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Sound Checks LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening - a review Liars: The Sound of a Flashlight Dying in a Cursed Forest at Midnight Good Art vs. Bad Entertainment: 'Nathan Fake' at Le Poisson Rouge Thom Yorke Solo - An Appraisal Michael Jackson: A Generation Y Perspective Animal Collective: Majestic Rats in the Sonic Brain The Top Ten Most Offensive Songs of All Time Fleet Foxes: Music the Way Nature Intended All Points West 2008:A Review from the Trenches Your Friend's Band (the world of unsigned music) Louder is better, right? A Concert Review of Queens of the Stone Age Drugs, Drums and Dust: Bonnaroo 2007 Bands that Got the Shit End of the Popularity Stick Six Albums Rock Snobs have to own, even if they might not like them I’m listening to Kurt Cobain scream out Radio Friendly Unit Shifter in France in 1994. The music is pummeling. The guitar is leaping back and forth from squeals of feedback to crunchy, unforgiving riffs (helped out, admittedly, by Pat Smear). Krist Novoselic is a very tall anchor on the bass. Through a thunderous pounding of the skins, Dave Grohl is forgiven for all the Foo Fighters albums after The Color and the Shape. I’m not there, it should be clarified. It’s just recorded history in the form of a bootleg titled, Va Te Faire Enculer, which, after running it through a translator program on my Macbook, is probably the best crazy album title ever. ‘Unit Shifter’ stumbles to its end and is replaced by super sludgy and sloppy cover of ‘My Sharona’. It’s oppressive and beautiful at the same time. As it fizzles out after a minute, Krist (or Dave, ‘cause sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart on the mikes, as they both exude a happy-go-lucky-mock-lounge-singer vibe) happily introduces the band: ‘Welcome! We’re Nirvana!’ It’s another ten seconds before Kurt sheepishly mumbles, ‘hi’. Then they go into a searing version of ‘Drain You’. Nirvana remains an anomaly unheard of in popular music. Only The Sex Pistols come close to matching the career trajectory of this blatantly anti-commercial band – both in terms of sound and, to use a dirty word, ‘philosophy’ – that became incredibly popular and influential for an influential but short period of time. But 1977 wasn’t 1991, and by the time The Sex Pistols were huge in England they could barely get through a show before it became a riot (or was canceled before they got onto the stage). And they seemed more a novelty act when they toured America, which ended up signaling the death knell of the band. The guitars snarled, the singer spat out poison words about the death of England, and the bassist they ended up with could shoot smack better than playing his respective instrument. All essential components for an underground revolution to be sure. It was a textbook/cookie cutter example of a manager – in this case, Malcolm McLaren – selling a brand of rebellion successfully, and has been utilized many times, before and since. Nirvana, though… Nirvana was just… weird. The Sex Pistols wanted to be the biggest thing in England so the whole country could see them take a dump on it. Nirvana seemed happy enough releasing an album, playing some earsplitting shows, and then retreating to their hole up in the Pacific Northwest. Accidental superstars to be sure, as nothing really suggested that they had any mainstream commercial potential. No easy to understand lyrics about smashing stuff up and making money. ‘I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned!’, Cobain screams over and over on the track sensibly called Negative Creep. You aren’t really supposed to scratch your chin over these lyrics like you would for ‘Desolation Row’, right? You could, of course, but it wasn’t necessary. In other words, it was DIY…like the grunge ethos itself. The music, too, pulls the listener in two directions. A bizarre bait and switch of Beatles-like hooks drenched in feedback and Sabbath-like rhythms. By In Utero, you were practically wincing as the squeals of the guitars in Senseless Apprentice. But the best way to experience the band – and thank god for bootleggers – was live. Sixteen years on and it’s still a disorienting image, hearing this type of heavy, heavy, heavy in a sports arena (I’m listening to School right now, which might just have the best rock riff…ever). And that’s when it strikes you. Nirvana was fucking loud! Not in the same way that any good rock concert is loud, but that everything was on the edge of being too oppressive. The rhythm too fucking earthy, and the guitar alternating between a dying industrial machine and a shrieking violin. Plus the howl of a gangly frontman with a penchant for flannel who looked like – if he wasn’t onstage – he would probably fall over with a gust of wind (and considering he was more or less a heroin addict for most of the band’s existence, not far off the mark). Another bait and switch. Finding stardom in spite of doing almost everything to avoid it. Despite the hard work they put into their records and shows, they didn’t give a fuck (Novoselic on the band’s initial success: “We don’t try very hard, but from now on we’re going to try a whole lot less”). The instrument smashing that could go on for ten to twenty minutes. The dress wearing. The French-kissing on national television. Admitting, ‘it only hurts when I pee’ in some bizarre nasal voice on Mexican Seafood (try picturing any other grunge idol singing that). Few people did smartass like Kirst Novoselic. A bass player with a lead singer’s charm. Witness this brilliant bit of witty repartee from a show in Germany: Grohl: "Donkey show" Novoselic: "No! We're not supposed to talk about things like that!" (‘Cause "Danke schön" – ‘thank you’ in German – sounds like something else. Har! Har! Har!) Stranger than the music and the band that took just enough of themselves seriously was that it was embraced by so many so suddenly. When Grunge exploded in late 1991-early 1992, there were many bands on the cusp (Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Dinosaur Jr.) that could have been the flag bearers of the supposed movement against the sleek and shiny pop of the 1980’s. Certainly a catchy little ditty called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ helped, but the fact that instead of becoming a novelty it became everything that Generation X was supposedly trying to say suggests that there was a wealth of art and music ready to change the mainstream cultural landscape. Nirvana just got lucky to find themselves at the head of the class, and in the end it killed them. Besides, there was always someone else ready to come and take the King of Pop’s place on the top of the charts. (another one of those symbolic shifts that ultimately didn’t mean anything. A number one album doesn’t mean much beyond units shifted. It doesn’t make an album great, or a movement legitimate) Remember the Nirvana-Pearl Jam debate? I don’t. I was ten in 1992. And I wasn’t a cool ten year old who watched MTV or Muchmusic and bought the latest albums. All I listened to was what my father listened to: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Granted, that was and is the ‘eternally cool’ stuff, but it didn’t help on the schoolyard. Looking back now, however, with cynical clarity, it seems safe to say that Pearl Jam was/is a rock band. A very good, sturdy rock band that sang about personal anguish that any Gen-Xer could identify with. In terms of musical sound, Pearl Jam was only a couple notches above Bon Jovi. With such a sound and a brooding way about them, Eddie Vedder became a golden god. A really serious golden god. I don’t own Ten – which even PJ thought was a sanitized version of their live sound – I own something better. A high quality Pearl Jam bootleg from an early 1992 concert that has all of Ten on it, plus a cover of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in a Free World.’ And in some ways, that a great example of the difference right there. Pearl Jam did a note-perfect replication of a well-known rock anthem. Nirvana covered obscure songs (a Bowie song everyone forgets, short poppy Vaselines songs, stuff by Meat Puppets and Leadbelly…) with reckless abandon. Compared to Pearl Jam (what Cobain called ‘corporate rock’) Nirvana was a punk band molesting The Beatles molesting Devo that made lyrical claims like, ‘My mother died every night, it’s safe to say, don’t quote me on that’. How Nirvana got as popular as they did is beyond me. And that sounds like a dig at them, but it’s not. I will always take Nirvana over Pearl Jam. But how this band, one so loud and caustic became so famous – became the pinnacle for mainstream teenage angst despite singing lyrics in the style of second-rate beat poetry – is a question for the ages. How did kids identify with a frail, suicidal guitarist-singer with a wall of noise behind him? How did they so quickly go from Axl Rose to Kurt Cobain? Sure Axl Rose wrote tough songs about how badass he was and then sad songs about how difficult it was to cope with life, but most of them were written after the women and fame he had to endure after becoming the leader of the biggest band on the planet. Cobain wrote about living under bridges and sniffing glue even after he signed with a major label. The fringe was in his blood, in equal parts desolate and absurd. Looking back on this now, twenty odd years later, grunge doesn’t feel like a novelty, but its influence is better seen in the ever-growing multi-genre cultural landscape called the ‘underground’ than in anything you’d hear on the radio today. That’s how grunge started after all, so it’s almost fitting to say that it surface briefly in the 1990’s, took a look around, sold some platinum albums and arena concert tickets, and then went back beneath the waves where it was always more comfortable in the first place. It’s tempting to say that ‘everything changed’ when these bands sold millions of records but Madonna and U2 didn’t disappear during this time, and ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ was one of the biggest hits of 1992. Revisionist history states that the kids changed, that they did a 180 degree turn to alternative music and all things underground, but it rings a bit hollow. It’s like saying everyone became hippies between 1966 and 1969. In truth, Nirvana was never for everyone, and no one knew that better than the band members themselves. Not long after their mainstream breakthrough, they tried to crawl back under the bridge they weren’t actually sleeping under. 1993’s In Utero did exactly what the band wanted it to do: Scare off record label executive and jock rock fans (who ran into the sullen arms of Eddie Vedder). Listening to the band’s music now is not the same for me as it is for the people who heard it while it all happened. By the time I was aware of Nirvana, they ceased to exist. Trying to imagine the average MTV viewer watching a Nirvana video and liking it is hard to picture for me. Nirvana’s music is disturbing, but in a fun kind of way. It was disturbing when it came out in 1991 inasmuch as it was loud, confusing (MTV aired ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ with the lyrics running along the bottom of the screen), and it hasn’t gotten any more normal. Nirvana copycats were extremely watered down, and started to blot out all the true grunge bands within a year or two of the dam breaking. And while it can be argued that the influence of the band’s music can still be heard today in most bands centered around a nice strong guitar sound, nothing in the world of mainstream rock is currently as piercing as Heart Shaped Box or Lithium. And those are the hit singles. When you burrow into the deeper cuts on Incesticide like Beeswax and Big Long Now, you get crushing not-quite-power chords and dissonance with Cobain howling about being blind and how he, ‘got his ding-a-ling spayed.’ Few songs are as unforgiving as ‘Endless, Nameless’, a good enough name for the act of looking down the barrel of a shotgun as any. It’s not serious, but it’s not a day at the races, either. It’s occupies that middle space where the music doesn’t compromise to anyone or anything, but offered up at the right time, can stop the average music listener in their tracks. Nirvana’s repugnant appeal lived a life of novelty without the band or the music actually becoming novelty. It was the hype that had the short shelf life and that was it. An assessment of Nirvana as a whole is not an easy task. The band was a big bowl of contradictions, which thankfully doesn’t mar their legacy in the least. The words are typical the first thing a critic attempts to analyze and deconstruct, and the ‘poet’ Cobain thwarted that attempt by stressing to his band mates that the music comes first (Grohl’s stated that sometimes Cobain would scribble words out on piece of paper in the studio just before a vocal take). When in doubt, make the guitar screech. Not cry, not whisper, not even howl. Just screech. White noise barely allowing the words to be recognizable. Beyond the hype, beyond the critics, even beyond the millions of fans. All that’s left is a sound, a twisting, gnarled sound that will outlive us all and go beyond. To Nirvana. This is Happening: LCD Soundsystem Okay, yeah, so it’s the new album by that Williamsburg guy who owns too much weird electronic music that he rattled off on that first single all those years ago. It’s still just beats, right? It starts quiet so you’re supposed to sway in anticipation, and then it gets loud and then you can dance. I get it. It’s like cold disco or something. And yeah, so far the opening track – “Dance Yrself Clean” – is meeting these expectations to a tee. Quiet with a nice catchy flute-like sound… and then boom! The drums and cymbals hitting where they should, ‘cause after two great albums and a bunch of EPs, he’s become an expert at fusing four-on-the-floor with Another Green World. And now he’s howling about dancing myself clean, and that sounds like what anyone who goes to a club kinda wants to do… So wait, why’s he now singing, ‘it’s the end of an era, it’s true’, and ‘it’s a thirty car pile up with you’? Why are you harshing my sliding backbone buzz, man? I’m just trying to shake it like the white hipster I am – I can’t dance but I can count so I know how I’m supposed to move – and it’s like you’re staring at your dusty scrapbooks in regret and concern. Or begging, ‘take me hooooome’ on “All I Want”, which has a Fripp-guitar sound stolen straight from Bowie’s Heroes. As for the rhythms, this dude can lay it down with the best of them, but it’s the touches and flourishes of horns, pianos, and synths that make it special and propulsive. But the dance floor isn’t supposed to be ground zero for a midlife crisis. That’s where you sweat out your fears of never besting your father and not owning a boat. I mean, titling a song, “I Can Change”? Are you supposed to admit that here in the strobe-lit dark, where drinks are spilled and the quaking boys and girls are plugged into some form of aural ecstasy? And sometimes he’s not really speaking to whomever I’m picturing in my head. Not a special lady friend or some old war buddy or a bunch of people in packed little loft party (and I’m not hip enough for the name-dropping in “Pow Pow”). Sometimes I see him looking into a mirror, his backing band or pile of electronics just a bit further away so they aren’t part of the reflection. Only the words are supposed to be given a second, more careful look. And hey, when did he fine the time to sing so well? Didn’t he, like, just used to speak or yell? Why are these emotionally drenched words suddenly catching up with the quality of the beats? How did this happen? I thought the impassioned epics from Sound of Silver – “All My Friends” and “Someone Great” – were anomalies, but apparently they were brilliant blueprints. The music and vocals die away together at the end of “Somebody’s Calling Me”, forever intertwined, I can’t pull them apart, and suddenly I realize I’m bobbing my head to someone else’s catharsis but I’m so wrapped up in it that it’s a catharsis I want, too. Why is it working? I can see every angle and predict every corner. Electronic music isn’t supposed to be spontaneous, certainly not on the usually throwaway textual side of things. Why am I putting my ear up to the speakers to here the words – the confessions – that slide in and around of the beats? Why is this guy dropping Elliot Smith-like lyrical doubts so well? What is this salty discharge from the corners of my eyes as I hear this man pine for home on the final track? Telling me that, “You’re afraid of what you need”. I feel slightly invaded, but more astonished that such a single line can make me question my own life decisions and my hazy future while I am still enjoying myself thanks to the music. I am being pulled in two different directions, and I don’t care as long as the sounds don’t stop. But it does stop. “Home” winds down so peacefully, as if the last sixty-five minutes were a private therapy session set to music. And that’s okay. It all worked out. You’re healed. And in case you’ve forgotten, you danced the night away the whole time.
