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Beastie Boys - So What’cha Want In light of the news that...

Fri, 04 May 2012 18:14:25 -0400

Beastie Boys - So What’cha Want

In light of the news that Adam Yauch, AKA MCA passed away today, I’d just like to share the song and video that introduced me to the Beastie Boys. At the age I was when this song came out, in my mind, there were three types of music: crap my parents listened to, rock music, and finally R&B and Rap. At the risk of further wearing out a tired cliche, the Beastie Boys bridge a very important and significant gap in my musical vocabulary and played an important part in opening my mind to a whole new world of music.

Enough has been said elsewhere today about the type of person Yauch was, and what the Beastie Boys meant to music, so I’ll spare you any more of that here because we like to keep it light (see: awkward teenage romances and fuck jams).

I will say this: We love music. All kinds of music. For me, the Beastie Boys were a big part of that. Specifically, MCA was my favorite of the group, and not just for his musical contributions. I’m sad he’s passed, but glad he left this music and a legacy of giving the world more than just songs and being more to the world than just a musician.

Silk: “Freak Me” If you lived through the paradigm...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:23:00 -0400

Silk: “Freak Me”

If you lived through the paradigm shift of The Internet, it is still almost beyond belief that information is so nakedly accessible — that the functional distance between you and any cell of the corpus of human knowledge can be machine-reduced to a single point. Saying this makes me sound, I am sure, like an old man dribbling mushed peas onto a Kozmo.com bib, but it is likely to be the only global sociocultural paradigm shift I’ll ever be privileged enough to experience both sides of as a conscious living being, and so I relish reliving it.

BEAR WITH ME, sorry, I am going to talk about fuck jams in a minute.

Because: I think the much more interesting perspective one can have of the internet—my own bias, of course—is basically the one I had of the microcomputer when I was growing up; a culture-secreting machine that was simultaneously ubiquitous and capable of magic. Technology so useful and so pervasive weirds things; that all other technology doesn’t resemble it seems utterly backwards. And so I love to look at this culture of infinite, instantaneous data retrieval from the opposite angle; to view the past as an environment in which knowledge necessarily required pursuit.

Which can be problematic! One huge danger in rubbernecking the reverse chronology of cultural evolution, FOR EXAMPLE, is ascribing false nobility to actions which once were and are no longer standard practice. It is mind-blowing to think, in a surface-level way, that there have been millions of people who have built their own homes with their own hands — but when you get a little closer to the reality of the process you begin to understand that what it is, is merely difficult, but necessary, work. The same is true for the conception people in their late teens have now, I would imagine, about a pre-internet culture; that we were not marinating in graspable data did not make the pursuit of such romantic so much as it meant, at least in my experience, that you just speculated a whole bunch.

Where the power of naïveté came most into play, were you a pre-teen glued to the R&B station, was in the interpretation of—and here we are—the fuck jam.

SCENE THE FIRST

I’m sitting on a microbeach the size of a sedan’s shadow. I am eleven years old and have a crush the size of an exploding star on a girl whose first name and surname are synonymic. In fact, in the summer of 1992 the entire world is, basically, this girl, basketball, Nintendo, and the tiny plastic boombox I have carried with me to the microbeach. Casey Kasem is introducing the #1 song of the week, and for the first time since I’ve started listening to the radio, he sounds audibly disappointed in the title of the song. “Freak Me,” he overenunciates.

I am still sheltered enough that I haven’t yet caught on to the fact that something can be experienced by millions, and yet still be distasteful to adults, so this shakes me out of my proto-pubescent bummer reverie. “Freak Me?” I try catching the words as they ooze, perfumed, out of the speakers, and spread into the air. Something completely ineffable is fundamentally different between this and the song I’d tuned in to hear (“Jump,” by Kris Kross). I get serious. I stop mooning out over the lake and focus all of my attention — if I don’t listen with all my might at this instant, I could forever lose this song and its weird totemic power, gone to time. For the first time in memory, the boombox has edged out Nintendo for third place.

