Cut Shallow Radio

Top Ten Songs of 2010, January thru June

2010-07-05T00:50:00.001-04:00

Making summer mix CDs and playlists always gets me thinking about the first half of the year. As far as music goes in 2010, we've been pretty lucky; at least more lucky than with 2009. So here's my ten favorite singles of the first half of the year. Now go make your own mix.

[10] "Soldier of Love" by Sade
It's pretty much a lock now that if Sade decides to make and release music that it will be worth your time, even if a decade of trends and gimmicks have filtered through pop radio in the interim.

[09] "The High Road" by Broken Bells
I've always liked Danger Mouse's production tone, and his affinity for vintage keyboards and late 60's Pop meshes well with James Mercer's songwriting. I also like that Mercer has (a) emerged as a very distinct vocalist, and (b) that his songs are gloomy and broken-hearted on this set. The notion that the man behind a decade of sweet indie-pop songs might be slightly misanthropic is exciting to me, and "The High Road" is particularly melancholy and seething.

[08] "I'll Stand By Her" by Marvelous Darlings
OK, I admit it. I sometimes wish every band sounded like this - a perfect blend of snotty punk of the Replacements/Buzzcocks school and the power pop of the first three Cheap Trick albums. Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook comes up with one the best of these kind of nuggets here, and since we've lost The Exploding Hearts and Jay Reatard, we can definitely use it.

[07] "Dancing on My Own" by Robyn
Even more than Sade, Robyn has become reliable. You can count on her to make interesting music. From a Pop perspective, she might be the closest thing to vintage-80's Prince we have today. I love the gender-confused chorus on this track.

[06] "Crown on the Ground" by Sleigh Bells
Yes, this came out last fall, but its album just came out, so I'm counting it. Besides a song this heavy-handed can dominate for a whole year if it wants. It's obnoxiously loud in all the best ways, sexy and sweet, but bullies your senses with piercing riffs. As much fun as the album is, this is still the duo's highlight so far.

[05] "Tighten Up" by The Black Keys
Like the album it's on, at first I really liked this song, but the more I listen to it, the more it becomes a serious kind of love. There is an effortlessness to the Keys this time out, and I love the soulful ease of all the songs on the new disc; the beats are especially tasty in a simple way. Oh, and my Dad thinks this song sounds like Bob Marley, but he's kind of crazy.

[04] "The Mighty Sparrow" by Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
Ted Leo has become one of my favorite artists because he's consistently awesome on record and even more so on stage. So when he comes out with songs like this, which will work perfectly in his live show, they usually end up with high play counts on my iPod. I truly believe this is one of his 5 best songs.

[03] "Drunk Girls" by LCD Soundsystem
Sometimes, James Murphy's David Bowie obsession gets to be a bit much ("All I Want" is a little too "Heroes" this time out), but when he mines Bowie's often overlooked Lodger sound, then I'm OK with it. The only song on the new LCD that sounds like a single happens to bear a welcome passing resemblance to Bowie singles like "DJ" and "Boys Keep Swinging", while also believing in waking up together.

[02] "Tightrope" by Janelle Monae (feat. Big Boi)
For a split second I thought I might be over the song. Nope. Still a masterpiece of Post-Funk Modern Pop. She might be crazy, but Monae's still making the music we all thought Prince or Andre 3000 would be making right around now. I'm waiting for the world to catch up.

[01] "Shutterbugg" by Big Boi (feat. Cutty)
What is internet-speak for the opposite of "epic fail"? Is it "Big Boi FTW"? If it is, then that's what I want to type here. This song so completely wins these past six months that it makes the rest of the music world look lazy (I'm wondering when the last time Dr. Dre sniffed a track this good was), while also putting my faith back in the Outkast machine. "Shutterbugg" packs the funk of "So Fresh, So Clean", the catchiness of "Ms. Jackson", and the jaw-dropping rewind-that highlight-reel feel of "B.O.B.". Andre 3000 loses purely from not doing anything, let alone something this great. If you hear this song coming this summer, it'll be me, bumping it loud as fuck in my car with the windows down. All. Summer. Long.

A Farewell to LOST

2010-05-25T19:31:00.005-04:00

NOTE: this post is full of spoilers, in case you haven't watched the show and intend to.

I have always felt that genre fiction - especially Sci-Fi - is best when it sticks as close to reality as possible. When I was in college, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and my friends and I would sit around drawing all day, coming up with dozens of characters, each with their own origin. One day, around the time I stopped pursuing this goal, I decided that the concept of the skin-tight superhero costume was ridiculous enough to turn me off from mainstream comics, and if I was ever going to draw these heroes and villains again, I was going to draw them wearing costumes that looked like real clothing. And those feelings have permeated how I feel about the film and television that vaguely falls in the modern fantasy genre, especially as it has taken hold over the last decade. From a film as subtle as Children of Men, to Christopher Nolan's Batman films, to the first season of Tim Kring's Heroes, I like to see the how and why behind the extraordinary.

Despite the hundred or so unanswered questions left dangling after this Sunday's series finale, LOST worked for me because there were answers to the mysteries, even if we didn't know them. I loved seeing what was inside the Hatch, or that there's a time difference between the Island and the outside world, or that polar bears could end up in the Tunisian desert by way of some Bermuda Triangle-like portal. For all its wonder, LOST felt like the real world to me, and maybe I didn't realize it until the last couple episodes, but that was due to the great characters, and the actors who played them.

In the end, there are complaints that I could voice - like for all the show's interwoven arguments of faith versus science, science kind of got short-changed, and likewise the Island got gypped in favor of the community-based limbo of the "sideways world" (which wasn't sideways at all, but more of a post-world) - but that's just me personally looking for what I loved most about the show. It doesn't change that the producers and writers had an epic story to tell, and they told it beautifully. The show was a wild ride that I loved regardless of how I feel about the last hour.

As I am known for my lists, I threw these two together over the weekend in anticipation of the finale, and I hope you like them. Goodbye, LOST. I know, no matter how hard the networks try, there will never be another show like you.

-------------------------------------

The Ten Weakest Hours of LOST:

10. "I Do" (Season 3)
Blah blah blah Kate gets married blah blah blah. Pro: guest star Nathan Fillion. Con: the ill-advised mid-season finale that is often cited as permanently crippling the show's ratings.

09. "S.O.S." (Season 2)
While it does include THIS awesome moment, and while I guess Bernard & Rose are nice enough to deserve one episode, I just remember being bored and not caring.

08. "Adrift" (Season 2)
Yes, Locke went down in the Hatch for the first time, and yes, there was the Dharma shark, but with the flashback about his custody battle, we start to learn early on that we really don't care about Michael if Walt isn't around, especially when all he's doing is clinging to a hunk of metal in the water for an hour, hollering "WAAAAAALLLLT!!!"

07. "Abandoned" (Season 2)
What seemed like a cool twist at the time - Shannon gets killed just as she finds love with Sayid, and by the returning survivors from the tail-section and the raft - now plays as the writers not really having anything for Shannon to do in the larger construct of the show. Her flashbacks with the death of her father and her evil stepmother are particularly forgettable.

06. "The Other Woman" (Season 4)
Juliet has an affair with Goodwin, which I'm ok with, but we have to suffer the lame out-of-nowhere character of his wife Harper, the Dharma psych-therapist, not to mention Ben's tantrum about how Juliet belongs to him (which hasn't been referenced since). And that's just the flashback (wasn't this a season of flashforwards?) - remember Juliet trying to stop Faraday & Charlotte from releasing the gas at the Tempest station? Yeah, me neither.

05. "Across The Sea" (Season 6)
The best way to describe it is a missed opportunity. The origin story of Jacob and his nameless, smokey brother just doesn't work for me. The pacing is terribly slow, stretching what should have been 15-20 minutes of story to 50 minutes, needlessly casting marginal kid actors just to tie into the blond boy who's been running around the Island throughout Season 6. Sure, they threw us some necessary answers, but we didn't get anything about the Statue, Lighthouse, Temple, or why Smokey doesn't react well to ashes and sonic fences. We did get Allison Janney's wooden acting and middle American accent though.

04. "Exposé" (Season 3)
Yeah, so...Nikki & Paulo. Yup, that happened.

03. "Whatever the Case May Be" (Season 1)
So, Kate went through all that trouble for a die-cast toy plane?? Yawn.

02. "Something Nice Back Home" (Season 4)
I will be proven right in the coming years, that this episode was all a bad idea. It spends the bulk of the time on Jack getting sick, and then having his appendix taken out by Juliet, which felt like the writers were stalling again. Likewise, Claire wanders off with the ghost of her Dad and leaves Aaron in the middle of the jungle, which felt sudden and senseless. Jack proposes to Kate in the future, only to drive her away by being a drunk idiot. And the writers scream in our face that Christian Shepard is the smoke monster sitting in the lobby of his son's practice, setting the smoke detector off, only to both reinforce it (UnLocke tells Jack that he appeared to him as Christian) AND undo it later in Season 6 by telling us Smokey can't leave the Island! WTF???!!!

01. "Stranger in a Strange Land" (Season 3)
It's not just an hour about Jack's tattoo guest-starring questionable actress Bai Ling. It's also a boring hour where Jack kind of gets in bed with The Others, and Kate & Sawyer basically do nothing but walk & row a boat.

-------------------------------------

The Thirty Best Episodes of LOST:

30. "The Economist" (Season 4)
A great episode that mostly stands alone - Sayid's German romance with Elsa ends with the revelation that Sayid is an assassin...for Ben?? Meanwhile, in one of his best scenes, Faraday wonders why there's a time difference between the freighter and the Island.

29. "Jughead" (Season 5)
This episode succeeds because of all the information download on the origins of Charles Widmore and Eloise Hawking, their involvement with The Others in the mid 1950's, and their relation to Daniel Faraday. There's also the great scene when Locke stomps into The Others' camp to see Richard.

28. "A Tale of Two Cities" (Season 3)
This Season 3 premiere may start the weak Hydra Island storyline, but the opening sequence showing the plane crash from The Others perspective is truly awesome, and the verbal sparring between Juliet & Jack in the shark cage remains riveting.

27. "Recon" (Season 6)
Sideways Sawyer is a cop??!!? Yup, and his story is pretty awesome, with Miles as his partner. On the Island, Sawyer gets back to being dirty, playing both sides of the eventual UnLocke Vs. Widmore clash. We also get a nice morsel of the Claire/Kate tension, as mediated by UnLocke. This episode feels like the beginning of the end.

26. "The Variable" (Season 5)
As far as I'm concerned, any Daniel Faraday is good Daniel Faraday. This episode is essentially about his relationship with his apparent parents, as well as him conveying his plan to save all the Survivors stuck in 1977 by detonating the "Jughead" hydrogen bomb from the 50's, setting the stage for "The Incident".

25. "The Beginning of the End" (Season 4)
The flashforwards start in earnest, with Hurley's car chase, "The Oceanic Six", the first appearance of Matthew Abaddon, and Charlie's ghost showing up 3 times to make Hurley even crazier. On the Island, Hurley cannonballs and finds the Cabin, Jack & Locke split up the survivors, and Daniel Faraday arrives...

24. "Confirmed Dead" (Season 4)
The proper introduction of Faraday, Miles, Charlotte, and Lapidus, all with very intriguing reasons for being brought to the Island. Plus, apparently Ben was expecting them, and has a man on their boat.

23. "The Incident" (Season 5)
To say it's the weakest of the season finales isn't to say it's bad - it is still on this list of the show's best episodes. I just felt that the Incident of the title - the detonating of the hydrogen bomb at the site of the would-be Hatch - didn't measure up to the rest of this episode, which includes the first appearance of Jacob and his mysterious brother, Jacob's globe-trotting adventures to meet the Survivors in the past, Ilana revealing to Richard that the real Locke is dead, and that 'UnLocke' is the new show villain, tricking Ben into stabbing Jacob.

22. "Walkabout" (Season 1)
The first glimpses into the mysterious John Locke, and his shocking condition before coming to the Island.

21. "This Place is Death" (Season 5)
The time-flashing jumps from the first half of Season 5 never really held much weight since they were happening to only half our heroes, but this episode resonates with the return of Jin, the origins of Rousseau and her madness, Charlotte bugging out and ominously uttering the title in Korean, revealing that she was a girl in the Dharma Initiative and then dying in Faraday's arms, and Locke dropping down into the well to fix the frozen move-the-Island wheel as instructed by Christian Shephard. Plus, Jack, Sun, Ben & Desmond unite to go visit Eloise Hawking in L.A., which Desmond punctuates with the great, "Are you looking for Faraday's mother, too?"

20. "Man of Science, Man of Faith" (Season 2)
LOST's put-up-or-shut-up moment. So, you're telling me there's a Scotsman down in the Hatch, who happened to meet Jack jogging one time, and he's got full living quarters down there, and he has to press a button every 108 minutes? OK, yeah, that was worth the summer wait.

19. Happily Ever After (Season 6)
The umpteenth return of Desmond, but he's always a welcome presence. What's nice is we also get some Charlie Pace, even if he is basically a mischievous Mancunian Leprechaun in this episode. Desmond has a purpose on both the Island, where Widmore, we'll later learn, intends to use him as a "failsafe" to the Island's electromagnetism, and more importantly in the sideways life. In fact, Desmond's all-you-need-is-love revelations suddenly pump life and meaning into the uncertain sideways storylines, finally connecting that world to the world on the Island, and starting the ball rolling towards the series conclusion.

18. "LaFleur" (Season 5)
The best Sawyer episode, but not for the past Sawyer reasons. This episode is very subtle and mellow compared to the usual adrenaline levels of the show. The time-flashing gang joins Dharma, and Sawyer macking it to Juliet turns out to be one of the sweetest and best developments in the show's run. Also, was that the whole Statue?

17. "There's No Place Like Home" (Season 4)
The finale of the writers' strike-shortened Season 4, it features many great moments, like Sayid's jungle throwdown with Martin Keamy, Sawyer jumping out of the helicopter, the freighter blowing up, Ben 'moving' the Island, and Penny coming to everyone's rescue. It also teases the legend of Jeremy Bentham, who, it turns out, is John Locke in the coffin.

16. "LA X" (Season 6)
Apparently, Hurley's hiding a note inside a giant Ankh inside Charlie's guitar case to give to a Samurai living in the Temple. Whew! There's also a "Sideways" universe (who knew?), Juliet dies, Sayid dies but then lives after a magic bath, and by the way, Locke is the muthafuckin' Smoke Monster and he is royally pissed off! Let the Terry O'Quinn acting clinic begin!

15. "Live Together, Die Alone" (Season 2)
The season finales are always highlights on LOST, and the return of a drunken Desmond Hume is a bonus. Of course, we also have Desmond, Charlie, Mr. Eko & Locke blowing up the Hatch, the first glimpse of the Statue (or its foot), the kidnapping of Jack, Kate & Sawyer, and the emergence of Benjamin Linus, who lets Michael & Walt leave the Island (you can do that?) while insisting that The Others are "the good guys".

14. "What They Died For" (Season 6)
It feels like the first hour of the series finale, really. All set up, but set up to The End. The swirling convergence of the sideways survivors points towards a crowded concert climax orchestrated by Desmond. The Island protagonists run head on into Jacob - for the last time - who throws his figurative mystical cards on the table and Jack volunteers for a shiny new sheriff's badge. Meanwhile, the inevitable collision between UnLocke, Ben, Widmore, and Richard finally happens, but not quite the way we thought it would. One thing is for sure: it leaves you dying for the finale spectacular.

13. "Deus Ex Machina" (Season 1)
The episode when the show picked up steam and started to become something truly special. Again focusing on John Locke, we saw for the first time his terrible parental drama, as well as issues dealing with the Island's healing properties, Boone's tragedy in the crashed Nigerian beechcraft, and in one of the great TV moments ever, Locke banging on the Hatch door until a bright light surprisingly comes on inside.

12. "Lockdown" (Season 2)
There are two reasons this remains one of the best episodes in the entire series: the first is this is the episode where it's revealed that "Henry Gale" is most definitely not who he says he is, setting the stage for one of the great TV villains of all time; second is the "Blast Door Map" which Locke sees in ultra-violet light while trapped in the Hatch's lockdown. The Map was the best of the early breadcrumbs for rabid fans dissecting the show online.

11. "The Man From Tallahassee" (Season 3)
As I write this, I start to realize that the John Locke episodes are obviously a cut above, maybe because his character is more fun to write, or maybe because Terry O'Quinn is a genius actor. This episode comes clean on Locke's father Anthony Cooper, we get Locke's 8-story plummet to a wheelchair existence, as well as Locke blowing up Ben's submarine, stopping Jack & Juliet from going home. Oh yeah, and there's a "magic box", and Locke's dad is bound and gagged inside.

10. "The End" (Season 6)
There are really two questions as it relates to this 108-minute monster. The first question is it a great series finale, and does it satisfy all our questions? My answer is no, and I could talk for hours about why not like most Lost fans could. But I think in the spirit of the show and the fun I've had with it over the years, the second and more important question is, is it a great Lost episode? And the only answer to that is an absolute yes.

09. "Pilot" (Season 1)
The basis for everything, from the super-expensive opening beach scene (this remains the most costly pilot episode of all time), Kate stitching Jack up, Charlie getting "You all everybody!" stuck in our heads for days, Smokey snatching up the pilot's body from the cockpit, and everyone's favorite rampaging polar bear.

08. "The Substitute" (season 6)
The sideways world comes together as we follow John Locke to meet Good Luck Hurley, temp agency Rose, and school teacher Ben. On the Island, we get Ben's sadly comic eulogy for the real John Locke, while UnLocke starts to slowly unveil his game with Jacob through conversations with a reluctant Richard, a drunk Sawyer, and visions of Jacob as a ghostly boy, and also by revealing the cave of mostly crossed-out candidate names to Sawyer.

07. "The Shape of Things to Come" (Season 4)
In one sentence: The assault of the Mercenaries. In a bit longer form, the freighter doctor washes ashore with his throat slit, Ben keeps a shotgun in his piano seat, Claire's house blows up, the deliciously evil Martin Keamy executes Alex in front of Ben, and Ben summons Smokey to decimate the Mercs. In the future, we're left to wonder why Ben would suddenly appear in the middle of the Tunisian desert wearing a winter parka (kind of like the polar bear skeleton Charlotte dug up), and if he can get into Charles Widmore's bedroom in the middle of the night, why he doesn't just kill him.

06. "The Life & Death of Jeremy Bentham" (Season 5)
...Or what happened to John Locke after he fixed the time-flashes. Ending up in the same desert as Ben did, he is tasked by Charles Widmore with reuniting the Oceanic Six to return to the Island, which seems to also be Ben's task as well. Hmmm...Oh yeah, and it includes the best scene of the entire series.

05. "The Candidate" (Season 6)
Sideways Jack explores the coincidences of his meetings with sideways Locke, who's still in the hospital after Desmond ran him down. Meanwhile, Jack goes along with UnLocke just long enough to rescue his people from Widmore, and then steal Widmore's submarine. Claire is distraught about being left behind again, but UnLocke isn't, knowing that Jack has a ticking timebomb in his backpack, and killing eight birds with one stone will accomplish his ultimate goal...except that doesn't happen - Sayid sacrifices himself to save the day, though he takes Sun & Jin with him into the murky deep.

04. "Exodus" (Season 1)
I could say the epic season 1 finale is a classic because is could be boiled down to some of the most iconic one-liners of the series, from "The numbers are bad! The numbers are bad!" to "You've got some Arzt on you" to "We're gonna haveta take the boy." But it's more than that - explore for a millisecond the scenes that those quotes are taken from and you will see some of the best television of all time. The sequence on the raft is as good today as it was six years ago, and the view down the open shaft remains the greatest cliffhanger of all time.

03. "The Man Behind The Curtain" (Season 3)
"You do remember birthdays, don't you Richard?" The epic backstory of Benjamin Linus, from meeting Richard Alpert as a boy, to "The Purge" - gassing the whole Dharma Initiative - and taking over as leader of The Others. Naomi has dropped by at this point as well, but we're too busy visiting "Jacob's Cabin" for the first time, and then seeing Ben shoot John Locke and leave him for dead in the Dharma mass grave.

02. "The Constant" (Season 4)
It had been going for a while, but quietly, almost without notice - the Desmond & Penny romance feels like it exists completely separate from whatever else is going on. This is the episode that made it historic. Both Henry Ian Cusick and Sonya Walger should work as actors for years off this one hour of television, the rare moment where an action/sci-fi show does romance and it's neither cheesy nor forced. And if that wasn't enough, this episode also cements the Daniel Faraday character as one of LOST's best.

01. "Through the Looking Glass" (Season 3)
The reason this episode and "The Constant" are usually cited as the series favorite episodes is because of the emotional set-pieces featured within, and rightly so. But what makes this the best episode by far is because it can't just be reduced to Charlie's Death. There is a ridiculous amount of development in these two hours. In fact, most people forget that the heartbreaking drowning of Mr. Pace AND the jaw-dropping cliffhanger of Jack yelling "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!!" is the same hour of television! The flashforward was a genius move at the time, making us wonder what happened to Jack, who was Kate going home to, who was in the coffin - even the easter eggs are great, like the funeral parlor anagram, or the Nirvana song. But the best stuff was on the Island: you had the first seed of the Juliet/Sawyer hook-up, and Hurley saving the day with the Dharma VW bus, not to mention Sawyer finally shooting Tom Friendly for taking Walt. Walt told a dying Locke that he had "work to do". Rousseau finally gets to meet her daughter, while Jack gives Ben the all-time great beating the fans were waiting for. The radio tower, Patchy's grenade, "Good Vibrations", Naomi taking a knife in the back, "Not Penny's Boat", a phone call to some guy named Minkowski. This is most definitely the best LOST episode, topped off with possibly the greatest death in TV history. R.I.P. Charlie Pace. You all everybody.

[001] OK Computer

2008-12-01T05:28:00.004-05:00

Album: OK Computer
Artist: Radiohead
Release Date: June 1997
Label: Capitol
Producers: Nigel Godrich & Radiohead

"Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week), getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries, at ease, eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats), a patient better driver, a safer car (baby smiling in back seat), sleeping well (no bad dreams), no paranoia, careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole), keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then), will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall), favors for favors, fond but not in love, charity standing orders, on Sundays ring road supermarket (no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants), car wash (also on Sundays), no longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows, nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate, nothing so childish - at a better pace, slower and more calculated, no chance of escape, now self-employed, concerned (but powerless), an empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism), will not cry in public, less chance of illness, tires that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat), a good memory, still cries at a good film, still kisses with saliva, no longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick that's driven into frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness), calm, fitter, healthier and more productive, a pig in a cage on antibiotics."
- "Fitter Happier"

PART ONE: New Millennial Anomie

“The Bends was an introspective album… There was an awful lot of soul searching. To do that again on another album would be excruciatingly boring.”
- Phil Selway

“I spent a lot of time trying not to do voices like mine. The voices on “Karma Police”, “Paranoid Android” and “Climbing Up The Walls” are all different personas. I think “Lucky”, the lyric and the way it's sung, is really positive, really exciting. “No Surprises” is someone who's trying hard to keep it together but can't. “Electioneering” is a preacher ranting in front of a bank of microphones.”
- Thom Yorke

Morrissey gets a bad rap. For over two decades he’s been this “godfather of mope” or whatever, and if you really listen to his lyrics, they’re usually so over the top with the pumped-up woe-is-me routine that it’s pretty funny. Thom Yorke has the same kind of reputation, but for him, it’s mostly well-founded. Granted, in recent years, he’s lightened up a bit, especially in interviews, but most people only interested in surface information think of him as a sadsack, whining and crying all the time. It’s kind of his own fault though; beyond his highly elastic and emotive voice, he tends to sing about broken things a lot of the time, whether it’s hearts and marriages, or governments and citizens and societies.

OK Computer is Yorke’s most obvious collection devoted to this melancholy, and yet this is no general, tears-in-your-beer kind of affair. No sir. OKC is a very specifically sharpened and aimed kind of depression, at the time a modern, Y2K kind of depression. The band’s previous album, The Bends was as straight-forward as Yorke could be in the broken heart department, but a lot of the guitar rock came through as bright color to offset his gray, bummed-out vibes. Following this album, the bellyaches of Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail To The Thief are either emotionally scattershot or murked up to obscure what he really wants to say, the overall moods of these albums purposely fashioned as a series of mysteries to throw off detractors’ easy labels – one of the reasons that Thom Yorke might seem more cheery in recent years is because he’s having fun fucking with certain corners of the media. But the Computer, it got his undivided attention, unerring focus because the subjects that he decided to write about here struck a previously unstruck chord in him (and of course made this the turned corner that directed all the albums since).

There has always been a lot of debate over whether OKC can qualify as a “concept album” (I hate that term), and while the band has always emphatically said no, Yorke does admit a vague, similar theme to all the lyrics, mostly because he was tired of writing about love, and he found new things to write about. But it’s less of a lyrical thread than a mood. If you think about it, as an album with a general overall theme of urban anomie with a side of authority paranoia and saturated nervousness over the new technological revolution – faster, more compact, more individual and therefore exclusionary…intentional loneliness, essentially – OK Computer is more of a literal ‘concept’ album than a rock opera with a clear narrative string and characters for the singer to inhabit. It’s more of a loose definition in relation to how people have always taken it, and that makes the tag less of a dirty word.

You can sense the unity between the title, the album artwork (continued throughout the associated singles & EP’s), and the lyrics. The title is ambiguous – is it a statement, a question, a response? It can be argued that Yorke spends the album afraid not necessarily of a computer, but instead what the computer represents – the sci-fi future that we all grew up with, explicitly our idea of what the future is supposed to be like, and the fact that it’s now our present. Some of the album artwork has a quaint quality reminiscent of late 1950’s advertising, the kind that is continued today, conveniently, in things such as the emergency procedures laminate you find on an airplane; these things are placed side by side in the CD booklet, and then defaced, a pretty clear message of at least where our jumping off point should be.

It’s not entirely clear what specifics should be taken from the imagery – again the ‘concept’ is kept loose, more a permeating dystopian melancholy than clear talking points of society’s ills – though I’d like to propose that Yorke, who has had a co-art director credit on each album starting with this one (collaborating with Stanley Donwood), is implying the wholesome politeness of post-WWII America is the kind of society that is predisposed to conformity, a conformity that would be listless enough to allow the development of that era’s idea of future tech to one day slowly wear away at everything from creative, independent thought to even face-to-face human interaction. Remember the big Skynet artificial intelligence takeover that is the crux of the Terminator films? Yeah, it happens in a fictional August 1997, ironically in the same summer this album was released. There is no denying our world was afraid of the new millennium and looking ahead at technology passing us all by. Now put yourself in the place of a 28 year-old singer-songwriter tired of writing about love and prone to soaking his art in depression and frustration anyway. Yorke turned his lyrical eye to whatever the standout elements of the fictional dystopian futures he grew up on were, and applied them to the real life parallels he saw.

OK Computer is littered with images of Big Brother-esque police states and paranoid citizenry, the stuff of frequent fiction; it’s even possible to see art imitating art, as the lyrics certainly touch on similar themes to Alan Moore’s classic anti-Thatcher graphic novel V For Vendetta, and in turn its film adaptation could definitely have used OKC as its soundtrack. The first words on the album are “In the next world war…”, which is pretty telling. It’s never been clear to me what “Paranoid Android” has to do with a paranoid android (specifically, Marvin from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), and how the lyrics all work out, but there is definitely an implied fear of government – the line “when I am king you will be first against the wall” always felt gleefully aggressive to me, followed by the tyrannically dismissive “your opinions which are of no consequence at all”; of course, we are lead right into the section where Yorke as said tyrant king is ordering beheadings simply because one of his subjects didn’t remember his name. “Karma Police” could possibly continue the monarch’s declarations, commanding that arrests be made on simple misdemeanors like ‘talking in maths’ and ‘buzzing like a fridge’, apparently illegal in this alternate universe.

“Electioneering” juxtaposes the elected official with the monarch – no doubt thoughts formed by a British mind, especially with Tony Blair palling around with Oasis at the time – and as Yorke paints images of riot shields and cattle prods, it’s clear that these authority figures (including the Shakespearian father from “Exit Music”) are here to draw our contempt. It’s never laid out by Yorke, but it’s one of those things that as soon as you read the lyrics, it’s clear he wouldn’t have written a song about them otherwise. Yorke sees them as stifling life much in the same ways that an A.I. technology might, and wants to put up a fight, later singing “The head of state has called for me by name, but I don’t have time for him”, as well as “Bring down the government…they don’t speak for us”.

That character, that point of view from “No Surprises”, is Yorke’s narrator, and it’s the narrator that experiences this updated definition of anomie that permeates the album. It seems to me that anomie in the traditional sense is like the opposite reaction of anarchy – when normalcy and order are absent, anarchy is the chaos that results, while anomie is essentially passive, an overwhelming community malaise, a societal depression. In the late 20th Century though, with the millennium approaching and fears of the Y2K disaster popping up in the media, anomie had to take on new facets. Fear of lack of available information was one key – in the years since, the world has grown exponentially concerned with not only the ins and outs of the media, but more so the trivial secrets of celebrity and beyond, going as far as creating a mainstream fetish out of voyeurism. By most likely writing about a stuffy corporate world, Yorke actually managed to critique a vapid movement that wouldn’t happen for another five years, singing the oft-quoted, “Ambition makes you look very ugly, kicking squealing Gucci little piggy.” It was a warning, and now it all feels dirty; gossip journalism jumping from tabloid pages onto the internet, and it lets anyone with a cable modem play seedy detective in the privacy of their homes, damaging the way you might eventually interact in person, growing to assume that everyone is deep down perverted in some way, and that maybe it’s OK just to stay home and not bother.

This leads to a prominent feel of disconnection from your neighbor, resulting from rapid technology advances. This is often cited as the major element of this new figurative population wet blanket; we don’t realize it, but it starts with shopping from home or wearing our iPod earbuds during our commutes (the banality of which is confronted on the first verse of “Let Down”), and snowballs from there. The next thing you know you don’t even introduce yourself to your new neighbors until you can’t avoid them when you both take the garbage out at the same time, going months maybe without meeting. Believe it, it’s happening now. Next thing you know, we’ll have robots to take out the garbage. I bet Japan has them now.

The booklet for the Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP, which was released in the US as a companion piece to the album (and to promote the Against Demons tour), is a bit more focused on translating the themes on the album. There are dozens of phrases, some ominous, that suggest a society suffocating in all literal and figurative ways, and they get more desperate-sounding from page to page:

Help us to help you. Uniforms. Thick smoke, no breeze. Missing persons. 200 people faint; hard to breathe. 200 commercial organizations; military, governmental, and non-governmental organizations. Do not get out. What might have been. The more you drive, the less intelligent you get. Oxygen should be regarded as a drug. Thick smoke not evenly distributed. If you don’t ask me out to dinner I don’t eat. Lobster-skin-shopping-mall-coffee-stained-lipsync. Nothing in common. Unbelieving nausea. A flaming, but living, pigeon. The results of this intrusion into your life will be used ‘responsibly’. The innocent have nothing to fear from the rapidly expanding data industry. Story begins with explosion; ends with explosion. Your fantasies are unlikely, but beautiful. Reduced enjoyment and pleasure. The smoke came back extremely thick and abrasive. Awareness by social class. I’m safe and sound. People are aware, but not that bothered. Authorities here are alert. Everything I do/say is suspect. A strangler’s hands. No autonomy; a lethal cocktail; horrific violence. I am bad. I am to blame. I think a little more sucking-up is needed. Food and water crisis developing. A tortured night. A serious and adult expression. My suit hangs in front of me, full of nothing; it is up to me to fill it with myself. Have a safe day. Words on a gravestone. What will we mean? Nothing. General loss of interest. The last player left in the game is the winner. A smile like the grim reaper. Children go to school tied together, led by parents. Airport closed; people coughing yellow phlegm. Not sleeping okay; trapped in hyperspace.

Following all of that wonderfully chosen language is a passage from Noam Chomsky that sheds light on Yorke’s view of this new millennial fear, information transfer and the resulting disconnection, and how it has evolved from the apathetic conformity of that late 50’s America:

“…people would like to think that there’s somebody up there who knows what he’s doing. Since we don’t participate, we don’t control and don’t even think about questions of vital importance. We hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let’s hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we’re not taking part in what’s going on...
It is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: they’d better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control out lives and to control international affairs…”

Thom Yorke’s narrator wants to buck these trends, but there is also a sense of helplessness (The ‘job that slowly kills you’, the carbon monoxide and the ‘final fit’ of “No Suprises”), or at least inevitability to them that weaves in and out of the lyrics (and the artwork). The narrator is struggling with this crippling anomie – taken to a point of personal positive reinforcement techniques the kind found in the chilling “Fitter Happier” – but trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which in this case would be making peace with the titular computer, or technology in general. Consider just the song titles for a moment, words or phrases of stress – ‘paranoid’, ‘surprises’, ‘homesick’, “Let Down”, “Karma Police”, “Climbing Up The Walls” – and then the intended sarcasm of “Fitter Happier” or “Lucky”, or going even further – on the back of the album’s booklet, “The Tourist” appears to have a long-form title which reads “The Tourist in Times Square in nuclear fallout reflective clothing in his personal space”, which so promotes the ideas on display within some of these songs that Radiohead should’ve ran with it. The original title of “Airbag” was the genius “Last Night An Airbag Saved My Life”, a play on the classic Indeep single “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”, and a presentation of the notion that maybe technology can be salvation. Yorke’s narrator even expresses his shock at that notion: “I’m amazed that I survived; an airbag saved my life”, but he’s working at it, earlier on proclaiming “In the neon sign scrolling up and down, I am born again”.

It’s quite possible that Yorke is positioning his tyrant against his fearful narrator – the narrator is the one making strides, the one talking in maths that the tyrant wants the Karma Police to arrest – and the voices in the narrator’s head are telling him to not “hit the panic button, hit the alarm”. The conclusions of all these tugs of war are left dangling, yet there is a sense of hope in the moving “Lucky”. Yorke’s cries of “kill me again” are linked to the neon second birth of “Airbag”, but he decides he wants to be pulled from the aircrash, and it’s gonna be a glorious day. And considering the mesh of new music technology and human artistry on Kid A and Amnesiac (both in the relief of the new millennium, Y2K in the rearview), what might have been just sci-fi fantasy were actually ways for Thom Yorke to deal with where his head was at in 1997, against his own demons, his authorites on alert, his personal space – the OKC logo is two stick figures shaking hands, one holding a briefcase – and to offer them as chronicles of where the world was at in 1997, the new millennial anomie, figurative bandages for mass worry, assuaging fears that in the shadow of 2000 and technology speeding like fast german cars, music can know how you feel, and it can be your airbag.

PART TWO: The 8-Track of The 90’s

“The resurgence, and arguable final entrenchment, of manufactured Pop Stars by their handlers over supposedly more artistic fare – and more importantly the acceptance of such common pleasures by critics – razed the significance of the complete album. Which is why OK Computer, and it's ‘Best Albums Ever’ companion Loveless, eternally top these polls: somehow we doubt we'll ever see their like again.”
- Brent DiCrescenzo, Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of The 90’s, 2003

No. No. No No No. And fuck you very much for trying to play revisionist culture sniper. Yes, I’m talking to you with your healthily overworked iTunes account and your iPod permanently on shuffle. And oh, you over there, yes you, elitist vinyl sniffer trying oh-so-hard to get back to bygone “glory days” that you weren’t even born for. Fuck you as well. Yes we all know that, say, Sticky Fingers is the motherfucking shit, but there isn’t much difference between it and OK Computer, construction-wise – the former is 10 tracks and 46 minutes, the latter is 12 tracks and 53 minutes. So I don’t want to hear any crap from baby-boomers or random-play-brained ADD kids about the CD being put out to pasture, because right now, the CD is keeping the album alive.

