Posted on August 22nd, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
Joseph Hill, the singer, songwriter, and moving force behind the great reggae band Culture, has died at 57. This is sudden and very shocking (to me, at least); he was still touring and performing very recently.
Other people can talk more intelligently than I can about Hill's place in reggae history. He was my favorite reggae singer and songwriter, and even though I'm not a big fan of his work after the 1980s, I can't believe he's gone so young.
Culture's Two Sevens Clash is in my (admittedly undereducated) opinion the best reggae album ever, and it's always the one I recommend to people who want to begin exploring reggae beyond Bob Marley. It's apocalyptic, brooding, lyrical, and melodic, and it is hypnotic from start to finish.
Rest in peace.
Posted on June 27th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
I am very sorry to report that Sleater-Kinney have broken up. To me, they were one of the three or four best rock bands in the world for the last ten years. Considering their consistent run of excellence since Call the Doctor, maybe the best.
Thanks to lj's gybefan2000 for the heads-up.
Posted on May 7th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens has died at 48, in his sleep, cause unknown.
I am in tears. The Go-Betweens are near the heart of my musical taste. "Bacehlor Kisses" is sublimely beautiful. I don't know if I can listen to it today. I guess I should try.
They had re-formed, recorded three reunion albums, the first two of which were surprisingly good and the third, amazingly, standing with their best work, just last year.
This is awful. I can't write about it yet.
Posted on March 31st, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Musicians.
We finally got Illinoise. The John Wayne Gacy song is heart-achingly beautiful. I was moved so strongly by it the first time that I couldn't listen to it again for an hour till I recovered. The moment when his voice jumps up to the "oh my god" brings me near weeping every time.
This is the second time Sufjan Stevens has done this to me; the first time was also a vocal jump ("lord" in "Seven Swans").
Posted on July 2nd, 2005 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians, Quotes.
I liked being in a dangerous band, and I never thought I wouldn't be in that dangerous band. So if I ever go back to it, it's going to be dangerous. It's not going to be gingerbread cookies and milk.
--Billy Corgan
Posted on November 17th, 2004 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Musicians.
On another online forum, I was asked what my favorite album of the 1980s was.
The odd thing is, my knowledge of 1980s music is relatively weak. I'm much stronger on the 1970s and the 1990s. At least half the people in this conference know 1980s music better than I do. In the early eighties, I worked in a big record store -- the Seattle outlet of a chain called Peaches. It was an interesting experience in many ways, and I'm not sorry I did it, but it burned me out on popular music for years. It's astonishing to me now, but I went half a dozen years without following new music at all. I doubt that will ever happen to me again. I missed the advent of the Pixies, for crying out loud. By the time I knew I loved them, they were breaking up. Which means I was seriously getting back into music around 1990, 1991.
Just because I'm not qualified doesn't mean I don't have opinions, of course. So:
The Minutemen, DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME (vinyl version; both cd reissues cut songs -- though if cd is all you can find, get it anyway).
Not a famous album, perhaps -- certainly not a bestseller -- but beloved by many; probably the greatest American punk rock album, and one of the albums that signaled how far punk had traveled. The Minutemen were three musicians: bassist Mike Watt, drummer George Hurley, and guitarist D. Boon. Each of them was a terrific player, and you wouldn't get bored listening through the entire record one musician at a time. But what made them a great band was their peculiar fusion. They were self-described "disciples of the three-way," and their songs were perfectly balanced, each of the three of them contributing in equal measure; no band has ever sounded as free of ego as the Minutemen.
The Minutemen were charming in many ways that could have been annoying, if they weren't so intelligent and sincere. For example, they were self-mythologizing, singing of their lives and their past and their subculture and their homespun philosophies (condensed to their own specialized catchphrases); they were famously from San Pedro, working class, garrulous, political, not afraid of their brains but not overbearing. They swung effortlessly from social and international stridency to songs about their punk childhoods to songs about showers needing to be repaired. They somehow managed to be unique without being merely eccentric, self-conscious but not painfully so, friendly but bracing, like the most interesting regulars at your local bar. They were cool as only people who don't give a shit about cool can be. They covered Creedence, and Steely Dan, and Van Halen, not from irony but from love, and believe me, when they did that, they were the only punks that did.
The Minutemen chapter in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life (the book's title comes from a song on Double Nickels) is my favorite, because D. Boon and Mike Watt come across exactly as I thought they would: two opinionated friends who can't stop arguing.
