One of the worst aspects of working at The Museum Company was the music they—”we,” I suppose—were forced to play in-store.  You can probably imagine the types of music that such a store would sell: so-called world music, of course, to remind shoppers of their (and The Museum Company’s) broadness of taste and interests; the always anodyne, sometimes excellent big-band work of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, which worked in concert with the ubiquitous water lilies to make the store feel like a safe haven for middlebrows from the frightening, incomprehensible world of art/music/anything created after 1965; and, finally, some small amount of ’50s and ’60s pop (Motown, etc.).  Since I’m the type of person whose mood, desire to work, and even outlook on life can be torpedoed far too easily by the wrong music—and since I’m also the type of person who always thinks he has better music taste than anyone else within sight—I felt I owed it to myself and, indeed, the customers of The Museum Company to pick the in-store music as often as I could get away with it.  (I usually ran unopposed, though there was one quasi-hippie lady in her ’50s—she only worked a few hours a week, for the employee discount, I always thought—who insisted on playing zydeco music whenever she was working.)  I often opted for Ella or Louis, and I waited impatiently for them to get to something good by Gershwin or Porter or Hoagy Carmichael before I had to go somewhere unpleasant (the storeroom or mall dumping area or even the dreaded food court for lunch).

While going through the CDs one day, I came across a box set with the theme (I believe) “great songs of the 20th century” or something to that effect.  Sadly, I cannot find any information on this box set on allmusic.com or anywhere else, nor do I remember much about what specific songs were on it.  What I do remember is that on the final disc, hiding between two sure-fire Museum Company crowd-pleasers (probably “Do You Believe in Magic?” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”), was “I’m Waiting for the Man” by The Velvet Underground.  I’m almost certain I had to read the back of the CD twice, and probably the liner notes at least one time, before I believed that it was not a misprint.  To say that this song was out of place on this compilation does not suffice; it was like a porn clip spliced into a home movie.  I played the disc as soon as I could, though I didn’t jump straight to the Velvet Underground song.  Instead, I waited, allowing myself the pleasure of anticipating what I was sure would be a jarring, upsetting transition between “Do You Believe in Magic” or “Build Me Up Buttercup” or whatever it was and Lou Reed’s tale of purchasing heroin in Harlem.  I was certain that someone would take notice and, if all went well, be offended.

I was familiar with the song, of course, though I had to circumvent my mother to get to it.  Years earlier, I had joined one of those music clubs (BMG, I think) that offered some number of free CDs if you agreed to purchase four or five at the standard price.  My mom handled the actual paperwork and thus knew what I was ordering; when she saw that I had selected the VU box set Peel Slowly and See, she didn’t forbid me from going through with it, but rather made me feel like such a transgressive creep (with bad taste!) that I changed my order to something less offensive to her sensibilities.  As usual, her disapproval—even when it was based on what I considered to be questionable aesthetic, moral, or ethical values—was far more powerful for me than any outright ban or restriction.

Soon after my failed attempt to access the VU’s music, my brother moved home after finishing college and I gained access to his library of mother-upsetting music.  After all I had heard and read about the band—and especially after my experience with my mother—I was expecting something very disturbing to come out of the speakers when I put on The Velvet Underground and Nico, and I’m sure that I was neither the first nor last person to be simultaneously disappointed and pleasantly surprised by “Sunday Morning,” the somewhat languid, soft opening track of the album.  The more challenging tracks come later on, I would find out, and some of them—”The Black Angel’s Death Song,” in particular—remain difficult listens even today.  But for the most part, the 33 years between the album’s release and my surprising discovery of “I’m Waiting for the Man” at the Museum Company attenuated the music’s power to upset and disturb listeners.  The lyrics about buying drugs, about sadomasochism, about death, about taking heroin: they’ve lost their power to shock, and perhaps even to merely offend.

No one noticed the song: not the other employees, not any of the customers.  I played it again and again, every time I was at work; placing the song in the context in which it was originally heard—surrounded by significantly more cheery, sometimes even insipid songs—somehow failed to make it stand out.  What had I been thinking?—no one listens to the background music in stores, anyway.  I knew this on some level, I suppose, but I played the song anyway as some kind of reminder to myself that The Museum Company was not going to last forever.  It’s hard now to believe I needed that signal; I must have, though, seeing as I listened to the song intently every time I could, bobbing my head back and forth a little too conspicuously as I rearranged ugly jewelry and waited for the summer to come to an end.