Dai Griffiths, Head of the Department of Music at Oxford Brookes University, wrote a book on OK Computer. In many ways, it’s impenetrable, at least I thought so, as far as getting across the clear points that OKC is the best album of the last however-many years. I had to read it twice, the second time with a highlighter, in order to chip away at the excess to find the real good stuff. What he does really nail though are the ins and outs of the compact disc, and what it has meant to music, and more specifically to the idea of the album; this is something that bears discussing when considering OK Computer specifically as an example of a great album, and the time when it was released. The CD is the bridge from the past to the future, and it has brought us to a place now where we have unlimited possibilities, for better or worse.

The album, the collection of songs as a unified statement of an artist’s work, or as a snapshot of that brief period in the artist’s life, was pretty much the best invention in 20th century music. It has been, for the truly important artists with more to say than a single or two can hold, the vessel that best got their point across. The greatness of the album as a format is now taken for granted, something second nature to anyone who has ever become interested in modern popular music, but to think back to 1964, when Elvis was making movies, Dylan was still acoustic, and the British Invasion was just touching down in the US, the album was still just a collection of songs. Now, for the most part, it did already hold one of its key distinctions, which was that the songs collected were usually of the same period of creativity, but a thematic coherence had yet to be established, at least in Rock & Roll. Now, I’m not talking about concept-album storylines again; it’s way more basic than that: the way an artist explores a sound, a palette from which they’re going to work from. Icons like Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, and Ray Charles had already toyed with album-length sounds, and The Beatles, Beach Boys, and Dylan were about to explode things to a degree that these new approaches would become the norm.

Now, fast forward to the late 1980’s, to the slow, public coming-out party of the CD. The possibilities that the compact disc offered changed the entire idea of what the album was. The main reason was the time it allowed: 70+ minutes. Griffiths points out that this changed the entire culture of the album. For example, think of the 1970’s, when kids would get together in bedrooms to get their minds blown by Floyd or Zeppelin. The longer you make an album, the less inclined you are to sit and endure the entire thing in one sitting; the activity of listening was forced to be more individualistic, a trend that has taken over in the age of the iPod. The big artistic statement – the double album – was all of a sudden not as special; legendary works like The Who’s Tommy or The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St. could now fit on only one disc, losing some of their epic magic. Conversely, in the present, note the post-Strokes Indie Rock love affair with returning to short album lengths. I personally love it, cuz it was good enough for Revolver or Ramones, right, but I think more importantly it speaks to a key reaction. Throughout these twenty years we’ve been examining on this list, the music world has been married to the compact disc. And as much segregation remains in commercial outlets, rock and rap fans are as intertwined as ever, and I think we can all agree that we’re all sick of mediocre 70-minute albums that could be whittled down to a really good 45-50 minutes; in many ways, it diluted the art in the musician creating the perfect collection and then sequencing it in its own special way.

More importantly than any other feature, the CD allowed for programmability, effectively putting the issue of sequencing in the hands of the listener. At that moment, the idea of the great album should have been dead; not only could fans play songs at random within a set that was supposed to have a specific order, but they could also program out songs they were less fond of, striking them from record, deleting them from what that album meant to them, changing the intended piece of art. It was quite obviously the first step towards the song-by-song usurping of the music business by iTunes. It was everything we always said we wanted, when we’d buy albums with four good songs and seven or eight stinkers. It eventually overloaded secondhand CD shops with copious amounts of Cracked Rear View and Jagged Little Pill and Pieces Of Me enough to put them out of business. Be careful what you wish for.

Hope came from the artists of the mid-90’s Britpop movement, so devoted to repeating the works of a time gone by, that they naturally worshipped the album as artistic work. Radiohead were obviously a piece of that without being a slave to the idea. Interestingly, the UK is way more single-minded, so the idea that Britpop’s leading lights respected the album while also catering to the starving singles market was a bit odd. More than anything, Radiohead went with the flow for The Bends singles and found great success, definitely unexpected seeing as “Creep” wasn’t that big a deal at home. It doesn’t appear though that the band gave it much thought, especially considering the wild decision to release the schizophrenic six-and-a-half minute “Paranoid Android” as the lead single for their third album. Singles chart fortunes I’m sure were pleasant for them, but the album was the focus to their campaign.

OK Computer is the last great statement in what a great CD album can be. It was released at the tail-end of the format’s dominant era, before the backlash started in earnest and birthed our current marketplace. It’s longer than most classic 60’s and 70’s LPs by about 10 minutes, but appears to preserve the side-break of vinyl by placing “Fitter Happier” as a sort of intermission (though reports have always varied as to whether it should end Side One or begin Side Two). It’s also shorter than the average CD album, probably by about 5 minutes; this is no 70+ minute wank fest like Oasis’ ’97 offering Be Here Now. Radiohead had a clear idea of their piece of art as it related to the medium in which it would be delivered to listeners – the CD could have easily been crammed to its 79-minute limits with good songs that were instead saved for singles and EPs. It was a perfect statement in length and sequence, ironically perfect enough that it eliminated the need to skip or program, the key features of the format it so well represents. In that way it stands at ease next to essential albums from the vinyl era, and proves that despite all the technical opportunity that the CD format has given the music business, there can be such a thing as a classic album on CD. And while you can say I’ve given you 99 other examples, OK Computer is by far the best.

PART THREE: Taking America by Karma and Luck

“There's a lesson to be learned from the album's success. It underlines the fact that radio and record companies underestimate what the general public are capable of listening to. This is not above people's heads. We're people, and we're making it; other people can get it too."
- Ed O’Brien

When Kid A was released in October 2000, it debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart. If you were judging strictly on Radiohead's previous chart experience in the US, this would have come as a surprise to you considering that their previous full-length, OK Computer, peaked at #21, and they weren't exactly a singles machine like they were at home - Gen-X's very own “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Paranoid Android” went top 5 as the album's appetizer.

So now that we're finally here, and this is the almighty #1 album, the question of 'why' is inevitably linked to a 'how' - how did Radiohead conquer America? Because that's where the answer lies really. It was America that was the swing vote so to speak. The election was for best band on the planet, and to win, they needed a best-album-ever to believe in; a signal of change to use a currently valued word. 1997 was a great year for music in that it had at least half a dozen certifiable classic albums, if not a whole dozen, so OKC had stiff competition for attention when it came out. To get to where we are now, I could relay statistics, but telling you a story is more fun - a report from the frontlines, sort of, kind of like sneaking into a movie but you've missed the first 25 minutes.

Everyone knew “Creep”. Then most people under the spell of your Green Days and Smashing Pumpkins and Becks forgot to check out Radiohead's sophomore classic The Bends. That's a story told hundreds of times. It’s OK. The wrong has been righted all these years later for sure. It is now considered the classic that it always was. In the early months of 1997, that's when you would find me falling from a great height onto the Radiohead bandwagon. My friend Ross raved about The Bends at the same time that my New York cable company started carrying MuchMusic, Canadian MTV broadcasting from Toronto. It was serendipity - MuchMusic played the fuck out of Radiohead's five Bends videos, and me, locked into a heady obsession with Jeff Buckley's Grace, could do with some more excellent choirboy alt-rock as I also explored vintage 70’s Punk and tired of the Classic Rock which I had held in such high esteem for the preceding few years. Much's programming backed up Ross' claims - dude, this is a band you need to know going forward.

And so it went for most current Radiohead fans I'm sure, because you'd have to be crazy to believe that all the people that bought Pablo Honey have stuck with them for the long haul. The Bends was the gateway album. And shit, let's be honest, when OK Computer came out, a lot of people were confused. There has been so much applicable history since, but when OKC was released, it was a weird album. Obviously it was good, but was it accessible to a new audience? I'd say it was a stretch. I can tell you what I thought: there were some sweet riffs in there, but the only song that really stuck with me was “Karma Police” because it sounded like “Sexy Sadie” by The Beatles.

There had to be a bridge from the initial confusion to today's worship, from a place where Radiohead would play “Electioneering” on The Tonight Show because A&R had concluded it was the song that sounded most like The Bends, to today, when message boards full of Radiohead diehards complain that the same song is the weakest link in the OKC chain. And like so many great pieces of art, that bridge has been time. The year that followed the album's release was a year full of reevaluation for fans and critics, a year for word of mouth, for the cosmic alignment to settle in.

OK Computer is an album way better than anyone expected, released into a music world of no dominant scene or genre. Alternative had splintered and thinned out, pop was eyeing a resurgence as was a new kind of heavy metal, and most importantly, it was also a year of raised acceptance for all things British. While Blur decided to ‘woohoo’ their way toward approximating Pavement and Noel Gallagher's song ideas disappeared up his nose, the world feasted on a post-Britpop wave of Anglophilia that extended to The Verve, Primal Scream, Spiritualized, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Portishead, Cornershop, and eventually even Robbie Williams; more than anyone though, Radiohead took advantage by touring the fuck out of the record, and succeeding because they could back their shit up from every angle.

I started working at Tower Records in November of 1997. At this point, OKC was firmly ensconced as an album-of-the-year favorite to everyone who gave a damn; we all agreed it was a great album. But by the spring of 1998, it was different. A line was crossed. Fans that would’ve been devoted before were now rabid. The band released the Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP (a collection of UK B-sides) as both a thank you to fans and as a promotion of their spring theater tour. Our store had a ticket outlet, and I remember the manager crushing employee/fan dreams of cheating the system when we were informed that we'd have to stand in line for tickets with everyone else. Two shows at the legendary Radio City Music Hall, with Spiritualized supporting, the last two dates of the tour no less. Standing on line, you couldn't help but feel something special was happening, like every young Smiths, Cure, U2, R.E.M., Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, Pavement, Blur, Beck and Bjork fan had come together and decided this was the band that they had been waiting for. Radiohead had done something right, mixed just the right amount of ingredients. OK Computer had been the call - this is our triumph, the culmination of the Alternative movement.

Tickets went on sale, and I was shut out; the guy in front of me got the last ticket. Radiohead have played New York around a dozen times since, and I still haven't seen them. Karma, luck, and how much money is in my wallet have yet to see eye to eye. But I hang on to hope. Thanks to my job at the record store, I was fortunate enough to attend listening parties for both Kid A and Amnesiac, so I've gotten close. Regardless, I know that they will remain that band that my generation turns to, and that the next generations discover like I discovered The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. You can see in their faces now, when they do webcasts and special performances for fans, that the band knows that the unerring support that they’ve accumulated from fans is itself the greatest reward for all the music they’ve made. It’s translated into a living, a career, and as they continue to make consistently incredible music, it’s the least we can do. If nothing else, it lets us be confident that shit is happening for us – to quote Jeff Buckley, “It’s all about now!” It lets us know that when our parents brag about what music they grew up with, we have one thing they didn’t – Radiohead – and they made the best album of the last 20 years.

PART FOUR: Just Five Friends in the English Countryside

“And when it was great music it was great art and it didn’t have anything at all to do with labels and who says Mozart is by definition better than Sonny Rollins and to whom…
Sometimes we are lucky enough to have one of these people like Miles [Davis], like [Bob] Dylan, like Duke [Ellington], like Lenny [Bruce] here in the same world at the same time we are and we can live this thing and feel it and love it and be moved by it and it is a wonderful and rare experience and we should be grateful for it…
It’s all in there, the beauty, the terror and the love, the sheer humanity of life in this incredible electric world which is so full of distortion that it can be beautiful and frightening in the same instant…”
- Ralph J. Gleason, from his original LP liner notes for Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, 1969

“What they've done is use a stunning assortment of shrewd instrumental ideas to express contemporary anxiety and alienation, all in the form of pop songs, on albums conceived to be more than the sum of their parts.”
- Marc Hogan, citing Radiohead in his Pitchfork review of Deerhunter’s Microcastle, 10.08

In hindsight, it’s easier to see the mastery of their craft. When OK Computer came out, Radiohead were thought of as just another “Alternative” guitar band clogging the airwaves, and in that transitory summer when music shifted directions in so many ways, the music world was puzzled with what to really do with them, especially since few had given The Bends the time of day. What was music like in the first half of 1997? We were basking in the glow of Beck’s Odelay, mourning Biggie, and bracing for the hit of supposed next big thing Electronica. Who wanted to waste their time with five pasty English boys who had been holed up on an estate somewhere recording paranoid art-rock?

And then we heard “Paranoid Android”, and collectively said ‘what the fuck??’ A mindbending choice for a single at six and a half minutes, it’s funny to realize now that what we all said about it then still holds true: “Paranoid Android” was the “Bohemian Rhapsody” of the 1990’s, but more than that because the individual sections stack up as stronger (Thom Yorke has also compared it to The Beatles’ “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, which also works nicely), with more thematic mystery in its lyric. The guitar tones of the shuffling opening sparkle like a summer afternoon, and yet the mood of the piece is chilly. Without a doubt, “Paranoid Android” encapsulates the band’s instrumental skill best – three guitarists continues to be the main attraction, allowing Ed O’Brien to take some time out for percussion or Jonny Greenwood to molest his vintage keyboards and other noise-making contraptions. Electric piano pops in and out before that colossal riff slashes its way in; I think the images of Jonny, head down, hair swaying, attacking his guitar are so burned into fans’ minds that he gets credit for all the cool guitar moments, but it’s O’Brien pealing off the classic riff while Greenwood is busy whittling away at his solo. O’Brien emerged as the kind of MVP support player in the mold of R.E.M.’s Mike Mills on OK Computer, going toe-to-toe vocally with Thom Yorke on “Android”’s operatic section, on the climactic third verse of “Let Down”, or the gorgeous harmony on “No Surprises”, the kind of voice that seems to always be hanging in the background. Of course, knowing now that “Paranoid Android” began, and was played live opening for Alanis Morissette (at her peak) in American arenas, as a 14-minute mega-epic complete with organ solos, I think we should be glad the band edited themselves and we got to hear the finished product.

The way the disparate pieces of “Android” work together to form a great whole is much like the varied approaches of each song collected to produce a greater album, or the five band members’ individual strengths adding up to more than the sum of the parts, allowing the band to climb to new heights (which they haven’t come down from since). If OK Computer works as the masterpiece we treat it as, it’s that much more remarkable considering the two distinctly different recording periods that birthed the album, one before that Alanis tour and one after. But even before that, the soaring charity anthem “Lucky”, released as a single before work on the album even commenced, set the tone for the proceedings, already exploring Thom’s new lyrical pastures, but also translating his fears into uneasy sound. Right off the bat, there is something different about the way it sounds, not the usual downbeat feel of Radiohead, a different shade of gray, deeper, musically more saturated with despondency but lyrically hopeful in Yorke’s own warped pleas to “kill [him] again, with love”. The guitars soar when Yorke soars, and stagger in the gutters when Yorke finds himself there. Obviously, the make-or-break moment is his pained “It’s gonna be a glorious day” in the second verse, slyly guided by a subtle rising synth off in the corner; surely that one heart-crushing line delivery won over thousands of mopey teens, the spiritual flipside to the joy of Bono’s “I wanna run, I wanna hide!!”. The combined hum of the band on the instrumental coda of “Lucky” might clinch the award for the band’s best song, not overly flashly, and yet simply perfect for all of its 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

Following the lead of “Lucky”, four of the album’s songs came from the “Canned Applause” sessions, the first of the album’s two genesis locations, a converted shed out in the countryside with no running water. These five tracks together reveal the band’s new directions while still bearing musical progressions from The Bends. The lullaby of “No Surprises”, seemingly delicately left behind in the night rather than recorded by a rock band, shows the band still working with essentially the same color palette as on the previous album (with some new bells and whistles), but now for different ends (the backing vocals on the final chorus pleading “get me out of here”). “Electionerring” takes the chaos of “My Iron Lung”’s freakouts and sustains them for an entire song. Now, granted, it’s obviously the most overt song regarding the band’s new lyrical focuses, but the lyrics aren’t really there, slogan fragments instead of prose, letting the music do the talking. It’s definitive racket – brittle, tinny guitar plucking out the melody on one side, fat, slobbering riffage drooling all over the other side. The rhythm section is vibrating reaffirmation of life, the realization that the wordless power of Rock & Roll is its ability to compel you to move.

One thing I’ve come to realize in the process of closely examining OK Computer is that “Subterranean Homesick Alien” is probably their most underrated song. I’m guessing the reason is that it completely doesn’t fit with the rest of this album. For one thing, none of the lyrics fit with the overall threads of the other songs, instead as a stand-alone introspective piece about alien abduction, and how maybe it’s not such a bad idea considering the state of society. It’s weird that I’ve always felt that the song feels very American to me, like the narrator must be American simply because you never hear about alien abductions elsewhere, or maybe because Yorke sings of “warm summer air”, and well it must always be cold and rainy in Radiohead’s world, right? The electric piano that conducts the melody also gives it a humid summer vibe, the guitars swirling and blinking like fireflies (or possibly the lights on alien saucers) very American South damp overgrowth, the rhythm section rolling at a lazy pace, Colin Greenwood’s bass reduced to a buzz that’s not unlike when oppressive summer heat creeps past the hundred mark. The narrator’s state of mind is receptive and open, yes a little worried, but more composed than the paranoid blurts on the rest of the album.

“The Tourist”, featuring absolutely devastating vocals from Yorke, one of his most breathtaking performances, and sizzling glam-god lead by Jonny, amounts to the band’s very own “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide”, the kind of slow epic that can bring the house down night after night. It glides in at a morphine-drip pace, caressing you, comforting you after your long hard journey through the album’s world, but after the first chorus, Jonny’s guitar flashes its fangs, but only for a moment, as if building its power to explode at just the right moment. That moment is after the next chorus, focused with laser precision, strong-arming the rest of the band, bumping up against Yorke’s self-aware cries, flailing around with grace.

With more songs written but not yet recorded, Radiohead jumped on the Alanis tour to work out some new material, and those songs would form the rest of the album. Constructed on laptops in the back of a tourbus and during soundchecks in massive American arenas, “Paranoid Android” and these others songs exhibited an expansiveness the band hadn’t explored before. The sublime “Let Down” actually sounds as if were recorded at one of those soundchecks, the ringing guitar arpeggios ricocheting off the concrete slab and beams of steel (actually, it was a ballroom at 3am). More than any other song on the album, it succeeds strictly on its overpowering sound, a nod to Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”, chords and arrangements magically chosen for maximum emotional impact, like the guitar solo being in a different time signature than the rest of the music, or the dual vocal lines in the third verse raising all the hairs on your arms and back of your neck. Where “Let Down” works because it fills all the spaces with shimmering guitar din, “Exit Music (For A Film)” written for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, works on what it leaves empty. Initially occupied only by a quiet acoustic guitar, Thom Yorke’s voice enters by taking up almost the entirety of the atmosphere (achieved by recording on a stone stairway). As the song builds, he recedes to make room for the elements piling on, from sampled strings to Colin Greenwood’s apocalyptic bass explosion, Phil Selway’s swinging drums; when Yorke breaks through with “And now, we are one…”, the song unleashes its full power, if only for a few moments, collapsing soon after under the weight of the lyric’s drama.

The newer tracks, recorded at the estate of actress Jane Seymour, presented the band breaking away from the traditional song structures they had traded in, instead honing songs through creative arrangements influenced by a wide range of sources, from composers like Olivier Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki, the film scores of Ennio Morricone, Miles Davis’ landmark fusion double album Bitches Brew, to the more expected Pixies. Obviously, between “Paranoid Android” and “Karma Police”, there is a debt to The Beatles’ White Album. “Karma Police” has remained the gateway for less adventurous listeners, their biggest hit this side of “Creep”, but not all is right in this police state. There is weariness in Yorke’s voice that gives away the ruse; it’s a technique used by countless artists, the sleight of hand, the nice pop song that slides through meta self-reflection and disintegrates into digital decay. That decay continues in the interlude “Fitter Happier”, and wordy, possibly formless diversion, a trip to Radiohead’s most avant garde side, sounding like a sci-fi take on Sonic Youth’s “Providence”.

Besides their listening habits, the rooms of the mansion they were in contributed to the atmosphere of the album, as I mentioned on “Let Down” and “Exit Music”. The song with the most obvious benefit is the terrifying “Climbing Up The Walls”, where the sounds bleed so much into the ether that you can just close your eyes and visualize the high ceilings. Musically, it’s Radiohead’s first step towards what would come on Kid A and Amnesiac, eschewing the guitar-bass-drums rock makeup into something wholly new and creepy. The guitars exist almost entirely as texture – there’s that one clean Edge-like line stuttering along the the walls – and the emphasis is placed on ambient noises and electronic fuzz. Selway’s drums have a metallic tone to them, and coupled with the buzzing bass, the rhythm section suggest dub reggae. Jonny Greenwood is working from the other end in, his Penderecki interest showing through on his string arrangements, the violins descending into white noise as Yorke loses it completely.

Jonny Greenwood’s monster guitar-and-cello riff that opens the album went a long way towards solidifying this album as one for the ages – it works as a welcome, sort of telling you that this is something you want to pay attention to. And the album didn’t disappoint. “Airbag” is the condensed version of the album, in it all the musical and lyrical ideas of the following songs are at least suggested, from the string section, to Yorke’s one of a kind voice, to the further guitar examination and destruction. Much like the coda of “Lucky”, the wordless ending of “Airbag” features a serendipitous aligning of the band playing to their strengths, and also just playing. Over Phil Selway’s infamously DJ Shadow-inspired jumping-bean beat, and Colin Greenwood’s attention-stealing bassline (the album’s best), the guitarists are getting restless, their strings crumbling into chopped up electronic bursts and waves of static, and under it all, Yorke is emoting, just his voice undulating on auto-pilot. But the feel is one of joy, a release of pressure; it’s the sound of the best band of the last twenty years being themselves, and it’s awe-inspiring, one of many moments on this album which illustrate how fortunate we are to have a band to match our times.

Tracklist:
01. "Airbag"
02. "Paranoid Android"
03. "Subterranean Homesick Alien"
04. "Exit Music (For A Film)"
05. "Let Down"
06. "Karma Police"
07. "Fitter Happier"
08. "Electioneering"
09. "Climbing Up The Walls"
10. "No Surprises"
11. "Lucky"
12. "The Tourist"

"Karma Police" [video]

- "Paranoid Android" [video]
- "No Surprises" [video]
- "Lucky" [video]

As seen in the documentary, Meeting People Is Easy, Radiohead nearly went insane and broke up from the amount of touring they did to support OK Computer. The one remaining upside to that stressful journey is that there is a ridiculous wealth of video online from that tour. Therefore, you will only find performances from June 1997 through 1998 below, to keep with the premise that the album wasn't the only great accomplishment of this fertile period for the band.
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 1]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 2]
There's a great moment in this part where Thom is playing the freshly-written, future Kid A highlight "How To Disappear Completely" at soundcheck in an empty Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC. He had written the song during this tour to keep himself sane, and later called it the song he'd like to be remembered by.
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 3]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 4]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 5]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 6]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 7]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 8]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 9]
- Meeting People Is Easy [Part 10]
Ends with a great early version of "Nude", then called "Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)", played at one of the aforementioned Radio City concerts. Long considered the 'holy grail' of unreleased Radiohead tracks, "Nude" finally appeared on 2007's In Rainbows.

Live at Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, NY [12.97]
Recorded for MTV's Live at the 10 Spot, this widely bootlegged show became one of the last great actual music moments that MTV aired before becoming a mess of reality retard retreads (although the band did it again in 2003, uptown at the Beacon Theater).
- "Airbag"
- "Paranoid Android"
- "Subterranean Homesick Alien"
- "Exit Music (For A Film)"
- "Let Down"
- "Karma Police" & "Fitter Happier"
- "Electioneering"
- "No Surprises" & "Lucky"
I was going to post "Airbag", but this performance of "The Tourist" is brilliant proof that Thom Yorke is one of the finest vocalists of the modern era, and as a bonus we get a Stardust-solo from Jonny Greenwood.
"The Tourist"

Live at the 1997 Les Eurockéennes de Belfort Festival
"Paranoid Android"

- "Airbag"
- "Exit Music (For A Film)"
- "No Surprises"
- "Lucky"

Live at the 1997 Glastonbury Festival
- "Exit Music (For A Film)"
- "Karma Police"
- "Climbing Up The Walls"
- "Lucky"

Live on Later with Jools Holland, 06.97
- "Airbag"
- "Paranoid Android"
- "No Surprises"

"Lucky" [live at soundcheck for Washington DC, 08.97]

- BONUS: "Airbag" [live at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert]
- BONUS: "Paranoid Android" [live at Amnesty International '98]
- BONUS: "Let Down" [live in San Francisco, 04.98]
- BONUS: "Karma Police" [live on Letterman, 08.97]
- BONUS: "Electioneering" [live on Leno, 07.97]
- BONUS: "Climbing Up The Walls" [live in San Francisco, 04.98]
- BONUS: "Lucky" feat. Michael Stipe [live at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert]

CSR's Top Albums of 2007

2008-08-21T17:38:00.004-04:00

Here’s my better-late list of the top albums of 2007; like I said last year, I like to let them settle a bit, strip away the hype, and see which ones are really worth your cash, or if you have them already, which ones are still fun to pull off the shelf.

[20] The Big Doe Rehab // Ghostface Killah
Far from his best, but pretty good from Pretty Toney is better than 95% of the Hip-Hop out there; “We Celebrate” is a killer.

[19] The Good, The Bad & The Queen // The Good, The Bad & The Queen
Released in January of ’07, and virtually overlooked by the end of the year, this remains a solid collection of languid afro-dub-folk from Damon Albarn’s latest supergroup.

[18] Mirrored // Battles
The inventive techno-math-rock of Battles argues that if technology is going to keep changing the music business, then shouldn’t it change the music too?

[17] Neon Bible // Arcade Fire
Funeral was like a warm blanket in the winter, but the band wisely thawed out, and took to the streets with colossal anthems for the masses.

[16] American Gangster // Jay-Z
After the regrettable Kingdom Come, the world wished he had stayed away, but Jay made us all feel foolish when he dropped this surprisingly great album, one of his best.

[15] Myth Takes // !!!
While most of the rock bands that aimed for the dancefloor and failed move on to their next gimmick, !!! sticks to what they do best, filling floors with fiery, psychedelic punk-rave-disco-funk.

[14] Weird Rippers // No Age
It’s not so much the music, most of which sounds like it was dubbed onto cassette in a Cali garage in 1981, but the myriad possibilities of the do-it-yourself punk duo’s imagination and infectious innocence that slaps a smile on your face.

[13] Living With The Living + Mo’ Living EP // Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
Whether the world wants to give him his propers or not, Ted Leo is one our greatest songwriters and Rock & Roll heroes; and whether you want to give yourself over to his fifth Pharmacists album – 15 songs, fattened with 5 more tracks on the bonus Mo’ Living EP, that covers power-pop, political hardcore, classic soul, arena rock, white-boy reggae and epic balladry – it still manages to be his excellent stab at making a London Calling-style opus.

[12] Kala // M.I.A.
I wasn’t as sold as Rolling Stone, which dubbed this sophomore slump the Album of the Year (granted the slump is mostly due to the brilliance of the debut, Arular), but this globe-trotting collection of fist-raisers has its own bright, colorful, party-igniting moments that stand up nicely.

[11] Below The Heavens // Blu & Exile
The most overlooked album of the year (if only because it’s hard to find in its physical/non-digital form), it’s a refreshing blast of the kind of Hip-Hop people still reminisce about, that summery early 90’s sound of acts like Tribe or Pharcyde; if you’ve ever wished Kanye’s rapping would live up to his beats or ego, or for Nas to stop trying to be so gangsta, then this album is for you.

[10] The Reminder // Feist
A rarity – a great Pop album for people over 18 years old, that is multi-faceted, and all the facets bear multiple listens; Leslie Feist’s ascension, to commercials (for once, marketing rewarding soul instead of sucking it out), to the Billboard charts, and to the Grammy stage, was one of the best things about music last year, all a tribute to the little wonder of this album.

[09] Because Of The Times // Kings Of Leon
Despite offering zero in the way of new ideas – all the classic rock clichés still apply to KOL – this album makes you realize that air guitar or air drumming may be a sort of reflex, like when someone lurches at you just to make you flinch; you want to play hipster police and complain that “Charmer” is a Pixies rip-off, etc, but by “Black Thumbnail”, you feel like windmilling Townshend-style.

[08] † // Justice
Electronic dance music tends to move too fast (faster than fickle Hip-Hop) for classics to be dubbed as such and then enjoyed for their brilliance, a genre shattered into dozens of soon-forgotten subgenres, each likely to have its one representative classic album or single, and little more; French duo Justice, like Daft Punk before them, circumvent this trend by making a straight-forward funky big-beat big-riff housequake of an album, timelessly suitable for all parties, everywhere.

[07] In Rainbows // Radiohead
The greatest band of our generation takes a break from raising the bar musically, and does it with their business model instead; this is the first time in fifteen years that they didn’t totally blow my mind, but it’s still a delicate, guitar-centric four-star affair, highlighted by the long-awaited appearance of the decade-old ballad “Nude”, and the haunting “All I Need”, an almost-R&B lament which turns out to be their best song in years.

[06] Totally Flossed Out // The Cool Kids
If Clipse were into rare sneakers, geek culture and BMX bikes instead of slinging crackrock, they might sound like The Cool Kids, the most refreshing Hip-Hop group to emerge in the last handful of years. Never officially released as far as I know, but traded all over the net and posted track-by-track on every hipster blog imaginable (and now partially re-recorded, re-sequenced, and released as The Bake Sale EP), this 8-song EP updates Too $hort, EPMD and Licensed To Ill-era Beasties for a post-Pharrell world, making 808’s, stonewash, and fat gold ropes fresh again.

[05] Icky Thump // The White Stripes
If I was friends with Jack White, after 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan I would’ve grabbed him by the shoulders and shook the marimba out of him. This is what we want – plug the guitar in, turn it up, and have some fuckin’ fun…actually, the success of this album makes it seem like Brendan Benson did just that.

[04] Untrue // Burial
Immersed in the miasma of the album, surrounded by disembodied voices getting bumped around by skittering beats, maybe this hazy “Dubstep” sound is the laptop equivalent of Shoegazing; MBV used one word – Loveless – to convey the entire idea behind their masterpiece, and Burial has done this with Untrue, every song soaked in tears and dipped in shards of broken hearts.

[03] Boxer // The National
For me, The National conjure that eternal American Post-WWII cool of the late 50’s and early 60’s, the time of Sal Paradise hopping trains all over the countryside, the romantic ideals, like when first kisses sparked fireworks, breakups were like stage-plays, and a picnic was a pretty picture, with “bluebirds on our shoulders”; they update that world as subdued, literate, pastoral, brokenhearted, post-punk noir, equal parts Scott Walker, Springsteen, Joy Division and Morrissey.

[02] Sound Of Silver // LCD Soundsystem
Years from now when music enthusiasts are looking back at 2007, this is likely to be the mostly fondly remembered album, that default classic that will represent the entire year – mostly because ’07 was very much about getting your groove on, dancing away the war and the gas prices, and here the twitchy, encyclopedic brain of James Murphy imagines a lost 1982 collaboration between David Bowie, Prince, The B-52’s and Giorgio Moroder, with the goal to resurrect disco and make it cool. It’s completely fathomable to imagine this album slowly spreading over the coming years, popping up in the collection of any discerning music lover, especially ones who like their dance music to be a bit more than a four-on-the-floor kick drum and a synth riff; Murphy has a less exclusive, more populist outlook though: “All the little people wanna dance, it’s true!!”

[01] Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga // Spoon
For me, it’s no contest. I admit complete bias – they are my favorite band at the present time, but after all these years of trying to think as a critic, how could I not personally love something that I regard as superb? Spoon hold two truly rare attributes in today’s musical landscape: they are great artists, and they are remarkably consistent. Those two things together put them in a sparsely populated V.I.P. that few bands have ever reached. Everything they’ve released in the last decade has been worth your hard-earned dollars, worth having those pieces of plastic on your shelf that so many are ready to put out to pasture. It doesn’t matter though if you have vinyl, CDs or MP3s, what matters is the music, and on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon has wrangled their best collection of songs. Though I may occasionally gripe over the odd choice to place “The Ghost of You Lingers” as track two, or that “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” is merely very good compared to the rest of the album’s excellence, the album remains crammed with classics, from the genius Motown pastiche of “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” to the house party starter “Finer Feelings”; from the dancefloor thumper “Rhthm & Soul” to the glorious single “The Underdog” to the cinematic Pop of “Black Like Me”, there’s something here for everyone. It would be a shame if you didn’t find a place for this on your shelf.

[002] Appetite For Destruction

2008-08-04T19:57:00.002-04:00

Album: Appetite For Destruction
Artist: Guns N’ Roses
Release Date: July 1987
Label: Geffen
Producers: Mike Clink & Guns N’ Roses

“Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here everyday
You learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we play
If you hunger for what you see you’ll take it eventually
You can have anything you want but you better not take it from me”
- from “Welcome To The Jungle”

“Well I’m-a west coast struttin’ / One bad mother
Got a rattlesnake suitcase under my arm
Said I’m a mean machine / Been drinking gasoline
And honey, you can make my motor hum
…
Wake up late, honey, put on your clothes
And take your credit card to the liquor store
That’s one for you and two for me by tonight”
- from “Nightrain”

“Just a’ urchin livin’ under the street
I’m a hard case that’s tough to beat
I’m your charity case so buy me somethin’ to eat
I’ll pay you at another time
Take it to the end of the line
…
Captain America’s been torn apart
Now he’s a court jester with a broken heart
He said: Turn me around and take me back to the start
I must be losin’ my mind – ‘Are you blind?’
I’ve seen it all a million times”
Take me down to the paradise city
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home”
-from “Paradise City”

“Rock & Roll in general has sucked a big dick since the Pistols”
- guitarist Izzy Stradlin, from a 1988 Rolling Stone magazine interview

Looking back at the list so far, one might find the album choices to be of the mind of an arty little fucker, someone Indie-minded, but not quite hipster-than-thou, and certainly not touching Daughtry, etc, with a mile-long pole. Now though, you’re scratching your head. You see that classic gold banner and purple cross-on-black, skulls staring back at you with empty minds, and maybe you think I’ve lost my own marbles. But I haven’t; my stance on which albums would make this list was forged over years of reacting to popular music, the changing tides of Rock & Roll and its struggles for attention with surging Hip-Hop and Alternative and Pop one-hit-wonders. Rock & Roll was wounded once upon a time, and never fully recovered. To anyone who has talked to me about this list, and begged to know what Number One is, I’ve always said forget that – what’s Number Two? It’s not a mind-bender by a long shot. It gets included in these kinds of lists all the time. But I think this is my boldest choice; my point is that no one ever thinks of it because Rock & Roll isn’t around much anymore. It’s one of the biggest selling albums of all time, and it’s mostly forgotten about unless it’s wagged in your face. Only one person asked where and when it was gonna show up - Joel gets a gold star for, in that same moment, guessing the top 3 unintentionally. The reason why it’s here is simple, my friends: Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction is the perfect embodiment of the kind of albums I was looking for to make up this list, and maybe even more than that.

