at any rate, the opening verse of "Panic Pure" is worth considering as a precursor to "Nightswimming":

My earliest memory is of holding up a sparkler
High up to the darkest sky
At some 4th of July spectacular
I shook it with an urgency I'll never be able to repeat

90's Hit Parade #7

2011-12-16T10:09:00.000-08:00

A Tribe Called Quest w/Leaders of the New School - Scenario

In my humble opinion, the best ensemble rap track ever recorded. You've got a nice, mid-tempo beat, slow enough for the MC's to have space to let their personalities come through, but energetic enough to pack a dance floor, and a good party-anthem chorus bookending the verses, basically the ideal set-up for a posse cut. And each rapper brings some great rhymes that showcase each one's own personality.

"Scenario" features all the members of A Tribe Called Quest and Leaders of the New School passing the mic, and each one of them brings their A-game, but still sound like they're just having fun. Take Phife, for example, and how he effortlessly flows back and forth between fast and slow patterns, often within the same line, such as the way he builds a three-syllable pattern then suddenly breaks it, cramming "Well whadyaknow?" into that space in the third line. It's not just that the technique is so hot, but also that it's totally Phife's, that odd, choppy rhythm that is his alone.

Or Charlie Brown, who comes with an aggressive rap that he punctuates with percussive syllables: "Can I get a hit? (Hit!) Boom-bip," or "New York, North Ca-ka-la-ka and Compton." Dino D's verse is all complex tongue-twisters, culminating in a rush of one-syllable blows: "Funk flipped flat back first fist foul fight fight fight
Laugh yo how's that sound (ohhhhhh!)" And then Q-Tip comes on, totally relaxed. He doesn't try any kind of verbal gymnastics, but his flow just hits your ear right. If you look at the video, you see it on his face. He's just the most laid back dude in rap, and that smiling, sunshiney vibe flows through his rhymes: "I love my young nation, groovy sensation/No time for hibernation, only elation"

Obviously, Busta Rhymes is saved for the finale. Who wants to follow a verse like that? He comes in and tears up every goddamn thing around him, and it sounds even crazier when it's contrasted with Q-Tip's relaxed style. A lot of Busta's verse is nonsense, "UH!'s" and "ROOOAWRR!'s," and he sells the fuck out of all of it, until he kicks the track home to the chorus.

90's Hit Parade #8

2011-12-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

Jane's Addiction - Stop

There are so few rock bands that really deal with the concept of ecstasy. I'm not talking about sex, or even excitement, but a sort of out-of-body experience that you can get from sex, from drugs, from jumping out of an airplane. Jane's Addiction are completely in touch with ecstasy. When they sing about being "ocean size," I take it to refer to Freud's phrase "the oceanic experience," meaning an altered state of consciousness, ego dissolution. It's not always a theme expressed in their lyrics, but it's the constant theme of the music itself.

"Stop" is the boiled-down expression of what Jane's Addiction is about. It's one of the most exciting hard rock songs I've ever heard, it's four minutes zipping by (can it really be that long?), filled with hairpin tempo changes and bristling with excitement. "Stop" starts the first side of the last album of Jane's Addiction's original 3-album run. Its companion piece, kicking off the second side, is the epic "Three Days." One explosive, one implosive, both ecstatic.

Addendum:

This past summer was one long wave of 20th anniversaries, which I guess is another way of saying that the summer of '91 was an eventful time for me. I graduated from college in May, got married in June, and on July 4 we were spending our honeymoon at the annual Smoke Out in Washington, D.C. In August, we attended the first Lollapalooza, and in September, we moved to Athens, GA (I specifically remember making the last trip on Labor Day). For the first month, I worked at a pizza place down the street from the football stadium, which on game days would get an unbelievable rush that I really wasn't prepared for. I bring this up just because it makes it very easy to pinpoint things that happened in that first month, namely that the Red Hot Chili Peppers dropped Blood Sugar Sex Magic, then Nirvana released "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as a 7", and then the album Nevermind. In some ways, the 90's really begins in the summer of '91.

We'll get to Nirvana, but let's talk a minute about that first Lollapalooza, which to this day is the best live music experience I've ever had. I'm not sure if it was the individual bands, some of which (like the Butthole Surfers) suffered a bit from playing out of their element, others (like Living Colour) just sucked, or if it was the whole experience, which was so novel at the time. You really have to hand it to Perry Farrell. It took some audacious vision to pack stadiums with a bunch of bands that were mostly playing clubs and small auditoriums.

The highlights? Well, Rollins Band were incredibly heavy, really surprised me (I hadn't really listened to their stuff before that, assuming it would be even worse than late-period Black Flag). But Ice-T, man...Ice-T came on and kicked the show into gear. Seriously, it felt like everything just came to life at that point. I had been obsessed with Ice-T's album Original Gangsta for a few weeks at that point, and he really killed it. I've seen people tell the crowd to get up and dance, but Ice-T was actually looking directly at people in the front rows and saying "You! Get up and dance! Now!" Which was, uh, pretty effective. And at the end of the set, he debuted "Cop Killer," which, I have to say, sounded a lot better that day than it ever sounded on the record.

Siouxie and the Banshees came on just as the sun set, the air cooled and the sky was a deep blue, and they were perfect right there. They started out with some of their slow, middle-eastern-tinged exotica numbers, then built up into their danceable hits. Then, Jane's Addiction came on.

I'm not sure if they were really that great, or if it was something to do with my state of mind being out in the sun all day, but this was the best band I've ever heard in my life. I think I experienced whatever it is that Dead Heads feel, like there was nothing separating me from the music. We were one. I really don't know how else to explain it, other than to say that I was in the oceanic state. Feeling ocean size.

I went to a lot of these festivals in the 90's, and eventually came to the conclusion that I'd rather see 2 or 3 bands play in a small club. You lose the focus and intensity with these all-day events, and as they added a second stage, and a third stage for local bands, and a DJ tent, a poetry tent, a comedy tent, whatever, it just gets more and more diffused. But now I'm starting to come around to the idea that these all-day festivals are really for people my age. 40-somethings who don't go to a lot of shows, but like having big day-off events to plan their weekends around.

The Black Marble (Harold Becker, 1980)

2011-12-12T16:12:00.000-08:00

I have vague memories of seeing this movie on HBO back in middle school. Well, mostly I remember one scene, involving Harry Dean Stanton, a phone booth and a fire hose. The scene wasn't quite as funny as I remembered it from when I was 12, but still a good larf. The only other thing I remembered about it was that there was a blonde with huge tits, which was true enough:

It's your basic buddy cop movie, with the two lead performances both far too broad, but Harry Dean Stanton as the villain is just fantastic (is he ever not? No, seriously, can you think of a bad H.D.S. performance?), totally scuzzy and repulsive. But what I really enjoyed about it was the footage of L.A. from 30 years ago, a good 15 years before I'd ever set foot here. My hometown in South Florida developed so quickly that I could barely recognize the town of my 70's childhood when I went back to visit through the early 90's. As Atlanta expands it's metro-reach, Bobbie's hometwon has gone from being a one-horse, middle-of-nowhere town to basically being a suburb of Atlanta. But so little looks as if it has changed in L.A. since 1980. Throughout the film, I recognized buildings, stretches of freeway, Highland Park Police Station, all looking pretty much like they look today. The opening credits feature a shot of Hollywood from somewhere above the 101. The camera does a slow, 360-degree pan, showing us the Hollywood Tower, the Hollywood Sign and mansions in the hills.

90's Hit Parade #9

2011-12-09T09:10:00.000-08:00

Ministry - Jesus Built My Hotrod

Truth be told, I'm not a HUGE Ministry fan. I think there's a lot of good stuff on Twitch, The Land of Rape and Honey and The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. I have a very clear memory of the first time I heard "Stigmata," on Album 88 while driving home from the mountains. I kept saying "What the fuck is this?" and "It sounds like the Butthole Surfers doing disco!" It's a great fucking song. So is "Hizbollah." But they only really have one masterpiece, and that's "Jesus Built My Hotrod."

This song dropped shortly after I moved to Athens. It's always associated with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in my head, the two songs came out about the same time, and I remember one Friday night when they played them back-to-back on WUOG, and man, did they sound great together. The version on the 12" (embedded above, mostly because the official video is unembeddeble) is superior to what eventually came out on the album, but both versions rock so hard. All the harsh nastiness of Ministry's industrial sound is married to a killer rock-n-roll record, with vocals by Gibby of the Butthole Surfers, samples of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dennis Hopper, a killer steel guitar solo that sounds like ZZ Top jacked up on meth, growling rhythm guitar riff...man, just crank this song up, and forget about the lousy industrial-metal album it came off of.

90's Hit Parade #10

2011-12-06T07:34:00.000-08:00

Chemical Brothers w/Noel Gallagher - Setting Sun

Yeah, right around 1996. That was when I started to feel old. That's when this new music that I couldn't quite understand started taking over. And the thing about techno, or "electronica" (nobody really uses that term anymore, it's like "Japanimation") or whatever, was that it mostly seemed to be absent of songs. It was just about beats. So Chemical Brothers' "Setting Sun" was like the song that people like me needed at just that moment. It's not just a fully formed song, it's a fucking GREAT song. It makes you dizzy. It overwhelms your head. It reminds me of the one time I tried that drug, Rush, the shit in the little bottle that you sniff to get a head rush, which I didn't like, but I do like this. And it's a good song, with melody provided by Noel Gallagher of Oasis (a band I don't much care for, but he brings pretty much what a techno band lacks to the song).

Somehow, "Setting Sun" has everything great about a rock record--screaming "guitars" (even though they're not really guitars), lyrics about the devil, and of course that beat from "Tomorrow Never Knows"--but still feels like a techno record, with the crashing beat and the busy sense of chaos, the excitement of being at a rave. I suppose the evil twin of the Chemical Brothers is The Prodigy, who also combine aspects of techno, rock and hip hop, but who somehow come off as obnoxious and clumsy. Chemical Bros., at their best, get everything right that Prodigy get wrong.

Second Annual Eagle Rock Comedy Festival

2011-12-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

Hey, it's that time again! Free comedy all up and down Colorado and Eagle Rock Boulevard! Come on out!

Wednesday night, I'll be hosting the show at Dave's Chillin' and Grillin', and also performing with the improv group. Lots of good comics in that show. Thursday night, I'll be performing another set at Dave's. This will be a great show, headlined by Bobbie Oliver, hosted by Sally Mullins, with a special appearance somewhere during the night by Marc Fucking Maron! Lots of great shows all through the festival. There will also be an open mic going on on the Swork patio. Check out the website for full schedule.

Sunday, 12/11, the festival winners will perform in a free show at The Ice House in Pasadena, featuring the great Maria Bamford, Wendy Liebman and more.

90's Hit Parade #11

2011-12-02T09:22:00.000-08:00

Bikini Kill - Double Dare Ya

When I started this project at the beginning of the year, I actually had a different Bikini Kill song in this spot. I was planning to use their most popular song, "Rebel Girl," but after going back and listening, I decided that "Double Dare Ya," the first song on their first cassette, is really the greatest Bikini Kill song. At least, we should call it a draw.

"Double Dare Ya" starts with Kathleen Hannah at full scream, declaring "We demand a revolution, girl-style, NOW!!!" and never relents from there. It's an amazing vocal performance, really. She just throws everything at the microphone: rage, sarcasm, sisterly advice. Very few punk rock bands could summon the righteous fury that she throws out there. I realize that BK were hardly the first female punk band, or even the first to be as explicitly feminist (see, e.g., Crass' Penis Envy album), but when you listen to this you feel like you're hearing something new being given a voice.

I think the chief difference between male and female punk rock is how much the simple act of saying what's on your mind is revolutionary for female punkers. Being "pushy" is such a taboo for women, in ways that it never is for men. It's not that I can't imagine similar lyrics coming from someone like, say, Kevin Seconds, but I don't think they'd really have the same meaning or impact. Yes, dudes are told to conform and shut up by authority, but they also grow up receiving the message that there is virtue in pushing back. Teenage guys live in the conformity factory, teenage girls have it injected under their skin. So when Kathleen yells "Don't you talk out of line/Don't you speak out of turn," even though the sentiment isn't that different from, say, Dead Kennedy's "Hyperactive Child," the latter is mostly targeted to an audience that already knows it and wants an anthem. "Double Dare Ya" is directed toward an audience that is maybe still coming to grips with the idea. So when she mockingly says "Got to listen to what the man says," she's acknowledging a truth that might otherwise go unspoken for many of her fans.

Oh, and the last line of that verse: "Time to make his stomach burn." That's as great a punk rock line as has ever been written. Later, she states the real crux of it all: "You've got to know what they are/Before you can stand up for your rights." Then she repeats the word "rights," for some reason twisting it in a fake cockney accent. It feels like she's winding up. Then, she let's it go, screaming "YES! YOU DO HAVE RIGHTS!" (Or, as the lyric sheet would have it, "You do have them, you know.")

Bonus Beat:

"Rebel Girl" is one of those songs that seems not so much written as pulled out of the air (I believe there's a quote from Kathleen saying pretty much that somewhere). If she hadn't written it, someone else would have. It's just something that had to exist.

Bonus Bonus Beat:

I've fallen off the schedule a bit, as things have gotten crazy around here, but I do intend to get the final 10 entries in this list done before the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve. I'm just not sure it will be on the regular Tuesdays and Fridays schedule: I'm gonna be busy as hell for the next two weeks, then not busy at all for another two weeks, so you might get them 10 days in a row or something. Following that will be the usual 2011 retrospective posts, then some book reviews (I've been reading a lot of non-fiction this year). Then I still have four entries (actually, I'll probably break it into five) in the Best Films of the 00's series. Then, a sigh of relief.

90's Hit Parade #12

2011-11-26T08:35:00.000-08:00

Wu Tang Clan - Da Mystery of Chessboxin'

Remember the baseball speech at the beginning of The Untouchables? Wu Tang always remind me of that. They're a very democratic organization. Oh, sure, there's a hierarchy, no doubt. There are stars, and there are second stringers. But everyone on the team gets their turn at bat. I especially like "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'," one of the best ensemble raps ever recorded, because the two rappers that most would agree are at the bottom of that hierarchy both get plum spots: U-God kicks things off, and Masta Killa bats cleanup. And both of 'em knock that sucker outa the park.

U-God comes on with a gravelly voice, growlin' like Howlin' Wolf: "Raw, I'ma give it to ya/With no trivia/Like cocaine straight from Bolivia." Actually, I always thought it was "With no treble, yo," which would be a cool line because it would pun on uncut base and uncut bass, but it's still pretty great. I love how he just digs into certain syllables, like "eMANciPAtion PROclMAtion." Inspecta Deck and Raekwon both throw in some hot verses, and Method Man rocks a chorus, but then Ol' Dirty Bastard comes in and just takes the track over, half-rapping, half-singing, throwing out crazy shit like "Jacque Cousteau could never get this low." One of his best recorded moments is the line "Rappenin' is what's happenin'/Keep the pockets flappenin', hands clappenin'," not just because he adds those extra syllables, but because he makes them sound so good, like that ought to be how those words are pronounced, and because he makes those syllables hit right on the rhythm. And then there's the way he busts out "Gotta get up and beeeeeeeeeeeeee somebodeeeeeehhhh!" Finally, he introduces Ghostface Killa, and the track goes into yet another phase.

Ghostface is just nuts here, completely off the leash, hyperactive and chaotic, like a berserker swinging his sword every which way, chopping against the rhythm, "hittin' like a spiked bat." It's an amazing verse that builds momentum up to a chant of "Wu! Tang! Wu! Tang!" Then Masta Killa emerges in a clearing: "My styles illegal and death is the penalty." It's not necessarily the most impressive verse on the track, but it's exactly what the track needs right at that moment. His voice begins calm, contrasting with Ghostface's crazy spitfire routine, and slowly building intensity.