One of the worst cases of this sort of puffery can be found in the liner notes for the compilation of the band Black Tambourine’s music.  These liner notes were written by Tim Sendra, one of the former members of a band that was one of Black Tambourine’s peers in the Silver Spring, MD music scene of the late ’80s/early ’90s—in other words, by someone who was there to see it, but who wasn’t there to make it.  There’s nothing wrong in general about such a person writing liner notes for a compilation—after all, he saw and heard a lot of interesting things firsthand—but Mr. Sendra seems to have been entirely too enamored of BT in its time, and his ardor has not faded very much with time.  In fact, the ensuing years seem to have brought no perspective at all to Mr. Sendra: he describes BT as “legendary” and promises that “in the underground and alternative (in the real sense of the word) history of pop music Black Tambourine will go down as one of the all-time greats.”  Uh, really?  I mean, everyone’s entitled to his or her own opinion, but that seems like too heavy a crown for a band whose entire output consists of 16 tracks.

Mr. Sendra does get one thing right in his liner notes, though: “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge” is BT’s finest moment.  A demented love song directed to Pastels frontman Stephen Pastel, “Aggi” is all poppy melody and distorted guitars, a sunnier version of the shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine and their peers.  If most BT songs were this good, and if there were (a lot) more than 16 of them, Mr. Sendra might have a point with all that “legendary” talk.

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.

There are many equally invalid ways of defining musical (specifically songwriting) genius, but my favorite is this: a songwriting genius’ lesser songs somehow manage to retain the indelible, unique mark of their creator, whereas a merely good songwriter’s lesser efforts are generically unremarkable.  For example, Lennon and McCartney rushed off “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” for George Harrison to sing in the film A Hard Day’s Night. Wikipedia reveals that both men later had rather disparaging things to say about the song, with McCartney referring to it as formulaic and Lennon claiming that he (John) would never have sung it.  And you know what?  It’s not as good as the best songs on the Hard Day’s Night album, it’s not one of Lennon/McCartney’s finest efforts, and, yes, it’s a little forumlaic.  But it also has this awesome moment in the chorus when the chord progression goes in an unexpected direction (under the word “dance”), a moment that makes the song memorable and saves it from being generic; it may be a rush job, but it’s obviously a Lennon-McCartney rush job.

On the other hand, there’s Tom Verlaine.  Now, I like Television a lot, and I’d be a happy man if I had Tom Verlaine’s  songwriting ability.  That said, he’s not a genius; to see what I mean, just consider “Friction” from Marquee Moon.  It’s my least favorite song on the album, by far, and I don’t feel it’s mediocre in a particularly Verlainey way, or mostly bad but possessed of a few moments of sublime Verlaineness; it’s just sort of not a great song that could have been written by any number of people.

So what camp does Stephin Merritt fall in?  “Famous” (from the excellent Get Lost) isn’t a poor enough effort to be used as a test case for my completely invalid theory, but I’ll save us both the pain of going through yet another evaluation of a lesser effort and give you the answer: he’s a genius.  Every Magnetic Fields song—even the almost-unlistenable jokes on 69 Love Songs—contains some degree of Merrittness, that kernel of dry humor, extreme self-awareness, and acknowledgment of insincerity.  No one else could have written “Famous,” which makes Merritt somehow more valuable than a merely great songwriter; he’s irreplaceable.

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.

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

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

The proper explanation for this phenomenon, I now believe, has to do with a form of cognitive dissonance: the discrepancy between expectation and reality.  For whatever reason, I tend to expect a new album coming out by an artist I like to be like their old ones; when it’s not, I dislike it.  I don’t tend to have the same expectations when I listen to an album whose release I have not anticipated, even if I’m familiar with the artist’s other work.  In other words: I’m better able to evaluate a given album by a favored artist on its own merits when the album’s release date predates my familiarity with the artist.  This is, I admit, a little odd: if I first hear of Artist X after they have released five albums, and I buy the first four of those albums in order, listen to them, and like them, then why should the expectations I bring into listening to the fifth album be any different from those I would have brought in had I learned of Artist X and familiarized myself with their work prior to the fifth album’s release?  I don’t have a definitive answer, though I think it has something to do with implicit assumptions about artistic intent in the past versus the present.  To use the example of Artist X again, when all the albums in question lie in the past, it seems that I am willing to view them, whatever their stylistic or aesthetic differences, as intentional products of the same artistic mind; even if the fifth album ends up being very different from the other four, I shrug my shoulders and say, “I guess Artist X wanted to branch out.”  On the contrary, when the release of the fifth album is in the present, I don’t assume the same firmness of intent on the part of Artist X, and the possibility of the album being a mistake, rather than a deliberate foray into new territory, enters into the picture.

