Watching people pick their pop targets is very interesting, so watching the “discussion” around Jessie J unfold has been an exercise in furrowed eyebrows. Latest case in point: Perpetua’s Pitchfork reviews. To me, Jessie J seems no less dangerous than Katy Perry - in fact she seems far less dangerous because she has so little influence. Yet this month everyone’s going after her.
—From a first draft.
Whoever said “only boring people are bored” was fucking right. How can you be bored when typing “gavin mcinnes” into YouTube is a thing that you can do?
One time I was gchatting with a friend, in some deep-and-meaningful capacity that comes with gchatting on wine at whatever ungodly hour it would’ve had to be for our timezones to match, and she said “we don’t have to talk about this, sorry. what’s the best talking heads album?” I have no idea what we were talking about (that’s a lie, gmail tells me it was about a girl from September last year) but I remember (which I say to maintain some simulacrum of storytelling because, as I said, I have the chat log right in front of me) saying “Whichever one ‘Burning Down The House’ was on.” One of the first music videos I remember really enjoying was The Cardigans ft. Tom Jones’ cover of that song. I didn’t realise that one of my favorite songs of the eighties was actually on Remain In Light.
The first time I heard “Once In A Lifetime” was undoubtedly on rage, a music video show that’s been on air for longer than my entire lifetime, and according to Wikipedia is the longest running night-time television music program currently still in production. In formative years the show fostered my appreciation for older music, as well as the medium of music videos which are still rarely as good as they should be. The video is exactly the kind of weird shit that inspired my distaste for those terrible three minute shoots that just feature the band shot from eighty different angles, because even a bespectacled nerd dancing like an epileptic in front of a green screen (a green screen of two decades ago, no less) is forty times more interesting. It’s exemplary of the best kind of music: creative but simple, like Gondry or The White Stripes (“The Hardest Button to Button” is therefore a masterpiece.) The term “Eighties music” inspires sniggers from virtually everyone, which as a retrospective evangelist is upsetting. Should the eighties be taken more seriously? Talking Heads make a compelling argument.
This week: Big Star’s Radio City.
Michael Saba has saved me from doing The Mountain Goats a disservice by writing about them all week over at One Week, One Band. Lucky me/lucky everyone!
But out of self-interest, a little bit about my listening history with the band: The first time I heard The Mountain Goats was just after the release of Heretic Pride, which was recommended to me with the sentiment that they were similar to the best band ever. Ostensibly that’s a great idea if you want to get someone to listen to something, because who doesn’t want to hear more of their favorite kind of music? But of course, this sets expectations way too high and, predictably, I found the band to be pretty disappointing. It is not even a very accurate comparison! Since that disappointment, I’ve been hesitant to return to The Mountain Goats, but All Hail West Texas thoroughly won me over. It tickles all my lo-fi cravings, despite being generally tired of the style now, and the wry tales Darnielle constructs (“But selling acid was a bad idea / And selling it to a cop was a worse one”) are as captivating as any good fiction.
Yeah! I’m a radical! A rebel! A free-spirit! Kill your parents, kill the government, kill your own consciousness! Let me bake you a cake with a file to break you from the prison of your perceived reality! Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop us now, baby!
POP POP! Why is Magnitude in the “Ride Wit Me” video?
Vwomp vwomp vwomp vwomp
AND/OR
Doof dooftschhh.
THAT’S IT.
The other day in a heated and highly contentious debate between QED and myself I compared the amusement derived from Sheen’s quotes to that of Mighty Boosh dialogue. I’m not particularly invested in the Charlie Sheen debate anymore - I’m at least concerned for his health, but obviously find some of the things he’s said incredibly hilarious - so let’s have some fun anyway! All you have to do is decide who said what, the answers are at the bottom:
1. Dont make me cut the stuffing out your pillow […] with a motorbike made of jealousy.
2. I’ve been riding it on a mercury surfboard.
3. I’d like to punch out a really old lady. There’d be no repercussions.
4. I’ll sleep with her. I’m a special kind of vet - people bring the animals in, and I sleep with them. Do you have any sick animals that need some time with a vet? […] What I was saying was that I was going to start a vet practice. People would bring me their sick animals and I’d sleep with them. Turtles. Parakeets. I’d give parakeets blow-jobs.