SCENE THE SECOND

I’m playing basketball by myself in the middle of the woods, where my parents live. The amount of pavement available for me to dribble on is two-thirds the size of the key and at a ten-degree angle, and every ten minutes I brick a shot so bad it careens down the driveway. The boombox is shoved up against the house, positioned in a spot I hit with relative irregularity, and is tuned to a radio station that has recently switched formats and is, unbeknownst to me, actively imprinting me with a love of the Yamaha DX7. (Good.) The DJ crossfades into “Freak Me” and it’s like a gift. “Baby don’t you understand,” I sing along, “I wanna be your next man.”

The lyrics are, in fact, “I wanna be your nasty man,” something I would not realize until 2012, maybe two weeks before I wrote this very sentence. When I realize it — and it happens not as a result of even some cursory research, but in my own head, as I’m washing the dishes — it seems momentarily impossible that it could ever be heard any other way; the “next man” interpretation requires that you ignore an entire syllable. It is only plausible, I later decide, if you are a being to whom “nasty man” is a descriptor that makes no sense, and to whom it cannot.

SO,

The internet has solved the problem of “How can I access all music, in order to select some music?” to such a spectacular degree, that it thereafter had to invent a further solution: “I cannot cognitively process my desires when wielding the power of infinite choice. Can you select some music for me?” But it can never emulate choicelessness, so anathematic is that to the stream, and that state was a perfect Petri dish for naïveté.

It is difficult to revisit the state of naïve youth, even as a memory. I have to try. First: to exist is to take in information, constantly, without the faculties to determine which information is useful, or even true. Second: that dizzying intake paints a sheen of plausibility over any self-generated notion, no matter how improbable. Third: between birth and adulthood exists a period where thoughts you have yourself are exciting by the very virtue of being yours alone, and these thoughts can metastasize into actions, which can become rituals.

Now imagine that, as this protohuman, there is a single* device in your life, this radio, which is capable of delivering to you music that you’ve never heard — music which can be yours alone. It is, for that matter, responsible for reifying your realization that music is worth paying attention to in the first place. That it is powered by choicelessness makes it not a tool, but a conduit, in the way you couldn’t call a lightning rod a lightswitch, and trying to wish specific music out of it feels religious, in a way that visiting an actual church never had. Now you are hooked; your hope structure becomes entangled with the dial.

And when a perfect song juts out and strikes you? When you hear something you must hear again? You are stuck ricocheting its memory around your insides until your radio prayer takes. Your recall of the song mutates and evolves it as you obsess over its fading chemtrails: bridges leap from one song-memory to another; a rhyme which sticks out to you was, in fact, self-generated, in the idle downtime of a long bus ride, but is now neatly bookmarked in the second verse of a pop single.

Sometimes, actually even hearing it again could feel like too much, which now sounds absolutely insane—but when you spend months clutching the onionskin-tracing of a song you had one on-the-fly pass to sketch, the actual artifact is terribly holy when it finally shows its face to you again. But often enough, when you compared the two, you’d find that the version you’d kept differed in some fundamental ways to the genuine article; sentiment and faulty recall had modulated the memory over time down another evolutionary branch.

Here in the present, I cannot claim that this is better than unlimited access to the real thing; Youtube comment tween-spam-memes go a long way towards proving that obsession symbiotically mutates to pair with new hosts. But this past habit of song-worshipping has forever intertwined real objects with this frozen iteration of myself, inseparably. Is “Freak Me” my favorite fuck jam? Unquestionably. But that is because I co-wrote it.

* We didn’t have cable yet.

Fountains of Wayne: “Radiation Vibe” Why do I still...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:23:43 -0500

Fountains of Wayne: “Radiation Vibe”

Why do I still have to convince people how great Fountains of Wayne’s debut album is? Why is everyone immediately resort to their Pavlovian response of changing the radio station leaving whatever store they’re in when they hear “Stacy’s Mom” as soon as I mention this band? I understand the repulsion — that song is awful and it was pounded into our ears for one horrible summer. But for my money, no amount of listening to “Stacy’s Mom” could ever take away from that feeling I get when the chorus kicks in, “And now it’s time to say.. what I forgot to say. Baby, baby babyyyyy”. There’s something about the melody paired with that chord progression that I cannot fully understand in a rational way, but I know that I love it and I know that this song is perfect and if you disagree with me I will make you watch “The Wonders” on repeat.