Appetite For Destruction is classic from both a genre standpoint (Rock & Roll, or even Hard Rock), and a subgenre standpoint (80’s Hair Metal). It’s a fascinating psychological and sociological album, offering vivid examples of the rebelliousness and frustration that created Rock & Roll in the first place, not to mention where that predominantly male psyche went from there and how it got twisted by drug and drink. It didn’t necessarily knock down walls as put cracks in them, cracks that would lead to crumbling at a later date – if GNR didn’t swing the wrecking ball, Seattle could’ve never knocked down the building (bassist Duff McKagan was the original drummer for The Fastbacks, and brought his punk experience to L.A. from Seattle). It introduced icons of modern music – Axl Rose & Slash – who even at the start of their careers were masters of their respective instruments, and presented that mastery in ways no one had ever heard; both are front and center in one of the classic album openings of all time, the first 40 seconds of “Welcome To The Jungle” about as perfect as Rock & Roll can be. It is a beloved album by musicians and fans alike, the 20-year old hits still routinely greeted with excitement and smiles. And finally, it’s the album’s widespread appeal, the repeat plays from all walks of life, on radio stations and jukeboxes, car stereos and iPods, that makes it special - it’s not only how much people love it, it’s how many.

First: what is Rock & Roll? Dictionary.com says that it’s “a style of popular music that derives in part from blues and folk music and is marked by a heavily accented beat and a simple, repetitive phrase structure”. Hmmm, yeah I guess – I definitely think that there is a difference between “Rock & Roll” and “Rock music” though. The former does represent the music’s heritage, the fusing of Blues and Country and Folk, while the latter has come to describe the music’s scientific composition in relation to music that is not it. ‘Rock’ says that something is music played (usually) with electric guitar and a bass & drums rhythm section. When I say ‘Rock & Roll’, you probably think The Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley because they fit the heritage. But you wouldn’t necessarily say that “Roundabout” by Yes is a Rock & Roll song – though it is a Rock song, played on guitar-bass-drums (also: the video game is called Rock Band, not Rock & Roll Band). With all that being said, the borderlines for Rock music are now fuzzier than just looking at the instruments that the music is played on – The Roots have had a guitar-bass-drums make-up in the last handful of years, and they’re playing Hip-Hop. Ditto for Charlie Hunter and his trio playing Jazz. And so we sit and think and realize that that definition leaves out what I think is the most important part of all of Rock music, and Rock & Roll specifically: its inherent bold, often defiant attitude. Rock & Roll music couples the heritage with the attitude. That’s what the music is, an art of the once insecure finding a way to be confident; that’s why it was so naturally the music of adolescence at one of the most socially turbulent times in America’s history, and has continued in the following generations. Rock & Roll wants nothing to do with your establishment, or in these unfortunate waning years, it shouldn’t; after all these years, Rock & Roll as a term or label has been thrown around far too liberally. There is a vast chasm between Billy Joel and Iggy & The Stooges, and if there’s a rule of thumb, Rock & Roll is better loud.

When I was talking about Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, I wondered aloud that in some way it might be the culmination of the first forty years of Rock & Roll, and interestingly enough, you could make the same claim for Appetite For Destruction. But while Sonic Youth played on the spirit of Rock & Roll’s history without its musical guidelines, Guns N’ Roses were coloring mostly inside the lines, more linked to the music’s unfurling history. These bands represent both sides of the Rock & Roll divide of the late 1970’s, mirror images of the post-punk world. Sonic Youth adhered to the Punk ethos while paying tribute to the music they grew up on, while Guns N’ Roses stole the venom-spewing approach of Punk and applied it to Classic Rock & Roll. If you’re looking for a simple one-shot key to Appetite For Destruction, it’s this: This is the greatest Rock & Roll album made for a world that had no more use for Rock & Roll albums, and that’s why it remains so important – it’s an end only because no one has topped it yet. Even the way it was made was classic: In the Rolling Stone cover story last August celebrating the 20th anniversary of the album, writer Brian Hiatt, producer & engineer Mike Clink and engineer Victor Deyglio speak about Appetite being one of the last albums to be made “with vinyl in mind”, using classic instruments and amps, manually edited on two-inch tape, mixed by hand, without new automated technology. Since Punk broke in 1976, Rock has been everything but rolling. It’s been punky, alternative, hard, new wave, hardcore, grungy, retro, emo, metallic, and represented arenas, colleges and big hair, but GNR didn’t care about gimmicks. On the other hand, it’s funny how, even though they never really sounded alike, GNR constantly got compared to the at-their-peak ‘71/’72 edition of The Rolling Stones, who have come to be seen as the quintessential Rock & Roll band. The reason for that is the attitude + heritage equation again.

In the old Rolling Stone Album Guide from 1992, it’s noted that one of the reasons The Rolling Stones were the greatest Rock & Roll band of all-time was that their success was a tribute to the roots of the music, equal parts Blues and Country. On the other hand, GNR start the next age of Rock & Roll, where the musicians would not have grown up on Blues or Country, or even Rock & Roll’s formative years led by Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. The bands of GNR’s generation, emerging after the punk and arena rock of the late 1970’s, grew up through Rock music when it was at its apex – Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, etc. – and formed their frames of reference from there forward. While Axl Rose may have later tried to convince everyone that Elton John was his retroactive primary influence, on Appetite, he comes off as the misanthropic bastard teenage orphan of Steven Tyler and Johnny Rotten, and Appetite follows suit, testing positive for the DNA of stone-cold Rock & Roll classics like Exile On Main St., New York Dolls, Rocks, and Never Mind The Bollocks.

The rest of the band wasn’t exempt either – only Steven Adler looked the part of an 80’s Sunset Strip rocker; Izzy bridged Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders, Slash was Joe Perry if he was into The Misfits, and Duff was Tom Petersson dipped in Sid Vicious’ leather. The image, like the music, was a confirmation of Rock & Roll – the misogynistic “Anything Goes” is a throwaway on paper, but the band’s energetic playing makes it sound like a gem off Side Two of Toys In The Attic before revving up to be a 60’s garage-style rave up – but at the same time they were thumbing their noses at their heroes that had gotten old and crotchety and too concerned with their bank accounts. As Buddyhead.com noted on their “Rules of Rock” 7years ago, take a look at how low Slash and Duff were slinging their axes – even their posture was a representation of what their music sounded like, and the Buddyhead guys were among the young masses under that GNR spell – Penance Soirée, the 2004 album by BH-affiliated rock urchins The Icarus Line and one of that year’s best albums, was a new millennium update of Appetite’s L.A. decadence.

It was the band’s willing display of their punk-ish edge, in a sea of Poisons and Warrants, that got them noticed. Their understanding of Rock & Roll’s rebellion, and putting it at the forefront of the band’s image, is another of the most important aspects of Guns N’ Roses, at least up until the release of the Use Your Illusions – much like Kurt Cobain’s later promotion of his favorite obscure bands, GNR had no problem upsetting the mainstream-friendly image that the Sunset Strip bands had collectively groomed for themselves by namedropping influences from Johnny Thunders to the Dead Boys to the Misfits (later revisited on 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident?); similarly, Slash & Duff had no problem cursing on live TV while staggering shitfaced up to the American Music Awards podium, something Jon Bon Jovi would’ve never even fathomed doing. It seems like something so insignificant now, but this kind of personal expression put the band outside the lines of the Glam Metal mold that was MTV-approved, but it also revealed them as following, or possibly as the last embodiment of, the Rock & Roll archetype, where rebellion attracts impressionable teenage fans ensconced in their adolescent battles with parental authority. Those other 80’s bands were dealing in a two-faced scheme, attaching a kind of surface wholesomeness to their not-too-thinly veiled misogyny and rampant alcohol abuse in order to move more units, all the while having drunken orgies backstage. GNR gleefully reveled in the fact they were the dangerous ones. Somehow they pushed what Rock & Roll attitude and rebellion means, expanding its decency limits as their drug and alcohol usage went past reckless to addictive and abusive, packing the songs with references to it as blatant as the heroin ode “Mr. Brownstone” (they probably would’ve called it simply “Heroin” if Lou Reed didn’t nab the title 20 years prior), or “Nightrain” (on which rock-crit-dean Robert Christgau proposes, “[Axl] doesn’t love Night Train, he loves alcoholism”.)

This is the heart of the commercial and public paradox of Guns N’ Roses at their Appetite and GNR Lies peak – they ride the line of social pariahs and music megastars so perfectly that it boggles the mind how they could have been allowed to be so fuckin’ popular. Yes, I’m aware that Guns N’ Roses were not the most dangerous band of the era, because this was the same time that young males were flocking to Metallica and Slayer for the same answers, but the Guns N’ Roses approach was different enough to give the band long-standing respect from the fans. Just in recent years, readers of UK Hard Rock magazines Kerrang! and Metal Hammer both named Appetite as the greatest album ever - that’s remarkable considering the likely contenders from Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Metallica, and on and on. GNR fostered the Rock & Roll myth, the band as gods, but then they shit on the industry structure that helped put bands in that position. If I’m gonna tell you that Appetite For Destruction is important because it’s the last truly great Rock & Roll album, then Guns N’ Roses has to be equally crucial for being the last great model of the Rock & Roll Band, at the very least because they detonated the rulebook, taking the various notions of what it means to be acceptably (and legally) rebellious in normal society, and figuratively pushing the guidelines back 20 feet, or whatever, therefore enlarging the imaginary filing cabinet for Rock & Roll bands to be filed away in (and in their case, gloriously lowering the standards for a Rock & Roll band’s expected decorum). These boys perfected “shocking” from a marketing standpoint while having music that more than matched up. They are tailor-made for your parents to forbid the broadcasting of their songs out of your stereo and the display of their posters on the walls above your bed. They are the kind of guys that teenage boys want to hang out with and that teenage girls swoon over for just one reason: their parents tell them no.

And while there have been plenty of other Rock bands that got parents all riled up since then, we return to the fact that no one artist balanced their ability to incite a backlash with increasing their fanbase exponentially better than Guns N’ Roses. For instance, look at the longtime adversarial relationship between Guns and Mötley Crüe, and what they represent to 80’s Hard Rock – through the entire decade, The Crüe were the big dogs, but in the couple decades since, they’ve been holding on as a retro act, now more famous for Tommy Lee’s third leg than for their music. Meanwhile, GNR have done pretty much nothing in the last 15 years, and yet they’re name-checked by everyone from The Strokes to Avenged Sevenfold to Sheryl Crow. Going back to GNR’s assertion of a punk-gutter realism, we can kinda see the influential similarities, the New York Dolls as an influence on Nikki Sixx as well just like he claims, but at the time he was talking more “Detroit Rock City” than “Looking For A Kiss” because it fell in line with the scene; GNR also talked Kiss – and Zeppelin and Aerosmith (who they opened for in 1988) too – but they also rejected Paul Stanley as an Appetite producer by nodding off on smack and spreading rumors he was gay. Mötley Crüe have repeatedly described themselves more as a gang than a band in their early days, but Guns N’ Roses came along and pumped up the nastiness to levels that would be more in line with squatters in London in 1977. You could smell Slash’s filthy pleather pants through the pictures. Really – look at Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses in 1987, and tell me who you’re running away from in a dark alley. There’s nothing scary about Vince Neil in makeup… actually, fear is another way to look at it – Guns N’ Roses is to Rock like b-movie horror is to film, giving teenagers chills & thrills; Appetite is literally thrilling.

When I was 11 years old, and first saw the video for “Welcome To The Jungle”, it scared the shit out of me, and yet I got the point; adults don’t want to admit to themselves that kids are smart, but they are, and I knew watching the narrative of this farmboy off the bus in big bad L.A., flashing images of police riots and fights, Axl bound in that Clockwork Orange chair, that they were telling you that the city is dangerous. It is a scary place. At first, the video was also confusing to young rock fans like me, because these five guys kinda looked like all the other poodle-haired arena-ready hard rock bands that were filling up our TV screens (though a lot dirtier), so we bought into the image, but the song is obviously more ferocious than the image, with Slash & Izzy Stradlin’s guitars barking like slobbering pitbulls and serpentine Axl wanting to watch us bleed; it was akin to, say, the Bay City Rollers singing the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The UK” or “Bodies”. More so than pretty much every other album opener in history, this song sets the tone for its album. Every Appetite track comes on like a predatory animal chasing you downhill, and when the riff kicks in, it’s that animal’s jaws clamping down on you, razor-sharp teeth tearing your flesh.

As that classic opening begins, Slash’s guitar falls over itself as Axl whispers “Oh my God”, and you get the same feeling when you find yourself in a part of the city where you know you’re not supposed to be. Then that infamous siren-howl rises in the background, with Izzy’s bluesy licks and Duff’s bass soundtracking the impending chase, Steven Adler’s high-hats like your feet hitting the pavement – John Lennon once sang “run for your life if you can, little girl”, but he never conjured this kind of dread. Axl’s narrative is perfect – the notion that where you live could get worse everyday is not something familiar to suburban teens – creating a world you want to see because they got the ‘fun-n-games’ and you might ‘taste the bright lights’, but you don’t really want to visit because you’re not crazy about bleeding or screaming. For the opposite reason, that’s what many lower class or urban teens deal with on a daily basis, and so they identify with Appetite; I’ve met at least a dozen African-Americans living in urban areas that don’t listen to Rock music, but they have this album on their shelf, and they love it for the same reasons they love N.W.A. or Wu-Tang… Meanwhile, Slash & Izzy lay out their M.O.: interlocking guitar lines in each stereo channel, Izzy’s guttural yet clean rhythms on the left, Slash’s smeared and ragged leads splattered on the right – this is the clearest testament to Mike Clink’s timeless production; guitars have simply never sounded like this, Slash in particular possessing such a singular sound that you can tell his playing within two seconds. I encourage listening to this album a few times through only one channel, and then switching. The songs morph into new creatures when you can only hear Slash or Izzy, and it awards a new appreciation for their cosmic guitar slop.

Not only did the ferocity of “Welcome To The Jungle” set the band apart, but it turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. The funky “Mr. Brownstone” is probably the most radio-friendly groove on the album, so it’s too bad for station programmers it’s a song about heroin addiction and has a well placed “motherfucker” in the third verse. Slash’s wah-wah pedal is in overdrive, approximating Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” as best he can submerged in a smack high, while Izzy, Duff & Steve do donuts around him. This is one of the songs where Axl is staying mostly in his low register – no screeching to be heard, and it’s on these songs that you can hear the unique quality of his voice, as well as his unpredictable temper. Here he’s laissez-faire as much as he’s menacing on the live favorite “It’s So Easy”, home to the often-quoted couplet “See me hit you; you fall down”, possibly an early sign of Axl the abusive boyfriend/husband (if you assume he’s singing to a girl through the whole song). I think it’s easier to see that Axl’s social skills as displayed in the song are more worrisome because he can’t focus his frustrations; he’s got a sort of aggression A.D.D. where he just lashes out, and indeed he does suffer from manic depression. He’s singing respectively about hitting up your hot sister, drinking and driving, not getting no satisfaction (of course), blackouts (“fade into the night”?), unchecked violence towards random strangers (“See me hit you…Why don’t you just fuck off!”), and specifically towards women (“Turn around bitch, I got a use for you; besides you ain’t got nothin’ better to do, and I’m bored”). And then to finish it all off, he throws a curveball that you might miss unless you were scouring the lyrics: he’s spent the entire song being selfish, singing about everybody trying to please him, and yet when he’s scurrying off with his Miss Right Now, he’s the one who’s saying he’ll try to please her, a glimpse of his soft side which he was trying to play close to the vest.

There is a pity to this, that you could say “It’s So Easy” is the quintessential Guns N’ Roses song because of the abhorrent “character” that Axl is playing in it, fittingly too politically incorrect to ever be a successful single or radio favorite. After all these years, we can look back and see the pattern, and know it’s sad that we would expect him to be this guy. In fact, this was the band’s first single, a failure in the days of Slippery When Wet prior to Appetite’s release, with a video so X-rated it never officially saw the light of day, featuring among other things Axl’s future wife Erin Everly in bondage gear. Musically, it’s what you’d expect coming from McKagan, a muscular take on early 70’s proto-punk, but the lyrics are by far the focus. “Nightrain” is the opposite; save for an opening verse that can be boiled down to ‘mooching off stripper-groupies is fun’, it’s all chorus, with plenty of room for Izzy and especially Slash to light up some six-string pyrotechnics. The chorus is more of the same however, with Axl waffling between his meanings; is it Night Train, the cheap wine, to get him “loaded like a freight train”, or is it a night train to help him escape the “slum”, never to return?

Rock & Roll has always been exploring the shadows, devilish imagery from Robert Johnson to Mick Jagger to Ozzy, et al, but Appetite was deviating from this by dealing with the band’s reality, closer to AC/DC’s taste for women or Judas Priest breaking the law. Guns N’ Roses has become eternally linked to their proving grounds like so many bands before and since because their point of view is unique to that city, reporting from street level; the dark, chilling tale of “My Michelle”, about a fucked-up friend of the band’s spiraling out of control, illustrates that Axl’s storytelling (for L.A.) is sometimes closer to Lou Reed (for NYC) than David Lee Roth (actually, the girl told Axl she wished someone would write a song about her like Elton John’s “Your Song”; Axl decided that telling the truth about her lifestyle worked better than a sweet ballad). I’ve always heard the song as Axl’s ominous, bizarro-world version of Roy Orbison or Buddy Holly, the smoky slowdancing intro destined for the amphetamine-charged sock-hop chorus and the “Everyone needs love…” breakdown, all serrated riffs spurred on by Duff’s pogo-ing bassline. The verses drool acidic indictment, immediately calling out the porno daddy and smack OD’d mommy, the title character spoiled on cocaine bought with someone else’s credit card, the same card that she’s going to chop up the blow on the glass hotel coffee table with. Axl’s supposed to be this girl’s friend, but he’s airing her dirty laundry, and doing it in a threatening growl – huh, some friend.

But that’s Axl and Guns N’ Roses at this point in their career – too paranoid and anti-social for their own good, sticking to their own personal self-preservation routine that allowed them to survive on the backstabbing streets of Hollywood in the 1980’s. The tough “Out Ta Get Me” puts up a fight, a classic metal fist pumper that aspires to saddle up next to countless Keith Richards outlaw-on-the-run rockers, except that it too easily shows its hand, and instead comes off way too defensive against the faceless authority, the Rock & Roll oppressor. In some way though, it’s that much more empathetic to the pip-squeak metalhead in the corner of the lunchroom, a song he or she can call their own. I bought Appetite, like most kids my age, for the three big singles, but I had come up on Def Leppard and Van Halen and Bon Jovi – much lighter stuff. I hated Appetite when I got it; I would just listen to “Paradise City” over and over, rewinding it back, because “My Michelle” and “You’re Crazy” were fuckin’ scary. I braved lunchroom stigma and ended up returning it and exchanging it for some safe piece of shit (probably Europe or White Lion). It wasn’t until I got the 45 single for “Patience” – the purchase of which was a leftover reaction to Appetite, not wanting to be disappointed by Lies, so I just bought the single – and fell in love with “Rocket Queen” on the b-side that I felt like I might’ve made a mistake.

You see, there was a little of my 12-year old hesitancy in Axl, that part of him that drew him to make the Elton John-worshipping about-face later (shh…he was already privately working on “November Rain” in 1986). His love for Pop balladry led him to keeping the world of Appetite from being completely without hope. Hope was secretly important to Axl. “Think About You”, written by Izzy, is a tribute to Monique Lewis, the raven-haired beauty tattooed on Axl’s right arm; Rose sings the words differently than any other track here, with a soothing calmness but still in the Axl screech, that odd middle ground that he would eventually sing almost exclusively in on the Use Your Illusion twins, even while the band is barreling like a locomotive. Likewise, “You’re Crazy”, the most aggressive, punk-style track on the album, actually has a soft core. Axl is yearning for love, “lookin’ for a lover in a world that’s much too dark”; for once, he’s the responsible one, removing himself from a destructive situation in which his unsatisfied lover is, you guessed it, “fuckin’ crazy”. Sandwiched between these two tracks is the beloved “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, where Axl lays out right away that this beautiful relationship that he’s in is working in the present and backwards into the past – her smile reminds him of “childhood memories”, that “warm safe place where as a child [he]’d hide” – but with no hint of a future. Hope is about the future. That’s how it works. So, this relationship is teetering on uncertainty, and of course, after Slash rips his classic solo, one of the best of all time (I get chills at 4:04 every time), Axl is frantically asking “Where do we go now?”

Well, we go to the final two-and-a-half minutes of the album, the second part of the incredible “Rocket Queen”, and to Axl’s gift of hope. He insisted on ending the album on a bright note because he realized the journey through Appetite was a dark one. This is Axl balancing the all-pistons-firing assault of the band with the most positive outlook on the album: “If you need a shoulder / Or if you need a friend / I’ll be here standing / Until the bitter end / No one needs the sorrow / No one needs the pain / I hate to see you walking out there / Out in the rain”. It’s a euphoric Pop high, no drugs needed, and it points directly to some of the forgotten melodic genius of the future double albums – like say “Yesterdays”, a great overlooked single. Returning to the band’s generational influences, within their frame of reference, there’s a dichotomy of inspiration just as there is in Axl’s personality-on-record: The grit and attitude and swagger of The Stones is weighed against the pop craft of The Beatles (likewise, but not as important to this particular album, the words of Dylan are weighed against the musicianship of Hendrix, the former often called the greatest lyricist, the latter the greatest guitarist).

The first half of “Rocket Queen” is all bite, slithering funk-metal blessed by one of the greatest riffs of all time. However, this is where the rhythm section shines, revealing their gift for funk and the unsung power of the uncomplicated playing of Adler (Duff and Izzy hid his extra drums); if they didn’t fire him, he could’ve been the Metal Charlie Watts (though it bears noting his hero was Queen’s Roger Taylor, an informative and relatively obscure choice in a land of Pearts and Wards and Bonhams). This is also where I tell you that Duff McKagan is the most underrated rock bassist ever, his lead-lines quietly filling whatever space there is between the monstrous John Entwistle and the sly Paul Simonon. I used to play bass for about two seconds of my life, and someone had given me a bass book for Appetite For Destruction; I immediately shelved it though when I got a look at how complicated Duff’s parts were. They blew my mind, and I can’t listen to the album now without hearing them. The lyrics for this part of the song are a point of contention with me. There are other moments in the lyric book that are incorrect, typos, etc, but I feel that the context of “Rocket Queen”’s chorus was presented wrong. The booklet reads “Here I am / And you’re a Rocket Queen”, when to me it sounds as if it should read “Here I am / I’m your Rocket Queen”. This changes the narrator’s view – I’ve always felt that this is a character song for Axl, where he is singing as a teenage prostitute asserting her expertise, the kind of girl the band would’ve encountered against the backdrop of this seedy urban underbelly (The girl the character was based on was 18 at the time, and eventually became a madam). When the song breaks in half, and the lighter coda launches, Axl reverts back, and is now offering the prostitute his hopeful reassurances.

The Rocket Queen describes her L.A. as a “burned out paradise”, a contradiction that sums up the verse-chorus split at work in the epic “Paradise City”. The song epitomizes both the band’s signature Rock & Roll spirit and Axl’s conscious need to inject hope into his Pop by getting filthy in the gutter on the verses, and then pining for the green grass on the other side of the fence during the chorus. The entire concept and structure and lyric of the song are the culmination of the rest of the album, light and dark, as well as all their influences, woven together and funneled into 6 minutes and 46 seconds. The hands-in-the-air opening significantly starts with the chorus first, the light Pop side, whatever paradise Axl still saw in his Midwest roots (the same place that could’ve inspired the rage of “Out Ta Get Me”). But when that whistles blows, the band comes roaring out of the cage, that snarling riff decimating everything in its path. The verses are all Sunset Strip struggle, but it’s the chorus that holds the song aloft like a Bic lighter – the grass-is-greener mentality is basic human nature – until we get to the full-throttle endpiece. The band sounds absolutely unhinged. You can clearly hear Izzy, Duff, and Slash individually shredding their instruments; Slash’s fingers are moving so fact you’d think his fretboard was on fire, but his playing never once becomes excessive like so many 80’s guitarists, where it moves beyond servicing the song. This is partly because the band keeps up with him, Axl too, stretching his vocal chords to reach the back row on the highest tier of every stadium. This second part of the song isn’t just their punk fury unleashed – it’s a confirmation of their Rock & Roll legend status. It’s their Rock & Roll anthem, a reminder that this is music for the people, for everyone who doesn't accept everything they're told, and yearns for a better life. The Guns N’ Roses of Appetite For Destruction proved that some blues chords and a 4/4 backbeat don’t just make something Rock & Roll. It’s the attitude and the hunger, the need to push back. And boy, did they push back. Listening to Appetite For Destruction now, not only is there no doubt to its greatness, but there’s no doubt that finding that greatness again might be futile. How great must an album be if you can’t escape its long shadow? 20 years later, and I think Axl Rose has answered that question for us everyday - with his silence.

Tracklist:
01. “Welcome To The Jungle”
02. “It’s So Easy”
03. “Nightrain”
04. “Out Ta Get Me”
05. “Mr. Brownstone”
06. “Paradise City”
07. “My Michelle”
08. “Think About You”
09. “Sweet Child O’ Mine”
10. “You’re Crazy”
11. “Anything Goes”
12. “Rocket Queen”

MTV's Live At The Ritz [NYC, 02.88]
This show is ridiculous! They're all great, but "Out Ta Get Me" and "Nightrain" transcend their album versions, and of course "Paradise City" is a highlight - Axl goes into the crowd with a shirt, comes out without it, all while Slash is soloing on his back on the nasty stage floor.
- "My Michelle"

- "It's So Easy"
- "Mr. Brownstone"
- "Out Ta Get Me"
- "Sweet Child O' Mine"
- "Welcome To The Jungle"
- "Nightrain"
- "Paradise City"
- "Rocket Queen"

"Welcome To The Jungle" [video]

"Paradise City" [live in NYC, 05.88]

"Rocket Queen" [live in NYC, 05.88]

- BONUS: "Welcome To The Jungle" [live in L.A., 03.86]
- BONUS: "Welcome To The Jungle" [live on the 1988 VMA's]
- BONUS: "It's So Easy" [explicit unreleased video]
- BONUS: "It's So Easy" [live in Middletown, NY, 08.88]
Home video was totally the YouTube of 20 years ago
- BONUS: "It's So Easy" [live in Melbourne, 12.88]
- BONUS: "Nightrain" [live in NYC, 09.88]
- BONUS: "Nightrain" [live in Melbourne, 12.88]
- BONUS: "Out Ta Get Me" [live in Middletown, NY, 08.88]
- BONUS: "Out Ta Get Me" [live in NYC, 09.88]
- BONUS: "Mr. Brownstone" [live/acoustic at CBGB's, NYC, 1988]
- BONUS: "Mr. Brownstone" [live in Middletown, NY, 08.88]
- BONUS: "Paradise City" [video]
- BONUS: "Paradise City" [live in Melbourne, 1988]
- BONUS: "My Michelle" [live in Long Beach, CA, 03.86]
- BONUS: "My Michelle" [live in Melbourne, 1988]
- BONUS: "My Michelle" [live in NYC, 1991]
- BONUS: "Think About You" [live, 03.86]
- BONUS: "Sweet Child O' Mine" [single edit - video]
- BONUS: "Sweet Child O' Mine" [live in Melbourne, 1988]
- BONUS: "Sweet Child O' Mine" [live in Middletown, NY, 08.88]
- BONUS: "You're Crazy" [slow version; live in NYC, 05.88]
- BONUS: "You're Crazy" [live/acoustic at CBGB's, NYC, 1988]
- BONUS: "Anything Goes" [live in L.A., 07.86]
9-minute version, with alternate lyrics
- BONUS: "Rocket Queen" [live in L.A., 07.86]
- BONUS: "Rocket Queen" [live in Melbourne, 1988]

- DOUBLE BONUS: "You're Crazy" [live in L.A., 11.90]
Performed by Slash, Duff, Sebastian Bach & Lars Ulrich at a RIP Magazine party.

[003] Ready To Die

2008-06-19T00:05:00.011-04:00

Album: Ready To Die
Artist: The Notorious B.I.G.
Release Date: September 1994
Label: Bad Boy/Arista
Producers: Easy Mo Bee, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Bluez Brothers, Chucky Thompson, Poke (Trackmasters), DJ Premier, Lord Finesse, Dominic Owens & Kevin Scott

“I never thought it could happen, this rappin’ stuff
I was too used to packing gats and stuff
Now honeys play me close like butter plays toast
From the Mississippi down to the East Coast
Condos in Queens, indo for weeks
Sold out seats to hear Biggie Smalls speak
Living life without fear; putting five karats in my baby girl’s ear
Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool
Considered a fool cuz I dropped out of high school
Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood, and it’s still all good”
- from “Juicy”

“I know how it feels to wake up fucked up
Pockets broke as hell, another rock to sell
People look at you like you’s the user
Selling drugs to all the losers, mad buddha abuser
But they don’t know about your stress-filled day
Baby on the way, mad bills to pay
That’s why you drink Tanqueray, so you can reminisce
And wish you wasn’t living so devilish”
- from “Everyday Struggle”

“My shit is deep, deeper than my grave, G
I’m ready to die and nobody can save me
Fuck the world, fuck my Moms and my girl
My life is played out like a jheri curl - I’m ready to die!”
- from the title track

I feel like I should say this: I’m not entirely comfortable telling you that Ready To Die is the greatest Hip-Hop album of all time, but I’m doing it anyway. It’s not that it’s not good enough for the title, but it’s always felt more great than greatEST. From the start, any one of the top seven of the genre on this list – this, Paul’s Boutique, 36 Chambers, Illmatic, Low End Theory, Nation Of Millions, and 3 Feet High & Rising - could’ve taken the pole position. All seven are interchangeably essential to any collection of Hip-Hop, and of modern music. I expect that if you’re reading this then you own at least one of these albums, and hopefully all of them, even if you’d describe yourself as ‘not that into Hip-Hop’; exposure to these classic collections can at least better define your close-minded opinion. This may sound abrasive, but I don’t intend to be mean; it’s more of a defense mechanism, the same one that birthed this list in the first place – there has indeed been great music during my generation, and I just wish that my generation would fully embrace their own music instead of spending so much time with our parents’ music. It’s kind of depressing that I, a 31-year old Caucasian suburbanite (albeit in the shadow of Rap’s Gotham City home), know more about the storied history of Hip-Hop than a large percentage of African-Americans, specifically young people, and yet it’s “their music”. That feels wrong to me, and the problem is definitely not me liking Hip-Hop too much. It’s like, seriously, “Top Billin’” isn’t just a song that 50 Cent sampled last year! It’s one of the greatest singles ever!

There is a large part of me wanting to not make this a racial issue, but it is: Hip-Hop is the last great black art, and gets treated that way by so few of the African-American community and the blindly-following white consumer masses that make up the majority of its audience. There isn’t nearly enough respect flying around, and in many ways that’s the artists’ faults as well as the audience, the short-sighted program directors, and the two-bit “producers” with snap-track ringtone dollar signs in their eyes. Most any Hip-Hop acts bothering to try something new are usually trying too hard, forgetting about things like accessibility and universality, and coming off as too serious, and so they never hit, meanwhile those acts that are hitting are doing so song-by-song on iTunes, with no longevity in the plan. Fans download the one single, then roll over and go back to sleep before it’s time to hit the club again. The perceived “true” Hip-Hop fan – the staunchly defensive African-American who has grown up in one of the music’s meccas, from Queens or The Bronx to Compton to Atlanta to Chicago, etc. – will try and fight for the fact that yes, because blacks created Hip-Hop music that it is their music, but this ignores the fact that, as one of the genre’s greatest chroniclers, Nelson George, tells us in his essential 1998 book Hip Hop America, blacks abandoned Hip-Hop before it even got on wax, and it was kept alive as much by the early Puerto Rican break dancers and white Jewish businessmen who wanted to put money into it as it was by the few faithful black artists, and the fans it managed to salvage.

More than just a black artform, Hip-Hop is essential to the way that the world sees America and the modern experiences of the African-American community within; I’m saying that we all need to understand that this music now belongs to all of us, that a lot of the white kids in the world learn about black culture from rap music, and it’s always been this way, and especially so since the music’s 1990’s commercial takeover, when Biggie Smalls came into our lives. Since his murder, the music has been in a rut, and there is no hint that it might ever recover. This is probably due to the fact that Biggie Smalls, as the last truly great ambassador of Hip-Hop, is also the greatest MC that ever lived, and he will remain so at least as long as our lifetimes; it’s kind of hard to follow that up. Don’t waste your time trying to argue this with me, because I’ve had years of practice with deluded 2Pac fans. I know all the contenders from Kane to G Rap to Marshall. The only concession I’ll allow is if you’re the type of music fan that prioritizes historical significance – whoever did something first is automatically the best – then I will allow Rakim, but that’s it.

As a side note, I might as well say this now, because it can be said about virtually every verse on Ready To Die and then we’d be here all night: Biggie was the all-time master of internal rhyme structures, and he trained his voice to match, exploiting vowels for all they were worth (something he admittedly learned from Rakim and honed while hanging out with 2Pac); to choose only one example – shit, to only choose ten – would be maddening, but I’ll give you this line from the first verse on the album: “Lounging at the barbeques drinking brews with the neighborhood crews hanging on the avenues”; read out loud, it’s perfectly clear what he was doing, but to hear him actually do it, playfully pulling at those U’s, it’s remarkable in its simple genius. His command of the English language was mind-blowing considering (a) he was a high school dropout, and (b) he never tried to sound smart by using big words. I know I’ll say this more than once: Biggie talked straight, no frills. Even with all his miniscule details, he still gave you the facts. Even beyond MCing, as a presence in music, the only Hip-Hop acts to rival him in the last decade have been Jay-Z and Outkast, and well, neither ever really got over the hump the way they needed to (Admittedly, Biggie benefits in retrospect from his early exit, as there are only two official albums to consider – he never had a chance to really falter). I guess Jay got closer to Biggie’s level, but he bowed out just as his momentum was getting good, and he ruined it by coming back and having to start all over again. Outkast…well, I just think they gave up.

Rachel works with my girlfriend, and is a white suburbanite like me, though you could argue she is more white than me as she doesn’t necessarily have an overwhelming interest in the history of black musics like I do. If I told you her musical interests include Billy Joel, Journey, Weezer, James Taylor, modern radio country and American Idol, you’d wonder how Biggie would fit into her life, but somehow he does. We were at a birthday party for one of their co-workers at a bar one night, and “Hypnotize” came on the jukebox. Rachel starts rapping along to the music, and she knows every word, nailing every phrasing, every inflection, moving with the music, becoming Biggie; she is, in that moment, Hip-Hop’s biggest fan, and in her eyes I see that look that a kid gets on Christmas morning. When the song is over, she pulls out a dollar, hands it to me, looks me dead in the eyes with a sly smile, and says “John, put on two more”. Now I have that look – she’s given it to me. I put on “Gimme The Loot” and “Juicy”, and we rhymed together. It was in this moment that I realized that this album had to be the number one Hip-Hop album on this list. Because really, it’s not about the album, it’s about Biggie Smalls himself. It’s not just that Biggie means so much to so many people, but what he means, and how. What does he mean to Hip-Hop, and what does he mean to the global community of people that like music? There is something infectious about the multi-facted personality of Biggie, whether it’s the hustler, the criminal, the lothario, the verbal technician, the comedian, or simply the entertainer. Rachel (or I) never hustled drugs on a corner to feed our (non-existent) daughters, but like a great movie, that’s the power of great Hip-Hop, and of The Notorious B.I.G.