Bonus Beat:

Funny story: I got Enter the Wu Tang: 36 Chambers from Columbia House. I never really understood how Columbia House managed to stay in business. Pretty much everyone I knew had ripped them off at least once, getting those 12 CD's for $1 and then never buying anything else. Anyway, when the album came, I was extremely annoyed to find that it was the "clean" version. But I shrugged, and just made the best of it. It's possible that the reason "Chessboxin'" was my favorite is because it survived the editing process more intact than many of the other tracks. The worst, of course, was "Shame on a Nigga," which became "Shame on a Nuh." Not only does that not make any damn sense, but it doesn't even go with the rhythm. Years later, when I finally upgraded to the "dirty" version, I really started digging this song. While "Chessboxin'" is a great showcase for the whole Wu Tang crew (save Rza and Gza, who sit that track out), "Shame" showcases Wu Tang's bully boys, the stars of those early recordings: Method Man, ODB and Raekwon. They're all amazing, but if I had to pick a favorite here it would be Meth, who drops these amazing (and hilarious) lines: "razor-sharp I sever/the head from the shoulders, I'm better/Than my competor/You mean competitor? Whatever!/Let's get together." That's some all-time Hall of Fame shit right there.

90's Hit Parade #13

2011-11-20T10:17:00.001-08:00

Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole

The sole criteria for inclusion on this list is my personal taste. These are my favorite songs from the 90's. I'm not taking into account their sociological significance or their influence or whatever. For the most part, the same applies to the rankings, but, as I mentioned when I was starting out, there are a handful of songs in the top 15 here that I ranked higher than my personal feelings would allow. This is one of them, because it's absolutely one of the best songs of the decade, far beyond my personal enjoyment.

I've had sort of a love-hate relationship with NIN over time. I like them alright, but as I mentioned before, I've never quite been able to warm up to that industrial, goth-y sound. And maybe I felt a little less charitable toward them back in the 90's, because I was surrounded by people who really worshiped the band. Almost everyone I knew in the 90's was a fanatical NIN fan. Which means I spent a lot of time listening to them, rather against my will.

Anyway, like I said, they have some really great stuff. The Downward Spiral is a great album, they do a killer cover of Queen's "Get Down Make Love," and then they have this song, which is just an incredible single.

"Head Like a Hole" is a rowdy dance song, probably as energetic as industrial music ever gets. The song has a central tension between its two choruses sung in two different voices. One, perhaps a parody of Depeche Mode's "Master and Servant," demands submission: "Bow down before the one you serve/You're going to get what you deserve." The other refuses, screaming "I'd rather die than give you control." Eventually, the two voices overlap, control and rebellion locked in an eternal struggle. Perhaps the two voices are coming from the same head: when Trent Reznor removes Number One's mask, does he find Number Six underneath?

The Comeback!

2011-11-16T18:40:00.000-08:00

My triumphant return to the stage! Well, to stand up. I've been doing improv for about a year and a half now, but I've been meaning to go back to doing stand up for a while, and I finally took the plunge. The first bit, about A Separate Peace, was the kind of thing I didn't really think anyone else would find that funny, but it gets a laugh every time. Might just be the way I say it. I dunno, more to come I reckon.

90's Hit Parade #14

2011-11-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Bellbottoms/Ditch

I saw JSBX 3 times: twice at the 40 Watt, once opening for the Beastie Boys at the enormous (and notoriously acoustically impaired) Omni. All three shows rocked, but strangely enough, the best was the Omni. They were just so far down into the groove, so tight and so loose. When they played "Bellbottoms," the band was just going off on this extended jam, Jon just wailing on the guitar. He started playing this three-note riff that I think he might have stolen from KISS: Alive! (from the extended jam on "Let Me Go Rock n Roll"). Then he switched up suddenly, and started playing this boogie-woogie riff, like the one Angus Young plays on "Let There Be Rock" right when they're going into the unending guitar solo, but much faster. And if I've failed to explain how awesome that moment was, it just points out a larger truth about JSBX live shows: you had to be there. None of their albums capture it, but they do come pretty close on the best tracks on Orange (the first three and last three or four tracks are all prime. The rest is a'ight). "Bellbottoms" starts with a skronky one-note riff (here, listen to the full version, since this is all cut out of the video), which turns into a blaxploitation film theme with string accompaniment, then goes through a rather silly attempt at a James Brown "Sex Machine"-style vocal intro, and then just breaks the fuck loose, climaxing in a wild feedback jam (although nothing close to what you'd hear from them live on a good night). Then it segues into the funky "Ditch," which climaxes in an incredibly hard drum breakdown, with Jon hitting the hell out of the vocals: "I'm gonna dig that...DITCH!!!" And THEN it explodes into some nasty saxophone torture.

90's Hit Parade #15

2011-11-11T17:51:00.000-08:00

Beastie Boys - Root Down

I wrote a bit about this song in 2007. Here's some of what I said:

I've decided that "Root Down" is my favorite Beastie Boys song. It used to be "Shadrach," but "Root Down" has taken the lead. It's Mike D's final, autobiographical verse that sends it over the top for me:

Every day I'd take the train to the High Street Station
Doin' homework on the train, what a fucked up situation
On the way back up hearin' battle tapes
Through the underground underneath the skyscrapes
Like Harlem World Battles on The Zulu Beat Show
Like Busy B/Kool Moe Dee, that's one you should know
Enough of that, just gotta give some respect
To MCA, grab the mic and Ma Bell will connect

(I had to look that up. I always thought the last line was "To MCA, grab the mic and rock it all to heck" or something) I love the picture that paints so vividly of growing up in NYC in the 70's and 80's. And "underneath the skyscrapes" has a great, percussive sound to it.

As I noted the first time, it's also got a great video that mixes the Beasties with old footage of dj's, b-boys, graffiti and subway trains, adding to the 70's NYC vibe that the song evokes so well. Mike D really dominates this track: he also has this great rhyme:

We're Talking Root Down, I Put My Root Down
And If You Want To Battle Me, You're Putting Loot Down
I Said Root Down, It's Time To Scoot Down
I'm A Step Up To The Mic In My Goose Down

And this excellent piece of philosophy:

Sometimes I Feel As Though I've Been Blessed
Because I'm Doing What I Want So I Never Rest

Anyway, since the Beastie Boys are my all-time favorite band, and this is my all-time favorite Beastie Boys track, I have to rank it pretty high. The track is entirely constructed from cutting up Jimmy Smith's jam "Root Down and Git It." Listen to the original if you've never heard it, it's dope!

90's Hit Parade #16

2011-11-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

Hole - Asking For It

It used to seem like there was always a great, ubiquitous, hard rock album out there at any given time. Led Zeppelin IV, Toys in the Attic, Van Halen I, Back in Black, Appetite for Destruction...an album everyone knew back and forth, that sounded great cranked up in a Camaro or blasting out of the Tilt-A-Whirl, an album you could bang your head and air guitar and sing along to. For me, in the early 90's, even more than Nevermind, that album was Hole's Live Through This.

"Asking For It" is my favorite track on Live Through This, and probably the perfect example of what makes Hole a great band. It's a righteous riot grrrl anti-rape anthem grafted onto an eerily beautiful power ballad. And yes, I know Hole weren't officially a part of the whole riot grrrl movement, but that statement requires looking at riot grrrl differently than we look at any other movement in rock. Courtney Love was the great translator of riot grrrl. She translated Kathleen Hannah's rage to mainstream listeners in the same way that Elvis translated rhythm n blues. The chorus of "Asking For It" could easily be from a Bikini Kill song, and Courtney has no problem equaling the rage factor of Kathleen Hannah.

Courtney has always had a Stevie Nicks/"Witchy Woman" vibe to her. It's easy to picture 12-year-old Courtney Love, obsessed with rereading V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic, drawing pictures of horses and listening to Heart's "Crazy on You." So while the screaming refrain echoes riot grrrl rage, the verses have this total full-moon-shining-through-the-Autumnal-branches-as-lace-dress-flutters-in-the-wind feeling. In fact, even the chorus sounds like that. I can't think of another band that pulls this combination off.

John David Oliver, Jr., 1938-2011

2011-11-08T07:40:00.000-08:00

Dad (R) and his brother Bob in the 70's. Probably at a chalet we rented in the mountains of North East Georgia near Dillard/Clayton.

Dad with me and Tom, probably about 5 years ago.

If you noticed the blog being dead for a week, it's because I had to fly to Georgia to visit my father, who, after being in poor health for rather a long time, took a sudden nosedive. He died on Sunday, October 30.

My dad was a great guy. His story was a classic American success story. He was born in Closter, NJ, and joined the Army after high school with the intention of being trained as a pharmacist. As it happened, there were no slots open for pharmacists, so he studied laboratory science instead, and when he left the service he got a job as a lab tech at Martin Memorial Hospital. He was eventually promoted to Lab Supervisor, then Assistant Administrator (in charge of the technical staff for the whole hospital), then Vice President. The house I grew up in was like a symbol of that progression. When I was born, it had terrazzo floors and bare, white walls. By the time I left for college it had carpet and tile in every room, wood paneling on the walls, French doors that opened into a screened-in porch with a swimming pool, and a fireplace in the Florida room. All these were added gradually, paid for by second mortgages.

After my mother had multiple miscarriages, my parents adopted me and (two and a half years later) my brother, Tom. They surely got more than they had bargained for--we both turned out to be very troubled kids with extreme behavioral problems, and had to have been constant headaches for our poor parents. But it occurred to me over the last week that I don't even have to ask myself whether he would have done anything differently if he had known. He would have done exactly what he did, because that's just who he was. He was as cool a dad as anyone could have had.

Dad was very involved with the Catholic Church, and sat on the board of Catholic Charities (he was president of a branch of that organization on at least two occasions), but he never went in for the fire and brimstone or the social conservatism associated with the Church. His understanding of Catholicism was about following a moral code that had more to do with treating other people with respect and compassion then with any kind of disdain for other people's personal decisions. There were times when he would tell us over the dinner table about debates happening among the hospital administration about ethical dilemmas regarding, for example, emergency room patients who were uninsured and unable to pay for their treatment. My dad would always fight for the patients. After all, how could he do otherwise and call himself a Christian?

When people find out I was adopted, they often ask me if I have a desire to track down my birth mother so that I can find out where I came from. Truth is, I don't need to. I know where I came from. The older (and more self-aware) I got, the more I would look at my father and see myself. Every aspect of my personality seems to reflect him. He passed on his sense of morality and kindness, but also his moderate, easygoing nature, his sense of humor (usually off-color), and his love of the good life. (Maybe I didn't quite get his work ethic.) My dad enjoyed life, good food, a good drink, a good cigar. He retired twice, and each time was followed by the stock market taking a nose dive, so I don't know if he ever really had (in his mind) that real sense of being able to take it easy and not worry, but he didn't really need it. He always took it easy and enjoyed life to the fullest, even if he was working 12 hours a day. And I guess that's true enough for me as well.

Here's to you, Dad.

Words That Strike Terror: "Coming Soon - eMusic's New Look"

2011-11-06T08:20:00.000-08:00

Over the last few years, it's become almost a routine for people to freak out every time a social network or website they use modifies their interface. Most of these I've shrugged off. For instance, the half-dozen or so times Facebook has "improved" over the last few years haven't really bothered me much, although I see people on my feed infuriated by each change. But I certainly understand the problem. People don't like the stuff they're using every day to change radically. It usually feels like everything's been rearranged just as you were getting used to it.

Last week, Google modified the look of Google Reader, and it really pissed me off. And I think it gives me a little more insight into how this process happens. One of the things Google did was get rid of the "share" button on the reader, and other "social network"-type functions. The strategy seems to be to get more people onto Google's social network, Google+ (and away from Facebook, presumably). But here's the problem: when developers are making these changes, they see everything in terms of it's "intended use." The "share" button is intended to enhance a social network of Google Reader users. They don't see all the weird little hacks that people figure out, ways to use a function that have nothing to do with their intended function. So, for example, the "share" button on Google Reader, which I have never used to actually share anything (since I don't have any "friends" or "followers" on Google Reader, and don't really know how to even go about getting them). I use--that is, I USED--it to bookmark stuff. This was an essential part of the function. With the huge amount of blogs, tumblrs, twitters and websites I have in there, this is the only way I can ever hope to keep track of stuff. I will now have to figure out a different way to do this.

And now I receive an email from eMusic with the subject line you see above. Hopefully, this will be another thing that doesn't really effect my life. But I'm a bit nervous.

90's Hit Parade #17

2011-11-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

N.W.A. - 100 Miles and Runnin'

N.W.A.'s finest moment, with Ice Cube nowhere in sight. It's a full speed sprint, as Ren, Dre and Eazy each drop fantastically aggressive verses, then pass the mic around for a final verse. They spend most of the time doubling down on "Fuck tha Police" (Ren shouts "I didn't stutter when I said Fuck tha Police," Dre taunts "And while you treat my group like dirt, your whole fuckin' family is wearin' my t-shirt"), but they take some time out to dis departing member Ice Cube. Eazy E used to get a lot of shit, but let's not forget that the reason he was even in a position to be given shit was because he had skills to begin with, and he really makes this track. His high, thin voice stands out over Ren and Dre's drill sergeant shouts, and when he comes in with a machine gun staccato that cuts against the rhythm, it seems to change to whole feel of the song, like entering the bridge of a James Brown jam. In fact, when he starts out with "Runnin just to find the gun that started the clock/That's when I ease up off the startin' block," it's the second most exciting moment in the song. The first comes a few lines later when he says "TAKin' a MINute to TELL you what's ON my MOTHerFUCKin' MIND!" over a ticking clock that swings back and forth between the speakers.

The stereo panning is probably overdone a bit here, but it's a cool trick, and this is one of Dre's most intricate compositions, taking influence from Public Enemy's Bomb Squad and building on the PE-inspired "Straight Outa Compton." There's a runner's heavy breath going back and forth through most of the song, and when it breaks down after E's verse into the sample of "Nowhere to Run" from The Warriors (or was it Vanishing Point?), you can almost see a bouncing devil head providing the diabolical laughter. The fantasy of N.W.A. as FBI fugitives that provides the thematic structure of the song reaches back to a deep vein of black folklore, from the underground railroad to gospel to blaxploitation, with emphasis of course on the latter. When a guitar comes in at the end, it plays long, slow notes that sound like they could have come from a classic 70's soundtrack. N.W.A. produced precious little worth listening to in the following years, and Dre would smoke some chronic and abandon the harsh, aggressive style, but "100 Miles and Runnin'" is one of the most exciting hip hop tracks ever produced.

90's Hit Parade #18

2011-10-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Cypress Hill - Hand on the Pump

"Hand on the Pump" is designed for lowrider culture, for driving slow down the boulevard, but it's not the relaxing, good time music like, say, William De Vaughn's "Be Thankful For What You Got" or War's "Lowrider." Instead, it has a sinister sound. It's hard not to think of the scene from Boyz in tha Hood where a carload of gangsters ride down a street brandishing a shotgun. The foundational sample is a scratchy record of "Duke of Earl," a classic lowrider anthem, but an odd sample to base a hip hop record on, even beyond the vinyl noise. The hook on the chorus is much more melodically developed than you get with most rap songs. My favorite bit is when the "Lalalala lalalala" hook appears in the middle of the last verse (followed by "Look at all of those funeral cars"), showing up on a different beat and sounding even scarier. Just a perfect record.

90's Hit Parade #19

2011-10-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

Sleater-Kinney - I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

The great Sleater-Kinney album is, of course, 1998's Dig Me Out, but "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" from their second album, Call the Doctor (1997) is probably their strongest single (stiff competition from "Your No Rock-n-Roll Fun"). The great strength of the band has always been the way Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein's voices and guitars interact. Here, Carrie sings the verse in her scruffy pop-punk style, Corin belts out the chorus, punctuated by Carrie's screams, which function something like a horn stab. The two singers examine the intense passion of rock fandom from both sides, the verse sung by the kid in the audience, the chorus coming from the star on stage (or maybe the kid projecting herself into the star's spot). There are so many little bits you could unpack in these lyrics. Like "It's your-our-ours/Now I'm so bored." Is that about how corporate cooption makes music less "special?" Or "Invite you back after the show." Is that in an indie rock sense (I'm going to be one of those cool rock stars that hangs out with the kids afterwards and offers words of encouragement so they can fulfill their own dreams") or the arena rock sense ("What's yo name, little girl, what's yo name?")? I mean, all the context clues tell me it's the former, but it's kinda hot to imagine those lyrics being sung as a sexually predatory rock star.