Liars: The Sound of a Flashlight Dying in a Cursed Forest at Midnight Ascribing words to phenomena is the most basic form of communication, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, as the title suggests, trying to encapsulate certain ideas or events can become confusing or ridiculous. It can be particularly frustrating when discussing music, an art form that – while made with physical objects – is distinctly non-corporeal. This is why a popular form of describing music is the combining of two disparate genres, as it then forces the reader to use their own experience and imagination to make the hypothetical connection. Perhaps most famously, Kurt Cobain described Nirvana’s sound as ‘Black Flag being molested by the Bay City Rollers’. Acknowledging this caveat is especially necessary for the New York born punk/drone band, Liars. Call them The Sex Pistols spooning Brian Eno. The Beatles crawling over Swans. The Clash plus a wolverine high on PCP. Yeah, something like that. A trio of art students – Angus Andrew on vocals/electronic sounds, Aaron Hemphill on guitar/electronic sounds/percussion, and Julian Gross on straight ahead percussion – every step of their career is essentially ruining established conventions (some of their own making) and doing so in the most unpleasant way possible. Starting out in the early 2000’s as a post-punk band – the first of many not quite helpful genre terms this article will spurt out, once again proving that the only way to understand this band properly is by actually listening to the music – Liars evolved out of the two or three minute blasts of creepy, riff-hard, very nearly danceable sounds into something much more…arty. And insidious And oppressive. It is not music for the heart, barely for the mind, and not at all for letting the backbone slide. It’s for the ancient reptilian brain. So much of it sounds like broken machines, wheezing, pounding, and squealing in perfect unison. The brilliance is that the fragile balance between chaos and cohesiveness is repeated not only through individual tracks but entire albums. Outbursts like this are supposed to lose their edge when confined to four minutes of music, but it never does with Liars. The music ebbs and flows, rising and falling, fuzzy grey exploding into momentary multicolour eruptions. Their 2002 debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, only hinted at what was to come. An almost straightforward punk masterpiece, only the final track suggested that the band was willing to jerk its audience around for the sake of… something. This Dust Makes that Mud is an eight-minute dirge, with one small section of looped for twenty-two minutes more, pushing patience to a ridiculous limit. Is it a mistake, having the last half of your album sound like a factory? While their sound has become more complex, the basic Liars song structure is the intellectual bastardizing and extreme separation of the loud soft dynamic that – while having existed in some form for as long as music has existed – was popularized by the Pixies and Nirvana. The ‘atmosphere’ of a record is quite close to a mindless busy work term for critics who can’t think of a more exciting way to describe how the sounds of the instruments work together in the song. But Liars have found a way to go from sounding like they are chanting on the edge of a cliff to screaming riffs into your ear. Much like the work Reznor in the first decade of Nine Inch Nails, melody and familiar rhythm patterns are either buried under layers of screeching, unrepentant fuzz, or are only implied over a tumultuous cacophony of live and electronic percussion instruments. Aaron Hemphill is certainly the most accomplished experimental guitarist this side of Jonny Greenwood, as you are never one hundred percent sure how these sounds are created. Is he hunched over a keyboard, or a guitar neck screaming for mercy? What does doom sound like? Film scores have used orchestras to conjure up these grand sounds of dread, but how does a group of three or four alt-indie-rockers do it? What do you have to feel or think about? What do you do for a laugh after pounding on a drum for three minutes while guitar drone overdubs fly overhead? Does your audience ever enter into your considerations? Do you cackle when you wonder how they are possibly going to stomach ‘If You’re a Wizard, Then Why Do You Where Glasses’? Even the disparate, distracting sounds are only one of the tools the Liars employ to disorient the listener. Simply becoming familiar with the work of the band is fraught with difficulty. Attempting to remember song titles from the first three albums are quite close to episodes of futility. The opening track of their debut album is ‘Grown Men Don’t Fall in the River, Just Like That’. Those words are not mentioned at all throughout the song. Other tracks are ‘Tumbling Walls Buried Me in the Debris with ESG’. On the album Drum’s Not Dead, each track has either the term ‘Drum’ or ‘Mt. Heart Attack’ in the title (save one). As far as what Andrew sings about, it is mostly bleak, morbid poetry that Burroughs might have unleashed in more of his manic periods. Lyrically, there’s not too much of an evolution from, ‘they threw me in to the cement mixer’ (from The Garden was Crowded and Outside) to Drum and the Uncomfortable Can which has Andrew muttering, ‘Use your tiny screws, leave it in the wrists’, to ‘I dragged her body to the parking lot, I tried to find her, a savior right there amongst the cars…’ (from Scissor, their recent single) Sometimes these are screamed, spoken, or given a beautiful falsetto by Andrew. It either compliments or contrasts with the music, which are reactions that are courted in equal measure by the band. While the band was lauded for their confrontational and powerful blasts of post-punk on their debut, they followed the ethos of Brian Eno by not repeating whatever worked for the first time when it came time to record their second. Hence, They Were Wrong So We Drowned is perhaps one of the most oppressive albums ever recorded, up there with Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Suicide’s debut, and the bleak sound collage work of Igor Wakhevitch. Andrew is screaming ‘blood’ incessantly on the opening track (‘Broken Witch’) over drums that alternate between a lurch and a gallop, basement guitar sounds, and a schizophrenic second vocal track. The second track is an instrumental; like a UFO encounter gone completely wrong. The drumming throughout the album is always tense and thin. The guitar is broken and alive, and covered in toxic waste and trying to get the most out of its half-life. Each track is a serious of mental, paranoid explosions, culminating in the anti-church choir threnody, ‘Flow My Tears, The Spider Said’. Then it dissolves into less and less. Into wailing birds and exhausted nothings. Spin and Rolling Stone gave it one star. It only endeared the band to those who loved them even more. “Drowning angel got cold, but maybe now the grass will grow’… The band’s third album, however, Drum’s Not Dead, received much praise from critic circles, as it was a slightly more palatable form of the audio experiments found on They Were Wrong. A concept album detailing the war between creativity and destruction, it even included what could almost be called a happy and hopeful song at it’s close, The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack (‘I won’t run far, I can always be found’), proving that the band could write something heartfelt – as opposed to heart exploding – when it wanted to. As mentioned, atmosphere is a tough word to wrap one’s head around in sonic terms, but Drum’s Not Dead is bathed in an unsettling fog. The piercing highs and brooding lows are tempered in a valium haze and instead of being a hindrance joins the songs together into an single, graceful movement forward. The two most recent releases, 2007’s Liars and 2010’s Sisterworld are only more conventional when compared to the first three albums, but each have a bevy of superbly crafted songs, the former including the seminal ‘Plaster Casts of Everything’ and the joyous, falsetto laden ‘Houseclouds’. With the recent Sisterworld, the Liars have perfected…something. It doesn’t sound like the skittery punk of their debut, isn’t as teeth clenching as the next two albums that followed, but rather is some level of what I am wary to call maturation, as Andrew screaming ‘kill ‘em all!’ on ‘Scarecrows on a Killer Slant’, doesn’t sound like a band going quietly into their second decade of existence. It’s never comfortable and familiar. Crisper sounds means you hear the thin structure and holes in ‘Goodnight, Everything’ before the bottom drops out and the sounds of chaos explode again. Horns are supposed to be a ‘safe’ addition to the material on your fifth album, but it doesn’t work that way here. The sound is the key. Nausea and concern. It is a march through knives but you’re all the better for it when you make it through. In fact, you feel strong enough to return to the hurricane and pick it apart for pieces you may have missed. It’s not timeless, but it’s not representative of a particular period or genre. It hangs awkwardly in the air, daring you to define or defile it. It’s not easy, but the building blocks are familiar enough to give everyone a chance to decipher its industrial muck. […] This changes to something much more visceral when the Liars perform live, which they happened to do earlier this month, as part of early promo tour in support of Sisterworld. Seeing them at the Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington DC and the venerable Bowery Ballroom in New York City, one realizes that sometimes caring about an album’s ‘atmosphere’ can really get in the way of rocking the fuck out and pummeling your eardrums. The Rock and Roll Hotel is a dive bar in a crap section of Washington DC. Yes, yes it is. It is not the place you’d expect to see a band that has opened for Radiohead and played at numerous international music festivals to great acclaim. But Liars were here. Between playing a lovely theatre in LA and the Bowery Ballroom in New York, they treated a small but fervent crowd in a little hole in the wall to a powerful, oppressive sonic punch in the face. While they are a three person recording unit, on tour they add a bassist and extra guitarist – actually two members from the opening band, Fol Chen – and the add crunch was apparent from the get go. Angus screeched, mumbles, wailed, and shook like a giant leaf with epilepsy. Aaron played guitar or some creepy electronic keyboard thing with gusto, always looking like he was playing hooky on a school night. Julian smashed the shit out of the drums. The new tracks sat in well with the old. Scissor’s quiet-loud-quiet dynamic was the Pixies/Nirvana trick amped up to eleven. Here Comes All the People, tumbled out off the stage like a demented waltz, ‘counting victims one by one’. Angus had heavy echo and reverb on his mic, and a small little device beside him that with only a handful of knob and dial twists add shrieking feedback to the heavy pounding rhythms of the four instruments behind him. Overwhelming. Enveloping. You have to dig through the ugly ringing ears to find beauty in it. Heads bobbed like necks were going to snap right off. Some had to get the legs and arms going. A core group at the front needed to push off the shackles of everyday life by smashing into their fellow men at high speed when Scarecrows on a Killer Slant and the penultimate set closer Plaster Casts of Everything erupted. The encores were done as the main three piece, first of something from Drum’s Not Dead – not knowing song titles happens when all the tracks on that album have either the word Mt. Heart Attack or Drum, and neither have lyrics relating to the titles – and the ever creepy screaming opener from their second album, Broken Witch. Angus and Aaron both screamed for blood, and while I can’t guarantee that any of that was shed, there was definitely a hell of a lot of sweat. […] The next night – at the Bowery – is something slightly different. It’s hard to put the finger one it, as this is a band that has made a history of breaking such proverbial digits. A nicer venue doesn’t mean a more refined set. It’s still a screamer. Louder, perhaps, as the sound system can hold the sonic onslaught better than the Rock and Roll Hotel, which probably had to deal with meter in the red the whole time. Angus is chattier. The band plays harder, if that was even possible. The sound was fuller. It was less a bar band bent towards the madness of the abyss and more an art installation gone completely out of control. The crowd swings, sways, and runs riot across the floor. It is close as a bunch of white hipsters can get to dangerous fun. This time, leaning into the mosh pit at the front of the stage during Broken Witch screaming ‘blood!’ over and over again, Angus comes as close as possible to seeing what he – our temporary god – has wrought. It is permissible madness. A spiritual maelstrom. New York never felt so far away, which is a miracle in and of itself. Liars can take you away, and after awhile, you wonder if you would ever want to go back. […] Liars are something else entirely, but they are still human, so you can see them do their thing before your very eyes. You can watch the sound and the chaos that is somehow inherent and naturally occurring in every note. It is a sinewy web of violent sounds and images. It’s not simple, straightforward, or other terms people look for when it comes to forms of entertainment, but some of the best things in life never are. Liars are beyond. Find them for a moment before they float away forever.
Good Art vs. Bad Entertainment: ‘Nathan Fake’ at Le Poisson Rouge
Electronic music covers a wide range of sounds. It isn’t really an easily pinned down sound, like punk. The only thing that unites the genres is the tools used in the music’s creation. It can sounds as poppy and friendly as Black Eyed Peas, as cold and impenetrable as Autechre, and as pumping and beats-heavy as Modeselektor (maybe that’s another common theme: Misspelled or made up names). A live electronic music performance then, can also come in a variety of flavours. Sonically, anyway. Visually, not so much, as it’s just a guy standing in front of a computer or mixing board turning dials and bobbing his head (unless the artist sells out arenas, and has to present a dazzling light show to keep people from complaining that they shelled out fifty bucks or more to watch someone twiddle knobs). Going into the hip basement that was Le Poisson Rouge, you’re not sure what to expect for your eighteen dollars. The venue and price suggests where most electronic artists are nowadays. Under the radar, and not really getting near the quickly dying idea of mainstream music. Headlining was British artist Four Tet, respected ethereal beat maker within the ‘industry’, perhaps best known outside electronic music for his touring with and remixing of Radiohead. Opening for him was another Englishman, Nathan Fake, who also offers up beats, but has no problem adding squeals and pops on top of them, so your mind explodes as your body shakes. (another electronic music feature, at least in concert, is ear bleeding loudness) And so, from 10:40 to about 11:00, an unassuming man in a plaid shirt stood in front of the electronic gadgets on a stage and made horrible sounds with them. No drums, no drum machine. No 4/4 time. Hell, no 7/4 time. It was alarm bells being given either thorazine or meth. Loudly. This wasn’t the throbbing, rhythm heavy Nathan Fake I was familiar with and expected. And at first I assumed after a minute or two that this was the ‘build’ into a more familiar rhythm or song. But this moment never came. The ‘build’ leveled of into a plateau, but it was just as unrecognizable and sonically dissonant as before. What is going on? Why is he doing this? I had never seen what Fake looks like. I knew he was English, and that didn’t help at all. Electronic artists aren’t really a talkative bunch, and microphone wasn’t even set up over the decks, computers, and other equipment. I’d seen photos of Four Tet (or Kieran Hebden, if we go by what’s on his passport) on some music websites, so at the very worst it would all be answered when he took the stage. I only had a handful of Fake EPs, so I wondered if I had accidentally glossed over an album full of carefully orchestrated feedback. Perhaps on his myspace page he had mentioned that this current tour was going to me even more abstract than usual. Or maybe this performance was completely old hat and everyone else around me – who seemed to accept the disorganized howls with typical hipster interest-via-disinterest – knew exactly what was going on. The drones and squeals rose and fell, but never with a moment of silence between. No song to pick out, no break from one suite to another. All was one, a single performance that stretched out from shrieking knobs and burping dials. One almost had to will it into some sort of narrative or familiar pattern. Energy was not spent wallowing in the rhythm by bobbing the head or bending the knee. It was all cerebral, making tenuous audio connections and trying to pick out nuggets of similarity or – just maybe – meaning. I wanted this to work. I really did. I did because I enjoyed the music I had previously attributed to the electronic artist that releases music under the name of Nathan Fake. I had invested in a mental concept of him, and with his name appearing on this evening’s bill, I had made a connection that what I was to hear (and to a lesser extent, see) was going to reflect that concept. And right now this reflection was being torn apart. I couldn’t see my idea of Fake up on that stage. I couldn’t find what was familiar and known. The problem then became expectation. But what should I be expecting? What right do I have to expect anything at all when it comes to artistic performance? Even the act of buying a ticket does not guarantee that the artist is going to play their greatest hits, or ‘best’ material, or what you want to hear. The transaction – while financial – is a form of trust, an informal agreement where the audience gives the artist – as long as they show up – the benefit of the doubt as to what is going to occur in the act of performance. But there’s nothing legally binding as to what the show might entail. You can’t sue U2 if they don’t play Where the Streets Have No Name in your local hockey arena. And maybe the smaller, more independent electronic artist can push this relationship to its breaking point more easily, but jesus, what was the point? Lou Reed’s feedback laden Metal Machine Music album was supposed to be the big fuck-you to both his record label and audience, but when he recently performed the material live he at least informed the audience that the show wasn’t going to be ‘Walk on the Wild Side‘ before tickets went on sale. Here it felt like Fake was deliberately misleading us, pushing this music as if it was challenge to audience: ‘Are you going to follow me to this new, unfamiliar, abrasive place?’ I couldn’t help but think it on behalf of all of us here, even if I was the only one contemplating such a question. How long were we going to take it before walking out, holding our ears, or just going to the bar and screaming over the din for a overpriced cup of beer? I didn’t want to be the closed-minded philistine and so held my ground, even though this wasn’t the ‘Nathan Fake’ I knew. It wasn’t fun. Or enjoyable. So why didn’t I move? Why didn’t I walk to a quieter place in the room? Why I was I trying so hard to like it, to rationalize it, to understand why Nathan Fake would do such a thing? Was this becoming ‘high art’ because it was uncompromising? Because Fake was willing to challenge the audience’s preconceptions not only of himself, but of art in general? Is he becoming the true artist by caring not a whit for the public’s reaction? Yet what is the merit of that, if it alienates them, as you are burning the very bridge – the artist-audience relationship – that makes art possible? And then I realized that I was agonizing over how I felt about the show in front of me. (it was also a nice distraction from the unrewarding attempt of focusing on the music) I was deconstructing the artist, myself, and the relationship between these two subjects. And between music in general. In other words, I was being a critic, pouring over – rather obsessively – what I just saw/heard. I cared enough not to just go ‘fuck it’. The problem and issues the music was raising had become constant thorn in my side. And not after the house lights went up, or as I was walking home, but while it was unfolding in front of me. If that’s not a quality of great art, I don’t know what is. Reaction. Debate. Even if only in the audience’s head. After a very long twenty minutes, the dying machine powered down and silence reigned for a few seconds before applause broke out. I joined in, and Fake walks offstage with a smile. I get a beer and drown my confusion with each sip. I wasn’t sure who or what I just heard and saw, and it was both exhilarating and frustrating. I was in some unconfirmed borderland of culture. All was up for questioning, and my only solace was knowing that this had to be temporary. If the next person who takes the stage was the man I know to be Four Tet, then I can assume that the person before was in fact Nathan Fake. If the next person is just some stranger… well, then they have a chance to finally ‘be’ Nathan Fake. The labels are slipping of the people jars. After about fifteen minutes, the next person to take the stage was a shaggy haired, pale white guy who began to fervently lay down drum machine beats with liberal doses of organ-like electrical pulses sprinkled on top. It was a song – yes, a song – called The Turtle, from the Hard Islands EP. This was Nathan Fake. The Nathan Fake I knew and could break it down to. Suddenly all was right with the world. Expectations met and boundaries pushed, if only for a moment. Later – talking to some guy at the mixing board – I find that that what drove me to question the act of musical performance as a whole was a ‘bonus’ opener that the shows organizers added at the last minute; a fellow who goes by the name of Birdshow. The answer. A possibility confirmed. I lodge in deep within my brain, like every other experience. And then bob my head with joy to both the known and reassuring sounds of Nathan Fake and Four Tet.
Post script? Few forms of artistic expression can exist in this type of scenario. When it comes to a performance our expectations are either met or not, but in either case we know exactly why these things have occurred. (they didn’t play a particular song you wanted to hear, or did a bad job playing it) The third option has stand outside of this binary, and it is the absolute unknown. No background knowledge, the material offered completely tabula rasa. And the first thing we do – our instinct – is to erroneously force the unknown into the things we do know, even though this almost immediately takes a wrong term. If we don’t know what’s going on, we should end our musings and tendencies to let the mind wander right away, not grope blindly in the dark and come to some haphazard, incorrect conclusion. This mental phenomena is called ‘argument from ignorance’, where we assume conclusions when there is no – or inefficient – reason to make any conclusions at all (‘I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s probably…’). It’s not a problem – and rather intellectually engaging – when it happens when you are listening to music. It can have much more dire ramifications if you are engaged in pursuits such as public policy, international relations, and scientific experimentation. Knowledge is power, so wield the blade carefully or not at all. Art is thankfully nothing but target practice.