I’ll go one further: my brother Ian currently resides in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, only a few blocks from where Biggie grew up – Biggie on St. James, my brother on Quincy. I have walked down those streets late at night, and I’ve seen the neighborhood at its calmest, most quiet, and also most unsettling and creepy. I’ve gotten the evil eye from corner boys or the Rastas across the street, and I’m comfortable enough to think that if they ever had beef and stepped to me, our mutual love of Biggie Smalls would have everything smoothed out in minutes. He is that neighborhood in so many ways, and vice versa. Even though he sold millions of albums and is one of the biggest names of the last two decades of music, there is a little-MC-that-could quality, a pride that comes in being a Notorious B.I.G. fan, the same kind of pride that Biggie himself had, making “fat, black, and ugly as ever” OK, and even sexy. Bed-Stuy oozes that from every bodega and brownstone. Whether he realized or not, Biggie’s straight talk made him the ultimate example of the young black ghetto male in America, and his inadvertent representation of that archetype to the rest of the world resulted in his iconic status.

Unlike so many rappers of his generation who were hooked on Hip-Hop from an early age and took years to build their skills, Biggie hit the ground running, his development as an MC only four or five years from him picking up a mic to when he released Ready To Die, a masterpiece album, and his entire career fits nicely into a nine year span. We’ve all seen the VH-1 specials, but this is something that needs to be singled out: remember that Biggie was likely hustling drugs pretty much up to the second he was in the studio. This seems common place in Hip-Hop now, with countless rappers airing out their suspect and shameless exploits in the years since Ready To Die, but at the time, this was frighteningly new, and this fact, and the tirelessly detailed lyrics that Biggie wrote about the subject, form the reason why I positioned this as the top Hip-Hop album on this list. Quite simply, Biggie, and specifically his songs on Ready To Die, not only represent the black ghetto male in a general sense, but specifically the past, present, and future of the characterization. This isn’t merely a great album, it’s a social event, albeit one that took years to reveal itself fully; that is the ‘future’ part of the equation, so we’ll return to it.

Let’s get with the past: Biggie, with Puffy orchestrating the proceedings, begins the album with carefully chosen samples as backdrops to his tales. Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly”, not only the classic portrait of drugs in the inner city but also a signpost to 1972, the year of Biggie’s birth, gives way to “Rapper’s Delight” and the aforementioned classic “Top Billin’” by Audio Two, the soundtrack to a tumultuous adolescence as a stick-up kid. The “Intro” concludes to the sounds of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s “Tha Shiznit”, the best song from 1993’s Doggystyle, with Biggie leaving prison with big plans. Those big plans, as he and Puffy would make abundantly clear in interviews for years, was to make an East Coast version of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, and so again, the sample was not arbitrary. Like the “Intro”, the dancehall hybrid “Respect” also has Biggie revisiting his difficult entry into this world - “Umbilical cord’s wrapped around my neck / I’m seeing my death and I ain’t even took my first step / I made it out, I’m bringing mad joy / the doctor looked and said ‘he’s gonna be a Bad Boy!” – and his journey from troubled child – “So school I didn’t show up, it fucked my flow up” - to street corner hustler – “Put the drugs on the shelf; nah I couldn’t see it / Scarface, King Of New York, I wanna be it.” And in case you think he’s only glorifying the drug trade, he notes his downfall and incarceration – “All the money I stacked was all the money for bail” – for equal measure.

Turning his reminiscence outward to his community, the album begins in earnest with the epic “Things Done Changed”. As produced by Dominic Owens & Kevin Scott, “Things Done Changed” bathes the gray projects of days gone by with heavenly light in the form of rising cinematic strings, moaning 70’s horns, and cascading harp. This fanfare works with Biggie’s back-in-the-day narrative, and yet is in direct opposition when he flips his story to the present. He begins with the hopeful, but can’t even make it four bars without the darkness creeping in:

Remember back in the days, when niggas had waves, Gazelle shades and corn braids / Pinching pennies, honies had the high-top Jellies, shooting skelly, muthafuckers was all friendly / Lounging at the barbeques drinking brews with the neighborhood crews hanging on the avenues / Turn your pages to Nineteen Ninety-Three, niggas is getting smoked, G – believe me!

Here is the beginning of our present, where Biggie’s personal experience on the corners of Bed-Stuy directly informs the musical screenplays he’s writing, and eventually the global idea of the ghetto male. Somewhere along the line, he nicknamed himself both the “Black Frank White” after Christopher Walken’s drug kingpin in The King Of New York, and the “Rap Alfred Hitchcock”, and not just because he cut a similar famous silhouette. The visions of violence from here on out on Ready To Die are explicit to say the least – “Talk slick, you get your neck slit quick, cuz real street niggas ain’t having that shit” – but never cartoonish or gratuitous; they’re carefully measured to not sound outlandish, and in doing so, you never doubt that these may indeed be things that Biggie saw or did (as opposed to other MCs whose criminal forays were maybe too good to be believed). I’ve talked before about the ‘grim reality’ of ghetto life, especially on Nas’ Illmatic and Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers, but where the former might excel in intelligence and insight, and the latter excels in brute force, Biggie wins by cutting down the middle with plain speaking. He doesn’t mince words, illustrating the stress - “I stay seeing bodies with the muthafucking chalk around it” – the fear – “Little muthafuckers with heat wanna leave a nigga six feet deep” – and the paranoia of adding the criminal world on top of the corrupted ghetto one – “And we’re coming to the wake to make sure all the crying and commotion ain’t a muthafucking fake”.

That paranoia is soaked into the grooves of the throbbing “Warning”, one of the great productions in 90’s Hip-Hop, a massive bump that’ll rattle your car trunk. Easy Mo Bee produced this and five other of the album’s fifteen songs, but because those six are the most by one producer, with the rest of the tracks spread around, it’s Mo Bee’s thick, enveloping funk and heavy beats that provide the sonic signature for the album. Over this beat, Biggie wonders ‘why niggas want to stick him for his paper’, but really, it doesn’t matter; all that matters is that he knows exactly how to deal with the threats to his throne…

Call the coroner; there’s gonna be a lot of slow-singing and flower-bringing if my burglar alarm starts ringing. What you think all the guns is for? All purpose war, got the rottweilers by the door, and I feed them gunpowder so they can devour the criminals tryin’ to drop my decimals…
Bet you Biggie won’t slip; I got the Calico with the black talons loaded in the clip so I can rip through the ligaments, put the fuckers in a bad predicament, where all the foul niggas went. Touch my cheddar, feel my Beretta, buck what I’ma hit you with you muthafuckers better duck. I bring pain, blood stains on what remains of his jacket, he had a gun, he should’ve packed it, cocked it; extra clips in my pocket so I can reload and explode on your asshole. I fuck around and get hardcore, C-4 to your door, no beef no more, nigga…

This is par for the course, and would later conflict with his real life as a celebrity, inspiring the single “Mo Money Mo Problems”. But his defensiveness is only one element of his criminal narratives. The fear he intends to instill in his victims in the flawless “Gimme The Loot” portrays Biggie at his most vicious. I’ll say this for as long as I live: this song is possibly the single most impressive performance by any MC, at least to date. Biggie lays down what on paper appears to be just a bunch of jack-move boasts about “robbing muthafuckers since the slave ships”, but he strings them together as a conversation between two thug partners, rapping as both people, at different pitches, with different flows. I thought it was a guest rapper for months before I realized; it remains jaw-dropping even after the thousandth listen, regardless of whether you’ve been desensitized by the album’s most extreme violence described in the lyrics. Biggie illustrates that these crimes are often spawned by the desperation of poverty – “When it’s time to eat a meal I rob and steal, cuz Ma Duke ain’t giving me shit, so for the bread and butter I leave niggas in the gutter” – and that the lengths that people will go to - “You’re talking to the robbery expert; step into your wake with your blood on my shirt” - is very possibly disproportionate to what they get out of it – “Niggas come through, I’m taking high school rings too; bitches get strangled for their earrings and bangles”.

The breezy “Everyday Struggle”, riding over the same drums as Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray”, focuses on the day-to-day grind of the street-level dealer, and again the poverty of the inner city. The song is key to Biggie’s world because it shows us the hypocrisy of his existence; one second he expresses genuine remorse for his profession, wishing he wasn’t living ‘so devilish’, then the next he sounds almost gleeful about ways to make more money dealing. His operation gets raided, his friend gets murdered, and his woman gets sent up the river for being his drug mule, moaning, “I'm seeing body after body, and our mayor Guiliani ain't trying to see no black man turn to John Gotti”, but then he turns around and plays proud poppa to his daughter. It’s this mapping of the gray areas in the criminal world that Biggie is so incredible at, not unlike the best directors in film, showing the duality of the evils of society, the loving family man who happens to be getting his whole neighborhood hooked on crack.

Biggie mirrors that duality with his take on women, equally schizophrenic. In many places on the album, he plays the misogynist, treating women like they’re there just for his entertainment; he never reaches the Compton level of rudeness, the ‘bitches ain’t shit’ idiom, but a song like “Friend Of Mine” (the album’s weakest song) puts him damn close; the only difference is, for Biggie, he let’s slip that his attitude might have resulted from initial hurt – “When I like you, then you go and fuck my friend, bitch”. Similarly, he spends all of “One More Chance” crowing dirty about how he’s got the “cleanest meanest penis” that will “shatter your bladder” and “make your kidneys shift”, but in the sex skit that immediately follows, when he fucks his girl so hard that she falls off the bed, the first thing out of his mouth is a sheepish “sorry”; his objectification is foggy at best, because at the other end of the spectrum, the G-funky “Big Poppa” is talking strictly to the “ladies in the place with style & grace”, while the chorus calls out to the “honeys getting money playing niggas like dummies”, casting the females in the superior position.

Biggie doesn’t spend the whole album rapping about the streets and the girls – he is an MC after all, and MC’s have to talk about themselves and how awesome they are. There’s no shortage of that on Ready To Die, but what sets Biggie apart is his sharp sense of humor. How better than to describe Biggie’s skills than “Unbelievable”, also the name of the classic track produced by DJ Premier, where the astounding wordplay and punchlines come fast, like the immortal diss, “Your life is played out like Kwamé and them fucking polka dots” or the darkly comic, “The gat’s by your liver, your upper lip quiver; get ready to die, tell God I said hi”. On “Machine Gun Funk”, he’ll “get up in that ass like a wedgie” and he’s “beating muthafuckers like Ike beat Tina”, but it’s the first verse of his smoked-out freestyle duet with Method Man, “The What”, that pretty much packs a laugh a line: niggas is “soft like a Twinkie filling”, their “style is played out like Arnold on that ‘Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?’”, Biggie’s going to “throw dick to dykes”, and he wants “the fuckin’ fortune like the Wheel”. Then he finishes you off by dropping the infamous hiccup into the second verse, something no one saw coming.

It is Biggie as an influence that makes Ready To Die point towards the young black males of the future. He could have never known when he recorded these songs that they would become guides, textbooks, and new rules for the next generation of corner boys and stick-up kids. To look at the ghetto youth of today, and their up-and-coming generation of MC’s, is to know that Biggie’s lyrics are now project manifestos. He lays it out quite easily in “Things Done Changed”, more so than all his other classic lines:

If I wasn’t in the rap game, I’d probably have a ki’ knee deep in the crack game / Because the streets is a short stop; either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump-shot

That line rings true to so many young black males’ daily stresses and limited life-paths, and throughout the album, frank lessons like that were taught unintentionally. Without a doubt, many have gotten ideas of the drug trade from this album, although hopefully they’ve realized that Biggie put it down and walked away, toward a mic, and never went back. It may be more of the same exploitation that he’s been known for since Biggie’s passing, but when Puffy made Da Band learn all the lyrics to “Juicy” up on MTV, there was a specific reason: it is the quintessential rags-to-riches rap song, Biggie in the limelight cuz he rhymes tight. Not only does it convey the struggle to get over (to revisit Curtis’ Superfly), or the overwhelming relief to have made it, but it pulls in all the themes of the album: the reminiscence of back-in-the-day, trying to put the sinning and gats behind him, reconciling with his Mom who had kicked him out. It’s never all positive – surely there are some young men who have unfortunately learned how to mack it to girls from “One More Chance” or “Friend Of Mine”, but the end result is usually something closer to “Me & My Bitch”, which despite the title and its tragic tale, is a song of devotion that, at its base intention, is a good message. The terrifying title track and even more upsetting “Suicidal Thoughts” go a long way to detailing his penchant for violence and depression, but Biggie made sure to explain in pretty much any interview that these are just stories about his past, before he was an MC, and that when he said he was ready to die, he meant he was willing to give 100% to the Rap game; if you risk it all, you must be ready to die.

Looking at it from that angle, the title of the album takes on a whole new meaning: Biggie Smalls’ decision to be an MC, as opposed to a drug dealer, is his great risk; he’s saying he’s ready to die for Hip-Hop, and therefore walking away from crime. Since Biggie emerged as a part of New York’s gritty resurgence, motion picture kingpin figures like Pacino’s Tony Montana and Walken’s Frank White have become icons to the young ghetto male. But what do those characters have in common? They die in the end. They fail. They get shot and killed because there weren’t ready to die by Biggie’s way of thinking – they couldn’t see the risk of walking away as a good one. Biggie’s success made him, right or wrong, into the ultimate ghetto role model, but after the fact. Of course he died in the end too, but that’s his tragedy – he “left the drugs alone” and uplifted himself, he did what he could, but it was someone else’s lack of vision, not giving their 100%, that made them think taking the greatest MC from the world was a good idea.

But we have the music forever. I’m calling this the best Hip-Hop album of the last twenty years (and, essentially, ever) not because the collection of songs is unmatched, but because it contains the best work of the best MC, and if you want to represent an entire genre, shouldn’t you pick the artist who’s best at it? In my #6 entry on DJ Shadow, I reference the 150th issue of The Source, and the best feature is on Biggie Smalls being named the greatest MC of all time. The magazine hints at the most sound theory I’ve ever heard: It’s not that he’s the better than any one MC, whether it’s the lyrics of Rakim, the flow of Big Daddy Kane or Eminem, the passion of 2Pac, the storytelling of Slick Rick, Ice Cube, Kool G Rap, or Scarface, the charisma of LL Cool J or Jay-Z, the intelligence of KRS or Chuck D or Nas. It’s that The Notorious B.I.G. is as good as all of them. That’s why he’s the greatest of all time, and that’s why Ready To Die is #3. Bow before the King of New York.

Tracklist:
01. “Intro” [interlude]
02. “Things Done Changed”
03. “Gimme The Loot”
04. “Machine Gun Funk”
05. “Warning”
- Home Invasion interlude
06. “Ready To Die”
- Answering Machine interlude
07. “One More Chance”
08. “#!*@ Me” [interlude]
09. “The What” [feat. Method Man]
10. “Juicy”
11. “Everyday Struggle”
12. “Me & My Bitch”
- Interview interlude
13. “Big Poppa”
14. “Respect” [feat. Diana King]
- “I don’t be doin’ this” interlude
15. “Friend Of Mine”
16. “Unbelievable”
17. “Suicidal Thoughts”

"Gimme The Loot/Big Poppa" [live in Philadelphia, 1994]
from the documentary The Show

"Warning" [uncensored video]

"Juicy" [uncensored video]

"Unbelievable" [live in Hartford, 1994]

- BONUS: "Intro" [audio]
- BONUS: "Things Done Changed" [fan video]
- BONUS: "Gimme The Loot" [audio]
- BONUS: "Machine Gun Funk" [audio]
- BONUS: "Warning" [live]
- BONUS: "Warning"/interview [live in Philadelphia, 1994]
from the documentary The Show
- BONUS: "Warning" [audio]
- BONUS: "Ready To Die" [audio]
- BONUS: "One More Chance" [audio]
- BONUS: "The What" [audio]
- BONUS: "Juicy" [live in Baltimore]
- BONUS: "Juicy" [audio]
- BONUS: "Everyday Struggle" [audio]
- BONUS: "Me & My Bitch" [audio]
- BONUS: "Big Poppa" [uncensored video]
- BONUS: "Big Poppa" [live at MTV's Spring Break '95]
- BONUS: "Big Poppa" [audio]
- BONUS: "Respect" [audio]
- BONUS: "Friend Of Mine" [audio]
- BONUS: "Unbelievable" [live in Atlanta, 1994]
- BONUS: "Unbelievable" [audio]
- BONUS: "Suicidal Thoughts" [audio]

- BONUS: "Warning/Juicy/Me & My Bitch" medley [live at The Apollo, 1996]
- BONUS: "One More Chance (Stay With Me Remix)" [video]
- BONUS: "One More Chance (Stay With Me Remix)" [live video]
- BONUS: "One More Chance (Stay With Me Remix)" [live at The Apollo]
- BONUS: "One More Chance (Stay With Me Remix)" [live on Martin]
...yes, the Martin Lawrence sitcom. Seriously.

R.I.P. Stan Winston [1946-2008]

2008-06-17T07:18:00.000-04:00

I am faced today with the unavoidable task of writing a goodbye to one of my childhood heroes. Before I wanted to be a writer or a comic book artist, I wanted to be Stan Winston. As far as I am concerned he was the greatest movie magician of the post-Star Wars era. For all the amazing comic book artists that made me want to go pick up a pencil, every time I draw something what I really hope it looks like is one of Stan Winston's creations. He was a four-time Oscar-winning master of make-up and visual effects, but it's in physical effects and animatronics that he wears the crown. If you don't know his name, then you surely know his work...

I learned about Mr. Winston through two of my favorite movies when I was in my early teens: James Cameron's Aliens and Terminator 2. When I found out that the same man was responsible for making these robots and creatures look so real, that was it: I wanted a career in special effects. I subscribed to Cinefex magazine and was all set to go to college at 14. Then I started reading comics...

I never mattered though, because I still love this work. I'll say it again: Winston made everything real. Whether it was hunter aliens with crab faces or dinosaurs tipping over trucks, he did something that computer effects just couldn't do, and note to George Lucas, still can't.

Looking over his credits, it was suprising to know he did far more than I thought he had. Edward's Scissorhands - that was Stan. The creatures of hell in Constantine - Stan. The only good thing about Spielberg's A.I., that robot bear - also Stan.

And if the aliens and terminators weren't enough for me as a teen, it was Jurassic Park that blew me away most. I think it was because everyone was talking about the incredible leaps forward in CGI, but to me the best scene in that movie is the sick Triceratops. Winston did all the physical effects for the movie, and when the walk up to that body, and the belly heaves with breath, well, you'd think dinosaurs were really back on earth.

And his genius extended to the very end. When Jon Favreau made the brilliant decision to make as much of Iron Man without CGI as possible, he turned to Stan Winston. Winston made the suits, and Tony Stark's escape from the desert cave in the original armor will stand as one of Winston's high points forever.

And so I say goodbye to one of my heroes, but am confident in the fact that his legacy will stay eternal in the history of film.
- IMDB news story
- IMDB credits

Headphones: R.E.M.'s Accelerate

2008-06-02T23:39:00.000-04:00

Do you know anyone who would call R.E.M. their favorite band? Me neither. If you do, they are probably about 40 years old, and they discovered Fables Of The Reconstruction or Life’s Rich Pageant in their freshman year of college. But why is that? We’ve all met thousands of die hard music fans. I know at least a handful of people that swear by everything Mike Patton does (even those bedroom experiments), and I know at least two Rocket From The Crypt fans that genuflect at Speedo’s feet. I think one of the reasons R.E.M. hasn’t inspired crazed and obsessive fandom in people my age and younger is because there’s always at least one issue that prevents their albums from being the kind of disc you pull off the shelf for fun; their albums are frequently over-serious mixed bags, so it curbs someone wanting to be really into them. You listen to R.E.M. because you want to listen to them specifically, not just cuz you want some music on.

That’s why Accelerate, their fourteenth album, is such a nice surprise – its upside is that it’s listenable to a ridiculously pleasant degree. That doesn’t mean it’s not another mixed bag – it is, though it’s much less so than their last decade of work, as well as easing up on the big meanings. Where this new album succeeds is with what I think is the problem within the arc of their career: it’s all about audience expectations, right or wrong. R.E.M. has always been a melancholy band, but when they broke out, they did so largely on a string of singles pulled from their sunnier side; “It’s The End Of The World”, “Stand”, “Pop Song 89”, “Shiny Happy People”, etc, all gave balance to the gloom of “The One I Love”, “Orange Crush”, and “Losing My Religion”. And then they hit the world with the mixed messages of album-length stylistic explorations Automatic For The People and Monster. The world didn’t know what to think, and so they didn’t know what they wanted from R.E.M., and the great but confusing New Adventures In Hi-Fi definitely provided zero answers. It’s much like when U2’s audience rolled with the change of Achtung Baby, and the band rewarded the good faith with the perplexing single “Numb” and Zooropa; while the tour still did well, the album tanked, and people tuned out on Pop which, while spotty, had a handful of classic U2 songs buried underneath the gloss of “Discotheque”. And so, I propose that Accerlerate could be to R.E.M. what All That You Can’t Leave Behind was to U2: a fresh start in the eyes of the public. With the first single “Supernatural Superserious” sounding like everyone’s favorite R.E.M. song rolled into one, as well as a beefed up cover of “There She Goes” by The La’s, they might actually get their second chance.

The world wants the fun R.E.M., and the band responds here with fun-sounding songs. That doesn’t mean their lyrics are light-hearted, it just means they play with infectious energy. At this point in their careers, there is nothing stopping R.E.M. from doing whatever they want, and usually when musicians get to that point they put out albums heavily informed by what they liked when they formed a band in the first place (see Eric Clapton’s From The Cradle, ironically released the same day as Monster). It is fathomable that Peter Buck, Mike Mills & Michael Stipe sat down and decided that if they were going to continue to do this, then it had to be fun for them too. That is one of the two things that drive this album. The fun they’re having stirring up a racket, probably echoing their favorite songs from the 70’s and early 80’s (like the very post-punky title track), promotes the energetic performances, especially from Buck, who even on the album’s two weakest tracks, “Mr. Richards” and “Sing For The Submarine”, keeps you swirling around with fascinating guitar mastery.

The album rarely slows down, clocking in at a refreshingly brisk 35 minutes (five of the eleven songs finish up before the 3-minute mark; only two exceed 4 minutes). On “Living Well Is The Best Revenge”, “Horse To Water” and the already classic “I’m Gonna DJ”, they’re striving to reclaim the breathless rush of songs like “End Of The World” and “Star 69”, but wisely stop the songs when they’ve said what they have to say. The other thing driving the album is the smart decision to record with the touring lineup, featuring longtime fifth member Scott McCaughey and former Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin. R.E.M. has always had an unblemished live reputation, and Rieflin makes them ten times stronger, bashing away like a kid twenty-five years his junior, finally the perfect replacement for human metronome Bill Berry. Even slower, less aggressive songs like “Houston” and “Until The Day Is Done” retain a forcefulness that the band hasn’t possessed in years. In the end, this may not be the perfect R.E.M. album, but is there such a thing? What Accelerate can be though, sounding not unlike a cross between Big Star's Radio City and Wire's Pink Flag, is the R.E.M. album you actually want to take off the shelf and play all the way through, and for a band eyeing thirty years of existence, that’s about as much as we can hope for.

"Supernatural Superserious" [video]

"Living Well Is The Best Revenge" [acoustic, in a car]

Netflix Diary 7

2008-05-28T23:00:00.001-04:00

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God [1972]
I wanted to see this after enjoying last year’s Rescue Dawn, because I had always heard how good it was, and how in a lot of ways it is the…technical forerunner to director Werner Herzog’s 2007 expedition. But ya know what? I was bored to tears by Aguirre. I understand how much of an impossible feat the production was, trekking a film crew and actors in full suits of real armor through the South American jungle – it’s all right there on the screen – but that doesn’t mean it makes a good film. The story is skeletal, with half the scenes being improvised, and the acting is alternately forced, amateurish or nonexistent. It’s not a completely bad film, illustrating madness and paranoia pretty well, and the craft does count for something, but I just found it profoundly disappointing for all the cultish hype it gets.

A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints [2006]
I really really wanted to like this movie, because, as I’ve said, I like Shia LaBeouf, and I really like the recent choices of Robert Downey Jr. Actually, I did like this movie, and I do recommend it, but I do so with some reservations. The movie totally hinges on the good performances of these two lead actors (playing the young and old versions of the same person, Dito Montiel), as well as the fact that it’s simply a filmed autobiography, adapted and directed by Montiel himself. NOW, the rest of the movie is merely good. The situations are interesting, though sometimes not well drawn enough, and unfortunately the characters are mostly unlikable, though Irish Mike is cool...but I can’t shake the fact that I wanted young Dito to escape his world not because I was rooting for him, but because I was rooting against the world. Apparently, this is just one of the short stories from the original book, which continues with Dito fronting a hardcore band among other things, so maybe that’s the place to start. Otherwise, this is just another in a long line of coming-of-age dramas that take place in the five boroughs of New York City.

[004] Paul's Boutique

2008-05-23T17:55:00.003-04:00

Album: Paul’s Boutique
Artist: Beastie Boys
Release Date: July 1989
Label: Capitol
Producers: The Dust Brothers (Mike Simpson & John King), Matt Dike, and Beastie Boys, with Mario Caldato Jr.

“Well if your world was all black,
And your world was all white,
Then you wouldn’t get much color out of life now, right?”
- from “Dropping Names”

Oriental girls, Italian women, Upper East Side nubiles, topless dancers, Southern belles, stewardesses flying around the world. House parties, aluminum bats, rocking mics, staring at radios, B-Boy limps, Mardi Gras floats, billy-goat beards, disco calls, the Funky Four + 1, onion rings, DJ Hurricane, lava lamps, Patty Duke, peg legs, “Full Clout”, bong rips, Sam the Butcher bringing Alice the meat, Fred Flintstone’s bald feet, whippets, dookie rope chains, ‘Clarence’, the bump. Johnny Ryall the rockabilly bum, Mayor Ed Koch, the Bowery, “Maggie’s Farm”, hand-me-down Pumas & tie-dye shirts, Memphis, gold teeth & gold records, Louis Vuitton & Gucci, Nighttrain & O.E., Donald Trump, Wonder Bread bag-shoes, “Helter Skelter” & “Blue Suede Shoes”, Elvis in the army. Superfly, Egg Man with his egg gun, Humpty Dumpty, a Rastaman, “You’re Gonna Get Yours” & “Bring The Noise”, the Easter Bunny, Dolemite & The Mack, Eric Haze, Green Eggs & Ham, Yosemite Sam, crack pipes, Jaws & Psycho. High Plains Drifter, Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas, 8-tracks, Kool cigarettes, cellular phones, Travis Bickle, plowing over mail boxes, Motel 6 porno flicks, black and tans in brandy snifters, K-Mart & 7-11, Jell-o & lemonade, Steve McQueen, Ballantine with the puzzle caps, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry & Dirty Harry, “Your Momma Don’t Dance”, Otis the drunk, Nix Check Cashing, Harry Houdini (as a verb), Off-Track Betting, “Suzy Is A Headbanger”. The Beatles, Range Rovers, Naugels, Isaac Newton, Ben Franklin, the times-table, J.C., Shea Stadium, The Palladium, B.D.P., “waxing and milking all of your square heads”???, girls covered in honey, a Quarter Pounder deluxe, ‘jimmy protectors’, facials, cops cooking up the crack, Ponce De Leon & the Fountain of Youth, Robotron, Pro: Adidas & sinsemilla, Anti: Fila (?) & cocaine, Cheech Wizard, Galileo. Ping Pong, Dragnet, Mr. Roper, the N.Y. Yankees, Mrs. Crabtree & Spanky, “Proud Mary”, Ring Dings, hopping turnstyles, “Doo Wah Diddy”, chillin’ like Bob Dylan, sucking your mother’s dick, Mothership Connection, ‘sorry, Charlie’, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, coconut lotion, Are You Experienced, P.C.P. Sadaharu Oh, Tom Thumb, Tom Cushman, or Tom Foolery, Chuck Woolery, the Grand Canyon, moccasins & a bib, Welcome Back, Kotter, the gift of gab, the blue-plate crab special at Woodman’s in Essex, Mass., James at 15 or Chachi in charge, white Sassoons, a Coupe De Ville, “Ain’t It Funky”, Vincent Van Gogh’s ear, throwing trash cans through windows, the 6 train, a one ton ho, beatnik chicks just wearing their smocks, “Ballroom Blitz”. Jethro’s too close to the BBQ, Skin the cat. Chuck Chillout, stolen cars, “Mississippi Queen” & “Funky Cold Medina”, Rambo, Bruce Willis, Dave Scilken, the Son of Sam, A Clockwork Orange, curse words, headless chicken, free-base, racism. Pool hall brawls, bingo & lotto, townies & hash brownies, Mookie, ‘I’m a farmer’, Ecstasy, elephant tranquilizer, money-hungry miser…Rush not Rush, the ‘Bowie coke mirror’, Ricky Powell, The Godfather of Soul, St. Anthony’s feast, wife beaters & tax cheaters in the White House, cops with rope chains selling cheeba, space cake cookies, “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, more Five-O. Cherry red Lee press-on nails, Rapunzel, ‘the wet look’ vs. baldness, pasta primavera & Geraldo Rivera, brown-noses, Dolomite (again), “Beat On The Brat”, Phil Rizzuto, ‘Funky Pam’, Alabama, Penicillin, Doris the finkasaurus. “Loose Booty”, The Batman 60’s TV show, smokin’ and drinkin’ on a Tuesday night, “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You”, “Amazing Grace”, Al (from S.S. Decontrol), Shadrach, Mesach, Abednego, the Putney Swope sequel, Jacoby & Meyers, the Atlantic Antic, Adidas, Rambo (again), Robin Hood, J.D. Salinger, Charles Dickens, The Colonel’s chicken, Harry S. Truman, Alfred E. Newman, Jerry Lee Swaggart or Jerry Lee Falwell, Mario Andretti, Fleetwood Brougham D’elegance. ‘For the best in men’s clothing, call 718-498-1043 - ask for Janice’. DMC, The Fat Boys, Dick Butkus, Jelly Roll Morton, over in Fresno, Rolos, Hasenpfeffer Ale, taking the D train to Coney Island, transfer to the 1, the New York Post, Fulton Street, trench coats & wing tips, Captain Kirk, pick-pocket gangsters, Bernie Goetz, prostitutes in spandex, turtlenecks & creased Lee’s, Dunkin Donuts, Jamaica, Queens, El Diario, Orange Julius, George Dakoulias, skiing, lions with wings, more black & tans, ultimate destiny, Disco Dave, gold finger knuckles, buffalo soldiers with sawed off shotguns making bombs, “Broader Than Broadway”, M-O-N-E-Y, Annabelle & Slick Nick, “Folsom Prison Blues”, seeing ghosts, Shamrock – not Shamus, O’Houlihy, nor Brian, Bob Marley, Chinese suits, Hawthorne Wingo, Napoleon Bonaparte, Cezanne, Joe Blow the Lover Man, Fruit Stripe Gum, butter your muffin, bait & tackle, Red Lobster, Spinach D, Raymond Burr, “The Village”, trips, funky beats, & bugging out to it, good times & going A.W.O.L in Amsterdam…

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of Paul’s Boutique.

This is a lost world, a place that no modern map can lead to, a utopia that nurtured us but that we can never find our way back to. It is like the Lost island of Hip-Hop. They always say (you know, “They”), “They broke the mold when they made it.” Well, on this one, it’s true. And who is “they” who broke the mold? Greedy lawyers and bitter, short-sighted out-of-touch former artists that forgot what it means to make something new and challenge the status quo. They delivered the devastating blow to sampling with a blade thrust into Hip-Hop’s side, right under the ribs, left to bleed out; but Hip-Hop and sampling survived, begrudgingly learning to live with the new limitations. Sure, feeling ripped off can be a valid reaction – I’m not going to discount that – but maybe have the heart to recognize the New that is steam-rolling the world around you whether you like it or not, and be selfless for once...not to mention fuckin’ manning up if someone takes your song and makes a better one out of it. What did Jay say? “You made it a hot line. I made it a hot song.” Yeah, exactly.

As we come to the end of this list, and I assert my celebration of Hip-Hop (always unfortunate that it must also act as a defense), it is only right that I note that this is the most visionary Hip-Hop album of all time – musically. Let’s be honest, the Beastie Boys are good MC’s, and on Paul’s Boutique they did present what can now be seen as their best rhymes and best flows – so many years before nadirs of “ice is cold and fire’s hot” (from the otherwise cool “Unite”) or the regrettable single “Ch-Check It Out” (save for the ‘fressshhhh attire’) – not to mention creating the kitschy, widescreen new dimension I illustrated above, but this album was really all about fresh tracks. If the beat is Hip-Hop’s heart, then sampling was its blood for the entire 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s. In finding its foothold as the new voice of the youth of the world, Hip-Hop’s artists chose as the music’s vehicle the dismantling of the culture of their parents’ youth. Sampling in early Hip-Hop was the ultimate in youth rebellion; it is the opposite of the cover song. The cover song is a tribute, not to just a song being musically sound, but also to the idea. Sampling rejects the idea, or at least intends to rewrite it; it says to the older generation, “Yeah, we hear what you’re trying to put across, and we see that you and yours get such-n-such out of it, but this is what we’re getting out of the same sources over here, one generation removed”. The artist doing the sampling chooses his or her samples for maximum impact, for shock value – it’s a question of force, even if the music he or she is making is not forceful. Hip-Hop in the late 80’s was an art form fighting for respect and recognition, and so the artists had to make that much more noise to get attention. At the time, the Beastie Boys were growing to be experts in this, and on Paul’s Boutique, they united with more genius minds that worked like theirs did.

According to the legends, the unsung hero of the Paul’s Boutique sessions was Delicious Vinyl co-founder Matt Dike. First an assistant to artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, next a DJ and club promoter, and then mastermind behind Tone Loc and Young MC, Dike has been described almost as the Hip-Hop Syd Barrett; he was known to DJ parties from closets, and even when he was actively working on this album, he’d lock himself alone in his bedroom and just pour over his crates of vinyl for samples, while everyone else was in his living room where the equipment was. But it is through him that all the pieces came together in Hollywood in 1988 that would lead to this massive record. Mike Simpson and John King, soon to be dubbed The Dust Brothers, were college DJ’s dabbling in making tracks, and met Dike through Tone Loc when he got signed to Delicious Vinyl. Recording engineer (and future Beasties producer) Mario Caldato had hooked up with Dike to help with both sound at his clubs and with the recording equipment in his apartment. The Beasties, in a heady malaise from their Def Jam woes, simply came to Dike looking for the tastemaker to point them in the direction of a good time. Instead Dike played them a tape of The Dust Brothers’ new tracks, tracks so hectic that Young MC and Loc could never hope to rhyme over them, and it was all over.

The blueprint for this campaign was “Full Clout”, the Dust Brothers’ cut-up instrumental Funk breakbeat dancefloor monster - featuring samples of Funky Four +1, Average White Band, Afrika Bambaataa, Led Zeppelin, Brothers Johnson & more - that they would kill Cali clubs with; when they played it for the visiting Beasties, the Boys begged for a copy to take home and try to rhyme over. The Dust Brothers thought: no way – it’s too erratic and fast to rap on. But sure enough, the Boys delivered. Redubbed “Shake Your Rump”, and complete with a disco call and an infamous bong hit, it kicked off the creative avalanche that would amount to Paul’s Boutique. The record was getting made. It was a meeting of the geniuses. Dike had the ideas, Simpson had the DJ chops, King and Caldato had the tech know-how, and the Beasties brought the warped, irrepressible energy and open minds.

