Hey, it's the end of the month! Kind of crept up on me. I can't believe we're already half-way through 2009.
I bite my tongue so much in the presence of certain people. (I'm specifically talking about these people, who I'm sitting around right now trying to write this while they attempt to distract me by suggesting that I write, "There are certain politicians who do not have the planet's best interest in mind and we must identify them and eradicate them!" but that seems so... fucking for virginity, you know?)
Sometimes I'm not sure if this song describes the ideal woman or not. I don't think I've ever known a girl like this----she sounds like a real bitch, but also someone hot as hell. I'm just all sorts of confused on this issue. I don't know who the ideal woman is. I know that she smells good, and when she looks me in the eyes I feel lucky.
Space's first album is a freaky brit-pop menagerie of darkness. I discovered Space via a song they did for the Lost in Space movie soundtrack (a movie which I was unfortunately addicted to as a youth, complete with massive crush on Lacey Chabert) which was almost nothing like what this album contains. Much like what I've been doing here lately: this song isn't at all representative of what is on the album, this is basically a bonus track at the end of the album.
You might remember a song called "Female of the Species" that was featured in the first Austin Powers movie (specifically, I think, turning the scene with the killer chick robots) and that song was by this band. There you go!
It wasn't until I realized that loving somebody wasn't going to solve all of my problems that I started to fear commitment. For the first part of my early twenties (if you can even assign 'parts' to the early twenties, but for the sake of this we'll just say this was my years 18-23) I thought I'd always be a hopeless romantic, a constant victim of unrequited love, bouncing back and forth between two types of women: those who want something from me, and those who just don't want to be alone. Countless failed and awful relationships taught me one thing, I thought: I'll always be the victim of unrequited love, even within a relationship.
I never understood guys who were afraid of commitment; the ones that pretty girls cry about, the ones that leave behind beautiful women. I always thought: how could you not just want to hold onto someone, no matter what?
But now I've got the fear in me, too.
It wasn't a broken heart that taught me that I shouldn't love someone. It wasn't selfish women stringing me along for their own purposes that made me unable to trust. It wasn't even being cheated on that made me embittered and sad. In truth, I never learned any of those things, no matter how many times the world tried to teach them to me.
It wasn't until I stopped expecting that adding someone else into my life would fix all of my problems that I started to fear commitment. It makes sense, really: it was the constant feeling of need to have someone in my life that motivated me to want to be with someone so badly. Now that I no longer feel that I need to have someone in my life, I've suddenly realized that I no longer have to settle or work around someone else's undesirable characteristics.
My ex, as we were breaking up with the the second time, kept saying that relationships are work, relationships are work, relationships are work, and you have to be willing to work for them. In the context of what we were having issues with, she meant that relationships are about working past the things that annoy you about your lover. "Work" is actually just willfully ignoring or letting go of the things that bug you. I found myself in a position where I didn't feel like I wanted to work, not in the way, that a good relationship not necessarily shouldn't be work, but at least shouldn't feel like work, and it always felt like work to me.
I don't know what love is, now, simply because I've lost all touch with what I used to think love felt like. Love was that dangerous feeling, where I felt like logic and control are slipping away from me and being absorbed by a constant feeling of need and desire. I can't even feel this way anymore, so I feel detached entirely from emotion. Not all emotion, but what I've always thought emotion was, like a fish that's jumped from one bowl into an entirely new and unfamiliar bowl and is consequently shitting his fishy pants and crying that the world he knew turned and left him there merely because he didn't even realize he switched bowls.
Now it's dawning on me that I've switched bowls, and the anxiety of no longer "knowing what love is" is waning and It's finally dawning on me that I've got to figure out what is going to make me feel like I'm in love. I'm still coming from the angle of "what need can a relationship fulfill in my life?" but now instead of answering that question with things like "direction, ambition, a reason to wake up in the morning" I can think clearly of things an ideal woman would bring to my life, like "companionship, warmth, understanding, hot sexiness, cool headedness".
It's scary, but it's also exciting. I feel lost a lot of the time, like I'm being swallowed by all the indecision that my newfound clear-headedness brings me, but it's a lot better than feeling like I'm wallowing in nothing but self-pity and fear. I wonder how long it'll be before I feel love again, and of course, melodramatically, I wonder if I will ever find it again... But until then, I'm going to be happy.
Your lesson for the day: A relationship isn't going to solve your problems. If you think it is, then you're going to have a lot of trouble in life.
Song Note: The Magnolia soundtrack doesn't seem to be up for download on Amazon MP3 and I don't talk about Magnolia here, so instead I link to a Harry Nilsson tribute album I've never listened to before.
I had the pleasure of seeing Rodriguez for free Friday night (last night, technically, but I am writing this on Monday). There's not much I can say about the show except to say that the band that backs him is totally competent in reproducing the instrumental genius of Cold Fact and even, in some cases, improving upon the original recordings----like in Sugar Man the normally straight-laced seeming long-haired guitarist with the googly eyes performed a raucous guitar solo complete with hair flailing and tendons in his arms throbbing while he wailed on the tremolo.
The man himself was the Mexican equivalent of Ozzy Osborne, shuffling his feet and wandering across the stage as if partially confused. The band would whisper things to him and grab his arm and point him toward the mic, at which point he'd say something only mostly confusing and laugh at himself ("I don't trust a band that drinks... and I don't trust a band that doesn't drink... heh heh heh..."). The minute a song started, however, he was nothing but a professional, playing each song wonderfully and singing it just as well, as if a day hasn't passed since he recorded his albums in the 70's.