Actually, that movie’s not so bad.

Positive K: “I Got A Man” This song engendered so...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:17:18 -0500

Positive K: “I Got A Man”

This song engendered so much false bravado in my 10-year-old psyche. There I would be, in the privacy of my bedroom, this song playing back on a tape I had ordered from Columbia House not knowing that I’d actually have to, you know, eventually pay for it (Sorry, Mom), lip syncing this song and mean mugging the mirror. Having been moderately successful at getting girls to give me valentine’s up to that age, this felt like the natural next step for me: take girls away from other guys, and when the girls object, remind them that I am not trying to hear that. I knew my next move. I knew how to handle it. I got this, I thought.

When my training was complete, and the time to apply my new skills at recess arrived, I set my sights on Jackie, my longtime crush, and current girlfriend of Tyler, a friend of mine who I harbored an quiet rivalry with. He was a good guy. We both liked Notre Dame. But I was going to take his girlfriend away. Sorry, Tyler.

I approach. I clumsily recite lines from this song (“I tell ya now, I got eyes for youuuu.”). Tyler gives me a new nickname (“Zipperhead”), everyone hears it, laughs, and suddenly all that swagger from my bedroom sinks to the bottom of my Reeboks right there in the middle of the tether ball court.

I slump away +1 new nickname, and no new girlfriend.

Zhane: “Hey Mr. DJ” Try to listen to this and not...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:00:06 -0500

Zhane: “Hey Mr. DJ”

Try to listen to this and not have the best time. I dare you.

Deep Blue Something: “Breakfast At...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:40:00 -0500

Deep Blue Something: “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”

“Well, he’s the lead singer in a rock band,” Jeff from wardrobe said, puzzling over the pants rack. “You can’t really go wrong with leather, right?”

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: “Mary Jane’s Last...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:00:06 -0500

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”

Uhh, so Kim Basinger is dead, but still looks amazing, so instead of just doing your job and preparing her for burial, you touch her a bit inappropriately, take her corpse home and put makeup on her, make her dinner, dance with her, then dump her in the ocean when you’re done with her?

Yeah, I was a child when I saw this for the first time.

Radiohead: “Just” I have a friend that through some...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:00:05 -0500

Radiohead: “Just”

I have a friend that through some internet sleuthing discovered he was a distant relative of John Wilkes Booth. My younger brother, using the internet, managed to figure out what small town in northern Mexico our grandparents our from when this important piece of information managed to evade even our own father during his life. Thousands of people are completing college degrees out in the middle of nowhere thanks to the internet. I can track down some random clip from “3-2-1 Contact” in less time than it takes me to eat a BLT on my lunch break, of course, on the internet. If you have enough money and have reached a certain level of desperation, you can order yourself a wife from a former Soviet bloc country over the internet with minimal effort.

Impressive, I guess. But if the internet still can’t tell me what that guy says at the end of this video, it’s basically useless.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Aeroplane I understand I may be in the...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0500

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Aeroplane

I understand I may be in the minority when I say that I think the Chili Peppers really became a great band when they stopped trying to play psycho-funk music that made you think you were stuck in some kind of fever-induced nightmare. I never liked it. “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” was a great album because it was their first step away from that sound, but what helped me really give the Chili Peppers a chance was when Dave Navarro joined the band and brought a bit of the “Jane’s Addiction” guitar sound to the group. They released a couple good songs after that and have since trailed off into a steady state of recycling their own songs. Whatever, good for them, they’ve built a good career for themselves when by all accounts, they really shouldn’t have lasted this long.

Their best song is “Soul to Squeeze” from the Coneheads soundtrack, but whenever the Red Hot Chili Peppers come to mind, this is the first song that I think of. When it came out, I was just learning to play the bass. I took bass lessons twice a week at this family-owned and operated music shop a couple of towns over. My lessons were usually going over fundamentals, but every once in a while, I’d bring a song in for my instructor to teach me how to play. (I’ve already written about what lead to the end of my tutelage with this particular fellow) We spent an entire session breaking down the bass solo to this song (which is cut short in the music video, and still cut short by alternative radio today, causing me great anger), which I would play along with in the rock arena of my bedroom, simply rewinding the song back to the beginning of the solo and repeating the process ad nauseam for months on end. That was a true crowning achievement for me as a young musician, and probably also the moment when my parents realized they probably made a mistake letting me quit sports.

