Category: Music

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What It Is: 6/28/10

What I’m reading: Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis. Blech. Also, I read a really wonderful interview with Bob Colacello, the former editor of Interview. I’d like to it, but it’s from the new ish of Fantastic Man, and they don’t post content online. (!?) But Colacello was so interesting that I ordered a copy of Imperial Bedrooms, his book about Andy Warhol.

What I’m listening to: We Are Born, in which Sia goes adorably disco. Also, Blood Like Lemonade, in which Morcheeba was so happy to have Skye singing for them again that they made a record that sounds an awful lot like Skye’s 2 solo albums. Meh. And Walking Wounded. Guess I oughtta check out those Tracey Thorn solo records sometime.

What I’m watching: 44 Inch Chest (it’s no Sexy Beast), Michael Jackson: This is It, and Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. The MJ pic was okay, but that Rush documentary was A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Go grab the DVD on Netflix. NownowNOW!

What I’m drinking: DH Krahn’s & Q-Tonic.

What I’m smoking: I had an Arturo Fuente Single Chateau during our company picnic on Friday (I had to get work done and showed up around 4 hours late, but I still got to spend 2-3 hours at the picnic). It was the first cigar I smoked in years and, boy, was it good.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: The usual: discovering a snake, charging a deer, and otherwise just trying to stay cool.

Where I’m going: A couple of July 4th weekend parties.

What I’m happy about: The end of my big-ass Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma issue is in sight! Only 3 more profiles to write, after which I’ve gotta lay out all the pages, but it’s actually coming together! I think I’ll actually be able to finish it by Thursday! Whew!

What I’m sad about: The state of the pharma industry.

What I’m worried about: What effect the above is going to have on my livelihood in the next few years.

What I’m pondering: Why Rush isn’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That’s a goddamned embarrassment.

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Man Out Of Time: Music

Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books

I think music is the one field where “the decade” really is a delineator. I try not to extrapolate broader trends from my own experience, but this is one case where I think I’m just part of the new shape of things.

Which is to say, my music-listening habits were flat-out transformed over the course of this decade. The changeover to digital began in the 1990’s, but went bananas in the past 10 years. My iTunes library contains around 45,000 songs, incorporating my and my wife’s CD libraries, the songs I stole back when that was cool, and other friends’ libraries, copied in toto. In fact, that’s why I didn’t get an iPod for the first 18 months or so after their introduction; I was waiting for one with large enough storage capacity to handle my library. (Okay, I was also on a PC and hadn’t yet drunk the Apple Kool-Aid.)

Sure, my music library today is filled with songs I’ll never listen to — such as my IT manager’s collection of German industrial aggro-something (rock?) or my pal Fink’s collection of, um, every single thing that Robyn Hitchcock ever recorded — but with storage space plummeting in price, why not keep it all?

I tend to just set iTunes and my iPod to shuffle, so I can discover unfamiliar music or recontextualize music I’m familiar with, but that carries the downside of missing out on albums qua albums. Add to that the fact that I rarely sit still long enough to listen to a 40- or 50-minute collection of music, and I’m left in a position where I can barely think of ten albums that I’d put on a “faves of the decade” list. We can download everything, so why listen to a single collection of songs by an artist?

On top of this, I have to make the embarrassing admission that I really don’t know much contemporary pop music. I don’t listen to the radio, don’t go to a gym, and don’t have, um, friends. My only experiences with Kanye West were his two awesome ad libs: blowing up Taylor Swift (who?) at that awards show and The Greatest Live TV Moment Of All Time, when he declared, “George Bush hates black people” during a Katrina benefit broadcast.

Similarly, I’d heard OF Lady Gaga for a while, but I never heard a song of hers until an episode of Parks & Recreation a month or two back. (It was fine, but I’m putting her in the same boat where I keep John Waters and Andy Warhol, the S.S. Love It In Theory, Not So Much In Practice.) Of course, the snob in me would reply would be that contemporary music sucks and I’m not missing anything, but that attitude’s gotten me in trouble in the past.

On my trip to Los Angeles in November, I decided to turn off my 120gb iPod’s shuffle setting and listen to albums in their entirety. I’ve stuck with that since my return, doing my best to go through entire records over the course of my commute and on drives out to the train station to pick up my wife. I’m so used to randomization, to the infinite jukebox, that it’s a real test for me to just let an album go to the end. Maybe it’ll help me to slow down.

Favorite Albums of the Decade

Time (The Revelator) (2001) – Gillian Welch – I wrote about this (finally!) for this year’s 9/11 post, so go back there and check out what I had to say. This is my favorite record of the decade, hands down. Nothing else comes close. The 9/11 context is a big factor for my attachment this album, the same way other people find Kid A or Is This It to be The Album of the Decade. (I’ve never made it through either of those records, so hey.)