Cold Fact itself is just as great as any of the numerous reviews you'll find on the internet are. Rodriguez' lyrics are relatively simple, and at times near-silly in their simplicity, but you can't deny his natural talent for writing good songs. What really makes the album, however, is the near flawless instrumentation across the whole thing. Every song features not only the hook that Rodriguez wrote into his song, but instrumental hooks and flourishes courtesy of a talented group of musicians you can find named in those aforementioned reviews elsewhere on the 'net.
If you haven't sat down and listened to Cold Fact at least a couple times, you're missing out on one of the best albums out of the 1970's that I can guarantee you've never heard.
This is day 200! How cool! Only 165 to go until I've hit a whole year. This is the longest non-dysfunctional relationship I've ever had with anything, even my cat.
Dukes of Stratsophear are XTC indulging their utmost love of psychedelic music. The new issue of this album is supposed to have cool liner notes, but since you probably don't get those with an MP3 copy, there's a cool page over on Chalkhills (an XTC fan site) with the band's description of what each song is a homage to which is a great companion to Chocolate Fireball and works on it's own as a good introductory course to the variety of styles of psychedelia that existed between the US and EU, without even featuring a real song from the era.
There are SO MANY good songs on this record. Really! What better way to ring in my 200th day?
The Fiery Furnaces are a hard band to like. Evidence of this is easy to find: just download their live album, Remember and try to listen to it. Admittedly it's not their live show unfiltered, the fiddled with it in the studio and made it even more labyrinthine and inaccessible than their live shows already approach. After Blueberry Boat they made me really excited, though at times discordant and annoying, I figured their next album would be pure genius. Unfortunately, Rehearsing My Choir followed Bruce Springsteen's format of following up a more accessible record with one that is mostly indecipherable and moody. Disappointment consumed me and I have not since recovered, albums later left unlistened and lonely in a folder deep within the bowels of my computer.
(DID YOU SEE THAT? I just wrote a bit like Pitchfork! I am so fucking cool!)
Blueberry Boat, however, is no less a work of genius regardless of the sorrow that later material summons. This song, and a few others (like My Dog Was Lost But Now It's Found and, uh,... I'm sure there's more), are even worth listening to out of context, though the majority of the album is definitely something that needs to be enjoyed in one full long play.
I have to stop falling a day behind. It's disappointing.
I love the album art for this album. It reminds me of the original cover art for the Isaac Asimov's Robot City series of novels. I'm assuming the books look like this CD for obvious reasons (same artist or homage) but haven't researched it.
This album comes from my audiophile days when I was spending hundreds of dollars on proper cans with an amp. This is why I posted this track instead of some of the other more disco-like numbers, because the sounds and layering on this track are magnificent. If you have a good sound system, or, better yet, a good pair of Sennheisers with a good quality amp, listen to this shit. It's rad.
The CD version of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway that I have is split wrong. What is presented here as one song "Fly On A Windshield" is pressed up right against "Broadway Melody of 1974". It's obvious that someone just got confused, and decided that "Broadway Melody of 1974" was the brief interlude leading into "Cuckoo Cocoon" instead of a song, with lyrics all of it's own. The version on Amazon MP3 seems to be cut properly, with these two songs as a separate pieces, and it claims to be a "new stereo mix". I may buy it just to see, because...
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is the best album ever, at least when considering "the old days". Yes, I will put myself on the line here and say The Lamb is better than Sgt. Pepper's, better than Pet Sounds, better than Dark Side of the Moon. The Lamb is nothing short of brilliant, in all it's excessive glory.
I wrote a paper in a Humanities class all about the storyline of this album, the parallels that can be drawn between it's concepts and Peter Gabriel's state of mind at the time of it's writing, about how it's just a coming of age story pushed into a lunatic realm where lust and desire turn you into a slobbering ugly beast where the only recourse is to chop off your penis and wear around your neck----at least until a raven swoops down and steals it from you.
There's so much goodness in the album (even the winding down of the second half) that it was hard for me to pick one moment I wanted to share with you. It could have been "The Chamber of 32 Doors" and I could have told you about how that song used to fill me with so much hope and sorrow. Maybe even "Lilywhite Lilith", an emotional rocker that might be about Gabriel being taught the ways of passionate lovemaking after years of confusion, or just about a blind old lady leading the character Rael through a cave system to safety. Even opener and title track "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" has a perfectly delicate balance of bombast and quiet contemplation. Yes, quiet contemplation. Quiet contemplativeness. It's true.
But, so much of my life is summed up by the lyric, the music, and the vocal, when Gabriel sings, "and I'm hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway." For much of my life I have felt this way, waiting for the inevitable collision to bring whatever it may my way. These days it's almost nonexistent, but I still feel a powerful connection to the "Fly On A Windshield" part of this song.
"The Broadway Melody of 1974" is here simply because it's part of the song, really, in my mind. A lot of good lines in it and Gabriel's variable accent sing-speaking the line, "the cheerleader waves her cyanide wand, there's a smell of peach blossom and bitter almonde," always sticks in my head.
In short, The Lamb is one of the most important records ever. To think that Peter Gabriel and his friends were only twenty-three when they wrote all this still blows my fucking mind. I'm twenty-four and I've done absolutely dick!
This is a radio-friendly edit of Brave New World off "Highlights from Jeff Wayne's..." to make for easier listening. The real version on the album is much longer and much better.
Apparently there is a live tour of this that goes around every couple of years and one day I would like to see it, though I doubt I'll ever get to see it.
Did you know? This album spent 290 weeks in Britian's top album charts. That's over five and a half years. I doubt anyone in the US ever cared about it.
Tomorrow I'll have to post "I wouldn't want to be like you" off Alan Parsons' "I, Robot". Everyone who understands why that is funny raise your hands! It's funny because they both sound like disco! Yayayayay!
