Slumberlord
Apparently it is a lyrics-quoting day for some reason...
Everyone who is born in this country or applies for citizenship should get a CD single of "Hey Ya":
"Shake it, shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture"
I have mixed feelings about the
Broken Social Scene album, but I can't
not love "Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl":
"Park that car/
Drop that phone/
Sleep on the floor/
Dream about me"
Yes, a must-hear for anyone who hasn't already.
Obie says it best:
"This is my favorite song/
I sing along when the DJ throws it on"
I feel like I've been eating and breathing music for a few weeks now, which is a good thing for me. And now I'm going to write a long-ass entry about it, pardon my French.
A couple bases to run tonight. First off,
the Neptunes. It goes without saying that most of "Clones" kicks ass. I haven't completely digested it yet, but "It Wasn't Us," "Frontin'," "Blaze of Glory," "Hot," "Pop Shit" and "Popular Thug" all solidly kick my skinny ass and that's a sixth of the album right there. What really sucks, however, and what made me think for a moment that I had burned the wrong tracks (or that some loser had purposely mislabeled his lame garage band's demo so it would be downloaded) is the two rock tracks on here.
Spymob?
High Speed Scene? Not only do both of these tracks suck large, but I don't think I've ever heard of either of these bands. Why is it that hip-hop types who have impeccable taste in their own genre buy into total garbage in rock? Occasionally you'll get something that strikes oil like
Aerosmith and
Run-D.M.C.'s "Walk This Way" (which is basically responsible for Aerosmith being anything more than a joke post-"Rocks"), but more often than not it seems to fall in more with
Damon Dash signing that teenager's garage band. God. That was all over MTV the other day. Makes
Posh Spice look like a master Rook to King Four move there by comparison...
And all this talk reminds me of
Jay-Z and tossing
Lenny Kravitz. I mean if there is anyone who can demand the very best in collaborators more than the Neptunes, it's Young Hova. If he wanted it he could probably have
Jimi Hendrix rise from the grave for a collaboration (he's resurrected
Biggie enough times). Instead, he decides to team up with washed-up coffee shop rocker Lenny Kravitz. His hip-hop collaborations have been pretty solid this year alone -
Beyonce,
Pharrell, even (hell yeah!)
Punjabi MC, which I never got to play for the ex, oh well, but anyway, think of all the good Jay-Z could have done if his taste extended to rock and roll.
Nonetheless, "The Blueprint Vol. 2" is pretty good despite it's messiness - perhaps because of it. I think Jigga took the wise choice in using a white album to follow up the "Sgt. Pepper" of "The Blueprint." Still, "The Gift and the Curse" doesn't compare to its predecessor -
Kanye West just blows me away - that album has a whole
sound all to itself. I didn't buy it for the longest time because I heard the singles so many times and I was all like "The album tracks probably aren't that good, blah blah blah, I'm stupid." Well now I wish I had a time machine so I could go back 1-2 years and slap Past Me in the face for my stupidity. This shit is required listening and anyone who doesn't have it can go be miserable listening to "Yoshimi"* or whatever crap they think passes for good music.
But one of the really great things about "The Blueprint" is that it's almost all Jay-Z with very few guests, and "The Gift and the Curse" is quite the opposite, with guests coming out of the woodwork. Still, I'm excited about the album he's supposed to release later this year.
William Bloody Swygart, never one to hide his true feelings, has straight trashed
JT's "Senorita." He doesn't approve of the crowd call-and-response segment. I don't know. I like it. I like when, instructing the women in their part, JT does a shrieky little falsetto. I don't know. "Cry Me A River" is fantastic, "Rock Your Body" and "Senorita" are both quite good, but outside of that I haven't heard too much of his that I'm crazy about, and to level things off, he is associated with recent
Black Eyed Peas efforts, which I have not heard, but which reportedly (according to both P-Fork and ILM) are the spawn of Satan himself.
And there's more! After an uneventful weekend of sleeping and meaningless drinking and possibly-hearing-from-the-ex-but-in-the-end-not I went last night (Sunday) to see "Lost in Translation" with David and Adrian. As a film I give it ***, a bit better on ambiance than actual substance. Also,
Scarlett Johansson = hot.
Sofia Coppola also = hot. Very very hot. What I really liked was that at the end of the movie the credits list "In Order of Appearance" and Johansson is listed as first even though the first "face" you see is
Murray's - but the movie BEGINS with (SPOILER!) a shot of Johansson's (very nice) ASS (in semi-translucent undergarments). That may sound scandalous but hey, the movie does feature Bill Murray looking forlorn while Japanese strippers dance to fuckin'
Peaches (no joke!) so brace yourself!