90's Hit Parade #20

2011-10-17T18:53:00.000-07:00

Justin Warfield - Fisherman's Grotto

Justin Warfield was an interesting guy. He was basically one of those college acidheads, obsessed with Burroughs and Phillip K. Dick and gangta rap, who happened to be a decent rapper himself. The track I really liked back when was "Drugstore Cowboy," which took the premise of the movie of the same name and went nuts with it. Now, this is the conundrum for the modern druggie: acid is awesome, but heroin has the hipster cache, so they get mixed up in Justin's mythology: he's knocking over drug stores for heroin, but I guess this is the 60's, and you can also steal LSD from psych wards.

"Drugstore Cowboy" is a cool track, but the amazing horn riff, sampled from some old Chicago record, and frantic beat on "Firsherman's Grotto" sound as fresh as ever. This is one of my favorite party cuts, makes me want to just start jumping around the room whenever I hear it. There was a bunch of videos of remixes out there, but none of the original version, so I uploaded the mp3. Then I found a video of the original song, but I kept the mp3 up, who knows how long the video will last. After this, Warfield made a stoner metal record, which I've never heard.

90's Hit Parade #21

2011-10-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

Bahia Black - Retrato Calado

A bit obscure--in fact, it doesn't seem to be in print--but this is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. My friend Sam, who turned me onto it, told me (with characteristic hyperbole) "it's so good I can't even listen to it." Makes me think of a quiet morning on the river in Florida, perhaps watching a single pelican glide low over the water. Can't find it on YouTube, but the second track, "Capitao Do Asfalto," (below) is also quite brilliant. After that, the album becomes less interesting, basically a bunch of percussion workouts, but these two tracks are both amazing in their own way.

90's Hit Parade #22

2011-10-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

De La Soul - A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturdays

1991 seemed like a disappointing year at the time. A lot of new albums from bands that had put out really hot albums in the previous year or two that failed to live up to expectations. What was interesting was that they all failed in such similar ways. Long, sprawling, directionless albums whose momentum was held up by countless skits and filler bits. Everyone was making their "White Album." I remember hanging with my friend Ric, and he put a bunch of new CD's in the CD changer, and somehow they all kept landing on the skits and intros and outros, for like 15 minutes. Needless to say, I was not entertained.

Well, De La Soul is Dead gets better with a little perspective. In fact, a lot of what I disliked about it initially is what I like about it now. The skits, digressions and seemingly unfinished songs add to the album. Recurring bits, like the samples and bites from Slick Rick's "La Di Da Di" that turn up throughout, serve the same role as recurring themes in classical compositions. Once you get your head around it, it's actually a very cohesive work of art.

The standout, of course, is "Saturdays." I've put it on almost every party mix I've ever made. Constructed from at least half a dozen disco samples, it's as perfect a party track as has ever been recorded, a pumping, danceable record but also loose and relaxed.

Psychedelicatessen Radio, Season 2, Episode 1: Horseplay

2011-10-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

Download the motherfucker!

NOW HEAR THIS! This Tuesday, October 18, Bobbie Oliver and Sally Mullins (the two funniest daughters o' bitches in L.A.) will be taking over the Flappers main room. Sally will do at least 30 minutes of comedy, followed by an hour of Bobbie! It's free, and we're taping to make DVD's, so come on out and lend your support while enjoying a great show. Flappers has really good food and drinks, too, by the way.

In preparation, here's the latest episode of Psychedelicatessen Radio, where you can hear Bobbie and Sally (and Chris Schumacher and myself) talk about deep topics like horse porn and ass-to-mouth. OK, it gets a little intense, but worth it to hear Sally's theories about KISS and Chris' feelings about the Valley. While we're at it , here's some Bobbie and Sally:

90's Hit Parade #23

2011-10-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

Guided by Voices - Weedking

So we've determined that Smashing Pumpkins are my favorite big-time 90's rock band, which begs the question, who are my favorite small-time 90's indie band? At the time, without hesitation, I would have chosen The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but now, for the band that really stuck with me through the years, I gotta give it to GbV. The bottomless well of amazing pop songs, the experimentation with tape noise and other "lo-fi" sounds, the haphazard way there albums are seemingly slapped together, all give them a mysterious aura. When you listen to a GbV album, it's easy to fantasize that you're listening to some mysterious relic you found on a dubbed cassette that was for some reason in the bin at Goodwill.

"Weedking" is not what I think of as a typical GbV song. What most often comes to mind are straightahead pop songs with tight Buzzcocks-like harmonies: "Hardcore UFO's," "Quality of Armour," "Echos Myron," "Game of Pricks," "My Impression Now." "Weedking" is more of a heavy psychedelic rock thing. Like a lot of their songs, rather than a verse-chorus-verse structure, it cycles through phases, new hooks being introduced every few bars. It begins with heavy mystic shit: "Long live rockathon/Offspring and Tagalongs were finding/The history book has lost its binding/Pages everywhere/Two Titans without care will read them/We conjure ghosts and then we'll feed them." Is it just babble? Probably, but it sure sounds like it means something, the images possessing a powerful, mythical iconography like Tarot cards. The song builds, then abruptly cuts off, leaving the listener to imagine the brilliant guitar solos that fill the rest of the missing tape.

90's Hit Parade #24

2011-10-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

The Breeders - Cannonball

Jesus, this whole thing is starting to wear on me. I'm starting to get the temptation to just quit. But we're almost done. Past the 3/4 mark! So this song is like the archetypal 90's "alternative rock" hit, innit? Its' fantastically catchy, it ROCKS, but it's also quite weird, with all these odd elements that cycle in and out. It's structured almost like a hip hop track in that respect: you could imagine putting this together out of samples in Vegas or Acid or whatever you use. The guitar comes in for four bars, disappears for four bars, comes back again for four more. Crank it up, dude!

90's Hit Parade #25

2011-10-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

Luscious Jackson - Strongman/Energy Sucker

Funny how I can generate so many paragraphs on Smashing Pumpkins, who, as awesome as they are, I never really thought about a lot, but I'm not sure what to say about this pair of groovy tunes that I included on about 75 mixtapes in the late 90's/early 00's. Mostly, I find myself just wanting to talk about how hot the two singers are: gorgeous Jill Cunniff on bass and sassy Gabby Glaser on guitar. I always loved how their two voices interact. These two funky feminist joints are by far the highlight of their debut album, Natural Ingredients. I especially love the slinky groove on "Strongman," with bongos and flute providing the 70's sabor. Then that weird stretchy noise (could be extreme whammy-bar manipulation on guitar, but sounds more like a record being slowly "scratched" back and forth, or a reel-to-reel tape being manipulated) on "Energy Sucker" over the hard drums. They had some other great stuff to. The album started off with a good single, "Citysong," which had a nice video, and ended with this cool dub track called "LP Retreat" (not on Youtube). But the one other real killer they had was off their first EP, In Search of Manny. The video below is poor quality (probably off an old 120 Minutes VHS), but behold the greatness of "Daughters of the KAOS," below. P.S. the only video of "Energy Sucker online is this Power Rangers fan vid. The comments are hilarious. Apparantly, people have very strong opinions about Power Rangers.

Bonus Beat:

90's Hit Parade #26

2011-09-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

So I've been thinking about it (obviously), and I've decided that Smashing Pumpkins are my favorite of the big "alternative rock" bands of the 90's. Nothing against Nirvana, they're a kick ass band, but not really one of my favorites. Don't particularly like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden are OK but a bit too slick and stiff, Red Hot Chili Peppers already had their best days behind them by the time they hit it big, and I think most people would agree that Green Day, Offspring, Alice in Chains, No Doubt, etc. were second-stringers. The real competition would be Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails and Hole. Hole's Live Through This is probably my favorite album of that era, but they never really followed it up with anything as good. Rage are awesome, but let's face it, they make music for 16-year-olds. I like to crank up a few Rage songs now and then and feel 16 again, but it's not like I listen to them a lot. And while NIN probably have the most impressive body of work, I never quite warmed to that goth/industrial sound. So Smashing Pumpkins win by default. (I do prefer Jane's Addiction, but I think of them separately--if I remember correctly, they were already in the process of breaking up when Nevermind was topping the charts.)

Which is a funny conclusion, because while I always liked the band, I've never spent a lot of time thinking about them, and until this year didn't actually own any of their albums (I have since corrected this via iTunes). But their first three (maybe even four) albums form a pretty impressive body of work that represents the era well. When I first heard their first record, I remember thinking they sounded a lot like Jane's Addiction. In fact, that's what everyone thought, which is funny because nobody thinks that anymore. We just think of them as Smashing Pumpkins. But it's a great stoner rock album, veering back and forth between Blue Cheer-style heavy metal mayhem and dreamy, mellow psychedelia all while keeping a steady acid groove. It's repetitive, but I find it enjoyable throughout. They kicked it up a notch on Siamese Dream, keeping the heavy metal stuff but adding a knack for writing great radio-friendly pop songs in the Pixies/Cheap Trick vein, and a note of morose sulking courtesy of The Cure and Depeche Mode. And it all worked together, made a great sound and a really impressive album. And then we get to Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which is not so much an album as a monumental act of hubris.

Melon Collie is, in some ways, the final statement of the "grunge" era, which I always think of as consisting of kids who grew up on 70's classic rock, then got rid of all their old albums when they got into punk, then a few years later remembered that they really did like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, and began trying to reconcile the two schools. Melon Collie is the final rejection of the idea that one must choose, that if you like The Ramones you have to hate Yes (or whatever). If anything, it rejects the whole punk rock ideology and attempts to one-up Physical Graffiti and Tales from Topographic Oceans. I'm tempted to say that it's impossible to make a good album with 28 songs, but then I remember Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. But what you definitely cannot do is make a great album consisting of 6 different versions of the same 5 songs, which is pretty much what I hear on Melon Collie. So, yeah, the album is WAY too long, but the high points are pretty impressive. (Also, props to Billy and the gang for having the self-control to save the best single, "1979," for the last quarter of the album.)

Right off the bat, they tell you what they're aiming for, starting the album off with an epic instrumental that leads into this sweeping, string-driven power ballad. Then, in case you think they've forgotten how to rock, they pummel your face in with "Jelly Belly," "Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings." "Bullet," the lead single, is one of those songs that sounds great the first 20 times, and then starts to annoy you and you never want to hear it again, but at least in concept it's an amazing rock song, with a chorus that combines a headbanging rhythm worthy of vintage AC/DC with classic punk lyrics that could be on an old Black Flag album: "Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage." Teenage angst and frustration blasted through the radio waves so succinctly that I'm almost jealous of the kids who heard this when they were 15. And that same attitude is there on "Tonight, Tonight," conjuring an army of Holden Caufields out to "Crucify the insincere." (Sounds like the militant terrorist wing of the cult of The Great Pumpkin!)

Not only is this a beautiful song, but it's got a great video, one that really compliments the song with it's steampunk recreation of George Meilles' A Trip to the Moon. One of my favorite (like, top 5 at least) videos of all time.

90's Hit Parade #27

2011-09-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

Ween - Frank

Ween's The Pod is maybe the ultimate stoner album. Not just in the sense of listening to it, but in the sense of it being so obviously made by stoners. It's so half-assed, way too long, lots of stupid humor, and lots of obsession over food. And it's awesome.

This song...just wow. So heavy. It's like a dense, dark chocolate cake. The guitar riff almost reminds me of Joe Walsh. This is one of two songs on the album with a chorus about porkroll egg and cheese, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about it.

90's Hit Parade #28

2011-09-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

Public Enemy - I Don't Wanna Be Called Yo Nigga

This isn't my favorite Public Enemy song (we'll get to it), but it is my favorite Flavor Flav song, so I figured I'd include it. This song is just butt funky. I always picture big, fat women doin' the butt dance when I hear it. Incredibly catchy chorus--it took an incredible act of will to not go around singing it in public (seriously, black people--if you want us to stop using that word, you need to stop making it sound so damn good!)

Antithesis:

Ice T - Straight Up Nigga

I was obsessed with this album when it came out. It sounds pretty dated now. I should dedicate a whole post to Ice-T at some point, after I get this stupid countdown done. But for now, a good response to Flav.

Synthesis:

A Tribe Called Quest - Sucka Nigga

Q-Tip attempts to bridge the gap here. His head is with PE, his heart is wtih Ice-T. Or his eyes say "no no no," but his lips say "nigga nigga nigga."

90's Hit Parade #29

2011-09-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

Phish - Train Song

That's right, TWO PHISH SONGS MOTHERFUCKER! YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT?

The train song is a classic American motif, and this is a fine one, a beautiful Appalachian melody sung in a high lonesome falsetto, with the sort of stoner imagery you'd expect from a group of travelin' hippies (I especially like the bit about passing the drive-in movie). Makes me think of sitting in a backyard in Athens, GA on a summer night watching fireflies and drinking some dude's terrible homebrew.

For some reason, I connect it with this song as well:

90's Hit Parade #30

2011-09-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

Notorious B.I.G. - Party and Bullshit

A recurring theme in this countdown is how I've belatedly come to appreciate a lot of mid-90's rap like The Chronic and Nas that I didn't pay much attention to at the time. And here is my most egregious oversight. I guess Puffy's glitzy R-n-B grooves didn't appeal to me at the time, as I was still waiting for someone to one-up The Bomb Squad, so I never really listened to Biggie, even when he was within earshot. When I started hearing him lauded as one of the greatest MC's of all time shortly after his death, I chalked it up to post-mortem hyperbole. Then, maybe a decade ago, I got an mp3 of this song off of some blog and finally HEARD it. And I can't believe what I'd been missing.

Now, compared to, say, a Chuck D or Kool Moe Dee or someone, Biggie doesn't sound like he's trying that hard. If you listen, there's a lot of clever shit going on there, and he projects it like a motherfucker, but it just sounds effortless. There are some musicians who claim they don't know where their music comes from, that it just comes through them like the Holy Spirit. I bet that's how Biggie felt. Like, you ever hear that quote from Michaelangelo, that he looks at a slab of marble and just chips away everything that's not the sculpture? That's how perfect this rap feels, like every word is just the exact right word to go in that spot, and all Biggie had to do was say the right words. There's a zen to the way he fits it all right in the pocket, and there's also a bouncy thing going on, which might be why this particular song appeals to me so much. That boppity beat fits Biggie's bouncy lyrics so well that it feels like one thing: the bounce of the beat, the bounce of the lyrics, the bounce of the fat rolls under his shirt, all one big, perfect motion.

By the way, the sample source for that chorus:

90's Hit Parade #31

2011-09-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

Heavenly - Hearts and Crosses

This is one of those songs that I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard it. Unfortunately, it's not an interesting story--I was driving down a back road that would take a long time to explain where it was--so I will have to write about the actual song. I guess this is an example of the sub-genre of indie pop known as "twee?" A disturbing, angry song that's all the more unsettling for being played as a happy, catchy little pop tune with a cheesy Casio keyboard.

There's a Hole in my Bucket List

2011-09-06T14:20:00.000-07:00

One day from seeing The Motherfuckin' Stooges, and Iggy breaks his foot. Consolation prize: photos of the band playing at Farmington High School in Michigan in 1970 (via Doug Wolk).

90's Hit Parade #32

2011-09-06T13:33:00.000-07:00

Getting very near the end! I hadn't counted on the fact that doing these two entries a week was going to keep me from posting much else, but I feel like I'm close now. This should be done right around the end of the year, so in the first weeks of 2012, expect a few round up posts (favorite TV of 2011, etc.), and reviews of some of the books I've been reading (pretty much all non-fiction this year) and a few other things that I can't really get to right now. Then I'll start finishing up the Best Films of the 00's list (I'm into the top 20, so they're all films I have plenty to say about, just need time to say it). Anyway, back to the Hit Parade...

