#305 Odelay -- Beck (now #306)

Beck made me think of Jackson Pollock.

And imagination.

The album wasn't so much about the music, but rather, Odelay represented a musical space that proved vast imagination took place.  Much like a Jackson Pollock painting isn't so much about the end product, but the proof that a man used his imagination to create something that fit into our *updated* perception of art.  Or at least that's one justification for why people like shitty paintings.

In Beck's defense a five-year-old could not have created Odelay.

Odelay is an odd hodgepodge of music.  I couldn't tell if it was all made through a series of keyboards, turntables, or computers--but yet, it was surprisingly enjoyable.  I got the sense that these were highly motivated people searching to find something new to create, whatever the cost may be and in the process created an imaginary space that carried the listener out to uncharted waters.  There wasn't a single song that stuck out to me as the best on the album.  They are actually all quite unique from one another and yet, are produced with the same sort of gusto and inspiration.  It sounded a little like grunge, electronica, a medley of rock, punk, and indie music, all made with unconventional sounds.

Most importantly, this album made me think of how difficult it is to find one's little space in the great web of creativity and imagination.  While listening to this album, I began to process my love for writing from the beginning.  When I was about six-years-old, I remember dictating to my father, while he chicken-pecked at our DOS computer, the "great" story of a cat, a sloth, and a giant snail who were on an adventure in the rainforest.  It was imperative that my father get down every detail of how the cat and the sloth could fit inside the snail--which really wasn't an important detail to the story that lacked conflict and character development.  Not to mention themes.  Or direction.  

But the turning point of all of this was when I was in the 8th grade, I got grounded for failing algebra over my two week christmas break.  I took all my anger and angst for my inability to do math well, and my frustration that I was being grounded because I was having difficulty learning something and released it on a primitive laptop I stole from my father.  I wrote a 70 page story.  I mean, it's terrible and you couldn't pay me to reread it now. But the point is, I created something.  I wrote 70 pages when I was 13.  Even though it is all crap, it was a creation.  It represents that imagination was used.  I would have killed to be able to write so much in college, but worries of "what will the professor think, what will my peers say?" inhibited my ability to create.  Perhaps, I've finally unlearned all of that to not care anymore.

(I would also like to take this time to say, I forgive you, Mrs. Alma Martinez of Gregory-Portland Junior High school for telling me, "The will is there, but the ability isn't."  I remember that, 13 years later.  It's not your fault you were as bad at teaching as I was at algebra.  I might have failed algebra, but you failed your students.  I just have to live with the fact that I can't find the value of X.  You have to live with the fact that you left deep scars in people during their most tender years.)

But anyway.  If it wasn't for that "teacher," I never would have found the motivation to write.  Even if nobody read the 70 page story I produced.  And it begged the question to me, does it matter if nobody notices a creation?  Is it enough that imagination took place?  Writing for writing's sake?  Music for Music's sake?  If nobody ever listened to Beck's Odelay, would it diminish the fact that they created something nobody had tried before, put it together and suffered painstaking thought processes for the sake of imagination?

I don't know why this album made me think of that.  Perhaps too many artists are so preoccupied with trying to "make it" or finding themselves in the world and becoming famous that they forget first and foremost, it is most important to create.  Who cares if other people read, listen, or see it?  And so, I've decided that at all costs, I will write once a week.  Just for myself.  So perhaps I will blog more from now on.

Thanks Beck.

What the rolling stone peoples had to say:

DGC, 1996

Burrowing into the studio with sampledelic producers the Dust Brothers, Beck came back with a Technicolor version of his Woody Guthrie-meets-Grandmaster Flash vision, demonstrating to his rock peers that turntables had a brighter future than refried grunge.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/beck-odelay-19691231#ixzz296PuYMuw

#13 The Velvet Underground -- The Velvet Underground and Nico (still #13)

Now that I have gotten knee deep in this project, it has become more and more imperative for me to become submerged in the music to get a true grasp of what it must have felt like to listen to it when it came out.  Proper mind-set is key.

