JAKE CLELAND

Out on the balcony of the extremely suburban club I went to on Saturday night, I asked a friendly looking dude if I could borrow a cigarette, and then followed it with “I say borrow, what I really mean is steal,” and he said “Yeah you better not fuckin’ give it back when you’re done with it,” and we both laughed, and then we got to talking about how he lives in Port Melbourne but he’s here with some friends, and they’re all going fishing tomorrow “if we can even wake up tomorrow morning,” and about how it’s not what you’re fishing for that matters as much as the meditative aspect of the experience as well as an excuse to just get together with friends, in the same sense as what multiplayer video games provide, and then we mutually bitched about the sort of people that go to these clubs, and how this scene is so incestuous because even though you could go out here every week and meet someone new, they inevitably know seven or eight people you know as well, and tonight I looked at a facebook invite for a friend’s band (they’re real good if you still stomach dance-punk, which I do) and saw in the sidebar of invitees a list of people I’ve slept with in the past two years, people from ostensibly totally disparate social groups who nevertheless were all within one degree of separation from each other, and I wondered with a straight face whether this was the consequence of popularity and whether that awkward moment where you walk into a room at a party and have to tiptoe around the fact that you’ve seen everyone there naked will occur more and more as I get older. What I’m trying to say is that smoking is a really good way of making new friends.

52 Albums: #38

Deciding on a first track is important, it sends a message. Some artists choose to start with a single (“Needle in the Hay” off Elliott Smith, “Death to Los Campesinos!” from Hold On Now, Youngster) while others choose to speak more directly to the audience (“Thriller”, “And Now For Something Completely Similar”). A Tribe Called Quest chose a third option for their 1993 release Midnight Marauders, having a mechanical female voice belonging to actress Laura Dern open the album following a woozy record scratch, framing the album as a late-night program for insomniacs, overthinkers or the just plain restless. ”We hope that you will find our presentation precise, bass-heavy and just right. Thanks.” It’s disconcertingly cordial; if science-fiction has taught us anything, it’s that polite machines are often looking for an excuse to unleash repressed homicidal rage. Thankfully it never comes to that, and even the album itself is relatively low on rage, instead opting for weary disappointment in life’s bullshit along with the awareness that things - people, society - have the potential to change.

The album’s loose concept, the didactic, librarian-esque voiceover, bookends some of the tracks, either with an explication of the concept (“7 times out of 10 we listen to our music at night. Thus spawned the title of this program. The word ‘maraud’ means ‘to loot’. In this case, we maraud for ears.”) or added social commentary. It’s on the latter point that the album dressing works best, as the break from melody into elevator music behind the knowledgeable narrator makes serious statements like “Did you know that the rate of AIDS in the black/hispanic community is rising at an alarming rate? Education is the proper means for slowing it down” stand out. Their keen social awareness also goes to linguistics and the evolution of language like on “Sucka N***a” where Q-Tip nails it so hard the whole verse deserves to be quoted:

See, nigga first was used down in the Deep South.

Fallin out between the dome of the white man’s mouth.

It means that we will never grow, you know the word dummy.

Other niggas in the community think it’s crummy.

But I don’t, neither does the youth cause we

em-brace adversity it goes right with the race.

Yo I start to flinch, as I try not to say it.

But my lips is like the oowop as I start to spray it.

ATCQ are also captivating storytellers. On “8 Million Stories”, Phife Dawg runs through a truly godawful day, having his car broken into twice, his stereo taken, his little brother throwing a tantrum in the middle of a store, burning his shirt while ironing it for a date who eventually stands him up. The way every couplet drives a new point in the plot leaves little time for specific details, but as each problem piles on, hammered home with Q-Tip hoarsely chanting underneath “help me out” to God or anyone else who’ll listen, so does the sense of helplessness.