Tad - High on the Hog

In the Mudhoney chapter of This Band Could Be Your Life, there is much discussion of how Mudhoney got fucked over by the UK music press, who portrayed the band as a group of psychotic, backwoods hillbillies, then a year later ran exposes claiming that the band were not, in fact, crazed, backwoods hillbillies (which they'd never claimed to be), it was all an act! As far as I can tell, however, Mudhoney's labelmates TAD really WERE crazed, backwoods hillbillies who got their kicks ingesting copious amounts of mushrooms and Jack Daniels and rampaging through the Idaho wilderness in monster trucks. And by recording some of the rawest, most brutal RAAAAAWWK!!! music ever put to vinyl. Their 6-song Saltlick ep from 1990 is, to my ears, the best thing recorded in the whole northeastern SubPop grrrrrunge cavalcade (well, except maybe some of the late 80's Mudhoney stuff) (later Tad records suffer from the same law of diminishing returns that gets most metal bands, and they start to sound more like Helmet than, uh, a bunch of crazed backwoods hillbillies wigging out on mushrooms and Jack Daniels). "High on the Hog" stands out to me because it sounds like classic blooze rawk. You could almost hear, I dunno, Ted Nugent or Black Oak Arkansas doing this song. But it leads into the maniacally noisy "Wood Goblins," so I tacked that one up just for good measure.

90's Hit Parade #33

2011-09-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

Beck - Mixed Bizness

It's difficult to pick a song off Midnight Vultures, Beck's "sex album." Side one especially is solid killer tracks, but I think this disco dancefloor burner stands out even in the crowded pack, and it's a standard on my party mixes. Midnight Vultures is maybe to Prince what Ziggy Stardust is to the Stones: all those sexy moves get filtered through Beck's Gen X irony machine, so you basically get Prince surrounded by air quotes. Beck's lyrics are as profoundly silly as they were on "Loser": lines like "You make a garbage man scream" and "I wanna defy the logic of all sex laws" and "She looks so Israeli" and some shit about Zankou Chicken. It's all about pairing up and gettin' busy, and throughout the album Beck stays busy pairing up peaches with cream, milk with honey, nicotine with gravy and, here, bizness with pleasure. Freaks flock together, baby! And local shopping malls receive anonymous calls (I don't even know what that means, I just love that line)!

90's Hit Parade #34

2011-08-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

Bjork - Headphones

I remember reading in SPIN or something at the time that Bjork wrote "Headphones" as for "her boyfriend, Tricky." According to wikipedia, it was actually written to Graham Massey (of 808 State, collaborator on much of Post), "as a thank you for his mix-tapes." But it was indeed produced by Tricky (who also remixed it for the subsequent remix album), so maybe it was written with Tricky, and I misread it. Bjork herself (again, according to wiki) calls it "a love letter to sound. The sound of sound."

So it's a song about falling asleep listening to music on your headphones, and it seems to be designed specifically to be listened to on headphones while falling asleep. The lyrics are the most abstract on the album, and they become less coherent as they go on, observing her own reactions to the music: "These abstract wordless movements/They start off cells that haven't been touched before...I don't recognize myself/This is very interesting." All the while, these round little percussive sounds bounce around behind her. If you've ever fallen asleep with headphones on, gradually losing consciousness of the music as it ceases to be something separate from yourself, you can relate.

Bonus Beat:

Bjork - Human Behavior

A classic 120 Minutes video. This is one of those rare videos that not only goes perfectly with the song, but actually elevates the song. I wish I could explain why, something about the surreal visuals and the way they seem to respond to the rhythm of the song. I looks like something that might be on the TV in a room you enter in your dream. It's a great song, but I swear it's not quite as good when I hear it absent the video.

90's Hit Parade #35

2011-08-28T19:54:00.001-07:00

Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name

One of the most overplayed songs of the decade: I'd wager that the first 45 seconds of "Killing in the Name" are more recognizable than the opening chords of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." But Rage totally earn that place in the 90's canon. They just tower above the lame funk-metal bands like Living Colour and 24-7 Spyz that people thought were hot shit back then, and nobody remembers now. For one thing, Rage understand metal. Tom Morello does what great metal guitarists do: he makes memorable, heavy riffs. His style of duplicating the Public Enemy "buzz" sound uses techniques similar to those Eddie Van Halen used to make the cool sounds on his classic heavy metal records, then he'll drop a crushing Black Sabbath-style riff into the mix. For another thing, they understand funk--check out that walking bassline on "Guerrilla Radio"and try to imagine anything that cool on a Korn record. It's unpossible! And "Killing in the Name" stands out as a great fucking rock-n-roll record, especially in that amazing moment after the guitar solo, when the whole song is climaxing/falling apart while Zach chants "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me" until the band comes back in even harder, backing up the fuck you chant. Not only that, but they kept the pace up for three LP's, if anything getting better and harder as they went on.

Funky Tuba

2011-08-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

If your kid gets assigned tuba in marching band, and they think it's an uncool instrument, show them this. "Voodoo Chile" kicks in around the 4:00 mark. You can find the studio album, Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix, here, courtesy of Mining the Audio Motherlode. Quite enjoying this.

90's Hit Parade #36

2011-08-23T10:29:00.003-07:00

The Drive-By Truckers - Late for Church

Back in 1998, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley hadn't yet developed into the great songwriters they would become (they hit their mark with 2000's Southern Rock Opera). Fortunately, they had a secret weapon in bassist Adam Howell, who contributed this beautiful little tune to their debut album. A classic slacker anthem set in the milieu of gorgeous Appalachian folk music, perfect for sitting on the porch eatin' boiled peanuts and drinking beer on a lazy Sunday afternoon. And when the harmonies kick in on the "I am an angel" chorus...damn, you just never heard anything so beautiful. I probably won't get a second entry up this week, maybe I'll double up next week.

90

2011-08-23T10:29:00.001-07:00

90's Hit Parade, #37

2011-08-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

Ice Cube - You Can't Fade Me

I tried to pick a different Ice Cube song. I really did. I listened repeatedly to his three early 90's albums (not that that's any great sacrifice--AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, Death Certificate and Predator comprise one of the best three-album stretches in history), but this song is just the epitome of Ice Cube-ness. Yes, this is the one with the line "What I ought to do is kick the bitch in the tummy." It's a disturbing song (although the line is not quite as harsh in the context of the song as when it's pulled out by itself), one that I'm not very comfortable with (which might be the point), and one that was controversial even among the hip hop community of the time for its seething misogyny and violence. I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about it in terms of "violence against women"--for Ice Cube's character, violence is an acceptable way of dealing with anyone, probably the ONLY acceptable medium of human interaction (or at least the only one worth writing lyrics about). This particular song at least sets up some tension: his instinct is to kill the woman, but he knows he can't get away with it. Cube casts himself as the victim here, and I don't doubt that grifters like his female nemesis actually exist (the song may even be based on first-person experience). I see it more as a portrait of an ugly world than an expression of misogyny, but I say that without trying to obscure the misogynist worldview that supports every line of the story.

Speaking of streaks, it's also worth noting that Most Wanted was produced by Public Enemy's production crew, The Bomb Squad, the same year as Fear of a Black Planet (my favorite album of all time). "Cant' Fade Me" is track 5 on Most Wanted, "Welcome to the Terrordome" is track 5 on Black Planet, both are the highlights of their respective albums, so it's perhaps worth comparing.

Fear of a Black Planet starts slow, the sample collage "Contract on the World Love Jam" slowly forming out of wind sounds, revealing a slow, funky beat that finally hardens as it transitions into the mid-tempo "Brothers Gonna Work it Out." Momentum builds through the James Brown funk of "911 is a Joke" and the taught collage "Incident at 66.6 FM," then the floodgates open up and the group lets loose with the full-speed "Welcome to the Terrordome." Chuck D is at his best when he's working at this car chase speed, throwing his complex lyrics at the listener faster than the ear can process them.

AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted starts out full speed, with (following the opening skit) "The Nigga You Love to Hate" and "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" back to back (you can tell the song changes from the brief skit that separates them). Cube is doing Chuck D a bit here (the line "(I'll) never tell you to get down, it's all about comin' up" is a classic bit of Chuck D-style wordplay), but Cube relates to Chuck roughly the same way young Mick Jagger related to Bob Dylan: Chuck's rhymes come from his frontal cortex, Cube's come directly from his dick. On track 4, "What They Hittin' Foe?" the beat drops down to a mid-tempo hard funk, and you feel Cube slide into his wheelhouse. This beat fits his voice. He can throw syllables like punches on the beats. The violence and swagger of Ice Cube comes out hard and percussive. In this mode, he sounds more like KRS-One than Chuck D. "What They Hittin' Foe?" goes by too quickly (1:22, to be exact), then Cube yells "Kick an old school beat," and "You Can't Fade Me" starts up. Now we're even further into the bucking beat, a little smoother, and even more suited to Ice Cube's voice (the next song, "Once Upon a Time in the Projects," goes even further into his territory, but I don't think he rises to the occasion quite as well). As Cube unfolds his ugly little story, we get a clear picture of his character, his violence, his pride, his world. And all the time, this incredible rhythmic performance, his raps functioning not only as the vocal but almost as another drum track. When he talks about kicking the bitch in the tummy, you feel the kick.

Wednesday, August 17, 8:30 pm, Ice House Annex

2011-08-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

Come on out for a night of improvisational comedy!

90's Hit Parade #38

2011-08-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

Jane's Addiction - Been Caught Stealing

Jane's Addiction were (along with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone) constants among my social circle during my college years in the late 80's/early 90's. But there was always some discomfort with this song, as often happens when people spend several years thinking of a band as the emblem of their outcast subculture and suddenly see them embraced by the mainstream (and this was just a hint of what would happen with Nirvana less than a year later). The first time I heard "Been Caught Stealing" blasting out of a frat house, I was a bit shocked, but I think the negative reaction is completely wrong. In fact, what's awesome about this song is precisely that it was a hit. Think about it: this is a song about shoplifting that got played on the radio and MTV, that became a big hit, that everyone was listening to. That's so much more subversive than whatever purist underground music you're championing. I mean, people still get pissed off about people "stealing" music on the internet. This is a song about actually stealing actual THINGS! I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty damn cool. (Embedding disabled on the official video, but here it is if you want it.)

Notes on Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

2011-08-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

While not a great movie by any means, Rise of the Planet of the Apes succeeds as summer entertainment because it actually delivers what it promises: an army of killer apes going on a rampage in San Francisco and fucking people up. It probably should have been more violent (I'll get to that in a minute), but it really gave me something I've always wanted to see.

There's not a lot of original thought in Rise. Like Avatar, it seems to be a quilt stitched together from scenes, shots and dialogue from other movies (the first half of the film seems almost directly transposed from last year's horror flick Splice). But unlike Avatar, it didn't bore me. The trick, I suppose, is that it made me feel the plight of the apes. I would also add that director Rupert Wyatt has a gift for capturing images that just look cool. They're mostly looted from every other film ever made, but the movie looks great, especially once the ape uprising begins. The classic western image of Injuns rising from over a hill on the horizon looks so much cooler when the Injuns in question are apes. And central to the film is one brilliant image, the one used over and over in the ad campaign, that serves to represent the whole film in a singular moment. I probably don't need to explain further (you've seen the image even if you haven't seen the movie), but it's that shot where Cesar is looking at Brian Cox through the glass of his cage, giving him a blank ape look, then turns around and let's us see a face that displays not only intelligence, but violent rage suppressed into grim determination. This is also the most unintentionally funny scene in the movie. Brian Cox happens upon the apes doing some sort of organized exercise, stops for a minute to watch them...and then just shrugs and goes on with his day. "Apes forming an army, that's a funny thing, eh? Ah well, doty-doty-doh."

I should mention that I'm not really a huge fan of any of the original movies. I mean, I like them and all, they're fine scifi films, but they've never been holy texts to me or anything. In the original prequels (Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the latter of which mirrors the plot of Rise) the stories were parables for the civil rights movement, and some of that carries over to Rise, but it's removed from the social context. Maybe the struggle still continues today, but it certainly doesn't look like it did in the 60's. The original apes films were made when America was still pretty much a battlefield, and those themes resonated with the audience. In 2011, I don't think the images of an ape being sprayed with a firehose, or snarled at by a police dog, or of police in riot gear lining a bridge, have the same resonance for the audience, but the filmmakers seem to think there's something there, and even have Cesar stop a gorilla from killing a police officer, marking him as a stand-in for Martin Luther King. (Again, seems like a huge misstep. My recollection of Conquest is fuzzy, but Wikipedia tells me that during that uprising, the apes killed plenty of cops. This one could certainly have used more blood.) I was trying to square this in my mind when I saw an image that did look familiar from recent memory: the police collectively turning and running from the apes. It reminded me of video I saw last year (can't seem to find that particular clip on YouTube, but here's a similar video) of Iranian riot police turning and running from crowds of protesters. These Hollywood films are made with an eye toward international distribution, and considering all the unrest in the Arab/Muslim world (and elsewhere, in places like Burma), maybe this story will find some some resonance overseas that it can't quite connect with here. (For reference, compare the photo above of riot police assaulting the marchers on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, with the one below of a similar march in Cairo, Egypt from earlier this year.)

Finally, I didn't particularly like the ending. The apes all go off to live peacefully in Muir Woods? Well, it's doubtful that they'll be allowed to do that (despite Cesar's pacifist impulses, they've left a lot of destruction and at least a small body count behind). The military will probably be in to wipe them out soon enough. Or, I suppose, they will be needed for more cruel medical experiments to produce a vaccine to counteract the virus that will be spreading around the globe by the time the second film starts. Regardless, I didn't like this upbeat, pastoral ending. I saw a better one. Cesar should have died in the battle, and with him the pacifist approach to the ape revolution. The apes escape, and after Cesar's dramatic death scene, we see the ugly ass ape from the research lab with the huge chip on his shoulder become the alpha. MLK has been replaced by Malcolm X, and the war between ape and human is on. (I loved the design of that ape, by the way. There's one scene where we see him walking through the crowd during the riots that reminds me of Banksy's caveman image.)

Final thought: is that Draco Malfoy kid doomed to play mean little assholes for the rest of his career?

90's Hit Parade #39

2011-08-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

Fishbone - Housework

There are certain sounds that I have an almost fetish-like love for. No matter how mediocre the material, if the Ramones are playing anthemic punk rock, if Black Sabbath is cranking out slow, heavy riffage, if the Beastie Boys are rapping, I'm happy. I'll gladly listen to the worst Holwin' Wolf blues record you can dig up. And as lame and annoying as Fishbone got, as much padding as they filled out their sprawling records with, as corny as their attempts at humor sometimes were, as lunkheaded as their political anthems could be, if they start playing ska, to this day my ears prick up.

Reality of My Surroundings is considered by some a high point of their career. I think the album's too damn long, and contains a lot of just bad stuff ("Fight the Youth" is exhibit A, and that "If I Were a...I'd" shit keeps fucking up the flow of the album). I think of it together with all the other overlong, disappointing follow-ups of 1991 (Red Hot Chili Peppers' Bloodsugarsexmagic, Public Enemy's Apocalypse '91: The Enemy Strikes Back, De La Soul is Dead...although I have certainly reversed my position on that one...lame records by Butthole Surfers, Ministry, I forget what else). But I'll readily admit there are some real gems buried on it, none better than "Housework," which is almost the platonic ideal of a Fishbone song: the bouncy, manic ska, the dixieland horn jam, the breakdown into 3/4, that cool piano that kicks it off...all just perfect!

Bonus Bonin':

90's Hit Parade #40

2011-08-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band - Old School

I included this on my best of the 00's post, but it's actually from late '99, so I'm double dipping. If you like the funky, second-line music on HBO's Treme, this captures that New Orleans feel better than anything I've ever heard, and keeps it up for an epic 12 minutes! Horns blast, drums thump, and the whole things sways back and forth like a drunk trying to find his way home from Bourbon Street. This is one of my favorite long-form jams, maybe right behind "Sister Ray."