So.  I drove to a Dallas prep school and bought some heroin from a 7th grader, put on my best 1967 outfit and shot up while this album was on repeat:

(Hope you dig the couch.  It was a friend of a friend's in college and somehow my husband and I ended up with it.  For now.  Ignore dog toys.  oops.)

WTF do you use the spoon for?  I just
knew you had to have one.

Although, if truth be told, I really had no idea what the spoon was for and the closest thing I could find to a syringe was a kitchen utensil.  

Embarrassed by my lack of street knowledge, I didn't want to google, "How might one 'shoot up' heroin?"  But I finally rationalized that with my college education, surely I have the brainpower to figure this out.  So after puncturing a few veins I decided this album was pretty rad.  But I guess that I just don't know.

*For those of you worried out there, Hi Mumsey, no actual heroin was purchased or used for this blog entry.*

Although, I quite imagine that if you did wish to buy heroin, a Dallas prep school would be your best bet.  However, I do hear that they only use 2% and prefer to cut the rest with Tylenol PM.  Which is hilarious.  You already have heroin.  Why do you need Tylenol?  And whoever came up with the word "cheese," has clearly never given a slang word to a drug before.  Doesn't sound de-lish to me.

Did they have legos in 1967?  

Alright.  Now on to Mr. Reed and his band.  Whether or not you are on heroin, this album is one of the best I've ever heard.  There is something so mysterious, eerie and disconnected that you just can't stop listening.  Nico's voice and accent are super annoying, but once you realize that they picked her because they needed a nails-on-blackboard-cat-in-heat effect to tie all the creepiness together; you're like, holy shit, that's totally brill.  plus banana.

Now, I'm too loyal to Bob Dylan to allow myself to like Andy Warhol.  But this album was totally boss.  It starts out with this sesame street happy beat with the song, "Sunday Morning" and the song is so ambiguous that it could mean just about anything--however, the lyrics have this ominous feeling that juxtapose the beat so well.  I wonder if the song is about a hangover, or waking up after doing too much heroin and needing more but being too afraid of what it might mean to need more.  There isn't a single drug reference, but feelings of wasted time and restlessness keep you guessing.  Then you move on to, "Waiting for the Man" about buying drugs from someone who wasn't enrolled in a Dallas middle school.  But, the obvious highlight on the album was, "Heroin" which is so nihilistic and sad it left me with a happy feeling that nihilism still exists in the world beyond post-graduate stress disorder.  Some of the other songs are about S&M (woo hoo, "Venus in Furs") and even Lou Reed can't keep a straight face while singing about a "whiplash girlchild," dominating someone in the dark.  The second time he says "now plead for me" he breaks and laughs a little bit which is sort of an icebreaker because the song is so freakin weird.  Basically, the album is about sexual deviance and drugs.  So, way to represent the New York socialite scene in the 1960s.  Although, I hear the album didn't catch on immediately.  And that's totally understandable.  Peace, Love and Nihilism don't exactly go together like sushi, wasabi, and soy sauce.  Although, perhaps, heroin goes well with anything.  I wouldn't know.  So you can move your DEA truck off my street already.

Taste the whip, bitches, now plead for me: 

"We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible," John Cale, the classically trained pianist and viola player of the Velvet Underground, said of this record. It was no idle boast. Much of what we take for granted in rock would not exist without this New York band or its seminal debut: the androgynous sexuality of glitter; punk's raw noir; the blackened-riff howl of grunge and noise rock; goth's imperious gloom. Recorded dirt-cheap at a studio that was literally falling apart, it is a record of fearless breadth and lyric depth. Singer-songwriter Lou Reed documented carnal desire and drug addiction, decadence and redemption, with a pop wisdom he learned as a song-factory composer for Pickwick Records. Cale introduced the power of pulse and drone (from his work with minimalist composer La Monte Young); guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker played with tribal force; Nico, a German vocalist added to the band by manager Andy Warhol, brought an icy femininity to the heated ennui in Reed's songs. Rejected as nihilistic by the love crowd in '67, the Banana Album (so named for its Warhol-designed cover) is the most pro­phetic rock album ever made.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/the-velvet-underground-and-nico-the-velvet-underground-19691231#ixzz27h1IdHRt

#317 The Eminem Show -- Eminem

If The Sound and the Fury didn't convince me that having mommy issues could seriously eff you up, this album totally did.