Fiona Apple: “Criminal” I. Had. The biggggest crush...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0500

Fiona Apple: “Criminal”

I. Had. The biggggest crush on Fiona Apple for about half a minute when this video came out. Everytime MTV would play it, I would sit and watch this video, a rapt, military grade level of attention, slack jawed as she writhed around on the floor, indifferent to how this video might impact my impressionable younger brother. Whatever, he’s got to learn about women sometime.

Being a fan of loud music with guitars, I wouldn’t dare confession my obsession to my friends. An affinity for Fiona Apple was something to be treated, not celebrated. I didn’t care. I kept my secret and I cherished it, 4 minutes at a time, whenever MTV would let me.

But then I learned she was with David Blaine, and I could no longer watch this video with any sense of joy without this face popping into my brain and ruining the whole thing.

It was probably for the best. Fiona Apple is crazy. But still: fuck off, David Blaine. Go levitate off the edge of a cliff or something.

Rage Against the Machine: “Killing in the Name” I...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:00:06 -0500

Rage Against the Machine: “Killing in the Name”

I had friends that knew of Rage when their first album came out. I didn’t get in to them until “Evil Empire” came out and Tom Morello sent me on an unsuccessful quest to learn how to use my guitar as a turntable. I was drawn to the socio-political commentary of Zach De La Rocha’s lyrics just as much as I was to the heavy sound of the band. I always had a passing interest in politics and social awareness, but Rage Against the Machine is what galvanized me, and set me on the ideological path that I followed to where I am today.

But before one goes on to study political science and history in college, they must first be a bit ridiculous.

I bought their debut, self-titled album shortly after buying “Evil Empire” and took immediately to devouring it. I read books and articles about Leonard Peltier at the library and wrote “EZLN” in huge letters on just about every notebook and textbook within arms reach at any and all times. Rage Against the Machine quickly became my favorite band, causing me to see myself as a future social activist, fighting injustice and racism and prejudice and sexism in all its ugly forms!

And my first fight against the man was a noble, one-man protest against the grave injustice of being grounded by my parents for not coming home from riding bikes when I said I would. What gave them the right to impose their will upon me? I was nobody’s slave! I would take this no longer! Go to my room? Fine, but not because you told me to, but because I want to! Screw you, Dad! Screw you, Mom! You guys are ROBOTS!

I went to my room, alright. Fuming with indignation, intent on making a statement. you may cage this body, but you will not cage this voice! I reached for the Rage CD with the monk that set himself on fire, skip forward to track 2 and slide the volume nob all the way to the max. I sat there as the song built to its climax, knowing my parents could hear Zach de la Rocha speaking on my behalf, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me. Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” So on and so forth.

My mom swung open my door and shot me with a look as if to say, “Really? This is your move?”, informed me that I was also grounded from my stereo, unplugged it, and closed my door again.

Touché, Mom and Dad.

Soul For Real: “Every Little Thing I Do” I am an...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:00:06 -0500

Soul For Real: “Every Little Thing I Do”

I am an unabashed lover of all R&B and rap music from the 1990s. I am not too humble to tell you I have a near Rainman-like memory for melodies, hooks, videos, guest appearances, so on and so forth. If it was on MTV Jams, I knew it. I loved Soul for Real. Who didn’t? Candy Rain? The oversized suits? The coordinated dance moves? The grooves, the hooks, the harmonies? Heavy D?! It was perfect. It captures the era and the vibe of R&B at that time. This is the stuff that I love. But as the years have worn on, I have lost some of what I remembered, despite being a part-time DJ that focuses primarily on this particular music from this particular era. To that end, I always appreciate the opportunity to rediscover songs that I had lost without even realizing it. Hearing them for the first time again is the best feeling.