It is tempting to fall into a very unremarkable media narrative concerning the solo career of Radiohead singer-songwriter, Thom Yorke. That it is nothing more than laptop-built electric beats that, most notably, dragged down the band’s sixth album, 2003’s Hail to the Thief. The story begins thus: In the wake of the widespread praise for 1997’s OK Computer, Yorke – in an attempt to find a new form of musical expression – Yorke snubbed guitar and the familiar ‘rock’ sounds, and purchased the entirely back catalogue of Warp Records, a label devoted exclusively to electronic music, notably Autechre and Aphex Twin. These were his primary influences when the band regrouped to record the fourth album in early 1999. After a year and half in studios across three countries while battling writer’s block and almost breaking up the band, Radiohead had two records worth of challenging and unique material that was a far cry from early hits The Bends and OK Computer. Kid A and Amnesiac were taut, concise albums where the other band members – while initially overwhelmed by Yorke’s insistence on an original approach to composition via mainly electronic influences – tempered the singer’s wholly computer-driven experiments. Hail to Thief, however, ‘suffered’ from glitchy beat tracks like Sit Down, Stand Up, Backdrifts, and The Gloaming (although the latter became a live fan favourite thanks to Greenwood’s pounding bass), and many of the b-sides from that album’s singles (I Am Citizen Inane, Paperbag Writer, Where Bluebirds Fly) felt like only one human had anything to do with the creation of them. Further evidence to this scenario are the 2006 and 2007 releases, The Eraser and In Rainbows. Conventional wisdom holds that with his album The Eraser, Thom Yorke got all his Warp Records-influenced rhythms out of his system, allowing for Radiohead’s 2007 release In Rainbows to be a concise collection of ‘actual’ songs, which is why the album got Radiohead some of their strongest critical praises since OK Computer ten years earlier. The End. The truth, of course, is much more complex. It is not so much that the facts of the above narrative are incorrect, but that it glosses over much of the intricacies of the band’s – and especially Yorke’s – musical history. Like a great many musicians, Thom Yorke has long drawn upon the many genres of music through his upbringing as well as the gestation of Radiohead. His first band, formed at the University of Exeter, which he attended, was an experimentalist punk group called Headless Chickens. This was followed by a foray into the vestiges of electronica, as he DJ’d around the city at this time as well. Of course, it was with his high school band Radiohead that Yorke found success. And it was as early as the band’s seminal second – and ‘rockiest’ – album, The Bends, when Radiohead began embracing the world of electronica, as B-sides for the singles were remixed versions of the keyboard-enhanced Planet Telex track which opened the album. In various musical press at the time, Yorke personally encouraged fans to purchase the singles for precisely these tracks. In early press for OK Computer, electronic artist DJ Shadow was frequently cited as an influence, as his seminal 1996, the all-sample, Entroducing… brought a new form of electronic music to the forefront. Yorke’s first prominent foray into electronic music was providing the lead vocals for the British duo UNKLE’s track, Rabbit in Your Headlights, a drum-and-piano laden electro-ballad in which the captivating music video almost overshadows the song itself. Afterwards, in the wake of OK Computer, Yorke did indeed forsake the typical guitar rock – saying he was ‘sick of melody’ – but the idea that electronica alone drove the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions ignored what was – on a track-by-track basis – clearly the most dominant influence: jazz. As Davis’ Bitches Brew was yet another semi-obscure OK Computer influence, the work of Coltrane and Mingus can be seen on The National Anthem, Morning Bell, Dollars and Cents, and Pyramid Song. As well as the obvious choice, the Amnesiac closer, Life in a Glasshouse, which features jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and his band. Additionally, the idea that Yorke alone is the lone electronica advocate in the band is countered with the fact that guitarist Ed O’Brien has claimed he prefers ‘more ethereal sounds’ and that for the most part in Radiohead’s live performances it is multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood that utilizes the electronic instruments much more than Yorke, who limits himself to using a sequencer on Kid A’s title track. So it is with all this in mind that one must approach Yorke’s solo output, which can be said to have properly begun with his first and currently only full length LP. Released in summer 2006 as Radiohead themselves toured and tested new material through Europe and America – and handy way to deny that the band was on the verge of a breakup – The Eraser can be considered one of the most commercially successful electronic records of all time. Critics generally noted that it was almost exactly what they would have expected from the Radiohead front man. Pitchfork Media gave the album at 6.6 out of ten, noting that it felt a lot like the weaker aspects of Radiohead’s recent releases, which was not necessarily a great thing. Another critic flatly announced that the ‘apocalypse occurs somewhere around the sixth track’ on the record. Despite the departure from the early sounds that he was known for creating in Radiohead, the tracks from The Eraser are not as unconventional as critics initially assumed (a charge also levied against the Kid A-Amnesiac-Hail to the Thief triumvirate). In fact, some of these songs had legitimate choruses. Even hallmarks of electronic music like track length that typically exceeds radio format was foregone. Adamant that what he writes is pop music, it could be argued that Yorke simply adds in a pad or beat sample in place of where a guitar – if what was being worked on was a Radiohead track – would be. And if that observation was taken to the most logical extreme – that any instrument in Radiohead can be replaced to some degree by an electronic doppelganger – than it could be theorized that what truly makes a Radiohead song is Thom Yorke’s voice. It is a particularly strong argument when one considers how forward and formidable his voice is on all the tracks of The Eraser. While it was subject to heavy processing and speak-singing on the last three Radiohead albums, Yorke’s falsetto plays a dominant role which longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich insisted be at the forefront, despite the singer’s resistance, who stated in 2006 that, ‘it annoys me at how pretty my voice is. Especially if what I’m singing is deeply acidic.’ So as cold and alienating the processed music may be, the vocals keep the songs from becoming frigid beats. And despite the synth-driven sounds, the rhythm is still body moving. ‘Rocking out’ may not be the most accurate term, but the man never lets the beat drop. And Yorke has no problem attributing the cohesive ‘song-like’ quality of the album to Godrich, who, according to the singer, was instrumental in putting together the loops and beats he created into actual pieces of music. But it must be noted that the music on The Eraser falls in a much narrower category of sounds, never going to the electronic extremes of Aphex Twin’s quiet-deafening dynamic or Underworld’s unending beats. Nothing on The Eraser could be described as oppressive or indulgent, as only And it Rained All Night and The Clock could be considered frantic, too-uptight-for-the-dance-floor freakouts. Skip Divided seems to be cut from the same cloth as Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box or The Gloaming, and Cymbal Rush feels like a distant cousin of Everything In It’s Right Place. Even compared to some of the most ‘difficult’ Radiohead tracks – Kid A, Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors – The Eraser comes off much more direct and approachable. Initial reviews of Radiohead’s ensuing 2007 release In Rainbows compared the new album favourably to Yorke’s solo debut, noting that it was good to remember that Radiohead is band, and that member’s such as drummer Phil Selway and bassist Colin Greenwood are no match for the drum machines and bleeps found on The Eraser. Which is certainly true, but seems to miss the point. As Yorke has said about electronic music, its non-humanness is what attracted him to the form in the first place. Thematically, however, The Eraser can clearly be seen as an extension of Radiohead’s previous album, 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Yorke tackles political manipulation, environmental disasters, mental breakdowns, and professional failure over the nine tracks. While the musical style may change as the man works by himself, the voice and lyrics remain constant. In many ways, it is Yorke’s voice that keeps the album from being a competent-yet-unremarkable electronica album that would only appeal to a niche audience. On tracks like Analyze and Atoms for Peace, his voice hits peaks that haven’t been reached since 1995’s The Bends. On other tracks it may be more conversational or understated, but it always spearheads the music, giving it power. No instrumentals, no lengthy outros. Even lyrics-starved Cymbal Rush permits Yorke to croon wordlessly to the cold beeps, bringing warmth and familiarity to music which would otherwise be more at home on a Autechre album. But perhaps the best example of the approachability of the album’s material is hearing it performed live, sans electronic manipulation. In the wake of the album’s release in the summer of 2006, Yorke made a number of semi-public appearances performing various tracks on piano and acoustic guitar. The Clock, done for the Henry Rollins Show and Analyze, performed at the Mercury Awards, were intense and fragile pieces, respectively, with the single instrument pushing the rhythm forth and Yorke’s voice accentuating it. Additionally, Cymbal Rush appeared at a handful of Radiohead concerts in the summer of 2008 as a piano-only encore, silencing crowds of up to thirty thousand people with its vulnerable plunking of ivory keys. While it is unsure in which cases the electronic version was fleshed out before the acoustic/piano version (or vice-versa), what is more important is how well the two versions of the song complement each other. This reinterpretation of sounds built and constructed in a studio or on a computer is nothing new for Yorke, who was required to attempt the same feat with Radiohead when touring behind Kid A and Amnesiac in 2000 and 2001. Besides the album, the singles from The Eraser – Analyze and Harrowdown Hill – offered a total of four b-sides for further audio entertainment. As with the b-sides of the Kid/A-Amnesiac sessions, these songs take on a more experimental edge when compared to the album in question. Jet Stream and A Rat’s Nest are both glitch heavy tracks with Yorke’s nervous voice carrying the beat forward better than the machines. Iluvya is at once both Yorke’s silliest and simplest attempt at building a song out of computer noises. The Drunk Machine, with its multipart structure, can almost be seen as toying with the Pixies’ loud-quiet dynamic in a disorienting four minutes. In addition to the b-sides, other material released on the singles of various tracks was remixes of songs from the album. As noted earlier, all the tracks from The Eraser fit comfortably into the four-to-five minute range, despite the fact that one the chief hallmarks of the underground electronica that Yorke embraced is lengthy, winding pounding rhythm tracks. These traits were found in the remixes of The Eraser, which included work by some of Yorke’s favourite electronic artists like Burial and Modeselektor. Some remixes were relatively faithful to the original tracks, while other sampled only a single beat or loop and stretched the track to a ridiculous extreme. In many ways it was more familiar type of electronica record, despite the presence of Yorke’s familiar vocals. After this flurry of Eraser related material, Yorke refocused on Radiohead, releasing In Rainbows and touring sporadically in 2008 and 2009, yet the last few months have given us another round of releases. First was a 12” double A-side single of Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses and The Hollow Earth, the former a familiar ‘thrashy’ track that Radiohead debuted in concert in 2001, and was originally titled Reckoner, which found a place on In Rainbows, albeit in a very different version. This re-acquiring of the track solely by Yorke from what was earlier a full band composition is unique, as – with the exception of some piano loops provided by Jonny Greenwood on Cymbal Rush, The Eraser’s closer – Yorke solo tracks and Radiohead songs were clearly defined and separate. However, what is clear from these new songs – especially the other track on the single, The Hollow Earth – is how close they are in style and theme to the tracks on The Eraser. This was followed not only by an addition of the new song Hearing Damage to the New Moon soundtrack – a sequel to the 2008 teen vampire hit that was based on a series of novels, Twilight – but the revelation that Thom Yorke had been rehearsing live versions of The Eraser material, and that he was prepared to do a weekend of show in Los Angeles in early October of this year. The most notable addition to the band was the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, Flea, who added life to the album’s robotic rhythms. In a live setting, it reinforced the idea that all this electronic material sits comfortably together. And this is the crux of the issue at hand. While Radiohead is known for their constant evolution and creative metamorphosis, bringing new ideas and structures to not only their music but the audience-artist relationship, Thom Yorke’s solo material seems comfortable in a single, more conservative gear. Whether it be The Eraser or the recently released tracks, cool beats and warm angelic vocals are the standard. Almost paradoxically, it is when Thom Yorke – the main creative force behind Radiohead – works alone and without restriction that continual change seems uninteresting to him. This observation is not meant to dismiss or criticize the music, but only to put in context alongside a band that over the past sixteen years have done nothing but evade simple musical labels (Yorke has recently said about Radiohead: ‘we’re formless motherfuckers). So perhaps it is time to rethink the narrative that opened the piece. Instead of it being the challenging realm of electronica, Yorke’s solo material is where he can play it safe and work within traditional expectations with familiar styles and structures. It is Radiohead where the experimental side of the man – and his band mates – truly shines. That said, what a wonderful traditional and familiar style it is. After all, a good beat is a good beat, whether it is from man or machine. Or – in the case of Thom Yorke – a bit of both.