The ultimate example, or at least the biggest statement, of the Beasties role in the sampling rebellion is “The Sounds Of Science”. The Dust Brothers and Dike smashed all preconceived notions of what the music of The Beatles, the world’s most famous band, could become, grafting bits of “Sgt. Pepper’s” to “The End” and a whole chunk of “When I’m Sixty-Four”. The admittedly very white and mostly un-funky Beatles were kind of a Hip-Hop no-no, for legal reasons; they’re even more of one now. It’s like getting away with sampling the anti-sampling Prince (Arrested Development, raise your hands). You sit on the edge of your couch, staring at the phone, waiting for your lawyer to tell you you’re getting sued. So in that way, the Beasties were able to put on the table a slice of sampling gold, and not only prove as fresh and rebellious as Public Enemy or N.W.A., but by deconstructing the most-beloved touchstone of the baby-boomer culture, they also bucked the rest of Hip-Hop sampling James Brown, structuring the majority of the song’s lyrics around very un-Hip-Hop subjects (like, um, science). Of course, the second half of the song also contains tossed off lines like “Went berserk and worked and exploded, she woke up in the morning and her face was coated,” as lascivious as anything they oozed out on the first album.

In fact, critics are constantly talking about the leap in maturity on Paul’s Boutique, but other than not talking about wiffle ball bats and smoking dust, they didn’t mature that much; “59 Chrystie Street” would be right at home on Licensed To Ill. In fact, most of their “advances” would fall under Chris Rock’s ‘Whaddya want: a cookie?’ scenario. It’s like, yes, we realize that coke & crack are wack, and yet other forms of drunken and/or drug-assisted adventures are apparently OK. Built over an obscure Funk Factory sample, “Car Thief” (where Fun Lovin’ Criminals stole their sound from) is much more than its title, loaded with all sorts of drug use (smoking elephant tranquilizer = cure for Def Jam headache) rubbing elbows with sly social commentary. They’ve just painted their pictures and written their fables in new, vivid, and much funnier ways. While, yes, there is “Johnny Ryall”, the detailed tale of the plight of the homeless, that homeless man is a hysterical caricature, a fictitious rockabilly star with no royalties to collect and left to begging on the street. Shit, there’s less in the song about helping the homeless as there are parallels to be drawn between Johnny and the Beasties’ new attitude towards the record company’s treatment of artists in the wake of their stressful extrication from Def Jam’s clutches.

The reprehensible activities are found throughout the album, and their new crime narratives almost act as multiple extensions of the debut’s immortal “Paul Revere”; it isn’t just the Superfly-sampling, egg-tossing drive-bys in “Egg Man”. “Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun” seethes about ultra-violence, and “Hello Brooklyn” deals with a sociopathic bomb-maker targeting city officials and sticking up old ladies. The most obvious example is “High Plains Drifter” - constructed out of little more than a loop of the beat from the Eagles' "Those Shoes" - once again mining the American outlaw myth for their dangerous cool, but this time a much grander tall tale, laced with intricate asides and footnotes, and one of the best examples of the Boys’ masterful vocal interplay, at times trading lyrics word by word. In fact, this turns out to be one of the enduring triumphs of the album: as, specifically, a Hip-Hop unit, the trio is unparalleled in wordplay. Simply trading lines like Run-DMC was not nearly enough. The three of them experiment with all different configurations and doubling effects, giving the impression that they are parts of a whole, operating as one consciousness; their arrangements on “Shadrach” are just as incredible, somehow avoiding ever stepping on each other’s toes.

OK, so Paul’s Boutique is a classic record an all, but it’s more than that, and it’s only after so many years that we can recognize its real achievements. First, it’s one of the greatest artistic turning points in music history, a startling sharp left like What’s Going On, London Calling, or Kid A. We all know the story – the Beasties quit Def Jam cuz Russell wasn’t handing over the Licensed to Ill cash, the critics all thought they were a joke, as good as the debut was, and that they were destined to be a one-album wonder. No one expected anything this futuristically retro in aesthetic. And we even know that when it came out, despite great reviews, Paul’s Boutique was a relative bomb, never even touching the top ten (whereas Licensed To Ill was the first Hip-Hop album to hit #1). But the Boys hadn’t set out to make a hit. They wanted to make whatever they liked. Like the aforementioned classics, it is a brilliant example of an album smashing artistic preconceptions and helping an entire genre to turn a corner. But there’s something more in there, in between the doubt and the triumph, something that’s more than music.

The Boys now claim that they were in-character on Licensed To Ill, playing the roles of drunken misogynists, but they also admit that the roleplay became reality as they spent most days inebriated and hopping on groupies. With Paul’s Boutique they slide into what could be considered their ‘true character’, the personas they would hold for the rest of their career – Adrock always the fast-mouthed clown, Mike D the suave connoisseur of art and kitsch, MCA the musical and spiritual vagabond, all three lovable laidback stoners. These personalities, of course far deeper and more multi-faceted than these simplified descriptions allow, ooze out of the Beasties’ music starting with this album, and have carried the group to a rare level of…not popularity, but of acceptance into our homes and lives. On “What Comes Around”, we get to hear the Beasties as close to their true selves as they had let on up to that point, just screwing around in the studio, riffing on “Funky Pam” Turbov’s name just for laughs, and there’s plenty more flippancy where that came from on the separated Siamese “Get On The Mic” and “Mike On The Mic”. Even on a song as understated and hassle-free as the dubbed-out “3-Minute Rule”, the personality and attitude come through loud and clear, no softer than their earlier Def Jam personas, and yet miles removed. We’ve all grown up with the Beastie “boys”, and they’ve grown as men in many obvious ways, traveling figuratively farther than most acts ever even consider being possible. The Beastie Boys have become like the fun uncles that make tedious family gatherings worth the aggravation.

Furthermore, the Boys’ unquenchable thirst for the edge of entertainment and pop culture novelty amplified their musical evolution, and in that evolution, that warm fuzzy feeling that the Boys give us, lies the reason Paul’s Boutique is one of the essential albums of its generation. Their entire way of being while recording Paul’s Boutique informs the all-inclusive spirit of the soon-to-be-launched Alternative movement, which is to say that while these songs don’t necessarily sound like the ragged Rock to come, the musical open-mindedness that Perry Farrell would promote with his Lollapalooza festivals was already proposed and best demonstrated on this album by the Beastie Boys. It’s somewhat strange to think that when a piece of art is hailed as ‘ahead of its time’, the implication is a kind of prescience, aimed at “The Future”; Paul’s Boutique was ahead of its time, but only by a couple years, and so it’s that much more perplexing why it wasn’t more successful.

And while it didn’t take off immediately, Paul’s Boutique was vindicated three years later, when the Beasties released Check Your Head, and were hailed as Alternative innovators, pushing the idea wider by picking up their instruments again (they do it here for the first time since the hardcore days, on the lumbering “Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun”) tossing groovy instrumental funk and Latin Jazz in the same mixing bowl as hardcore rants, spiritual tone poems (first touched on here by MCA’s mysterious “A Year And A Day”), and the usual boom bap. The influence is endless, with the best examples being Beck – as the quintessential 90’s Alternative artist, the perfect synthesis of second-hand Rock and Hip-Hop, the approach of this one album applied to an entire career – and the soundtracks to Quentin Tarantino’s films. Tarantino understood like the Beasties did that good music is good music, no matter if the genre it’s stuck in is supposedly currently out of favor; the landmark soundtrack for Pulp Fiction had teenagers who were into Soundgarden and Alice In Chains all of a sudden grooving to past classics by Dick Dale, Kool & The Gang, Dusty Springfield, and Al Green. Those teenagers were primed by the Beastie Boys, no doubt about it, and it makes you wonder how the swirling declaration of independence “Shadrach” and the disco-puzzle masterpiece “Hey Ladies” weren’t certified hits. Some things can be so good they can defy a backlash, especially when they’re based on pure fun, but that doesn’t mean that the world is ready; sometimes they just want the same ol’ crap. But instead of delivering a boring sophomore platter set in the same raw black and white as Licensed To Ill, the Beastie Boys went with their hearts, flanked by other creative people that shared they desire to paint in the entire spectrum of color, and gave the youth of the world the blueprint to their future.

Tracklist:
01. “To All The Girls” [interlude]
02. “Shake Your Rump”
03. “Johnny Ryall”
04. “Egg Man”
05. “High Plains Drifter”
06. “The Sounds Of Science”
07. “3-Minute Rule”
08. “Hey Ladies”
09. “5-Piece Chicken Dinner” [interlude]
10. “Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun”
11. “Car Thief”
12. “What Comes Around”
13. “Shadrach”
14. “Ask For Janice” [interlude]
15. “B-Boy Bouillabaisse”
- a) “59 Chrystie Street”
- b) “Get On The Mic”
- c) “Stop That Train”
- d) “A Year And A Day”
- e) “Hello Brooklyn”
- f) “Dropping Names”
- g) “Lay It On Me”
- h) “Mike On The Mic”
- i) “A.W.O.L. / To All The Girls (Reprise)”

"Shake Your Rump" [single edit - video]

"Egg Man" [live in NYC, 10.06]

"Hey Ladies" [video]

"Shadrach" [video]

- BONUS: "Shake Your Rump" [live at the 1996 Tibetan Freedom Contest]
- BONUS: "Shake Your Rump" [live in NYC, 10.06]
- BONUS: "Shake Your Rump" [live in Montreal, 09.07]
- BONUS: "Shake Your Rump" demo [audio]
- BONUS: "Johnny Ryall" [audio]
- BONUS: "High Plains Drifter" [fan video]
- BONUS: "High Plains Drifter" [audio]
- BONUS: "The Sounds Of Science" [audio]
- BONUS: "3-Minute Rule" [audio]
- BONUS: "Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun" [video]
- BONUS: "Car Thief" [audio]
- BONUS: "What Comes Around" [audio]
- BONUS: "Ask For Janice" part 2 [home video]
Black & white home video of the album cover shoot, soundtracked by the original Paul's Boutique radio ad that the album version was based on.
- BONUS: "B-Boy Bouillabaisse" parts B-H [audio]
- BONUS: "Hello Brooklyn" [live in NYC, 10.04]

Netflix Diary 6

2008-05-13T00:08:00.000-04:00

2 Days In Paris [2007]
I want to recommend this, but I hesitate because your enjoyment kind of depends on your sense of humor. If you like slapstick and Adam Sandler lowbrow type of stuff, you’ll hate this. If you like what I call “uncomfortable humor” – like if you love Christopher Guest’s movies, love The Office, but prefer the Ricky Gervais Office to the Steve Carrell Office – you’ll probably dig this. I was on the fence, because I did an equal amount of laughing out loud and cringing in discomfort. If I was Adam Goldberg’s character, I would’ve split way early in the trip. Overall though, Julie Delpy does a pretty good job of juggling the raunchy writing, semi-guerrilla directing and bi-lingual acting.

The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters [2007]
I don’t want to form too much of a pre-opinion for you – I’ll just say that it’s a fucking masterful documentary, one of the best I’ve ever seen. If you like documentaries or just movies in general, you need to see this. Hollywood wishes it could write a screenplay this fuckin' perfect.

Who is Yorick Brown?

2008-05-12T02:02:00.003-04:00

“Comic book, ever the entertainment choice of juvenile delinquents...
...The format has all the advantages of film and none of the drawbacks. It’s the cheapest way to get our unfiltered vision into as many hands as possible... We could create something new, something that challenges our audience at the same time it’s helping them escape. Artists are supposed to hold a mirror up to society, but ours could be a...a fucked-up funhouse mirror!”
- from Y: The Last Man #54 (April 2007)

I am not breaking any news here; I am admittedly late to this party. This is certainly common knowledge to anyone that keeps up with comic books. Y: The Last Man is among the greatest comics of all time. In my opinion it can stand along side Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and pretty much anything else you care to nominate. I might even say it's the best of them all. My friend Rick, who turned me onto the book, compared the thirst for new issues during its recently concluded regular run to heroin addiction, and I've fell into fixing just like everyone before me. 60 issues equals about 1500 pages, and I read them all. In three frantic, euphoric days. Wizard Magazine, comic bible for the last 17 years, recently named the first issue as the best comic released during the magazine's lifetime, suggesting you "dig out your copy of Y #1 and give it to any of your non-comics-reading friends with the simple instructions 'Read this.' We guarantee the first issue won't be their last."

Running from 2002 through this past January, this masterful work by writer Brian K. Vaughn and artist Pia Guerra is so many wonderful things at once. It's sci-fi, it's comedy, it's tragedy, it's a road story around the globe, it's romance, it's political and societal commentary. The story revolves around an unemployed 22-year-old English-lit grad and budding escape artist named Yorick Brown, the greatest fictional character for our times, full of smart-ass sarcastic wit, hidden smarts, and endless pop culture references, and of course the most important part - he's the last man on Earth.

One day, every mammal with a Y chromosome on the planet drops dead, except Mr. Brown and his pet monkey Ampersand. They are alone together adrift in a world of women. Now every guy always says 'oh, awesome'. Yeah well, if you were the last guy on Earth and were being chased by an angry gang of chicks intent on snuffing out the last remnants of the oppressive patriarchy - or whatever - you wouldn't be so stoked.

The comic ends up developing 4 or 5 concurrent plots at once, and by the time you're in the final 20 issues, that's doubled. The obvious questions - Why did Yorick survive? How will they repopulate? - are combined with emotional human drama as Yorick & Ampersand are joined on their journey by spy/bodyguard Agent 355 and genetic engineer Dr. Alison Mann, asking deeper questions like how does one continue a life after such a global tragedy, or why do men & women really need each other, and of course, how does Yorick get from Brooklyn to the Australian Outback to reunite with his girlfriend? These sixty stories, one-issue fables or parts of larger arcs, will make you ache with joy or deflate with sadness, sometimes both at once. When I finished, I felt small and insignificant in its presence.

I recommend this book, now collected as 10 trade-paperback volumes (#10 is released in June) about as highly as possible. In the end, it's a spectacular piece of fiction, possibly this generation's On The Road - it is indeed that good - though Vaughn is less about revolutionizing prose than he is a slave to his vivid characters and their world. His story was good enough to win him his hero, Buffy/Firefly creator Joss Whedon, as a new colleague and friend, not to mention a position on the writing staff of ABC's Lost (as magnificent a show as this is a comic), and his obvious genius with wrapping up all loose ends of a huge, multi-plotted story bodes well for that show's final two seasons. And of course there's already a movie in development, optioned before the comic was even finished. DJ Caruso (Disturbia) is at work on the first of a planned trilogy to star his go-to star Shia LaBeouf (a pretty good casting choice for Yorick). But the comic is so deep, I don't know if a trilogy is enough; maybe that's just my intense love for this book talking. Regardless, it's not important for now. What is important is everyone getting their hands on Y: The Last Man. Buy it, then lend it to all your friends. That's what I plan to do. Mostly because then I can shut up about how fuckin' good it is.

Netflix Diary 5

2008-05-05T23:34:00.003-04:00

The Wild Bunch [1969]
Easily one of the ten great Westerns of all time, this is just as revolutionary as Bonnie & Clyde when it comes to pushing the boundaries of film in the late 1960’s. Besides the fact that the violence is still fairly excessive by today’s standards, with the body count up around 150, it’s also one of the earliest films I can think of off the top of my head with gratuitous nudity in it (nothing like a few Mexican whores swimming in vats of red wine). Not just that, but the film’s finale is a pioneering example of the kind of jump cut editing that would become popular in the post-MTV late 80’s and early 90’s, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine are spectacular as aging desperados attempting to retire, and Sam Peckinpah’s direction is flawless throughout, especially on the tense (and improvised) train robbery sequence.

Bridge To Terabithia [2007]
I read a really good review of this movie when it came out, but never found the time to see it. I was flipping past the SAG Awards and saw that the girl lead, AnnaSophia Robb, was nominated for Best Young Actress, and so I was curious again. I had it on my Netflix, but ended up catching it on cable one weekend morning, and I was surprised how good it was. The studio totally botched the advertising for this one, because not one ad hinted at the power of the story, instead trying to pimp the Walden Media effects team, which is really only 20% of the film, if that much. All the kid actors are great, especially Robb, who looks like a future star from the moment she gets on screen. The climax is heavy duty, so have your tissues at the ready. It’s not a film revolution, but it is a really good movie about how kids deal with loss, guilt, and regret, and the filmmakers made an honest movie that doesn’t insult their audience’s intelligence like the studio’s marketing did.

Overpriced Popcorn: Iron Man

2008-05-01T17:58:00.000-04:00

Overpriced is right - $5.45 for a medium that would be a small at any other theater. But that's OK. Last night, I'm at the world-famous Ziegfield Theater in New York City. For as long as I can remember - literally, since I was like 2 years old - I've wanted to see a movie in this theater, because for my whole life, seeing TV stories on the rampant success of the original Star Wars Trilogy, the Ziegfeld was always shown as the theater to premiere these great fan-friendly summer blockbusters, like NYC's less pretentious answer to Mann's Chinese Theater in LA. And now I'm here, with the ornate lights on the walls and velvet and leather everywhere. It looks like the Playboy Mansion. The reason I am here is because my oldest friend Chris recently completed an internship at Marvel Comics, and before he left, they put him on the list +1 for the company's Iron Man screening. What, I said? I get to see Iron Man with the Marvel offices, complete with rah-rah speech by former comic-art-genius and present Marvel head Joe Quesada?? Count me the fuck in, for realz son! But let me get to the point - is the movie any good?

Yes. A hundred times yes. Taken with the grain of salt that comes with the genre of comic book films, this is nearly as much of a success as Batman Begins was three years ago. Director Jon Favreau (Zathura, Elf) has put together a flashy action film that is stuffed to the seams with emotion, fun and A-list acting. Robert Downey Jr. carries this film on his (come)back the whole way, with at least as much coolness as he had in the masterful (and sorely overlooked) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - CSR's top film of 2005; he exudes so much charm and honed personality as the billionaire weapons manufacturer Tony Stark that you have to know something special is going on here. It is. Having realized the folly of hiring two first-time writers to draft the screenplay, Favreau and Marvel Studios (this is the comic powerhouse's first experiment in developing a film on its own; Hulk reboot to follow in June) went out and got the writing duo who worked magic with Children Of Men - CSR's top film of 2006 - to add some weight to the high-speed smashings and bashings. It definitely worked, but also of note is that they weren't done writing when the film started shooting last year. Downey joked on David Letterman's show last night about throwing out the script every morning, and it turns out he wasn't entirely joking; Downey's ability to improvise flawlessly within the tone of the scene coupled with Favreau's feel for the whole piece apparently need to get a hell of a lot of credit for the success of this film.

As a blockbuster chosen to open the summer, Iron Man is perfect. Audiences will have so much fun with this movie even if they have no idea about the comic book background like they did with the big four - Spidey, Supes, Bats, & the Mutants. In the scheme of superheroes on the big screen, only the aforementioned Begins and Spider-Man 2 are better. Downey inhabits the role of the self-centered, alcoholic womanizer with flair, and his efforts are followed by an equally kind & sexy performance by Gwyneth Paltrow and a correctly-measured over-the-top villain turn by Jeff "The Dude" Bridges. Even further, the combinations of physical effects (robot suits by action movie GIANT Stan Winston) and brilliant visual effects by - duh - ILM are almost as good as Downey. The Iron Man suit is every bit as good as the Transformers were bad, and the aerial sequences and climactic battle are wonderfully orchestrated, divebombing kamikaze popcorn spectacle. No matter how much the popcorn costs, the price of admission is cheap for the rollercoaster thrills you'll get at Iron Man.

Special superhero film rating:

Headphones: Be Your Own Pet's Get Awkward

2008-04-30T07:16:00.001-04:00

I like the old school Punk Rock. I like it a lot. Actually, I probably like it way more than a man my age should like it, although considering Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore signed BYOP, I really have zero to be self-conscious about. I remember a guy I worked with once wondering how I could possibly evolve my music tastes backwards – I loved sweet singer-songwriter stuff and classic Rock heavy on 10-minute solos when I was 17, but now I can barely even tolerate that stuff. I need my music LOUD, raucous, and (mostly) short and snappy. My attention span is shrinking as I age. Be Your Own Pet fit the bill nicely by piecing together all my favorite parts of the second wave of US punk, from Misfits to Black Flag, Descendents to Bad Brains, Avengers to Replacements. Howling pixie Jemina Pearl – a real-life version of what Avril Lavigne thinks she is – likes to sing about dreamy boys, bitchy girls, sex, violence, cult films and zombies, cartoons, drinking under age… you know all the finer things in life. It’s the new generation of teenage junk culture, a young band (average age now 19) for whom Dookie was their gateway drug, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fill the spot that Scooby Doo did for their parents (“Bummer Time” is Pearl’s heartfelt tribute her favorite pizza-eating mutated amphibians).

There are a couple of noticeable developments from the ’06 debut (which is a CSR fave). First, the greatest improvement is the addition of new drummer John Eatherly; the kid is only 17, but he’s already a powerhouse, leaving your jaw hanging with his power and speed. Second, the songwriting is growing in interesting ways. The band is moving away from bonkers hardcore, discovering their melodic senses (“You’re a Waste” is a straight-faced kiss-off with no fingers crossed), and trying on riff-centric classic CB’s-model punk, and like the Ramones and Blondie, they’re reaching back to elements of 50’s & 60’s teenage rebellion themes, updated with an explicit twist (though their label cut three tracks, including the BFF-breakup ballad “Becky”, from the US version for being “too violent”, which is total horseshit; find ‘em on the internets). The result is a more edgy, less cock-rocky, more fast-n-fun version of what The Donnas do, yet still with flashes of hardcore bite (though that hardcore, like the 65-second “Food Fight!” with its cries of “Sucks for the janitor!!”, and the undead love song “Zombie Graveyard Party!”, is more Milo Goes To College and “TV Party” than “Banned In DC”). Best of all, the galloping “Heart Throb” is sexual confusion at 90 mph with no seat belt. If I have one complaint, it’s that the lyrics feel a bit undercooked, but Jonas Stein’s guitar playing is getting sharper by the song, and Pearl shines with a more focused, robust performance. Her voice has matured into a powerful, bluesy belt; I’m sure in the coming years, we’ll hear her exploring her powers even more, with a tight rocket ship of a band behind her.

"Food Fight" [video]

"The Kelly Affair" [video]

Summer Movies. Part Two.

2008-04-24T01:06:00.001-04:00

Hmmmm...Curiosities...These would be films that look somewhat interesting, and I'm riding the fence between matinee and Netflix...

Redbelt [May 2]
David Mamet will hold a special place in film history one day. I don't know what that place is, but it will involve a lot of great, albeit stiff dialogue with lots of swearing. I feel bad that he has to resort to jumping on the UFC bandwagon to get an audience, but regardless, he's got Chiwetel Ejiofor, and he is by far the most underrated actor around today.
[TRAILERS]

War, Inc. [May 23]
Long-delayed, but Cusack has earned a little faith. Basically looks like Grosse Pointe Blank gone political satire, which is fine. I just don't know, after the last five years of relentless, ubiquitous political humor, if it's $10 fine.
[TRAILER]

Mongol [June 6]
Genghis Khan biopic. I know three things: the trailer looks cool, nominated for an Oscar this year (Foreign Language), and supposed to be the first of a trilogy. OK, tell me more...
[TRAILER]

Kung Fu Panda [June 6]
LOL! Oh, Jack Black voicing a Panda who goes chop socky. How original - fat comic actor voices fat comic animated character. Wow! Genius! ...Anyone remember Shark Tale?? How'd that work for ya?? My little-kid side is a little intrigued, but really, am I supposed to be blown away by the A-List talent supporting in an animated film?? Here, for everyone to gawk at: Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, Ian McShane, Michael Clarke Duncan & David Cross. Whoopee!!!
[TEASER]

The Incredible Hulk [June 13]
Pros: All things Edward Norton, acting, producing, writing, co-directing?, generally being more fun than Eric Bana. Also, a villain (what a novelty) played by...is that Tim Roth? He's still alive?
Cons: Liv Tyler is not Jennifer Connelly. CGI Hulk is an upgrade but not enough. No word of the plot = Raz nervous again.
Meh: William Hurt. The Transporter director (I swear if Hulk does one bit of martial arts, goddammit I'll...).
[TRAILER]

Hancock [July 4]
I've already put my faith in Peter Berg's corner as a director. We've covered that, and it will come up again. Premise is fun. Will Smith is Will Smith, and I can just hope this is better than that mess I Am Legend. Don't like Theron, or as Rick calls her, Chuckie. That leaves Jason Bateman. Save us, brother.
[TRAILER]

Hamlet 2 [August 22]
Two words: Steve. Coogan. Give this man a Golden Globe cuz an Oscar is too stuffy for him. High school drama teacher makes sequel to centuries-old masterpiece. Kind of Chris-Guest-esque, and yet Stand & Deliver. Early word is mixed, but still...Coooooooogan. Also, Poehler says "Suck my balls!"
[NSFW REDBAND TRAILER]

Babylon A.D. [August 29]
Vin Diesel in a sci-fi action epic? I'm not sure anymore. Children Of Men has a kid with Total Recall? OK, maybe I'm might be in. I am one of the few people you'll probably find who liked Chronicles of Riddick, but it wasn't a classic or anything. I'm thinking this is his last chance to wow me.
[MAKING-OF TEASER]

Summer Movies. Part One.

2008-04-23T00:17:00.001-04:00

Some summers are packed with options. Others are not. At first, when I looked at the schedule for this summer, I thought, wow, there appears to be a blockbuster on every Friday. But we all know that's never how it goes. Many of those studio hopefuls turn out to be D.O.A., and after reconsideration, this year looks to be a long one for the studios' money men, sweating repeats of some of the higher profile nosedives of the past few summers.

Here are your TEN best bets for the summer of 2008...Enjoy.

Your Ten Best Bets:
10. The International [August 15]
The long-awaited English-language debut by Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer is an espionage action-thriller starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts as an Interpol agent and a NYC A.D.A., respectively, uncovering the illegal evils and conspiracies of a massive worldwide bank. Sounds like the Bourne films without the Kung Fu.

09. The Happening [June 13]
A lot of people are fed up with M. Night Shyamalan. I am not one of them. Unlike most sheep, I think Unbreakable is his best film, and I even liked both The Village and Lady In The Water. But even if you are not like me, you might concede that this film could be his "return to form".
[TRAILER]

08. Tropic Thunder [August 15]
I hate Ben Stiller, but damn if this doesn't look like a genius comedy. By all reports, this is the Robert Downey Jr. performance everyone will be talking about come the end of the summer.
[TRAILER]

07. Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull [May 23]
What can I say really? It's Indy. I love him like an uncle I've never met. He nurtured me when Han Solo and Dr. Peter Venkmen weren't around . But alas, as much as I want to see this, and as inspired as I think Shia LaBeouf's casting is, the heavy dose of special efx and an Area 51 alien storyline make this smell more like the Temple of Doom than the other two. Besides, it has Lucas' prints on it, and after the last decade of disasters, that makes me very nervous.
[TRAILER]

06. Iron Man [May 2]
Here's why this is going to be good: At least a few people must have seen the finished product by now, and the promotion machine is ahead-full-steam. That equals confidence. That means they think it's good enough to lead off the summer. Jon Favreau has yet to direct a classic, but all his films have been very good, with Zathura looking to hold the most hints to this one. A superb cast can't hurt.
[TRAILER]

05. Pineapple Express [August 8]
Considering how untouchable the Apatow posse is right now, how can this possibly miss?? These films should be just more of the same old thing, and yet they're not. They have a human heart underneath all the fratboy excess. Oh, and M.I.A. rules.
[NSFW REDBAND TRAILER]

04. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army [July 11]
Trailer 1 looked amazing enough, but with the recently released second trailer revealing all sorts of new, wonderful, and completely fucking crazy visions from Del Toro's warped mind, this is looking like one of the greatest fantasy films of all time. Watch both, compare and contrast.
[TRAILERS]

03. Son Of Rambow [May 2]
It's a winner, in that it will win us all over. Garth Jennings, as much a fantastic visionary as Guillermo Del Toro, had the unenviable task of making the Hitchhiker's Guide movie, and I personally think he did a great job. Now what does he do for an encore? He updates the movies he used to make as a kid with his friends. This is a must-see, a film with a beating heart in the season of high-gloss.
[TRAILER]

02. WALL-E [June 27]
It's fuckin' Pixar, muthafuckas!! You better recognize!!
...robot voices by Ben Burtt, Oscar winner for "voicing" your last favorite robot.
[TRAILER]

01. The Dark Knight [July 18]
Hmmm...let's see...Batman Begins is the greatest superhero/comic book film adaptation of all time, no contest, by a fairly large margin. Christian Bale is easily one of the ten best actors around right now, while Christopher Nolan must be among the five best directors. No Katie Holmes; Maggie Gyllenhaal = upgrade. More Caine, Oldman, & Freeman. Aaron Eckhart is a great idea, and they're saving him, not putting him in the trailers. And of course, Ledger, you tragic man... your lost soul will leave us with what your peers are calling one of the most twisted, deranged, frightening, haunting performances of recent memory. I hope they're right. You're already going to be remembered, but if you do the nerd fanboy coalition a solid, and do an iconic favorite proper, they will make you immortal. Ask the Fellowship.
[TRAILER]

[005] Daydream Nation

2008-04-19T17:55:00.001-04:00

Album: Daydream Nation
Artist: Sonic Youth
Release Date: October 1988
Label: Enigma [US], Blast First [UK]; reissued on DGC/Geffen
Producers: Sonic Youth with Nicholas Sansano

“Looking for a ride to your secret location
Where the kids are setting up a free-speed nation for you
Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer that’s rockin’
And a cord and a pedal and a lock, that’ll do me for now”
- from “Teen Age Riot”

“Falling outta sleep I hit the floor
Pull on some Rock tee and I’m out with the door
From Bowery to Broome to Greene, I’m a walking lizard
Last night’s dream was a talking baby wizard
All coming from female imagination
Daydreaming days in a daydream nation
Smashed up against a car at 3 a.m.
Kids dressed up for basketball beat me in my head
There’s bum trash in my hall and my place is ripped
I totaled another amp, I’m calling in sick
It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation
Daydreaming days in a daydream nation”
- from “Hyperstation”

The late comedian/social critic Bill Hicks once insisted that you, the human being, are not special. He was critiquing the overflowing love that a parent has for a child, and how it is misguided due to the fact that a man’s average “load” contains tens of millions of sperm, each one a possible bun in the oven, and that one just happened to make it to the egg. Having listened to this Hicks routine a couple hundred times, I should not be as unsettled as I am right now. I’m sitting here staring at author Matthew Stearns’ book on Daydream Nation for the ongoing album-spotlight series 33 ⅓, and I’m equal parts shocked and amazed, and a little pissed off at the universe. I am about 30 pages into the 160 page book, and I’ve got to stop because I am realizing that Mr. Stearns’ opinions on Sonic Youth’s definitive artistic statement, the 1988 double album Daydream Nation, are pretty much identical to mine. I’m thinking, oh great – now whatever I write for this will stink of plagiarism, and as a reflex I now have a bit of writer’s block. Except that the ghost of Bill Hicks calms me down – if I am not special, therefore neither is Matthew Stearns, admittedly a better writer than I – though in doing this list, I’ve read maybe a thousand reviews, and you’d be amazed by the amount of good authors, journalists, columnists, etc. who all say the same canned shit about these great albums that, frankly, deserve more effort. With Daydream Nation, the stars might have aligned just right to expose the album as the genuine artistic masterpiece that it is, and in such a way that anyone with a pair of ears can hear all its many timely inspirations and how they were funneled into this ‘noise’. And who am I to not also reference these virtues to death? Ha, we’ll see...

Sonic Youth’s sixth studio album, Daydream Nation is a sprawling double album that is the definition of what music writers mean when they say “sprawling double album”. Like I had alluded to in my entry on Prince, Daydream Nation is among that exclusive club of classic doubles that (a) would not be improved by shaving off songs and releasing it as a single-LP album, and yet (b) in the age of the CD, it is short enough to fit onto one disc (71 minutes). Daydream Nation is so epic that in many ways it’s a tough nut to crack – five of its fourteen songs clock in at 7 minutes. You need to prepare yourself for it, find the right mindset for the Sonic Youth experience. The band knew this, I guess seeing the reactions Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen got in 1984 with their sprawling double albums – Punk Rock does not welcome big artistic statements (in the 1993 video below, Thurston Moore even jokes about Daydream Nation being their Tales From Topographic Oceans – ah, music nerd humor...). There’s even the album closing, three-part song-suite. Are you kidding?? This is 1988 New York right, not 1973 Godalming, England?? And it all deflates with a ZZ Top/Dino Jr. reference? My head is spinning.

The four sides of the album – each with its own symbol, one for each band member, winking knowingly at Led Zeppelin’s brand of BIG Rock & Roll – were sequenced specifically as mini listening experiences within the confines of the whole album, each side averaging about 18 minutes, the length that the band determined was easily digestible; knowing that their music was too mind-blowing to absorb in one shot, but also that the epic magnitude of the songs necessitated a double album instead of a single so the songs could breathe. Side Three, for example, jerks back and forth in frantic motion, with the pounding, surrealist ode “Hey Joni” wasting no time getting right up in your face, guitars ringing and squealing and stuttering, pulling in opposite directions, before being pushed aside by the ambient interlude “Providence”, Thurston’s delicate piano haunted by an answering machine message from Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, set to explode with the undulating growl of an overheating amp, cracking and falling into the seasick dream-pop of “Candle” with its urban Wonderland reveries, before crashing into the belligerent beat poetry and hellish demilitarized-zone punk rock of “Rain King”.

For me personally, I have found difficulty wrapping my brain around their bracing, atonal sound for over a decade now, but I think over the course of this project, I’ve found that my brain has accepted their sonic palette (just the fact that I could interpret “Candle” as a ‘pop’ song is proof enough). In fact, it bears mentioning that for all the albums in this top ten, with the exception of Loveless, it has taken me months, and sometimes years, to fully appreciate their greatness. None more so than with this album though. I’m not afraid to admit I simply didn’t get it. I would scream to the Rock heavens ridiculous queries like “Why does the second half of Kim Gordon’s fucking brilliant ‘Sprawl’ have to go and wank off in the arty ether??!!” or “What’s with the two cyborg halves of ‘Cross The Breeze’, the post punk anthem glued on to the abrasive Metal instrumental? Why not just make two separate songs?” Foolish boy I used to be. This album makes slapping on your headphones akin to buying non-refundable tickets to, I don’t know, Thailand or Morocco or somewhere equally exotic. If you’re not willing, the whole thing might fly over your head – it reminds me of the classic scene in White Men Can’t Jump (Yes, there is a classic scene in White Men Can’t Jump) when Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson (master thespians, both) are arguing over Jimi Hendrix. It’s the “just because you listen to Jimi doesn’t mean you HEAR Jimi” argument. That statement becomes profound when applied specifically to Sonic Youth, and to Daydream Nation.