Last year I went out on a first date with a girl I had just recently met. It was pretty typical as far as first dates go. We went to a show, grabbed some drinks, small talk this, small talk that, smile and laugh, try not to act nervous, don’t talk about your ex! At the bar later, there was a DJ spinning R&B from the 90s, and I sat there in my personal mini-paradise, combining some good music with a beautiful girl. It helped I had been drinking. We talked a bit about the music, I felt sly being able to recognize and identify each song that came on. We got nostalgic, talking about the time when these songs came out, I talked about being a DJ. Then the DJ started playing this song, the beginning of which I did not recognize — This was one of the songs that had faded from my memory. My date? She starts dancing in her chair just a little bit, a big smile comes across her face and she jumps in, right in time, “You. Are. On My Mind. You. Are. On My Mind.”

And with that, I was hooked. Never was there a more fitting song.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Sublime: “Santeria” I’d never heard anything...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0500

Sublime: “Santeria”

I’d never heard anything like Sublime when “What I Got” first popped up on my radio on one of the nights I stayed up late listening to alternative radio. Late at night, after Loveline, was when they would play stuff that MTV hadn’t gotten a hold of yet, and I was going through my phase where I wanted to be different than my friends, I wanted to discover new music before they did. I stumbled upon Korn and the Deftones and Earth Crisis before they did. I didn’t like that we all got in to 311 at the same time, so there I would be — up late in my bed, blank cassette in my radio, ready to hit record anytime I heard something come on that caught my ears.

This insatiable desire to be ahead of the curve actually turned me in to a little shithead.

Bradley Nowell died in 1996, two months before this album was released (Thank you, Wikipedia), but people just hearing Sublime for the first time didn’t know this. I don’t remember how I found out, but it was a piece of information that lent more credibility to my “I heard them first” claim. I introduced a lot of my friends to Sublime, which they came to love, much to my join and self-satisfaction. I’m Cool Music Guy now!

No, just kind of a shithead.

On the school bus one day, I handed my headphones to the girl in the seat across the aisle from me. “Check this band out.” I played her this song, and she loved it. Her head started nodding.

“Who is this?” She asked.
“They’re called Sublime. They’re from Long Beach, California.”
“I like it, it’s really cool.”

(Here’s where I ruin it.)

“Yeah, they’re pretty awesome. I’m going to go see them in concert here in about a month.”
“Really? Cool! I should go too.”
“Hah. Yeah right, they’re not playing. The lead singer overdosed and is dead now, so obviously they aren’t playing. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”

She handed my headphones back and Cool Music Guy sat there by himself the rest of the way to school.

New Radicals - Someday We’ll Know All things considered, I...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:34:00 -0500

New Radicals - Someday We’ll Know

All things considered, I shouldn’t still find this to be such a compelling song. The New Radicals never really stood out for most people beyond that video with everyone at the mall and the dude’s bucket hat. I liked this song when it came out, and it sort of faded into my memory from there, but the other morning, I was walking to work, hands tucked into my coat pocket to fight the cold, thinking about someone that matters very much to me, and this tune crept back up, ripe with new relevance. I’ll stop myself there because if I don’t I’ll go start writing in my livejournal. Just enjoy the song and its sentiment.

Guns N’ Roses - “November Rain” This has to...

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:45:00 -0400

Guns N’ Roses - “November Rain”

This has to rank as one of the top 5 pop-rock songs of the 90’s, and if you disagree I will have you stabbed. The reason I post this in such haste is because I just learned that today is the 19th anniversary of the release of “Use Your Illusion I and II”, and they were the first albums that really exposed me to the dynamic range a real rock and roll band could have outside of the garbage I had grown accustomed to from the hair bands of the 80’s at such a young age. Who cares if “Get in the Ring” made me want to be a violent little shit, these albums were important for a budding music lover to own. I wore these tapes out, and my mother was not pleased. (Thank you, Columbia House.)

Sadly, a lot of the luster these albums deserve is forever overshadowed by what’s widely agreed to be an even more seminal and important record that was released just seven days after the “Use Your Illusions” in 1991: Nirvana’s “Nevermind”

God bless Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagen, Matt Sorum, Steven Adler and Dizzy Reed. You introduced me to rock and roll as I know it, even if Nirvana stole your thunder.

Usher: “My Way” Never mind the unnecessary scream...