90's Hit Parade #41

2011-08-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

Eric B and Rakim - Don't Sweat the Technique

Rakim stood out from his peers (Chuck D, KRS-One, Big Daddy Kane) for his Miles Davis-cool delivery. When the others were working at being as hard as possible, Rakim was laying back, his flow rough but calm. So it makes sense that he would eventually start rhyming over jazz samples. But the duo's use of jazz is nothing like A Tribe Called Quest or Digable Planets. The samples come fast and dissonant. Compared to the Bomb Squad production on Public Enemy records, it's relatively simple and uncluttered, but it has the same effect of overwhelming the senses, and centers Rakim's voice as the calm in the eye of the storm.

Top 50 Films of the 00's, Part 5 (25-21)

2011-08-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

25. Once (John Carney, 2006)
Two musicians meet in Dublin. They form a friendship, collaborate on some music, maybe fall in love, and in the end, go their separate ways. Not really a typical musical plot, and the music isn't really typical of musicals either, being mostly low-key, folky ballads. In fact, there's really nothing quite like Once, which takes the aesthetic of a small indie film and sets it to beautiful music. It just feels...right. There's something about the chemistry of the two musicians, the process of working together to create a song, the way their voices suddenly meld together in the film's signature song "Falling Slowly," that's beautiful in its own right while still being a nice little metaphor for, you know, doin' the honkity-bonkity.

24. The American Astronaut (Corey McAbee, 2001)

I stopped going to midnight movies around the time I turned 30. Can't stay awake through them anymore. But if I was gonna sit in a cold, damp theater after midnight to watch an oddball movie with a receptive crowd, the movie I'd want to watch is The American Astronaut. Written, directed and starring Cory McAbee, head of the indie band The Bill Nayer Show, who contributed all the music, TAA is an offbeat scifi musical filmed in high-contrast black and white on cheap sets. Like most rock operas, the plot doesn't make a lot of sense, but in this case that's a feature more than a bug, as the story unfolds in a strange dream logic, like something you'd dream after falling asleep while watching an old 50's scifi flick on late night TV. But unlike most rock operas, or for that matter most musicals, the songs are all great: solid, memorable, and extremely catchy. If you did watch this at a midnight movie, you'd remember all the songs the next day.

23. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003)
The challenge of filming Lord of the Rings is unusual. Making a movie that the target audience has been picturing in their head for 10, 20, 30 years? Yeah, no pressure there, right? The books themselves aren't all that great as literature. Their strength is in how completely they present an immersive world that young dreamers can lose themselves in. It even has maps! (I personally prefer The Hobbit, the story of this guy who just wants to live a quiet life and eat a lot, suddenly pulled into this world of adventure and dragons and magic rings.)

It was no surprise to me that Peter Jackson could pull it off, despite having done nothing on this scale yet. He had obvious talent, as demonstrated by Heavenly Creatures (one of my favorite films), and the rest of his filmography demonstrated all the requisite traits for carrying out such a project: attention to detail, commitment to concepts (and to taking ideas as far as they could possibly go), and a fascination with practical effects. And the results of Jackson and his team's effort is almost frighteningly satisfying.

The films sometimes even improve on the source material. One example: reading the books, I never liked the fact that Legolas fights exclusively with a bow and arrow, even in close-quarter, hand-to-hand combat. It just seemed silly, like he ought to have a long sword for this stuff. But the choreography in the films convinces me, especially in the scene in Fellowship of the Ring where Legolas fires an arrow at an orc, then grabs another one and, in one fluid motion, stabs another orc in the eye with the arrow, loads it into a bow and shoots down a third orc.

Another fantastic scene is the lighting of the beacons. This scene is in the books, but do you remember it? Well, if you're the type to have read the books 30 times growing up, you probably do. (I never really got through the whole thing when I was a kid, and finally sat down to read them as the movies were getting made. As an adolescent, I always preferred the Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melnibone series, where they'd get right to the violence and monsters instead of having 20 page descriptions of the woods.) But for most, it's not a scene you'd spend a lot of time thinking about. Seeing it, you are overwhelmed by the scale, the incredible distance represented by the path of the beacons, the idea of soldiers whose sole job it is to sit in a station high atop the Misty Mountains awaiting the sign.

So: Extended cut or theatrical cut? Well, for Fellowship of the Ring, I could go either way. The theatrical cut is probably better for newcomers, and contains as much as you really need of the story. The extended cut is for the fans, who just want to spend a little more time in this world. For The Two Towers, you really need the extended cut. TTT just contains too much story. In the theatrical cut, it feels crowded, jumping from plot point to plot point with no room to breathe: thishappenedandthenthishappenedandthenthishappened... For Return of the King, I'll take the theatrical. You lose that great scene with Saruman and Wormtongue, but the movie is too long to begin with (although probably better paced than the book, which goes on for 100 pages after the climax, with all that shit about The Gray Havens).

22. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black, 2005)
In Shane Black's reflexive film noir tribute/sendup, Robert Downey Jr. plays Harry Lockhart, a small-time thief (classic film noir character) who suddenly finds himself cast as an actor in a crime thriller, and subsequently finds himself living through his own noir adventure. The funniest bits regard Harry's constant frustration at the world's stubborn refusal to follow the rules of movie cliches. Shane Black, of course, has a good view from which to write such comedy. He got very rich writing lousy blockbuster action movies in the 80's and 90's before going into exile from which he finally emerged to direct his own script, and a lot of the comedy is directed at himself, the Hollywood process and the movies that ended up being made from his scripts. And of course, KKBB has the advantage of having Robert Downey Jr., a brilliant character actor with enough charisma to be a leading man, doing some of his best work with a great foil to bounce off of in Val Kilmer, a once popular but rather dull leading man who has recreated himself as a brilliant character actor.

21. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi, 2007)
Coming of age is always a bit difficult, but coming of age in post-revolution Iran is a whole other story. Marjane Satrapi first published her memoir in the form of a French language comic book in 2000, then adapted it into this French-language animated film in 2007. The story of a sass-mouthed young girl growing up in a repressive society where everyone is constantly watched, and finding escape through Michael Jackson and Iron Maiden, is illustrated with a beautiful combination of Persian art and cartoon motifs. Persian friends have told me that this is as accurate a portrayal of growing up in Iranian society as they have ever seen. What makes it so awesome is that, even in the darkest, most repressive days of Iran's history, Marjane still sees the world as a teenage girl, and tells her story with playful humor even as the bodies are stacking up, in a way that never feels false (compare to the awful attempt at a holocaust comedy in Life is Beautiful, which never feels anything BUT false).

90's Hit Parade #42

2011-08-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

Rev. Horton Heat - Liquor, Beer and Wine

OK, first of all, let me say that if you're going to buy one Horton Heat album, it should be his third LP, Full Custom Gospel Sounds (produced by Gibby of Butthole Surfers). This song is from his fourth album, Liquor in the Front (produced by Al Jourgenson of Ministry). Heat is a fine guitarist and a strong frontman, but his rockabilly schtick gets old pretty fast (and even faster when he attempts some kind of lounge singer act on songs like "It's Martini Time"). But I do think this pitch-perfect country song hits the spot. I'm not exactly sure how to sub-classify it, though. It sounds kinda like a hybrid of western swing and honky tonk, but I'm hardly an expert on country and western subgenres.

90's Hit Parade #46 (Revised)

2011-07-31T17:35:00.000-07:00

Redd Kross - Elephant Flares

As the 90's began, the 70's seemed like a strange joke. The loud, silly fashions, gimmicky bands like KISS and The Village People, pet rocks, even Nixon and Carter all seemed too weird to have actually happened, yet we could all remember having grown up around it. Those things all had happy, childhood memories attached to them. So there was a strange mixture of nostalgic warmth and ironic chuckling in the 70's parties and disco nights and KISS covers. This mixture is perhaps the defining (and damning) aspect of our generation. It brings to mind annoying hipsters and childish nostalgia-addicts, but maybe it's not all bad. The ridiculousness of the 70's ensured that we couldn't quite romanticize the decade the way previous generations romanticized the 50's and 60's.

Redd Kross made this goofy nostalgia their stock in trade, not only on their albums but in cinematic side projects like Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and Spirit of '76. The latter featured David Cassidy as a time-traveler from the future who ends up in 1976, where his guides are the MacDonald brothers (the core members of Redd Kross), and is nothing but one long 70's joke. The soundtrack included a new Redd Kross song, "1976," which featured a dead-on Paul Stanley impersonation for no reason at all. This all seemed really cool when these guys were just about the only people doing it. By the end of the decade, Redd Kross' whole schtick would be a hit TV show.

"Elephant Flares" is all hooks, like one of those Desmond Childe compositions that Bon Jovi was topping the charts with at about the same time. It's even got three choruses, all of them catchy, but of course the best one, the one that makes it a bona fide summer classic is "Cruisin' down the highway in my Trans Am/Custom T-top down/Hear some BTO/Playin' on the radio." I've had existential crises over whether it's really healthy to dig the irony-rich not-quite-parodies that Redd Kross specializes in, but when I've got this cranked up in my car on a hot day, I feel no guilt.

Anyway, couldn't find this on YouTube, so I just embedded the audio, but here's one from the same album:

And it's analog:

90's Hit Parade #43

2011-07-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

Beastie Boys - Negotiation Limerick File

Before we begin, I'd like to point everyone toward a recent post at the Just One Song More tumblr, and in particular the song "Fol the Rol Lol" by Edward M. Favor (the mp3 is here, the text explaining it is here). Like our entry here, "Fol the Rol Lol" is composed entirely of limericks, so the Beasties are working in extremely old school mode here. I like the idea of building a rap song out of limericks. It sounds so natural, in fact, that if not for the title I doubt I'd have made the connection. But that gimmick isn't really why I include this song among my favorite Beasties tracks. I just love the sound of it. It's so warm and inviting, soulful and almost pastoral compared to the urban sound of most NYC hip hop. This actually gets the summertime sound better than Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's classic "Summertime."

90;s Hit Parade #44

2011-07-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Negativland - Helter Stupid

OK, Wikipedia tells me that this album came out in 1989, but I don't want to go fucking with my list at this point, so I'm keeping it here for now. Negativland had included a song called "Christianity is Stupid" on their previous record, Escape from Noise, which featured a sample of a fundamentalist preacher saying those words. They then launched a prank on the media by releasing a vague press release saying the song was suspected of driving a young man to commit murder (which, in the wake of certain court cases and jihads against satanic heavy metal, seemed fairly believable in 1989), and refusing to talk about the case. The media took the story and ran with it, and the band recorded the results and remixed them into a complex sound collage which made up the first side of their new album (they also included liner notes that explained the hoax and its results in detail). It's an overwhelming, hilarious, and somewhat trippy experience to listen to.

90's Hit Parade #45

2011-07-22T20:59:00.001-07:00

Latyrx - Latyrx

So most of these songs I don't have stories about the first time I heard them, and how blown away I was. Most songs take a couple listens to really reveal themselves. This one, yeah, I remember it as clearly as the first time I heard "Eruption/You Really Got Me" or "The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave." It was right after our first exploratory visit to L.A. We arrived at ATL around midnight, got to our car feeling somewhat dazed and confused, nearly got into an altercation with another driver who wanted our space and didn't think we were vacating it fast enough. I tuned in WREK, the Georgia Tech station (which is just a fucking BONKERS station), lit up and drove off. A midnight hip hop show was just starting. I think the first song they played was something by DJ Shadow, then it segued into this (which is also produced by Shadow). I was blown away, nobody else in the car seemed to care.

The track is called "Latyrx," by a duo that's either called Latyrx or Lateef and Lyric Born, and later kicked off an album that was either called Latyrx or The Album or maybe Latyrx: The Album. It begins with the best section, with the two rappers rapping simultaneously over sitar-like synth drone. this is the best section. I almost can't believe nobody had ever recorded anything like this before. Lateef's rap sounds almost like a Hindu chant, Lyrics affects a voice that sounds like Richard Pryor doing a white guy. Then, after a shadow cut-n-chop breakdown, the two go their separate ways, dropping all kinds of marvelous nonsense (my favorite headscratcher: "I taught neanderthal to use the rotary phone/I kicked the Devil in his neck without my rosary on." The rest of the album is solid, but there's nothing even close to this.

90's Hit Parade #47

2011-07-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

Busta Rhymes - Dangerous

Look, I'm a white guy from a suburban, upper middle class family. I don't know shit about any aspect of black life, inner city life, poverty, violent crime, any of it. In other words, I can only process hip hop through the filter of my own social experience. And one of the most important things hip hop gave to white music fans was a way to talk about money as something other than the root of all evil, or capitalism as something other than a corrupting influence. I remember watching Bones, Thugz and Harmony being interviewed on MTV. There was some stupid question about what to call the particular genre of rap they were creating, and they said something like "We don't care, it's all about the cheeze." In other words, we don't give a fuck what it's called, as long as we're getting paid. I thought it was amazing, because it was impossible to imagine a white rock musician saying anything like that. The punk ethos was adamantly opposed to any association between art and commerce. At it's root, this is a positive idea: an artist shouldn't compromise his vision to fit the audience's expectation. But like anything else, when this philosophy crystalizes into a dogma, it ceases to be very useful, and transforms into this hostility toward the idea that the effort involved in creating music deserves any financial reward. Second- and third-wave punk bands were deeply infected with this neurotic worldview (first-wave punk bands formed without realizing they were punk bands, and wanted to become famous, same as any other rock band--in fact, in the UK, many of them did become famous). You can see this in the vicious hostility that greeted Nirvana when they became famous, or the way Green Day and Offspring were referred to as poseur punk for mall rats when they sounded pretty much like 80's punk bands. Or the outrage over the Buzzcocks music being used in a car commercial. God forbid a band that had been making great music for years get some kind of financial reward for it!

Take, for example, the gratingly ascetic Fugazi. They're a band I greatly admire for most of their business model. They refused to sign with a major label, in order to keep full control over their music. They actively work to keep the price of their albums and concert tickets low. All great stuff, as far as I'm concerned. But they also refuse to sell t-shirts or other merchandise. They consciously refuse a revenue stream. Their fans are holding out money for t-shirts, and they're like "keep it." I'm sure they think "we're musicians, not a t-shirt shop." Well into the existence of the band, Ian McKaye was scooping ice cream at a Haagen Daaz shop, and Guy Picciotto was waiting tables. Did they think there was more dignity in listening to their stupid boss give them shit than in selling t-shirts to fans who want them? What kind of puritanical bullshit is that for an adult to be hanging onto?

Or take the Dead Kennedys, who went through some legal turmoil in the late 90's. This dispute seems to me a very two-sided disagreement among musicians about royalties and licensing (which may or may not have included a plan to use "Holiday in Cambodia" in a Levi's commercial), but all Jello Biafra had to do was drop a few buzzwords about "corporate greed" to win the P.R. battle with their fans (read the user reviews of Dead Kennedy's albums on eMusic to see what I mean). Even if the Levi's story is true (my guess is that it is), I find it baffling that fans would rather see the musicians who made their favorite records spend their 50's and 60's working menial labor than to hear their favorite songs in a Levi's commercial. It reminds me of a t-shirt popular among Harley Davidson enthusiasts: "I'd rather see my sister in a whorehouse than my brother on a Honda." You notice that there's not much concern about what the sister wants, but at this point I'm about 4 degrees removed from Busta Rhymes, so I should start tacking back to shore.

So yeah. In the midst of this idiotic neurosis about money, how fucking liberating it was to hear musicians talk about getting paid like it was a good thing, like it wasn't something shameful! My all-time favorite acquisitional rap line? "Back in the day, a nigga used to be ass-out/Now a nigga holding several money market accounts." God, I love this song for being such a sweaty, horny jam, but I also have to love it for it's naked love of capitalism.