I have gotten over this tendency (to some extent) by simply playing the crap out of new releases.  I find that if I hear the new songs enough to be familiar, my original expectations cease to color my impressions, and I can evaluate the material on its own merits (subject to my permanent aesthetic sensibilities, of course).  Still, I almost prefer to discover “new-to-me” artists that have stopped recording, so that I don’t have to worry about confronting my new release problem.

A related issue–and the one relevant to my take on The Who’s “Love, Reign o’er Me”–arises when one hears a culturally relevant/popular song by a culturally relevant/popular artist without knowing it.  This is a far happier state of affairs than potentially having good music ruined by one’s silly expectations; in fact, it can be quite nice to play the musical naïf in the company of knowledgeable, but ultimately conventional, music fans, poking holes in their sacred cows by pointing out the simplest musical or lyrical absurdities.  My wife has done this many times, often to my delight, sometimes to my embarrassment, and occasionally to my horror: as I have written before, she has changed my musical sensibilities, often by asking the simplest questions, questions not borne of a skeptic’s need to find fault with orthodoxy, but of a genuine curiosity.

A few weeks ago, we returned home from somewhere to find that there was no parking on our block–a fairly regular occurrence, especially on Friday evenings and Saturday (we live in a neighborhood with a large population of observant Jews who don’t drive on the Sabbath).  Not wanting to park far away, we decided to circle the block and wait for someone to pull out.  The classic rock station I had on was playing The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”–not my favorite Clash song, by any means, but not a terrible song to be stuck listening to while waiting to park.  Two more trips around the block, however, and the song ended; the DJ mumbled something I couldn’t discern, there were a few moments of silence, and then came what sounded to me like rain.  I thought for a moment that we were hearing a commercial, but it soon became apparent that this was indeed the beginning of a song.  I was confused–what station could play The Clash alongside any band that would start a song in such an obnoxious manner?–but my confusion was soon replaced by disbelief.  The singer, whom I initially ID’d as Meat Loaf, was clearly pouring too much of his heart and soul into the song–more, in fact, than the wobbly lyrics could bear:

Only love
Can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
Only love
Can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers
Laying in the fields.

At this last line, my wife and I started cracking up.  Was this a lost Spinal Tap track?

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain.
The nights are hot and black as ink
I can’t sleep and I lay and I think
Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain.

By the end of the song, we had found a parking space, and were sitting in the dark car laughing hysterically.  I didn’t know what band lay behind the bloated, self-important, overwrought ballad we had just heard, but I suspected that they were either a product of the 80s or one of the countless overrated ’70s classic rock bands The Clash and their brethren had rendered (for me, anyway) irrelevant.  I have never enjoyed the stylings of Led Zeppelin, the Doors, etc.: the total lack of irony and humor, the absurd bravado, the half-assed spirituality, the trite invocations of the occult, the nauseating testosterone levels–I’ve always felt that that sort of classic rock is music by men who never grew up for boys who will never grow up.  A Google search of the awful lyrics we had just heard confirmed my suspicions–The Who are most certainly one of the canonical classic rock bands–but also surprised me: I have always held them slightly apart in my mind from Zeppelin, etc., mostly on the strength of their early, British Invasiony work (“Can’t Explain,” etc.).  Had they really sunk this low by the mid 70′s?  Apparently they had.  Further research showed that the song had appeared on Quadrophenia, the band’s second rock opera; in this context, the theatricality of the music is at least somewhat understandable (though it’s still overdone), but the lyrics are still irredeemably awful.

There is no other way to say it: “Love, Reign o’er Me” is an awful song, an overwrought monstrosity with trite, high-school-poetry-level lyrics.  Would I have thought that had I known the band behind the song before hearing it?  Perhaps not.  I’d like to think that, had I been alive and a fan of The Who in 1973, I would have popped Quadrophenia onto the turntable, been disappointed, and put it away in favor of The Who Sell Out or even Tommy.  Then, over the course of a couple months, the album would have grown on me, little by little, as my preconceptions wore away.  By the time 1974 rolled around, I would have finally been able to evaluate the album accurately, and I would have hated every fucking obnoxious second of “Love, Reign o’er Me.”

