#16 Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan

My first impression of this album was, oh man, Bob wrote this for girls like me.  And it kind of made me smirk because I think most people hear this album and they direct Dylan's anger, raw knife-edged emotions, and empty despair at someone else, someone they are trying to dehumanize try as they might, and can't; but I've never really felt that way about anyone because I always did the breaking up.

But I guess that's not even true either.  Sexy image, I suppose, but probably not realistic.  You see, to trivialize this album and call it a break up album, cathartic as it might be, seems to miss the point entirely.  The point is about perspective.  And we don't get to see his ex's.

To make it all more confusing, I grew up with this album deeply ingrained in my brain before I could understand what the lyrics meant.  My childhood was imbued in the sounds of Dylan's harmonica.  But I gave it a shot and did my best to listen with fresh ears.

It occurred to me that the reason Blood on the Tracks is so very successful, is because Dylan gets at the heart of human feeling without making it totally gay.  You can feel the universe's pain and healing process and all the simpering threads of memory from anyone else who listened to this album and felt their heart strings tug too much to be comfortable.  But the songs are so surreal, mostly Tangled up in Blue, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome when You Go, and Shelter from the Storm they feel like they have always been here (and that's true for me in this lifetime) but Dylan found a vein in the collective unconscious and sucked it dry for the sake of this saturated star in a galactic sea of musical milky ways.

But did he puss out like James Joyce after Finnegan's Wake?  Or get worn out from whiskey dick like Faulkner did after Absalom, Absalom?  No fucking sir.  That man is still making awesome music because he GETS it.  He's here, probably like Shakespeare and Milton were, to make us understand ourselves better.  Yeah, Harold Bloom, I just made that comparison.  Get over it.

So shut the fuck up and stop whining about how he sounds like a belching pig and pick up this album before you die a miserable life without a glimpse of your own soul.

The new epiphany I had when I tried to listen to it anew was the idea that what makes Bob Dylan so dynamic are his perspective changes and paradigm shifts visible from album to album as he's grown up.  It made me think that, every few years we should shed our programming and start fresh.  Get some new values, be different people, start making different decisions, get some Descartes' Fireside action.  I think I do that, rather a lot and can appreciate things like Dylan's Christian album because I get it.  It's all about perspective.

And it's also weird to think that two people can be in the same car listening to the same song and have drastically different experiences and memories and day dreams.  Paradoxically, both are sharing in the music and are connected, but they are both disconnected from each other.

For example:

My Dad and I were driving through the dirt, rugged roads in northern Idaho a few days before my wedding with sirius radio cutting in and out through the forty foot tall pine trees and mountain interference.  We were singing along to "Tangled up in Blue" on one of the classic rock stations.  The song would cut out but we'd keep singing and Dylan would chime in and out to check on us to make sure we were keeping good time.

When we got to the end of the song, my dad said, "I never understood what he meant by that ending; "some are mathematicians, some are carpenter's wives..."

(don't know how it all got started
I don't know what they do with their lives
but me, I'm still on the road,
headed for another joint,
we always did feel the same
we just saw it from a different point of view
tangled up in blue.)

My interpretation came so naturally to me; I tried to control my excited tone.  I said, "well, you are a geologist.  Your point of view is to see the earth as a living organism on a timeline most people cannot comprehend.  You can see what it was and what it might be.  That's how you understand 'being,' thus, that's your perspective.  I see the world in poetic moments full of irony (like schooling my father on a song he's heard for 30 years), understandings, misunderstandings, human interactions, and philosophical ideas.  We can both listen to this song and take drastically different things away from it; yet we're sharing the experience together.  We can't see the world through other perspectives, but we all feel the same sometimes about the direction our lives are heading or the way we feel about people and each other; I guess, sometimes Dad, we all get tangled up in blue."

We continued to drive and I wondered what this song might have reminded him of.  Probably his days of living in New Orleans or further back in Kentucky, or sleeping on the floor in someone's house in Kalamazoo. or rocks, rocks, and more rocks.
But me, I'm still on the road...

Columbia, 1975

Bob Dylan once introduced this album's opening song, "Tangled Up in Blue," onstage as taking him 10 years to live and two years to write. It was, for him, a pointed reference to the personal crisis – the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes – that at least partly inspired this album, Dyl­an's best of the 1970s. In fact, he wrote all of these lyrically piercing, gingerly majestic songs in two months, in mid-1974. He was so proud of them that he privately auditioned almost all of the album, from start to finish, for pals and peers including Mike Bloomfield, David Crosby and Graham Nash before cutting them in September – in just a week, with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance. But in December, Dylan played the record for his brother David in Minneapolis, who suggested recutting some songs with local musicians. The final Blood was a mix of the slow, pensive New York sessions and the faster, wilder Minneapolis dates. Together, they frame the gritty anguish in some of Dylan's most passionate, confessional songs – from adult breakup ballads like "If You See Her, Say Hello" to the sharp-tongued opprobrium of "Idiot Wind," his greatest put-down song since "Like a Rolling Stone." "It's hard for me to relate to people enjoying that type of pain," Dylan said after the album became an instant success. Yet he had never turned so much pain into so much musical splendor.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/bob-dylan-blood-on-the-tracks-20120524#ixzz2RLfJ6Vhd 
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#87 The Wall - Pink Floyd

"Look Mummy, there's a drone up in the sky..."  :)

My encounter with this album evoked the most surreal experience I have had yet throughout this project.  I should have expected that with Pink Floyd, but I'm not talking about the way my brainpiece processed their information the way they wanted me to perceive it.  I'm talking about something else entirely.