I'd say this and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway are tied for "best concept album of all time".
Amazon MP3 Note: If you actually buy this album from Amazon MP3, all you need are the first two discs. This means instead of $40 the album will only cost you $13, which is still kind of silly for an album that made millions in the 70's, so just go ahead and download it illegally.
MC Honky is a side project of eels' E (Mark Oliver Everett) where he makes somewhat silly and fun music. It's been a while since I've sat down to listen to this album all the way through (since 2003, probably) so I can't say a lot about it except to say that if you're an eels fan then it's obvious what you must do.
If you're not an eels fan, just enjoy this song. It's silly and maybe even a little annoying, but like all of E's work, it's catchy and cute. Much of eels' material is so glum that even the happy moments that could potentially ooze cuteness often don't, but with MC Honky he really let himself go down the cheerful & goofy roads he usually avoids.
If you've ever heard in passing about an album where authors wrote the lyrics and wanted to hear it but didn't ask who it was by or what it was called, well, here you go. Let me save you some time though: it's really only partially listenable. I'd say the best song is this one. A lot of the time the author's "lyrics" are too prose-like and no matter how desperately the smart guys behind One Ring Zero try to bend them into a melody or any sort of rhythm, they refuse to give.
Or, my ears are just not smart enough to hear the genius. Michael Hearst, one of the two smart guys, has a degree in music composition and can play more instruments than I know positions to fuck in, so perhaps it's just that I am not educated enough to appreciate the unorthodox rhythms and textures of As Smart As We Are. I suppose in the end the only way to find out whether or not the chick has a penis or not is to peer under her skirt. So, go forth, if you enjoy this track, and listen to this album and decide for yourself.
Thanks to the joy of Angelfire, there's an old ugly webpage still on the internet with a couple song interpretations straight from Filter themselves right over here. It's only worth noting because, and this is probably due to Robert Patrick's endless clamoring for fame, there was that whole big to-do over Trent Reznor and Robert Patrick having some falling out, and on the page Patrick clearly says this song isn't about Trent Reznor.
The story as I knew it was this: Robert Patrick was from back east and he wanted to get out to California, and he also liked Nine Inch Nails and ended up playing with the band around the time Trent Reznor wanted to move out to California. Robert Patrick came out here on Reznor's back, played with the band for a while, and finding out that Reznor wasn't exactly looking for collaborators on Nine Inch Nails left Patrick with a desire to start his own band. So, Patrick jumped ship, and I guess parting wasn't sweet sorrow for the either of them, and up until a couple years ago everyone was like, "OMG, if Robert Patrick and Trent Reznor are in the same room bad things will happen!"
All in all, stupid. Just like how Hey Man, Nice Shot isn't about Kurt Cobain.
I like to pretend that Filter only ever released one album, Short Bus, and one song with The Crystal Method (off that Spawn soundtrack that amounted to one band fucking around with some other band's song and never really resulted in any artful collaboration). Everything after this has sucked complete balls. I'm no Filter fan, but I think Short Bus is pretty much excellent all around. Pure mid-90's industrial rock!
I wonder how badly this long post title screws up the design. Probably not at all. I'm skittish.
Nine Inch Nails covers are tricky, and that's all I can really say about it. Once glance at Amazon shows that the majority of the reviews decry this tribute album. I've heard a few, and they mostly all suck, but every now and then you get one or two good tracks out of them. Off this one, you've got this song.
George Sarah is an 'electronic composer' who might be known for his work under the name T.H.C. (who are also featured on this tribute album) and might be even better known for his work with Anthony Stewart Head (Giles, ya know) on his album Music for Elevators. The chick who sings this all wonderfully? No idea who she is. Maybe George Sarah picked her up off the street.
As it is... yes, beautiful vocal, and, to me, awesome backing music (though someone on Amazon insults it in saying it sounds like an iron lung that detracts from the vocal, as if this guy forgets Reznor's own spray bottle antics on remixes of Eraser! golly!) combines into a gorgeous sad song, and probably one of the only decently acceptable Nine Inch Nails covers in existence.
This is turning into "weird dark music week". Hope you don't mind.
If you do mind, and want your usual dose of indie music that I normally assault you with, two days ago I posted a 78 minute mixtape (my preferred nomenclature) that you can actually download for your own personal enjoyment over at http://birthday.staires.org. I think it's the best mix I've made yet and I'm really excited about it, which is why you can either just listen to it or download it.
And on to the song...
I wish when I was listening to Skinny Puppy and cEvin Key's solo/other work (Download, Doubting Thomas) that ohGr had been around. I hate to say it, but Nevik Ogre's work in ohGr is more accessible and more fun to listen to than Skinny Puppy's only mostly dreadful comeback record (The Greater Wrong of The Right) and even Download at their most enjoyable. My memory of real industrial, electro-industrial and, later in my teens, electronic body music (which mostly involved flirting with Covenant before they started to suck and Project Pitchfork while I was tripping acid) is mostly fleeting so I'm mostly waxing knowledgeable on the topic. I do that by name dropping as many bands I can think of. How many are there in this paragraph? Only eight? Hm. Die Form, Throbbing Gristle, Frontline Assembly, :wumpscut:. There, I feel better now.
As it is, this song has a great mood and it's catchy as hell I think. Are the lyrics politically themed or are they about some sort of relationship? I prefer to think the lyrics have a personal connection, based on how they're sung, but it's all a matter of angles in the end anyway.
What in the hell is this song about? Will Cullen Hart, are you out there? Can you hear me? Do you know that I love you? Do you know that I have shed tears, mental tears in my head, over the fact that there has not been a second Circulatory System album?