90's Hit Parade #48

2011-07-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

Ween - Piss Up a Rope

Believe it or not, when I was working out this list, the hardest part was deciding which Ween song to use. They've got so many good ones! (I ended up getting it down to two.) I settled on this rowdy faux-country song in which a cartoon redneck kicks his good-fer-nothin' woman out the house and lets loose a misogynist tirade. The rant is hilarious for both its absurdly colorful profanity ("Up shit creek with a turd for a paddle," "You can wash my balls with a warm, wet rag") and its strange specificity ("I'm sick of your mouth and your 2% milk"). Like their spiritual forefathers the Butthole Surfers, Ween have no filter--their music travels directly from their subconscious to their mouths, although their lyrics are more clever and their muscianship more disciplined than the Buttholes. Track down a live version, though. The studio recording is marred by a completely inappropriate guitar solo.

A few other songs that I considered:

And of course, the big hit:

90's Hit Parade, #49

2011-07-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

Radiohead - Paranoid Android

Like most people my age, I spent a great deal of the last 15 years bitching about how MTV didn't play music videos anymore. In retrospect, I'm not sure why. Most music videos are horrible, and can you imagine a bigger waste of time than sitting around watching videos? Well, that's an easy set up of course: a bigger waste of time would be watching the original programming that replaced them. MTV really was a bad habit, and in fact I watched a lot of that original programming because I retained a Pavlovian need to turn the TV onto that channel where the videos used to be. Some of it was OK: Beavis and Butthead was fun, at least for a while, and Daria and The Maxx were both awesome, but I also watched junk like Dead at 21 (about a teenager who had received super intelligence from a government experiment, but never did a smart thing in the whole run of the show) and The Real World (I watched the second and third seasons, and might have watched more if Puck hadn't made season three so unwatchable).

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the last time I regularly tuned into MTV was for The Osbournes. And in the minutes before and after The Osbournes, I remember two things. First, seeing Kurt Loder announce that Rob Halford had come out of the closet. This was funny, because just a couple days before, a friend and I had been talking about Judas Priest, and I came to the realization that their whole act was basically a gay fetish show (something I'd never realized as a metal-obsessed youth). The second thing was, I saw this demented animated video for a dark prog rock epic. Captivating, ain't it? I watched to the end to find out the band, and it was by Radiohead! The band that had that awful song "Creep" a few years ago (or was Radiohead the band that did "Connected"? I always got them mixed up)! I didn't realize at the time that Radiohead had followed up their lame debut (which, to be honest, might be a great album aside from "Creep"--I've still never heard it) with a fine rock album called The Bends. I wasn't even aware they were still around. They completely blindsided me with this one.

"Paranoid Android" is as dark and paranoid as the title implies, and gave me the first real hint of Thom Yorke's strange, trance-like singing (my favorite moment being the way he suddenly begins chanting the line "God loves his children" before breaking into a distorted guitar section). Maybe it's because of a nursery rhyme that I remember, but when Yorke sings "When I am king, you will be..." my mind always anticipates "...my queen," and is always shocked to get "first against the wall" instead.

I still think "Creep" is a pretty awful song, though.

90's Hit Parade #50

2011-07-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

The Fugees - Fugee-La (Sly and Robbie Remix)

Hey, look, we're half way through! And a seasonally appropriate tune here, perfect for hot, sweaty summer nights. How can you hear that beat and not start shaking your hips? I guess this is more or less the same beat that nowadays gets called "reggaeton," right? Like I said, I'm not that big on remixes, but this one, tacked onto the end of The Score, is by far my favorite thing on the album, takes the whole vibe of the group and kicks it up to the next level. Should probably be used in a Bacardi ad or something.

I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficara and John Requa, 2009)

2011-07-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

In I Love You Phillip Morris, Jim Carey does what Jim Carey does. He plays real-life conman Steven Russell as a grotesque. I don't mean anything negative by this. Like I said, it's what Jim Carey does. It's not how Phillip Seymour Hoffman would play the role, just as Marcel Marceau wouldn't go about portraying a man in a box the same way Harry Houdini would. There's a perverse joy in watching Carey apply his physical comedy skills to this tragic human being. His face is still as expressive as it was when he appeared on an early 80's HBO Young Comics special and conjured Clint Eastwood, Jimmy Stewart and Chairman Mao using nothing but his facial muscles.

Americans traditionally have a fascination with fictional con men. We generally hate the real life version, especially when we are their target, but when we see them on screen we somehow identify with the con, not the mark. A big screen con man usually has about as much in common with Bernie Madoff as Batman has with Bernie Goetz. They're clever people who take pleasure in separating arrogant millionaires from their money, and for whom the con is a fun little puzzle to work out, a childish game. This portrayal of Russell undermines that idea. Russell is a sociopath, but he's also a desperately hurting man. In fact, the latter is a much more central point to his life than the former. He doesn't see himself as a con man. In fact, most of the cons I've known in my life don't. They always think they've just got this one white lie to get through to achieve happiness. They've conned the hell out of themselves. And Russell is just trying to win over the man he loves, or live the life he feels he's entitled to, to fill that craving in his heart. God, he can see it right there, and he's absolutely convinced himself that he can get it if he just goes through with whatever con he's running at the moment. And Carey, in his grotesque facial sculpture, brings all of these emotions to brilliant life.

90's Hit Parade #51

2011-07-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

Jesus Lizard - Boilermaker

Jesus, this song is brutal. Sounds like a boxer, dancing on his feet while delivering knockout blows. Along with Killdozer, absolutely one of the best heavy metal acts of the era.

90's Hit Parade #52

2011-06-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

April March - Chick Habit

The standard "fun fact" about April March is that, prior to her recording career, she was an animator for Ren and Stimpy, which makes a lot of sense since her songs all sound like they're being sung by cartoon characters. Judy Jetson maybe. This one, in particular, conjures a Kricfalusi-drawn girl group.

Kauai Travel Guide

2011-06-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

Aaah. Just returned from a relaxing vacation in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai. Kauai is one of the smaller and more remote islands in Hawaii, and apparently not very crowded in June. We also stayed on the less-populous East side (most of the tourist resorts seem to be on the North). So I'm going to share some pics, and tell you a little about visiting there.

Kauai is just insanely beautiful. I don't know for sure if it's any more beautiful than the rest of the islands, as it's the only one I've been to, but seriously, everywhere you look you see beaches, mountains, flowers and chickens. Yeah, chickens. It seems a hurricane hit this island in 1991, and released a lot of chickens from their cages. They went wild, and they are literally everywhere. The roosters (which seem to be more common than hens) crow all goddamn day. It's a fascinating look at how species spread in the wild: 20 years later, even way up on the remote mountains there are chickens running around. I tried to ask the chickens in the picture below why they were crossing the road, but I got no response.

Another thing you should know about Hawaii is that it's very far south. Like, almost on the Equator. I did not know this. I figured it was straight west of California, the same way that if you start sailing east from Ft. Lauderdale you end up in the Bahamas. It's not. So what I'm saying is, you need to use some serious sunscreen down there. The sun will laugh at your puny SPF 30. You need, like SPF 786 or something. Now, I was raised in South Florida, so I know the rules of the sun (it's dangerous from 9 am to 3 pm. It's even worse between 10 and 2, and from 11 to 1, shit, you might as well stick your dick in a light socket), and I was careful enough not to get painfully burned, but I did end up with a very itchy rash in all my sun-exposed areas.

Oh yeah: and it's expensive. Your average meal in Kauai (and I assume the rest of the islands) is going to cost about the same as a high-end steakhouse in L.A. And there was never a point where I was eating something and just thought "Goddamn, this is good!" So you might want to try to get some groceries when you get there, although the groceries are pricey, too. Apparently, it costs money to ship ingredients out across the Pacific.

The girl who sat next to us on the plane recommended we pick up The Ultimate Kauai Guidebook: Kauai Revealed. This proved to be a useful book. It's arranged in a logical way, and the writing is witty and entertaining.

We stayed at the Kauai Beach Resort. Now personally, as much as I like all the volcanoes and beaches and whatever, my idea of a good vacation basically comes down to this: a place to swim and time to read. Now this place...I'm sure it's not the cheapest place on the island, but it seemed like a good deal on Priceline, and I can't imagine a place suiting my needs better. The pool is like a Hawaii theme park: fake caves and waterfalls, a fake lava hot tub, all that. After spending a week swimming in these pools, I don't know how I'll be able to go back to the crowded lap lanes at the Glendale Y. Tuesday night, they had a live band and hula dancers performing on the rocks at poolside during happy hour ($3 mai tais). You could conceivably sit in the pool, drink a mai tai and watch the hula dancers right in front of you. Talk about milkin' it!

The food at the hotel was, of course, even more expensive than everywhere else, so we ate out at least once a day (well, one day we just got a Subway while we were out and ate it in the room later). Some of the places we ate:

KCL Barbecue and Chinese Restaurant was a typical example of the local fare: bad Chinese food with a lump of macaroni salad next to the gooey rice.

The Bull Shed is right on the water. I mean, seriously, RIGHT on the water. Our tiny triangular table was pressed up against this window (see below) that was, like, 3 feet from the waves. You could even open the window, but the wind and waves were a bit much. Can't remember much about the food.

Keoki's Paradise is as close to a "tiki bar" as the island has. No cool mugs, and if they had Singapore Slings they weren't bragging on 'em, but a nice open air dining hall with lots of tropical greenery and fake waterfalls. If you were going to Kauai and didn't want to splurge on a luau, this would be a pretty good substitute. My steak was lame, but Bobbie got ribs, which were pretty good, and teriyaki chicken, which was very good. Had a nice, strong taste of caramelized teriyaki. Below is the view from our table (beyond it is a parking lot).

Tip Top Cafe and Bakery is in a motel in Lihue, and is a popular breakfast spot for locals. No atmosphere at all, but the macadamia pancakes were tasty. After eating here, we went to see a couple waterfalls. You're not really right up on these, but you have a good view. There was a third we were considering going to, that you could get closer to, but the hike seemed like too much of a hassle. But here are some nice pictures we took.

Far below: The Quiet Village

Scotty's Beachside BBQ actually has pretty good BBQ: ribs, chicken, pulled pork, brisket. They also have mai tais and other specialty cocktails, and some local beers on tap. But best of all is, once again, the view. The dining room is open air (ie, there's an open window that takes up the whole side of the place facing the sea) and arranged in tiers with all the tables facing the ocean. Incredible view.

Smith's Tropical Paradise: Of course, if you're going to Hawaii, the one thing you want to do is attend a luau. Understand before you go that luaus are going to cost close to $100 per person. This one was near our hotel, recommended by both the guidebook and the people we talked to, and seemed to be one of the cheaper ones on the island (I believe we paid $85 a piece). Now, Bobbie was a bit disappointed with the luau experience. Having grown up on Elvis and Frankie & Annette movies, she was expecting dinner to be on a beach, by a big bonfire, with big plates of food brought to you by people in native garb. So we didn't quite get that. Instead, dinner is served in a big open-air pavilion, where you sit at long tables and go serve yourself buffet style while a Hawaiian band plays. You can stuff yourself like crazy on local delicacies, including the awesome kalua pig, which tastes great with greasy Chinese fried rice, and chicken adoba, which tastes very porky (maybe it's cooked with the pig?), and poi, which tastes like nothing but has the appetizing texture of mud. There's an open bar with mai tais, beer and full bar service. The mai tais, in contrast to the ones served at the hotel, had a nice, balanced taste, and seemed to contain more ingredients than Myers and pineapple juice. Dinner is followed by a big show with the native dances of Hawaii, along with the dances of other Polynesian peoples, and Chinese and Japanese dances. There's fire dancing, and a big, fake volcano, the whole nine.

What makes this particular luau so cool is the setting. It's in this big park covering acres of gardens and ponds. Swans and peacocks roam the grounds. There's a big King Kong-like mountain in the background. There are tropical flowers everywhere. And you are surrounded by birdcalls that sound like they were taken off a Martin Denny record (except that Martin Denny stopped recording before 1991, so there are no cock-a-doodle-doos on his records). That title, "tropical paradise," is earned.

Monico's Taqueria: on the last day, killing some time before the airport, we decided to just get some Mexican food. Simple, cheap, you know what to expect. So we stopped at this place (recommended by a guy at the hotel, faintly praised by the guide book). We had to wait about 10 minutes for them to open, as this is one of those places that closes between 2 and 5 (common for most of the country, but I guess living in the city I'd forgotten about this phenomenon). I ordered two tacos: carnitas and al pastor. Both good, but I really liked the pastor, which was these beautiful little bits of diced pork, almost bacon-y. This actually turned out to be one of the best things I ate on the trip.

Waimea Canyon: So the last day, we had to check out at 1:00, but the only flight out was a red eye leaving at 8:45. We decided to drive up the mountain on the West side of the island, which gives you some great views of a huge canyon, and of the ocean (and the next island, if it's clear enough). Actually, couldn't see the ocean from way up on the mountain because of clouds that day (and we never even made it to the tippy-top), but further down we got some amazing views. Enjoy the pictures.

This last one was a little place some ways up where a stream was running through red dirt dunes like some kind of Martian landscape. Lots of red dirt on Kauai. Your shoes are red by the time you leave, especially if you're into outdoor activities (which, admittedly, we're not).

90's Hit Parade #53

2011-06-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945

I never read The Diary of Anne Frank, but it made an impression on me nonetheless. I remember a whole shelf of copies in our elementary school library, lined up, various shades of red and pink depending on how long they'd been sitting on the shelf. I knew the story of course, and it's easy to see how, for anyone that read the story at a young age, it could haunt you for the rest of your life. It haunted Jeff Mangum, and he devoted several songs on Neutral Milk Hotel's best-known record to the recurring dreams he had had about the character. And this song is definitely about a dream, imagery following that strange dream logic (at one point we see Anne Frank taking a tour of the Anne Frank house: "And here's where your mother sleeps/And this is the room where your brothers were born"). But you can also feel the deep horror at the real situation behind this story. It's definitely not for laughs.

NMH were sort of the odd addition to the Elephant 6 Collective, a group of indie-pop bands out of Athens, GA that also included Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control (and later several other bands, including the great Of Montreal). While the first two bands played distinctly 60's-style psychedelic pop, NMH were their own thing. They fit in in a general sense, but they didn't sound like anyone else. Honestly, I don't think In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a solid album from start to finish, but the few songs that stand out are really amazing. Mangum's off-key singing, the odd instrumentation and lo-fi recording all work together to make this one of the best indie pop songs of the decade.

90's Hit Parade #54

2011-06-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

The Highwaymen - The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never Ends

Took me forever to find this because for some reason I had it in my head that this supergroup was called The Outlaws. Anyway, here it is, 4 of the most distinctive voices in country trading off on a classic gangsta story. Although, if I were putting together a dream team in the 90's, I'd probably team Willie up with Merle Haggard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Lo-retta Lynne. But that's just me.

90's Hit Parade #55

2011-06-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

Beastie Boys - Body Movin' (Fatboy Slim Remix)

I don't really seek out remixes. Their always interesting when I hear them, but in general, I'd just as soon listen to the original, thank you. But this is one that really kicks the song up to the next level, from a pretty good second single off Hello Nasty to one of the best Beastie tracks ever put to wax. It's that 4-chord headbanger progression Fatboy Slim adds to the chorus. It just sounds like the way the song should have been in the first place, and turns "Body Movin'" into one of the all-time great spazz-attack-on-the-dancefloor tracks.

90's Hit Parade #56

2011-06-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

Cibo Matto - Birthday Cake/Know Your Chicken

Cibo Matto were one of those bands that were all the buzz for a couple minutes, then mostly forgotten. Maybe that's OK. The album of food-obsessed, hip hop inflected electronica from a pair of Japanese-American chicks didn't sound nearly as weird and wonderful six months after I bought it as it did on that first listen. But watching these performances, especially the one of "Know Your Chicken," convinces me that at least these songs deserve their place in the canon (throw "Beef Jerky" in there, too). I mean, this stuff is just off the charts for coolness, the noisy choruses, the tight beats, the surreal lyrics. Maybe I should dig this CD out and re-evaluate.