The first time I listened to it, I was invigorated and awestruck.  There were moments when I felt like crying--because (ironically) I thought, these people feel the same way as I do when they perceive an institution and those who wander around like zombies.  They also could understand the appealing nature of building a proverbial wall against all the other breathing thoughtless creatures who occupy my immediate space, or identify with how good it feels to just shut people out while scrambling to paradoxically not be alone.  Of course, Roger Waters and his friendies are in their box feeling just as alone as all those people plugged into their phones (listening to PF!) or those of you watching trash tv with a box of wine.  or two.  Ironically, we are all as alone as the next guy; try as we might to "stay connected."  Obviously, we can invert this entire paragraph and claim that no person is an island, try as they might to get away.  Like someone chatting with babes on the Interwebz is actually alone and not at the same time.

But this album resonated with me on such an eerie level.  God, I thought, I must really be screwed up to identify with Pink Floyd, of all the bands so far.  When I heard "Another Brick in the Wall pt 2" I immediately thought of my short-lived teaching experience.  Quitting teaching was sort of the best thing that ever happened to me; Roger would OBVIOUSLY agree.  I'm glad I don't have to indoctrinate people anymore or lie to them and tell them they can be whatever they want to be when they grow up as long as they work hard and try.  Or tell them college will help them get a job.  Or encourage them to take out student loans to go to school, which only enslaves them into the system to spend their lives paying it back with time at a soulless job under fluorescent lights that smell like burnt skin and fried dreams.  Whatever happened to teaching people to just grow up and be happy?  And why the fuck do they still make people respond to bells?  And when will people learn that time is an illusion and they've all been programmed to respond to clocks (thanks to the public education system!)?

This album made me realize that hopefully, I'm not the only person walking around so lost inside my own head that I feel like I can't function normally sometimes in social situations.  Maybe everyone feels so incredibly alone that they mask it with their own walls and distractions.  Like drinking or watching grown-ass men in colorful foamwear mount one another homosocially to fight for an oblong shaped brown ball with laces grunting over gained yardage.  My tactic for distraction is no better; I mask it with humor.  Like making someone laugh creates a semi-real bridged connection with another being to distract from the constant isolation.  So I just make people laugh and I think, is this normal?  Is this real life?  Am I interacting just fine with these people?  And then I just keep piling bricks upon bricks.  Or feeling at odds about things other people find to be so normal, like sleeping, eating meat, or old horror movies, for example.

"Is there anybody out there" made me recall the five minutes I stood frozen by the inundating waves of shock and fear when as a child, I walked into the living room while my brother was watching The Shining.  And something inside of me broke that night in those five minutes, and I felt so utterly alone for the first time.  I've never seen the whole movie, but there was an aura about being so helpless and alone that not even your parents could save you and it fed my childhood realization that maybe nobody is ever really connected to another person.  We are all so alone and I, at the time, was more alone than anyone else because the images in that movie built a wall around me that didn't allow comfort or compassion to enter when it came time to sleep.  Whereas, my brother processed the information like he was watching just another cartoon.  And that disconnected and unshared experience isolated me further and reenforced the terror that movie (and this album) creates because he was able to just blow it off when I wasn't.

And then, as an eight-year-old, the lights went out and I was in bed.  There were expectations of sleep.  And the suffocating anxiety about sleeping crept up, like a cloudy hand from under the bed to pin me down by the chest and force me to stare up at the ceiling in tears until dawn because sleeping was so unnatural to me.  We willingly shut down, like machines with dead batteries and give up all of our power to become vulnerable and exist in a mind state without senses.  On purpose!  (some crazies even take NAPS) And I thought, I might not wake up tomorrow.  I might not wake up ever again.  And then like always, I succumbed, after exhaustion took its toll and night after night, in a struggling battle against sleep--I would fail and as sleep took me into the night, I acquiesced to the fact that I was going to die alone again tonight like the night before and the night before that.

That feeling is almost as terrifying as being around a lot of people--because the more people that are around, paradoxically, the more alone one feels.  Like being at a concert, which I believe is the very idea that inspired the concept for this album.

Understand me a little better now, college roommates?  Childhood friends who I bailed on for sleepovers?  Sorry Mumsey for never napping as an infant.

Many years later, I listened to a This American Life podcast about the Fear of Sleep, and someone else had an experience with The Shining that was similar to mine and I wondered how many terrified youngsters were out there unable to sleep for decades because of just FIVE whole minutes of the movie.  You are not alone, my fearful friends.  Get the mother fucking twins out of the mother fucking hallway.  nuff said.

So, in the midst of all this thinking, I asked my husband if he would watch the movie "The Wall" with me.  He looked at me, shaking his head and said that if I chose to watch it for this project, I'd have to do it alone because it really creeped him out and he'd rather not see it "or the marching hammers" again.

um, after watching the trailer, that's just out of the question.