Posts like the ones I wrote last fall should really be the once-a-week (or even less frequent) “fancy dinners” of this blog: long, thought-out meditations on a topic or topics related to, but ultimately bigger than, a particular song.  I cannot prepare a three-course-meal every day, however (even a poorly cooked three-course meal, to strain a metaphor to the breaking point), and if I try to do so I might stop cooking altogether; I need to make Ramen sometimes.  From now on, then, this blog will do a better job of living up to its name, providing my (sort-of succinct) take on a particular song each day and only delving into wider issues occasionally.  I hope you will enjoy my Ramen.

My brother introduced me to Guided By Voices (GBV) when I was 14, and, once I had gotten over the fact that they were not British, I started to love them.  I remember writing “Under the Bushes Under the Stars is the best album of 1996″ on the blackboard of my freshman-year English classroom in high school, though I only half meant it—like all hipsters, I really just wanted to prove my superior music knowledge to my classmates, though I doubt any of them were impressed.  GBV albums are almost all hit-or-miss affairs, and your threshold for songs about spacemen and/or robots must be pretty high to sit through one all the way, but if you do leave early, or even take a two-minute break, you might miss a concentrated shot of pop brilliance.  Robert Pollard, GBV’s leader and only member to stay with the band throughout its entire existence, wasn’t exactly a blind squirrel when it came to songwriting, but he was sort of indie pop’s Adam Dunn: low batting average, but high slugging percentage.  I made a best-of-GBV CD when I first got a CD burner, and it’s probably one of the best best-ofs you could hope to assemble.

“Game of Pricks” is a song off of Alien Lanes, GBVs 1995 album.  If memory serves, it’s the first GBV song I heard: my brother played it for me on his old Pioneer stereo system while home from college on break and asked me to guess where the band was from (I did not guess Dayton).  It’s a typically short GBV song—1:33—and features many of the golden era GBV sonic signatures: heavily echoed/reverbed vocals delivered in a fake British accent; crappy-sounding, tinny drums; and a bass so flimsy-sounding that it may as well not be there.  GBV famously recorded at home on consumer-level 4-tracks (or worse!) for much of their career, a move made out of economic necessity which ended up giving them much of their charm and a good portion of their sound; they had to make do with what they had, and they did better, crafting a unique, quasi-throwback sound out of entry-level analog recording equipment.  That oldish sound is perfect for “Game of Pricks,” a song which could, except for the lyrics, easily be a late-’60s Dave Davies solo track (it’s too gnarly and slightly too aggressive to sound like the Beatles or even a Ray Davies song).  The lyrics, like many lyrics in GBV songs, are not really meant to be parsed, but the words sound somehow right together, and Robert Pollard’s stretching of the word “owe” over two syllables in what must be called the chorus is delightful.  The melody is infectious, to say the least, and possesses a slight sing-songy quality which manages not to grate.

GBV started to record in the studio in the late ’90s, and I lost interest in them.  It wasn’t some hipster/punk negative reaction to their abandonment of the DIY aesthetic, but a genuine feeling that the influences that predominated in their music changed when they changed recording platforms.  There were always elements of prog rock, arena rock, and hard rock alongside the obvious British Invasion bits in GBVs music, but they came off as tongue-in-cheek or were simply neutered or attenuated by the crappiness of the 4-track recording process.  The Kinksy bits, on the other hand, came through more strongly since the music they were referencing had itself been recorded largely on (somewhat) crappy 4-tracks.  I didn’t suspect that the man who wrote “Echoes Myron” and “Game of Pricks” would actually want to record mostly unironic arena rock if given the technical means, but I was wrong: after a lineup change in the mid-90s (after Under the Bushes Under the Stars), Pollard headed to the studio with a new backing band and embraced a harder, louder sound; he also implied that the 4-track had been holding him back.  It had been holding him back, of course, but mostly from writing crappy arena rock like “Bulldog Skin.”  GBV broke up at the end of 2004, and Pollard devoted himself to his solo career.

Pollard has long since devolved into self-parody, but I think it’s worth remembering that at some point prior to 1995, he sat down and wrote 20 or so songs one night, and one of them was “Game of Pricks,” and it was great.