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:51:19 -0400

Usher: “My Way”

Never mind the unnecessary scream fight that almost ruins the middle of the song, the more important question here is What the hell is going on? In what bizarre universe does Usher have a dance gang that battles Tyrese’s dance gang for the affections of a woman in a junkyard while Jermaine Dupri perpetually interrupts with laughs and “yo yo yo yo” in the background. Spumoni ice cream themed outfits on one side, Arctic G.I. Joe on the other, let’s dance this out, friend, You suckas just got served. I love dance fights, especially when casual dating arrangements are at stake, but this is next level — there’s no way this particular battle happens on planet Earth, and that’s what makes it great. Where can I get a spray painted duster like that? (eBay. Someone check for me) Or even better, once I get that duster, who’s going to teach me how to moonwalk on my knees? The Warriors-cum-West Side Story-cum-Clockwork Orange universe in which women decide between potential mates based on their screaming, singing, running, and dancing abilities (as well as their ability to multitask) is one in which I want to live.

Make it happen, Richard Branson.

Black Sheep: “The Choice is Yours” You know, this...

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Black Sheep: “The Choice is Yours”

You know, this song was one of my aces in the hole when I would DJ house parties. It was used to escalate the energy on the dance floor as the sudden reminder of a great song often forgotten would induce ass shaking and fist bumps for the DJ.

Now it just makes everyone think about dancing hood hamsters and ~~affordable~~ cheap, Korean motor box things.

But, hey… the speakers light up, right?

Nada Surf: “Popular” I just got Nada Surf. This song...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Nada Surf: “Popular”

I just got Nada Surf. This song set off my state of the art teenage sarcasm detector when it came out, and (forgive my slight hyperbole here), it gave license for me to not be popular, and I finally gave up my quest to be so. I hated our Johnny Football Hero (Frank M., I’m looking at you… on Facebook. I’m looking at you on Facebook right now.) This CD was the crown jewel in my CD collection for a long time, and though I was typically very protective of bands that I liked when the popular kids at school started listening to them, the irony of the popular kids loving this song was too great to ignore. Nada Surf made sense to me: the subtle angst, the dynamic writing, both lyrical and musical, hell, even the songs sung in French made sense to me. So I held them dear.

Then I got to meet them several years later and realized that I’m just an anxiety-filled music nerd.

By some stroke of genius, my best friend was able to contact the band as they were touring to promote their second album after being dropped by Elektra. He had arranged with Matthew Caws to let us film their show in town and the band agreed to an interview for the video. This was before the age of youtube, so what Matthew expected to come from having a couple of high school kids film you and ask you inane questions, I have no idea.

My friend and I showed up at the venue about 5 hours early. We (very poorly) filmed their soundcheck, helped them set up their merch table, requested songs for them to play during the soundcheck and the show, and pretty much just did our very best to stay out of the way and act cool. It didn’t matter that these guys, once the darlings of 120 Minutes and Alternative Nation, had showed up in one of the most beat up old vans I had ever seen, these guys were idols to us and they let us in.

In between the soundcheck and the show, Matthew agreed to a quick interview. My friend was so nervous that he decided I should be asking the questions while he filmed. I hadn’t even interviewed my own mother, let alone a musician that I admired this much, so I’ll leave you to imagine the ratio of actual questions to mumbled ass kissing, but Matthew was incredibly gracious and humored us patiently for a good 15 minutes as he explained why their label didn’t like their second album, why he doesn’t like playing “Popular” live (not because it’s their hit, but because the verses are difficult to recite while playing guitar), and what his favorite Star Wars character is (God, I hate myself).

In the end, the show itself was exactly what you’d want a show with one of your favorite bands to be: intimate, in a small space, performed on a very short stage, and sparsely attended. We grabbed a quick Q&A with Ira and Daniel after the show, spent about $100 on merch, and drove home. When they returned a year or so later, we left the camera at home, but they still remembered who we were and hooked us up with some free merchandise after the show.

This was all just a really long way of saying that the guys in Nada Surf are incredibly genuine and grateful musicians who really seem to appreciate their fans, put a lot of love into what they do, and are willing to let their fans in and share the experience with them.

Basically: the exact opposite of Art Alexakis.

Stabbing Westward: “Shame” Here is the thing it is...