Boxer (2007) – The National – I stumbled across a song from this in my iTunes library in 2008 (not sure who I got it from), tried out the album, and fell in love with it. I’m no good at describing genres, so you’re outta luck. I tried telling someone it’s “this sorta mellow modern rock sound,” and that’s about all I can do for you. This album, with its not-quite-sensical lyrics, unobtrusive orchestral additions, and Bowie-esque baritone, has become a key piece of my traveling soundtrack. I tried some of The National’s earlier music but didn’t dig them: things were a little too harsh, too fuzzy, too hip rock-‘n’-roll.

Simple Things / When It Falls / The Garden (2001 / 2004 / 2006) – Zero 7 – My go-to for chillout. I first heard their breakout single, Destiny, on the radio near the end of a 400-mile driving day in 2002. I was still 45 minutes from home, so I kept repeating the band and the song to myself. I stole the single the next day, fell in love with it, and bought the CD. I don’t love any of Zero 7’s first three albums on their own enough to put them on this list, but the combo of all of them has meant a lot to me this decade. I find their soul-chillout sound a lot more engaging than records by Moby, Blue 6, Photek, etc. Their sound evolved over the course of the first three records, with vocalists coming and going. Sia Furler is the mainstay/anchor for those albums. The fourth record, from which she’s absent, is a disaster.

Everything, Everything (2000) – Underworld – My affinity for Underworld’s pounding techno beats and chopped-up lyrics boggles my wife’s mind (as does their music), because of my utter lack of drug-taking and club-hopping. Still, something about their work utterly possesses me. Maybe it’s just a “this is who I could’ve been” if I had taken drugs and went to clubs. Everything, Everything is a live album and most of the songs are actually better than their album versions, bursting with a vital force that I didn’t even realize was lacking on their studio releases. Only one — Pearl’s Girl — fails to live up to the studio, for reasons that are too technical for me to get into.

Sea Change (2002) – Beck – One of my favorite contemporary writers told me he listened to this album incessantly to get over a heartbreak, just like I did. I later discovered that we may both have been getting over the same girl. Beck apparently recorded the songs to get over a breakup, too, but not with the same girl (as far as I know). This album is a change of pace for him: the sound is more acoustic, the lyrics are less non-sequitur-ing, and the overall result has a lot more heart than Beck’s other music.

Honorable mention

Give Up (2003) – The Postal Service – A friend of mine played me this record when I was traveling, so I picked up the CD before going home. When I tried to import it into iTunes, I discovered that I already owned the whole album, courtesy of a cloned library. That’s the only time this has happened; I swear. It’s a twee album, but what can I tell you? If you’ve made it this far in my blog, you know I’m a big geek.

Speakerboxxx / The Love Below (2003) – Outkast – Embarrassing admission: I’d never heard Outkast until this 2003 double-album. Then I heard Hey Ya!, was blown away, declared it the best pop single I’d heard in a bazillion years, and started checking out their stuff. I had no idea music like this was being made, and was flabbergasted by the stylistic leaps the duo was making. In part, this was due to my sad-ass racist stereotyping of hip-hop. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent post about Outkast’s album-to-album growth left me comparing it with the Beatles’ progression throughout the ’60’s. Outkast really made some remarkable music. Of course, I showed up just when the party was ending.

St. Elsewhere (2006) – Gnarls Barkley – Crazy was one of the greatest singles of the decade, matched only by the aforementioned Hey Ya! The rest of this album is awfully good, but I don’t find myself listening to it too often.

A Friend of a Friend (2009) – Dave Rawlings Machine – This was released in November 2009, so perhaps it’s too new for me to consider it a fave. But it’s the closest thing I’ll have to a new Gillian Welch album, it’s been on heavy rotation since I bought it, and a couple of songs will likely make their way onto my next Mad Mix CDs (yeah, I still make mix-CDs for people), so it’s at least an Honorable Mention.

I Was Only Just a Chorus Girl (2002) – Ari Scott – We dated for a while, and I still enjoy listening to her first record. It’s (generally) bouncy, catchy, piano-driven singer-songwriter sorta stuff.

Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books

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Man Out Of Time: Introduction

Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books

I imagine “future generations” will consider the decade to begin with the contested election of 2000 and end with “man, they messed up the country so badly, people were willing to vote a black guy president.” Maybe they’ll take 9/11 as the thematic starting point instead. Whatever. What I’m saying is, I think the decade’s outward/historical manifestation is The Bush Years, but I’m hard put to understand what my inner/hysterical manifestation of it is.