5. I expose people to magic, I expose them to something they’re never otherwise going to see in their boring normal lives.
6. I don’t think I’d have done comedy if I was born eighty years ago […] I’d have been a lord. Shooting people that were on my land
7. I’d like that, yeah. Teenage girls with my face on their breasts. Is that what you want me to say? […] I’d like it. Everyone would like it. I think everyone should be made to wear body-suits which are collages of my face.
8. I have a 10,000-year-old brain and the boogers of a 7-year-old. That’s how I describe myself.
Answers here.
From reading a review of an album to downloading it took about three minutes. A minute later I thought “Oh yeah, I gotta get that album.” It was such an easy, thoughtless process I’d already forgotten I’d done it.
—
Lee Ranaldo. SEE, MARTIN? I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO DOESN’T CARE ABOUT THE STROKES (via supcakes)
I had my Strokes phase halfway through last year coming off a Libertines phase, and now I’m just pretty bored by them. Julian Casablancas seems like a normal dude at best and an arrogant dick at worst, and the evidence for this is in literally every aspect of The Strokes’ publicity (even the music videos.) I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and forego accusing them of being a little too closely devoted to VU/The Stooges because we can explain that away by saying it’s a historically New York sound, but it doesn’t change the fact that their success was buoyed by the hopes and dreams of myopic fans regardless of merit. The “death” of rock is a fallacy, so without their saviour status, what are The Strokes? Just another meat-and-potatoes rock band, albeit far less intriguing than their predecessors.
By now you’ve concluded - assuming you possess the near-prophetic powers of deduction I give all my friends credit for, combined with undivided interest in my life and activities - that I’m reading a book that’s called Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung. Its content was written by Lester Bangs and it was collated by Greil Marcus, and it has that Lou Reed interview. “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves” would probably not be published today. Not only is it extremely personal but it’s also aggravated and antagonistic and both Bangs and Reed come off as a couple of other a-words. For those not obsessed with either’s canon, Lou Reed and Lester Bangs were locked in a hotel room over several different nights with the interviews taking place under the influence of sleep deprivation and mild drug use. At one point Reed tries to forbid Bangs from leaving so he can show Bangs that Metal Machine Music includes sounds deliberately used as an irritant - working on theories which’ve long been in development by the military for crowd control - to explain that it wasn’t a bad album, it was a targeted assault on the listener. In the sense that it showed Reed as slightly unhinged as well as desperate for conversation, it was a humanizing exposition for the man that looks and sings like the walking dead.
Reed isn’t a genius, but he is a very good songwriter. Some dues have to be paid to Warhol for fostering his experimentation which allowed him to learn, and Transformer is better off for it, because while & Nico was revolutionary for its chaotic, innovative nature, this album ultimately feels more cohesive. The Bowie influence is prominent, especially on “Satellite of Love” which is so Bowie-esque it sounds like a pastiche despite being originally recorded by The Velvet Underground. It seems like a shift towards a poppier sound would be disappointing after having been exposed to the anarchic noise of The Velvet Underground, but the result is such a gosh-darned rewarding rock and roll record that’s hard to find fault with. There’s a lot here to appreciate (e.g. the very vicious guitar screech that punctuates every line on album-opener “Vicious”) for repeat listeners.
The predecessor of this 52 Albums project was a moment in late 2009 where I asked Reddit to recommend albums I had to hear while I was on a ten-day road trip, and one of those was The Velvet Underground & Nico. I later read that Reed structured “Heroin” to sound like it feels. It was the first time I ever considered shooting heroin. A bloody stupid thing to do, but proof of Reed’s hypnotism.
This week: The Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas.
—20 Year Old Lover
Juliette & The Licks - “20 Year Old Lover”
But Juliette, you’re a little older than me.
—R2D2 signs up for OKCupid.
I started following Rebecca Fuentes, Charlie Sheen’s one millionth follower. Because if we’re gonna embrace this utterly ridiculous paradigm we’ve been running towards over the past couple years/millennia, why not grab it by the throat?
