Music – Page 8 – A place for my stuff

What am I Listening To?

I’ve added the Mog widget to the left nav. Mog tracks the music I’m listening to, and if those songs are in their database, you can hear samples. If you click the widget, it takes you to my profile and in the list below “Last Songs Played,” you can click on the speaker icon to hear a sample of that song.

My new favorite song is “Got Nothing” by Under the Influence of Giants. Check it out. Also take a listen to “Lost in a Whirlpool” by Frank Zappa. Captain Beefheart is the vocalist, and it was recorded in the late 60’s. I really have to wonder if that song wasn’t somehow the inspiration for South Park’s Mr. Hanky.

Unusual Tunage

I came across this CD, The Kings of Diggin’ at the Tower Records sale in Nashville, and it’s the best $10 I ever spent. I highly recommend it. DJ’s Kon, Amir and Muro share two discs worth of their favorite vinyl relics, culled from their years of audio spelunking in the back of America’s record stores: obscure soul, funk, jazz fusion and other groovy nuggets abound. In particular, one track stood out, as it’s the basis for a current chart hit.

The Moon People – Hippy Skippy Moon Strut

Astute listeners will also recognize that the tune splices its groove with a variation on “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells.

The chart hit in question is Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man,” and I’m glad this gave me the excuse to address something. Her new record is fantastic. Yes, you heard right, Colter has purchased a Christina Aguilera CD. Why? Because DJ Premier is behind the boards for several tracks and Christina cuts loose from the constrictive pop format here and there. You’re already tired of her “Candyman” from the Verizon commercials, but it’s a nice homage to that 40’s/Andrews Sisters sound. There’s also a convincing gospel soul number, and several legitimately funky songs. And her voice. It has some magical direct line to the spinal cord. I had hoped that her new record would lay off the studio gloss, as her voice is one of the few in pop that does not require multi-tracking. My hope is that she’ll someday attempt a raw, stripped-down soul/jazz record, but I’m not holding my breath.

Punk Rockers = Low Self-Esteem?

Mick Jones of The Clash had this to say in a recent Onion AV Club interview:

Well we certainly appreciated the Sex Pistols, yeah. They were quite influential just on a personal level. I was a great music fan, and always wanted to be in a band. I followed music intensely, from a very young age, and Sex Pistols showed me that music was something anyone could do.

I hear that a lot with punk and indie musicians: the realization that music is something anyone can do, as though there were some barrier beforehand that gave them the impression that they couldn’t do it. Jones is essentially saying “Anyone can play punk music,” which contains within it the assumption that there are other musics that not just anyone can play.

Maybe punker rockers all have low self-esteem and looked at those other musicians as people doing things they could never do. Or maybe they were simply lazy and thought music would be hard so they never gave it a try until punk music, apparently the easiest rock genre, came along and showed them the way. It’s no wonder, then, that punk rockers so eschew musical virtuosity; it’s the stuff that comes from that other world of music that they thought was too hard to do.

It’s not my intention to insult punk rock or its practitioners; I’m just wondering about the psychological roots of their chosen genre. I suppose in the 70’s (and still today), as the Big Rock and Roll Machine was coming into its own, taking over more and more arenas with bigger recording sounds, that kids would look at that inflated circus and assume that the mechanics of music were just too much for a kid to understand. Because rock and roll isn’t just music; it’s theater and sporting event and circus and fashion shoot. Strip all that away and it’s just guitar chords and lyrics, and that’s what punk wanted to do: strip out the other junk.

However, punk left theater in (few musicians are as theatrical as Johnny Rotten, Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer), and then fashion snuck back in as all the kids were determined to dress “punk,” and so the circus came back to town. So maybe what we need is a genre of pure music, with no attendant fashion expectations. That would most likely end up being jazz, though.

And that would definitely be too hard to try.