After the dreadful recollection of my childhood hypnophobia, I relistened to the album but this time, I couldn't suppress the memories of my bedtime rituals that would help to stave off the anxiety I associated with sleeping (i.e. turning on and off the lights 15 times.  Kissing all of my stuffed animals over and over etc.  Like the little narrator in Proust's Swann's Way, begging Mumsey to come up and check on me before she went to bed) nor could I disassociate my reoccurring Zombie nightmares from the album--I forgot to mention those; I have them often.  So, take all that unnecessary baggage and top it with the idea of a fascist regime taking over a population, inspired by my husband's description of "The Wall" and watching the trailer and you probably wouldn't want to listen to Pink Floyd again either.

So I reached down and touched the pause bottom halfway through the song "The Trial" and left all that weight, bad energy, baggage, and bullshit lying in the middle of the sidewalk behind me as I changed the music to Bob Dylan, who pretty much makes everything better, and kept walking.

Leave the childhood fears behind.  We don't need no friggin triggers.

The album is amazing, literally seamless, flawless, and hits so close to home that I just couldn't bear it any longer.  I have nothing bad to say against the album but I don't think I can handle listening to a song from them again because I just get so heavy with angst and bad energy that I could never get "comfortably numb" to Pink Floyd.  The surreal experience was the drastic change in perception from the first listen to the last.  I went from loving this album to being completely unable to listen to it--and my fascist 1984 private room 101 hell would be at this concert plus Jack Nicholson, a sleepover and some hallway twins (and pickles).  Which was pretty much what they were going for, it felt.

I hate your Lonelier than Thou attitude, Pink Floyd.  I'm so creeped, I don't want to look up the album cover to put on this entry.

Columbia, 1979

Pink Floyd's most elaborately theatrical album was inspired by their own success: the alienating enormity of their tours after The Dark Side of the Moon [see No. 43]. As the band played arenas in 1977, bassist­lyricist Roger Waters first hit upon the wall as a metaphor for isolation and rebellion. He finished a demo of the work by July 1978; the double album then took the band a year to make. Rock's ultimate self-pity opera, The Wall is also hypnotic in its indulgence: the totalitarian thunder of "In the Flesh?," the suicidal languor of "Comfortably Numb," the Brechtian drama of "The Trial" and the anti-institutional spleen of the album's unshakable disco hit, "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2." Rock-star hubris has never been more electrifying.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/pink-floyd-the-wall-20120524#ixzz2Na7k6TWn 
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#3 Revolver -- The Beatles

Revolver is an intimidating album to cover, because I actually know a lot about it but don't really want to share the knowledge with you about how they came up with this or that name, or which song helped to influence the psychedelic movement, WTF is Yellow Submarine about anyway, yadda yadda ya.  That kind of music talk is so boring to me, and it's the only kind people even find anymore.  I'm more interested in what you felt when you heard the album.  Where were you when you heard Revolver?  It's like when people talk about authors and poets and not the fucking books.  Example: William Faulkner's life wasn't really that interesting, contrary to his novels.  He didn't know how to mail letters at his job and he had such alcoholism that he was often found covered in vomit passed out on toilet seats, he was short, he got old and wrote his nobel prize speech on the airplane on his way to get the award.  BFD.  Moving on.

Not to mention, everyone already knows everything about the Beatles anyway.  So if you want to learn that shit, go to wikipedia or find you a music blog that doesn't talk about the life that happens around the music.

I recently saw "Lars and the Real Girl" and that movie was so profound that I thought about it while I listened to Revolver over and over again.  The two meshed in my head and I came up with an idea about music that has probably been thought before, but probably nobody was inspired by the supporting actress in Lars and the Real Girl (she's a life size "love doll") to come to this thought.

So, in Lars and the Real Girl, Lars has had a difficult childhood full of abandonment and as an adult, he suffers from this delusion that he has fallen in love with a woman named Bianca, who is actually a life size doll.  About half way through the movie, there is a point where we begin to notice that life happens all around this doll, because of this doll, and in spite of this doll.  The town comes together to assist in the delusion, by having Bianca volunteer around town, hang out with church women, etc. etc. By treating her as a real person, Lars finally realizes that they care about and love him.  Thus, this hunk of plastic begins to bridge the gap between Lars and people.

And I believe that's what music does.  And not just music, but bands as well known as the Beatles specifically.  It doesn't matter what nationality you are, you've heard the Beatles, and they mean something to you.  Even if it's nothing.  My Venezuelan Brother, Daniel (long story) once told me that back in Venezuela, one of the songs they learned in their English class was "yellow submarine" and they had to learn to sing it in English.  It totally makes sense to use that song.  It distinguishes between sky and sea, and there are loads of colors to learn...(woot! go ringo!) but anyway,

Albums are tangible things; they are not alive.  But life happens because of the music they repeat, in spite of the music and all around it.  All the people who have heard Revolver will take that music with them and when they hear Eleanor Rigby, they will think of an old woman they once new, or the person they met in a car while the song was playing and wonder how those people are doing.  Maybe when people hear "Tomorrow Never Knows" they will think about that one time in India when they dropped acid or whatever.  who knows?  Probably tomorrow doesn't.