When this album came out, my brother came into my room and whispered, come to the grocery store with me, I just bought the new Eminem album and you have to listen to it.  In his truck, he handed me the cd, and I took out the booklet and followed along with his lyrics to "White America."  We were Shady's perfect target audience, 15 and 19, white American kids, blond, blue eyed, upper middle class.  I felt sinful just holding it, and even at 15 I knew Eminem was talking directly to me.  I shuddered as he accused me of putting his lyrics up under a microscope to uncover a layer of anger and disfunction I never knew existed (how did he know I was so nerdy to read along??) and I sat with an open mouth as he talked about creating an army to march to the steps of congress and piss on the lawns of the white house.

Excellent.  Where do I enlist?  Come on, Marshal, where was your burly black recruiting officer sipping Hennessy and smoking a joint at my high school's college fairs?

If you haven't listened to White America, by all means, click on the link above.  I think it's more important now than it was 11 years ago.  And because I feel this anger more NOW than I did as a teenager, I suppose the public education system is better off without me.

He was the unheard voice of our generation, I fear.  But make no mistake, he was the voice of our generation.  This album provoked so much political anger, but I believe it fell on deaf ears (in Texas, anyway).  Ironically, it's so anti-Bush and anti-War, even though it's through a medium of endless anger and frustration.  In the song, "Square Dance" he accuses us of being at band camp and unconcerned about a draft to go fight in Iraq for the government (see lyrics below).  For someone who was born in around 1973, perhaps this seems like a concern.  But for those of us who were in High School during the time of 9/11, I would say, you were made fun of if you didn't want to enlist right out of High School to go kill "those bastards who did that thing to them towers I didn't even know existed until September."  He could have been our Bob Dylan, he pretty much was, minus Peace and good drugs like Acid, but instead everyone from our generation are wild Snorlax(es? Snorlaxi?) and would rather bury their heads in the sand, or just blindly trust institutions.

Some choice lyrics from "Square Dance:"

Yeah the man's back
With a plan to ambush this Bush administration,
Mush the Senate's face in and push this generation,
Of kids to stand and fight for the right to say something you might not like,
This white hot light,
(...)
Yeah you laugh till your motherfuckin' ass gets drafted,
While you're at band camp thinkin' the crap can't happen,
(...)
All this terror America demands action,
Next thing you know you've got Uncle Sam's ass askin'
To join the army or what you'll do for there Navy.
You just a baby,
Gettin' recruited at eighteen,
You're on a plane now,
Eating their food and their baked beans.
I'm 28,
They gonna take you 'fore they take me

And here we are, bankrupt, unemployed, vaccinated, fluoridated, addicted to adderall, and bored.  You don't need a draft if everyone wants to join the U.S. army, Mr. Slim Shady...sad, but troof, my wigga.  It's ok, America loves to prosecute anyone who incites independent thinking.  (cough Julian Assange cough Alex Jones cough).

Change of subject--Eminem also consistently gets flack for being a misogynist.  Writing songs about murdering ex-wives, beating women, killing his mother, yadda yadda.  Let me give you a spoonful of perspective, from a female's point of view.  Homeboy has serious abandonment and Mommy issues.  Just listen to Cleanin' Out My Closet and remember the valuable lesson we all should have learned from Frankenstein, if anyone actually reads anymore; and it's that monsters are created by society, not born.  His song about his anger towards his mother is no different from Sylvia Plath's anger aimed at her father in the poem, "Daddy" where she calls her father a bastard and a fascist.  But we call her a "feminist confessionalist poet."  And talk about her as "groundbreaking" for women's rights and the confessionalist movement in poetry classes.  I smell a double standard.  But maybe nobody reads poetry anymore either, so all those incensed by Eminem probably don't know about her...Neither actually killed their parents, but both are metaphorically burying a past (and the offending parent) they'd have been better off without.  It's called M.E.T.A.P.H.O.R., try to say it again-- Meeeetttttttaaaaaaaaaaappppphhhhhhooooorrrrrr.

and as Em says, "If my lyrics were literal, I'm a criminal, how the FUCK could I raise a little girl?"