Though they didn’t pioneer conscious rap, they operated at such a high level that they created a legacy inspiring the auspicious (“The fans want a feeling of A Tribe Called Quest / But all they got left is this guy called West”) and the less so (Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon), leaving behind a discography not only jam-packed with witty rhymes but also status quo-challenging lessons for better living. Lessons which are precise, bass-heavy, and just right.

“I’m so two thousand and late,” Fergie says over the phone to a one night stand, holding the pregnancy test in her hands, crying.

I Am The Biggest Rock Star In The World.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I see is the gorgeous supermodel to my left. The second thing is the gorgeous supermodel to my right. The third thing is the room literally full of supermodels, all naked, all of whom I blessed with multiple orgasms the night before. Some might think they’re just after me for my status and my money, of which I have so much that I use it as wallpaper on my fleet of yachts, but I think they just like me because I’m a regular, down-to-Earth guy, despite having a fleet of yachts with hundred dollar bills stuck to the interior. That humility, along with my gigantic dick, is why I’m the biggest rock star in the world.

When I’m on-stage, I embody the zenith of human accomplishment. We play a twelve-hour set during which I change my guitar forty times. The complex arrangements of our music - all written by me - require multiple tuning changes and I don’t want to waste a minute of the crowd’s time by tuning between songs. I do it for the fans. I have a guitar that’s totally transparent. I have a guitar that shoots fireworks. I have a guitar that shoots fireworks that shoot fireworks. I have a guitar made of pure energy. It took CERN six years to develop and its conception was the real reason they created the Large Hadron Collider.

When I drive down Sunset Boulevard in a red corvette, I hear myself on the radio. They play our latest single last because it’s been at the top of the charts for the last 93 weeks. I sound great, but the instrumentation sounds a little sloppy. I wonder if I’ve exceeded the potential of the band. I wonder if I should go solo and try to make it on my own. I probably could, because I am the biggest rock star in the world. 

Every weekend I throw a party and invite all my friends: Pharrell, Jay-Z, the guys from The Lonely Island, Bruce Springsteen, Michelle Bachmann, and five thousand extras. Jay and I were going to do an album together but apparently he was so soured by the last experience that he’s decided not to do it. The Lonely Island are supporting us on our next tour; we feel like it’s important to capture the comedy-music market now that Tenacious D are so popular. Andy Samberg is just like how you’d expect, he’s a really nice guy. So is Pharrell, really nice guy. Springsteen, really nice guy. Michelle Bachmann, really lovely. Everybody I know is really nice, except the haters, but we don’t play for them.

Every time I give an interview, I answer all questions with one hundred percent honesty. “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.” I wrote that for the first single off our debut album, but it’s also my personal philosophy. I believe by being open with the fans, who I do all this for, we all become closer. I also make sure to mention all the charities I’ve donated to, so other people can donate to them too, not because I want people to be impressed by my philanthropy, because like I said before I’m really humble and just an everyday guy, albeit one who gets to live in a mansion built in the shape of a T-Rex.

I am the biggest rock star in the world. It’s awesome.

52 Albums: #37

The first album in this series to actually make me feel worse for having listened to it.

Calling your debut album “Autobiography” is a pretty clear statement of intent, doing away with the implicitness that songwriters write what they know and directly opposing the plausible deniability one has when creating any sort of narrative that it’s really about the artist themselves. A bold move! Or it would be, if Simpson had anything vaguely controversial or complicated to say. The first lines of the album are “You think you know me / Word on the street is that you do,” which I assume are meant sarcastically but given how absent of substance she seems, it’s hard to decide for sure.