Michael Jackson: A Gen Y Perspective Rapper Chuck D infamously said that, ‘Elvis meant shit to me’, and while I won’t take such an extreme view when it comes to my opinion of Michael Jackson, I would certainly say he didn’t mean much to the culture of my upbringing and current music collection. I slipped through the cracks somehow. Michael Jackson was never really an artist or entertainer to me. He was more a symbol of the dangers of having all your cracked dreams coming true. The glove, the moonwalk, the endless adulation of childhood innocence, and the…music? Is that last thing ultimately what I am supposed to accept as his legacy? Unmistakable, archetypal eighties pop beats beneath a smooth, near-asexual but still powerful voice? Or is it the man and his mysteries –not the music – that I should be standing in awe of? In some ways I feel obliged to care to some degrees about both, which is never a good start to trying to feel anything genuine. I was born the year Thriller was released. By the time I was aware of a thing called pop culture – outside of the world of Sesame Street and the Ninja Turtles – some blond heroin addict from Seattle had made flair, spectacle, extravagant showmanship and the synthesizer seem, like, more trouble than it was worth, dude. To be fair, I was even sheltered from the early rise grunge with my father’s incessant listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. Not that I was discouraged from listening to contemporary music, I just… didn’t. The first time I really thought about Kurt Cobain was when I heard on the news that he killed himself. But it was in this weird miasma of guitar feedback, flannel, and laughing at the mainstream while it tried to embrace this new, re-punked genre that I heard about Michael Jackson, who seemed to be antithesis of everything contemporary pop culture was. He was still a massive star – I remember his Black and White video, where he vandalized a car at the end, and his Super Bowl performance where he vanished from the top of the stadium and reappeared on stage on the fifty yard line – but it was always echoes of some former greatness I seem to have missed. The tag line with Nirvana’s Nevermind album is that since it displaced Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the charts in early 1992, it meant that was grunge was overthrowing the shiny pop of the eighties. It didn’t seem like the music of last decade had anything left to say. Dangerous was Thriller the Third. Michael Jackson had enough drive and creative control to make sure that everything he did could be condensed into a successful formula, but that means if you keep doing the same thing, it becomes by definition formulaic. The snappy first single, the edgy self-titled track, the soft as a pillow ballad, and the g-rated protest song. I remembered hating the overbearing cheese of Heal the World when my grade four class did some sort of lip-sync dance/performance to it for a school concert. As far as the early nineties were concerned, Jackson was a song-and-dance man at a time when you played music with your gut and the volume cranked up to eleven. This meant the removal of tight choreography and carefully planned media events from your repertoire. The perception in 1992 was that the music mattered, and that anything else was too much effort (Nirvana bassist Kurt Novoselic on his band’s sudden success: “We don't try very hard. But we're going to start trying a lot less”). It’s a gross oversimplification, of course, but the shift from overall image to music was perceptible. And Michael Jackson’s image was a huge part of his appeal, and it just so happened that he was a figure during my youth of – not only suddenly irrelevant music – but of controversy, as it was at this time that accusations of child molestation were first bandied about. Jackson went from weird to creepy overnight, as everyone my age learned about sexual abuse from allegations surrounding this eighties singer whose face was growing more and more doll-like every year. To my friends and I, he was just a very, very, very, very successful version of Gary Glitter. For every Michael Jackson song I would hear, I would hear a pedophile joke about what he had in common with K-Mart (‘both had boys pants half off’). He was a recluse who wore surgical masks everywhere, owned a zoo/amusement park, and when he did do press the fact that his rhetoric concerning his love for children wasn’t turned down at all was just disturbing. On The Simpsons, he voiced a big white bald guy in a mental institution, was credited as John Jay Smith, and had a imitator do the singing, all factors which really didn’t help his case as being… relatable. Or understandable. An image of this superhuman artist was being replaced by with an institution that was essentially too big to fail, so instead began a very, very slow crash and burn. Michael Jackson always had to be something more than his creative output, because his creative output was sporadic, repetitive, and superficial. I mean, it was pop music crystallized. It had the friendliness of the early Beatles records with a dance floor beat, and didn’t aspire to ever be much more. It was hopelessly naïve coupled with ‘ee-hee-hee!’ It was the best kind of disposable music, which meant it wasn’t disposable at all. But that doesn’t mean we had to like it. The music was simple, direct, accessible, and that meant without a towering figure behind it, it would be instantly forgettable. Ever the iconoclast, Frank Zappa in his autobiography/criticism of the pop culture in general asked, ‘do we care about how Michael Jackson makes his music? No, we just want to know why he bought the bones of the elephant man.’ The difference between Jackson’s ‘Beat it’ and N’Sync’s ‘Bye, Bye, Bye’ is simply a more powerful computer on which to program the beats. Michael Jackson will be remembered for breaking sales records, but the music itself will always be a distant second. And so this vacuum was filled with an image, first of his own crafting as a sensitive, charitable man-child, followed quickly during my teenage years with the press putting their own more uncomfortable spin on the man. Painkillers, hyperbolic chambers, pale skin, and a hypothetical face. This was what fame could do a person, holed up in a place called Neverland. Michael Jackson’s last fifteen years or so was a slow train wreck that only ended last week, as he was trying to prepare for a fifty concert run in London. Odds makers took bets saying it wasn’t going to ever happen, and it seems now like all the cynics that were supposed to have been born en masse in my generation were right. In a recent article praising him, Gideon Yago noted that Michael Jackson made it, “okay to ignore reality if the production quality was good enough.” True, but Jackson the man lived in reality, whether he knew it or not. The nineties were a sobering time when both the highs and lows of life were – if not outright celebrated – then at least acknowledged in the form of a couple great tunes like Paranoid Android, Black Hole Sun, Jeremy, Hard Knock Life, and Smells like Teen Spirit. This is why Jackson seemed like a relic throughout the decade, and by the time teen pop made a return at the end of the nineties thanks to the Backstreet Boys, N’Sync and Britney Spears, he came back as a spooky father figure with a wax face partying like it wasn’t 1999, but 1985. And this wasn’t the music you were ‘supposed’ to like at the end of the nineties. Not without a hint of irony, anyway. The slick, manufactured pop sound was a thing of derision and mockery, a sign of superficial musical taste and lack of social awareness. Even the maligned rap-rock of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock was considered more authentic and relevant than the lightweight Top 40 material. For those who liked their sounds more complex and nuanced, we had the epic melancholy of Radiohead, or the layered, neo-psychedelic sounds of The Flaming Lips. Jackson still had legions of fans, but they had the characteristics of cultists, treating the man like a deity and disparaging all those that criticized him. I’m not sure what the world is supposed to take from Jackson’s death except for the dangers of fame. I won’t take the music that always rung hollow to a child of the nineties, and I can’t take the positive images of the man from the mid eighties when he was the world’s superstar because I was in diapers. And the less said about Jackson in the 21st century, the better. Like Elvis, his best work was decades behind him and his last years were full of bizarre moments that revealed him to be a shadow of his former self. It was a sad end to a life of dizzying highs and unspeakable lows. Jackson for years tried to resist a hard truth that seemed to be ingrained into the very DNA of Gen X’s and Y’s, which is that believing in an eternal, unchanging happy ending is going to lead you to shattered dreams and disillusionment. In the words of ‘our’ superstar, who literally bit the bullet at the top of his game in 1994, Michael Jackson embraced, ‘a denial, a denial, a denial…’
Animal Collective: Majestic Rats in the Sonic Brain Dividing and categorizing people have resulted in some of the most horrendous and vile events in the history of human civilization. From the Huguenots to the German Jews to the current genocides of certain tribal groups across the African continent. However, in the wake of recently having the pleasure of witnessing an epiphany filled evening at the Sound Academy concert venue, I think I can safely divide humanity into two the following two distinct groups. Animal Collective People and Non-Animal Collective People. Obviously the main difficulty to this is that there are billions of people across the globe that has never heard of Animal Collective (and it’s their loss) but I remain confident that the current cross section of society that has heard of Animal Collective and formed an opinion of them can adequately represent the whole of the earth. Animal Collective makes music. Music that is not for everybody. In fact, music that may well be for very few people. Friends I consider to be incredibly open minded when it comes to music have told me with hands over their ears to turn that shit off. They are frequently written off by anything even remotely mainstream as ‘a lot of noise’. But that’s what music is. That’s what sound is. Dismissing Animal Collective’s music so quickly does it a great disservice. It’s when you get under the covers with it and start feeling your way around does the full, rich body of the subject reveal itself to you (wait, what’s are you trying to say with that metaphor?). Okay, to backtrack slightly. The band is prolific. By standards of almost any other recording artist these guys make lots of music. Since 2000, they have released nine albums and three EPs, plus a handful of solo records from the four members. And suddenly I wander on topic and therefore, off topic. This band isn’t good with pigeonholing, and I feel I would be doing them a disservice by making too many standard rock article quips and comments as we go. So. Animal Collective. A bit of difficulty then. Good. Challenging music requires challenging words. Describing the music of Animal Collective is like describing a cubist painting. Nude descending a staircase? How the fuck so? How do you describe that without seeing it? The words only get you so far. Labels stuck to this band peel and fall away quickly. Folk? Rock? Dance? Electronica? You see a guitar onstage, but they don’t seem to be treating it with the respect one would hope for. Even when Avey Tare (oh yeah, these Animals have stage names) strums it, it doesn’t sound like a guitar. It is like a reminder that instruments are elaborate ornaments, and that the real music comes somewhere between the mind of artist and mind of the listeners. And this quandary can turn people off, but that’s their loss. Those that stick with it, those that see music as a journey and not superficial payoff after superficial payoff, will be rewarded. And that’s the divide. Putting your heart into listening to the music as much as the artists do when they are creating it. Ringo Starr said it don’t come easy, and that’s certainly true for music in the 21st century. Top 40 radio is dying, and in its last industry-driven throes is attempting to burrow itself in your ears with anything that seems like an easy sell. Critical acclaim is fragmenting into smaller and smaller genres. Suddenly no one can possibly consume every ‘good’ piece of music popping up across the globe. It won’t be long before ‘music critic’ is a laughable term, to be replaced with such labels as ‘Dub Step Electronica Advocate’ and ‘Post Rock plus Irony Supporter’. Even ‘music fan’ won’t cut it. Now you’re a ‘local audio analyzer’ specializing in punk played in under-300 occupancy venues between Simcoe Street and 8th Avenue. Fortunately, no matter what’s printed on your business card, it can all be narrowed down to one thing: Where are the beats? And are they worth getting to? In this case, the beats are in your head. Animal Collective is a drill, getting them out. As far summer 2009 is concerned, Animal Collective is a drug infested robot that is climbing over the North American continent throughout May and June. Having had the chance to see them in their element – read: hunched over knobs and dials on a raised stage in front of a couple thousands drunk and stoned twenty somethings – one realizes that the ghosts are in the machine and are tired with creating anything but audio epiphanies. Panda Bear, Avey Tare, and the Geologist are three of the four fine fellows who make noises with magic boxes. AWOL is Deakin, who usually plays guitar-ish type things (his no-showing meant I wouldn’t be hearing my favourite tune, For Reverend Green, which I don’t think has anything to do with the soul singer). Stepping onstage as the curtains open to reveal audio consoles and a weather balloon-like ball hovering above them that will soon have spacey images beamed onto it like a spherical lava lamp, the band immediately launches into the friendly warm sounds of the fan favourite off of their first album, Chocolate Girl. But as quick as the band giveth soothing melodic sounds, it taketh away. With a simple guitar strum, an inhuman braaaaaaaaang can suddenly be emitted from what looks to be a multicoloured shroud wearing a mixing board. What Would I Want Sky comes along as sensible as its title, bathing the audience in counter melodies and atonal burps. Animal Collective has no problem with layering a simple pop song with insane drumming, processed human screams, or feedback that has been conducted with enough skill and grace to make it sound like sweeping arcs of rattling storm drains. Comfy in Nautica is the happiest song in the world that sounds like airplanes are about to land on top of it. And the band seems to revel playing in the realm of mischievous extremes, either patting you on the head or biting you through the skull. The fun stuff like Lion in a Coma and My Girls from their recent masterpiece, Merriweather Post Pavilion (more newspaper-like pandering), is tempered with drip along squeal fests like Bleed and Slippi, which is a short burst of beach boys going punk by way of Swans. But it works, it flows, it comes out of the machines being created on the spot but all according to a master plan. If Brian Wilson’s brain didn’t melt under the weight of record company pressure and drugs in the late nineteen sixties (christ, a second Wilson reference? Are you sure you’re listening to enough music?), he might – if he was lucky – create something as epic as Fireworks, which morphs from a simple folk song with a funky beat into an electro-psychedelic masterpiece. Fifteen minutes, with the return to the chorus at the end wrapping up a trip within a trip. Despite the critical success and the commercial…nothingness… with the Collective remaining under the radar, it can almost mean having nothing to prove which means the band can be free to experiment and let loose with impunity. For a long time electronics were a taboo tool for live music, as it seemed like a difficult instrument to improvise around. Fortunately, technology has come to the rescue, and now, with only three people and extremely powerful computers, looped sounds can be repeated endlessly and manipulated, creating music as naturally as strumming a guitar. But why do that when you can play a real guitar, right? And Animal Collective understands this point perfectly, because their music doesn’t sound like it was/is made with guitar, bass, and piano. It’s wholly alien and original, but still tempered in lightly familiar melodies and rhythms. And having toured incessantly since their inception, they’re a formidable live act. Long, spacious atmospheric introductions to many of the songs show how comfortable the band is with tinkering with its materials parts. But more importantly, it’s just fucking fun (you have to stress this?). For two hours minds were blown for a couple thousand people in this tiny downtown venue. It’s nice to get together like this because many people don’t understand. We are a group that is not ostracized or oppressed, but simply ignored. A group ardently following a small group made of disparate members and sounds – so much so that they have to call themselves a collective – coming together with the beauty of a slow motion car crash in reverse. It’s hard to remember that it’s simply three people with knobs and dials. It comes out like fire. It’s soft as a sharpened rock. It laughs at melodic subtlety with a wall of horrible sounds. It makes chaos fuck order on an electric seabed. It’s Animal Collective. And we lucky few are Animal Collective people.
The Ten Most Offensive Songs of All Tim Please note: Offensive here does not mean bad (well, for one of them it does). Offensive in this context means shocking or obscene or music and lyrics that most people would find incredibly derogatory. Songs that makes you stop and say, ‘holy shit. That’s strong stuff’ when it’s over. If you can get to the end of them, that is. 10. Ice T and Body Count – Cop Killer Not that they are the best gauges of culture, but you know you’ve got a hot potato on your hands when both the president and vice president make a point of saying they think your record is appalling. Police unions and foundations across America spoke out against it. Tipper ‘Allergic to fun’ Gore also got a chance to make a reappearance on the national media stage after the PMRC hearings in 1985. Pressure was strong enough for Ice T to have the album pulled from store and then re-released without this track. Public outcry forced the hand of Warner Bros. Records, who refused to release other rap albums from some of their artists for fear of similar backlashes. While the response was understandable, it was strange no one mentioned that the song is only pretty good to begin with. The music is boilerplate 80’s metal, which means it kind of feels outdated for when it’s release in 1992. On top of that, the lyrics weren’t that much different from anything that you’d find on NWA’s first album: “Cop Killer/Better you than me/Cop Killer/Fuck Police Brutality”. He also laughs at the families of dead police officers (“fuck ‘em!”). That’s pretty raw, but it’s the public’s reaction that puts this one on the list. Further Listening: NWA – Straight Outta Compton
9. Captain & Tenille – Muskrat Love This is the only gimmick ‘so bad it’s offensive’ song on the list. A squeaky-clean love song so syrupy it gives you type-two diabetes. Sample lyric: “Nibbling on bacon, chewin on cheese/Sammy says to Susie honey, would you please be my missus?/And she say yes/With her kisses”. What can you say to that? The grade three lyrics match perfectly with bland adult contemporary melodies that the world shat out en masse in the mid nineteen seventies (what the fuck is that shimmering sound made by? Wind chimes?). But why muskrats? Why not noble, proud animals like gazelles or horses? Muskrats are like lemmings without the mass suicide. This tune was voted as the worst song ever in a poll a couple years back. That hasn’t stopped people from posting videos on youtube them lip syncing along to the song with their pet hamsters in tow (I guess muskrats make shit pets). If there was one song that created the need for punk to bubble to the surface in the late seventies, this might just be it. There are even fake muskrat noises in the song! Jesus Christ! Further Listening: Barry Manilow – Can’t Smile Without You
8. Suicide – Frankie Teardrop Ten minutes of weird electronic sounds on top of a story about a guy losing his mind and killing his family. No singing. Just telling a story. It’s like when Jim Morrison got lost five minutes into The End, but a hell of a lot creepier. Alan Vega sounds like Marilyn Manson on a particularly bad day, alternating between nervous exposition and mindless screaming. It’s hard to make atmosphere offensive, but these guys find a way to do it. The music is just unpleasant buzzing with the bare hint of an oozing rhythm, meant to grate and annoy. In the end, ‘we’re all Frankie’s, and we’re all lying in hell.’ How touching. Further Listening: Throbbing Gristle – Hamburger Lady (funny title, but not at all funny)
7. The Velvet Underground – Sister Ray You probably won’t realize this is a song about dope dealing orgy that ends in the murder of a sailor because you’ll be busy wrapping your head around the fact that it’s a seventeen minute jam filled squealing guitars and a Vox organ that overwhelms all the other instruments. Allmusic.com uses the term ‘oppressive’. Every act that came after and tried to make white noise and feedback instruments – Sonic Youth, Joy Division, Animal Collective - owes at a debt to this track. Lou Reed has many chances to go over the scant lyrics, and each times he gets a bit more frantic. In some ways, listening to the entire length of this song becomes an endurance test, and it should be noted that live versions of the track were known to exceed thirty minutes. Take that, Grateful Dead! Further Listening: Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music (Part 1, 2, 3, or 4) (Reed himself has said, ‘anyone who gets to side four is dumber than I am’)
6. Electric Wizard – Funeralopolis Most songs on the list deal with incredibly explicit and profane lyrics. This tune takes an extra step, as the music itself is almost impossible to listen to if you’re not a fan of the sounds of apocalypse, let alone familiar with the concept of it. In eight and half minutes English doom metal experts Electric Wizard meet and exceed every heavy metal cliché very, very loudly. The music slow is like a slow lurch, with piles of guitars echoing a feedback laden dirge. By the end, the solos begin to overwhelm the rhythm section and vocals, and it begins to sound like chaos, not music. As far as the words, the Iron Maiden stuff those kids kill themselves in the eighties ain’t got nothing on this song. When Jan Osborn screams, even the lighter lines seemed caustic: ‘I don’t care/this world means nothing/Life has no meaning/My feelings are numb’. There’s even a swipe at abortion (‘condemned to die before I could breathe’). And how about that ending chant: ‘Nuclear warheads ready to strike/this world is so fucked let’s end it tonight’ Sister Ray is longer, but the Velvets sound like they’re having a crazy party the whole time. Funeralopolis sounds like Electric Wizard is skullfucking you for eight minutes. Further Listening: Monster Magnet – Spine of God (singer Dave Wyndorf says ‘I love everyone’ in this song, but I’m pretty sure it’s because he’s on drugs)
5. The Rolling Stones – Cocksucker Blues The Rolling Stones were switching to a label that wasn’t going to screw them out of as much money, but they still owed a final single to Decca Records in the fall of 1970. They knocked out this nugget, a soulful acoustic ballad where Mick Jagger wonders forlornly where he could get his cock sucked, and his ass fucked. And that’s the chorus. Supposedly about a gay prostitute on the streets of London, it might be a not so subtle metaphor for the underhanded dealings of the many record executives of the sixties who preyed on young groups with empty promises and rigged contracts. And the bit about the cop that rapes the kid is probably how the band felt about the police at the time, considering all the drug busts. Funnily enough, the next single the band did release was Brown Sugar, a track about heroin, S&M, eating pussy, and interracial, underage sex. Cocksucker Blues was never released and has essentially been only available on bootleg recordings. Meaning you can now find it on youtube in fifteen seconds. Further Listening: Son House – Your Southern Can Is Mine (old blues singer wailing about a pimp threatening to hit one of his prostitutes in the face with a brick)
4. Patti Smith – Rock n Roll Nigger I suppose in terms of offensive protest songs, you could take Masters of War or any Rage Against the Machine track, but certain words are by themselves guaranteed to make people cringe and get pissed off. Rock n Roll Nigger isn’t very far off from Lennon’s Woman is Nigger of the World, using the key term to represent any marginalized group of people. Patti sounds like Grace Slick with a major chip on one shoulder and an empty whisky bottle balancing precariously on the other. Also, it’s a got a great ‘fuck you’ riff. Further Listening: Peaches – Fuck the Pain Away
3. The Anti-Nowhere League – So What Rock n Roll Nigger had a point behind its abrasiveness. This one doesn’t: ‘I fucked a sheep, I fucked a goat/I rammed my cock right down his throat’. That pretty much says it all. Further Listening: The Dead Kennedys – Too Drunk to Fuck (hey, sometimes it happens)
2. Eminem – Kill You In terms of cramming a bunch of violent and sexually explicit lyrics into one four and half minute song, this leadoff track from Eminem’s second LP takes the cake (although D12’s Bizarre is also pretty unhinged. He just isn’t as good as Marshall on the mike). Raping mom, painting with people’s blood, taking pills and booze to quiet the voices (he also comes off schizophrenic, thanks to his evil alter ego, Slim Shady), it’s all here, plus chainsaw sound effects. And of course, it’s not just content, but the form. Eminem sounds like he means it. He’s a gifted lyricist and a MC who knows how to contrast control with insanity. In a battle for Marshall Mathers’ mind, a host of different and dirty characters come out for the knife fight, bringing some of the most twisted lyrical topics you could think of: Sodomy on a camping trip, references to Psycho, killing fat people, a couple homophobic references, and he’s not even afraid to date himself, with references to both OJ and Columbine. It’s over the top-ness is practically mocked within the song, when Eminem seems to be wrapping up the second verse but then announces he’s going to keep going and describe killing the girl for another couple lines. Further Listening: A ton of hardcore rappers get close, but let’s go with DMX – X is Coming
1. Bob Dylan – Positively Forth Street As Eminem quickly adds at the end of Kill You, ‘I’m just playin’ ladies, you know I love you’, you realize that many times there is a large disconnect between the artist and the words they are putting forth. Sometimes it can be obvious that they are saying or singing is not true (Eminem didn’t rape his mother, and the guys in Anti-Nowhere League never fucked a goat), and sometimes it’s clear the artist is using explicit lyrics in an attempt to make a greater point (Rock n Roll Nigger). As said in entry #2, Eminem sounds like he means it but we all know he’s joking. As for number one, Positively Fourth Street, you would swear that Dylan straight out believes ever word he sings. No, not only believes it, but actually pictures meeting the hapless protagonist while he’s singing it. Like Eminem, he is able to create mental pictures in the listener’s heads, but while Eminem takes it over the top to the point of cartoonish ultraviolence, Dylan keeps it rooted it the prosaic and familiar. Dylan talks directly to this person and gives a terrifying laundry list of their negative personality characteristics. How lousy it is to hang out with this guy, how he’s a lying, back talking hypocrite. What would usually be a line or two in any other song is something Dylan obsesses over. Every one of this unnamed person’s faults ripped open and dissected for all to see. This isn’t just a putdown, but Dylan kicking a man in the teeth repeatedly. He doesn’t need any dirty words, either. And the music doesn’t fit right, but that only works in the songs favor. It’s got an upbeat organ in front with a pleasant folk rock backing rhythm. In the end Dylan says,
“I wish that for just one time
Yes, I wish that for just one
time I mean, holy shit! It’s vicious honesty that crushes the soul. When the sentiment ‘fuck off’ isn’t good enough, try this song. It burns like hellfire.