I thought about how Eleanor Rigby is one of the best songs they ever wrote.  They all supposedly contributed lyrics to it too (if you cared).  I had the string trio I hired play it at my wedding.  And it'll be at my funeral too.

And your bird can sing:

"I don't see too much difference between Revolver and Rubber Soul," George Harrison once said. "To me, they could be Volume One and Volume Two." Revolver extends the more adventurous aspects of its predecessor – its introspection, its nascent psychedelia, its fascination with studio artistry – into a dramatic statement of generational possibility.

The album, which was released in August 1966, made it thrillingly clear that what we now think of as "the Sixties" was fully – and irreversibly – under way.

The most innovative track on the album is John Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows." Attempting to distill an LSD trip into a three-minute song, Lennon borrowed lyrics from Timothy Leary's version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and recorded his vocal to sound like "the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountaintop." Tape loops, a backward guitar part (Paul McCartney's blistering solo on "Taxman," in fact) and a droning tamboura completed the experimental effect, and the song proved hugely influential. For his part, on "Eleanor Rigby" and "For No One," McCartney mastered a strikingly mature form of art song, and Harrison, with "Taxman," "I Want to Tell You" and "Love You To," challenged Lennon-McCartney's songwriting dominance.

Part of the album's revolutionary impulse was visual. Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles' artist buddies from their days in Hamburg, Germany, designed a striking photo-collage cover for Revolver; it was a crucial step on the road to the even trippier, more colorful imagery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would come less than a year later.

Revolver signaled that in popular music, anything – any theme, any musical idea – could now be realized. And, in the case of the Beatles, would be.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/the-beatles-revolver-20120524#ixzz2MXBrH47l 
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#35 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - David Bowie

What the fuck did I just listen to and why was it so awesome?

This album was easily one of the greatest musical accomplishments, ever.  Without hyperbole or sarcasm, Ziggy Stardust has it all: Great tunes, aliens, mentions of spiders, just someone named Ziggy gets like 250 points, and the imagery of a cat from Japan.  Kick. Ass.

I have spent the last two weeks totally married to this album.  We drove to Dallas together, drove to work together, whilst jogging to "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," I stopped in the middle of the trail and vehemently exhaled, "Oh No, Love! You're not alone!" to the amusement of our village idiot, a Boo Radley of sorts who vagabonds around the park all day in the same clothing, staring at clumps of dirt or the sky for hours at a time...

and I shuttered and wondered; Hark, I am not much different from this being.  for I am the crazy shouting to myself and constantly constantly constantly living under the shadow of an impending doom of ongoing existential angst that began with my first heartbeat, anyone's first heartbeat, all of our last heartbeats and stand alone in the park channeling Eliot through the immortal vibe of Bowie:

I have measured out my life with music albums;
I know the singing ceases with an ending drawl
Bowie contemplates the limits of his ego.
So how should I presume?*

Ahem.  I know how.  So, if I could ask David Bowie one question, it would be, "If you could go back in time and have sex with ANYONE, who would you pick?"

Many chew on the question, taking it rather seriously and try to come up with something clever like, "I'd be Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Rider" or "Watch out Audrey Hepburn, Holly doesn't come lightly" or what have you.

But Bowie would probably answer this question with the same force and vigor of a God answering the question of the meaning of life to a mere mortal.  He would stoically respond, "Why, I would of course fuck myself, my child."

While listening to this album, I was told by several people, "well, you know he and Mick Jagger had a thing, right?"  So, after careful pondering, I came to the conclusion that the closest thing our dear solipsist, David Bowie, could get to copulating with himself was to have sex with the only person on the planet cooler than him, gender be damned.  It probably wasn't even sex.  It was probably a way to call the rest of their alien brethren to earth for a jam session.

I was all on a cloud about this album until I watched the movie of the 1973 concert.  And it was like someone ripped the beating heart right out of my chest and ate it while I tried to scream.  As I watched a 90 pound creature prance around the stage in wallpaper, it occurred to me that the spread of the AIDS virus was not because of government experiments on monkeys in Africa, nor was it God's punishment to the gay community, but it was caused directly because of the Ziggy Stardust tour.  Every time Bowie flipped up his kimono, it was not for rapturous applause, but it was to secrete microscopic spore-puffs from his ballsack, thus gassing the virus out onto an enthralled community of coked-up unsuspecting teens.

I do not think that he will sing to me... *

Anyheum-- what the spiders from Mars have to say:

This album documents one of the most elaborate self-mythologizing schemes in rock, as David Bowie created the glittery, messianic alter ego Ziggy Stardust ("well-hung and snow-white tan"). The glam rock Bowie made with guitarist Mick Ronson on tracks like "Hang on to Yourself" and "Suffragette City" is an irresistible blend of sexy, campy pop and blues power. The anthem "Ziggy Stardust" is one of rock's earliest, and best, power ballads. "I consider myself responsible for a whole new school of pretensions," Bowie said at the time. "They know who they are. Don't you, Elton? Just kidding. No, I'm not."

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#390 Elephant -- White Stripes

Jack White reminds me of that creepy Tim Burton creation from A Nightmare before Christmas.  I was expecting manic songs declaring "this is halloween" around every turn; but instead, well actually, that was pretty much what I got.