The lyrical content of the album covers - surprise, surprise - dealing with boys, from finding someone to fill that gaping void inside you (“Pieces of Me”) to relationship power struggles (“Love Me for Me”). I’ve always found that “Pieces of Me” mentality extremely troubling: what sort of unstable nutcase feels literally incomplete without a romantic relationship? You, probably, given how absurdly engrained in the collective consciousness that whole concept is, and for that I’m sorry. Obviously community and affection and validation and all that are very important for mental and emotional well-being but I reject the notion that I’m less than I could be with another person in my arms. In fact, quite the opposite. I feel distracted in relationships, always more concerned with what the other person is thinking (or thinking about me) than what’s going on with me. I suppose the benefit of being such an undying narcissist is that I’ve already found The One - he lives in the mirror and he gives a hell of a handjob. Autobiography is, for the most part, about relationship problems, as Simpson wrote a lot of it after breaking up with her boyfriend, handily foreshadowed in that reality-TV-ish way in the first episode of her show. Unfortunately it’s not good enough a reason to release an album just as a therapeutic exercise (go ahead and write one if it helps, though; art therapy seems pretty legit) and because I feel Simpson deserves no more than a lazy and trite analogy, think about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent promoting her album and how many children literally fucking died because that money didn’t go towards fixing the third-world. 

Do you ever consider that the positive contrarianism that’s led to greater pop appreciation brings with it a pressure to find greatness in all pop music while denying that you just might be totally indifferent to it? The truth is that I find nothing extraordinary in this album, and with the surfeit of evidence that even Simpson’s managers knew what she was doing was totally bland that the only way it could sell was standing her explicitly in aesthetic opposition to her sister, I’m inclined to feel alright about that. Halfway through Autobiography, after the insipidly titled “Love Makes The World Go Round”, I started watching Lady Gaga’s music videos. Now that’s a popstar everyone can get excited about, especially in this post-The Fame Monster epoch after her metamorphosis from the coy, Eurodance-earmarking fashion victim into a genre-gobbling embodiment of fashion, art and artiste, a holy trinity for an era when God only exists on the dancefloor. If each generation gets the popstar they deserve, then we should pat ourselves on the back for being so extraordinarily good, whatever it is we did, because Gaga’s dedication to molding genre-benders that also top charts and setting new standards for anybody thinking about making a music video makes her a successful artist, both commercially and in terms of her own creative ambition by standing up to the legacy of her idols (Bowie et al.) In contrast, the only justification Ashlee Simpson could possibly offer is that she wanted to make an album and she did and Christ, that’s probably more than we’ll ever accomplish, isn’t it? What a weak consolation.

It seems facile to compare something made in the first quarter of last decade to Lady Gaga in the modern day, but Lady Gaga is not really the point, even though she’s good evidence of it; there has been great pop music for over half a century, it wasn’t all just tuning up before The Fame, so Ashlee Simpson (and everybody else) has no explanation that could satisfyingly excuse the mediocrity of her music. Monet allegedly said “It’s only too easy to catch people’s attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared do it before,” but Simpson hasn’t even done that, all she’s done is make a passably catchy album for apparently no other reason than that she thought it looked cool when her sister did it and she had some breakup stuff to work through. Like trying to decode a pop-up book for ages four and up, sometimes you’ve gotta throw in the towel and admit that all that’s inside are pretty pictures and nothing more.

52 Albums: #36

I left the house today intending to do something dramatic and very sad, which didn’t end up happening, but blessed with that forethought I decided to attempt to create my own Curse Song. “Curse song” is a bit of slang I picked up in the back pages of Phonogram, in an essay by the perspicacious Kieron Gillen, and it refers to a song which, no matter the context in which it’s played, will strike you with paralytic dread as you’re helplessly thrown back to the moment of absolute agony that that song is tied to. To that end, I put Boxer on my unfortunately small iPod and got on a train. The first train ride, the one there, was heart-wrenching; Matt Berninger’s baritone vocal makes the ideal sound to voice the culminated effect of firing neurons that give rise to the notion of ‘a soul’ and as close to a narrator of my life as I’d like, other than maybe Morgan Freeman or Emma Thompson, or T-Pain.