Fleet Foxes: Music the Way Nature Intended Sometimes the trees are so thick outside my window I don’t see forest, only a grey black mass with countless pointy appendages. Swallowing up those on either harmless afternoon walks or serious business. But if I am ever put in the position where I must venture through the snowy woods, I do not bat an eye or turn around to stare at my cabin with fears that I may never see it again. I have the Fleet Foxes on my iPod, and I know they will lead the way. The bridge between man and nature is this Seattle quartet, only three years old. But age does not matter here. Forget ‘paying your dues’. Incredible music comes along when it is ready, not when the world surrounding it is. And sometimes true success won’t show up on the charts. With the slow death of the industry giants, pushing anything but the sure bets of established artists is too much of a financial risk. To find new music today requires a bit more effort on the individual’s behalf. Word of mouth becomes the most powerful promotional tool, which means the first question from neophytes is typically, ‘well what do Fleet Foxes sound like?’ And so begins the analogies. The Beach Boys in a forest. The folk Beatles. Wilco without the neuroses. The soundtrack of the woods on a snowy day in February. Sometimes we do a great disservice to art of all kinds by explaining their essence away with disparate comparisons. The only thing I can say for sure is that Fleet Foxes do not belong in 2009. In fact, it’s a sacrilege that I am listening to them on such an infernal technological device like an iPod. If I was any fan at all I would carry around a gramophone with me at all times, cranking it with noble diligence. Very little music can be labeled timeless. Usually the word itself holds little to no meaning at all. ‘To be of no time’ is to not dwell within the time and space of our universe. But this music – made by people who walk upright and breathe air like you and I – is able to borrow heavily from folk and sixties pop and still sound while still sounding like…nothing I’ve ever heard before. Much of the credit has to go to singer-songwriter Robin Peckhold, who has the most unique and emotional voice since Thom Yorke. Sometimes the lone sound for miles, sometimes double tracked, it fills up the gap between the sparse instrumentation while leading the music at the same time. They are simple songs of love and loss, but Peckhold is able to make sound like is heart about to burst from his chest and fly up to the heavens. ‘Tiger Mountain Pheasant Song’ is a simple acoustic ballad on guitar with the vocals sometimes right up front and sometimes in giant church, echoes bouncing every which way. The end of ‘Oliver James’ is the sound of the band saying, ‘screw it. We don’t even need to play anymore.’ Peckhold just sings unaccompanied. And he kills it. But it takes a crack band to know when to play its heart out and when to shut it down, and [band members] do it magnificently. A tight group, no flashy solos, it stands out because they play together so harmoniously. ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’ builds up and winds down in an epic three and half minutes. Guitar, piano, drums, vocals, never veering off a course that is familiar yet unexplored. Like a walk on an old forest path in fresh snow. The two and half minutes of ‘White Winter Hymnal’ is the teaser and definite track on the album. You can hear Peckhold inhale in between the lines of the hypnotic chorus. The band step in and out like calming waves. And it’s these little things that makes this music feel that it’s alive and twisting in your eardrums. Fleet Foxes have pushed aside the electronic and bombastic sounds of today and have crafted an album that harks back to a past I can’t imagine existing unless their music is playing at that moment. It creates images in your head of falling snow, burning fireplace logs, and a sky pregnant with possibilities as you walk beneath branches and over frozen streams. An atmosphere immersed in nature. And this is only the beginning of their career. Wherever their forest path leads, we’d be crazy not to follow.
All Points West 2008 – A review from the trenches
Smashing a
plastic cup of beer – after a thirty minute lineup – against this
festival’s main stage to inaugurate its maiden voyage Rain, wind and
sunny breaks welcome us, and on the other side of bored security guards
barely patting me over is a rather empty music festival. As an added screw
job, the wristbands that are affixed to your wrist do not allow you to
drink to your heart and wallet’s content. Each band has five removable
plastic tabs on it that are removed with each purchase, meaning no one is
to get more than five pints over the entire 10 hour concert. By early
evening the beer tent is getting more and more crowded. And people are
offering the serving girls bigger tips if they don't remove the wristband
tabs for each purchase. This is a city
festival. The early afternoon exists for the music fans who wanted to hear
the small indie bands. As offices close on Friday, the bands get bigger in
stature, the crowds grow, and lying down anywhere you want to stare at the
clouds goes from childlike to naive to impossible.
And here would be
a good time to mention that the much touted ‘proximity to Manhattan’
existed in appearance only. With the skyline right behind you it gets
through your head that it's only a quick walk or swim away. It's not. Of
course, a huge factor in this is that getting thirty thousand people out
of the same location at more less the same time - even if just crossing a
road - is never going to be easy, but unless you wanted to wait for up to
an hour for the fifteen minute ferry ride, you were stuck with a sixty
minute public transit voyage involving two completely different train
lines and a long walk to the closest station. -A picture of
George Bush Senior with the words, ‘I should have pulled out’
Christ, and The Roots were playing just one stage over. At least that’s a band that let’s their guitarist go apeshit for five minutes. And you gotta give props to a hip hop band (yes, band) that’ll cram in Zeppelin and Rodgers and Hammerstein into a jam on one of their biggest hits (You Got Me). And ?uestlove is the black Bonham.
Me and my compatriots left as the band finished off with the electro rave up, Idioteque. We headed back for the island with thousands of others, bathed in the afterglow of a band that pretty much wiped out any memory of every other band that graced the three stages the last two days. Damn crafty Englishmen.
And that’s the
danger of every music festival. It’s hard to dig in your heels and run for
years in this business by name only. Profits are based on lineup. People
can overlook bad lines and mismanagement and overpriced anything if the
bands playing are good enough. Radiohead fans would brave quicksand and
blizzard on the same night for a taste of honey. Ditto Metallica and Pearl
Jam fans (Bonnaroo snagged ‘em both this year). If you build it, they will
come. If you don’t, we’ll stay home. England’s crown jewel – Glastonbury –
had a weaker than usual lineup, and ticket sales reflected this. It’s show
business, and there’s no business without the show, and no show without
any business. So yeah, I missed the third day, but I really don’t think I missed anything at all.
I wasn’t there…it wasn’t happening…
Damn Radiohead…they get into everything…
They're unsigned. They're on myspace. Five people went to see them at a bar last week... I step into the dimly lit Smiling Buddha. There is a group of six people who have pushed two tables together and are eating appetizers, chatting loudly. Further to the back there are four young men hunched over a drum kit, tuning up some guitars and a bass. On television above the bar (and the bored bartender) is 60 Minutes. Including myself, I count twelve people. I am here to see Soup Kitchen Lineup. I know the bass player. We were once roommates. I do not know anything about them. No album reviews, no good word of mouth, no critics pick. All I had was a request to come via telephone. They are my friend’s band, so I had to show up. The early twenty first century is a strange time to be in a band. With the advent of American Idol and record companies relying more and more on sure-fire bets like adult contemporary and non-threatening hip-hop, the term 'band' seems to be as loose as the term 'artist', so it would be best for us to define our terms first. A ‘band’ is being defined here as a recurring group of individuals who play mostly self-written music at live venues as well as record music in a studio for those people who cannot attend these live shows. In the past, bands would play in bars and clubs until a representative from a record company offers to sign them. Playing these songs in sports arenas and blowjobs soon followed. If the band is fortunate enough to pen two relatively popular albums, they may able to pursue playing and recording music until they die (which, judging on past precedents of rock and roll culture, may not be far off). In the past, getting a record deal was extremely hard. You had to have talent. You had to have the good luck to find yourself playing in a venue with a representative of a record label present. In the eighties, with the advent of MTV, which allows people to watch music as much as hear it, it got even more difficult, as you had to have talent (though not as much as before) and style (which had to ooze out of every pore). This didn’t change until the rise of the internet in the late twentieth century, and with it came a Do-It-Yourself type attitude for new bands, mainly because Warner Music sure as hell wasn’t going to do it for you anymore. At first simply a haven for star trek geeks, the trading of words through cyberspace soon became the trading of sounds, and without explaining Napster to all those fourteen year olds out there who own 500 albums thanks to Limewire, suffice to say, paying for music has become as cool as paying your taxes. The record companies initially reacted the same way we all would if someone was stealing something you owned: They called their lawyers. But like a benevolent hydra, for every Napster they sent to lawsuit limbo, two more rushed in to take its place. Suing music fans was bad PR, so short of cutting many, many middle management positions and quasi-successful bands, the record companies did absolutely nothing. Taking it upon themselves, up and coming bands began post music, tour dates, and personal info on various social-networking websites, most notably myspace. The most popular success story was that of the UK band Arctic Monkeys, whose first album became the fastest selling debut in English music history thanks in part to having their music spread like wildfire through the bowels of the internet. Cyberspace makes it possible to have your band’s songs available to all corners of the globe and to connect with fans one-on-one, almost instantly. The internet also makes it almost impossible to get paid for these services rendered. Such is the catch-22 of the music business today. I’m sitting on a stool in the Smiling Buddha, reading the closed captioning on the TV while drinking a cheap pint. Overhearing the group of six, I realize that they are the ‘headlining’ band plus their entourage, and that means Soup Kitchen Lineup is the opener. Only one other person has entered the bar by the time my friend leaves the stage and comes up to say hello. We have more awkward than usual conversation, which makes sense as he is essentially about to go to work. I am thanked for coming, and in return I don’t mention the turnout. He tells me they have a myspace page, and I tell them that that’s cool. In the five minutes before he’s called back to the stage by the guitarist, he orders a beer and we watch/read 60 Minutes in relative silence. There are few things better than going to a small bar on a whim and seeing a great up and coming rock and roll band for five bucks. And there are few things worse than doing the same thing out of fulfilling a duty as a friend. There are unwritten rules about how to support a friend’s musical endeavors: You have to go to their first gig, their second gig, and after that, you are not obliged to appear in any way until they are playing at a venue larger than the usual bar or have a CD release party. Oh, you could go to every gig they do, but that’s a quick way to become a roadie, lackey, or groupie. A roadie means you will actually carry things and be useful to the band, while a lackey means you just kind of sit in the audience and try not to get on their nerves during sound check. Everyone knows what a groupie is (and does). Yet almost every band still playing in a bar are a long way from dealing with roadies, lackeys, and groupies. The Do-It-Yourself work ethic is not so much chosen as thrust upon them (which is a shame, especially considering what groupies are for). It's the same in every city of modest size. Hundreds of young men and women toil in meaningless jobs during the day trying to 'buy their soul back at night', to quote poet James Dickey. Most will never escape this launch pad of bars and run down clubs. After all, there are only so many types of original music you can make in the corner of a room. In every town and city there can be dozens of bands that you've never heard of, but almost certainly know. Remainameless is a rock trio that tries to be Nirvana and Led Zeppelin at the same time, and they succeed more often than you’d think. I’ve known the guitarist/singer for years, and I’ve probably seen more of his gigs than any of other small band, if only because they’ve lasted long enough to open for and headline above a shitload of other bands other friends have been in. Their myspace page states that they sound like, ‘the best damn rawk band in Canada’, and considering what one wants when they ‘rawk out’, they aren’t far off the mark. A couple indulgent guitar solos? Check. An above average rhythm section? Check. Mostly understandable singing about love, loss, and cutting through the bullshit? Check. A closing song that feels like an epic? Check. The occasional guitar smashing? Check. Speaking of which… A quick note on guitar smashing: Most small-time bands cannot afford to break their instruments. The Who would lose money on tours because of always having to buy new gear. Nirvana didn’t have enough money to turn it into an art until they signed to a major label. That’s why it really is a treat to see a frenzied guitarist dripping with sweat during the final climax of the last song of the night destroy his axe in a small bar with a tiny crowd. You can see the madness in his eyes as he pulls the strap over his head, the crowd eggs him on with cheers, and just as he raises it above his head and the drummer plays the shit out of hi hat cymbals, he remembers that they have band practice tomorrow and rent is due next week. The guitarist’s enthusiasm sags and the arm muscle weaken. The guitar comes down on the stage with a light drop instead of a Kurt Cobain baseball swing. To salvage his image, the guitarist tries to mangle the strings before walking offstage with the swagger you’re supposed to have after breaking the neck of your precious. What a letdown. Oh the pretty things were once the big three, who at one point had four members, two of which were my roommates (one now plays with Soup Kitchen Lineup). One of the guitarists in the new group played in the early rap metal band Project Wyze that had a minor - but big enough - hit to get a slot on the Ozzfest tour. Then there were issues with the label, the band was stuck with a hefty recording studio bill, and subsequently dissolved (rock on, indeed). Compared to remainameless, who best epitomize a straight ahead rock band, oh the pretty things are bit more haywire onstage. The tall, cocky leader will think nothing of waltzing over to a keyboard mid-song and stop playing guitar in favor of pounding the keys. When he does play guitar he frequently breaks strings from constantly heavy riffing. At least one song in every set has to be a Stairway to Heaven-like epic, starting with a slow buildup and ending in an explosive finale, maybe even tossing in a squealing guitar solo that is done while wandering through the audience. He stops songs on a dime to have a sip of beer, and then goes right back into it, just to show that the band has the chops to do it. He heckles the audience better than they could ever heckle him. Anyone he knows who knows the lyrics and can carry a tune are ordered onstage. All of this is kosher when playing in a bar filled with forty people. In fact, it maybe necessary for you to remember oh the pretty things past the next week. The only downers are the singalongs, which are usually met with an awkward silence by the audience unless it's really easy stuff (yeahs, nahs, and ooohs are the best choices). The last time I saw oh the pretty things they did a particularly spirited cover of The Beatles Oh Darling, inviting anyone to singalong. I was dismayed to see (and hear) that I was the only one singing (badly). I don't know if it was because of lack of enthusiasm, or lack of familiarity of the Beatles, but hoping against hope that the reason was not my generations disinterest in abbey road, anyone who has been suckered into attending a friend's anything will admit that you can't possibly have that much fun if you are spending the night in a bar out of obligation. In this case, you're lucky if the band will share their drink tickets with you. Back at the Smiling Buddha, I realize Soup Kitchen Lineup sounds like the grateful dead without the acid, so they sound like Wilco without the insecurity. To further solidify this observation, they cover 'Cumberland Blues' at the end of their set. My friend keeps his bass lines in check, avoiding the rock and funk I know he enjoys playing. It helps the overall sound of the music, as the two guitarist vocalists don't overwhelm me with their playing, focusing more on the songs than virtuosity. Despite a dead-ish quality, there are no twenty minute space outs. All in all the music gives off a nice warm, rock-country vibe, which probably means they'll never get anywhere unless they drive around the country in a van and play almost every night, where ever they can and build an audience one gig at a time. The headliners table claps politely after every song, but they don’t seem to be paying attention to the music in between. Sometimes the camaraderie between bands are so tight that you get sick of the fact that they're always headlining/opening for each other or - if one of the band members is your roommate - play 'Dust in the Wind' together at three AM in your kitchen. Sometimes the two don't know each other's names. Sometimes there is unfounded animosity between bands simply because of the cutthroat competition that can exist in the underground music scene. There just isn't that much cash to go around. It is factors like these that make the early history of a band filled with short period of intense change and long periods of little to nothing happening. Bands will go months between gigs, and sometimes they’ll play at two different venues the same night. One band I knew called Stealing Sugar saw their lineup double in size to ten people in the span of two months, and didn't break up so much as get pulled apart by gravitation forces (and nearly impossible scheduling). Of course, any doctor of physics will tell you that some debris will still come together and jam again on drunken Saturday nights. These incestuous gatherings are nothing new. It's how Broken Social Scene got started. And sometimes these spur of the moment musical flings are all that makes playing music worth it. In a new band you have to delude yourself and ignore the fact that the odds of anything coming out of all your hard work are astronomically small (sometimes because of devastating fact that the band sucks). Playing a gig in front of three people may be quirky once or twice, but any more than that and it because depressing. Connecting with people in a bar of all places is an uphill battle, especially if most of the attendees are just looking for a way to kill a Saturday night. Who wants to rehearse in a basement three times a week, put up a posters all afternoon that everyone ignores, lose money every time you rent out a place, play songs no one really listens to, and quietly find a new drummer because your current one is a drunk? The sacrifices one makes for that tiny shot of success is ridiculous unless you have that quintessential love for music itself. A clichéd assessment, sure, but if I ask anyone in the bands I've mentioned why they do it, their answers would be the same: 'Because', 'I have this drive in my heart', 'it's the sound of the guitar that just calls to me' 'I don't want to do anything else with life', 'Fuck you, help me carry this amp down the stairs'. Of course, you might just do it all for the money, and if that's the case, you may as well just start a cover band. Speaking of which, as some quick advice for up and coming bands, cover songs (two tops per show for any respectable group) have to be chosen carefully. They are either a radical reworking of popular songs, or faithful copies of lesser known material. Bands know that there is a possibility that these songs are all that the audience will remember, so you may as well prove you've got unique musicianship (by reworking Karma Police) or unique taste (by playing Ella Guru note for note). I stand outside the bar after Soup Kitchen Lineup’s set with my friend so he can smoke a cigarette. One of his band mates joins us. Even though I just saw them, I can’t remember what he played. All four of them kind of look like the Kings of Leon. Showing the courtesy the headlining band didn’t show them, Soup Kitchen is staying to watch the rest of the show. Just as I was bidding my friend farewell and making vague promises about attending future gigs, a young woman walks up to us and asks for a light. Small talk allows us to find out that this bar was her final destination. My friend’s eyes light up and asks her if she’s heard of his band. The young lady looks confused, and my friend explains they just played a great set inside. She remains nonplussed: ‘Oh. I thought it was karaoke tonight.’