But speaking of Peaches, this movie does have a pretty damn good soundtrack:
1. Intro/Tokyo - 0:34
2. City Girl performed by Kevin Shields - 3:48
3. Fantino performed by Sebastien Tellier - 3:12
4. Tommib performed by Squarepusher - 1:20
5. Girls performed by Death In Vegas - 4:26
6. Goodbye performed by Kevin Shields - 2:32
7. Too Young performed by Phoenix - 3:18
8. Kaze Wo Atsumete performed by Happy End - 4:06
9. On the Subway performed by Manning, Roger Joseph Jr. / Brian Reitzell - 1:10
10. Ikebana performed by Kevin Shields - 1:38
11. Sometimes performed by My Bloody Valentine - 5:19
12. Alone in Kyoto performed by air - 4:47
13. Shibuya performed by Manning, Roger Joseph Jr. / Brian Reitzell - 3:26
14. Are You Awake? performed by Kevin Shields - 1:35
15. Just Like Honey/More Than This performed by Jesus & Mary Chain / Bryan Ferry - 12:37
That's actually not totally complete. But, point being, it made me smile, and laugh a bit, and yeah, it wasn't the best movie, but Sofia and
Spike (ha!) are a pretty cool couple. They should go by "Sophie and Spike." "Adaptation" did have a
Folk Implosion song, though, did it not? And "Wild Horses"? Do you think they compete for coolness in their soundtracks?
Yeah, the film put me in a good mood... and I wasn't even that crazy about it. Plus, since I've come home, good tracks have been popping up on random play. I'm convinced that
Tom Tom Club's "Suboceana" is one of the best songs ever. It just
sounds so on. It makes me get up and shake my ass like I only wish I could in public, hey.
Kelis's "Milkshake" is a front runner for best song of 2003.
Gold Chains' "Rock The Parti," oh damn. Oh damn. Oh really. Please. Stop. Best song EVER to mention Chechnya. I'm a melted pile of wonderful. Everything else in your life can go to pot and music is still there for you.
*I don't hate... really. I think "Soft Bulletin" is pretty damn good. "Transmissions" is not bad at all, probalby one of the few things I listened to in middle school that I would still tolerate today. But "Clouds Taste Metalic" is rot and someone (a CUTE GIRL even) was playing "Yoshimi" while I was on vacation and it is still bad in my mind.
Wayne Coyne has love for Justin Timberlake, but still, the Lips are rapidly becoming the Most Overhyped in indie rock. That is all.
Johnny Cash - "Ring of Fire"
Ok, I wasn't going to write anything on Cash, but then the song came up on random play... from the perspective of someone raised on rock 'n' roll, this song is so wonderful because it is so minimal. You can separate each of the elements; the horns, of course, Cash's voice, June's voice (and listen; what an amazingly subtle and accomplished turn it is on this song - it's a shame more respect wasn't paid to her when she passed earlier this year) and then... well that classic Tennessee Two guitar/drums combo is welded so tightly together in the hot dust of this song that it sounds like one instrument, and rightly so.
By highlighting the singing with an understated and utterly genius instrumental performance, "Ring of Fire" is like a lost step-uncle to
Prince's "Kiss."
One more thought on "Breathe" - you must, must, must love the fact that deep down at the bottom of that banging, sexually charged track is a stout German guy with green overall shorts and a little hat, red cheeked, pumping out those two oompah notes over and over. Oompah dancehall!
I'm back from vacation and hopefully will have some time to post more incoherence here...
I'm continuing to build the arguably self-abusive Break-Up Mix Tape That Will Never Actually See The Light Of Day. I've realized that a whole lot of great pop songs from the last year or so are also really great break-up songs - "Cry Me A River," of course,
Basement Jaxx's truly vicious and quite righteous "Good Luck,"
Dizzee's "'Round We Go (Ain't No Love),"
Lumidee's "Never Leave You (Uh-Oh)." Most of those involve cheating and do not (to my knowledge, shudder) apply to me, so I'm sticking with
Blu Cantrell and
Sean Paul's "Breathe," which mirrors my own life pretty closely except that I'm not a Jamaican dancehall star. Not yet anyway.
On a different note, I was on vacation over the weekend... on Friday I was riding around with a friend and we started hearing
Johnny Cash everywhere we went. The more I heard the more foreboding things got, because when you hear someone's music as much as I heard Cash's Friday, you can bet that the person has died. I've never been the biggest Cash fan, and I don't feel any need to repeat what has already been said - his music speaks for itself. And kudos once again to
Justin Timberlake for having love for Cash at the MTV Video Music Awards of all places. Strange world.
Can't decide if I like this
bolding of the names on first reference, gossip column-style.
Thoughts?