Only kidding.  The album declares that it is a concept album of sorts.  I read so in the little booklet that came with my one cent cd that I ordered off of amazon.  It deals with "the death of the sweetheart."  So, you know when it's like 2 am and drunk o'clock and your lazy ass was SUPPOSED to make the long rambling paper tie into all the things you learned in class?  And give it important attributes like a thesis statement and some themes for good measure, but you didn't?  So you "muhahahaha-ed" to your clever little self and you erase your shitty turd of an introduction and then you rewrite it with this sentence: "THIS PAPER IS ABOUT ____________." even though it isn't?  That happened in this album.  But, that doesn't take away from its awesomeness.  It just felt like they had a lot of after thoughts and tried to make those work.

I was very confused, because when I heard the song about a man talking to himself in his mind behind a cigarette, I was like, "is he going to kill his sweetheart?  why is she breaking up with him?" oh, right, because he looks like he stick-walked himself off a Tim Burton storyboard, I remember.

But none of this prattle is important.  Everyone knows that with music it's not so much about the lyrics but the feelings it creates.  So you can be like homeboy and just use the pronoun "it" over and over as a subject and elementary rhyming, but blow everyone away with your killer music.  The truth is, they are a very talented group.  None of the songs remotely resembled the previous one and I was very impressed how they drew from jazz, older genres of music, and even folk music.  The only song that I didn't really care for was the last one where they sang back and forth at one another and tried their best at humor with singing.  The banter was annoying and sounded like junior high flirting.  Their lyrics still beat the hell out of Mark Knopfler's though.  hands down.

Seven Nation Army, for whatever reason, reminded me of the time I was stuck in the Victoria and Albert museum during the London Bombings of 2005.  It was July 7th and it was a Thursday morning.  I didn't hear a whole lot throughout the album that resembled their purported theme, but I felt the terror of losing one's safety net; and that's what this album made me feel all over again.  Although neither Jack White, nor I, have enough evidence to write a convincing argument that the song, "Seven Nation Army" argues for either the death of the American sweetheart, or the sick feeling that burgeons up as you leave what might be your last phone message on your father's office phone saying, as calmly as you can, "I think we are being held hostage.  Bombs are going off all over London.  I don't know how many more will go off or if they have one in the museum.  I know it's too early for you to be at work yet, but I had to call anyway.  If I don't make it home, I love you Dad."  Neither theme really works and I would fail both of us heartlessly if I were still a slave behind a podium with a red pen.  But everyone with a brain cell knows grades are a crock of shit, so let there be terrible themes and wonderful music, and anxious stories that are dropped at the end of a blog entry like a bomb and don't have a conclusion...

What those who don't get paid to ramble had to say about Jack and Meg White:

Jack and Meg White proved their minimalist garage rock had more depth and power than anyone expected. On tracks like the slow-burning "Seven Nation Army" and "The Hardest Button to Button," Jack's songwriting finally matches his blues-fanboy, art-school shtick.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/the-white-stripes-elephant-20120525#ixzz2KHKZKD57 
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#297 Weezer -- Weezer (now #299)

Ironically, sometimes my favorite albums are the hardest to write about.  I've been listening to Weezer this entire month and I have sat down to write about this album four times.  I think I have something interesting and then I reread it and it sounds forced and confusing.  Like I tried to say so many things that I say nothing at all.  Reader beware: This post will be some version of that.  

And then I came across this article that I will come back to in a few paragraphs that made me rethink and reframe everything I thought I felt when I listened to Weezer.  It also pretty much had nothing to do with Weezer.

At first, Weezer brought back a lot of good feelings.  Overall the songs are upbeat, catchy, and whimsical, even.  I remember listening to Weezer on my drives to high school and ballet.  There seems to be a presence of Weezer throughout my teenage years, specifically the summer between my junior and senior year when I hung out with my best friend Kristi a lot and we went to the nasty beaches of corpus christi and swam in our pool.  Weezer came along for the ride.

When I first started listening to the album this month, my husband and I shared a moment in the car driving home from our favorite pizza place.  I put on "the sweater song" and he recalled a great memory from college and shared how that song made him feel.  As I glanced over at him throughout the song, his smile grew until his dimples showed and as we pulled into the driveway we were building up to the final climax and singing along and I was pretending to play the drums and the music was as loud as it could be and then as it ended and we were pulled back down from feelings and memories that neither one of us shared together, but in that moment they fused and somehow became mutual.  And I smiled at the commonality of uncommonality and he just said, "man, Weezer can deliver.  Most other bands build and then just fizzle, but Weezer really hands you a climax."

And so I kept listening to the album, trying to return to that high.  And then I read an article two days ago from New York Magazine called, "High School is a Sadistic Institution" by Jennifer Senior, who argues that through several different sociological and scientific studies of the prefrontal cortex's development in adolescents that high school is the worst idea in the history of human socialization and how in many ways, we never leave high school because it forms our identities whether we ever wanted that or not.  So basically, life is one awful Lord of the Flies cluster fuck.  and nobody can actually grow up anymore.  It's a pretty amazing article and I strongly suggest looking into it.  But there was one paragraph that caught my eye.  It was about music.  We all listen and relisten to the music we heard as adolescents--and that music becomes so intertwined with our identities that it defines the type of music we listen to for the rest of our lives.   So if you don't believe how much high school can impact your identity, check your playlists, doods.  It's because teenagers feel everything so much more than when their brains are in any other state in their lives.  So that high, those feelings music evokes, stay with you.  forever.

