Shamelessly Lazy Reposting of Facebook’s 15 Albums Thing

Because I’m still burned out from that last post, here’s something easy.  Facebook asks you to list 15 albums in 15 minutes—not your favorite albums, necessarily, but ones that mean a lot to you and have stuck with you for some time.  Because I care entirely too much about making the most of whatever meager rhetorical potential I possess, I took longer than 15 minutes…but not too much longer.  Without further discussion, and unedited:

15 Albums Thing

1) I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One Yo La Tengo

Blew me away at 16, blew me away at 20, blew me away last week.  I ignored/disregarded the lyrics when I was younger, but now I know that Georgia and Ira are our indie rock poets of domesticity–not the tranquil, frozen thing of the popular imagination but actual roiling, sometimes nerve-wracking, difficult domesticity.

2) Curtis Curtis Mayfield

Genius genius genius.  “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” is enough of a journey by itself (best arrangement incorporating a harp ever?  yes), and when that’s done you get to hear “Move On Up.”

Day 10: “I’m Waiting for the Man” by The Velvet Underground

During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked at The Museum Company, a now-defunct store that specialized in selling the sort of (for lack of a better term) crap one usually encounters in museum gift shops: tote bags emblazoned with Monet water lilies; shot glasses featuring “The Scream”; and, as I liked to point out to my friends when offering what I imagined to be a pithy explanation for the store’s somewhat improbable existence/success, “overpriced, ugly jewelry to old women.”  That summer found me on top of the highest, broadest crest of  intellectual haughtiness that I have ever ridden in my life—how could someone who had been busy learning the secrets of the Universe (freshman physics) only two weeks before be expected to happily take the garbage out to the mall dumping area?—and it should come as no surprise that I was an unenthusiastic, though obedient employee.  My boss Georgia somehow found it within herself to refrain from reproaching me/punching me in the face when I used my copious down time (there’s only so much ugly jewelry and only so many old women) to solve physics problems as conspicuously as one can solve physics problems; for that, I will never forgive her, though at the time I was relieved to have the opportunity to remind everyone—fellow employees, customers, anyone else that might have needed reminding—that this was merely a summer job for me, and that I had profound intellectual investigations (sophomore physics) to resume come August.

Day 9: “Throw Aggi off the Bridge” by Black Tambourine

Liner notes for compilation albums are always good places to find hyperbole.  Did you know, for instance, that the Vaselines’ Dum-Dum sums up “everything great about pop music…in just over half-an-hour”?  (That quote is taken from Everett True’s liner notes to the Vaselines retrospective Enter the Vaselines.)  Well, no, Mr. Everett True, that’s simply not the case.  But can one reasonably expect otherwise?  You can’t very well write liner notes for a career retrospective of a band and come off lukewarm about their sole LP.  Part of the job of the liner notes for a compilation is to justify the existence of the compilation, and that usually leads to some inflation of the band’s importance and skill by the liner notes author.  (One amusing exception: in his liner notes for the Orange Juice compilation The Glasgow School, music journalist and former Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly repeatedly points out his former band’s musical limitations and inability to fully realize the vision of main Orange Juice songwriter Edwyn Collins.  When he does praise the band, he’s remarkably restrained and modest; not coincidentally, those liner notes are among the finest I’ve seen for a compilation album.)

Day 8: “Famous” by The Magnetic Fields

Will anything compel me to actually update this blog regularly?  Will I actually have to resort to some tired blogivational device—writing about the first song to come up on “shuffle” on my iTunes, say—in order to force myself to put down my not-so-fresh thoughts every day?  Yes.  I will resort to exactly the aforementioned device.  iTunes, what you got?

Great.  A mid-level Magnetic Fields song that I have no strong feelings about one way or another.  Great.  This promises to be a great post.

Day 7: “Julia” by The Beatles/”Death Disco” by Public Image Ltd.

The fact that almost no one reads this blog makes it relatively easy for me to get “a little bit personal,” if you’ll excuse the expression, without running the risk of coming off as the type of person for whom blogging is a necessary part of the process of feeling.  If I had a big audience, I would probably never write this entry; however, since you know that I know that you don’t exist, you can easily convince yourself that I’m effectively writing in a fancy private journal powered by WordPress, and not (pathetically) trying to garner pity on the internet.

My mom died a year and a half ago.  Since her death, I’ve found that, unsurprisingly, certain songs that figured prominently in our relationship have acquired the power to affect me much more than they ever had before; what’s surprising (to me) is that the feelings these songs evoke in me are, for the most part, not particularly bad ones.  At worst, these songs make me slightly wistful, a little melancholy—I would go so far as to say that they often make me feel better.  What’s much more interesting to me is my new relationship to “dead mother” songs; in particular, the beautiful “Julia” by The Beatles and the completely harrowing “Death Disco” by Public Image Ltd.