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:35:52 -0400

Stabbing Westward: “Shame”

Here is the thing it is important to remember, as adults, as we stare gape-jawed at the singles charts peppered with Black Eyed Peas and LMFAO and Ke$ha and the rest, eGrumbling at the futility of being culturally aware in these end times—culture overtakes us before we are ready for it. We do not have the array of tools at 14 to parse that by which we are engulfed; it simply engulfs, and we twist in its center, mutating—and it is in that larval state that we put our capital where our hearts are. Not after, when we gain a crumb of perspective and hastily push ourselves away from the singles charts and into the deeper waters of the Olympic-sized cultural pool, but during, when we’re porous and eager and, most importantly, secretly confused about the whole mess.

Take this song—I sure did, in 1996, from the radio to an ad-hoc tape mix and then around with me all day, bookended by “Closer” and “Backwater.” This video might as well have been science fiction to me, so insulated was I from such actual horrors as domestic abuse or stalking—the lyrics didn’t strike me as coming from an unreliable narrator, both because I didn’t know what one was and also because I wasn’t paying attention. The platitudes offered up by this song, though, tumbled into my lap, ripe off the vine—a phrase like “all that I believe I am” was as good as a punched ticket to the margins of my pre-algebra notes or (in rare and heady cases) the sides of my One-Stars.

Listening to it now in the clean room of my adult experiences and my (still-terrible, but) proportionally-improved attention span, it’s almost a totally different song—the production is still deliciously dense and it still kinda makes me want to get an underbuzz, but the content of the song now blooms out from that audial center, obvious now, no matter how unparseable then. Which is not to say that no teenager can understand nuance, but that the nuance can be beside the point, or, really, that the point is to have music to call your own in the first place, and to make valuations thereafter.

So naturally, then, I think about how I felt at 17 about, like, The Bloodhound Gang, or about Gravity Kills, or about Courtney Love, and the question that keeps resurfacing is: Why are we so incredibly concerned about the cultural input into youth culture when the cultural artifacts of youth culture are, by and large, just the window dressing on “being young?” The kids are alright — the kids are always alright — no matter whether their pop songs are about self-harm, immature desperation, unprotected sex, consumerism—or nothing. And, no, the purview of pop music is not limited to those who can’t yet buy Tanqueray, and yes, it’s always appropriate to demand transcendence, rather than simple convenience, from pop culture, but—

—but I keep thinking about the party in ninth grade where six of us stood in a driveway, domed by the arching pine boughs of nowhere, fastballing loose bricks at a Toni Braxton CD, over and over, until it was pulverized, running immediately thereafter back to the room with the stereo, away from songs about difficult love and easy lust, leaping and swaying into the hormonal fray of our peers, now blanketed by Hole’s “Gold Dust Woman,” a song so intensely about cocaine that Stevie Nicks can no longer remember whether it was about cocaine. Thinking about all the above like so: The purpose of the music was to create ownership of oneself; to separate oneself from one’s family; to create a private history; to finally participate. The details of that separation are under the purview of the individual, and god keep the children who interpreted these songs—any songs!—instructionally, and in the meantime there is the beat and the rhythm and the song. Just so.

Nine Inch Nails: “Closer” This song screwed me up....

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Nine Inch Nails: “Closer”

This song screwed me up. Then the video screwed me up worse.

A friend of mine who was way in to metal bands that nobody else at school had heard of lent me a copy “Pretty Hate Machine” which was my first exposure to Nine Inch Nails. Either that album was tame or I just didn’t get it, but either way it failed to prepare me adequately for hearing Trent Reznor tell me he wanted to…. you know…. This was one of my earliest exposures to the unique combination of violence, sex, and religion and it was all wrapped up in a nice montage of monkey Jesus torture, strange rock gods dressed in all leather spinning in mid air, a butcher shop, dusty relics covered with spider webs, a silhouetted microphone that my teenage brain thought looked like a boob, actual boobs, and S&M.

So there was the album, The Downward Spiral, and the song here, and the F-word and the feeling from the inside part, and then the video with all the stuff. I grew my hair, then shaved my head, then listened to Marilyn Manson, and started wearing more black, and bought all of the NIN CDs and rejected God, etc etc.How did I not turn out completely screwed up as an adult?

Was it Weezer? It was the Weezer, wasn’t it? I knew it.