Oh my god! It says the new Circulatory System album is supposed to come out in August! Did you hear that? I just came in my pants.
For those not in the know, Olivia Tremor Control (featured previously on the site) was primarily the word of two dudes, Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss. Wikipedia says this now but I used to spout it as original knowledge that I came up with all on my own: their strengths were balanced perfectly in Olivia Tremor Control, kind of like how Lennon & McCartney's combined influences created some of the best music ever, Hart's taste for sonic experimentation and abstract art was balanced by Doss' thirst for good pop hooks and melodies and a general 70's-era Beatles-esque sound.
When Olivia Tremor Control broke up, Doss went on to form The Sunshine Fix, with a heavy influence on happy pop Beatles-esque sound music. Hart went on to form Circulatory System, where he was able to construct all the abstract weird experimental psychedelia that he wanted. Is it perfect? No, because Olivia Tremor Control was perfection (at least for all of Dusk at Cubist Castle and for 70% of Black Foliage) and without Doss around to manage Hart's more elaborate experimentation, things get kind of out of hand, kind of like how 80% of this album is largely unlistenable out of context.
As it stands though, Will Cullen Hart is one of those musical geniuses, like Jeff Magnum (of Neutral Milk Hotel, and if you didn't recognize the name "Jeff Magnum" until I said "of Neutral Milk Hotel" then you should get off my website), who constructs beautiful music that isn't necessarily accessible but upon repeated listens you can start to appreciate how truly inspired they are as artists. It's no surprise then that Jeff Magnum himself worked on this album (as well as some of Olivia Tremor Control's early work). All those Elephant 6 Collective guys sure do like to fiddle with each other's things.
"We are often symbols, definitions, tables, hardware in a circular time," is the catchiest chorus of any song ever that doesn't make any sense at all.
OH MY GOD THE NEW ALBUM HAS LEAKED I COULD BE DOWNLOADING IT AND LISTENING TO IT RIGHT NOW OMFG OMFG OMFG.
I am getting really bad at this time travelling thing. I can't believe I am three days behind as I write this. It's not the 14th, it's the 16th, but what do you know anyway, internet reader, not that it really matters...
When I was in middle school my best friend was big into Nirvana, but I never got into them. He'd keep insisting on how awesome they were but I never really believed him. He'd play Floyd the Barber for me and while the darkness of the song and riff appealed to me (as I was going through my dress all in black/Nine Inch Nails obsession phase), I never felt any sort of urge to sit down and actually listen to Nirvana until high school. I am not sure who or what inspired me to dive into their work but, I did, and I was entranced for a while.
Now-a-days when I feel like listening to Nirvana, I listen to Bleach. Nirvana and In Utero are too... something. Polished? Whatever. Grunge should be dirty and loud, it should be angsty and vulgar, and Bleach is all those things.
Another good reason for liking Bleach over all the other Nirvana albums is that when I play songs off of it (especially this one), people who are "familiar with Nirvana" (e.g. they grew up around Nirvana because they heard it on KROQ all the time) always say, "Who is this?" and I say, "This is Nirvana," and they say, "Really? This doesn't sound like any Nirvana I've ever heard," and I say, "That's because you fucking suck and don't know shit about music."
So, I tell you, listen to Bleach, and then make smug pretentious comments about how Nirvana was truly excellent before Butch Vig got his fangs in them and crafted Nevermind around Kurt Cobain's nervous-sad energy.
Man, it must have been hard to be a grunge band back in the early to mid-nineties. No matter what you did, people compared you to either Pearl Jam or Nirvana. It's the fault of the genre, really: grunge emphasizes simplicity. You fiddle with the formula of "simple pop hooks, grimy vocalists, and grimier guitars" too much and you end up in weird places (like chamber rock, or indie rock, or ...) so you really can't do anything but sound like Pearl Jam or Nirvana.
Michael Pitt gets off easy with Pagoda (which I've posted here), because it's been ten years now, since the glory days, and you can release an album that unabashedly worships Nirvana and Pearl Jam and instead of being labeled as derivative bullshit (which Pagoda would be labeled if this were 1994) you're hailed as a revivalist, or at least damned with faint praise on how thoroughly you capture the era's sound.
Seven Mary Three however had the unfortunate pleasure of beating Nickelback to the "gruffy singer alternative-rocky top-40 hit that'll never go away" single with this song, back in 1995, and I loved it, at ten years old, I thought it was fucking awesome. I still do. It's a great song. How Seven Mary Three didn't catch onto whatever bullshit formula Nickelback managed to tap into, I'll never know.
I picked up a promo copy of this album from a used record store in Uptown Whittier when I was a youngin'. I'd write about how I think buying used music (especially promo copies) is unethical but, really, I download music, I have no ethics. Enjoy your Saturday!
This concludes mid-nineties week! Next week will be whatever it will be.
There's a Harvey Danger song ("Moral Centralia") that contains a lyric that reminds me of this song, though the situation is reversed: "I'd like to go back ten years / and show you a picture of yourself now / but I'm afraid that it might kill you then"
It wasn't "Brick" that made me take notice of Ben Folds Five, (thank god), and it wasn't "Song for the Dumped", and, well, shit, it wasn't this one either. It was actually "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces", which I could relate to (being a skinny geeky white boy in a school system full of white skaters [with the very tops of their hair bleached, remember that trend? jesus] and mexican wannabe-vatos, I tended to get picked on a lot) strongly and caused me to buy the album and discover this song, which over the years has stuck with me and caused me not to turn into the person described therein.