Not to mention that when women kill in music and movies, it's sexy.  See this ending snapshot from Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video where she freaking burned some dood.  But she's not known for being a man hater, is she?:

In Marshal's own words on his "Sing for the Moment" song:

They say music can alter moods and talk to you
Well can it load a gun up for you , and cock it too
Well if it can, then the next time you assault a dude
Just tell the judge it was my fault and i'll get sued

His music is an expression of anger, a confession- not unlike Plath's poetry, to uncover the depths of his anger, and raw unadulterated emotion.  It spills out of him with perfect rhyme and meter, layered with metaphor and symbolism, and it probably feels good, like inhaling after being under water for a minute.  He really is a lyrical genius.  I suspect he has fragments of Shakespeare's soul locked up in some of his brain cells.  Eminem explains in the lyrics I chose above that, yes, he understands his music can alter your mood, but don't prosecute him for your life choices.  Are we going to sue the creators of the Batman Trilogy for James Holmes's decision to shoot up a theatre too?

In fragments from the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written....No artist is ever morbid.  The artist can express everything,"  as Oscar Wilde once put it.  So I say, leave Eminem alone.  His songs are beautifully written, regardless of content.  And who wouldn't envy someone who can stand up and scream and feel no end to the depths of human emotion?

Bravo, Mr. Mathers.  Badass Album.  I don't think you're on the "updated" 500 album list, Em, but this is what Rolling Stone Mag had to say about you on their "100 greatest albums of the 2000s" or whatever.  If you want to see my brief rant about how Rolling Stone changed and updated their list, please click here.  (sorry, slim, you were replaced with the Pixies, of all bands.)

Otherwise, this is what somebody wrote about The Eminem show:

On his third album, Eminem shifted from provocation to introspection, mulling fame, fatherhood and the psychic toll of being America's biggest pop star and – according to scolds on both ends of the political spectrum – number one moral menace. The rhymes were as densely packed and virtuosic as ever ("When I speak, it's tongue in cheek/I'd yank my fuckin' teeth before I'd ever bite my tongue"), but they were also poignantly confessional; the beats largely jettisoned perky hip-hop to embrace the power chords and grandeur of Seventies rock.

Related:
• Rolling Stone's Original 2002 Review

• Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: Eminem's 'The Eminem Show'

• Eminem: A History in Photos

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-best-albums-of-the-2000s-20110718/eminem-the-eminem-show-19691231#ixzz235HeaJLn

I have a bone to pick with you, Rolling Stone

Alright, I am sorry that I didn't post a blog for July.  I don't have a great excuse, but plan on doing two albums this month to make up for it.  Actually, getting married in 16 days should be a good enough excuse, but on top of finalizing a wedding, I will try to squeeze in two albums.  You see, I am just a little annoyed with Rolling Stone.  They decided, out of nowhere to change their top 500 album list.  I noticed this when I posted the George Harrison blog that on my printed copy from a year ago where I highlight each album I've listened to, it clearly said "All Things Must Pass" was #437, but when I checked the Rolling Stone website, it listed it as 433.  Conundrum.

I was befuddled and annoyed.  I'm not a super type-A personality, but when you throw a wrench in my plans, I will fucking kill you.

So the next album that I have been listening to is "The Eminem Show" by Eminem, of course.  If you ever want to blow off steam, Mr. Mathers is your man.

But when I checked to see what number he had been moved to, I think they took him straight off the list.  They only have his other album on there (please correct me if you wish to click through their updated list of 500 and let me know if you see The Eminem Show listed anywhere else).  So after one whole month of analyzing his anger, I had to decide what to do.

Thus, the delay in my post.

So, here is what I am going to do.  I am going to stay true to the original list that I printed off.  The original one published in the paper version of Rolling Stone Magazine in 2003.  When I notice that an album has been moved, I will provide the changed rank in parenthesis.