This was, you might think, a deeply fucked up thing to do, putting so much effort (relatively little, really, but more than any normal person perhaps) into eliciting masochistic glee. Well, yes, I suppose it was, but I think at this point I’ve got a pretty good handle on how to make myself happy but judging by the fact that my neutral has become a feeling of relative contentment, I’m worried I’ve got no idea how to make myself sad. This is the sort of problem only a very privileged person has, I know, but I’m very seriously concerned about my impotence when it comes to feeling any sort of ‘negative’ emotion. Can emotions really be negative? Actions that stem from emotions like rage and that, sure, but the emotions themselves seem like they all deserve to be felt in equal measure. Anyway, no matter how loudly I listen to My Chemical Romance, I can’t shake the feeling that I Am, actually, if I’m being honest, Okay (trust me.) What if I’m Okay forever? What if I’m incapable of feeling sad ever again and the rest of my life is just consistently pleasant? I might as well be completely emotionless, a robot, only good for making outrageously clever tweets and insightful commentary on the state of music criticism. Absolutely dreadful.

So I apologise to Berninger et al. for having what I’ve heard could be described as a mature conversation and resolving a potential conflict before it became one and robbing him in a sort of metaphysical sense from being engraved in the headstone of another relationship. I don’t know what to tell you, mate. 2011 was a hell of a year and that graveyard is FULL. But all that personal bullshit aside, here’s why I still really, really like The National, more than I ever predicted I would: the production is incredibly fresh, letting each instrument shine through the layers unimpeded while still allowing them to combine into something that’s a little bit elusive and inexplicable, the polar opposite of Los Campesinos!, whose music is totally cacophonous most of the time but they’ve got a different thing going on that works regardless. Berninger’s lyrics are instantly memorable, especially on the supremely lonely “Mistaken For Strangers” where he sings “You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends / When you pass them at night / Under the silvery, silvery Citibank lights,” and “Oh you wouldn’t want an angel watching over / Surprise, surprise, they wouldn’t wanna watch.” I could write paragraphs about each section of music, like the drumming of Bryan Devendorf which is totally danceable in a fucking morose way that I just think lends itself so perfectly to a party where everyone’s dressed in black and staring at their shoes and stepping side-to-side to the music but not because they’re self-conscious as much as they’re totally absorbed in the music’s relevance to them, hypnotised by the beat, but I’ll leave it until I’m better acquainted, and hopefully by then someone’ll have said it better on One Week, One Band anyway. 51 weeks ago I made an off-hand remark that I wouldn’t do the list in order, as I didn’t want to get to The National at the end of the year and wind up loving them when I could’ve been into them for the whole year. Well, I accidentally fulfilled my own dumb prophecy, and probably saved some money on not seeing them at Harvest a while ago, but at least we got here in the (near) end.

52 Albums: #35

In contrast to Surfer Rosa, which had the sort of pace where by the time you got to “Gigantic” you didn’t realise you were already half way through the record and got a little disappointed because of it, Let It Be feels unending. That’s not to say it’s, like, bad, because it’s quite mesmerising, but like, why aren’t some of these songs 2/3 as long as they are? It certainly doesn’t help that I’m listening to it, thinking “Oh, there’s Pennywise” and “There’s whatever other band I really liked when I was 15 and thought anything without the repulsive force to clear a Blue Light Disco was worthless,” which brings me to the primary (and doubtless, only) insight for this review: my appreciation is sometimes going to fundamentally differ from anyone who was into this stuff at a different period. Maybe in ‘84 when Let It Be came out (I don’t know that many forty year olds though) or just coming from a different listening background, I mean we all have different contexts for this sort of thing and I think whatever appreciation I could’ve had for The Replacements has been spoiled retroactively by the bands they influenced.