If anything this song merely perfectly describes the kind of person who never grows up past high school, that person who thinks they're cool as shit because they haven't done anything since and spend all their time sleeping all day and listening to music. These people want you to believe that their life makes them happy, that they're so cool for not caring about anything and that things like jobs and reality are for other people. Unfortunately for them they are actually the antithesis of happy, of cool, and while the lives they lead may be attractive to those who are feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, most people know that they're just losers, and that more than likely they were just unpopular losers in high school as well.
Local H's "Cool Magnet" also reminds me of this song.
I saw Go in theaters. I remember when me and my friend Matt went to see it, we were Freshmen in high school---no, we were in 8th grade, middle school, it was right as theaters were starting to crack down really hard on minors seeing R-rated movies without parents. They wouldn't let us in, but we were quick to point out: "Last week you let us in to see Van Wilder and that was way raunchier than Go could possibly be," and pointed at our parents standing at the door going, "Let them in, morons." So we got in.
And then I sat there, transfixed, while I watched all this drama unfold over drugs and gay television stars and there was danger and sex and 14 minutes of Katie Holmes being all... Katie Holmes-like, cute and such. While I sat there I thought: Damn, this life seems awesome, I can't wait until I get older and start doing drugs and get involved in drug culture and have friends who go to raves and get into trouble and fuck shit up and dang! Selling drugs must be AWESOME.
This was before I had ever done drugs, being that I was in middle school and I wasn't one of those kids who could say, "I've been smoking cigarettes and pot since I was 12 years old!" and these were always kids with older siblings and my older siblings were so much older than me that by the time I could have even been exposed to drugs by them, they were out of the house and gone. Go left me obsessed, though, at such a young age, with the idea of drug culture.
Go was one of a few movies (Rushmore, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a few years later Donnie Darko would be added to this list) that I left on repeat in my room while I "surfed the net" as I was a youngin, a mere ten years ago. I don't rewatch movies like I used to, but I'm still transfixed by media involving drugs. The Salton Sea (w/ Val Kilmer), John from Cincinnati (more about the emotional issues that drive people to drug use), Spun, Weeds, Burning Bad (which I don't watch because meth is scary) and countless others have carried the torch throughout my life.
Now that I'm older, and I've had the opportunity to live nights like the one Go describes, and have mostly passed on them and taken a few others, I'll say that everything is just as exciting as the movie made me think it was when I was a teen. Sure, no one gets hit by a car, and I've never been chased by an irate drug dealer (I've never even pissed one off), and the girls aren't ever as cute as Katie Holmes and Sarah Polley (not the ones you get to lay your hands on anyway) but for the most part it's easy to feel alive, to feel young and excited, to feel dangerous and beautiful.
Sometimes I feel bad for people who don't live on the coasts of the USA. I get the impression that life is boring and monotonous for people in Illinois, Michigan, Kansas, et al. The whole universe revolves around us Californians, us New Yorkers, and the drug culture itself in California is so lively and high quality. In states where marijuana is a felony (Nevada), the quality of product is so low that you might as well be smoking oregano (you'd probably get higher, too). Out here, there's a rave going on somewhere every night, there's always someone with drugs around every corner, and every night can feel alive and exciting if you look for it.
Look! I'm finally no longer behind! Nineties week has so inspired me that I have caught up! No more time travel for me! Just straight up song a day, two today, one tomorrow. Yadda.
This song had a really elaborate music video, if I remember correctly, with a pretty girl getting whisked away by her parents, away from the singer, who obviously loves her, etc, etc. Oh, hey, this is the internet, I'm sure I could find the video and just post it here. I'm stupid.
Oh, I can't embed it because Universal Music Group are a bunch of cockfags. If you want to see the super cool video, complete with moody camera/focus shifting (another staple of the mid-nineties), then you can see it over here. Great video, check it out, it really perfectly captures the mood of the songwriting and the music. Good stuff. Etc.
The debate about this song over on Songmeanings is pretty lively. Kind of silly considering how utterly obvious the song is. I guess if you've never been in a relationship, or tried to be in a relationship with someone and got shot down, then you wouldn't understand, but even then you have to be pretty daft to get this interpretation:
I had originally thought that this word was a negative end to a friendship.. and that the singer was talking about a friendship that no longer had meaning to him. I asked a friend of mine what he meant by four letter word and he said "I end" but that's two words.. and so he alluded it to swears.. however.. on taking a closer look and thinking about it.. to me it reveals itself to be about love (which conveniently happens to be a four-letter word). The "When I go fishing..." stanza tips off that he wants "his friend" to say something besides friend.. and that whenever she calls him a friend.. he just wants to friendship to end so the "love" can begin.. that way the song makes perfect sense to me.. but is almost completely the opposite from what I originally thought.
What the fuck? How can you not know what "a four letter word" means?
I've never really remained friends with any of my exes, although every couple of months I end up hanging out with a certain one a little bit because we get along pretty swell when we're not too busy living our separate lives, but I've certainly never had a relationship end with "let's just be friends".
It's the ultimate snafu, really, saying that, because if you commit any thought to the idea it just seems foolish. You're saying, "I know that by saying this I am implying that it won't hurt you to be around me, after I break your heart right now, and by implying that I am also implying that it won't hurt me to be around you casually, so I must not have any feelings for you any more, which is probably why it doesn't matter to me that it's going to hurt you, but I'm selfish enough to think that not telling you to simply not talk to me anymore will make you feel better because I am so great. Or something, you know, I'm sure it won't kill you to be friends with me."
People are so insensitive!
To be totally honest I've always thought the song was about a girl using a guy for sex and him wishing that it would be more. The four letter word is "f*ck". This song is about a guy in a relationship with a girl that is centered around sex. When she says he's her friend, what he hears is that he's her f*ck, her lay, her saturday savior (a song title which will be posted here sometime), and while they lie in bed together he "goes fishing" for words from her that might expose that she has some sort of feeling for him, but ultimately he knows she'll never love him.