I am pissed.  I still have 400 something albums to go, and they will probably change the list in a few more years anyway, so this is the only thing that makes sense.  When I've completed the original list, perhaps I will add in the new albums, but I will probably be bored with this project when I am 40, have 3 kids to homeschool and live in the middle of a forest.  Don't laugh at me; have fun falling from your corporate ladder.  elle oh elle smiley wink-face.

Is it just me, or is it also scary that on the interwebz, you can update something like a list and not tell anyone and then all the history of what it used to be is lost and gone forever unless you're a distrusting person like myself and printed out the original?  cough*1984*cough

So thanks Rolling Stone for this snafu.

# 437 All Things Must Pass - George Harrison (#433 new list)

The last time I listened to "My Sweet Lord" my car had been flipped upside down going 70 miles per hour on I35 on the anniversary of the birth of our lord, William Shakespeare.  While my seatbelt held me upside down, I watched the glass smash onto the pavement and my crappy Nissan Altima screamed in agony like a braking train.  The unyielding pavement popped piece after piece of glass flecks up and up like popcorn, hitting my face and shirt and wrists.

I was laughing.  Like a Kurt Vonnegut character becoming unstuck in time.  I recalled the faint smell of leather and satin from pointe shoes years ago.  Effervescent ejaculations of uncontrolled giggling poured out of my body like tears.  I laughed at the death that I was waiting for as my head hit the window and all I could hear above the sounds of screeching breaks, roaring highway, and my own beating heart were the (un)comforting words of George Harrison singing, "I really want to see you lord, but it takes sooo long my lord (hallelujah)."  During a nutcracker rehearsal when I was 14, one of my friends said to me, did you hear, George Harrison from The Beatles died today.  yeah, I said, as I hopped up and down to break in my new pair of pointe shoes.  The crack of the rosin rocks beneath my blunt toes looked remarkably like the glass popping in my face.  And, as one who is cursed to find irony in every moment of life, I laughed.  Until a man held me back in my seat as he unbuckled my seatbelt, pulled me out of my car window, carried me to the side of the road, laid me on my back, put my feet in the air, and said, "you're going to be fine.  I do this for a living."  I said, "you pull people out of cars for a living?  That's a pretty sweet job." (My Loorrrdddd, my my my lord, my sweet lord, Krishna Krishna) "I'll stay with you until the ambulance gets here."  He said.  "No, you don't need to do that.  When I feel better, I'll get up and move my car." I said. "It's upside down." he said. "Is it?  If you could give me a minute, I'll just flip it back over."  "Just relax but don't close your eyes.  you could lose consciousness."

When life came back into focus a few days later, I picked up the accident report.

"Passenger extracted herself from the vehicle."  according to three witnesses.  And when I saw my car, both front doors were jammed closed and both windows were intact.  To this day, I have no idea how I got out of the car, upside down after a concussion and spinal compression.

Apparently, my guardian angel is a 40 something hispanic male in black nike shorts and a wife beater.

That memory, and the memory of a stiff new pair of pointe shoes as I recalled my first celebrity death rushed through my brain when I turned this album on.  His words melodiously slithered through my brain and unlocked doors of memories long forgotten and images not of this lifetime.  Through a neurological web, I recalled the crunch of a rosin rock under pink point shoes and the sound of shattering glass.  I thought about how we are not individuals, although we think we are.  In an article I recently thumbed through, they estimate that microbes outnumber our own cells 10 to 1.  And that we are not single entities, but rather we are private ecosystems, providing a home for billions of cells and microbes who all work together like a micro-universe.  We are forests.  And that each cell has its own parts and functions and works with its neighbor cells, much like we live in houses and live next door to other families.  I recalled walking my careless pomeranian puppy who stepped on a small snail that carried the secret fractal geometry of the universe in his miniature shell as I heard Harrison sing through my earbuds, "Isn't it a Pity."  I thought about the time where I once had a moment when I stood naked in my closet and felt humbled by my clothes.  This shirt, I mused, this cotton shirt is so much more than that.  IT started with cotton seeds that came from centuries of cotton plants once picked by sweating black hands, but are now picked by people all over the world.  And those little balls of cotton that came from the same plant went off to a factory to be spun and dyed.  A beautiful person planted the seeds, someone with a pregnant wife picked the cotton, a small child wove the cotton into fabric, a woman who was inspired by a song someone wrote designed the image to be printed on the front, someone who was bullied in high school designed the printer she used, and a recovering alcoholic sent it to a store, and I bought it and brought it home and placed it in my closet.  And at the moment I  lifted it over my head and put my head through the hole, I was born with a realization that this very moment was put into motion years before I was conceived.  And this moment too, shall pass.