It can be said until the music world is blue in the face: Punk Rock, despite all its immediacy of passion and the attractiveness of the DIY aesthetic, will always paint itself into a corner. If the artist strays outside the 3 or 4 chords and lockstep beat, they’re prog sell-outs and they’re bounced out on their asses. “Hardcore” punk rock, as it was in the first half of the 1980’s (and especially in the US), was even worse, adding mob violence to the already volatile underground scene. And so that’s why the scene died. Black Flag, the band that had burned the hottest, faded away in an almost pathetic way; D. Boon left us, crippling the Minutemen just as they were discovering phase two of their evolution, and the music’s other major artists – Bad Brains, Ian MacKaye, X, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, etc. - grew out of, or moved on from a scene now with plenty of room for new blood. Sonic Youth did the same, progressing past the ragged trash-art No Wave of their early albums, and on to something that vaguely resembled Rock songs. Enter the likes of Dinosaur Jr, Butthole Surfers, Pixies, Big Black, Beat Happening, Green River, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, and Nirvana, as well as Brits like the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, bands that keep all of the Punk spirit but not necessarily its self-imposed limits.

In the scheme of things, Sonic Youth has always been something of a singular presence because they straddle these waves of creativity. Before they were even a band, Lee and Thruston were learning guitar tricks from avant-garde composer Glenn Branca, so when they emerged onto the early 80’s Punk scene, their ideas might’ve been a bit more mind-expanding than most bands found on your average all-ages hardcore bill. That’s why Sonic Youth was so taken with this new generation. Sonic Youth finally had some company, from a mind expansion standpoint. “Total Trash” chugs like 70’s glam rock while “Eric’s Trip” is about exactly what a song with that title should be about – LSD, and it draws understandably from the garage rock of the 60’s, but then both are soaked in this new wave of “college rock” flavor. The epic “Teen Age Riot”, which I’ll talk about in a minute, was originally about Dino Jr’s J. Mascis running for President, and he also gets name checked in “Silver Rocket” (along with Cher, which I don’t have an explanation for). Think about it like this – a road tested, comparatively veteran band is so taken with the next generation of talented bands that they make a whole double album to celebrate their new peers and the aesthetic and out-there ideas that they’re promoting. When you break it down, it’s heartwarming, and adds infinitely to the power of this album.

There’s that moment in last year’s Juno when, after being introduced to Sonic Youth by Jason Bateman’s ‘Mark Loring’, Ellen Page’s titular pixie seethes, “Oh and I bought another Sonic Youth album, and it’s just noise!” First, isn’t that ‘noise’ comment always the criticism of SY? I know I used it in my less-enlightened years – when the first song you hear by them is “Bull In The Heather”, while your head is admittedly in the Valhalla clouds of a Led Zeppelin obsession, it’s not going to be your favorite new song. I would like to take this moment to assure the world that Sonic Youth are not noise – they are racket. There’s an important difference. We generally think of noise as something which is not to be listened to, it can be assumed, because we don’t think anything can be gained from it; Daydream Nation mostly definitely does not fit this criteria, although it can occasionally indulge in outburst of squall, in particular the middle minute of “Silver Rocket”, which then snaps back to its hardcore rush like the band flipped a switch. On the other hand, racket implies opinion; it’s what your parents yell at you to turn down because they don’t get it. Therefore, in this instance, racket is automatically the coolest thing ever. There are very few moments in Sonic Youth’s career that you could imagine even the most open-minded liberal parent digging on initially, and that’s one of the many reasons SY has been one of the most unimpeachably cool bands for over 25 years – they are the sound incarnate of Lou Reed’s wrap-around shades, Paul Simonon’s shattered bass, and Run-DMC’s laceless shell-toes stomping on coliseum floors.

Look at the panoramic photo from the liner notes of the 1993 CD reissue, showing the band standing on a gritty urban corner bathed in the yellowed light of a streetlamp, definitely somewhere in the Bowery on New York’s Lower East Side, Thurston Moore in fact doing his best Lou Reed, wearing shades at night, Kim Gordon, always the shredded punk goddess, dressed in ripped everything, Lee Ranaldo, stoic, posing both as the tough, evoking DeNiro on this mean street, and as the calm everyman, Steve Shelley acting the pipsqueak, his sinewy machine gun Popeye forearms seemingly glued onto his math nerd frame. Their cool is a post-modern cool, and they come bearing Daydream Nation as the ultimate in what went right in the 1980’s. Writer Eric Weisbard once said for Spin that this album “fulfilled New York punk’s key ambition: the fusion of gallery art and popular song”. And that’s true, but now even further in retrospect, it feels even more encompassing than that, the digestion of all things Rotten Apple turned around, running through CBGB’s and No Wave, Flash and Bambaataa, Crazy Legs and “Seen”, Basquiat and Haring, Mayor Koch and Bernie Goetz, L.T. and Dwight Gooden. This album is quintessential New York which is to say it is proof that being odd and rough around the edges and set apart from the masses can decidedly make you cooler than the rest of the nation; the rest of the nation dismisses this notion and that’s why they’re listening to Daughtry and Toby Keith right now. If you decide that you don’t like this racket, then you have found your own personal limits of Rock & Roll love, because Sonic Youth is most definitely Rock & Roll to the muthafuckin’ core, and if you can’t get with it, then you are a deserter, a traitor to whatever youth you have left, and you need to get out of the way or get crushed into the cracked, gum-stomped pavement. Kim Gordon will be 55 years old in a couple weeks – what’s your excuse? I personally will admit to being a half-deserter; I went AWOL, but they caught me, and threw me in Sonic Youth traitor rehab, so I’ll be OK soon enough.

...Wait, hold up, is it possible that the moments that Sonic Youth spent in their tiny studio writing the racket of Daydream Nation, and of course the final product, might be the culmination of the first forty years of Rock & Roll, both it’s definitive triumph and its murder at the hands of the avant-garde? Is it the peak of Punk Rock because it is Punk Rock as High Art? Is it death by drum stick or screwdriver thrust into the body of the electric guitar? Just a thought...

Second, um, well, it’s obvious Juno didn’t buy Daydream Nation, and why the fuck not?? If you are a high school student who (a) loves Iggy & The Stooges, a band which Sonic Youth has covered, (b) has no problem loving Mark’s stories about The Melvins, a band who is part of a national scene built by bands like Sonic Youth (even now, Sonic Youth are the lone survivors of the diverse 80’s scene that burnt trails across America), and (c) has either half a brain or access to the internet, which Juno should have both of, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t have heard that Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth’s best album, a towering monument of sweet melodic songs executed with precision jackhammer percussion and carpet-bombing guitar molestation. Even still, if you go to the record store (if you can find one), or I guess the big-box retailer of your choice, saddle up to the ‘S’ section in ‘Pop/Rock/Soul’, and actually look at the CD, I believe it has a big honking sticker on it with 5 stars all over it, probably “One of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums” on there somewhere, and definitely “The Best Album of the 1980’s – Pitchforkmedia.com”, so why in your quick-quipping, Sunny D-swilling world would you not buy Daydream Nation?? It’s got that candle just sitting there staring at you, telling you that every other album cover in the store is trying too hard. Really though, just one listen to “Teen Age Riot” and you’d be sold.

G-----7--7--7---5------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-----5--5--5---5----------7-------------------------------------------------------------------
D---0----------------5---7-----7(p)5(p)0-------0-----0---7--7--7--7--7--5--5------0---
B-----------------------------------------------------------------------------0------------------
A------------------5---5------------------------------------------------------------------------
G------------------------------------------0------0---------------------------------------------

G---7--7--7---5--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E---5--5--5---5-------------------------------------7------------------------------------------
D---------------------------5----------------5------5------------------------------------------
B--------------------5---7-----7-----5---7----------------------------------------------------
A-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the tablature for Thurston Moore’s guitar riff in “Teen Age Riot”; what I really wanted to do here was have the sheet music for it, but I had no luck scouring this web which supposedly has everything. If you play guitar, I encourage you to retune your guitar and play it for yourself. I would argue that the riff is the greatest of all time, disconnected from blues underpinnings that might hold back some of its more ‘classic’ competition; it barely even constitutes a riff because most riffs exhibit a sort of aggression, a release of strength or emotion (original “Layla” = great riff; unplugged “Layla” = waste of my fuckin’ time). Thurston plays the riff lazily at first, in an almost sleepy delivery, one might even call it delicate, but by the climax five minutes in, he’s in a frenzy, and the riff packs its punch with wrecking force. The melody snakes its way into your brain and latches on, freeing your mind from the preconceptions of the Arena Rock of the 70’s, though SY have never been hipsters or haters, instead the ultimate “difficult” sounding band has remained fiercely inclusive, including footage of Kiss in the video for “Riot”. With that freedom, Thurston stirs up that indescribable magic quality in Rock & Roll. In fact, when the riff launches the song at 1:21, after Kim’s introduction, it serves not as theme music for J. Mascis, but as royal fanfare for Daydream Nation, an entrance march for what the band saw as Rock & Roll’s presidential campaign after eight years of the suffocating cultural anesthetization of the Reagan Administration, and indirectly the spiritual son of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” for the all of the hard-working, long-touring network of the 80’s independent label underground. It is an anthem in the purest sense, able to stand alongside presupposed classics like “Like A Rolling Stone” or “American Pie” or “Stairway To Heaven”, caked in the gob and broken pint glasses of countless Punk club shows. There is something hidden in that melody, something supernatural which dives right under your skin, forcing all hairs to stand at attention. It is, as suggested before, the distilled cultural energy of New York City, of Punk Rock, of youth itself and the symbiotic relationship Rock & Roll must have with the young people of the world.

It is OK for two people to feel the same way about music; I think it should be kind of obvious by now that that’s the fun of it, especially with something considered “underground”. It’s the tightly knit community that makes the come-up happen in the first place; it’s the whole concept of them being small enough to be “my band”, until that band “makes it”, and then they get disowned because they’re “sell-outs”. But that would be the complaint leveled against Sonic Youth after this album, ones which they met by continuing one of the greatest careers in music history with a remarkably high level of consistency. Daydream Nation however is the turning point of their career, which is to say that everything that Sonic Youth has ever done can be classified as pre- or post- this album. Furthermore, it might even be fair to say that the massive universe of “alternative” Rock can be split with the same division, as Daydream Nation somehow completes an era of exploration that began with The Velvet Underground & Nico twenty-one years earlier (I would love to posit that there was an album of similar weight in the last couple years to complete another 20-year arc, but kaleidoscopic instant classics like Return To Cookie Mountain or Sound Of Silver don’t have the zeitgeist-defining air to them that DN does – maybe we’ll get one in 2008). Up until this album, to call something “Punk” actually meant something, having not so much to do with chord limitations and speedy tempos, but with the catharsis involved with bucking the culturally accepted, and significantly, doing something new. After Daydream Nation, well, “Punk” as a tag has become more nebulous because there’s a widespread view that everything has already been thought of, and so the label gets pinned on artistically unbridled acts, without a doubt more applicable to Public Enemy or Aphex Twin than…take your pick of the faceless bands on Fuse. On this album, Sonic Youth made what has been recognized as one of the few definitive statements of edgy, alternative, independent, underground, avant-garde American Rock. Shit, just ask the Library of Congress... “Culturally, historically, or aesthetically important and/or inform or reflect life in the United States” – yeah, that seems about right.

Tracklist:
01. “Teen Age Riot”
02. “Silver Rocket”
03. “The Sprawl”
04. “’Cross The Breeze”
05. “Eric’s Trip”
06. “Total Trash”
07. “Hey Joni”
08. “Providence”
09. “Candle”
10. “Rain King”
11. “Kissability”
12. “Trilogy: a) The Wonder”
13. “Trilogy: b) Hyperstation”
14. “Trilogy: c) Eliminator Jr.”

"Teen Age Riot" [single edit - video]

"Silver Rocket" [live on Night Moves, 11.88]

"Eric's Trip" & "Hey Joni" [live at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival]

"Candle" [home video]
Super 8 footage filmed & edited by guitarist Lee Ranaldo
Shot on set of the "Candle" music video

- BONUS: "Teen Age Riot" [live in Dusseldorf, 04.96]
- BONUS: "Teen Age Riot" [live at the 2006 Osheaga Festival]
- BONUS: "Teen Age Riot" [live at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival]
- BONUS: "Teen Age Riot" [live in London, 08.07]
- BONUS: "Silver Rocket" [video]
- BONUS: "Silver Rocket" [live in Pittsburgh, 08.06]
- BONUS: "Silver Rocket" [live in London, 08.07]
- BONUS: "The Sprawl" [live in Cologne, 06.07]
- BONUS: "'Cross The Breeze" [live at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival]
- BONUS: "Eric's Trip" [live in North Carolina, 06.06]
- BONUS: "Eric's Trip" [live in Pittsburgh, 08.06]
- BONUS: "Eric's Trip" [live at the 2006 Osheaga Festival]
- BONUS: "Total Trash" [live in Berkley, 07.07]
- BONUS: "Total Trash" [live in Ferrara, Italy, 07.07]
- BONUS: "Total Trash" [live in Rome, 07.07]
- BONUS: "Hey Joni" [live in Dallas, 10.07]
- BONUS: "Providence" [video]
- BONUS: "Candle" [single edit - video]
- BONUS: "Candle" [live in Lisbon, 07.93]
- BONUS: "Candle" [live in Perth, 02.08]
- BONUS: "Rain King" [live in Ferrara, Italy, 07.07]
- BONUS: "Kissability" [live in Ireland, 09.07]
- BONUS: "The Wonder" & "Hyperstation" [live in Austria, 08.07]
- BONUS: "The Wonder" [live in Barcelona, 06.07]
- BONUS: "Hyperstation" [live at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival]
- BONUS: "Eliminator Jr." [live at the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival]
- BONUS: "Eliminator Jr." [live in Dallas, 10.07]

The Black Keys are better than your band

2008-04-18T19:40:00.001-04:00

How could I not post this?? Fucking aces!!

"I Got Mine" [live on Letterman]

Classic for the Weekend 04.04.08

2008-04-04T15:22:00.001-04:00

Here's something I came up with on the way home for lunch. Every friday I'm just gonna throw up a video for a classic song to ease us all into the weekend. First up: the 1992 anthem "Who Got The Props?" by Black Moon. Have a good weekend everyone.

Black Moon: "Who Got The Props?" [video]

Netflix Diary 4

2008-04-04T14:09:00.004-04:00

The Game [1997]
I’m a big David Fincher fan, and Fight Club is one of my favorite films of all time, so it is a complete mystery why I’ve never seen this decade old film. Well, now that I’ve seen it, and been suitably blown out of my shorts by it, I think I want to make a big statement: The Game is Fincher at his Hitchcockian best. That’s right. I said it. It’s rare that I feel as satisfied by the journey in a film as I did when this movie was finished. Everything was in its right place, and that’s kind of the point; if there were any goofs or loose ends, the film wouldn’t work. The ending got me just as it got Michael Douglas’s character; I was totally suckered, and I loved every minute of it.

Overpriced Popcorn: In Bruges

2008-04-03T08:14:00.000-04:00

Anyway you explain the story, it sounds like comedy gold: two hitmen hide out in quiet European tourist town. The town is in Belgium. One hitman (Colin Farrell) is a rookie, the other (Brendan Gleeson, ‘Mad Eye Moody’ in the Harry Potter films) is gay. The gay hitman loves the sightseeing, while the rookie is a foulmouthed lout. The rookie meets the girl of his dreams, and she turns out to be a drug dealer who tries to have him mugged (by her ex, with a gun, loaded with blanks). And there’s a midget who gets high with whores and makes racist remarks, and later dresses as a schoolboy. NOW, all that is hysterical on paper (and probably on weed, which is likely where a lot of these ideas came from), and it mostly translates onto the screen as well, in gloriously filthy and politically incorrect fashion, but there’s also a downer of a subplot with Farrell dealing with his shocking...error during his first kill. So if there’s a problem with In Bruges, it’s that the director couldn’t decide whether he wanted to make a screwball comedy or a sobering drama, so he made both at the same time. Luckily, the comedy wins as far as screen time.

In Bruges [uncensored trailer - NSFW]

Headphones: The Raconteurs' Consolers Of The Lonely

2008-04-02T18:09:00.006-04:00

Look, this isn’t a bad album. It’s really not. But I also can’t recommend it to you. I should like this, but it’s been too many long years of hearing countless bands and albums that sound like this. I know my Hendrix Experience and Zeppelin backwards and forwards because they were special, like truly, to the core, on some other shit, but it’s all downhill from there. I have stacks of CDs like this one that collect dust, admittedly good even great, from Derek & The Dominos to Rod Stewart & The Faces to Machine Head to two handfuls of AC/DC to On The Beach or Rust Never Sleeps to most of Tom Petty or The Black Crowes or the Dazed and Confused soundtrack to anything Pearl Jam’s done after Yield. It’s Classic Rock. There’s not much else to say after that. The single which I posted the video for last week is good, and likewise any other song that has a tasty riff and a brisk pace sticks out as more fun, good for a BBQ soundtrack. Beyond that, it’s unfortunately forgettable.

Headphones: The Gutter Twins' Saturnalia

2008-04-02T08:09:00.004-04:00

It’s the Fall of 1996, and my favorite albums are The Afghan Whigs’ cinematic Black Love and Screaming Trees’ psychedelic Dust. How could I know that one day these soundtracks to my college commutes would one day collide on “Idle Hands”, the first Gutter Twins single? It sounds just like I would’ve hoped – a swirling, dramatic, baroque, swaggering beast...sort of. It also kind of sounds like The Cult made a song for a horror movie tie-in...and the chorus isn’t that great. Everything about The Gutter Twins looks good on paper. Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli are both booze-swilling, hard-living, recovering-smack-addict Grunge survivors...or were; they’re now “elder statesmen” who've hit bottom and are wise enough to know not to fall back down the rabbit holes they once sang about so vividly. They are, essentially, what Layne Staley wishes he had lived on to be, and they know this, happier now knowing that their comparative “lack of success” (if you can say that about men able to have 20-year music careers) probably saved their souls. All of this gets funneled into their songwriting, long on brilliant noir lyricism full of Catholic guilt and nailed to sweeping gothic arrangements. Their union as The Gutter Twins was a match made in the darkest corner of heaven.

Or at least that’s the way I hoped this would end. You see, with Dulli’s recent Twilight Singers albums, I like the songs but I’ve never been crazy about the production and the mix. His albums have been way too clean for the vibe of the music, with the vocals way too out front. Lanegan on the other hand has had all that worked out, but his melodic sense isn’t necessarily his strong suit, instead preferring to lean on rough, bluesy atmosphere. So, where’s the problem, right? Shouldn’t The Gutter Twins work if Dulli just writes songs for Lanegan to sing? Well, yes. And Saturnalia, while not the sinister masterpiece their fans would beg for, succeeds way more than it falters. “Idle Hands” really isn’t that bad – it’s actually pretty good – but as is the case with most of the album, Lanegan’s singing saves the day. “The Stations” opens the album with a straight duet, a perfect hybrid of their sounds and sensibilities, allowing you a brief high as you think that maybe this is really going to be ‘it’, that album you’ve been waiting for. But then “God’s Children” comes through, and it’s basically a Twilight Singers track with Lanegan singing backup on the chorus; don’t get me wrong, it’s a good song, but this album is supposed to be about the two of them together, and to lose that so early is a minor misstep. “All Misery/Flowers” recovers though, in a most strange way – by evoking Tricky (and not for the only time). Lanegan presents a cyclical blues lament, purposefully staying off the beat, and creating a tension which Dulli pulls along when he shows up halfway through.

Dulli must’ve been listening to late period Beatles while he was writing his songs, and his lifts produce a few of the worst and best moments on the album. His slow-burning solo “I Was In Love With You” is just the kind of song that doesn’t fit here, betraying the mood of the rest of the album with out-of-place keyboard work. On the other hand, “Circle The Fringes” is the type of ballad he excels at, beginning as an evil-twin take on Side Three of The White Album, before being shocked to life by a stuttering guitar, just in time for Lanegan to growl. The great “Bete Noire” recalls another 60’s supergroup – Blind Faith – filtering the melody of that band’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” through Lanegan’s lighter moments on the Trees’ Dust, held high by spry electric piano.

As on the opening two tracks, the duo’s religious dilemmas provide a fertile lyrical source; the acoustic gospel soul of “Who Will Lead Us” produces one of Lanegan’s most nuanced vocal performances. One of the best songs, “Seven Stories Underground”, returns to Tricky’s deconstructed Blues-Hop shuffle, with Lanegan intoning “Heaven is quite a climb”. Further on, the rush of “Each To Each” manages to be quite infectious despite its thin “1979” machine beat and a looping guitar figure that sounds like that Sting sample on Nas’ “The Message”. Saturnalia closes with “Front Street” which admittedly begins too naked, just the duo and an acoustic guitar, and the lyrics aren’t as strong as they should be for an arrangement like that. But as the song builds, it’s not in a heavy-handed way, it’s methodical and considered, and the song gains power from the steady roll. As the music swells, the former trouble-making Rock veterans sing, “We’re gonna have some fun, son”, and you realize that, with a twinkle in their eyes and mischievous smirks on their faces, they might be singing to each other.

"All Misery/Flowers" [video]

"Idle Hands" [live on Letterman]

South Park: Help Yourself

2008-03-28T00:55:00.004-04:00

I never understand when people say that the first two seasons of South Park are the best. This is completely nuts, making obvious that most people didn't stick around through some of the rough times to make it to the glorious present. There's no doubt that since the show regained its swagger with Season Six (and the classic Lord of the Rings episode), it's been pretty much all genius - Season Eight, the show's best, remains one of the greatest television seasons of my lifetime. They've just now begun their 12th season with Cartman giving Kyle AIDS, a headless Britney Spears on the run from the whole world, and this week, a tribute to the 1981 animated film Heavy Metal, crammed with commentary on anti-drug campaigns, Anne Frank, and Elliot Spitzer.

But that's not even the biggest news. That would be the relaunch of their official website, which now features "free, streaming, full-length episodes and clips from the entire 12 seasons of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning animated series". The show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, were their usual selves: "When asked about the launch of the new site, Stone and Parker said, 'We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time so we gave ourselves a legal alternative.'" If you've lost track of the show over the years, now is the time to see what you've been missing.

Enjoy this clip of Ms. Spears in the recording studio...

Headphones: Hot Chip's Made In The Dark

2008-03-27T22:29:00.002-04:00

Hot Chip tiptoe along a musical cliff. By choosing what can effectively be seen as an update of 80’s synth-pop as their style, they’ve put themselves in the same circle with New Order, Erasure, the Pet Shop Boys, and early Depeche Mode. This is not a problem in itself, as they are some of the best groups of the New Wave era, but problems can arise if you let the quality of your output dip below these lofty standards, you can fall off the cliff, sounding like the second and third-string New Wavers famous more for their haircuts than their music. Hot Chip’s breakthrough second album, 2006’s The Warning, was a near-masterpiece, a clear picture of their strengths with very little of their weaknesses, and an especially refreshing example of the wonderful juxtaposition of the voices of Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard; the album was pleasurable enough to end up as CSR’s #4 album of that year.

Now, two years later, they return with the unfortunate mess of Made In The Dark. The clarity of the last album is mostly lost, with the band having more fragmented song ideas than actual fully-written songs, deciding to simply cram pieces together into awkward wholes. At least half the album falls prey to this, forcing most of the songs to be odd novelties. “Out At The Pictures” is the worst offender, sounding like aural vomit, and the genre exercises “Don’t Dance” (80’s Prince) and “Hold On” (Disco) don’t fair much better. There’s charm and tasty bits to lead single “Ready For The Floor”, “Bendable Poseable” and the cheeky “Wrestlers”, but they never really come to fruition. “One Pure Thought” starts off great, stumbles, falls apart, pulls itself together, and then falls apart again. The only track in this fashion that works is the rumbling “Shake A Fist”, but mostly just because its sonic elements are more exhilarating and interesting; it’s also fun, where most of this album is not.

Even when they pick something and stick to it, they still fall short. Club banger “Touch Too Much” actually focuses and emerges fully-formed, but that form is kind of a bland version of The Warning. After the good looks he got from the last album, Alexis Taylor has taken the feedback as license to go MOR pop for the Indie set. Blue-eyed Soul ballad “We’re Looking For A Lot Of Love” works its tender groove well enough to be the one slow song that really succeeds here, but the title track and “In The Privacy Of Our Love” are terribly maudlin, way too bad in an Elton John way for anyone’s taste. “Whistle For Will” is only a little less grating because it sounds more like John Lennon, but no less precious. It’s a shame really, because the band was able once to graft beautiful pop full of heartache to edgy computer music. Now we have to just hope they can remember how to do it for next time.

"Ready For The Floor" [video]

New Raconteurs: "Salute Your Solution"

2008-03-25T18:39:00.001-04:00

It's a pretty sweet single, even though it's basically a better version of "Blue Orchid". I have no problem if Jack wants to alternate between this and The White Stripes. But is it just me, or whenever Jack's singing, I know it's him, but when Brendan Benson sings, I can't tell if it's him or Jack. Just sayin'. I'll have an album review early next week. Promise.

...Oh and yes, the video is supposed to look like this. It's still photos.

[006] Endtroducing...

2008-03-25T00:50:00.003-04:00

Album: Endtroducing…
Artist: DJ Shadow
Release Date: September 1996 [UK], November 1996 [US]
Label: Mo’ Wax/A&M [UK], Mo’Wax/ffrr [US]
Producer: DJ Shadow

“And I would like to be able to continue to let what is inside of me, which is...which comes from all the music that I hear, you know, I’d like for that to come out. It’s like, it’s not really me that’s coming, the music’s coming through me.”
- from “Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt”

This is one of my favorite movies scenes...
DJ Shadow talks about crate digging at the record store on the cover of his debut album, from Scratch, a documentary on Hip-Hop DJ culture.

Much like DJ Shadow, I was digging. But instead of glorious trips through crates of old vinyl, I was going through boxes of old packrat stuff, the detritus of my life, looking for one article, one piece of paper – an early 1997 (if I remember right) new artist spotlight on Josh “DJ Shadow” Davis from Mojo magazine, in which Davis talks about his two-year daily grind of sweating bullets in Dan The Automator’s tiny studio, crafting his debut masterpiece Endtroducing…. When I worked at Tower Records, I found the magazine when I moved into my office, and was so blown away by the article that I tore it out and tacked it up on the wall, where it stayed the whole time I worked there…

Anyway, I couldn’t find it in the boxes, but I did find The Source’s 150th issue, from March of 2002. This too is a good read. One of the features inside is a list of what the magazine feels are the 150 most important moments in Hip-Hop’s history. I scan the list…no DJ Shadow. Hmmm. Number 150 is “Big Daddy Kane appears in a 1991 issue of Playgirl magazine”. Now, maybe I’m a bit biased, but…wait, no I’m not – Kane is the shit, and anyone that calls themselves a Hip-Hop fan should have at least “Raw” and “Set It Off” on their iPod – but frankly, it’s ridiculous that such an achievement as Endtroducing… is ignored by the Hip-Hop community in favor of Kane hanging his wang out in a nudie mag. It’s even more perplexing considering that in the magazine’s 10th anniversary issue some years earlier, they did recognize Shadow by cherry-picking him as an alumni in the “Unsigned Hype” retrospective, alongside Biggie and other big names. But, the 150th issue, it shoudla-coulda-woulda read something simple like, “DJ Shadow releases sampling classic Endtroducing…”, or even better, “Guinness Book names DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… first album ever created from 100% samples” (which, shhhhh, is untrue, though having to say ‘99% sampled’ is annoying just because he used a couple snippets of friends joking around). As a tribute, I was going to compile this entry using 100% samples of other reviews of the album, but then I realized I had too much to say of my own, like I wonder if the reason that Endtroducing… isn’t readily recognized by the Hip-Hop community is maybe they just don’t understand it. Actually, I think very few people in the entire music industry understand what goes into the music of DJ Shadow.

Think about it – the two turntables have been out of favor in Hip-Hop since around the mid 90’s, so the community wouldn’t have any reason to watch what’s happening with the DJ’s. Everyone just started rapping to DAT tapes, and even before then, the DJ had been marginalized to just playing the track and maybe yelling the chorus. The DJ was no longer in the spotlight. The true believers had to create ‘Turntablism’ as a subgenre or else lose collective focus and interest on the still-evolving art forever. But even still, Shadow doesn’t totally fit into this category either. If you watch Scratch, the movie that the clip above is from, Shadow appears to be from an entire different world in terms of just his mindstate, how he approaches his art. He’s almost spiritual about records, like a monk. But he is a Hip-Hop head, there’s no doubt about it; he’s been immersed in the Hip-Hop world since he was a teenager, releasing his first tracks as early as 1991. He knows his breaks better than pretty much anyone – a break obsessive since high school, he famously impressed Chuck D in 1988 by knowing where quite a few of the unlisted samples for P.E.’s heavily-layered Nation Of Millions came from – and he can scratch with the best of them.

The intro of the album, “Best Foot Forward”, is Shadow’s conscious nod to his heritage, ten tracks – from the likes of Kool G Rap, Beastie Boys, Jeru, and others – cut up and scratched across 48 seconds, 48 seconds that let you know this man is definitely the real deal, lightening fast scratching and all. But it’s also almost like Shadow conceding, “Here you go, have some of what you’re expecting, before my music forces you to abandon all preconceived notions”; it works as a palette cleaner. The only other track on the album that has a vaguely Hip-Hop aesthetic is “The Number Song”, which scratches up old school cuts by Theodore, Flash, T La Rock, and Kurtis Blow, but is built on the back of Cliff Burton’s “Orion” from Metallica’s Ride The Lightening, about as far from Hip-Hop as you can get. He knows where his heart is at – he has infamously made a habit of moving copies of the CD in record stores from the “Dance” section to the “Hip-Hop” section, because Shadow is, in many ways, tied to Hip-Hop in the same ways an artist like Public Enemy is “Punk”, which is to say they’re truer to the spirit of the music than its accepted sound. This album was once even named the “best Dance album of all time” despite the fact that you could never really dance to it. Most of Endtroducing… sounds nothing like concurrent Hip-Hop of 1996 – Biggie, Jay-Z, Wu-Tang, Mobb Deep, Busta, etc. – but Shadow is no doubt getting his water from the same well, so to speak.

But as good as he is with a turntable and a mixer, it’s with the Akai digital sampler that Shadow is a master. There have been way more than a few moments when I’ve made the claim that DJ Shadow is the Jimi Hendrix of my generation, and just as many times, people have called me fucking nuts. But to me, A) that’s unnecessary hero worship for the Baby Boomers, B) resistance towards Hip-Hop as the predominant new cultural development and music form of the last 30 years, and C) ignorance towards what it is that DJ Shadow actually does, and how a digital sampler works. The sampler – in this case, the MPC60 model – is very much the iconic tool of Hip-Hop in the 1990’s, in the same way that the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul have become synonymous with Rock & Roll. I’m sure I could load some sounds into an Akai and mess around a little, but it wouldn’t come out like Endtroducing… Shit, maybe Kanye West uses an Akai sampler too, and maybe very well, but not like Shadow. It’s the results that he gets from the Akai sampler that allow me to compare him to Hendrix – he uses an instrument (the literal, general definition, not necessarily the musical definition) that is utilized by thousands of people, but somehow, like Jimi, what he creates seems not only timeless, but peerless. To say that 50 years from now Endtroducing… will be held in the same high esteem as Are You Experienced or Electric Ladyland doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch to me. But I’m a little ahead of myself – for a basic crash course in what this machine is, watch this video; it features Shadow (in the black t-shirt), DJ Nu-Mark (in the center), and Cut Chemist (without a cap, who you might recognize from his cameo as the science teacher in Juno), the latter two from Jurassic 5, all three playing the Akai sampler…

"Pushing Buttons"

OK, so now let’s talk about how you get to the point where you can do something like that. When he’s working, Shadow will pour over hundreds of records a week – he’s been called both an anthropologist and an archeologist more than a few times. To give you an idea of how many pieces of vinyl he owns, Shadow has a second house just for his record collection; the only other person I know of with a collection like that is legendary Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaataa. After Shadow finds breaks or sounds or riffs he wants to sample, he’ll play the record on the turntable, hooked up to the digital sampler. Then once he has the samples in the sampler, he can manipulate them and layer them however he sees fit. Each sound is assigned a button; for example, as you see in the video, one button might be the kick drum, one might be the snare drum, and so on. Shadow can then bang out whatever beat he wants. He can then loop whole sequences, and then go back and bang out more sounds, etc. While the album is a masterwork of sequencing – with Shadow admitting that it simply couldn’t have been ordered any other way, that the songs dictated the running order – if you’re still not sure and need a starting point, look to the enduring landmark single “Midnight In A Perfect World”, the encapsulation of Shadow’s genius in five minutes. The loops are laid down in a clear way – it’s in many ways the calmest track on the album, and the reason why the album was often mistakenly grouped in with the Trip-Hop movement – and you can take your time dissecting each loop, focusing on each sample, trying to figure out where they began and ended, and what kind of songs Shadow could have possibly found them in.

The album opens proper with “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt”, a slow-building epic constructed on a hopscotching piano loop coupled with a crumbling-skyscraper boom-bap-beat, providing the base for the layering of the track – the stolen dialogue, the soaring choir, the funk bass and chicken-scratch guitar, the cascading bells – all swirling together as Shadow uses the sampler to juggle the beat like four people at the same time. The playful “Organ Donor” is the most obvious, simple example of the capabilities of this incredible machine; built almost entirely from one short passage of music, and cut and pasted in a hundred different ways to create a new one, it stands as another clear illustration of what is actually going on here. As you listen to the album, you start to realize that every single one of these sounds came from somewhere. None of them were created, save for the bits of dialogue on the untitled and “Why Hip-Hop Sucks” interludes. And the songs are whole, even full, not skeletal in any way. The swinging beats of “Changeling” and “Mutual Slump” clang and scatter, splashing all over the blank canvas. In the former, the cracks and crashes reverberate across the enveloping hum of the bassline and layer after layer of sighing strings, synthesizer washes, guitar fuzz, and who knows what else. In the latter, the racket forms most of the track, with its floor-tom-on-steroids acting as the low end; Shadow fills the leftover space with the melody from Björk’s “Possibly Maybe” (the most recognizable sample on the album), squealing free jazz horns and flutes, and frantic breakdowns.

Now, it’s not like no one had worked magic with a digital sampler before – De La Soul had pioneered the use of the Akai on 3 Feet High & Rising - but Shadow was making an album entirely out of samples, from scratch (no pun intended), and 100% from the original vinyl (no CDs!). As his base, the drums on Endtroducing… are so amazing and ridiculous and sick, that when I first heard the album, I remarked to my brother that this guy was the best drummer I’d ever heard; all his beats are like the best of John Bonham collected. I felt kind of stupid when Ian told me that he didn’t actually play the drums, that all the beats were cut and pasted from existing albums. The album is so seamless, I was understandably floored. When Shadow made the album, it was just barely at the beginning of home recording involving the desktop computer. Being at Automator’s studio, he got to see the future Dr. Octagon and Gorillaz producer testing out the earliest versions of Pro Tools. But Shadow stuck to his MPC60, which at the time worked with 3.5 floppy disks. So, no computers, no 2” reels of tape and mega-studio equipment – just a couple turntables, a sampler, hundreds of records, and dozens of floppies strewn about, each one full of Frankenstein parts for this puzzle-like masterpiece.

This is not the first time I’ve tackled Endtroducing… in this type of forum (though I’ve never gone to these lengths). Like a handful of the albums on this list - Loveless, 3 Feet High & Rising, Rated R - I previously wrote a review of this album for the original Cut Shallow website back in 2002. My original write-up hinged on what was my initial opinion of the album, which is that it seemed to me to be more a piece of art to be appreciated than a collection of music that presents a pleasurable listening experience. I, like more than a few writers before me, used the world ‘collage’ a lot to describe Shadow’s compositional skills. I have to dispute all of this now though, as over the years, this album has enriched my life to such a huge degree specifically through the music that it contains.