Obviously the lyric "end is the only part of the word, that I heard" screws up this interpretation a bit, but I don't care. I know my interpretation is probably a bit wrong but the mood of the song seems to match this quite well.
I am still a day behind. I'm writing this YESTERDAY, you see? It's the 8th, right now, as I'm writing this, not the 9th.
There was this band back in the day called Placebo. They recorded an album of nasally whiny 90's indie rock with a homosexual bent and it was pretty good! This is one of the songs off of it. I like it a lot.
Then, unfortunately, someone, somewhere, got their fangs into them and they shifted their sound and style toward what was popular in the day (think the way Orgy dressed) and ever since then Placebo fandom has seemed to be solely the domain of fat white girls.
In short, Placebo sucks, but this song is pretty good.
1.) I am a bad daily MP3 blogger, as this is day two that I have been a day behind. You'll see two songs today, one later on when I have something more to write about, and then I'll be all caught up.
2.) Last night (or two nights ago if you're reading this on Monday) I ended up a party and there was this guy there who "studied seven languages" (the truth was that he did wood carving on bracelets so he knew how to write the letter forms well enough to sell them to people but it's not like the guy understood them) and introduced himself to me by saying, "Do you want some DMT?" and then explaining the mind expanding wonderfulness of it... until my friend came up and said, "I did DMT, it sucked, it turned me into a bobblehead and it wasn't fun."
The highlight of the evening came when we were all slowly realizing he was full of shit, after he tried to lecture us about aliens, and he moved on to a different group of people and I heard him say, "Have you guys read the Necronomicon? The real one, written by the Egyptians, I have it!" and I regret that I didn't speak up, because all I did was laugh to myself and lean over to my girlfriend and say, "This guy really doesn't know that the Necronomicon was made up by H.P. Lovecraft?"
This song is kind of about this, I think. I heard this on The Craft soundtrack back in the day, when I was in middle school and my obsession with Elastica was riding high even while I was still wrestling with my "gothic" side. This song made it really clear to me: hardcore goths are full of shit. Basically, anyone who is "hardcore" into anything that doesn't have a solid basis in fact is probably full of shit. The whiny "I'm gothic, I'm gothic!" that Justin (the drummer) shouts is really the key to the song entirely.
I don't know what makes that guy think he can cling to all this metaphysical shit. When we asked him what he did he rattled off a laundry list of things that seemed purposefully engineered to make him sound like he was an artist of some kind but all we saw was a drunk greasy guy rattling off about bullshit.
It's so easy to sound like you're informed when you fill your head with knowledge about all sort of things that no one would regularly concern themselves with. It's also very easy to allow yourself to become saturated with tons of incorrect information and then try to spread it to others when you're so wrapped up in the mystique that you're trying to cast out into the world. So easy, in fact, that you end up making yourself look like a big asshole by recommending that people check out "the real Necronomicon". You know, the one by the Egyptians.
Everyone on Songmeanings says this song by Martha Wainwright is directed at her father, Loudon Wainwright III, but I never got that from this song at all. Maybe that's because I'm unfamiliar with the Wainwright line (having never listened to Loudon and not feeling very inclined toward Rufus) or that no matter how annoyed I am at my parents I don't think I could write a song so scathing.
Someone on Songmeanings says this is the perfect encapsulation of teenage agnst and, yes, it definitely is, and if it's really a song about her father then it's even more perfect, because it's that sort of foolish shameful thing teenagers say to people before they grow the fuck up and learn how to not be little ungrateful assholes about everything. I ever have a singer songwriter daughter and she wrote a song like this in regards to me I would probably slap her. This shit is offensive!
But as just a song, directed toward society at large (or some nonspecific general bloody motherfucking asshole of which there are plenty in the world), it's pretty awesome. I can totally feel her fractured wail, the way she spits the lines, and I can understand it all.
I just don't understand why some spoiled little brat who grew up with a famous rich daddy could even begin to believe she has the right to sing something like this about her dad. Man, I am really floored by this idea! I refuse to believe it. There is no way Martha Wainright is such a self-righteous cunt.
Oh, no, Wikipedia confirms, this is about her dad. Well, whatever. Funny though, that a year before this song came out, she worked with her pops on one of his songs. Bitches will be dramatic little bitches, I guess.
Note: This was written around 3:30 PM today, not at the 11:30 PM it is getting posted at. Is this relevant? I don't know.
I'm sitting on a lawn chair in the backyard of some house that I'm at. I feel like I've had a hard day. I can't even remember which song I picked for today, right now. Maybe if I try hard.
Oh, yes, the song Elastica ripped off to make Connection.
I live in a world dominated by truthiness. I would elaborate on that but I realized something today, like I seem to every day, that I can't stand explaining myself anymore. I used to spend so much time just explaining myself to myself (which was "the public" when I had my public journals going for all those years) in the hopes of understanding myself that it's, well, not at all surprising that I have no idea what is going on.
It's always been comedy at my expense. (I can't believe I am typing this all entirely on my G1.) I've never minded that fact, because for a long time I believed "there's no such thing as bad publicity" and "that being entertaining is better than being boring". I can't say I ever made any decisions for the express reason that I figured the experience would make for an interesting story, but I've certainly used "it's entertaining" as an excuse retroactively to justify lousy experiences I've had.
