one word better than the 6-word short story
review i wish i had written from eMusic user ernie-c, re: Vivian Girls
"yeah, i remember Tiger Trap."
review i wish i had written from eMusic user ernie-c, re: Vivian Girls
"yeah, i remember Tiger Trap."
today's Guardian has a great feature with musicians (and others) badmouthing classic albums that normally get a pass from any criticism. it's something we've probably all experienced at some point, and the albums discussed run the gamut from Nevermind to Pet Sounds to Dark Side of the Moon and there's lots of great lines like this one about the Strokes: "If ever there was a point where Gucci and rebellion were married together, it was right there." or this one about Trout Mask Replica: "It sounds like you feel when you've taken the wrong drugs, like going to your mate's dope party on speed. I'd listen to it with my head in my hands."
if i had to choose an album to put on the list, it would have to be "Horses" by Patti Smith. it's been about 15 years since i heard it for the first time and i've only come across it a handful of times since then, but it makes no more sense to me now as a "classic" than it did then. what exactly is supposed to be good about this album? i suppose i can see it in some ways as a counterpoint to to bloatedness and superficiality of a lot of 70s music, but the music itself leaves me totally cold and her voice is completely unappealing. and i like plenty of unappealing voices. meanwhile, 30 years later, did this album really accomplish anything? these days she just shows up at rallies to sing the execrable "People Have the Power" (note to Patti: no, they don't. i believe it was sold for stock options sometime in the mid-90s). i just listened to a snippet of the reggae crap of "Redondo Beach" and i'm wondering who on earth could seriously find that appealing in any way.
as my friend Dave would say it's a broccoli album - you're supposed to like it because you've been told it's good for you but i can't find anything redeeming in it (i actually like broccoli, but you get the point). it makes me feel like i'm at someone's poetry reading or performance art piece and afterward everyone is going up to her and being like "oh my god, that was so powerful. i really got what you were doing there" and i'm hanging toward the back thinking "OK can we all just get a fucking beer now and talk about Knocked Up?"
the Times Online reviews Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. it's pretty academic, and as derisive of the state of "pop" music in 1967 as you could easily find in many places today. and then thay have to go and take a big dump on the Monkees:
One can imagine a new pop group deciding cold-bloodedly to concentrate commerically on appealing to one of these age groups [teenagers and young adults]. The creators of the Monkees do not deny having done so and even virtuoso pop musicians are galled by the success of a group that was brought, Frankenstein-fashion, into being without reference to musical talents. Thir songs are carefully modeled on early-Beatles style uncreatively but skillfully manipulated. Their first single, Last Train to Calrksville, flopped in Britain at first, but zoomed up the charts as soon as the Monkees begain to appear in weekly short films on television (the manner of presentation heavily indebted to A Hard Day's Night. Just now, the Monkees are idols of the pre-teenage generation and are not quite despised by those approaching O-Levels. This has been their year in the absence of anything more remarkable, and the showmanship involved has to be admired, if not the musical artistry. I suspect that their songs were written by a computer fed with the first two Beatles L.P.s and The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes.
now I was sort of with them at first, because I know that had I been a music lover back then with a similar attitude to my own today, i probably would have hated the existence of the Monkees the way that i loathed O-Town or any of that other "made for the lowest common denominator" stuff. but the last line seemed a bit overboard. certainly it was a much harsher accusation in 1967 when computers were more theoretically mystical than it would be today (when such a thing is probably being done as we speak). i suppose i'm biased because i like the Monkees, and loved watching the reruns of the TV show back when MTV was watchable. their reunion tour in 1987 (taking advantage of the first big 60s nostalgia trip) was the first concert i ever attended. "Weird Al" Yankovic opened and this geeky 12-year old was in heaven. but i digress.
i suppose what i would be interested to know is how the reviewer would feel if the knew that the Monkees have remained popular and that some of their songs (Clarksville, I'm A Believer, Pleasant Valley Sunday) have become "classics", even among the musical literati. i guess probably the same way i feel knowing that Smashmouth will likely be more popular in 40 years than most of the music that i love.
the wife has jumped headlong into a project to completely digitize our music collection. since starting up with iTunes a couple years ago, we've made incremental progress, adding things in bursts, or when we felt like hearing something specific (we're pretty much without a stereo these days, so the computer is the main listening outlet). in that time we convereted over 9,500 songs, so when we started going through all the albums starting with "A" and adding those that we hadn't already, i started wondering what number 10,000 would be. Friday night, we got the answer: "Fuck This Shit" by Belle and Sebastian from the Storytelling soundtrack, an album whose existence made the NME posit that "the most hardened fan(s) of dreary Scottish indie....must be preparing to stab themselves repeatedly in the eyes with their Hello Kitty badges in order to stay awake for the whole thing." i couldn't hum it for you on a bet (it's an instrumental), but we got a pretty good laugh out of the profane title. now we'll have to see what #11,111 ends up being.
lying in bed this morning staring at the map on the wall, i realized that Bahamas spelled backwards is Sam Ahab. after trying in vain to make a connection to Moby-Dick (is Samuel somehow the equivalent of Ishamel?), i decided to just type "Sam Ahab" into Google. as it turns out, the most prominent use of the name was in a deleted scene from the Beatles' movie Help!. filmed in the Bahamas, the scene has the boys hiding out at the "Sam Ahab School of Acting". i don't know what the significance of this is other than that someone working on that film had the same realization that I did and actually had a reason to use it. but as i've never seen the movie, maybe this is just a roundabout way of telling me i should put it in my Netflix queue.