Endtroducing… is indeed a wonderful musical display, one that is not just a piece of craft, but a work full of passion and devotion to music itself, and especially the underappreciated corners that the sun never hits. The spacey funk of “Naplam Brain” is pulled out of the netherworlds of forgotten early 70’s swampy Southern Rock, crusty acid-damaged R&B, and pretentious Art Rock; and just as it thinks it’s going to get its point across, Shadow flips the schizophrenia switch, mutating it into the drum solo of “Scatter Brain”. It’s amazing to think in these terms – a drum solo on a digital sampler – but that is why this album represents so much about the promise of modern computer music. There is no shame, nor a lack of artistic skill or excitement, in creating what is basically an update of Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” mixed with something along the line of Vangelis’ Blade Runner score, all by “pushing buttons”.

An epic piece like the 9-minute “Stem/Long Stem” does not get written let alone recorded if the artist doesn’t have a passion about their music. It’s a symphonic, cinematic monster of a track, worked into a panic repeatedly by swollen string figures and some of the most brutal percussion you’ve ever heard (not actually played on drums); it’s so aggressive that it needs a breather. Shadow breaks by sewing in a piece of “Organ Donor” (before you’ve even gotten to that song, so you don’t even realize that it will visit you again) to shake things up, only to swell up again, this time with less of a percussive assault, but with no less drama brought by these stranger-orchestras fronted by homeless classical guitarists. Without even intending to do so, Shadow understood the sense of exhilaration and spectacle filmmakers look for in a score, because the song remains his most requested for use in film and TV.

Most everyone likes music, a lot of people love music. Others are obsessed. And yet, still more are consumed by it. DJ Shadow is consumed by music. I know this feeling; my friends might laugh at me for writing this, but what they don’t understand is I’ll never find a way to verbalize to them what it feels like to me. Most of my friends fit into the two former categories; a few of them would likely be in the third. I only know a couple people that I’d put into the last group along with myself (my brother would probably be one). To me, music is a transcendent encounter; it produces bodily reactions that I cannot explain, reflexes of emotion. Furthermore, for me personally, I am a creature of rhythm. My favorite part of almost every kind of music is the percussion. This is why I probably hate that most of Hip-Hop today – twelve years on from when Shadow asserted that it “sucked” – has abandoned the drums, instead content to get by with digitized kicks, handclaps and snaps. Where are the fuckin’ snares??? The Shadow knows – they’re on every dusty piece of vinyl in every second-hand store, musty basement, and garage sale across the world. And it’s that dust and damp smell that informs this album. Shadow’s obsessions led him to only the choicest bits for his massive project. This is where I tell you to call this album a collage is so misguided. A collage implies a sense of randomness that is nowhere to be found on Endtroducing… To listen to the two parts of “What Does Your Soul Look Like” presented here, you just know that they were composed with great care. Shadow has called the entire 4-part work (found on Pre-Emptive Strike) his “depression masterpiece”, and the pieces he chose to weld and splice together echo his emotional state. Parts 4 and 1 are both overcast jazz, beats rolling and swinging lazily, their bass fat and round and warm, giving room for the horns to…not cry full-stream, but more sob in their drinks. Stray vocals from far and wide float in like patrons to Shadow’s pub, each with their own sad story of life or love or the road or all three. What Shadow has done on these songs, and indeed on this record, what he has dreamt and then orchestrated, is closer to a musical quilt. You can picture him in tiny, dark, hot studio, huddled over the Akai sampler, piecing hundreds of errant sounds and beats and melody lines and whatever together, stitching each one to the larger whole of that particular song. It’s a truly awe-inspiring work, masterful execution, but not just craft. Endtroducing... is run through with heavy emotion, soul and sweat from hundreds of forgotten artifacts frankensteined into a true love letter to music itself, one that will one day be hard to find in those second-hand stacks, because I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to give up their copy.

Tracklist:
01. “Best Foot Forward” [interlude]
02. “Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt”
03. “The Number Song”
04. “Changeling”
“** Transmission 1” [interlude]
05. “What Does Your Soul Look Like Part 4”
06. [untitled interlude]
07. “Stem/Long Stem”
“**Transmission 2” [interlude]
08. “Mutual Slump”
09. “Organ Donor”
10. “Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ‘96” [interlude]
11. “Midnight In A Perfect World”
12. “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain”
13. “What Does Your Soul Look Like Part 1 – Blue Sky Revisit”
“**Transmission 3” [interlude]

"Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt" [live at Coachella 2007]

"The Number Song" [live in London, 2002]
from the Live! In Tune & On Time DVD

"Organ Donor (Extended Overhaul)" [live in London, 2002]
from the Live! In Tune & On Time DVD

"Midnight In A Perfect World" [video]

- BONUS: "Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt" [audio]
- BONUS: "Changeling" [excerpt; live at the 2006 O2 Wireless Festival]
- BONUS: "Changeling" [fan video]
- BONUS: "Stem" [single edit - fan video]
- BONUS: "Mutual Slump" [fan video]
- BONUS: "What Does Your Soul Look Like part 1 - blue sky revisit" [audio]
- BONUS: DJ Shadow talks about his MPC60 sampler that he made Endtroducing on

Heads Up: New Portishead...finally

2008-03-19T18:28:00.001-04:00

If you're internet savvy and fiending enough, you probably already have the new album. I downloaded it, but I haven't listened to it yet... And well, this single doesn't really make me want to. To me, Portishead music always meant the best in dust-n-crackle, a certain organic, antique quality to their new sounds. So, OK, we all have to grow up, and I can understand wanting to try something different after a decade in the making, and I can even dig some icy synthetics. But regardless of the tones in which it's cast, this single doesn't DO anything. I understand that, ultimately, PH is about the voice of Beth Gibbons, but this track is boring as fuck. The first two-thirds are just the same bad drums over and over, and then when the drums get a bit more interesting, the synths turn it into the score from Terminator 2. I waited ten years for THIS???

"Machine Gun" [video]

Portishead's Third is out 4/29 in the US.

Heads Up: New Raconteurs NEXT WEEK!!!

2008-03-18T08:22:00.002-04:00

Way to leave it to the last minute, Jack! What are you, Radiohead??
And the neo-classic-rockers say...Moooooooooo:

"The Raconteurs are happy to announce that in one week's time their second album, entitled Consolers of the Lonely, will be available EVERYWHERE Tuesday, March 25th.

"'Album' meaning: full length vinyl, CD and digital formats; and 'everywhere' meaning: local mom and pop Indie retailers, corporate superstores, supermarkets, iTunes, Amazon, the band's own website and any other location that could get the record up and going this quickly (some places couldn't move this fast, so they will join in as soon as they can).

"It contains 14 new recordings and is being released globally on Third Man Records in conjunction with our marketing/distribution partners, XL Recordings and Warner Brothers Records.

"The album was mastered and completed in the first week of March. It was then taken immediately to a vinyl pressing plant. Then to a CD pressing plant. Then preparations to sell it digitally began. March 25th became the soonest date to have it available in EVERY FORMAT AT ONCE. The band have done no interviews or advertisements for this record before this announcement.

"The purpose: to get the album to the fans as soon as possible and as we promised. We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception.

"With this release, The Raconteurs are forgoing the usual months of lead time for press and radio set up, as well as forgoing the all important 'first week sales'. We wanted to explore the idea of releasing an album everywhere at once and THEN marketing and promoting it thereafter. The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it.

"Another purpose was to also allow people to have their own choice as to exactly which format they would like to hear the album in IMMEDIATELY, rather than having to wait for their favorite format to become available. The band are also not releasing any version of this record that contains bonus tracks. Musically this album will be the same as the band created it no matter what format it is purchased in. (The sound quality of each format however, is a different story. The Raconteurs recommend hearing it on vinyl, but the choice is of course up to the listener).

"The band also prefer that fans buy the album as a whole instead of breaking up the tracks, but until iTunes and other digital services allows bands to release their albums with the option of NOT breaking it up, it will be sold in that fashion on those particular sites. On the band's website however, the album will be sold in its entirety as an mp3 at 320kb bit rate. Also in Japan, fans will be able to download the record via their mobile phones, as that is how a majority of recorded music is consumed there.

"The reason we are announcing this release one week ahead of time is because of retail pre-ordering and stocking, information about this album's imminent release was bound to come to light and could be confusing to fans. Also in the event that the record leaks, we didn't want this method of release to be seen as a REACTION to such a leak. It's not. The actual worst thing about a leak is the usual poor sound quality, akin to watching a movie on a wristwatch instead of in a theater. Which for the album's creators is a bit of a letdown, but again, it is completely up to the listener.

"There will be a video up on the internet for the first single, 'Salute Your Solution', on the 25th as well, provided it gets edited in time. We just filmed it the other day!

"We hope not to confuse anyone with too many options, or deny them the formats that they like best. The Raconteurs feel very strongly that music has worth and should be treated as such. Thank you to all those who respect music in this fashion, and thank you to our label partners for working with us to get this album to fans in as many formats as possible all at once.

"Thank you, and we hope that you enjoy Consolers of the Lonely.

"Sincerely,
The Raconteurs"

[via Pitchfork]

Overpriced Popcorn: Cloverfield

2008-03-11T21:26:00.001-04:00

[NOTE] "Overpriced Popcorn" is simply me giving my theatrical movie reviews a categorical title, like my album reviews are under the heading "Headphones". I'm doing this to set them apart from the "Netflix Diary", though the format will be basically the same.

I guess I should’ve reviewed this earlier seeing as my one overwhelming point is now kind of moot: if you ever want to see this film, you should probably see it on the big screen. On DVD, this film will most likely not work at all, unless you have the biggest HD flatscreen and the best in surround sound. My friend Tom has a TV like that, but his apartment is over his landlord's elementary-age kid's bedroom, so no dice on cranking up the volume. Being immersed in Cloverfield's alternate reality is essential to giving it its fair shake. The monsters are cool and pleasantly different than all the internet speculation; the smaller creatures in the subway reminded me of the "bugs" in Starship Troopers. The acting is...well tolerable at best - at the very least, it’s up to Lonelygirl15 standards. As a bonus, the soundtrack at the party is pretty good. Oh yeah, and it’s better than Blair Witch too, cuz at least you see the monster(s).

Netflix Diary 3

2008-03-11T20:48:00.001-04:00

Stardust [2007]
A good, fun bit of family filmmaking by, of all people, Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn; although I had gotten myself psyched up that it was gonna be a kind of next-gen Princess Bride, which I guess is too much to hope for, it was still mildly worth seeing, like on cable. It has a pretty good cast, highlighted by a radiant Claire Danes and an unforgettably ridiculous Robert DeNiro.

The Lives Of Others [2006]
Winner of the 2006 Best Foreign Language Oscar, but only hitting the US around when it won the award (early ’07), this instant classic from Germany would be a brilliant piece of filmmaking in any language. It not only deals with the place and power of art in a society, but how people’s attitude’s change towards art when the government tightens its grasp. Set against the police state of East Berlin in the 1980’s, the story of a Stasi Police investigator who has to struggle with the relationship between his politically sensitive profession and his silent opinions on the follies of his government’s policies produces deep, tangible characters with performances to match. This is a tense, genius drama as good as any from Hollywood in the last 5 years.

[007] Sign 'O' The Times

2008-03-07T08:40:00.010-05:00

Album: Sign ‘O’ The Times
Artist: Prince
Release Date: March 1987
Label: Warner Bros.
Producer: Prince

“Baby I just can't stand 2 see U happy
More than that I hate 2 see U sad
Honey, if U left me I just might do something rash
What's this strange relationship?"
- from "Strange Relationship"

“Hot thing, maybe U should give your folks a call
Tell them you’re going 2 The Crystal Ball
Tell them you’re coming home late, if you’re coming home at all
Hot thing, tell them U found a brand new baby doll”
- from “Hot Thing”

Let’s talk about the nature of the double album. I think it’s safe to say most music listeners would associate the double album with an artist trying to make a BIG Artistic Statement, capital A, capital S. Sometimes it’s to prove how eclectic they are, or that they’re such geniuses that the music just flows through them, and they have 100 songs that they’ll whittle down to 25, and drop 90+ minutes of music on you (Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness = a whopping 2 hours, not to mention the box set of supplemental b-sides, sold separately of course). It’s kind of funny then that even when offered more songs for the consumer dollar, we as the public turn around and say ‘give us less’ – there’s no doubt that 99% of double albums in Pop/Rock/Rap history would still be better as single albums. Despite its snapshot of a great band breaking apart, there is surely an even better 45-minute album somewhere in The Beatles’ “White Album”, and don’t even get me started on the likes of Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life or the mess of Wu-Tang Forever. Then there’s the bands that want you to pay twice by releasing two separate albums, when one would have been fine – GNR and Metallica, I’m looking in your direction. Hey, I love Radiohead, but think how much more satisfying Kid A would have been if it was filled out with the better half of Amnesiac. For my money, the double albums that work the best are the ones that now, in the age of the 80-minute CD, fit onto one disc: The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St., by far the most solid double album, and The Clash’s London Calling are the most notable, along with the 1984 works of Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen. But what does it say that Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times, a great double album of the 1%, was meant to be a triple album? Shit, it could’ve been a quadruple with all the songs he had! The answer, sort of, is what gets lost in the discussion – that the record label has a say in what they release, artistic genius be damned. For example, just this past fall, Robert Smith was bickering with his label over whether The Cure’s new album was going to be a single or a double, and all the uncertainty forced him to push it back to this coming spring. As stories of legendary double albums go, the genesis of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times is far more grand and interesting. His Purple Badness had already found success with a double release – the electro funk touchstone 1999, which, considering new-millennium music trends, appears to now be his most influential album, and after the success of Purple Rain, the label was generally OK with Prince doing pretty much whatever he felt.

What he felt like doing was making two albums of psychedelic Pop and skeletal R&B; both the barely mediocre Around The World In A Day and the underrated, elegant Parade bombed commercially, as did Parade’s terrible companion film, Under The Cherry Moon. Prince, the most brilliant Pop Star since The Beatles was in danger of losing everything – the support of his label, his fans, and of radio programmers that had taken a chance on him. So he did what he’s been doing, for better or worse, ever since: recording like a muthafucker. In the last days of 1985, before Parade was even out, Prince began his most productive period, gathering The Revolution to start work on the album Dream Factory, which was to feature increased songwriting input from the band (especially Wendy & Lisa), Prince’s growing interest in Jazz – his parents were Jazz musicians, and at the time, he had been hanging out with Miles Davis – and his first attempts at incorporating horns in his songs. In the ten months from that winter start through October of 1986, Prince assembled three different versions of the album, at first a single album, and then twice a sprawling double. The last version of the album included half of the songs that would eventually make it to Sign: the post-Live Aid, front-page-headline electro-blues of “Sign ‘O’ The Times”, the warped future-pop of “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”, the weird, moody seduction funk of “It”, the grade school confection of “Starfish & Coffee”, the jazzy come-on of “Slow Love”, the passive-aggressive “Strange Relationship”, the arena-ready anthem “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man, and the stark gospel of “The Cross”. The only problem was Prince was going to have to rerecord them all, because he was about to fire The Revolution.

In the wake of the mass firing (only keyboardist Dr. Fink remained), Prince, feeling that he needed to marginalize whatever The Revolution’s contributions had been, but also inspired by his fresh canvas, went on an even greater tear, producing the best work of his career in a mere three months, mostly by himself. The day after he fired the band, he began anew by recording “Housequake”, yet another in a long line of party joints extraordinaire, mashing up a James Brown stomp, call-and-response vocals, and golden horns with a growing interest in Hip-Hop’s sonics, as well as hiding an absolutely vicious metal guitar riff in the mix. The hilarious vocals – “Does anybody know about the ‘quake? Bullshit!!” – were sung in a pinched pitch that made him sound like a crazy woman (or a sexed-up drag queen or at least like he was sucking helium). Prince then decided to instead make an entire album in this new voice, under the name Camille. The Camille project would have been a sexually fascinating collection, more lascivious funk-pop, remaining explicit, but approaching the subject in new ways. The unlikely song that ended up meaning the most to the project was “Strange Relationship”, a track Prince had been messing with since 1982, and the only song that made it through every stage of this period to make it on Sign. Listening to it now, the palette in which Prince rendered it in illustrates why it’s one of those forgotten tracks in his oeuvre; the synthetic tones are dated, unfortunately framing one of his smartest, most mature examinations of a self-destructive relationship. On the other hand, the Camille highlight is definitely “If I Was Your Girlfriend”, still one of Prince’s best songs; over a muted R&B slow jam pulse, Prince ponders the relationship insecurities of his lover, and the eternal struggle between trust and sex, made even more strange by the fact that the song is supposed to be coming from Camille (Was Camille meant to be a lesbian?? If so – that much more genius!!). And as the song’s coda twists itself into place, like dark storm clouds rolling in, Camille begins to plead, seemingly set to unravel, but the result is a cathartic soliloquy:

“Is it really necessary for me to go out of the room just because you want to undress? We don’t have to make children to make love. And we don’t have to make love to have an orgasm. Your body is what I’m all about. Can I see it? I’ll show you. Why not? You could do it because I’m your friend. I’d do it for you. Of course I’d undress in front of you. And when I’m naked, what shall I do? How can I make you see that it’s cool? Can’t you just trust me? If I was your girlfriend you could. Oh yeah, I think so. Listen, for you, naked I would dance a ballet. Would that get you off? Tell me what will. If I was your girlfriend, would you tell me? Would you let me see you naked then? Would you let me give you a bath? Would you let me tickle you so hard you’d laugh and laugh, and would you, would you let me kiss you there, you know, down there where it counts? I’ll do it so good, I swear I’ll drink every ounce, and then I’d hold you tight and hold you long and together we’ll stare at the silence… And then we’ll try and imagine what it looks like. Yeah, we’ll try and imagine what…what silence looks like. Yeah, we’ll try and imagine what silence looks like.”

It amounts to a rant of all the relationship frustrations Prince must have felt, being a bachelor Rock Star, comfortable to explore his sexuality, but unable to find a lover to match his philosophies on the joys and freedom of sex and love. “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is Prince as the man who says what you’re afraid to, whispering that what society tells you is kinky is completely normal sexual interaction if your partner is at ease with you. It’s such an honest statement on the realities of day-to-day love, sounding weird and yet identifiable to men (and women) everywhere, setting the tone for the exploratory nature of some of the songs that Prince would write for what would become Sign ‘O’ The Times.

Only half-related side note: Here I would just like to pause and say that if you get the chance to hear the Camille album as intended, do so, as it is a quite a remarkable collection in its own right, much like The Black Album should have been (see below for where to find some of these songs):
Camille tracklist: “Rebirth Of The Flesh” / “Housequake” / “Strange Relationship” / “Feel U Up” / “Shockadelica” / “Good Love” / “If I Was Your Girlfriend” / “Rock Hard In A Funky Place”
These songs within the frame of Sign ‘O’ The Times have always reminded me of another double album: Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. Half of Zeppelin’s 1975 double offering, 7 of its 15 tracks, had been written previously for other albums dating all the way back to 1970’s Led Zeppelin III. The eight remaining songs, which were actually written in 1974/75 for Physical Graffiti, have a different, mostly darker tone, and taken on their own would have, in my opinion, formed Led Zep’s greatest album. While you’re burning yourself a copy of Camille, burn this too and enjoy:
Imaginary tracklist: “In The Light” / “The Wanton Song” / “Trampled Underfoot” / “Kashmir” / “Custard Pie” / “Sick Again” / “In My Time Of Dying” / “Ten Years Gone”

On the song that would become the eventual title track, Prince addressed social ills like drugs and gang violence more candidly than he ever had before, somewhat following the 80’s trend of charity in Pop music (he had infamously dropped out of “We Are The World”); I say somewhat because the song is half nonsense, undercutting the message a bit in the face of the ghetto snapshots that were coming out of the early salvos of hardcore Hip-Hop (B.D.P., P.E., N.W.A., etc.), but that doesn’t change the fact that the groove is tight, and it was sparse enough to leave him room for guitar wankage in concert. Likewise, the thick-yet-spacious guitar architecture of “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” was simply something to rock out to while Prince stretched his narrative of a conflicted one night stand with a single mother over the framework, cast in vivid hues to brighten up a gray story. The spiritual exploration of “The Cross” has been compared to The Velvet Underground doing gospel, but I always hear Neil Young with the ragged edges cut off and cleaned up; either way, it’s Prince most naked, emotional vocal performance, pushing his voice to the breaking point. There is a split-second moment when it even sounds like U2 (who Prince has had an adverse relationship with ever since The Joshua Tree beat out Sign for the 1987 Album of the Year Grammy), and it occurs to me that maybe U2 are The Stones to Prince’s Beatles – think on it for a while. Similar to “The Cross” in its bare bones approach, “Forever In My Life” is a stripped and straight-forward ballad on settling down, with a superb arrangement of multiple Princes singing around each other; its feature that everyone always seems to hang on is the way the backing vocals guide the lead vocal instead of following, and it was an inspired turn, as is the delicious acoustic guitar outro.

Like “Strange Relationship” and “I Could Never”, Prince’s Pop for Sign was very eclectic, and yet patently Purple. “Play In The Sunshine” is the type of song that The Revolution would’ve torn up in concert, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink song with all the rainbow colors and the needles in the red; it’s such an over the top piece of pop that it made Madonna and Michael Jackson sound depressed. “Starfish & Coffee” is basically a children’s song, but it’s wonderful melody and bouncy nursery rhyme structure are fun for all ages. Then there’s “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”, the best song on the album, and one of Prince’s greatest accomplishments. It is a Pop song like no other, one of those tracks you hear, and you’re not quite sure what you’re listening to. His drum programming feels askew, off kilter, like there’s something wrong with the drum machine, not unlike the beat juggling DJ Shadow would do a decade later (the song could easily find a home on UNKLE’s Shadow-helmed Psyence Fiction). Everything in the song is muffled, the bass warped like plastic left on a dashboard in the summer. The synths sound inebriated, like a drunk cartoon that burps and bubbles float out, and they moan their troubles in weird jazz chord progressions. The lyric, about a surreal flirtation between Prince and the titular waitress and how the encounter clears his head of past troubles, is a great example of Pop gibberish, full of non-sequiturs that bounce Prince’s narrator all over the place; there’s no chorus, just verses full of wonderfully odd ideas like Prince taking a bath with Dorothy while wearing pants cuz he’s “kind of going with someone”, leading to equally bizarre exchanges along the lines of, “My pants were wet, they came off / But she didn’t see the movie / Cuz she hadn’t read the book first / Instead she pretended she was blind / An affliction brought on by a witch’s curse / Dorothy made me laugh / Ha ha, ha ha.” This is Prince at his best, so far ahead of the field that he could release this now and it would still sound next-level.

The naughty overtones and space-age funk of “It” (melodic chimes over a stiff, industrial racket) and “Hot Thing” (come-ons so humid you can see steam rising off skin, and sweat on the walls) worked for getting bodies moving, but it was “U Got The Look”, a pop-nirvana duet between Sheena Easton and Prince-as-Camille, and easily one of his greatest creations, that was guaranteed to steam up clubs for years. Its genius mix of disco hooks and serrated new wave guitars and distorted synths showed similar hybrid classics like Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and anything by Robert Palmer as inferior, proving Prince was the new King, and to not even try and fuck with him; plus, only Prince could get away with putting “Let’s get to rammin’” in the chorus of a single during the PMRC era. The Swedes especially must have loved it, because it’s been cribbed by Roxette (“The Look”) and The Knife (the spectacular “Heartbeats”). The album ends with a one-two punch: the nine-minute live funk epic “It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night”, the last of The Revolution’s appearances, and the gorgeous “Adore”. The former plays like a summary of the Funk of yesteryear and a dry run for the rest of the styles Prince would explore before he left Warner. The latter is Prince as tender lover, the diminutive, sorta-effeminate funk elf that could steal your girl in less than a second; the song is a true love classic, working in every which way, from sincere to smirking. Play this for your significant other, and you’re sure to either get a ‘yes’ to that wedding proposal, or receive that booty right quick.

In 1989, Time Magazine called Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times the best album of the 1980’s. That’s a remarkable claim today, in the face of a slew of classic albums by Michael Jackson, U2, Sonic Youth, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Beastie Boys, R.E.M., Eric B & Rakim, De La Soul, Minutemen, Tom Waits, Metallica, and the Purple One himself, to name just a few. All these years later, I look at this album as almost a forgotten classic. I think one of the questions that needs to be asked is what has happened in popular music in the past twenty years to lessen the positive attributes of this album that led Time to such a assertion? Or maybe the question should be, conversely, what’s the rest of the world’s problem for not treating this as an archetype of modern Pop music? It’s confusing – I find myself staring at the tracklist for the album, and I wonder why so many of these incredible songs never get mentioned among Prince’s great compositions, when at least a third deserve the honor. Prince is undoubtedly viewed as a master of the single, packing his thirty year career with classic hit after hit, but he made, at least, three undeniable classic albums in addition to Sign, and yet the only album tracks you ever hear people talking about come from Purple Rain. Sign, as well as 1980’s Dirty Mind, and 1982’s 1999 all contain songs just as good as “Darling Nikki” and “Baby I’m A Star”, but you never hear mention of “Sister” or “D.M.S.R.” or (especially) “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker” (not to mention that some Purple Rain-era b-sides, like “Erotic City” and “17 Days” blow half that album’s tracks away). And so, consider that Sign ‘O’ The Times in the public consciousness has diminished because this is the album where Prince decided to grow up. His early R&B supporters (read: Black) were jumping ship at an alarming rate, migrating to the thin sounds of Whitney Houston and New Edition (though Bobby Brown’s great Don’t Be Cruel owes a ton to Prince); Prince was becoming too challenging for his audience, and they weren’t ready yet to acclimate themselves to the new sounds of Hip-Hop, and that’s why something like New Jack Swing succeeded. Prince was aiming for maturation of the soul, examining the gray areas of relationships in addition to looking for sex, and in so doing his commercial focus gave way to collecting a group of songs that spoke to the world as one whole piece of art. And sometimes, a big Artistic Statement, double-sized, triple-sized or otherwise, just doesn’t sell as well.

Tracklist:
01/01. “Sign ‘O’ The Times”
01/02. “Play In The Sunshine”
01/03. “Housequake”
01/04. “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”
01/05. “It”
01/06. “Starfish And Coffee”
01/07. “Slow Love”
01/08. “Hot Thing”
01/09. “Forever In My Life”
02/01. “U Got The Look” [feat. Sheena Easton]
02/02. “If I Was Your Girlfriend”
02/03. “Strange Relationship”
02/04. “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man”
02/05. “The Cross”
02/06. “It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night” [live; feat. The Revolution]
02/07. “Adore”

Addendum:
So, yes, you have a double album in your hands, but what about the whole double album’s worth of songs that got shelved? Well, here’s a guide to where, and where not, to find them:
The Black Album: Shelved at the end of 1987 and heavily bootlegged in 1988, it was finally released in 1994 to help Prince get out of his Warners contract. It closes with Camille leftover “Rock Hard In A Funky Place”.
Graffiti Bridge: “Joy In Repetition” was set for Crystal Ball, but ended up on this soundtrack for the forgettable Purple Rain sequel.
The B-Sides [Disc 3 of The Hits]: Here you’ll find slightly altered versions of “Feel U Up” and “Shockadelica”, both of which were slated for the Camille project, as well as “Power Fantastic” from Dream Factory.
Crystal Ball [NPG collection]: Not to be confused with the aborted album, this is a 3 CD compilation of outtakes from 1998, with a bonus fourth disc of the album The Truth. It was a limited edition, so you’ll have a hard time finding it now. It contained alternate or overdubbed versions of “Dream Factory”, the ten-minute “Crystal Ball”, “Sexual Suicide”, “Last Heart”, “Movie Star” (obviously and hilariously written for Morris Day), “Crucial” – all from the Dream Factory/Crystal Ball period – and “Good Love” from Camille.
Good fuckin’ luck – this is what the internet is for: These are the unreleased tracks. Some have been found on bootlegs for years, but because Prince is such a g-man for his music, his purple people keep this stuff from spreading too far. The prize is “Rebirth Of The Flesh”, the Camille and Crystal Ball opener, and the only Camille song not to be officially released (Which I had once, before my old computer crashed & burned! No!!!). Beyond that, it’s a Dream Factory/Crystal Ball treasure hunt: “Visions”, “It’s A Wonderful Day”, “Big Tall Wall”, “And That Says What?”, “Teacher, Teacher”, “A Place In Heaven” & “Neveah Ni A Ecalp A”, “Interlude”, “In A Large Room With No Light”, “Witness 4 The Prosecution”, “All My Dreams”, “Train”, and “The Ball”. Good luck.

NOTE: The Purple One is notorious for ruling the internet with an iron fist, so finding anything of his online that he doesn't make you pay for is a blessing. There's about zippo on YouTube. So enjoy what's here while you can, cuz it might be taken down by tomorrow.

"Sign 'O' The Times/Play In The Sunshine" [live in LA, 09.87]
from the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards

"Erotic City/Housequake/Slow Love/Adore"
from the Lovesexy 88 concert film

"U Got The Look" ['Long Look' version - video]

"It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" [live in Rotterdam, 06.87]
from the Sign 'O' The Times concert film

from the Sign 'O' The Times concert film [live in Rotterdam, 06.87]
- BONUS: "Slow Love"
- BONUS: "Forever In My Life"
- BONUS: "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man"

- BONUS: "Sign 'O' The Times" [fan video]
- BONUS: "Housequake" [live in LA, 1988]

Heads Up: new Futureheads part 2

2008-03-06T18:22:00.000-05:00

The Futureheads are a great young band with a small, devoted following; they are not Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails. So the fact that they're going it alone for their third album, without a label, is that much more admirable - and difficult. So they've taken to the, uh, airwaves. This is Barry & Ross asking their UK fans to support their new single. The album, This Is Not The World, should be out in early summer.

Video for said single, "The Beginning Of The Twist"

- BONUS: "Beginning Of The Twist" while walking down Carnaby Street, London

Headphones: Vampire Weekend's debut

2008-03-05T01:02:00.004-05:00

I'm going to Boston this weekend, or as my Yankee super-fan girlfriend would call it, "enemy territory". It has given the world good things - Mission Of Burma and the Pixies - but Aerosmith has created a lot for the city to answer for (though Rocks is pretty fuckin' sweet). Anyway, Vampire Weekend spends a lot of time singing about New England, Cape Cod this, Cambridge that, all while dressed like the rich-kid villains from any one of the teen flicks in the 80's. I try not to judge, but it's hard. Some critics have made the distinction that the band is definitely a pop band as opposed to a rock band, and I'd say not only is that true, but it's a necessary point. Rock & Roll was, is, and should be partially about your parents disapproval. And here's Vampire Weekend looking like the L.L. Bean catalog. Hmmm...not so much.

That sensibility informs their music. They get compared to the Talking Heads and Strokes a lot, but these are terrible comparisons. First of all, The Strokes are a better band, and their debut is better. If you ask me what I want to hear about in lyrics, rooms on fire or professors & campus, I'm gonna exclaim "Rooms on muthafuckin' fire!!" No one likes school, you square. Speaking of, David Byrne went to college in Rhode Island - behind enemy lines - and he made it out fine because he was special (or batshit crazy). He managed to stay insane for a few years, and when he started mellowing and getting arty, that time people like the most, like Remain In Light, I tuned out. You want a good comparison, check this real-life exchange between my girlfriend & I from earlier this evening, and the reason I'm busting this review out right now:

[cheesy 80's music playing over restaurant speakers]
Me: "Have you heard Vampire Weekend yet?"
Veronica: "I saw the video. I didn't like it."
Me: "The one with the stop-motion?" [referring to "A-Punk"]
Veronica: "Yeah. The video and the song were stupid."
Me: "Really? I thought it was OK..." [playing devil's advocate]
Veronica: "It just seemed like something Sting would've done."

There you have it folks. She said Sting. Not The Police. Sting. And no one wants to be like Sting. I know, because when I was young and dumb, I was a Sting fan. Then I bought the first Clash record. Sting collected dust from then on. Furthermore, I'm also reminded of that "classic" Feelies album, Crazy Rhythms from '82 (the one Rivers Cuomo stole the cover idea for the "Blue Album" from), which is another album that I bought because of its revered status, before being underwhelmed, only to be exiled to sit in a box somewhere. Don't get me wrong. It's not a bad album. It's just...OK, and only OK. "Mansard Roof" has that interesting beat, and "I Stand Corrected" is pretty good (mostly cuz it doesn't sound like the rest of the album). But the rest is pretty much all the same. And seriously, if you want an album that's like this, but you know, GOOD, pick up The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta, from back when Sting didn't totally suck. Oh yeah, and by the way, if you're going to pose with Fear Of A Black Planet in a picture, why not try making some music that sounds like you know Public Enemy exists. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to listen to The Stooges' Fun House before bed.

"A-Punk" [video]

Netflix Diary 2

2008-03-04T22:40:00.002-05:00

Bonnie & Clyde [1967]
1967 was the year that movies changed, and this was one of the great few that changed it (along with The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, and In The Heat Of The Night, among others). I would say it’s not a hands-down masterpiece, mostly because it hasn’t aged as well as some of the other films of the time – Estelle Parsons’s Oscar-winning supporting actress turn comes off as a bit grating now – but its classic status is still evident when watching. The violence was definitely revolutionary as far as what you could show and how you could treat it emotionally, and Clyde’s sexual hang-ups were definitely an interesting development of how a male lead could be portrayed. Throw in Gene Hackman’s breakthrough, a bit part by a super-young Gene Wilder, and Faye Dunaway in one of the sexiest performances of the 60’s, and you have a cool flick to go back and discover.

The Host [2006]
I’ve wanted to see this for about a year, and so when I got Netflix, I put it right at the top of the list. I think it’s always interesting to see what big budget blockbusters look like when made in other countries. As a monster movie, this is way more fun than, say, the Matthew Broderick-led Godzilla, wisely choosing to have the creature be smaller than most movie monsters – this thing is about 20 feet tall – so that during the action, whichever human is there engaging it can be fit in the same shot, instead of separate giant monster shots and tiny ant-of-a-person shots. Add in some good acting and classic slapstick humor from the Korean cast, and a little social commentary in the script, and you have one satisfying viewing experience, destined to be a cult classic.

Netflix Diary 1

2008-03-02T22:17:00.002-05:00

Disturbia [2007]
Ever since I saw The Battle of Shaker Heights, I try and check out Shia LaBeouf’s flicks; I think he picks good projects for his acting personality. This teen angst reimagining of Hitchcock’s Rear Window was a fun little slice of popcorn fare; as both teenage fare and as a thriller, it’s slightly above average. I don’t think it was worth a $10 ticket, but I enjoyed it. Good to see David Morse continuing to raise his profile too.

Breaking Radio Silence

2008-03-02T19:41:00.000-05:00

I've been kinda quiet in the Oh Ate, so I thought I'd do a brief catch-you-up...
- Be on the lookout for a new section: my Netflix diary. I realized that I see tons of movies (maybe 150-200 a year) and never write reviews for them, SO I will now be writing reviews for every movie I see no matter how short they are. The ones I see in the theater will be seperate from the Netflix diary - now that I've joined Netflix, I'm getting to catch up on some classics as well as see some crap that I'd never pay 10 bucks for. These reviews will start immediately.

- As I noted last year, I don't like to do my Best of the Year lists at Xmas/New Year's like everyone else. I like to get some distance on my opinions, as well as check out a few notable things that I might have missed. You will probably see the Best Films before the Best Music, but they both will come eventually.