I've used my ability to write publicly on the internet, and the excuse that people actually seem to read it, as a way to cope with and basically absolutely ignore the larger issue at hand, which is that I am a fucking idiot. If I just internalized all my difficulties instead of recording them to the internet and forgetting about them, maybe I'd be less inclined to play into my foolish belief that someone, (be it people on the internet or my friends in real life), anyone, finds it all so fucking interesting.
The truth of the matter is that most of the things I do don't make any sense. The other truth is that there are some truths that I've learned to never reveal, no matter the circumstances. There's no use explaining myself, because even if I could tell you the whole truth, it still wouldn't make any sense anyway.
Lately I've been getting a lot of questions along the lines of, "How could you possibly have changed so much over the last six weeks?" and for the most part all I can say is: I don't know. I feel like I woke up to something, something bad that is inside everyone, something that has been sabotaging my life and relationships from day one. The funny thing is when I say it, it seems silly: expectation. People who don't understand really really don't understand. People who do? There aren't many of them.
People think that I like talking about myself, but really I am just scared of conveying the wrong message. The internet is so rife with miscommunication. A simple five word sentence can have a single meaning when spoken aloud, clarity gifted to it by additional context, but when written down, it can take on numerous meanings. Assumptions kill the real meaning out of written word, things we think we know about the writer, things we think we know about the world at large.
There's no amount of written word that can compare in meaning to the look on a person's face when they speak to you. When people talk about how text messaging, email, and the internet are killing our ability to function socially, I see now that this is the reason. There are so many arguments I could have avoided, so many opportunities I could not have missed, had I not relied so heavily on the written word. I can write a good sentence, but it's not going to tell you what I mean.
Of course, we've already established that I don't make any sense anyway. I was told recently that I fall into the 'artisan' class of person, which I haven't done any reading into, but from the sound of what I was told, artisans are ethical and moral shapeshifters. I feel a lot of the time that I am constantly molding and shaping my worldview in order to align it with my emotions and feelings. Cognitive dissonance is not a warning sign that I should change my actions; it's a sign that I need to change my thinking.
What does any of this mean?
It means that I am tired. I am tired of being misunderstood by other people because I don't understand myself. I am tired of my reliance upon the attention of others, the internet who watches and nods silently while I ride on my rollercoaster of bullshit, to justify my ridiculous actions. I am tired of sabotaging myself by screaming what I think and feel at the top of my lungs all the time, usually before I am even certain about how I feel. How many times have I quickly reviewed an album only to discover that upon repeated listens, I feel entirely different about it? Way too many times to count, really. Why haven't I realized this before?
I'm still sitting on this lawn chair. I wrote this all on my phone while sitting here. It's another skill I have: I can probably type over 60wpm on this stupid thumb keyboard. Why the fuck? I don't know how typo filled it all is, but we'll see.
Depending on where you are this is no longer the song for Wednesday, but for Thursday, but I'm in California, which is the center of the known universe, so it still counts.
In the last 40 hours I have slept 5, due to a variety of crazy reasons that have all left me somewhat happy and content. As such, I haven't a lot to say.
This song is about stuff, and things, and it doesn't really matter, because it just sounds awesome. I am not a Shins fan, but I am a fan of "the Shins songs that were in Garden State" because when I first saw that movie I had yet to realize that I was a hipster who listened to nothing but indie music, so perhaps I should sit down and listen to some Shins albums and see if I am not offended by how ubiquitous they have become, which is extra funny because I listen to only their most notorious songs! What am I! Where have I come from? (I also had yet to realize, upon first watching Garden State, that Garden State is a somewhat awful movie, and not in the "cult classic" sort of way of bad but in the "I kind of groan when I hear a girl say it's her favorite movie" sort of way.)
If this song doesn't just make you feel good inside then you're foolish.
It's fun watching the friends you've known since grade school change over the years. It's also not fun, in a lot of cases, as you realize you have little in common with the people you've spent the majority of your life hanging out with. I hang out with a gang of people who went to the same high school I did, but since I dropped out after my freshman year I actually never knew them until a year or two ago. All my real high school friends have, well, I don't know, dissipated over the years. Evaporated away like the Salton Sea.
Since we went to the same school, we all know each other, and it leads to spirited discussion. One friend out of us gets discussed more than anyone else, and it's always in a negative way. It always starts with, "So-and-so is a douchebag," and then someone, like me, picks it up with, "Well that's just because he..." and then we all launch into our theories over why so-and-so is such a douchebag.
The reasons so-and-so is a douchebag are varied, especially depending on the values of the person speaking. Most people don't hang out with him any more because he doesn't like to do anything. "Hanging out" to him means that you go over to his house and while he does work or otherwise ignore you, you play his Xbox on his big expensive television in his uncomfortable room that lacks furniture with back support of any kind (seriously, his room: unusually high bed, and a bench) or otherwise ignore him.
Some say that it's because he's a constant flake. He's the type of guy who you can absolutely rely on not to do what he says he will. He'll tell you he'll be at your house in five minutes and then not call you for three hours. He's the guy who promises you he'll show up at your house on your birthday and then show up the next day all smiles with a familiar excuse. It's extra annoying because you know the guy never does anything, so you know that instead of hanging out with you, on your birthday, with all your guy's friends, he's probably just sitting at home with his head buried in his laptop. What's the deal with that?
Others say that it's because he's a poseur. He just latches on to what other people think are cool (like: he owns the same sort of computer equipment I do, which doesn't bother me, but others have called him a "copycat") but he never does it enough. He has no real interests, aside from buying useless bullshit, and every time he's tried to be active and healthy ("Let's go hiking!" "Let's lift weights!" "Let's lose this weight by not eating like an asshole!") he's never repeated anything past the second time.