As the decade progressed, I found myself writing less about politics, finance/business and international relations, and more about my own life. There was no changeover moment; it must’ve occurred to me at some point that there are plenty of other blogs to turn to for commentary on those topics. I still care deeply about those fields, and spend a lot of time reading up on them. Maybe it was my time with Montaigne that taught me about the value of looking inside to get a perspective on the outside. As far as I know, no one else is writing about my love, my dogs, my travels, my friends, my photos, my work, etc., except for my wife, and she focuses much more on my eats. So I’m my niche and welcome to it.

(Also, there’s less chance I’ll offend someone with an, um, off-color joke like the one in the first sentence of this post.)

Still, with all the decade-mania going on, I thought it would be interesting if I wrote about movies, books, comics and music for a “decade-retrospective” post. Trying to assemble my own lists for each category — “favorites,” mind you, not “bests” — was more daunting than I expected. I keep a running list of the books in my life, but not those other art forms, so much of this has to be painted from memory.

(I considered adding TV as a category, but realized that the drop-off from The Wire to whatever came in second was too steep.)

Compiling lists — fun though it is — hasn’t helped me reach a deeper understanding about what this decade “meant,” but I’m fine with that. I’ve spent almost seven years writing here and maybe that’s the story in itself: digital distribution has transformed the way we experience/consume all forms of art and how we share our thoughts with others. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic or elegiac about Facebook, Twitter, Kindles or iTunes (okay, a little about iTunes), so much as writing about some artworks that were created or published in the past 10 years and why I like them.

Welcome to my Virtual Memories. On with the show!

Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books

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Revelation

If it turns out that the world continues to exist after my death — I can have my hopes/doubts, right? — then I need you to do something for me: put Gillian Welch’s album Time (The Revelator) on repeat at my memorial service.

There are albums — forgive the old-school parlance — that I love more, but none that I’d rather have guide me into the next world.

I first encountered Gillian Welch in December 2000, when I saw the Coen Bros. movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? at the multiplex below Union Square. I didn’t like the movie much, but was floored by the soundtrack. In particular, I was entranced by a couple of tunes by Alison Krauss. I picked up the soundtrack a few days later, and listened to the “roots” music over and over. (This didn’t bother my girlfriend as much as when I discovered Ted Hawkins’ Songs from Venice Beach a few years earlier, an event that nearly burned out the motor of my CD player.)

I found the Krauss songs — Down to the River to Pray and I’ll Fly Away — utterly mesmerizing, even if their southern Baptist sentiment didn’t exactly jibe with my first-gen, northeastern Jewish background. I noticed that the latter song was a duet with someone named Gillian Welch, but wasn’t able to get a taste of her voice from the song. Welch was also the voice of one of the sirens in the song Nobody but the Baby, but I again couldn’t pare her sound out from Krauss and Emmylou Harris.

One Friday, several months later, Slate ran a review of a new album by Welch and her partner David Rawlings. Written by Daniel Menaker, it was subtitled, “The oldest young people in country music.” Curiosity piqued, I gave it a read. It sounded like it was right up my alley:

In this album, it’s time that reveals its own meanings and purposes. Using compositions that range from a ditty to a slow romantic waltz to a slurry blues moan to a hypnotic 15-minute-plus Philip Glassy imagistic tour de force, the album assembles an alt-country “Waste Land,” with quotes from and references to and nods toward scores of events and songs and people in the nation’s and the singers’ lives.

I decided I would pick up the album next week. That was September 7, 2001.

Four days later, we had a new edition of The Waste Land. The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, What the Thunder Said — all the parts were there, with Death by Air standing in for Death by Water.

I forget why we went out the night of 9/11, but my girlfriend and I stopped in a Border’s bookstore in Paramus, NJ that evening. I recall wandering among the shelves, trying to summon that feeling of solace I get among books. It wasn’t happening. We were, like the rest of the populace, shocked out of our gourds.

I surrendered and got ready to leave. On the way out, I passed a CD listening station, and noticed that Time (The Revelator) was one of the six disks it offered. Without a pause I donned the clunky headphones and put on track 1.

I heard the title song’s opening lonely guitar notes, then Welch’s lamenting voice, and six-and-a-half minutes later, I took the headphones off, picked up a copy of the CD, and numbly walked to the cashier.

In his Slate review, Menaker describe it as a concept album, and wrote:

So, what’s the concept? The losses inevitably incurred by the passage of time — personal losses, musical losses, cultural losses, losses of innocence, losses of heroes, losses of dreams. Taken together, the songs here seem to want to redeem these losses in two ways: by weaving the tattered remains of the past into new whole cloth — the cloth of art — and by finding the hidden meaning in them that the passage of time reveals. The dictionary says that in the theological sense, “revelator,” a word first used at the beginning of the 19th century, means someone who knows and can articulate the will of God — St. John is often called “John the Revelator” in Baptist hymns and sermons.

That night, at the end of the world, I felt like I’d heard the voice.