For Those of You Keeping Score at Home

Here are the CDs I got at the big Closing Sale at the Nashville Tower Records last Friday:

The Kings of Diggin’ – Compiled by Kon & Amir and DJ Muro
PJ Harvey – Is This Desire?
Planet X – Live From Oz
Mates of State – Bring it Back
Placebo – Once More with Feeling
Petra Haden – Sings The Who Sell Out
The Fiery Furnaces – Bitter Tea
Secret Machines – Secret Machines
Wil Calhoun – Native Lands
Al Green – Let’s Stay Together
The Mars Volta – Amputechture
Don Caballero – For Respect
Hooverphonic – Blue Wonder Powder Milk
Porcupine Tree – In Absentia
Vivian Campbell – Two Sides of If
Tim Kinsella – Crucifix Swastika
Head Automatica – Popaganda

Bringing Sexy Back

This is all very hush hush, but I heard through the grapevine that Justin Timberlake is “bringing sexy back.”

Of course this begs the question….when did sexy leave? And further, if it is true that sexy did in fact depart, what makes Justin Timberlake, a man[1] whose target demographic consists entirely of females under 18 and gay Republican Congressmen from Florida above 40, think that he is qualified to bring sexy back? Wouldn’t someone with a broader appeal, say Bea Arthur or Abe Vigoda, be a more likely candidate for the job? Timberlake is the woman Michael Jackson wants to be, and frankly that’s just not appealing to most Americans.

1.) in name only.

P.S. Angel would like to point you to this far more scathing indictment of Timberlake for presuming himself sufficiently competent to retrieve “sexy” from wherever it has been banished.

Pretense

Rant time. One of the most tiresome canards of rock criticism is that clever musical ideas are automatically pretentious. Progressive rock, guitar solos, jazz fusion – anything that takes lyrics away from the equation – these are the most misunderstood and misrepresented concepts in popular music.

The reason I bring this up is this somewhat lighthearted article at Onion AV Club. It takes shots at instruments that somehow are intrinsically pretentious. As though the mere existence of a Chapman Stick in a player’s hands designates them as pretentious. They even go so far as to pick on Trey Gunn, implying that he treats conventional guitarists with “contempt” because he’s so “serious” and advanced with his avant-garde instrument, which is such a crock. They really want to believe that, because that would make them feel so much better about themselves disliking Gunn and the Stick. Trey’s just a guy with a weird instrument – the only reason to bag on him is because the writer feels inadequate that there’s this instrument and level of musicianship that he just doesn’t get.

Anyway, I’m not annoyed by the article itself, but the conventional wisdom in popular music criticism that underlies it. I’m just so tired of it.

The real truth is that so many rock critics distrust pure music. They only understand lyrics. They don’t particularly care about actual music because it’s far more difficult to write about music than it is about lyrics. And very often rock critics are frustrated musicians, so there’s tremendous resentment against skilled instrumentalists. Every rock critic worth his sour grapes will tell you that Yes are a bunch of pretentious asses who plays needlessly noodly wank, while the truth is that they are actually one of the most musically creative bands rock has ever produced. There’s this peculiar insistence that rock must be dumb, that every band should be as harmonically inept as the Ramones and that’s just moronic. And I say that as a Ramones fan. Apparently there’s just not enough room within the definition of “rock” for Joey Ramone and Rick Wakeman to coexist. Yes, they are polar opposites but they both make good music.

Personally I find critical darling Michael Stipe to be far more pretentious than, say, guitar shredder Yngwie Malmsteen. Both are just guys who do what they love to do, they play the music that they’re passionate about and they do it like no one else can. Isn’t that enough? So Malmsteen has been making the same record since 1985, hasn’t Stipe been doing the same thing? So Malmsteen’s music is lyrically boneheaded – he has a singular style that is often imitated but never duplicated. By the same token Stipe is a legendary lyricist (also often imitated) but from a purely musical standpoint REM is just the same boring major and minor chords. I love both these guys and it really bothers me that there are such divergent crowds who insist that I pledge allegiance to one or the other.

There’s so much more to music than the petty rules and politics people want to impose on it. It’s so much bigger than we can even imagine.