The article also talked about how teenagers cannot navigate the emotions and intentions of others.  I won't go into it, but she sights many studies to support this thesis.  So, I began to wonder.  This music that I loved so much--perhaps I should lay down the pointless nostalgia and listen to it as an adult.

And I was shocked at what I found.  I knew "My name is Jonas" was freaking hard on guitar hero, but I never listened to the lyrics before.  They are incredibly sad, about a child who is working all day and a child who is below the poverty line who gets bad news from his brother...

Also, I had no idea, for instance, that "say it ain't so" was about an alcoholic father and his relationship to his son.  As a teenager, I just sang along and took no notice of the meaning.  The song was badass.  Now it's just as badass, but for a deeper meaning.  It worries me how much the melodies hooked me, and I didn't even know what the song was about.  

I think on a small level, I somehow felt betrayed even though I appreciate the band more for it.  I got creeped out because the song never matched the feelings it created in me.  

It sort of felt like that time I watched Ren and Stimpy when I was 18 instead of 5.  And had a serious what the fuck moment.  

When it came out, Weezer's debut was merely a cool, quirky power-pop album with a couple of hit singles – "Buddy Holly" and "Undone (The Sweater Song)." But Rivers Cuomo's band influenced a legion of sad-sack punkers. Today, they stand just a step below Nirvana in the alt-rock canon.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/weezer-weezer-20120524#ixzz2J3CZI2sH 
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#351 Brothers in Arms--Dire Straits (now #352)

This album was kinda like getting really excited for a massage and then realizing, mid-massage, that the massage therapist is going to talk the entire time and mostly about your back tattoo.  And you have to talk to her because she is slaving away.  And you can't complain about it because then you're the asshole who complained about being burdened by talking to the person who spent the last hour giving you a massage.

In other words, it was great, but shut the fuck up Mark.  Your lyrics don't say anything but nonsense and you can't sing.  You sang about appliances.  fucking appliances.  and you said "be bop a lula baby" more than once.  Just play the guitar and shut your face.

There is a special place in hell for people who spoil good massages and music with their excessive mouth noises.

I thought that "So Far Away" and "Why Worry" were the best songs on the album.  I could feel the emotion, once I turned down the blathering singer in my EQ, and felt at peace and some sadness too.

It occurred to me though, that so much of this project, becomes the glue in my day-to-day life.  The songs that I listen to throughout each period of time marinate and stick in the cracks of my reality. They take all the little things that happen and tint them with their melodies.  They play in the background while I receive pictures of my newborn nephew, they gloss over words on title opinions that I read daily, and this album was played all through this Christmas season showering baby Jesus with color-tvs and be bop a lulas.  Maybe certain songs and albums mean so much to us, not because they are great, but because they remind us of good chapters from previous eternities or specific mind-states.  They are one of the only links back to those memories, long forgotten by those who shared parts in them.  I never knew that a person could go through so many lives in just one lifetime.  Cats may have nine, but I believe we have nine hundred.

You see, my beloved cat, Socrates (Socats), disappeared on the 16th.  He and I have been traveling companions to the grave together since 2008 when I found him in my first apartment complex right after I graduated college.  Or, he found me.  Together, we set off on our new adventure.  He slept with me, purred at me when I was sad, pushed beer boxes around with his head, walked with me in the mornings, would drink water with his paw out of my bathtub, would sleep on my books, killed a rabbit once, and shat on the carpet many a time.  The two days before he left, he was unnaturally affectionate, preferring to lay all over me and sleeping the whole night through right next to my head.  Then I let him outside, like always.  and poof.  he was gone.

The last eleven days, I have tirelessly scoured my neighborhood.  I get a glimmer of hope and am immediately shot down in an exhausting roller coaster of despair.

All of life is letting go of it.  Letting go of your childhood, of the toys you played with as a child, all of your dreams as they one by one slip through your fingers, of your denial, of your favorite cat, of your mistakes, your childhood friends, your high school friends, your college friends, your post-college friends, your grudges, your anger, your failures, your hopes, your family members, and christmas once again.  And with each set of let-gos, a new chapter begins.

I played "why worry" from this album over and over as I searched for lost Socats.  His life, if it is still with us, has changed and begun a new chapter.  His fate is out of my hands.  I don't know if he was adopted by an old ass lady who never leaves her house, eaten by a coyote, got a letter from Hogwarts, or ran into Gandalf who asked him to carry the ring of power to Mordor.  All I know is that worrying about the most likely answer won't bring him back to me anymore than wishing I were a child again will make me ten.

We pass through so many doors and so many people (and animals!!) before we finally part this world in this lifetime.  But we are all traveling companions to the grave, as Charles Dickens once said...So, why worry?

Thanks Dire Straits for playing music through yet another dreary december.