For others it's because he's an asshole. One of my favorite things he's said that I like to repeat loudly to other people, is this "goal" of his that he had. We have another friend who spent the first 23 years of his life as a virgin, and this guy used to tell me (about three times), "My plan is that when he finally gets married, I am going to fuck his wife and impregnate her and have him raise my child without him knowing it." Why would anyone even say this? This guy has fucked several of this other guy's love interests and it just floors me. Who would do these things to a friend?
This has been my complaint: he has no creative or spiritual output. He claims he prays all the time and wears a gold cross, but if you pay attention to the way he treats others you can clearly tell that a camel will pass through the eye of a needle easier than this guy will get into Heaven. He told me once, "Just read the red text in the Bible and ignore the rest," and I wonder if he was simply repeating that, that he heard it from someone and always meant to, because he doesn't seem to have any idea about what Jesus taught. (Not that I believe but fuck, let's be ignorant about your own religion why don't you?) As close as the guy gets to art is playing video games, and maybe reading an Oprah's Book Club-class book or two. With no hobbies, I don't know what the guy spends his time doing. How does he not go mad?
Then a friend of mine stated the obvious and blew my mind: this guy isn't anybody. There's no "him" in him, and it's because of what he does. He's the wealthiest out of all of us, by a very wide margin, he could be married and have kids with his income but instead he lives with his parents and blows it all on expensive electronics and a Lexus (the most feminine looking Lexus you'll ever see, as well, which seems to be entirely lost on him but not lost to anyone else), because he sells AT&T mobile phones. The guy is the puppet master who tells the Best Buy goons how to best con people into buying an iPhone.
Salesmen aren't people, was his point, because all they do all day is shift personalities around in order to best sell people shit they don't need, or to manage to goons who sell shit all day and can't hold their own shit together.
In the shower, it dawned on me further: it makes perfect sense, as a salesman you have to believe in the need for the product. I wouldn't be able to shill things to other people because I would never be able to convince myself that people need the ridiculous things I am selling them. I wouldn't buy it, and I wouldn't try to gouge someone for it either. Our friend on the other hand is the epitome of a consumer: he relentlessly buys things, usually expensive electronics, something new every week (PSPs, personal video players, xbox, playstations, wii, televisions, new computers, netbooks, laptops, one of every ipod except for a touch, the newest cellphone, more video games, all things that keep you locked up in your house). He told me once, "All the things I buy are to replace the addictions I used to have," referencing his brief stint as a coke addict (as if being a coke addict for a few months and derailing your life is a unique experience only to him).
He's the perfect salesman, because he spends his days selling himself things in an attempt to make himself happy. "If I buy this thing, I will be happier than I was a moment before," and that's how he lives. There's no broad plan, no goal for self-improvement, he sells people things and tells people how to sell things all so that he can attempt to sell himself happiness... but you can't sell happiness. Not to yourself, and not to others.
Happiness comes from recognizing who you are, and allowing others to recognize who you are (and, hopefully, those other people kind of liking you still), but unfortunately for our friend: he isn't anybody. There's nobody for anyone to like. All there is is all the negatives to him: he's a flake, he's boring, he's disrespectful, he's a fake. Who is he? What are his interests? No one knows. Before long, no one is going to care.
I've tried in the past to convince him there is more to life than buying shit and sitting at home, but he's the type of guy who tries to adhere to random mantras, like, "I won't buy anything today and that will make me feel good!" without actually understanding or comprehending or having any real emotion about it at all, so they just fall apart after a day. I've tried to be mean, even, because sometimes that encourages people, but no, he just secludes further into his hermitage.
So, I'm giving up. The only thing that will make this guy change is if he loses all his money, but there's too much of it. He's going to spend the rest of his life being an absolute nobody. All his friends will find things that are interesting about themselves, find other people who are interesting in the same ways, and leave him behind. He's going to drive his Lexus around, with his overpriced shit-sounding stereo (if he heard how good my <$1000 system compared to his >$2000 system maybe he'd realize what a fucking idiot he is, to talk with my guy-ego for a moment), with his suit and his paunchy extra couple of pounds under it, and he's going to be lonely and trying to fill the hole with bullshit for the rest of his life and die utterly insignificant except to his grandchildren, looking forward to the inheritance.
What a sad fuckin' guy.
I guess that's another reason not to hang out with him: it's just so fuckin' sad, you know?
St. Vincent just released a new album that is getting fairly decent reviews. I'm sure I'll listen to it soon and love it and want to post tracks from it, but until then I am going to write about my experience with St. Vincent to date.
Short version only today: I fell in love with this album, but then I realized all the songs are nonsensical bullshit for the most part and stopped liking it so much. A few of the songs hold up decently, like this one, which may or may not be about sex. I don't know why it bothers me so much, Michael Penn's songs are mostly entirely nonsense, but they've got spirit to 'em. St. Vincent's material is purely aesthetic pleasing, with no real spirit or soul for the most part. "Paris is Burning" is an amazing song, the emotion summoned by the music is pretty rad (same with "Your Lips Are Red" and "Now, Now") and it all sounds great, but on a deeper level there isn't really anything there to look for.
Two cents, etc, that's why I have a website.
The first track off her new album left me feeling kind of the same way, but we'll see what I think of the rest of it.
St. Vincent played guitar in The Polyphonic Spree! I saw her with them probably twice I think. She had big hair.
I've been re-watching John from Cincinnati. This is a good show. Bruce Greenwood's character is a fucking hilarious blowhard jackass. The scenes with him in the hotel room with the blonde, oh my fucking god, so funny. Good acting on the part of Greenwood I guess. If you haven't ever watched this show, you should!
Here's the continuous-playback may 2009 playlist, which is kind of all over the board as far as flow goes.