And this album made me realize, that I am a piece of any puzzle of any one person or thing I have ever touched and will ever touch before I pass away.  And so are you.  And on a grand scale, we are God and Nothing at the same time.  Our lives are the most meaningful, especially for the billions of microbes who call it home, and are also the most insignificant of lives (to those who make us pay taxes).  And these small memories I've provided here, are some of the many memories of people who have been touched by this album.  If we could make a mountain out of the memories triggered by George Harrison, it would take an eternity to climb.  And he was only one man in our macro-universe.  And that is one of the many profound points I surmised from this album.

So if you didn't get that, give it a re-listen and keep in mind that "Not too many people, can see we're all the same."

Don McLean would be happy to know that this music saved my mortal soul.  Here is what Rolling Stone had to say:

Apple, 1970

Harrison had almost enough songs stored up from his Beatles days for a triple LP – the gas starts to run out during the jams on Side Six. But spiritual guitar quests like "My Sweet Lord" and "What Is Life" became classics.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/george-harrison-all-things-must-pass-19691231#ixzz1yHU3NE49

#27 King of the Delta Blues Singers - Robert Johnson

To be honest, I would have had a much better time trying to distinguish between ancient Chinese dialects than to distinguish between each track on this album.  I thought the same song was on repeat until I realized, after having listened all the way through the album several times that every song sounds unmistakably the same.  To complicate the issue further, the recording, albeit "digitally remastered" is horrendous enough that the static seems to become apart of the music so that it no longer stands out, like high fructose corn syrup in your tasty sparkling beverage.  Not to mention that Robert Johnson's "blusey" voice is so difficult to understand I think I only heard about three distinct words after tirelessly straining to decide if indeed English is the spoken language: Woman, Kitchen, and Blues.  Which, pardon my ignorance to this genre, isn't a recipe for interesting music to me (and honest people everywhere).

So, if the quality of sound, sound variance, lyrics, or catchy music isn't to blame for this album's startling 27th place spot, what on earth is?

So I looked him up.  I do this after I listen to the album.  I don't want what others have written before me to taint my virgin musical experience; nor do I want their biographical information to influence what I think of their music.  What I read was absolutely absurd.  Apparently, this dood sold his soul to the devil to be a "great" blues musician.  Epic Fail.  After achieving success and banging a lot of women (in worthless musician fashion) he was poisoned by a jealous person and the devil wanted his soul.  And then, somehow influenced every other musician who is/was worth a damn.  Just name your fav, s/he's on the list of groupies.  Because according to legend/typical groupie jargon, rock and roll couldn't have happened without Robert Johnson.

It reminds me of those self-righteous dickfarts I went to college with who claim that, "Without Beowulf, we mightn't have had such masterpieces as Lord of the Rings."  Well, we'd be much better off without both of them.  I day-dreamed of an interview with Miley Cyrus and she'd be all like "oh yeah, I couldn't have gotten where I totally am today had it not been for R. Johnson, homeboy show me love from hell, lol smiley wink face."

Just because something was created and it was the first (beowulf/king of the delta blues etc) doesn't make it art.  For serious.  Nobody likes primitive pottery.  We know nothing about the dark ages not because shit isn't there, but because it was boring shit and no self-respecting archeologist can lie long enough in his sad-faced office examining terra cotta crap his three-year-old could have made.  Had nobody like Clapton, Keith Richards, Bobby D and the like turned around and pointed fingers at this guy, would anyone know who he is?  Seriously?  Because this album was just total gibberish and whining.

But I could have lied like everyone else did.  Come on, admit it you music snobs, you totally don't go on a run or a car trip and get excited for "Moo cow's calf's baby mama blues in the kitchen. Woman." or whatever.