Warner Bros., 1985

Mark Knopfler started writing "Money for Nothing" when he overheard a New York appliance salesman's anti-rock-star, anti-MTV rant. The song, of course, became a huge MTV hit, and this album shows off Knopfler's incisive songwriting and lush guitar riffs on "Walk of Life" and "So Far Away."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/dire-straits-brothers-in-arms-20120524#ixzz2GK1jyxkl 
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#126 Remain in Light - Talking Heads (now #129)

There is a Southpark episode where any new music or television that Stan is exposed to sounds and looks like big piles of shit.  I felt a lot like Stan this week while listening to this cacophony of suck.  If you haven't noticed, dear reader, I have been trying very hard to stick it out with albums, even if I don't like them at first and do my best to appreciate the album for the band's goal and what it tried to accomplish.  I have been very successful, even with genres that I wouldn't normally like.  But this is stretching my optimism too far.

My experience with this album was very short.  Like listening to the Smiths, I did my exact two times through, and to be perfectly honest, I couldn't listen to the last two songs on the album again.  My anxiety and frustration would build up and control me and would only be abated if I turned off the disjointed, pointless noise.

 How on earth did this album make it to #126?  I really felt that this was a joke.  It honestly didn't even sound like music to me.  It just made my blood pressure raise because I was so impatient for the next song to begin.  There is all this twinkling and clanging and then someone begins to moan followed by women wailing a chorus in return and then they cue the last yelps of six one-eyed capybaras in a-cappella.  I could feel my left eye twitching and my right leg bouncing as I stared at the seconds decreasing across my iPhone screen for each song.  

I tried to think, well, each genre and generation of music has certain sounds and beats and rhythms that they adapt to and grow up with.  And that sounds like music to them.  I tried my hardest to get into the mindset of a person who prefers to listen to the Talking Heads more than any other band and I just couldn't even picture a single person or what he or she might look like.  Maybe he was someone who twitched a lot while flaring his nostrils and alternated speaking German phrases at parties for attention and commenting on topics like which black lights were better for finding stains on his little brother's sheets vs. which black lights might be more efficient for heating the closet where he keeps his Komodo Dragon collection.  But what do I know.

The ray of sunshine in the whole album was "Once in a Lifetime" which was probably the only tract that resembled anything like music.  If that song wasn't in there, there is no way this album would have made it to the list because everyone would have clawed their eyes out.

In Sum,

This was how my subconscious interpreted all of these bizarre sounds thrown together:

A Wild Snorlax +

This Dr. Seuss Instrument +

This Awkward Family Photo +

Dr. Ian Malcolm's discovery of Jurassic Shit

Here is what the Rolling Stone Mag had to say (nothing good.  The author totally doesn't know what to say and tries to be original with his description, but mine are clearly better; afropop, come on, cacophony of suck and 6 one eyed capybara is way more descriptive.  I win.):

On this New Wave watershed, the avant-punk avatars became polyrhythmic pop magicians. David Byrne and Co. combined the thrust of P-Funk, the kinky grooves of Afropop and the studied adventurousness of producer Brian Eno – and they still had a pop hit with "Once in a Lifetime."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/talking-heads-remain-in-light-20120524#ixzz2Da8XAuuj 
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#258 American Beauty -- The Grateful Dead (now #261)

I don't think you can just like the Grateful Dead.  I think that the correct interpretation for the meaning of "like" when dealing with the Grateful Dead is that you are somewhere on your journey to becoming a Deadhead.  You might not officially be one, but once you've been exposed, you are inevitably on your way.  If you die before fully becoming indoctrinated into its awesomeness, Jerry Garcia and all his laid-back fandom would probably say, "sucks dude, you totally ran out of time in this life.  Maybe on your next journey through the cosmic void, a Deadhead you will become."

Now, unlike all other bands, there is a cult following to this one that outdoes the cult following of even the most hardcore World of Warcraft Fans.  When you hear two deadheads engulfed in a conversation, it's almost like they are speaking a different language between dropping phrases like "the pizza tapes" or "naw dood, nothing beats Attics of my life from the live concert of June 1970 man."  The second part I made up, please, brother, don't crucify me if that's an incorrect statement.

My brother explained that The Grateful Dead is a way of life and wished me luck and best of karma on listening to the American Beauty album.  He hyped them up so much that when I heard the album for the very first time on my drive to work, I was... well, I was a little let down.  Maybe not let down, but certainly underwhelmed.  I stuck with it though.  I kept them on as background music, stole a pair of speakers from an empty office, played them so low I couldn't hear them if I moved or rustled paper, even just a little...

Then, although my ears had already warmed up to the album for a whole day on repeat, I heard "Ripple" for the first time.  I sat quietly at my desk and I let the song inundate me with peace.  Then, on my drive home, I turned up the volume and played Ripple over and over with the windows down.  I was so strongly reminded of the moment when I read Faulkner for the first time.  I was so obsessed with Charles Dickens and the Victorians, and others who perfected the classic novel, that when I read something that was so out of this world, and yet so real at the same time, it blew my mind open.  When I read my first Faulkner novel, I remember looking up after a paragraph and shaking my head in disbelief.  Then reading parts outloud to myself, just to hear how it rolled off the tip of my tongue.  I couldn't believe that someone could reinvent something so straightforward as a novel.  And then heighten its importance in the world and how we think of our life's purpose and those around us.