"Holy bombs make holy holes
Holy holes make homeless moles
Take the turtle and hare
Don't run around if you can walk there"
-
Super Furry Animals, "Venus and Serena," what this has to do with tennis... I do not know.
I went to the Dollar Tree today and along with some cookies and cleaning fluid I bought my
Justin Timberlake bobblehead. Price? Why, $1 of course. Amid a wall of J.C.s and Joeys (oh, so many Joeys) there were just two or three Justins left. At best, I can wait ten years and Justin will become this generation's Michael Jackson; then I can sell this for big bucks. At worst, I can make a little shrine with the bobblehead and pictures from magazines and candles all around and tinny little speakers blaring "Senorita" and "Cry Me A River." And that's a pretty darn good worst!
Keith Jarrett – Solo Concerts Lausanne-Bremen
Three LPs worth of music and it never gets boring and, amazingly enough, he never seems to run out of ideas, even while keeping within a relatively narrow thematic range.
While reading
Lester Bangs' interviews with Brian Eno, I came upon something interesting: as of 1979/1980, when Bangs finished the interviews, Eno owned 20-some records. A handful, really - about what the average person might have owned then, possibly less.
Of course, they are probably very good records; but less than 30? I won't hazard a guess as to how many records I have, but just the store-bought records, CDs and tapes add up to a number that must be rapidly approaching 1,000 (if it's not there already). But there is an expectation that a professional musician, and one who clearly puts a lot of value in music like Eno does, would have a lot of records.
And Eno isn't the only one. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth has a limited number of CDs and LPs: he thinks they take up too much space. He apparently owns a lot of 7" records, although he insists on always having a copy of the Ramones' first album handy. John Cage, perhaps most famously, never owned any records at all; he said he preferred the "music" of everyday noises, as in traffic and bird songs, which fits with his idea of indeterminate music and his approach to the art in general.
But why aren't these important creators of music also great consumers of music? While all of them clearly learned from the past, I think each of them had a willful disassociation for the past, or at the very least an interest in making music that didn't necessarily fulfill some pre-existing interest. Read interviews with musicians and most will say something to the effect of "then I heard
Let It Bleed/
A Love Supreme/
It Takes A Nation of Millions... and realized I wanted to be a rock singer/saxophone player/rapper."
And while this is natural I think in some cases it can be a crutch for musicians too dependent on the past. When it comes to musicians who have large collections, DJs are the most obvious because they actually need this music to make their own music; the pictures of DJ Shadow's huge hip-hop tape collection come to mind. But beyond DJs, I would be willing to bet that indie rockers have larger record collections, on average, than other musicians. Indie rock today, in sharp opposition to indie rock 20 years ago, reveres rock history, and almost every buzzed indie band right now owes a large debt to past rock artists - which is always the case to some degree, but I think it is much more pronounced today. And rock critics buy into this, too, because they love hearing all these subtle little reminders of their own record collections and love being "in the club," if you will.
And while there's nothing wrong with this, the more indie rock records I review this year, the more I feel like it's just a matter of which genre or band they are basing their sound on.
A favorite music memory: In college I was at this talent show and this well-dressed black guy wanted to freestyle but for some reason there was no beat. One of the other performers was this shaggy hippie guy with bongos. So they had the hippie play the bongos while the other guy freestyled and it sounded pretty good.
I'm reading
Lester Bangs' interviews with Brian Eno. I know I've said it before, but Eno is a genius. Everything I read about him, particularly the diary he did in the mid-'90s, convinces me that he really does combine this highly theoretical, avant-garde musician persona with a very human, natural, warm way of looking at the world.
And, of course, his music is still among the best. I've never been one of those people who could collect everything by one artist, or consider myself a huge fan of one particular artist; but Eno might be the closest for me.
Another Green World,
Apollo and
Discreet Music are all favorites of mine, and the latter in particular has recently been gaining ground with me. Although I must admit, it's difficult to get used to listening passively as opposed to actively (although this is the way I've traditionally listened to most classical and jazz musics, as background noise for some other task, usually studying).
Some random play highlights...
Pharrell ft. Jay-Z – "Frontin’"
Someone on
ILM made a good point - it is pretty funny that Young Hova tries to rhyme "nonchalant" with "audience." It's still a good track though.
Nick Cave – "Till The End Of The World"
This is one of the few songs that I downloaded off the WWU networks two and a half years ago that's still on my playlist. All of Cave's bizarre storytelling lifted up by this strangely optimistic chorus.
Dimitri Shostakovich – "Chamber Symphony for Strings Op 110a Allegro Molto"
This is such a cloying, spiraling movement. Halfway through, the strings kick into this weird, unsettling roll. Very emotive.
Gram Parsons - "Still Feeling Blue"
I am a sad bastard.