The other day I was having a conversation with some relatively clever, clued-in people who agreed that Chris Cheney of The Living End was Australia’s greatest guitarist. Earlier this year I closed my review of The Living End’s latest album The Ending Is Just The Beginning Repeating with the very clever line “This is their sixth album and Cheney seems to have found a formula that works for him: every song is just the same thing, repeating. (In case it’s not become obvious, like Mena Suvari’s character in American Beauty I consider getting called boring to be the most vile insult. I’m still curious as to why I’m not writing for Rolling Stone.) The point being that I thought if Cheney’s our greatest, we’ve got a serious problem, so I asked how I could have this opinion changed and was referred to their earlier work, naturally, specifically their self-titled debut, the one with “Prisoner of Society” on it. So I put it on and yeah it was alright but also totally unsurprising, and then I had a revelation: I was hearing this as someone who grew up in a world where The Living End were always Aussie rock superstars, where this album was canonically great, and not as someone who was hearing these rough-and-raw upstarts in 1998 and thinking “Holy fuck, I hope these kids make it big because they deserve it, I mean the toughness…” Then I started hearing it a little like the way I heard Royal Headache’s EP for the first time earlier in the year, and then the rest of the RIP Society roster, and ScotDrakula, and the rest of the Melbourne garage-rock survivalists, bands who are so rock’n’roll and just starting to hit and who give me a feeling like I’m cresting a wave of tofu and pidgeon-toed stances on a surfboard made of razor-sharp shards of ecstatic vomit. I still don’t think Cheney’s that much of a guitarist but I felt the hope, so I at least get why I should like The Replacements, because if some of my favorite bands hadn’t found that in them, I’d be a lot poorer for it, but inhabiting that perspective myself is a little trickier. Oh well, “Answering Machine” is such a jam. Now that’s guitar, and with some heartbreaking words to boot.

52 Albums: #34

Eighteen albums in as many days? We’re gonna sprint to the end! Expect the quality of writing to be much, much, much better than usual.

Can you believe I’ve never heard a Pixies album? I’ve heard the hits, of course; seen Fight Club and all that. I recall they played at Splendour in the Grass a couple years ago (sort of Australia’s Coachella, I suppose) and a friend who went ($400 tickets plus flights sort of preclude my own Splendour stories) told me that she didn’t get to see them because she was fucking some guy during their set and apparently came to a climax (her or the band, right guys?) with “Where Is My Mind?” That’s the sort of anecdote I suspect has been a little tampered with but I’m content to let it go because it’s just so damn good. Much like! - and here’s a segue so professional that only a practiced essayist and newsreader such as myself could so seamlessly pull off - the album at hand, Surfer Rosa. Released in 1988 on indie label vanguard 4AD, it’s as good a debut any alt-rock band could hope for, which, as far as I’m concerned, is a lot. I suppose I should apologise for genre bias but in the same way your ears glaze over when you hear “Britpop” (don’t worry, I do too) alt-rock just has more to prove to me because so much of it seems so dull. Can’t the same be said for indie-rock too, though?

“I miss your soup and I miss your bread / A letter in your writing doesn’t mean you’re not dead,” is a bloody catchy line, simply poetic delivered with a dull thud by the plodding rhythm of “Cactus”. “Tony’s Theme” makes me want to listen to The Go! Team, so I looked up a Go! Team video on YouTube just to check that they’re indeed what “Tony’s Theme” makes me want to listen to and found a comment that said “I think I’m going to move to the UK just so I can see amazing bands like this perform. America has shit music.” I just thought that was funny. It’s mostly the first half of Surfer Rosa that you can hear the blueprint for bombshells like Nevermind; the bottom end leading on from “Cactus” is a bit more upbeat. There’s a bit in The Mighty Boosh where Howard Moon goes to listen to Charlie Mingus records, saying “On one of them, you can hear Charlie himself laughing off-mic. It’s a pretty warm moment.” On Surfer Rosa, you can hear Black Francis himself shouting “You fucking die.” It’s a pretty warm moment. “Vamos” is a pretty great deep cut, getting into experimental guitar territory. What it sounds like is the soundtrack to a grizzly murder in a basement somewhere in Tijuana. That’s just the sort of thing I’m looking for, you know.