And then I understood.  The Grateful Dead is a mantra; it's a reinvention of the band.  Here's a band that makes you feel good because the tunes are happy, they are singing their feelings out, and not in a way that makes you identify with a song in the classic sense, but in a way that takes you to another place mentally.  You can leave the world without leaving it and feel good in the process.

I thought, if I die, I'd like Ripple to be played at my funeral.  Then I thought, naw, I can't do that, I'm not a Deadhead; other Deadheads would be snobby and turn their noses up at me.  But that's not who Deadheads are.  They're not like Eric Clapton fans--who totally suck, ps.  I really haven't met a Clapton fan I truly liked or admired.  Dead fans accept you no matter where you are on your Deadhead journey.  Just as long as you share your drugs.

Here are some good Deadhead resources, for the veterans and the neophytes:
The Deadpod
Deadlistening

What the Rolling Stone Mag had to say:

Warner Bros., 1970

The Dead were never better in the studio than on the down-home stoner country of American Beauty. Released just six months after the folky classic Workingman's Dead [see No. 264], it has some of the band's most beloved songs, including "Box of Rain" and "Friend of the Devil."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/grateful-dead-american-beauty-20120524#ixzz2CRs3CyW3

#245 Bryter Layter - Nick Drake (currently removed from list)

This album made me discover one universal truth.  Nobody ever grows up.  There are no adults, some of us just learn to act like them--most of us don't.  Because everything is always new to us, because we've never been 26, 40, or 75 before (to our recollection), it feels like the first time.  Just like the first time you eat, go to school, fall in love, get a job, etc.  We all feel like new souls now and then.

This album felt like something brand new.  Not just in genre (although it's not, of course) but it evoked a feeling of childlike innocence and first discovery.  And a rejoice in the fragility of a moment.  I felt calm and at peace, and I remembered moments of blossoming into something new, shedding my skin, and starting over.  Or moments of seeing something grand for the first time.  I was 18 before I ever saw snow.  It was the oddest miracle, it began snowing on Christmas Eve in Portland, Texas (south texas) and didn't stop until early christmas morning.  All I ever wanted since I was a child was to see and play in snow.  And the first time I watched its frothy grandeur, snow's heavy and delicate flakes blanketing cacti and palm trees; feeling the sensation of something silently accumulating on my hat, some new experience was born inside of me and filed away in my memory.  I picked up a handful of it, and remarked, like an idiot, "holy crap; it's a lot colder than in pictures."  And I wasn't 5, I was 18.  The next morning, nobody wanted to open presents, everyone was out in the streets making snow angels, snowmen with palm tree arms, throwing it at each other, remarking to one another what an amazing Christmas miracle.  Neighbors we hadn't seen all year were just staring at their yards in disbelief.  It hadn't snowed in South Texas in over 100 years; and we had a white christmas in 2004.  rad.

I haven't heard anything like this album.  Nick Drake is such a gentle soul, I am personally insulted that this album has been removed from the list.  His music would spread so much happiness if people would take the time to listen to it.  I feel like I must advocate for him.  I couldn't find it in the revised version of the list, but it was #245 in 2003.  If anyone is going through the list online and sees that I've overlooked its new position, please comment below.

Bryter Layter was so peaceful and serene that listening to it was almost like borderline meditation.  He has a sonorous voice that forces you to feel happy.  It's like he sings at the frequency monks chant, or something.  During a fit of road rage, (a nasty woman pulled out in front of me and then braked really hard for no reason) his "Hazey Jane I" song came on and I found myself taking a deep breath and thinking, "you are not a stupid bitch.  You are a divine human being.  and I'm not going to let you ruin this minute in my life.  It's not your fault that you are uneducated, eat microwaved 'food' and drink fluoridated water.  I'm not going to pray for your ignorant ass or anything, but I won't honk my horn at you and call you a fugly c*nt face either."

All because of the Drakester.  It's ironic because, according to his wikipedia blurb, he suffered from serious depression, and yet his music is such a reflection of serenity.  He reminded me of an English Jack Johnson, with better music.  Even the most introverted people must find a way to express themselves, and his fear of becoming famous makes me like his music even more.  He created music for the goodness of music, not to "become something or someone."  He didn't have to be heard, but he should be heard.  He will make you feel better about life.

The album cover made me jump though.  I felt a little creeped out looking at it.  I thought the album would be creepy and radiohead-like when I saw the cover.  It was the exact opposite.  Especially because I recently saw "The Ring" for the first time and watching that movie felt worse than the time I made a horcrux.  It really was like taking a razor-blade and cutting a portion of my soul off and hiding it in a murdered body.  Anyway, his face reminds me of the creepy girl in the movie.  And I can't, for the life of me, get her twitchy-ass movements out of my head.  Bitch came right out the TV!!!  Unprepared for that shit.  It didn't matter that I was 26; or that I am "an adult."  After watching that movie, I felt like a child again, and wanted to cry in a corner and sleep with the lights on.

But instead, I just listened to Nick Drake, and he made it better.  plus hugging a kitty.

They took it off the website, so I can't quote Rolling Stone for you.