UPDATE: As usual, Strange Pup says in two sentences what took me this long-winded and semi-coherent diatribe to not say.

#15*

Oops I did it again. I bought a guitar. My guitar teacher was hounding me to buy a real jazz guitar, and this Epiphone Joe Pass model was on sale at the Music City pawn shop in Sherwood.

epiphone joe pass

Speaking of guitars, here’s a shot of my other recent purchase, the Starfield Cabriolet.

Starfield Cabriolet

With the acquisition of the Joe Pass guitar, I now bring my signature model tally up to 7. Thus far I have models from Steve Vai, John Petrucci, Paul Gilbert, Richie Kotzen, Blues Saraceno, and Dweezil Zappa. Athough Dweezil’s is not really a signature model – it was actually his guitar. Hi, I’m a huge guitar nerd.

* Indicates 15 actual guitars in my home that I paid for. I also have a violin bass that is ostensibly John Mumford’s but he’ll never come back for it, two acoustic guitars I apparently inherited from Matt, I have a telecaster in Tara’s possession, an RG7 in the possession of Alex Moulton, and I have a couple of spare bodies and necks. This is why I will always hesitate when you ask me how many guitars I have. It could be as little as 15, but as many as 20.

Why John Mayer Will Always Be My Hero

The bastard is now building his own pedals. He definitely has the best blog of anyone famous about whom I’d care to read. Whether he’s recommending CDs or showing off his new sneakers, he just has that John Thing…it may be meticulously cultivated marketing, but I always feel like I Know That Guy. He’s just a good songwriter and guitar player doing his thing. No ego, no bluster, no blingin, no drugged out tirades or trips to the county clink with a $20 hooker…just clever responses to his fame and guitar nerdisms.

Selections from XTC

YouTube has reminded me how much I love XTC, and how few people know who they are. Here are some selections:

The puppet show in particular is hilarious. Apparently it was made to promote the Oranges & Lemons CD, but I can’t imagine what Geffen Records thought about it.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? (The Band)

I have a wide variety of musical interests, and I have a wide variety of friends. This leads to varying reactions about particular shows I go to see. If I tell people I’m going to see Kansas at Magic Springs, the reactions vary from excitement to derision. If I say I’m excited about seeing Mr. Lif from The Perceptionists, the reactions are the same but the camps are reversed. As someone who used to be a music snob, I suppose I can relate to each faction’s opinions about music, I just wish people would open up a little.

My outlook on music is summed up pretty well by Frank Zappa when he said:

“I think that if a person is making music — even if it’s the most crass, commercial kind of crud — that person should be doing that because there are people who want to consume crass, commercial crud. And they’re doing a necessary function for the audience that needs to be entertained. Just because I’m not the consumer of that stuff, it’s no reason for me to go on some big campaign against it. I don’t think it’s particularly aesthetic, but then again, if it’s providing enjoyment for somebody, then fine.”

Music is so much bigger than any one person’s narrow view of it. It’s more than notes on a page, it’s more than timbres, it’s more than the theatrical poses, and it’s a lot more than lyrics. In a way, it’s more than art. Art implies standards, but saying all music should be art is like saying all speech should be poetry.

Legendary rock critic Lester Bangs was a big believer in the idea that rock and roll is a form of expression that is gloriously and righteously dumb, and although he decried the attempts of progressive rock to legitimize the form, a band like Kansas was at least reaching beyond the restrictions of its genre. And the better hip-hop bands like Perceptionists are making compelling sounds that may or may not even be considered “music” per se. But if you like it, who cares?

I think people in general need to let go of their preconceptions of what is and is not right or cool or valuable, because I think these only get in the way of a wider view of music. Another reason for people to let go of their preconceptions is that all humans have a tendency to enjoy feeling superior to other segments of society. Dismissing what you don’t understand or can’t appreciate only makes you feel better about your own inadequacies and shortcomings. It’s much easier to deride or openly hate what other people enjoy rather than try to understand it, or them.