90's Hit Parade #57

2011-06-10T12:12:00.000-07:00

Halo of Flies - DDT Fin 13

Halo of Flies was lead by Tom Hazelmyer, who also ran the crucially important Amphetamine Reptile label. Halo of Flies was named after my second favorite Alice Cooper song (you can't fuck with "School's Out"). Halo of Flies only released 7" singles and a couple EP's, but they did eventually release their entire discography on a CD. Halo of Flies were a sort of midwest companion band to Mudhoney, or at least that's how it always seemed to me. Both bands (and, come to think of it, you could throw in the east coast Pussy Galore) played a nasty, skronky sort of garage punk. People hate on the term "grunge," but it seems the perfect term to describe HoF, Mudhoney and Pussy Galore, almost an onamonapeia. I especially love this song, with the extended whirlwind-of-wah-wah solo that wouldn't be out of place on a Funkadelic record. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if this is from one of their early 90's singles or their late 80's singles, but since it's on the 1991 CD, I'm going to count it.

2011-06-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

This is a fish-in-a-barrel target, but how fucking ridiculous is this video? Is the contemporary conservative movement in America basically just a bunch of losers who are mad that they don't have their own TV shows or movies? (And could that have something to do with the fact that when they do make movies, you get something like this?)

There's an almost infinite amount of stupid shit to focus on in this short clip, as Jesse at Pandagon notes, "from the insinuation that a gay male high school student was named prom queen because of Elmo to the assertion that totalitarian regimes in the Middle East are anti-church and anti-traditional gender roles." One thing that struck me was that they have a totally incorrect understanding of the term "the soft bigotry of low expectations." It's an idea that, even as a liberal, I think does have some merit, but it absolutely does not mean noting that poor and minority populations have higher illiteracy rates, and therefore directing educational programs toward those populations.

90's Hit Parade #58

2011-06-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

They Might Be Giants - Your Racist Friend

It was hard to narrow it down to just one song from Flood. That opening volley of earworms alone--the joyous "Birdhouse in Your Soul," "Lucky Ball and Chain," "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," and this song--is incredibly solid, and even throwaway songs like "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" can get stuck in your head for weeks. My wife would probably divorce me if she found out I was only picking a single song from this album, and considering some of the bands that I'm giving multiple slots to, she might have grounds. Anyway, I picked this one over "Istanbul" just on the basis of the latter being a cover song, and I think the lyrics are a bit more interesting than "Birdhouse." But really, you could take your pick.

I always like lyrics that cover subjects to which we can all relate, but which there aren't any other songs about, and "Racist Friend" sure does fit that bill. We've all been in this situation before. You're talking to someone at a party, they're saying things that border on racism, but you don't want to be Mr. Annoying PC Guy, so your just "nodding and pretending," then he crosses over that line, that line where if you nod and smile, you're implicating yourself. It's an uncomfortable moment, and you don't really want to deal with it, but there you are. Time to ruin the party.

BONUS BEAT:

If TMBG were the band you thought they were the first time you heard them, the light, clever band with the catchy songs that sound like old advertising jingles and are fun to tap your feet to, they would still be an awesome band. But of course, once you actually hear the lyrics to those goofy jingles, you realize that there's a dark streak running under the surface. This is what makes them a great band. (It's for this reason that 1988's Lincoln is my favorite of their albums, the one where this darkness is closest to the surface: the paranoia of "Where Your Eyes Don't Go," or the sadness of the disolving relationship in "They'll Need a Crane".) Here's a classic example, from after the time I stopped following their career (I checked out after Apollo 18). It's a catchy little song about the inevitability of death. You can actually feel it getting closer by the second: "You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older. And now you're even older. And now you're even older..."

Oh, wait, I just discovered that this song is from the 2001 album Mink Car, which should disqualify it for this list, but since I already wrote all this stuff, I'm keeping it. Anyway, there seem to be some late 90's performances on YouTube. Also, just because I LOVE this video:

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) from They Might Be Giants on Vimeo.

And, what the hey...

90's Hit Parade #59

2011-06-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

When I started doing this, I said that I wasn't making any commitment to do it on any particular schedule, but I settled pretty quickly into Tuesday and Friday posts, and now I get stressed when I'm missing that deadline. So today, I'm caught up! Although I can't help but plan out what I'm going to say in the days ahead of each entry, I am trying my best to write these as quickly as possible without editing much, so please try to tolerate the typos.

Digable Planets - Pacifics

Heresy: I actually enjoy Digable Planets records even more than A Tribe Called Quest. Well, I should say, I'm talking about the beats--as rappers, these guys are not as interesting to listen to as Q-Tip or Phife. But the beats, yeah, I think they beat Tribe. See, Tribe was making music that didn't sound like anything else when they came out, and when you go back to listen to it, you can sort of hear the seams where hip hop, jazz and laid back RnB are stitched together. Tribe provided the blueprint, so when DP recorded their first LP in '92, they already knew how to do it, and their beats sound more like a unified whole. At least, that's how my ears hear it.

Probably not heresy, exactly, to say that I prefer their second LP, Blowout Comb, to their more high-profile debut Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space), but it sure seemed like an unpopular opinion at the time. Absolutely one of my top 5 hip hop records ever. But Blowout Comb isn't really a singles record. Each song melts together into one continuous head bob. I would pick "Black Ego," but at 7 minutes, the repetitive hi-hat beat gets on my nerves. So instead, we'll go to the first album for a cut.

"Pacifics" sticks out a bit from most of the rest of the album. Less jazz, mo funk. The lyrics describe a lazy Sunday afternoon in NYC, and the funky rhythm feels like a relaxing walk through the farmer's market and used book store. Absolutely one of the best stoner hip hop tracks ever recorded.

90's Hit Parade #60

2011-06-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

Sonic Youth - Disapearer
This may be one of the best examples of Sonic Youth as a "song band" (rather than a "guitar band"), although it does have some great guitar work and an awesome jam at the center. This really captures the atmosphere that I most associate with Sonic Youth, a late night vibe. The melody is a bit abstract, like the best early R.E.M. songs, you can't quite get a grip on it but it sinks into your brain. And the video is a perfect match for what's already in the song: the feeling of driving late at night, past neon signs and streetlights in a hazy state of consciousness. I especially love the little visual pun with the cheap plastic word game, probably bought at some truck stop to while away the long hours in the back seat, on the words "Western Starland." Funny thing: I only saw this video a couple times, on 120 Minutes, but I would have sworn up and down that it was in black and white.

Bonus Beats:

I saw Sonic Youth twice while they were touring for Washing Machine (first was their headlining spot at Lollapalooza 1995). Curiously, I don't think the album is very good, but the songs sounded great live. I would say that both times, the highlights of the set were "Washing Machine" and "Diamond Sea," and the second time I'd add "Saucerlike" to that list (they didn't play it at Lollapalooza). I'm not sure why these songs didn't really come across in the studio. Maybe it's the jammy nature of both songs ("Diamond Sea" has the explosive climax like "Heroin," "Washing Machine" is more like the mysterious labyrinth of "Sister Ray"), but seeing these songs live...well, I'd put that second show in my top 5 live experiences of all time.

90's Hit Parade #61

2011-05-30T11:06:00.001-07:00

Pizzicato Five - Twiggy Twiggy

A tribute to the androgynous icon of the mod 60's from a great Japanese pop group. The beat is samba or bossa nova (I'll admit, I don't really know the difference), but with a big, upbeat sound. You could almost swear it was the theme song to some lost, Italian James Bond spoof. Guitarier live version here.

90's Hit Parade #62

2011-05-24T12:52:00.001-07:00

Digital Underground - Doowutchyalike

What's great about this song is how it totally captures the spirit of pre-Run DMC hip hop without aping the sound. It fits perfectly in with the sound of 1990, even as it makes you feel the heat of a summer night block party c. 1981. And yes, it's a hotter track than "Humpty Dance" (which is still a great track). It is strange how "Humpty Dance" endures, though. I would never have expected that track to be a cultural staple (at least among white folks) 20 years later, when most people have long forgotten "Mama Said Knock You Out."

CHAOS!

2011-05-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, May 25, Ice House Annex, 8:00 pm

90's Hit Parade #63

2011-05-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

Bis - I'm a Slut

If there's one band from the 90's that I think should get more attention, it's Bis. Man, they're so great! On their early records, they play Ramones-y punk rock with amazing youthful energy and cheer, and a hint of 80's new wave and disco. It's like a new generation of punk rockers erasing all the anti-disco sentiment from the scene. Then, this evolved into practice, because by the time 1999 rolled around and they released the AMAZING Social Dancing, they were able to actually reproduce that 80's disco sound, but play it with that same youthful happy-punk energy. So go out and buy you some Bis!

I was considering the earlier track "Kill Yr Boyfriend," and I think the two songs should be considered together. "Kill Yr Boyfriend" is a pretty basic punk rock attack on guys who are "beating you all the time" and "crap in bed." "I'm a Slut" attacks a more subtle expression of patriarchy, a guy whose overbearing jealousy makes a relationship impossible:

why can't i wear makeup tonite?
don't really think my t-shirts too tight
going out, can't let me out your sight
can i see my friends without a fight?

In the chorus, she sings "You tell me I deserve this/cuz I'm a slut/and I provoke you to do/these things to me." I don't think she means he literally told her that, but that his actions are telling her that, and the character in the song accepts it:

tell me when i talk i am a flirt
i agree, i prefer the long skirt
how nice of you to let me not work
i'll do anything to make you not hurt

That's a pretty strong social critique, but what's really impressive is how much the song makes you want to dance around the room like a spaz.

90's Hit Parade #64

2011-05-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

The O'Blivions - Vietnam War Blues

There were a ton of these neo-garage rock bands in the 90's (still are, probably), and most of them were pretty lame. This is one of the exceptions, some seriously deranged garage skronk of the highest caliber. First time I heard this song, my first impression was that it sounded like Pussy Galore doing the kind of straight-ahead rock n roll song that they (somewhat frustratingly) never did. Proof of the greatness of this recording is that most of the live versions on YouTube don't sound nearly as mangled as the studio recording, but the one above is a good approximation. Play it loud, muthafuckas!

Addendum: I have a vague memory of seeing these guys live in Athens, so vague that I'm not sure it actually happened. I just barely remember being out for a night on the town, and ending up at some very small club, and seeing these guys open with this song. I'm honestly not sure whether alcohol made my memory too cloudy or if I just dreamed the whole thing.

Our Mr. Sun (1956)

2011-05-14T20:21:00.000-07:00

I saw this movie at least once a year in science class growing up. I'm sure some of the science was a bit outdated--it was 20 years old at the time! I never realized that this was a Frank Capra joint--he wrote, directed and produced it for television. It was part of a series, and I know I saw at least one other film in the series (Hemo the Magnificent, 1957). I also didn't realize that Ol' Father Time was voiced by Lionel Barrymore--it was his last film! Hell, I never realized that the writer was Eddie Albert from Green Acres! It's on Netflix, or you can watch it at Archive.org (I still haven't warmed to watching movies or TV shows on the computer, so I opt for Netflix).

Funny how some of these things stick with you over time. The incredible scale of solar flares blew my mind as a kid. For some reason, I always remembered this little dramatization of a solar flare interrupting radio waves:

My favorite part was always the attempt to explain photosynthesis, with this hilarious li'l character representing choloroform:

But this time I was even more impressed by this magician character who is used to explain nuclear fusion. Just look at the character they give this guy, and the amazing stretchy poses:

Weird thing: it gets strangely God-y at the end. I never really noticed it as a kid, it seemed perfectly natural (hard to see much difference between the place you're forced to go Monday through Friday and the place you're forced to go Sunday), and it isn't really anything pushy, but it's kinda weird. This is the opening shot, by the way:

Do I Really Need to Come Up With a Title For Every God Damn Thing I Post?

2011-05-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

So, Andrew Sullivan has been trying to work out the relative success or failure of "Romneycare," the Massachusetts state health care reform bill passed by Republican governor Mitt Romney that is remarkably similar to the one passed on a national level by Congress a couple years ago, and which now hangs around Romney's neck like an albatross as he enters the Republican primary. Pure anecdote, of course, but this email from a reader in Mass. provides, I think, some useful insight. He starts by noting multiple polls that show majority (although far from overwhelming) support for the plan, then goes into a personal story. Here's what I see as the most relevant quote:

Stories like this are why people like Romneycare, even if they complain about it. As Obamacare becomes law and situations like this become known, it is difficult for me to imagine a groundswell for throwing children like my daughter into the fire.

This is pretty much what I hear when I talk to people from the UK or Canada. You will frequently hear them bitch about their country's screwed up system, but you will almost never (again, within my purely anecdotal experience) hear a Brit say that they prefer the US system. Yet, to those opposed to any government involvement in the health care system, all they hear are the complaints.

My point here is that it's very easy to point out the problems with Obamacare, or with the pre-Obamacare status quo. That doesn't really get at the argument. What we should be doing is comparing the costs to the benefits of any system. And it's easy to see why that's not popular on either side of the aisle. If the debate can be broken down to "health care is a human right" or "socialized medicine is slavery," then one side can potentially be shown to be "correct." We would all love to be able to be unambiguously proven right. Hell, I'd even love to be unambiguously proven wrong. If government-sponsored health care reform can be definitively shown to be ineffective or unfair, it'd be a load off my mind, and we could move on to some other issue. But the issue is simply not so black and white. It's good and bad, constructive and destructive, all at the same time, and we have to weigh the pros and cons to get to a real understanding of it. Just like any other issue (or most issues--I still haven't heard anything resembling a rational argument against gay marriage or marijuana legalization, but you get the idea).

90's Hit Parade #65

2011-05-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Tom Waits - Such a Scream/All Stripped Down

In 1992/93, Tom Waits finished up his stint at Island Records with a pair of albums that seemed to complete the musical journey he had been on for the length of his career, moving toward weirder and more dissonant sounds over the course of 20 years. The two albums are very different: 1993's The Black Rider, the soundtrack for an opera on which Waits had collaborated with Robert Williams and William S. Burroughs, brought Waits as far into his Bertolt Brecht-influenced cabaret sound as he would ever go, while indulging in all sorts of strange, dark sonic experiments. 1992's Bone Machine, by contrast, goes deep into blues and gospel sounds, even harking back to the earlier forms of work songs, field hollers and spirituals, all presented in a deeply noisy and harsh style that can only be called Waits-esque. Bone Machine is the sound of Tom Waits boiled down to a thick, intense reduction, a pure, the very essence of Waits.

My two favorite songs on Bone Machine are back to back, almost a medley, and I think of them as inseparable. "Such a Scream" is about as raucous as Tom ever got, all nasty blues and almost Pussy Galore-level noise. "All Stripped Down" has an odd lo-fi sound, and reminds me of some of the stranger tracks from Exile on Mainstreet (eg, "Just Wanna See His Face"). It sounds like something you'd hear at a storefront gospel church.

90's Hit Parade #66

2011-05-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

In March of 1997, I packed up all our stuff in a Ryder truck and headed west towards Los Angeles. I stuck a cassette in the tape deck and listened to this song, from the then-newish album New Adventures in Hi Fi. It was an obvious choice for its Hollywood imagery, its specific invocation of Mullholand Drive, but most of all for Stipe's refrain: "I'm not scared/I'm outa here." As I drove across the country (took us 5 days), Comet Hale-Boppe was in the sky, and in the hour or so that I was still driving after the sun went down I could see it just over the western horizon, leading me on. (Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, an apocalyptic cult called Heaven's Gate was preparing to commit mass suicide in hopes of catching a ride from interstellar pilgrims they believed were hidden in the comet.) That's the image that always enters my mind when I hear this song, one of my very favorite songs of REM's career. Here's a couple other late-90's REM tracks I like a lot:

Yeah, this is one of the greatest "I'm gonna win your heart," "to dream the impossible dream" songs ever written. Michael just pours so much passion and emotion into that chorus!

This is maybe the last (so far) truly GREAT REM song (although you could make a strong case for "Living Well is the Best Revenge"). I'm not sure I'm really capable of writing well about REM songs. I have a hard time figuring out what it is I like about them, or at least putting it in words, and I fear I might be puncturing the magic by over analyzing them, so let's just leave it at that.