I listen to music seriously. That doesn’t mean I won’t multitask while it plays (walking, typing, eating), but it means I usually put a lot of thought into the next album or play list for the journey that I’m going to be embarking upon (even if it’s just to the kitchen). Sometimes I am crippled by my multitude of choices and scroll though my music library for two or three minutes in an attempt to find the music that defines ‘me’ at that very moment (damn you, 20,000 song iPod! No wait, I don’t mean that. Sorry, Mr. Jobs, it’s a wonderful device). When I finally choose what to play, I am prone to zoning out or mouthing the words to the sonic masterpieces that pour out of my speakers or headphones. Not only do I pay attention to the lyrics and solos, but I even try to weed out the barely-there piano or drum fills. I have missed subways stops due to this pointless dedication. But then, sometimes there is music out there that doesn’t require even half-assed concentration. Sometimes there are albums that are just great background music. This doesn’t mean that they are unfulfilling and dull if you lie on your bed with a pair of headphones and groove to it, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get down on your knees and thank god for the gift of sound when you hear the songs, either. Its music you can talk over, cook to, and hump during. Or pretty much do anything except just ‘listen’ to the music. Here are ten albums that you can put on and forget about…but not quite.
St. Germaine – Tourist Jazz has always been pegged as ‘the’ background music by the musically-curious-but-still-small-minded-about-it crowd. And sometimes they have a point. Jazz – especially studio-recorded jazz – is about as exciting as a wallpaper. Sure it’s great for a lark for a moment or two, but do we really need nine minutes of, say, Miles Davis’ ‘So What’? Oh, right. It’s improvisation. Which means that while it is certainly technically challenging, it’s still as exciting as wallpaper 90% of the time. Of course, rather than desecrate the jazz masters from fifty years ago, I’ll just choose the album all the people who say they love jazz but can’t pronounce ‘Thelonious’ bought. This electronic drum beats plus real jazz instruments mash up came out in 2000, and kind of struck a chord for pseudo-hipsters. Thing is, it’s still an okay album if you don’t listen too attentively. It’s literally paint-by-numbers music. Perfect for wine and cheese.
Neil Young [and Pearl Jam] – Mirrorball Everyone likes Neil Young’s ‘Down by the River’, right? How about an hour of it? And imagine Crazy Horse suddenly became twenty years younger. Neil Young is up there with the Stones as veteran artists who have put out plenty of mediocre but never stupendously bad albums. This is one of those ones, but compared to, say, Hawks & Doves, at least its fun. All the songs on here are good, but none are great. You can tune in and out and won’t miss a thing. The riffs don’t go very far.
Phish – Hoist Unless you’re on a lot of drugs (and not blow), Phish’s entire discography comes off as a bit of a snore. The studio music is jazz-poppy, while the live stuff just… doesn’t… stop (chalkdust torture is right). This is their most accessible album, with no real jams except for a bit in the final song. Most of it is pretty contained and well put together, and while they don’t write the best tunes, these four guys don’t have much competition when it comes to playing well together. Too well sometimes, as these performances replace spontaneity with polish. But that’s okay, since background music has to straddle that odd line between uninteresting and uneven. And Phish just about hits that mark every time.
Stone Temple Pilots – Tiny Music (Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop) It’s like Purple, but not as good, so it’s perfect for this list. Scott Weiland got too doped up to support the album with a tour, meaning it didn’t end up as successful as their previous album (the aforementioned Purple). But not being familiar with this album is half the fun. It will sound like you know it by heart anyway. STP was always known as a band that ripped off the best from other bands, but hey, they did it really well, so why should we hold it against them? Everything on here sounds like a semi-Jane’s Addiction song, a broken Nirvana tune, or an aborted Pixies jam. And Big Bang Baby is the best B-minus rated alternative anthem ever.
Manu Chao - Clandestino Sixteen tracks in forty-five minutes? Hell, it seems like Manu Chao made this one to intentionally blur together into a booty shaking haze you can’t totally immerse yourself in because he’s speaking three languages. Nothing really sticks out except the hit ‘Bongo Bong’, and that’s fine as the whole album seems structured to sound like a speed-fueled jam full of radio sound bites and whistles as you bounce between France and Brazil/. By his own admission, Manu Chao’s songs are extremely simple. You don’t have to invest a lot of time and effort to catch the foot-tapping fever. You can drop it and pick it up later with minimal effort. Manu Chao knows what you want, and knows how to give you a good time. His live performances support this. Most of the band doesn’t stop jumping up and down for the whole ninety minutes. You’d swear they were on trampolines.
Kraftwerk – Autobahn Background music par excellence. The 23 minute title track is supposed to simulate what it’s like driving on the German motorways, so in a way listening to this as background music is actually a deep, metaphysical exercise of cosmic awareness. Thematically, the music is background. It’s a damn shame they don’t really sing, ‘Fun, fun, fun, on the autobahn’ (apparently it’s some actual German). That would have been beautifully cheesy.
AC/DC – Back in Black It makes the list because everyone knows the hits on here front and back, and the rest of the material is like the hits, but more forgettable. Even though it’s a definite hard rock, speaker shattering classic, it just can’t escape the label of dumb, loud music. When played at the correct volume, it’s overpowering. But dare to turn it down a bit, and you’ve got yourself nothing more than a fast paced blues album sung by a shrieking Australian. Perfect for taking the starch out of that stuffy wine and cheese shindig. Also, the constantly overplayed ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ deserves to be pushed out of the spotlight as much as possible these days. Meanwhile, the tender, heartfelt ‘Givin the Dog a Bone’ gets no play at all…
Bob Marley – Legend For too many Bob Marley fans, the reggae icon’s discography ends here, with this greatest hits album. Criminal, really. The Wailer’s debut LP, Catch a Fire is much more engrossing. But we aren’t going for engrossing here. Engrossing escapes from the speakers and instead of hovering over the room like a cloud burrows into your ears and makes a home. So instead I choose all the Marley we’re familiar with and can nearly dispose of. The fun hits, the vague political themes, all propelled by weed-drenched rhythms. While I bet there are people who don’t like reggae music, I never met anyone who truly hates it. Which is exactly the reaction you want for a background album.
Handel – Water Music Beethoven’s too thunderous, Mozart’s too catchy. So try this second-rate German composer’s attempt at winning over King George I (it worked). Water Music is perfect for when you want to seem high class and debonair but don’t want to drag out the Allman Brothers’ Live at Fillmore East. It is a short series of three musical suites that is both supremely regal and instantly forgettable at the same time. Sure classical music is poison to the ears for over 90% of the populace, but this is a nice, short antidote to pretty much anything else you’ll hear in the twenty-first century. Try it. You may learn something if you find yourself absentmindedly paying attention. And if you really are unsure, did I mention it clocks in at eighteen minutes? Surely you can spare the time for something that short. Because of this, it’s usually paired with Handel’s Music for Royal Fireworks on CD. And while that’s good too, real fireworks are slightly more interesting.
The Rolling Stones – Aftermath Before this, the Stones just wrote singles, while afterwards they began experimenting and then refining their sounds into cohesive albums. Stuck in the middle is this collection of…good songs. Just good, poppy rocks songs like ‘Under My Thumb’ and ‘Out of Time’. It doesn’t have the epiphany-like moments you get when listening to The Beatles’ Revolver, another album from the summer of 1966. And really, as far a background albums go, that’s a good thing. You don’t you look for (or get) moments of complete euphoria on background albums. All you get is a good beat and some lyrics you end up trying to hum along to. And sometimes that’s all music has to be.
Louder is better.
Right? – A Concert review of Queens of the Stone Age And maybe to counteract the success that might be going to their heads, the band made sure this concert felt like a small town show, which is what exactly what the current leg of the Queens summer tour consists of: trekking to small cities just off the beaten path. A little treat for the farm kids, who spent their pent up energy pushing each other around and crowd surfing. And while the best thing about a small-town show is the small-town venue where you don’t need binoculars to see the whites (okay, reds) of the band’s eyes, most of these concert halls don’t really know how to handle a band that happens to be as loud as The Queens of the Stone Age. A venue that is used to children’s book readings and Christmas carol concerts can’t really adapt to this wall of rhythmic noise, and regardless of how on point the band is, the overall performance suffers. Namely, the vocals barely peaking above the riffage. Even the ultra catchy refrain 'sick, sick, sick' from the song of that name required the audience to fill in the blanks themselves, as the backing vocalist/bass and guitar players couldn't be heard. It was even difficult to make out what Josh Homme was saying between the songs which is a shame as he is probably one of the more interesting and funny of the rock front men that engage in stage banter (Tool's Maynard James Keenan also comes to mind). A security guard he thought was being a bit too hard on the kids up front was subject to being pointed out with a flashlight and reprimanded (it probably helps that Homme is a bouncer sized 6'3). The opening band was Cage the Elephant, which actually sounds like song QOTSA themselves might write, and they had the same sound problem. I had no idea what the singer was wailing on about because the pronunciation died in the mix. Fortunately his voice meshed well with the music, and became more an instrument of emotive sounds than of a fountain of crisp, clean lyrics. It’s just as well. Their music was definite sludge rock, full of sloppy simple riffs, with nifty little solos by the fro-filled guitarist. It complimented the steely-eyed power of QOTSA perfectly, who are about as tight as drug-fueled music can (and should) get. While I could have done with a bit more tunes from the first two LP’s, the newest music blends in well with the older. 'Do it Again' and '3's and 7's' sit together like old war buddies having a beer at the legion, razor sharp guitars beside more razor sharp guitars. But tonight there is no sign of Homme's acoustic prowess like on 'Lightning Song' from Rated R. There is no shelter from the storm at this concert. The band is trying to appeal to your balls, not your heart. And I don’t know if Josh Homme is a real bastard slave driver in rehearsals, but these players are the best shave money can buy. With only a nod of Homme’s head, they stop and start on a dime. One small recurring beef: Turn up Josh's gee-tar for the solos. The man can play, and we wanna hear him (I guess this means I'm suggesting the concert should be even louder. Sorry, ears). It would make for a slightly refreshing change from the constantly propulsive sounds of the drum and bass rhythms of Joey Castillo (who gives Dave Grohl a run for his money regarding the title of best rock drummer today) and Michael Shuman, because while noise is a powerful, ear bleeding force, it also kills the aura of spontaneity, even if it is actually alive and well. 'Misfit Love' was subject to a nice lengthy, intro jam, but much other songs felt largely by-the-numbers, especially the fan-favourite 'No One Knows', which was missing the a cappella verse that graces the band's excellent live album/DVD, Over the years and Through the Woods. Damn it, reading this over sounds like I had a crappy time. And I didn’t. Not in the least. It was fucking great, exactly what I expected and wanted. Money well spent and all that jazz. My gripe about the sound, though, kind of opens up an interesting discussion about hard rock: Maybe it’s doomed to be played only at arenas and outdoor festivals. The Queens brought an arena show to a small concert hall, and kicked it’s ass a bit too effectively. The music overwhelmed the venue, and since the music and venue have to go hand in hand for an optimal sound experience, everybody in some sense lost (namely, they lost their hearing). It comes down to sight versus sound. Venues are called intimate because everyone there can see the band. But that’s not the point of music, which is – at least if you’re a great live band – a sonic medium. If you can see band, but can’t hear them very well, what’s the point? If that’s the case, I’d rather see Queens of the Stone Age at a 15,000 seat arena where they appear to be little specks onstage, as long as the sound quality is mint (which it was when I saw them open for NIN in such a view a few years back). I mean, the only solution to having an instrument stand out of a muddy mix is to turn it up even louder, which is a great way to get caught in those goddamn vicious circles (if you turn up the guitar, then the bass is too quiet, so you turn that up to compensate, etc.). Music can be too loud to be fun, and while it wasn’t the quite the case at this concert, the racecar was certainly in the red. But it was good music from the first note, so I got over it. Yeah, it's loud. Don't like it? Go home. The Queens of the Stone Age will play you out, wearing shit-eating grins and pounding away the whole time, laaaaaaaaughing...