My words will continue to fail, so why don’t you take a 6-minute break and watch/listen?

Rather than summon me back to 9/11, Time (The Revelator) seems to grow along with me. Sure, those first notes always evoke a world-weary sigh, as if I’m preparing to confront the great loneliness I felt on that day and its aftermath. (If my ex-girlfriend is reading this, please note: It was me, not you. But now, as the Beatles put it, my life has changed in oh so many ways.) But it keeps revealing new heights and depths over the course of the album, with Casey Jones and the whiskey pope, the Great Emancipator and the staggers and the jags, Elvis Presley Blues and five-band bills. It’s like discovering an America.

Menaker’s review cites a passel of lyrical and musical references in the album, but he misses the central one. He finds Gene Autry, Elvis, the Delmore Brothers, Bill Justis, James Brown, and folk and gospel traditions. His blind spot is the music of Blind Willie Johnson. It’s not to knock him; I only discovered Johnson a few years ago, but now that I have, the roots of Time (The Revelator) are much more apparent to me. That’s not to say that Welch and her partner David Rawlings made a derivative album; I’m just saying that the most direct lyrical precursor of its themes of apocalypticism and resurrection can be found in Johnson’s music.

As I grew older and allegedly wiser, as I found love and overcame my wheels-within-wheels paranoia, as my American experience deepened, this album seems to be waiting for me, like signs on a highway. The mysteries were all there, waiting to be discovered in its somnolent vocals and the stripped down sound of two guitars.

Time (The Revelator) builds up to a 15-minute coda, I Dream a Highway. The song takes up lyrical threads from the rest of the record and weaves them into a greater tapestry. It’s a regeneration, a highway ouroborous, a love that lasts through winters and decay, always returning to you, whoever you are.

One of my exes, a songwriter, told me she cried when she heard that song, because she knew she’d never be able to write something so beautiful. I can’t begin to do it justice. I’ve been trying for five years now, but this is the post you get.

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Musical Oldth

When I was in college (of course), my pal Mark & I talked about launching some sorta alt-culture ‘zine. Our only condition was that it would have nothing to do with music, because we could hold our own in just about any other field, but alt-music is the one field where you’ll always get demolished by someone who’s more “indie” than you. It was the early ’90’s, and people cared about that stuff then; get over it.

Nowadays, I need the occasional reminder that I’m old (38), out of touch, and otherwise unhip. Contemporary music is a great way to demolish any of my illusions that I can keep up with the kids. In that vein, I was happy that Pitchfork published its list of the top 500 tracks of the decade.

Since Matlock was just about to start, I skipped to the top 20, where I discovered that . . . I’m old, out of touch and otherwise unhip!

So, for your entertainment & edification, let’s count down Pitchfork’s top 20 tracks of the decade in terms of whether or not I ever heard them!

SONGS I HAVE NEVER EVER HEARD

20. The Walkmen – “The Rat”

19. R. Kelly – “Ignition (Remix)”

18. Hercules and Love Affair – “Blind”

17. Annie – “Heartbeat”

16. The Rapture – “House of Jealous Lovers”

15. The Knife – “Heartbeats”

13. LCD Soundsystem – “Losing My Edge”

9. Animal Collective – “My Girls”

8. Radiohead – “Idioteque”

6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Maps”

5. Daft Punk – “One More Time”

2. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”

SONGS I HAVE HEARD (WITH MY HEARING AID)

14. Jay-Z – “99 Problems”

12. OutKast – “Hey Ya!”

11. Gnarls Barkley – “Crazy”

10. Arcade Fire – “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”

7. Missy Elliott – “Get Ur Freak On”

4. Beyoncé [ft. Jay-Z] – “Crazy in Love”

3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy] – “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”

1. OutKast – “B.O.B.”

Weirdly enough, almost all the music that I do know from that list is by black artists, while almost every 0-fer was from white artists. This leads me to conclude that

  1. I’m racist,
  2. “YEAH!” by Usher, Lil’ Jon and Ludacris should’ve been somewhere in the top 100, and
  3. whitey made some shitty music this decade.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never even heard of the following bands from the list:

  1. The Walkmen
  2. Hercules and Love Affair
  3. Annie
  4. The Rapture
  5. The Knife
  6. Animal Collective

The only reason I know LCD Soundsystem is because Slate suckered me into buying their music. I hated their record so much I went back to check if the article was originally published on April Fools Day. If these other artists are anything like that, then I understand why the recording industry is collapsing.

I only know Arcade Fire because Robert Wilonsky mentioned that their song is used in the first trailer for Where The Wild Things Are. It turned out that I had one of their albums (Funeral) in my iTunes library, and I think it’s pretty good.

Oh, and I think “Hey Ya!” and “Crazy” should have been #1 and #2.