“Julia” is a song that I’ve known for a long time, and I’ve always found the longing expressed in the song deeply affecting.  The first time I heard it after my mom died, I cried.  But I think I may have cried the first time I ever heard the song, and I’m sure my eyes welled up on a number of other occasions when I heard the song prior to my mom’s death.  ”Julia” is a song that has always made me sympathetic to the singer, and that is still the overriding feeling I get when I hear it—I’m sorry that John Lennon’s mom died.  That it does not produce much in the way of empathy in me is, I think, a result of the fact that it’s a “dead mother” song written some 10 years after the actual death of Lennon’s mother, and that Lennon, while clearly still longing for her, had attained some sort of peace with her death by then (though not, according to his later “Mother,” with the nature of their relationship during his childhood).

When I first heard “Death Disco” a few months ago, I had no idea what it was about, but I was immediately drawn to it.  I found the collision of the propulsive, tightly focused rhythm section with the almost grating guitar and unhinged vocals both disturbing and completely absorbing, almost hypnotic; I could not get enough of the song.  I particularly liked listening to it while walking—it’s a fantastic song for working out, giving credence to PiL’s assertion that disco is “useful music”—finding the disconnect between my body’s instinct to give in to the song’s rhythm and my head’s instinct to reject the near-atonality of the guitar and vocals thrilling.  When listening to “Death Disco” while walking, I sometimes feel as if my brain is being transported through some terrifying purgatory against its will by a set of disobedient legs.  There are exactly zero other songs that make me feel this way.

One day, I decided to check YouTube to see if there was a promotional video for “Death Disco.”  There was, and in one of the information tabs was the following note: “The song Was Written to his Mother Eileen Lydon.”  A quick investigation revealed this fact to be true: John Lydon wrote the song not long after his mother’s death.  The lyrics, most of which I could never decipher, turned out to be fairly straightforward once the context was known (as lyrics tend to be).  Listening to the song for the first time with this knowledge proved difficult; if “Julia” provokes sympathy in me, then “Death Disco” provokes empathy.  Nonetheless, I keep on listening to it, and I continue walking to it, and I hit repeat.

I defended my dissertation and moved across the country within a month of my mom’s death—these things had to be done, even though I didn’t feel like doing them, or much of anything, really.  The legs keep moving, and the brain rejects, rejects, rejects.

Day 6: “Rubber Ring” by the Smiths

More like One Song a Year, eh? Hah.

I had a long post planned for this entry about the co-existence of irony and sincerity in music in general and The Smiths in particular, The Smiths as a band that one can grow old(er) with, “Rubber Ring” as the key song in understanding The Smiths, etc. etc….and then I came across Benjamin Kunkel’s wonderful essay on The Smiths in this book.  His essay makes many of the same points that I had intended to make, but, because Kunkel is a much better writer than I am, he did a much better job than I could ever hope to do.  I highly recommend checking that essay out.

The extremely short version of the argument: The Smiths were a band that wrote songs that were sometimes (often?) overwrought, melodramatic, and repulsively self-pitying, but their juvenility was neither genuine nor ironic—it was both.  Morrissey was expressing real anguish, but he was also smart/self-aware enough to know how incommensurate that anguish was with its sources, and how it would not last forever.  He was, in essence, a teenager with the gift of perspective—not enough to erase the pain (is any amount enough?), but enough to cause/allow him to lightly mock himself at the same time he was genuinely suffering.  That complexity is what makes The Smiths a band that follows one into adulthood (this is a point that Kunkel also makes): as a teenager, I’m not sure I got a lot of the irony; now I do, and songs that once only allowed me to indulge in self-pity now offer me the additional choice of laughing at my own egotism.  The music, of course, sounded great when I was 16, and still sounds as good today; it’s a banality to say that Johnny Marr is one of the most innovative, ingenious guitarists of the rock era, but it’s still true.

“Rubber Ring” pretty clearly shows Morrissey’s self-awareness, even as he expresses his somewhat preemptive resentment/fear of being left behind by listeners.  He’s not so caught up in suffering that he doesn’t realize that his listeners, who use his music as a balm, will one day not need him anymore.  He needn’t have worried, of course; the very fact that he knew enough to fear this allowed him to write lyrics layered enough to prevent that sort of abandonment from ever happening.  The “songs that made me cry” have not been forgotten, and have, in fact, become the “songs that make me smile,” and I know the same is true for many people who found The Smiths early.