Drugs, Drums and Dust: Bonnaroo 2007, A Special-Ass Report The fifth annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival sprung up again like it usually does in its usually place, ushering in the summer with its endless buffet of musical treats under the hot Tennessee sun. And certainly the best analogy is a buffet. With the exception of the headliners, with five stages playing simultaneously and not too far apart, you’re really not expected to hear an entire artist’s set (in fact, during songs breaks, you will hear other bands playing on the other side of the grounds). You make your rounds like the village whore or bicycle, taking in as many bits of diverse music as you can before you drop dead from heat stroke (body count for this festival: one, from said heat stroke). And that’s the real star of Bonnaroo, anyway: The heat. It’s with you every step of the way. The hottest Bonnaroo on record, they say. You woke up at eight thirty in the morning because all of a sudden it was too hot to sleep. (nine o’clock sound checks on the What Stage didn’t help none, either). So you lie in your tent or RV for a couple hours trying to save all the energy your going to need for the rest of the day (which won’t end until three or four tomorrow morning). ‘Man is it fucking hot!’ you tell your companions. ‘Yeah, it’s ridiculous’, they reply. And that’s what an in-depth discussion regarding global warming sounds like at Bonnaroo. But hanging around your campsite and smoking copious amounts of marijuana is only half of what Bonnaroo is all about. There’s also music. Tool, The Police, The White Stripes, Wilco, Gov’t Mule, and dozens of bands I’ve never heard of and will probably never hear again. See, I tried to see a couple random indie-bands I wasn’t familiar with at least a couple times during the festival, but doing so was not without hazards: 1 – Bonnaroo scheduled almost all of them during the ‘immediate skin cancer’ period of 12-4PM, meaning it was a physical endeavor of epic proportions to last an entire hour long set in the blistering Tennessee sun. 2 – The guidebook was rather unhelpful and vague, as a majority of these bands were simply labelled ‘indie-pop’. This is rather large umbrella-like term for a wide variety of music. It could be a quirky little band from Idaho with a violinist who sings about auto-accidents in nine minute songs with bizarre time signatures, or it could be a Maroon 5 clone before they get famous. I took a chance and saw the Cold War Kids. I didn’t know anything about them except that they were opening for The White Stripes for select dates this summer, which is about an as good recommendation as you could get. They were instantly forgettable. If I didn’t get a sunburn during the show, I couldn’t be sure that I was there in from of the That Tent at all. Same with Dr. Dog. I saw them at this VIP thing on Thursday night. They were a tight, energetic young (?) band that I can’t for the life of me remember anything about. The lead singer was the bass player, and he had a beard and brown shorts on. The songs were catchy and well-constructed, and went in my right ear before immediately dribbling out my left. Damn indie-pop. Wandering from stage to stage (What Stage, Which Stage, This Tent, That Tent, etc. Which led to comedian David Cross observing that the name process is funny for thirty seconds, then is just damn annoying and confusing), one appreciates just how many people it takes to put together such an event. Those pitas won’t wrap themselves, the bad vibes won’t go away on their own, and you know at least three people have that god-awful job of pumping out the port-a-potty’s nightly. Most small bands play in tents, so it really is a great moment when you walk out to the massive expanse of the main (‘What’) stage. Kings of Leon broke the seal Friday afternoon. Lead vocalist Caleb Followill wisely played guitar throughout the set as the songs from their new album Because of the Times would be rather sparse with just Matthew Followill on the axe. The show also gave the crowd the only drops of rain we would experience throughout the weekend. Surely if we knew that was it, we would have been much more welcoming. Following the Kings were The Roots, and they were excellent. They had a tuba player rocking the house with ?uestlove (boy is that name screwing with my word processor) hovering over it all on the drums like a shaggy black shaman. You know you have a crack live band when you’re playing a genre of music most people there don’t necessarily enjoy (hip-hop) but are still getting off on it. The Roots are like the Allmans of the ghetto.
As the sun set we got what was certainly the weirdest headliner
choice for any Bonnaroo: Tool. Their
show didn't deviate much from recent tour set lists, and it ran short of
the two-and-a-half hour runtime in the program (maybe two hours of
insanely heavy rock music was enough). I was personally hoping for an
encore of Third Eye, but we had to settle for Tom Morello guesting on
Lateralus as the treat for the night. On Saturday I braved the eleven o’clock sun and walked into Centeroo before the throngs came in to kick up the dust, which was quickly becoming a bigger problem by the hour. For four dollars you could get a good enough breakfast burrito at a nice little tent, and afterwards I walked over to the cinema. After a half of hour of random shorts (how a girl who can’t stop hiccupping was exploited by the Today show, the life of an onstage-Santa dancer for the Flaming Lips), Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes started. Tom Waits and Iggy Pop (with one long, hangdog expression). Meg and Jack White (kind of a sneak preview of Sunday evening, although Jack didn’t use a Tesla coil onstage). Bill Murray and the Wu Tang Clan. All having small talk over coffee and cigarettes. Was I on the edge of my seat? Yes, but only because the seats were damn uncomfortable. The film was slow enough that even those in the heaviest dope hazes were wishing things would pick up. In the end, the real fun was simply remembering how nice it was in the air conditioned tent as soon as you stepped outside into the scorching sun. Saturday’s headliners The Police were slightly more fun than getting busted. Andy Summers surprised me by being a better guitarist than I imagined a new-wave band member could ever be, and being an Oysterhead fan I knew the power of drummer Stewart Copeland, so I guess the blame has to fall on Sting and his songwriting (‘De DoDoDo, De DaDaDa’? I don’t care if it’s supposed to be ironic, it still sucks). Very little known fact: Andy Summers has released twelve solo albums since the Police broke up in 1983. Just keeping his fingers in shape for the inevitable reunion, I guess. The Police were tolerable for me personally because I got around to downing a hit of LSD just as they started playing. After a lazy Saturday (which was needed as The Flaming Lips and Gov’t Mule were playing late that night), it was just what the mystery doctor ordered. Acid pumps you full of energy. It's a psychedelic red bull for your brain. Your poor body could be exhausted but your mind is traveling at a thousand miles a minute. And because your mind is telling your body what to do and not taking no for an answer, you find yourself walking, wandering, dancing completely care-free for hours on end. For once your body can swallow every ounce of perception reality is throwing at it. It is one big happy overload, until you start to come down and your neck and shoulder start to tense up, as if your head has really absorbed too much like a massive sponge and is beginning to sink into your body. It is at this point that most music (but especially Sasha & Digweed) starts to sound like rusty metal being scrapped against Styrofoam, and you suddenly wish you were back tripping quietly in your RV. By late Saturday night the festival had the feel of a war zone. Bodies and dust everywhere. The first forty eight hours of drinking, smoking, and dropping everything under the sun had begun to take its toll, but that’s no reason for the music to stop. The heat and complete lack of rain kept the dust permanently kicked up. It shone in the night like some horrible fog, brightening 2AM to something more akin to a well lit military base. The only way to keep from coughing up a lung was to put on your just-in-case gas mask or to wrap a handkerchief around your face like a cowboy. Suddenly everyone at the festival looked like the outlaws the DEA said they were. And maybe it was the acid, but suddenly you’re wandering what the point of all this was. Are we just getting away with ‘murder’ in a field for a weekend before having to trudge back to the real world? While hyping Bonnaroo as being ‘something special’ is usually just a marketing tool for the promoters, sometimes you wonder if there could be something more, besides fun and money. Certainly by embracing at least a bit of the old fashioned hippie ethos, Bonnaroo can be transformed from a festival to a launching pad for a future utopia, if only for an hour or two. During their 12-2:30AM set on the Which stage, The Flaming Lips front man Wayne Coyne appealed to the crowd for an end to the war and ragged on Bush to monumental cheers. And while he may have had a hard time finding the right words and therefore rambled on a bit more than was needed, it at least made it seem heartfelt and unrehearsed. So while being a band that is just too damn strange to ever headline Bonnaroo, The Flaming Lips might be the one to define it better than any other group. The Lips and their crew are a tight knit group, holding the same kind of bonds that – ideally – the promoters of Bonnaroo want all festival goers to have. Emerging from a UFO/lighting rig, the Lips did songs about Jelly, Japanese schoolgirls fighting robots, and ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah’. It’s all in good fun, even though Wayne really wanted it to be so much more. He kept telling us how great it is to be here, and how much power people had when they came together for the right reasons. And damn it all if you didn’t want to believe him. And I forgot how good this band is live, even if you decided to ignore all the stunts like giant bubbles, UFOs, and cannon after cannon of confetti. They ended with a wonderful cover of the Stones, ‘Moonlight Mile’, and Coyne said it summed up the unity and communal aspects of the festival (I would have said it was more about an individual going through hard times that are almost over, but it’s a great song, so I’ll stop splitting hairs), and after two hours of solid over-the-top Lips, who’s going to call shenanigans on that? Maybe those who just spent six dollars on a cup of Budweiser. And what about fun? Not to say that The Flaming Lips weren’t that to a ‘t’, but a lot of kids are just here to get high and ROCK THE FUCK OUT. Not long after the Lips wrapped up I wandered the grounds and my choices were trance (maybe if I was on ecstasy and it was 1988) or Gov’t Mule, who were finishing up their marathon set with their own ideas of community and politics. They were doing back to back Sabbath covers, ‘Sweet Leaf’ and ‘War Pigs’. And of course, the secret brilliance about Sabbath is how damn easy they made it for musical virtuosos (and Gov’t Mule is certainly that, while being sub-par songwriters) to build and improve upon the three and four chords riffs Tony Iommi churned out. I mean, these guys just shamed Sabbath. A jam band playing heavy metal faster and harder than the godfathers of the genre. While a heart breaking thought to some, none of the kids there gave a fuck. They’ll get their rocks off wherever they can, and to hell with supposed legacy. By Sunday, joints were needed just to get out of bed in the morning. Bonnaroo is best experienced in a state of constant inebriation/intoxication. It’s what makes the heat, noise, crowds, expensive beer and mediocre food tolerable, as well as just improving the overall music listening experience. Fortunately, pretty much any poison under the sun is available to you with a simple walk through a campground village area (called ‘pods’, which are a series of tents that house food and trinket vendors, along with showers and first aid). What do you want? Pot, hash, mushrooms, acid, opium? They (well, someone) got it all. I even learned a new term for ecstasy (‘rolls’), making this whole thing a worthwhile educational experience. At Bonnaroo, it’s a seller’s market. Of course, this presents many opportunities for a piece of shit scum eater who would think nothing of ripping off a hapless, innocent concert-goer who’s used to buying an eight of pot in his hometown for thirty to forty bucks. In fact, I was deeply suspicious of the guy I bought acid off of (he charged $10 a hit, while others were charging $20), at least until I watched him tap out a bit of blow onto his wrist and snort it about ten seconds after he closed the deal. Wilco should have been absolutely perfect for Sunday afternoon. Countryish-rock-pop all done with a stamp of approval from the critics, but at this point in the festival it's an endurance contest, and people are still holding out too much for The White Stripes to really give Jeff Tweedy their full attention. Even the pit seemed too mellow for it’s own good. It certainly wasn't full, which is the only reason I went in. And I left early, because I didn’t want to miss a moment of…
The White Stripes.
Jack and Meg in all their glory. A massive stampede of people came for
their set, sending a giant cloud of dust across the stage for the first
few songs. The two of them didn’t bat an eye, and just played the shit out
of their respective instruments. Old favorites like ‘Jolene’, ‘Dead Leaves
on the Dirty Ground’ and ‘Seven Nation Army’ sat comfortably alongside
rare stuff like ‘Cannon’ and the new ‘Catch Hell Blues’. See, Jack White
will always be a blues guitarist, and an underrated one at that. Which is
why their new single ‘Icky Thump’ would have been right at home on Led
Zeppelin II. Same with the Son House cover, ‘Death Letter’ (audaciously
played at the Grammy’s a couple years back, if I remember correctly). Bonnaroo 2007, we hardly knew ye. Or maybe it just seemed that way because everything got dusty. Or hazy. Or both.
Summertime, and the living is easy. Why? Well, we’re not quite sure. In fact, with heat waves, increased pollution, gas prices through the roof, and strange tourists ruining all your favorite watering holes, you might say life in the summertime sucks balls. So with that in mind, we’ll provide you with a guide of one of the few respites to all this crapiness: Ear food. There’s nothing better than drinking a beer outside with friends and cranking up the music. Here’s a guide to make sure you don’t fuck up the ever-important tune selection. Road Trip CD The mix tape/CD and the MP3 player playlist are hallowed parts of the summer driving experience. When the destination is a cottage, festival, campsite, or pretty much any place where the goal is to drink a whole lot, a unique selection of music is needed to properly ‘pump up’ those crammed within the vehicle. While the organization of such an event may be a hasty and messy affair, there is no reason the music selection – sometime the single factor that prevents the ride from being a three hour slice of hell – should be. Follow these rules to make a kickass collection of songs: 1 – A good, foot stompin’ beat. Every song should boogie (except the sole ballad). It’s a prelude to the fun of the weekend. Leonard Cohen, Skinny Puppy, and everything Nirvana did after they got famous have to stay home. 2 – A mixture of old and new, popular and underground. The road trip is hallowed tradition dating back to the spring pilgrimages Christians used to make to holy sites across Europe in the medieval period. This doesn’t mean you have to load up your playlist with Gregorian chants, but there’s no point in putting together an assortment of songs that you could find on any Top 40 station. Mix the shit up. 3 – The ‘Road Trip’ theme. You’re in a car going seventy miles an hour down the interstate. The wind is rushing through your hair and is making such a racket you have to crank up the volume even more. May as well sing songs about road trips, cars, and almost dying in accidents. Let the following be a fine example of a playlist that tries to cover all the important qualities of ‘road trip’ songs: LA Woman – The Doors (nails two of three ‘rules’ right off the bat. Plus we get to meet Jim Morrison’s alter ego: Mr. Mojo Risin’) Broken Up Adingdong – The Beta Band (even though the percussion goes on a bit, it still works even though I don’t know what the title means. Doorbells, maybe?) Summertime Rolls – Jane’s Addiction (Perry Farrell’s weirdo lyrics about nostalgia don’t mean much until the band fully kicks in and he stars gleefully screaming the title over and over…) Truckin’ – The Grateful Dead (probably works even better than ‘LA Woman’, but more jammy, less hooky) Honky Tonk Women – The Rolling Stones (and this one is all hooky) Draw the Line – Aerosmith (the perfect, clichéd 70’s rock nugget) Black Thumbnail – Kings of Leon (a perfectly clichéd 70’s rock nugget, re-invented for 2007) The Passenger – Iggy Pop (the title says it all. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na…) Brand New Cadillac – The Clash (and the song would be even cooler if you were listening to the song in an actual Cadillac) Missed the Boat – Modest Mouse (the one ‘slow’ song, but can still be sung along to) Ray of Light – Madonna (perfect 90’s dance-pop) Back in Black – AC/DC (perfect 80’s metal-pop) Hey Ya – Outkast (perfect 00’s hip-pop) Airbag – Radiohead (yeah, yeah, Radiohead isn’t the most cheery band in the world, but this song is not about dying in a car accident, but just almost dying in a car accident…) Stuck in the Middle With You – Stealer’s Wheel (if there’s three people crammed in the back seat with luggage on their laps for the whole trip, this song is for them) Camarillo Brillo – Frank Zappa (proof Zappa could have written accessible, catchy rock songs if he really wanted to) Trampled Underfoot – Led Zeppelin (almost too hard for a fun playlist. Almost… and it’s about cars, anyway…) Lazer Beam – Super Furry Animals (poppy weirdness from Scotland)
The Summer Deck CD Okay, you made it to your destination, or, because you aren’t going anywhere, you’re sitting in your backyard or on your balcony. You need catchy, pop songs that can double as background music for when the conversation suddenly goes belly up. Summertime Rolls – Jane’s Addiction (it’s good enough to be on both lists) Hot Fun in the Summertime – Sly and the Family Stone Be My Head – The Flaming Lips (Bob Christgau said Brown Sugar is so good it discourages exegesis. The same can be said about this one) Sugar Never Tasted So Good – The White Stripes (sugar is fun!) Cool it Down – The Velvet Underground (hookers are fun!) Today – The Smashing Pumpkins Can You Hear the Music? – The Rolling Stones (murky, spacey funk from the post-Exile ‘slump’) Out on the Weekend – Neil Young & Crazy Horse (so laid back that it’s a stoner’s lullaby) Satellite of Live – Lou Reed Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and my Monkey – The Beatles Concrete Jungle – Bob Marley (social inequality never sounded so groovy) Just Dropped in – Kenny Rogers (summer is a time for drugs) What I Got – Sublime (drugs is summer a time for) Long Hot Summer Night – The Jimi Hendrix Experience (for time summer drugs a is) Golden Years – David Bowie (a disco song about future nostalgia. Oh, the supposed irony…) Wonderwall – Oasis (the one tune everyone can sing along to) Bop Gun – Parliament (‘cause your party can never really be too funky) Can’t Turn You Loose – Otis Redding Summer in the City – The Loving Spoonfuls (obligatory summer song that doesn’t suck)
10 Classic Summer Albums (don’t have time make a personal playlist? Here are albums you don’t need to tinker with. It’s alllll good…) Slanted and Enchanted – Pavement (indie hipster summer forever!) Rated R – Queens of the Stone Age (fun heavy! Heavy fun! 42 minutes of drug abuse!) Revolver – The Beatles (this is what happens what acid infiltrates the fab four) Grace – Jeff Buckley (it’s this close to being overrated just because he’s dead) Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-Nerd – Lynyrd Skynyrd (even though only assholes yell ‘freebird!’ at concerts, it at least proves they have at least a shred of good musical taste) 10,000 Hz legend – Air (a French electronic duo puts together a project that is infinitely more successful than the maginot line) Beastie Boys – Ill Communication (Hip-hop-punk-rock-funk-buddha-beats. And it's got 'Sabotage') Music from Big Pink – The Band (recorded in a big pink, house in the country, for listening in a same kind of place) Live at Fillmore East – The Allman Brothers Band (the art of jamming) You Forgot it in People – Broken Social Scene (ambient pop. There are words that you can barely pick out from the ethereal sound waves, but why bother? )
Summer Concert/Festival Etiquette
Bands that Got the Shit End of the Popularity Stick Damn critics. As much as their verbose, over-analyzed praises for a certain band can rope in new fans, it can also turn off and alienate the average music listener who doesn't know - or care - what 'seminal' means. Because of this and a myriad of other reasons, so much great music slips through the cracks of popular culture and are only found by a handful of diligent, curious music lovers.