Boon [proudly]: I'm just the average Joe, the guy who has been a janitor, a restaurant manager--
Watt [impatiently]: But the average Joe doesn't write songs. He... doesn't... write... songs.
Boon: Well, this one did.
Watt: You're not an average Joe.
Boon: This one did.
Watt: You're a special Joe.
Boon: I was borne out of being average because of my rock band.
Watt: No, no, because of these tunes. D. Boon, you're special and you've got to cop to it. You've got to cop to it, you're special.
Boon [exasperated]: All right! Ever since I was five years old, people said I could draw! Let him draw!
Watt [triumphant]: That's right. That's why I'm in a band with him. He's special.
Double Nickels on the Dime was a touchstone for those who saw punk not as a set of empty attitudes and posturings but as a point of view toward life, a constant questioning, a do-it-yourself ethic, a valuing of everyday experience, a championing of making your life what it ought to be and not in some other model. It's the stone-cold truth that Double Nickels changed lives, opened people up. It was the last great thing the Minutemen would do; during the making of their next album, Boon died in a van crash when his girlfriend fell asleep at the wheel.
Posted on October 22nd, 2003 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Musicians.
I'm not surprised at the reports of poor Elliott Smith's suicide; I'd guess no one who loved his music will be surprised. It's almost unbearably sad, though; sadder than I can afford to be today, with too much working and looming deadlines. I don't think I'll be able to listen to his music for several days.
Others will do a better job of describing him than I can. But before I go to work today, I want to say a little bit about what he meant to me. He was stark and personal, in a way that made you think you were having his thoughts. I suffered years of debilitating depression, and listening to Smith gave me an aching empathy. Even now, when I literally don't remember how it felt to be depressed, listening to Smith reminds me vividly of what I thought. Except he said everything beautifully, and wrapped it in truly gorgeous melody. That was the astonishing, vertiginous contradiction: the bleak words married to stirringly beautiful music, lush slow tunes and happy brisk ones, almost all of it memorable and inviting endless pleased repetition. His music was the antithesis of his words: it was beauty-embracing, life-affirming.
But oh, the words. We were just listening to XO a couple days ago, and noting how the bleakness of "I Didn't Understand" is so dreadfully convincing because it's personal; it's not a bitch or a whine or an accusation at the world, it's about being personally wrong and fucked up, knowing it, and feeling unable to do anything about it. It's the most direct and moving expression of personal bleakness I've ever heard in a song, wrapped in a beautiful, haunting (overused goddamned word) a capella arrangement.
thought you'd be looking for the next in line to love
then ignore put out and put away
and so you'd soon be leaving me alone
like i'm supposed to be tonight,
tomorrow and everyday
there's nothing here that you'll miss
i can guarantee you this is a cloud of smoke
trying to occupy space what a fucking joke,
what a fucking joke
i waited for a bus to separate the both of us
and take me off far away from you
'cos my feelings never change a bit
i always feel like shit
i don't know why i guess that i "just do"
you once talked to me about love
and you painted pictures of a never-neverland
and i could've gone to that place
but i didn't understand
i didn't understand, i didn't understand
Smith touched the very beginning of my relationship with Velma. Before we actually got together, two friends invited us to their place, the first time we had hung out together in many years. I put on Smith's XO. The penultimate song, "Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands," is an angry, bitter lashing out:
everybody cares, everybody understands
yes everybody cares about you
yeah and whether or not you want them to
it's a chemical embrace that kicks you in the head
to a pure synthetic sympathy
that infuriates you totally
and a quiet lie
that makes you wanna scream and shout
By the end it's spitting:
you say you mean well,
you don't know what you mean
you fucking ought to stay the hell away
from things you know nothing about
And then the song is transformed by a miracle: a gradually building coda, rising strings and a repeating drum sting that ascend to a staggering beauty, a sublime (yes, sublime, damnit) gorgeousness that transcends emotion and is pure musical ecstasy; I can't listen to it without closing my eyes, scrunching my face, and giving myself over to it. I can't deny my response to beauty like that; I can either throw myself into it or turn it off.
So I was standing, swaying and bouncing and smiling, eyes closed, to this passage of music I know and love so completely, and while I was doing so, Velma was watching me and falling in love with me.
I walked her home that night, though we didn't kiss yet. We think about that day, and that minute of beauty, and connection, every time we listen to the song. We thought about it and looked at each other with love listening to it two days ago. And we still will, still can, I know; but it will be touched with irretrievable, terrible loss.
Goodbye, Elliott Smith. Thank you.