- NOTE: There will NOT be a Best Television in '07 list, because TV mostly sucked my ass, illustrated by the sagging quality of good shows and the depressing Writers' Strike. Basically, you should be watching Lost and The Wire, as they are among the greatest shows of all time. If you've missed anything, go get the DVDs and watch them. Anything else worth watching is up to you. I personally watch The Shield, South Park, The Office, and Entourage when they're on, though it seems that they're all past their prime; let's hope I'm wrong. I also enjoy Heroes, though it's not an easy show to recommend to anyone passing on the street, as is the fun & informative daily Attack of The Show on the G4 channel. I despise pretty much any reality TV and mostly hate sitcoms. I've heard Dexter and Weeds are good, but I haven't gotten around to them on DVD yet.

[008] Loveless

2008-03-01T10:13:00.001-05:00

Album: Loveless
Artist: My Bloody Valentine
Release Date: November 1991
Label: Creation [UK], Sire/Warner Bros. [US]
Producers: Kevin Shields, with Colm O’Closoig
Engineered and assisted by: Kevin Shields, Alan Moulder, and Anjali Dutt, with Nick Addison, Darren Allison, Harold Burgon, Adrian Bushby, Tony Falter, Guy Fixsen, Pascale Giovetto, Dick Meaney, Colm O’Closoig, Hugh Price, Nick Robbins, Nick Savage, Charles Steel, Ingo Vauk, and Andy Wilkinson

"I just stopped making records myself, and I suppose that must just seem weird to people. 'Why'd you do that?' The answer is, it wasn't as good [as Loveless]. And I always promised myself I'd never do that, put out a worse record.”
- Kevin Shields, on why he hasn’t made an album since 1991

"[My Bloody Valentine] was the first band I heard who quite clearly pissed all over us, and their album Loveless is certainly one of my all-time three favourite records. It's the sound of someone [Shields] who is so driven that they're demented.”
- Robert Smith of The Cure

Not that I would position myself as a seasoned veteran or expert in the field quite yet, but the beginner’s tactics of writing about music usually involve stringing flowery adjectives together to describe the properties of a plastic disc. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is the kind of album that has demanded only the best in vocabulary over the last sixteen years. To give you an idea of the greatness that lies within this masterpiece, the following words have been cherry-picked from various reviews and retrospectives on the album: ambitious, avant-garde, balanced, beautiful, bent, breathy, calm, catchy, cavernous, challenging, classic, commanding, complex, creative, decadent, defiant, disorienting, distorted, diverse, dominating, dreamy, droning, druggy, dysfunctional, emotional, ethereal, excellent, experimental, extreme, fantastic, fiery, foggy, forward-looking, fractured, fragile, frantic, fuzzy, gentle, harmonic, harsh, immediate, influential, inimitable, innovative, inspiring, intense, intimate, inventive, jagged, layered, loud, lush, magical, masterful, melodic, memorable, mighty, mind-altering, modern, moody, noisy, obscure, peerless, pioneering, pretty, promising, psychedelic, pulverizing, real, remarkable, rewarding, roaring, self-assured, sensual, sexual, soft, spirited, strange, strong, stylish, surging, sweet, swirling, symphonic, tangible, textured, thick, trippy, undulating, unique, uplifting, vast, venerable, voluptuous, warped, weightless, and wonderful. Though every one is applicable, despite some being contradictory, I’d probably just go with ‘perfect’.

Granted, I said that those words were to give you an idea. With an album like Loveless, it’s hard to describe why it’s so great. I can tell you about it, but that doesn’t really communicate how it feels, how it forces your mind and body to react. But I’m going to try and touch on both. The background is fairly simple and well-known to those that care to know it, and yet still reads like a legend. My Bloody Valentine started as an Indie Rock band in the UK in the mid 80’s, working out the kinks of their sound, somewhere in the soup between 60’s garage psychedelia and the dissonance of Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth and, more so, The Jesus & Mary Chain. In 1988, they released the great Isn’t Anything, which over the years has become a pretty respected minor classic in its own right. But that album, well, it was tangible, and I mean that there were other bands that could be referred to as MBV’s peers and contemporaries; it wouldn’t stay that way for long though. Between 1988 and the release of Loveless at the end of 1991, so much in music happened to change the environment for audience-challenging music that didn’t conform to the Pop charts. Besides the ascension of the Alternative bands in America, and the emerging rave scene, a heady blur of Rock bands were taking hold in the UK, dubbed “Shoegazing” by the music press. The term has been explained quite logically – when these bands played live, they just stood there staring at their shoes; of course, the press wanted to make the assumption that they had some sort of anti-fame stance, but really it was because either it was too dark or they were too high to see the large arsenal of guitar effects pedals, which made their music possible, on the ground in front of them. My Bloody Valentine and Isn’t Anything had become early signposts for this new sound, and during MBV’s stay in the studio, the mini-movement was lead primarily by the band Ride, and other acts like Chapterhouse, Swervedriver, Curve, and later Slowdive.

Loveless shattered the genre’s constraints, leapfrogging pretty much every British guitar band at the time, and laying down the gauntlet to the whole Rock world; the hot new things in Seattle may have put the underground on MTV, but they weren’t pushing music like this. At least that’s what the press and the fans said. But I doubt that My Bloody Valentine had that sort of impact in mind at the onset. In order to fully understand the album, you’d have to be Kevin Shields. The sound of Loveless, one of the most singular sounds in all of music history, is the sound inside the MBV leader’s head. With the exception of the instrumental interlude “Touched”, which was created in full by drummer Colm O’Closoig, and the lead vocals sung by Bilinda Butcher, pretty much every noise on the album was courtesy of Rock alchemist Shields. Butcher’s guitars collected dust. Bassist Debbie Googe stayed home because it was easier for Shields to play the parts himself than to explain what he heard in his dreams. O’Closoig played live drums on only his interlude and one other song, the untouchable opening track “Only Shallow”, purportedly because of health problems; all other rhythm tracks were created by Shields, who had the drummer bang out simple patterns that he could handle playing while ill, and then Shields sampled and looped the parts he wanted. Shields angered studio owners, and got his equipment locked up. Shields drove the assistant head of his label, Creation, to a nervous breakdown and a head of gray hair at the age of 29. Shields spent two years in nineteen different studios with as many engineers (most of them didn’t do much), making an album that took thirteen days to master (most albums take one or two days), nearly bankrupting the small Creation and basically making an enemy of his label boss, Alan McGee, who dropped the band because he couldn’t see himself enduring work with Shields ever again. More important than any of these legendary twists and turns though is that Kevin Shields played the guitar.

Despite the sixty-year history of Rock & Roll, and the couple hundred-or-so “great” guitarists, there are very few moments when the essential tool of the music – the six-string electric guitar – was presented in a format which totally reinvented the way it was played. In fact, you could easily count them on two hands. The first would be jazzman Charlie Christian, and then whichever Bluesman you want to credit, Robert Johnson or whoever, with getting it all started, as well as your pick of the influential moments from the giants of rhythm guitar: Chuck Berry, Elvis sideman Scotty Moore, and James Brown’s funk slinger Jimmy Nolen. Jimi Hendrix’s debut album, Are You Experienced, would be another moment, as would the self-titled debut by Van Halen. And Loveless would also be on that shortlist, along with a couple others. The interesting thing about Kevin Shields’ place in this group, and the reason why Loveless is such a groundbreaking guitar album, is because of its sound, not how he played his instrument. Eddie Van Halen will always be famous for his lightning pull-offs & hammer-ons, but the music his band made wasn’t that different from their peers of the day, the Zeppelins, the Cheap Tricks, the Kisses. Jimi is a better comparison, the way he played with studio sound and pioneered the use of the effects, but at the same time, as far ahead as he was as a guitarist, his band did have contemporaries – Cream is most notable. And yet, he was Jimi, still the gold standard, and similarly, MBV had Ride, but Ride weren't even close. No one ever talks about the way that Kevin Shields plays. They talk about how he sounds. I’ve done it throughout this project; I’ve compared probably a dozen artists on this list to the My Bloody Valentine “sound” (and it could've been more), because it’s simply unavoidable. It’s like saying that any lush, summery pop song with harmonies sounds like the Beach Boys, or any bluesy hard rock with a wailing vocal is ‘Zeppelinesque’; you can’t help it, that’s just the way of the world. And yet through all this, unless you do the research, listening to Loveless will lead you to all the wrong assumptions about Kevin Shields as a guitar architect. The common misconception, which I myself have made countless times, is that Shields’ work on this album is masterpiece of orchestrating his many effects pedals. I’ve found that this is not true, and leads me to wonder whether maybe his playing is what we all should’ve been paying attention to. Shields maintains that he used very little in the way of direct effects, instead preferring to process and tweak things after the fact through studio equipment. He insists that most of the warped feeling of his guitar playing is due his style of “Glide guitar”, his practice of using the tremolo bar when he plays, bending the tone and tuning as he goes. It gives the sound a wavering feel, like the blurry blacktop in the distance on a hot day. Hearing the album, you’d think there are dozens of tracks packed with guitars, but Shields swears that it’s a lot more simple than people think, presumably a result of merely turning up the volume to ear-splitting volumes. In fact, if you’re listening to this album with the volume turned down, then you might as well not listen at all. This is my test when I play it in the car: I press play, start talking to myself, and when I can’t hear myself anymore, I know it’s as loud as the band intended (they had take a break in recording due to tinnitus).

MBV stuck around in the public consciousness during the recording of Loveless by releasing the Glider EP (named after Shields’ playing style), which featured the seven-minute “Soon”, the world’s first taste of what would be their next album. Listening to it now, “Soon” is much cleaner and sparkling than the rest of Loveless, vocals a little more up front, but no less indecipherable, featuring a spry, rave-friendly breakbeat and a little of that ringing guitar found on Ride’s classic slice of Indie Pop, “Vapour Trail”. The guitars initially sound a bit more conventional, until they can’t contain themselves, and burst forth with the bristling fuzz of distortion. Amounting to the next logical step from The Smiths’ epochal “How Soon Is Now”, “Soon” cranked the guitars even further into overdrive, ramming into distant singers like bumper cars, looped, echoed, panned, and cycling over themselves. When the album was released, it was clear that “Soon” was just the beginning, though some songs follow, somewhat conventionally, the evolution of the Loveless sound. To expose “When You Sleep” as the most straight-forward Rock song after “Soon”, you just have to look at how it’s been considered over the years. Superdrag borrowed its rhythm riff for their “Destination: Ursa Major”, and Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers covered it on the tour to support their She Loves You album of covers (though, unfortunately, it wasn’t included on the album). “Come In Alone” begins the second half of the album with molasses thunder, crashing like tumultuous waves on the rock of Rock – or whatever you would call this music – flashing synths and slashing guitars fending off Shields’ sweet, boyish voice.

When “Only Shallow” erupts in your eardrums for the first time, you’re likely to know the answer to the universe. All you get is a count of four. Four snare shots to signal the attack. The guitars sound like the apocalypse, or at least first time you saw Jurassic Park, and the Tyrannosaurus Rex roared through the theater surround sound speaker system, shaking your ribcage to the core, while the drums lumber just like that jeep chase. One of the great album openers of the 90’s, the song remains the best encapsulation of MBV’s greatness, screaming sheets of noise throwing shapes across your brain. Like virtually all of their songs, it doesn’t even matter what the lyrics are – possibly something about sleeping or some double entendre about vaginas, who knows really – it just matters how it moves you. I don’t mean figuratively either; the music of My Bloody Valentine is such an aural assault that you can’t help but be swayed. If it is at all possible to cross the human senses (as they say in the movie Ghostbusters, “Listen…Do you smell something?”), well then, “Only Shallow” sounds like heat exhaustion feels. It smothers the listener in an invisible cloud of stuffy hot air. And that feeling continues right through the album, with the distorted strings of “Loomer” sounding like fire burning – you know in movies when there’s an explosion in slow motion, and after the initial blast, you hear the massive growl of dozens of tongues of flame crackling as they lick the sky? Yeah, like that – rumbling like a never-ending crescendo, all pounding tribal drums with no relief of a snare, alleviated only by Bilinda Butcher’s cotton candy vocals and an undulating melody line. “What You Want” is cut from the same energetic cloth, but has the benefit of a propulsive beat. The guitars are sliced to be lean, the fat of the low end cut off and thrown in the background. An ever-present buzz creeps in from the margins, holding the vocals at bay, recalling MBV’s recent ancestors - JAMC, Sonic Youth, or Hüsker Dü - but mellowing out their punk impulses with Shields’ melodious Britpop vocal, Butcher’s background cooing, and a cascading flute-like synth line that evolves into a dreamy light show of silky tones.

Sounding like whales humping, “Touched” introduces the gorgeous “To Here Knows When”, also the featured track on the second Loveless-era companion, the Tremolo EP; the success of the EP placed its lead song in the UK Top 40, possibly the most unconventional Top 40 hit of the decade. “To Here Knows When” is Bilinda Butcher’s finest moment; again, who knows really what she’s singing about, but her voice guides the music through a dreamlike state, a rush of whirling pastel colors spinning past your mind’s eye, suggesting the most sensual of other dimensions, where all of your wildest fantasies come true. The bulging sonics of the song bleed past the lines, challenging the speakers to contain them; it has to fade out because it gets tired from exerting so much brutal beauty. Likewise, “Blown A Wish” is relentless in its cyclical splendor, flowing like water over you; it’s also the song to which the lyrics are clearest, though it’s not quite apparent if this is significant (Perusing online lyric sources, one can see that no one has figured out the words to entire album even now, though the overwhelming lyrical sentiment that fans have been able to make out is one of a troubled couple, referring to the disintegration of Shields and Butcher's relationship, hence the album title). Shields’ exquisite ballad “Sometimes” burns with the fire of hopeful love, built on a bed of purring noise, a material hum with a texture you wish you could reach out and touch. Acoustic guitars chug along as a whistling keyboard soothes you, washing away the stresses of everyday life. One of the greatest pleasures in my film-watching life is hearing this song in Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation; following the ecstatic scenes of Bob & Charlotte’s night out, they sit together in that classic shot – the tight hallways of some Tokyo karaoke parlor, in silence – and then My Bloody Valentine lands on your head, scoring their spent cab ride back to their foreign hotel, as Coppola nominates “Sometimes” for the best lullaby in the land (The film's soundtrack also marked the first time Kevin Shields had recorded new music for many years). At the center of the Loveless storm, “I Only Said” stands tall as a summation of all around it – the roaring guitars of fire, pouring over you like standing in a waterfall as your lover serenades you through the rush, while T.Rex’s circle you growling and whales fuck beautiful below you, and you float on clouds of tangible distortion, looking like steel wool but feeling as soft as a baby’s wisp of hair. Receiving the joy of Loveless is confirmation that your senses are working, that your brain is sending signals and that your third eye is open. You are an antenna, a lightning rod for experiences, immersed in the bliss of new love and crushed by one hundred broken hearts. To love Loveless is to love life.

Tracklist:
01. “Only Shallow”
02. “Loomer”
03. “Touched” [interlude]
04. “To Here Knows When”
05. “When You Sleep”
06. “I Only Said”
07. “Come In Alone”
08. “Sometimes”
09. “Blown A Wish”
10. “What You Want”
11. “Soon”

"Only Shallow" [video]

"To Here Knows When" [video]

"Sometimes" [excerpt]
as heard in Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation

"Soon" [single edit - video]

- BONUS: "Only Shallow" [live in London, 12.91]
- BONUS: "To Here Knows When" [live in London, 12.91]
- BONUS: "When You Sleep" [live in London, 12.91]
- BONUS: "I Only Said" [live in London, 12.91]
- BONUS: "Blown A Wish" [live in London, 12.91]
- BONUS: "Soon" [live in London, 12.91]
- BONUS: Kevin Shields walks you through MBV and Loveless in 5 minutes [2000 interview from Irish show @last tv]

First contender for single of '08

2008-02-27T17:48:00.001-05:00

I first heard of Estelle in 2004, when she broke down the doors with the incredible "1980" single, one of the best of that year (which is saying something, cuz '04 was one of the best years for singles ever). At the time, I likened her to a UK version of Lauryn Hill, and it seems that she's followed that maturation by slowly transitioning from MC to songbird. So now, check her new joint featuring Kanye: "American Boy" marries the type of smooth soul that John Legend's been pimping with an irresistable disco bump. Infectious is an understatement.

Estelle: "American Boy" [feat. Kanye West]

[009] Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

2008-02-21T22:15:00.003-05:00

Album: Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
Artist: Wu-Tang Clan
Release Date: November 1993
Label: Loud/RCA
Producers: The RZA, with Ol’ Dirty Bastard & Method Man

“It's been twenty-two long hard years of still struggling
Survival got me bugging, but I'm alive on arrival
I peep at the shape of the streets
And stay awake to the ways of the world 'cause shit is deep
A man with a dream, with plans to make C.R.E.A.M.
Which failed - I went to jail at the age of 15
A young buck selling drugs and such, who never had much
Trying to get a clutch at what I could not touch
The court played me short, now I face incarceration
Pacing - going upstate's my destination
Handcuffed in back of a bus, forty of us
Life as a shorty shouldn't be so rough
But as the world turned, I learned life is hell
Living in a world no different from a cell
Everyday I escape from jakes giving chase, selling base
Smoking bones in the staircase
Though I don't know why I chose to smoke sess
I guess that's the time when I'm not depressed
But I'm still depressed, and I ask what's it worth?
Ready to give up, so I seek the Old Earth
Who explained working hard may help you maintain
to learn to overcome the heartaches and pain
We got stickup kids, corrupt cops, and crack rocks
and stray shots, all on the block that stays hot
Leave it up to me while I be living proof
To kick the truth to the young black youth
But shorty's running wild, smoking sess, drinking beer
And ain't trying to hear what I'm kicking in his ear
Neglect it for now, but yo, it's got to be accepted
That what? That life is hectic."
- Inspectah Deck, from “C.R.E.A.M.”

"First of all, who's your A&R?
A mountain climber who plays an electric guitar?
But he don't know the meaning of dope
When he's looking for a suit-and-tie rap
that's cleaner than a bar of soap
And I'm the dirtiest thing in sight
Matter of fact, bring out the girls and let's have a mud fight"
- GZA, from "Protect Ya Neck"

In honor of the nine members of Wu-Tang…
Nine Reasons Why 36 Chambers Is One Of The Best Albums Ever!

- There are fuckin’ NINE of them muthafuckers!!!
It’s not like there hadn’t been any groups in Hip-Hop. There just hadn’t been any this big or this good. Actually, the make up of the Wu-Tang Clan is most similar to the earliest outfits in Hip-Hop’s history, like Funky Four + 1 or The Furious Five, mostly because the Clan takes their style from the playgrounds and street corners where Hip-Hop began. Through the 1980’s, the superstar groups became trios and duos, maybe you had a group with only two or three MC’s, and a couple DJ’s or dancers or some nonsense. N.W.A. was probably the closest thing to Wu-Tang, but again, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, and MC Ren were the only MC’s; Dr. Dre only rapped every once in a while. Wu-Tang took the N.W.A. plan, and tripled it, also seeing the rise of the posse cut – from “The Symphony” to the Native Tongues on “Buddy” and “Scenario”, through to The Chronic – as license to expose the world of Rap to their extended family, paving the way for the Dungeon Family, Cash Money, Dipset, etc etc. Furthermore, Wu-Tang introduced the idea of the MC as a character, the inverse of Run-DMC’s long-followed straight off the street method. Wu-Tang wanted to be the heroes (or villains) from their old Marvel comics, or the Kung Fu masters from all the old Shaw Brothers movies they saw in the old Times Square, and so they fashioned their monikers and on-the-mic personalities to be larger than life. One look at the schizophrenia of Eminem and his D-12 posse, and you can see the message was received.

- Almost all nine of them are really fuckin’ good!!
OK, so you have a group of nine MC’s. So what, right? But what if I told you that the best four – The GZA, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, and Method Man – could be included in the 20 best MC’s of the 90’s? That’s one fifth, a ridiculous level of dominance during the strongest decade of the music’s thirty years on wax. Not to mention that Inspectah Deck, The RZA, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard wouldn’t be far behind; Deck’s verse on “C.R.E.A.M.” is one of the few perfect verses in Hip-Hop. Wu-Tang ruled Hip-Hop for three solid years in the mid-90’s because they were good enough to hold on to the top of the mountain. Shit, when 36 Chambers was released, GZA had already been rapping for 17 years, since he was 10 years old, so there’s no wonder why he busts out the most memorable lines – remember, Wu-Tang “forms like Voltron, and GZA just happens to be the head” – from the baseball metaphors on “Clan In Da Front” to hilarious record industry one-liners on “Protect Ya Neck”, like “niggas so stingy they got short arms and deep pockets.” And, as they all had their characters, those characters came with distinct styles. When I got the album, I was almost immediately able to differentiate between all seven of the regulars, and so not only did they present an intriguing cast of characters like no one had ever heard, but they put themselves out there in a way that was easy to comprehend and digest.

- As MC’s, Wu-Tang were as raw as they were original
Just because you could tell them apart didn’t mean what they were saying would go down easy. Not only were Wu-Tang putting out there the same grim project realities as Nas was about to – the dangers of crime on “C.R.E.A.M.”, the HIV cautionary tale of “Tearz” – but they mixed it with their twisted slang pulled from those Kung Fu flicks and comic books, as well as 70’s TV, numerology, chess tactics, and teachings from the Islamic Five Percenters and Eastern philosophy (The group’s name comes from the Wudang holy mountain in central China, steeped in Taoism, ancient medicine, and martial arts). It was all woven so seamlessly into the style of the group right from the start, heavy duty darts for your brain that made Death Row sound one-dimensional. I think that’s why Method Man became the breakout star – because he had the most conventional sounding flow and the most lazy charisma of the group; he couldn’t be bothered most times to make a checkmate metaphor or even pull a jack move because he was way too fuckin’ baked out of his mind (Even still, an MC whose voice is defined by his omnipresent cottonmouth was still pretty revolutionary). On the “Torture” skit, you can’t take Meth seriously cuz you can tell he was laughing the whole time. That puts him, for the most part, in contrast to the rest of the Wu; he’s the jester to their knights in many ways. Ghost, Rae, Deck and GZA manage to cram a couple dozen threats into the first four minutes of the album, and “Bring Da Ruckus” definitely sets the tone for the rest of the record. Raekwon’s half of the “Torture” skit paints him as a deranged individual, the “literate, tight asshole” with his cracks and weed making his eyes bleed. If there was an Eazy-E in Wu-Tang, it was Rae, a wild stick-up kid and street-corner hustler with a Napoleon Complex who would eventually transcend his gimmick when his solo debut showed that he was more a genius of street business. Elsewhere, GZA “provokes niggas to kick buckets”, and ODB will “bite your muthafuckin’ ass”, while they both manage to talk about shitty drawers. Ghost is “hittin’ like a spiked bat” and “jettin’ like a runaway slave”, The RZA has you “open like fallopian tubes”, also noting that the Clan increases “like Black unemployment”, and Deck “slams tracks like quarterback sacks from L.T.”

- 36 Chambers wants to fight you
There were always rumors and legends of N.W.A. fuckin’ shit up, but looking back, why were they so dangerous? Cuz they were holding gats on their album covers? Eazy-E was just this little dude – not scary in any way, Dr. Dre was tossing Dee Barnes around, but you never heard of him throwing down for real, and Ice Cube looked real mean, but if he could be civil enough to make a Hollywood movie, he couldn’t be all that bad. When Wu emerged, their threats felt like when you first heard N.W.A., like you really didn’t want to know these dudes. While there definitely is some gunplay on the album – my mind immediately snaps to Raekwon’s cold-blooded shooting of a rival’s mother on “Can It Be All So Simple”, even as the rival begs him not to pull the trigger – it seems like every Wu MC just wants to beat your ass up, steal your sneakers, and stomp you one last time for good measure before taking off. The aggression on the album is palatable, a fascinating illustration of the defense mechanisms that ghetto males develop to handle day-to-day life; these men have brilliant enough minds to construct the various imaginative metaphors and similes on this album, but they haven’t figured out how to translate that quick thinking into a strategy for life instead of being menaces to society.

- The success of 36 Chambers gave underground Hip-Hop a jumpstart
This is the type of record that got pushed off of commercial radio in a second, forever relegated to the underground. But The Wu was too good to be ignored. Maybe it was the NYC fans wanting their own version of what the West Coast was proud of. But whatever the case, after the “Protect Ya Neck” single hit, Wu-Tang was wildfire. I think the platinum success of such a rough New York Hip-Hop act showed the country, and the world, that maybe there was a place for rough, left-of-center Hip-Hop on the charts. Before 36 Chambers, most of the Hip-Hop underground consisted of Rap albums either released or distributed by a major label that just didn’t do that well. But in the years following Wu-Tang’s arrival, all kinds of self-starting MC’s and producers started to take Wu’s lead, from No Limit to Rawkus. It was about not compromising what these artists felt was ‘true Hip-Hop’, not wanting to conform to major label expectations in order to make a career. And their gambles succeeded, even internationally, helping to spur on a healthy UK Hip-Hop scene that built through the late 90’s, culminating with Dizzee Rascal and the “Grime” sub-genre.

- Wu-Tang threw verse-chorus-verse structure out the fuckin’ window and just rhymed
I was talking about this album to a guy at work one day, and his complaint was that Wu-Tang never had any choruses, but that’s bullshit. The R&B hooks on 36 Chambers may be samples, but they’re still hooks, and they had choruses too – they’re just chants though, guys shouting in unison over the beat. To me, that’s more natural and organic. It’s been said many times that 36 Chambers sounds like everyone’s in one recording booth, knocking all the songs out in one weed-stimulated night, and the rhymes reflect that, more like a freestyle battle than anything – and where else would you have a bunch people standing around rappers, shouting along, but at a freestyle battle? This isn’t an accident – RZA had the Clan battling each other for the right to get on his beats, and so for each track, you’re hearing the best of the best for that beat, one of the many reasons that 36 Chambers is one of the few Rap classics with no weak cuts.

- 36 Chambers is the Hip-Hop Appetite For Destruction
In Rolling Stone’s original review for 36 Chambers, journalist Touré pointed out that the Wu-Tang Clan was breaking through on the back of their videos flooding the old NYC music video request channel The Box, and that, at the time, the Wu were to The Box what Guns N’ Roses were to MTV. Now, Touré was probably making a simple statement about the saturation of the groups’ videos, but his observation runs even deeper, and goes some way to explaining the power of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album. The first thing a listener is confronted with when pressing play on 36 Chambers are some mysterious dialogue samples from a Kung Fu film, followed by The RZA yelling “BRING THE MUTHAFUCKIN’ RUCKUS!!” over and over. The shock is not unlike Axl Rose’s scream that opens “Welcome To The Jungle”. “Bring Da Ruckus” is one of the most terrifying songs of all time that first time you hear it in all the same ways that “Welcome To The Jungle” is. They are scary. They make you want to run. They are both confrontations of the new, putting all that came before on notice. The comparisons for the rest of the albums can be just as aligned. Commercial breakthroughs “Sweet Child Of Mine” and “C.R.E.A.M.” share a tension of uncertainty. “Clan In Da Front” and “Nighttrain” have the same darkness and forward momentum. The angry rush of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit” is easily parallel to “My Michelle” or “You’re Crazy” – take your pick. The all-encompassing roar of “Paradise City” equates to the onslaught of “Da Mystery Of Chessboxin’”. And most telling, the aggression of “Protect Ya Neck” and the sensitivity of “Tearz”, sequenced successively, represent the duality of the two halves of the epic “Rocket Queen”. Of course, for both groups, what made them great on these albums was their hunger, and once they achieved success – as Raekwon puts it on the “Intermission”, “Once we get a little something, that’s when you know it’s on!” – their pretentious tendencies blew out the flame in the music and made the attempts to return to the ghetto seem somewhat hollow.

- 36 Chambers kickstarted the ‘Grimy Era’
That’s my name for it at least, that time from late 1993 until sometime in 1996; most people would call it ‘hardcore’. It ended when its proponents – Biggie, Nas, Wu-Tang’s Raekwon, along with Jay-Z – became more interested in being seen as rich, black mafia than the product of the projects they used to scream allegiance to. It was a new permutation of ‘Gangsta’. Wu-Tang didn’t talk about gangs and colors like the West Coast, and the mob (and Tony Montana) comparisons didn’t come until later. Even talk of hustling drugs is marginalized because the Wu MC’s spend so much time talking about the myriad of ways they’re going to beat the shit out of you. Listening to 36 Chambers was a clear message: if you come to Shaolin (aka Staten Island), prepare to experience Hell courtesy of these street corner thugs, dubbing themselves the Wu-Tang killa bees because they swarm on their victims. It’s important to note that seven of the nine members are felons. U-God and Masta Killa barely register on the album because they were incarcerated during recording, though both turn in excellent verses on “Da Mystery Of Chessboxin’”. Unlike the sunny Funk that Dr. Dre was piecing together, The RZA, who was beating an attempted murder charge during the making of the album, created his beats to reflect not only the brashness of the lyrics, but of the gloomy world that inspired those lyrics. And that sound was appealing to a lot of new talent that was looking for their way in the door. Nas’s Illmatic definitely benefited from 36 Chambers being out for a few months in the marketplace, and after Nas, Mobb Deep snatched up the Wu-Tang vibe, and used it to forge their great “The Infamous…” Even Wu-Tang’s gritty videos informed the new movement, parodied in The Roots’ classic “How We Do” video – the beatdown shot, the mansion rented for the shoot, the massive posse of thugs in the background, posing with Beemers and Benzes, etc.

- The RZA’s production style became the template for Hip-Hop beats in the mid-90’s
Listening to 36 Chambers, I can’t help but think that in some way, Dr. Dre missed an opportunity. His solo debut and introduction of his protégé Snoop, the title track for the Deep Cover soundtrack was everything that RZA would prefect – brittle, obsidian funk highlighted by sharp piano stabs and an atmosphere of creeping doom. I’d imagine that “Deep Cover” was Dre’s attempt to keep up with the brilliance of Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs. Muggs was, in late 1991 and into 1992, making the best tracks in Hip-Hop. In their pre-Wu careers, RZA and GZA were trying to do a 180, and there’s no doubt that they heard stuff like Cypress Hill, “Deep Cover”, and even Redman’s debut, Whut? Thee Album, as a sign that it was time to make music that they wanted to make. RZA’s landmark production sound has a few sonic signatures; the first is of course the piano. Heavily influenced by Jazz giants like Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, his playing acts as both melody and punctuation, sometimes sounding like he’s just banging away, and the piano is frequently treated to sound slightly out of tune. That piano spread across all of Hip-Hop and R&B for years – Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” springs to mind. RZA’s beats were as dusty and cracked as he could get them, almost taking on a churning, industrial quality, much like the car plants of Detroit influenced Motown; to move the rhythm, he used the massiveness of the Wu posse, whether chanting “Wu Wu Wu” in “Clan In Da Front” or piping off with the ‘doo ahh’s of “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’”. The soul samples on “Can It Be All So Simple” and “Tearz” were direct influences on Kanye West and Just Blaze. RZA favored mournful organ, detuned zithers and thriller strings, chopped and left with jagged edges, while the bass was huge, blown out and buzzing. Finally, he soaked the tracks in the analog murk of early Funkadelic, a claustrophobic fog that spread around the genre and touched anyone producing or rapping in the mid 90’s, from the drama of 2Pac and Eminem, the thuggery of Mobb Deep and DMX, the twisted funk of Redman and Biggie, not to mention the dozens upon dozens of one-hit wonders and forgotten MC’s, from O.C. to Jeru The Damaja.

- 36 Chambers saved New York Hip-Hop
In the early 90’s, New York Hip-Hop was at a stage when all the new school artists that had broken through in the late 80’s were settling into their careers. They had lost their hunger, the charts littered with tepid third or fourth albums by artists who had revolutionized the genre with their first two albums getting passed by Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Public Enemy and LL’s Mama Said were hittin’, but most of the advances were made by the forward looking Native Tongues (36 Chambers was released the same day as Tribe’s Midnight Marauders). Dr. Dre had finally taken the focus of the entire genre off P.E., and put it on the West Coast, now at the top of the Hip-Hop game with The Chronic. And it looked like Dre’s G-Funk era was going to be a long reign, but as his refurbished P-Funk synths and rubbery bass glided across the airwaves, there were rumblings in NYC. EPMD’s Hit Squad had yielded the ‘funk doctor’ Redman, and the Boot Camp, led by Black Moon and Smif-N-Wessun, were stirring the pot for the coming filth. RZA and GZA went through the dark days in NYC, signed and releasing forgettable Pop-Rap that their A&R men told them to. They flipped their lives around in order to follow their artistic hearts, and in the process realized the answer was to roll around in the figurative mud. Hammer’s Pop and Dre’s sunny BBQs didn’t reflect their everyday lives. 36 Chambers was a watershed moment because it was shocking to a Hip-Hop world that had stopped being shocked. Before Wu, almost no one in NYC was talking about the drug trade and gang violence; they drew a new map for East Coast MC’s. And one thing’s for sure, no one expected Wu-Tang to bury the West Coast, but they eventually did just that, opening the flood gates for New York to prove its mettle. The next six months saw a Hip-Hop Renaissance, from Ready To Die to Illmatic, straight from the basements and street corners of the 5 boroughs that birthed the music, and Wu-Tang were the ones that lead the charge.

Tracklist:
– Shaolin Introduction
01. “Bring Da Ruckus”
02. “Shame On A Nigga”
– Wu-Tang Killa Bees interlude
03. “Clan In Da Front”
– Raekwon’s Killer tape interlude
04. “Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber”
- Back in the day interlude
05. “Can It All Be So Simple”
– Intermission
06. “Da Mystery Of Chessboxin’”
07. “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit”
08. “C.R.E.A.M.”
– Torture interlude
09. “Method Man”
– Radio request interlude
10. “Protect Ya Neck”
11. “Tearz”
12. “Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber – Part II” (remix)
– “Conclusion”

"Da Mystery Of Chessboxin'" [video]

"C.R.E.A.M." [video]

"Method Man" [video - version 2]

"Protect Ya Neck" [video]

- BONUS: "Bring Da Ruckus" [live in NYC, 07.07]
- BONUS: "Bring Da Ruckus" [audio]
- BONUS: "Shame On A Nigga" [live, 1993]
- BONUS: "Shame On A Nigga" [audio]
- BONUS: "Clan In Da Front" [GZA solo; live in NYC, 12.07]
- BONUS: "Clan In Da Front" [audio]
- BONUS: "7th Chamber" [audio]
- BONUS: "Can It Be All So Simple" [video]
- BONUS: "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing To Fuck Wit/Shame On A Nigga" [video]
- BONUS: "C.R.E.A.M." [live on The Arsenio Hall Show, 1994]
- BONUS: "Method Man" [video - original version]
- BONUS: ODB ranting/"Protect Ya Neck" [live, 1993]
- BONUS: "Protect Ya Neck" [live on Uptown Comedy Club, 1993]
- BONUS: "Tearz" [live in Cali, 07.04]
from the Disciples Of The 36 Chmabers DVD
- BONUS: "7th Chamber, Part II" [audio]
"C.R.E.A.M./Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit/Shame On A Nigga" [live in Cali, 07.04]
from the Disciples Of The 36 Chmabers DVD

Heads Up: The Return of Junior

2008-02-14T23:43:00.000-05:00

'You know son, I'm also named after the dog...'