Below are artists and
bands that should have been much, much more popular than they ever were.
Or maybe they would have become shitty with all the popularity. Maybe some
music is best left for weirdoes and rock critics. Regardless, good music
follows below:
Now obviously ‘early sixties artist’ means they don’t really have an album to recommend besides a greatest hits collection of their singles, but I strongly suggest you seek this guy out.
Multi-instrumentalist and viola-lover John Cale took Lou Reed's disturbing songs into the howling sonic nightmares. Their almost self-titled debut album (The Velvet Underground and Nico, the latter being a spooky blond singer Warhol attached to the group) covered everything your parents told you to avoid: sex (‘Venus in Furs’), drugs (‘Heroin’, ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’), and whatever the hell ‘European Son’ was about. The material never faltered after this album, either. Every noisy feedback jam owes a debt to 'Sister Ray' (a ditty about a transvestite smack dealer). Every shamefully personal love song owes a debt to 'Pale Blue Eyes'. Plus they wrote ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Rock n’ Roll’. Chart success for this band was hitting #170. They were purged from their record label because of the drug references in their songs. By being the first dangerous, unpopular band, The Velvets made it safe for everyone else afterward.
All four of their albums released between 1967 and 1970 are must-haves.
In what I believe to be the secret to hide the absolute ghastliness of some of the lyrics, the Pixies utilized backing and multi-tracking vocals as effectively as the Beatles and the Beach Boys (check out 'Here Comes Your Man', 'Debaser', and 'Bone Machine'). It can't be all bad if it sounds like everyone is singing! Twisted surf rock. Raw and warm at the same time. It was never clean music but it never made you feel like shit. It was frantic acoustic guitar, pounding rhythm section, and a lead guitar that bounced off the walls with shots of feedback. It was about as close as you could get to timeless, so it had no place in 1987. Like the Velvets, we only knew what we had when it was gone, and The Pixies albums didn't really go gold until years after their 1991 breakup. Among those who give the band muchos kudos: Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Radiohead, David Bowie, Weezer, and know-it-all rock critic Robert Christgau. And maybe that was part of the problem. Suddenly The Pixies look like a critic-coddled, elitist rock band. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the darker than dark glint in the band's eye - or maybe because of it - The Pixies are for everybody. Their first EP (Come on Pilgrim) and their first two albums (Surfer Rosa, Doolittle) are highly recommended. Their next two (Bossanova, Trompe Le Monde) ain’t too shabby, either.
Too mellow? Too meandering? Too experimental? Although this sounds like the Grateful Dead without the aging hippie masses, they are almost plausible criticisms of the beta band, a couple of fun loving Scottish chaps who know their way around a laptop as well as an acoustic guitar. The Beta Band is like a slow moving airborne virus that - although you don't realize it now - will slowly envelope the world. Case in point: A pivotal scene in High Fidelity has John Cusack's character promising to sell 5 copies of the band’s 3EP collection within minutes of playing 'Dry the Rain'. Did it work in the movie? Who cares, it worked for me, and it'll work for you. When I played it for my friend, he bought their albums, not long after, he himself recruited a handful of converts. It’s a domino effect. If the band members are still alive in eighty years, they may just be crowned kings of the world. The only tension on these albums is when you take a deep breath between songs. Its fun, laid back, Sunday afternoon lullaby music. Or summer road trip music. The Beta Band was one of the few bands who knew that ‘groove’ didn't just have to mean a fuckload of bass (check out ‘Dog Got a Bone’). It was about the interplay of a whole host of instruments. Their music is like an unfolding of musical sensibility. You can almost imagine the next layer of music (be it vocals, guitar, piano, hand claps) before it kicks in. It builds steadily, carefully orchestrated, yet still manages to sound spontaneous, which in itself is a talent akin to tightrope walking while on fire. Songs like 'Troubles', 'Assessment', 'Dr Baker', and 'It's not too Beautiful' are superbly crafted anti-pop songs, while 'She's the One For Me' is a chugging, stoner locomotive/epic rock track. Of course music like this couldn't be appreciated by society at large all at once. The world would grind to a halt as we all bobbed our heads to 'Wonderful' from Heroes to Zeroes at the exact same time. So the Beta Band had to accept working in almost complete obscurity for its existence. They toured with Radiohead, they disowned their debut album, they named their second album Hot Shots II (no relation to the film), they got help with album three from Nigel Godrich, and then they broke up. Tragedy in its purest form, really. Get your hands on their 3EP collection, Heroes to Zeroes, and then Hot Shots II, in that order. The self-titled album has some treats as well.
The Deadly Snakes - This short-lived Canadian indie band is what The Band would sound like on ADD. Or a country-fied Nine Inch Nails. Maybe if punk went big band, with strings and horns. Unfortunately, all of those comparisons - while an attempt to be helpful for the uninitiated - don't adequately describe the diverse sound that The Deadly Snakes had. Two singers, both sounding like dogs, one whiny, one gruff. They were a band that dared give keyboards as much as attention as guitars and did it without sounding like Elton John. After finding their legs with two okay albums, they released Ode to Joy in 2003, a party record that you don't want to play at party because no one would give it the listen it deserves. The album opens with a one two song punch about funeral taboos and drugs (‘Closed Casket’ and ‘I Can’t Sleep at Night’). There are also fun songs like 'There Goes Your Corpse Again' and 'I Want to Die'. To call their follow up and final album, Porcella, more mature is to use a tired cliché. The slightly fresher cliché would be that it's the somber hangover album that follows the party. Songs of loss, regret, and isolation. It's countrified marching band darkness. 'So Young and So Cruel' is for the best and worst girl in the world. ‘Debt Collection’ is an angry demand for money that almost makes the listener feel guilty. The singer-organist also has the best stage name ever: Age of Danger. In live concerts he plays with so much enthusiasm that he always seems to be just about ready to float away from the organ, as if he can only stay grounded by keeping his fingers on the keys. Fortunately the rest of the band is right there with him, kicking ass and taking names. The band broke up in 2006, without making much of a dent across North America. I wore black for a month. Buy Ode to Joy and Porcella. Cry yourself to sleep with the knowledge that there is no live material available.
Funkadelic - being funkier, Parliament gets all the attention of this George Clinton collection of musicians. Despite it's name, Funkadelic sure as hell had no problem rocking out. Their masterpiece, Maggot Brain attacks almost everything head on except funk. 'Super Stupid' is Zeppelin-level heavy. 'Can You Get to That' is your traditional r&b tune after a couple big bong hits. And the ten minute title track is an instrumental guitar solo by eternally underrated axeman Eddie Hazel. His emotional, transcendent playing was the result of the band taking acid and Clinton telling him to play like his mother just died (now that's inspiration!). The weirdness continued as the revolving door lineup of both Parliament-Funkadelic kept the music quality hazy at best, as most albums afterwards were half filler. Other highlights are ‘Funky Dollar Bill’ (from Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow), ‘One Nation Under a Groove’, and ‘Cholly’ (both from One Nation Under a Groove). Some albums you can dismiss altogether, and sometimes George talks too damn much in the middle of the songs. But when Funkadelic got down, they made sure you wouldn't be able to get up for awhile.
At the same time the band has albums full of quality material that most people never get around to hearing. While many great sixties and seventies bands now broken up (Beatles, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix) have had a steady resurgence of sales, it never happened for the Stones. I would guess this is because they are still in the limelight, forcing every up and coming generation to roll their eyes collectively and imagine the band has only eight or nine decent tunes that are overplayed on the radio, anyway. It’s their loss, of course. Their early material reveals a young, energetic R&B band reinventing obscure blues songs. Aftermath and Between the Buttons practically invented Brit Pop. The psychedelic Their Satanic Majesty Request is an underrated summer of love offering. Even their 'bad' albums are at the very least 'good' when compared to almost every other artist. Goats Head Soup, It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, Some Girls, Tattoo You, Undercover, hell, even Emotional Rescue are all great rock and roll albums. Hell, one problem is that these albums above were never really compared to other albums released at the time, but to the masterpieces by the Stones from years earlier. In other words, they’ve always had an uphill battle when it came to reputation. Just remember: There’s a reason the Stones are still called the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll band in the world. Consistency. Something they have both onstage and in the studio.
Six Albums Rock Snobs have to own, even if they might not like them: The Rock Snob. A personality sub-category if there ever was one. Snuggled in nicely between movie buff and cat fancier, these guys (and occasional gals) were forced to listen to their parents music too early in life and either: a) wholly embraced it and started listening to music that was made before they were born, or b) completely rebuffed it and choose to rebel against them and society by listening to nothing that makes the Billboard Top 100. Either way, their record collections grew like rashes, eventually incorporating music the Rock Snobs bought because they had to, if only to be able to communicate with other Rock Snobs. Here is a list of six insanely valuable albums to have if you music isn't so much of a past time, but a way of life.
CAN – Tago Mago Can plays two types of music. Weird, almost inaccessible electronic music and weird, completely inaccessible electronic music. Oh, they have guitars and drums don’t get me wrong, but Led Zeppelin this ain’t. Thing is, on the mammoth jam Halleluhwah, they get about as funky as any bunch of Germans possibly could. And although it hurts to type these words, Paperhouse is almost a straightforward rock song (albeit seven minutes long with singer Damo Suzuki whispering half the words). The second half of the album is more soundscape than songs (especially with Suzuki not so much singing as emitting noises). The closer sounds like Broken Social Scene if half the band suddenly died. But then, this is 1971, and even Pink Floyd wouldn’t even be going this far into arty weirdness…ever. You own this album because of its influence on electronic music, new wave, and having something talk about with anyone you meet from Germany. Finally, play Peking-O at a party. Unless all the guests are on valium, it will not make it through its eleven and a half minutes unless you’re a linebacker that can keep the people away from the CD player.
The Beta Band – The Three EPs Okay, real diehards would say this is a satanic compiling of three EPs that stand perfectly well on their own, but since most Rock Snobs also have to think with their wallets to save up for that Faces box set, this really is an incredible deal. The Beta Band never got the popularity they deserved (and I would also strongly recommend their final album, 2004’s Zeros to Heroes), and beyond the Dry the Rain opener, most of the material won’t be know to the public at large, which just makes it that much more of gem (save the meandering Monolith electronic mishmash). Most of these are simply nice songs written on acoustic guitar with layers upon layers of quirky electronic beats and effects heaped on top of them. And I suppose that might scare people off (as it would be too weird, or not weird enough for snobs), but here electronica has never been used with such masterful restraint. All the songs, B + A, Dog Got a Bone, Needles in My Eyes, are wonderfully mellow sing-alongs, and despite coming from three separate EPs, never seem disjointed or out of place as they flow from one to another. These guys are so good, they even make sped-up chipmunk singing work (She’s the One). So here we have a great collection of commercially accessible songs (rock snobs are wary) that sold well enough only to be considered a cult favorite (rock snobs are reassured). It balances out to be Rock Snob nirvana.
Aerosmith – Greatest Hits No, you read that right. Yeah, there are tons of Aerosmith Greatest Hits collections, but this one covers only their early years, and is under forty minutes. A delightful, compact collection of rawk ‘n’ roll that any Rock Snob could play for a friend who’s not much of a music fan (although I doubt they have many of those). And that’s the secret about Rock Snobs. They really like all types of music, but only in measured doses, and this collection is just what the rock ‘n’ roll doctor ordered (Little Feat!). You’ve got the radio hits Dream On (great how Steve Tyler old voice breaks around the end into his regular voice), Sweet Emotion, and Walk this Way. Draw the Line is probably the perfect average rock song. You can’t really remember it when it’s over, but while it’s chugging along you have to put everything down and tap your foot. Last Child is downright funky. The silly Kings and Queens tries to be serious and fails just like it’s supposed to. Everyone calls Joe Perry a second rate Keith Richards, but that’s really a compliment since most rock guitarists are fourth rate Keith Richards’. Plus a decent cover of Come Together. Dude!
Radiohead – Amnesiac Oh sure, everyone can own Kid A. When the band had a three date US fall tour when it was released in 2000 and went to number one, everyone went nuts (front man Thom Yorke described it: ‘We were the Beatles - for a week’). Then everyone went back to the regular top 40 elevator music. But in the spring 2001 Radiohead unloaded Kid A’s fugly little sister, Amnesiac. Skittery dance beats and steels drums open Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box. Crushing piano chords whisk us away with the Pyramid Song. In a perfect world, You and Whose Army would open sports events, with its insanely catchy second half sing-along. Although there are guitars on this album, it’s just a trick. Hunting Bears is two minutes of guitar noodling, but it still seems to have the tightness and precision of the Berlin Philharmonic. Morning Bell Amnesiac sounds like as if the Kid A version of Morning Bell was left in a microwave for three minutes. In the most conventional sounding tune, Knives Out, Thom considers eating mice. The penultimate tune, Like Spinning Plates, is a swirling haze of beeps and drones that would be the soundtrack to walking though the gates of heaven towards god’s throne. Then it closes with an upbeat, jazz song about paranoia.
Comets on Fire – Blue Cathedral These guys almost got too melodic on their most recent effort, Avatar. Almost. It’s still one of the best albums from 2006. Regardless, 2004’s Blue Cathedral is unapologetically heavy and feedback-laden. The album is a real…asskicker? Mindmelter? Brainsplitter? Ah, let’s just go with motherfucker. Lead off track The Bee and the Cracked Egg is probably the heaviest song since the live version of Nirvana’s Aneurysm, and the opening to the Brotherhood of the Harvest jam sounds like a daunting walk down a staircase with the knowledge that there’s a dead body at the bottom. Even the ‘single’, Antlers of the Midnight Sun, doesn’t pull any punches. The band wallows in raw excess, creating a Phil Spector-like wall of sound, but only if the wall is covered with loose wires, chicken guts, and is drenched in battery acid. What should be even more appreciated is the fact that we get two short soft musical pieces in between the lengthier bits as to dole out the heaviness properly. It’s a small thing, but it’s nice to see that band knows how to set up an album to give us a proper ear pummelling. The lyrics might be stupid or they might be brilliant. It’s hard to tell because I only understand what the singer is saying when it’s the title of the song. It doesn’t matter. Here the sum is much, much greater, heavier, and louder than its parts. Rock snobs might think this is too stupid, but that’s what they crave after pouring over alt-country all day.
Frank Zappa – Chunga’s Revenge Ah, Zappa. Any rock snob worth their salt would admit the man was too prolific. Some would even point to this album, recorded with the ex-Turtles vocalists, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (appearing as ‘Flo and Eddie’), as evidence A, but I beg to differ. It’s a great mix of everything that Zappa was: Live weirdness (The Nancy and Mary Music, with some insane piano), demanding, overlong instrumentals (Transylvania Boogie), rock (Tell Me You Love Me is just an incredible rock song that never got the respect or airplay it deserved. In only two and half minutes, Flo and Eddie sound like they are going to explode, and that Zappa’s guitar might catch fire), light jazz (Twenty Small Cigars), somewhat mocking doo-wop and R&B (Sharleena, which is actually first class, straightforward R&B), and scathing social satire (Would you go all the way, which, thankfully, is the oft-repeated chorus). Plus a short drum piece called The Clap. With this purchase, the Rock Snob can finally appeal to their truly weird friends.
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don't you think it's about time you turned off your radio and listened to music? | |||