“Rubber Ring”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpf6gJU3520

10 Most Overrated (Mostly Indie (whatever that means)) Bands/Artists

I’m a little under the weather*, so this will be quick and to the point (and will include quotes by other people).  Ten most overrated bands/artists (in my opinion, of course) in no particular order:

1) Radiohead. Note that is is a list of overrated bands, not bad bands.  Radiohead was an excellent band, once upon a time, but their last few albums have been merely OK, while the hype surrounding them has continued to be absurd.

2) The Hold Steady.  Maybe you need to be drunk to like them?  Well, I’m drunk now, and they’re still completely uninteresting, and Craig Finn is still the third best songwriting Finn alive (and not really close to #1, Neil Finn).

3) The Doors. How funny that the aforementioned Craig Finn should have the definitive quote on The Doors.  Here’s what he had to say about L.A. Woman: “The music meanders, and Morrison was more like a drunk asshole than an intelligent poet. The worst of the worst is the last song, “Riders on the Storm”: ‘There’s a killer on the road/ His brain is squirming like a toad’ – that’s surely the worst line in rock’n'roll history. He gave the green light to generations of pseuds.”  That’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said (on record), Craig Finn!  By the way,  you can throw a dart at a wall full of Doors lyrics and hit something monumentally embarrassing.

4) Wilco. Again, not a bad band by any measure, but certainly undeserving of the enormous hype they once received (not really sure if they still command such respect/attention).  If Jeff Tweedy were a pitcher, his ERA+ would be 110: better than league average, but no Johan Santana (or even Carlos Zambrano).

5) Bjork. Yup.

6) Sleater-Kinney. I like a few S-K songs, but what the fuck is the big deal?  And the yelping, it really wears thin after like four songs.

7) Rage Against the Machine.  Matador Records exec Gerard Cosley said it more succinctly than I ever could: “If I was 11 years old and had never heard any interesting music before, RATM would be kinda exciting. For about 20 minutes.”  The revolution will not be televised, and will also not have any melodies, apparently, or anything approaching wit, humor, or subtlety.

8) Ramones/Sex Pistols. These are classic cases of seminal-itis: a band that’s really not that good—but that is very influential—gets overrated because of their effect on so many later bands.  Try to forget the context; focus on the songs.  Can you really endorse these bodies of work?  (Actual good punk: first Clash album, the Saints, and of course the Buzzcocks, whose early singles are fucking gold.)

9) Nirvana. Mostly boring melodies, angst sans any touch of irony, bleurgh.

10) Led Zeppelin. Not quite as embarrassing in the lyrics department as the Doors, but close.  They went more for terrible/sincerely inane lyrics than for terrible/faux poetic lyrics, which I guess is better.  “But listen to those drums!”  I don’t care, drummer.  “But listen to those HEAVY GUITARS!”  I don’t care, guitarist.  This is music for horny 15 year olds written by men who were, at heart, horny 15 year olds.

Feel free to excoriate me in the comments section.

*drunk

Day 5: “Love, Reign o’er Me” by The Who

One of many disturbing trends in my musical sensibilities is my tendency to be more likely to enjoy an album released outside of my notice (or before my time) than one whose release I have anticipated.  It is a trend I first noted in my high school years, when I would almost invariably find myself disappointed with the latest releases by bands whose previous work I had enjoyed.  At first I thought that I had simply had the misfortune of being turned on to bands immediately prior to their decline.  There were a few notable cases where this may have been true–I got into R.E.M. following Monster and before New Adventures in Hi-Fi–but as the number of new albums that I disliked rose, it seemed more and more unlikely to me that this was a proper explanation.  Furthermore, as time went on I found myself growing to like some of the albums that I had originally dismissed while continuing to dislike others.

Day 4: “Game of Pricks” by Guided By Voices

Hey.  Uh, hello.  It’s been a long time, huh?  When I started this blog, I promised to write about a song every day as a way to both exercise my long-dormant writing muscles and free some of the music-related thoughts knocking around in my head, but I only got to day 3 (!!!) before I grew tired and quit.  The problem, I think, is that I strayed too far from the songs themselves and instead wrote about meatier, more complex things: my personal history as a listener; my problems with protest music; and, in a fit of verbosity I hope never to replicate, the anti-indie “poptimist” trend in music criticism.  It’s not that these were bad things to write about—I’m actually (mostly) happy with what I wrote, and especially pleased that I managed to convey my thoughts quite precisely, which I am not always able to do—but the thought of producing such long posts on a daily basis was daunting, and I flinched.

Sorry for the Absence; Here’s a Mixtape

Here is a mixtape.  Enjoy!