Ideology vs. Thought

2011-05-07T18:43:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul discusses his position on abortion. Ron Paul believes that:

The fetus has legal rights—inheritance, a right not to be injured or aborted by unwise medical treatment, violence, or accidents. Ignoring these rights is arbitrary and places relative rights on a small, living human being. The only issue that should be debated is the moral one: whether or not a fetus has any right to life. Scientifically, there’s no debate over whether the fetus is alive and human—if not killed, it matures into an adult human being. It is that simple. So the time line of when we consider a fetus “human” is arbitrary after conception, in my mind....

If you were to ask someone like Amanda Marcotte to unpack this statement a bit, she'd probably conclude that the problem is that Ron Paul doesn't believe women are people. I see a different problem. Ron Paul is, above all else, an ideologue, and the one thing an ideologue simply cannot stand is ambiguity. Now, I think he's correct that "the time line of when we consider a fetus "human" is arbitrary." To me, that's an argument for stepping back and saying the government should stay out of this decision as much as possible. I guess I should back up a bit. I think most reasonable people would agree that, at 8 months, you've pretty much got a baby in there, and an abortion would be morally unacceptable (although on rare occasions medically necessary). And most reasonable people would look at the photo below and conclude that at 6 weeks, what you have is a lump of cells. It may technically be "human life," but it's not a person:

So yes, if you, for example, were to strike a truce by outlawing third trimester abortions with an exception for serious health issues (which would outlaw an exceedingly small number of abortions anyway), you are making an arbitrary call. That is, you're admitting that we don't really know when a fetus stops being a lump of cells and starts being a small person, so I'm not going to make that decision for anyone else.

Or let's look at it another way. I think we can all agree that protecting human life is a moral priority. But outlawing abortion isn't only protection of a human life. It's also forced childbirth. It's a violation of an individual's autonomy over their own body. Is Ron Paul really unable to see women as having autonomy over their own bodies? I posit that the problem is that Ron Paul is unable to accept that a fetus could be a human life AND part of a women's body. By God, it has to be one or the other! Just like a union has to be either an essential protection for laborers or an impediment to reform, and downloading music off the internet has to be either a moral act (because music wants to be free!) or theft from the musician. I don't object to any of these positions existing, but nobody really wants to talk about shit in politics right now. They just want to yell at each other. Which I suppose is why kids still buy Che Guevara T-shirts, and Republicans still worship Reagan. It's not about their actual positions (it's become a cliche to point out that Reagan would practically be a democrat today, and the Cuban revolution did not exactly put liberal principals into place), it's about being that young revolutionary with fiery eyes, or that stoic cowboy demanding the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's much cooler than sitting down and talking shit out, coming up with a compromise, which is what democracy is really about.

Why Don't We Redistribute GPA's?

2011-05-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

Did you see this one? Interview college students who believe in income redistribution of some kind, and ask them if they also think GPA's should be redistributed. If they can't think of a logical argument for doing one and not doing the other, then they're HYPOCRITES! GOTCHA! Yeah, I'm a little underwhelmed by the logic of this argument too. You're not obligated to explain why you have different opinions on two topics that have nothing to do with each other. "Are you ok with people eating pies? Well, how about eating babies? HYPOCRITE!"

The obvious answer, if we really need to do this, is that the entire POINT of a GPA is assessing accomplishment. That's maybe a secondary purpose of income, but the primary purpose of income is to allow one to purchase food, and thus not, you know, DIE.

xpostfactoid gives this argument a lot more thought than it deserves, and comes up with a lot of answers, but this one is, I think, the most relevant, not only to this argument but to just about any argument about economic politics in America:

3. Income redistribution in the U.S. is very moderate. No one who makes a lot of money has cause to complain that the state is depriving him or her of the fruits of labor. And by multiple measures of national well-being, humans thrive best in societies that invest in commonwealth, that is, do their utmost to provide the conditions for a decent life to all and to moderate without eliminating disparities of wealth.

Seriously, does anyone even think of programs like Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and Food Stamps as "income redistribution?"

90's Hit Parade #67

2011-05-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

Spiritualized - Electricity

Do I even need to say much about this song? The title pretty much tells you all you need to know. It's like a Yardbirds rave-up souped up with crackling punk rock energy and noise. The above version fades out about 30 seconds before it's over, full but unembedable version with the full feedback jam here. There's some nice live versions on YouTube as well.

90's Hit Parade #68

2011-05-03T14:13:00.001-07:00

2Pac w/Dr. Dre - California Lovin'

When Dre dropped The Chronic back in...wow, was it '92? Seems like it should have been later. Anyway, I didn't really take to it at first, and as it ended up being a hugely influential album (pretty much defining the sound of popular hip hop over the following years), I started resenting it more and more. In '92, the period that I consider hip hop's golden age was still going strong. The best rap records had hard, fast funk beats and James Brown samples, and the rappers would just grab those beats like a dog goin' to work on a bone, and spit out unbelievable tongue twisters and word play over them. Then, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you had crews like A Tribe Called Quest, that were sampling jazz records and getting this ultra-mellow sound. I loved both of these extremes, but The Chronic, with it's laid back Parliament-derived sound, seemed like a mushy middle, and that's where everything seemed to be ending up.

I was wrong of course. Dre's G-Funk sound may not be either PE or ATCQ, but it's its own thing, perfect for warm summer nights and hot days tending the grill. My favorite Dre track from this era is not from The Chronic, though. It's this 2Pac single, all vocoder and poplockin' synths, sampled or maybe just ripped off from Ronnie Hudson & the Street People's 80's funk jam "West Coast Poplock" and set to a hydraulic bounce of a beat. 2Pac released this single when he got out of prison, and it just feels like a goddamn party. Nobody's trying to overexert themselves, they're just having a good time. I guess that's what annoyed me about this stuff at the time, but it's what I love about it now. It's all about home state pride, but I love what they're proud of: it's "the Sunshine State where the bomb-ass hemp be/The state where you never find the dance floor empty." "California knows how to party" indeed.

What I Been Listenin' To

2011-04-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

I can't tell if the 90's Hit Parade is preventing me from writing anything else, or if it's the only reason I'm getting anything written. At any rate, here's an update on stuff I've been listening to over the last few months.

Winter of 2011, I've been listening pretty obsessively to Kraftwerk, Faust, Eno and Berlin-era Bowie. The explanation of why is fairly straightforward: been following the Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog, which got me wanting to check out Low and "Heroes" (heard them each once before, I think). This lead me to Bowie's collaborator on these albums, Brian Eno. A few years ago, I had set about getting all his 70's solo discs when they were all reissued, but after Here Come the Warm Jets, I got distracted. So now, I went back and got aholt to Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, Another Green World and Before and After Science (next up: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts). Kraftwerk were an important influence on these albums, and I've never really listened to them much, so I started investigating some of their mid-70's output. And then that made me think, you know, I've never really given Faust their day in court, maybe I should check them out. I'm sure none of that's very interesting, but hopefully the following paragraphs will be. First, let's back up.

When I was 18, my favorite band was the Butthole Surfers. They sounded like the inside of my brain felt during those years: the chaos and confusion, the repressed energy, the urge to scream and throw things, the feeling of being bound in my body. Another explanation is that there are two kinds of music I really like. I love weird music, music that doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard before. And I like really kick ass rock n roll. There are weirder bands, there are bands that rock harder, but I don't think there's any band that does both so well at the same time. So another way of putting this is that they succeed in sounding new and exciting, and sounding like something I already liked at the same time. To some extent, this is also true of Pussy Galore, Chrome, Shockabilly, Half Japanese, Geza X, Foetus, The Residents, Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Jimi Hendrix. These were all bands I became obsessed with at some point. But there was another group of bands that I wasn't as interested in, mostly British post punk* stuff. Bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, The Fall and Kraftwerk turned me off when I heard them. I didn't necessarily hate these bands, but when you're making a decision about what to listen to or buy, you tend to go for what you already like. Most of this is not even the result of a fair hearing: I heard one Fall album once in 1984 and concluded that I wasn't a fan. I'm sure I've heard Cabaret Voltaire somewhere along the way, but I can't even conjure what they actually sound like, only what I think they would sound like. Considering how long it took me to fully appreciate Sonic Youth, Minutemen or Captain Beefheart, dismissing these bands was extremely unfair.

To give you an idea of what I disliked about this stuff, check out the above song by Gang of Four (a song I taped off the short-lived free-form station WCEZ (Z-97) that broadcast out of Ft. Pierce, FL in the early 80's). It's a cool little song, nasty guitar solo at the end, but the way the singer is doing this dry, emotionless thing just doesn't work for me. Why would someone try to sound like that? Now, when I listened to Butthole Surfers records, it sounded to my ears like chaos, like paint splattered across a wall, like the manic paintings of Robert Williams. This appealed to me. With Gang of Four and some of these other bands, they make me think of Bauhaus design, clean lines and mechanical precision, which did not appeal to me at the time. This is, of course, how teenagers listen to music (and experience the world): by dividing everything into "good" and "bad." So if I love Butthole Surfers, I must hate bands that make me feel the opposite. Of course, as you grow up, you abandon these prejudices one by one. And so, over the last year, having pretty much accumulated all the punk albums I'd been interested back then, I started spending my eMusic bucks on some of this stuff that I hadn't liked so much the first time around. First up was Wire. I've had their first album, Pink Flag, for a while, and always liked it, so I tried their slightly more out there second album, Chair Missing. Chair Missing has some good songs, but too much drone stuff, which frankly bores me.

Next up: Public Image Ltd. Now, I've always thought these guys were OK, but I kind of had the feeling that without their previously famous singer, they wouldn't be nearly as well loved. So I downloaded Second Edition (aka The Metal Box). Can't say I like all of it, but there are some fine tunes on here: "Death Disco" with guitarist Keith Levine (more the star of the band than Lydon, if you ask me) throwing out lightning bolts of harmonics, "Poptones" with Levine doing weird swirley arpeggios, and of course, "Albatross." I can't be the only one to have noticed that Michael totally jacked this bassline for "Billie Jean," can I?

OK, so I wasn't that big on Wire or PiL. You know what British post-punk band is really awesome? Swell Maps.

Damn, that song is great. But we're getting away from my thesis, because Swell Maps are the kind of messy, chaotic punk that I always liked. So let's get back to Kraftwerk, who were always the epitome of the kind of band I didn't like. I started out with Autobahn, which is kind of neat, lots of long jams and interesting harmonic compositions. Then I moved on to Trans Europa Express, which is much more like what I always imagined Kraftwerk to sound like. Now, listen to this song:

It's like a piece of clockwork, so neat and symmetrical. That's not the kind of thing I'm usually attracted to in music, but it's equally fascinating in its own way.

Faust were an even bigger surprise. I swear I heard them on college radio back in the 90's, and my memory of them is that they would just jam on one chord for 20 minutes. (An interview in L.A. Record has me thinking that what I heard must have been their collaboration with Tony Conrad.) But the actual Faust albums I've been listening to are nuts! They don't sound anything like I thought they did. More than anything, they remind me of the Vampiros Lesbos soundtrack, just wacky psychedelic experimental stuff. I might even like them better than Can!

And Bowie? Well, back in the 80's/90's, I could never quite figure Bowie out. I liked some of his songs, but I could never really figure out what HE was about, or what he was trying to do. It was the movies Velvet Goldmine and Hedwig and the Angry Inch--both riffing on his Ziggy Stardust persona--that gave me an "in" to Bowie. I felt like they somehow managed to convey his aesthetic to me. So I began listening to the glam rock stuff. I finally internalized that stuff enough that I can move on to the weird, late 70's records. Interesting albums: at first they sound very weird, then after a couple listens it's surprising just how NORMAL they sound. And then they start slowly revealing their REALLY weird aspects. I particularly like the lyrics to this song off Low:

*I never liked the term "post punk," since all "post punk" bands are directly descended from the Velvet Underground, and all "straight up punk" bands are descended from the Stooges, who came around like three years after the Velvets, so really, The Ramones and Sex Pistols should be caled "post punk," and Wire and Joy Division should be called "punk."

90's Hit Parade #69

2011-04-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

A description of what happened immediately after the above performance, from Sara Marcus' book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Movement:

At the end of the song, the show launched into its next segment, an videotaped interview with a pair of Playboy models called the Barbi Twins. As the tape played, Jo and some of her friends regrouped, fuming. They'd been under no illusions about the nature of The Word, but it was disturbing how the show could absorb their provocations without so much as a blink, and then move on to a couple of self-described bimbos.

They edged up to the fake living room set where the boyish blond host, Terry Christian, was preparing to move things along. When the Barbi Twins segment was finished, Jo shouted--loud enough to be heard by over a million viewers across Britain--"So, Terry, you think all fucking women are shit, do you?"

"Ooh," Christian said, as if a three-year-old had just stepped on his foot.

"Crap!" the girls hollered. "Crap! Crap! Crap!"

The host's smile held fast to his face. "So did you like those young ladies?"

The girls booed boisterously. Others in the audience cheered or woofed, Arsenio-style. Cut to aerial view of the studio: the place was in an uproar. Militant fists beat against the air.

"I think somebody's out to make a name for themselves," Christian simpered, barely audible above the crowd. He said it again, but this time the screams from the audience jumped an octave. No cameras panned the studio now. Nobody in Brighton or Birmingham saw bouncers pounce on the girls and drag them from the studio.

Chris Rowley, left behind, shouted something inaudible that, whatever it was, pulled Christian off message. "Come up here, mate," the host challenged the musician, the violence beneath his grin peaking through like wallpaper glue. A beat. Christian rubbed his hands together as if washing them clean. Showed a dozen teeth, his lips rolling tensely.

"We'll be back after the break," he said, smooth again. And wasn't that just the problem? They always were back after the break. No matter how great the tupture, the regularly scheduled programming always prevailed.

But the programming also served as a vehicle for the rupture, and the kids who saw it were electrified. "My God!!!" one Melody Maker reader wrote in from Derby. "I've just seen Huggy Bear on "The Word" and they were WAY more exciting than Nirvana...I just can't help worshipping them!" Another reader, from Devon, gushed that the show "made me feel proud to be a babe with attitude--they were THERE, saying what I would have liked to."

90's Hit Parade #70

2011-04-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

Phish - Lawn Boy

Did I just lose the meager stack of credibility I had accumulated since I started this blog? Look, obviously, Phish are not the mind-bending, universe-expanding, game-changing band that their annoying phans (har!) believe them to be, but they're also not the horrible ear-rapists that people who've mostly never heard them think. How do I know they haven't heard them? Because whenever someone starts bitching about Phish, they always call them a "Grateful Dead rip off," and Phish really don't sound anything like the Dead. Phish sound more like a cross between King Crimson, They Might Be Giants and...I dunno...The Police (actually, they really sound like Gentle Giant, but who's ever heard of them?). The problem is, Phish are a band that are totally wrong about what their strengths are. They write good, occasionally great songs, and they're very talented musicians in terms of executing their off-kilter compositions and creating an appropriate mood for each song, but as soloists, they're boring as hell. They just don't have the chops, or an interesting enough style, to hold my interest for an 8-minute solo. I'm sure if I were to confront them with this critique, they'd be like "Oh man, we're not about showing off, you know, we're just trying to create a mood." There might even be some truth to that. Back in the late 90's, there was an internet radio station streaming random full live Phish shows 24-7. I listened to it at work a lot, and it was perfect work music: relaxing, pleasant but not too distracting. But to actively, attentively listen to live Phish is to be bored.

So I recommend their studio albums, of which Lawn Boy is by far my favorite. The songs are a bit more prickly than on some of their later albums, and even the long jam parts hold my interest. I particularly like the late night vibe on the title track. It has the same feeling as an early 70's mellow-out song like, say, Black Sabbath's "Planet Caravan" or ZZ Top's "Blue Jean Blues." Great lyrics, too, about going out to piss on your lawn in the wee hours and absorbing the dewy aromas of the plant kingdom.

Give Us Barabbas!

2011-04-24T10:46:00.001-07:00

Happy Easter, everybody!

Intermission

2011-04-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

The 90's Hit Parade will return next week at it's regularly scheduled time.