And if you don't believe that every song sounds EXACTLY the same, play the first 8 seconds of each recording before going to the next track.  it sounds like this on repeat: "Ber Ne Nurh Nurh Nurh dum dum bum bum bum... Mehehehehehe mamama in da kitchen!!!!!!  bur bur bur meeeeh mooo beeen so long" etc. etc.

But, I guess it is possible that without Robert Johnson, Dave Chappelle might have had a different opening for his short lived show of badassery.

Here is what the Mag says about Robert Johnson because they are all afraid of the devil:
"You want to know how good the blues can get?" Keith Richards asked. "Well, this is it." The bluesman in question was Robert Johnson, who lived from 1911 to 1938 in the Mississippi Delta, and whose guitar prowess was so great, it inspired stories that, in exchange for his amazing gift, he had sold his soul to the devil. Johnson recorded only twenty-nine songs, but their evanescent passion has resonated through the decades. This initial LP reissue of Johnson's original 78s was a fountainhead for 1960s rockers such as Richards and Eric Clapton, who plundered it for covers. A better starting point today might be the recently released sixteen-track compilation King of the Delta Blues.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-19691231/king-of-the-delta-blues-singers-robert-johnson-19691231#ixzz1vXWA5o8M

#2 Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys

I had this revelation about a week ago, as I was sitting on the back porch watching my cat Socrates chase butterfly after butterfly.  He would pounce a little to their left and they would fly away; confirming my suspicions that he is partially blind.  I sat there, like Pip in front of his parents' graves and thought, I'm here.  I am here.  Like, my whole life, has been building up to this moment, that just as soon as I appreciated it, it had gone from me.  Like the butterfly that flew over the fence and then there was this new moment, slightly altered, slightly different from the one of neuron fires previous.  And, like a cat who lives only in the present, I knew that this is all I have.  I did not go to college in this moment.  I did not attend grade school in this moment.  I am not the freckle-faced nymph I once was, who secretly ate sticks of butter, carefully unwrapping them and savoring the decadence between small fingers, who was startled with annoyance at the discovery that I could not wash the oils from my hands so easily at the conclusion of my crime; and who started secret clubs where all the members had to have an imaginary friend who played tricks on the boys who killed lizards and toads for fun.  I am 25 right now.  but I won't be that exact age in another second.  I had had all these thoughts before, but they were marinated in this new, surprising, striking feeling of mortality.  Like, I am not promised tomorrow.  I have this moment with my large orange cat and a cup of coffee, and the feel of the grass beneath my bare feet.  But I have nothing else.  I will have other things when I go inside, when I watch paranoid forensic shows on TV while I wait for the next notable thing to happen, or I will have the feeling of the white and black keys beneath my fingers as I play a sonatina by Beethoven; but I do not have those things now.  I have a cat who found me along his winding path, and a cup of coffee.  I wondered why, with persistent annoyance that we do not train people to think like the eternally content cat.  We are taught from the smallest age, that we must wait until we grow up.  You must wait until Christmas to get the Xbox.  You will have your free time in the summer.  You can drive when you are 16, you can vote when you are 18, when you are out of college, you can do whatever you'd like.  It felt like all this incessant and pointless waiting led up to this moment.  That I am here.  Finally, after so long of waiting.  And nobody could have told me that the future held a cat and a cup of coffee.  And a Beach Boys album that may have helped to spark many of these thoughts.  What on earth was the point of waiting?  Why do we program people to look towards the future when it has not yet arrived; and it might not- for you may be the unfortunate boy whose remains are found in a sewer, like in the last forensic show.  Or you may have been one of those people who used to talk of nothing but the future, how you will become a doctor, how you will marry a beautiful woman, how you will make lots of money, and now you nurse dark bottles of beer after a tiring job, standing in intimate circles in the back corner of a bar and talk about nothing but the past, when it is no more.

When I first listened to Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys, I was a little disappointed.  At first, it seemed very poppy, and I wondered with annoyance how they could have made their way to the second slot on the list.  I thought I would say things like, which beach boy turned trick to get them up that high on the list?  But I really don't know anything about why this album was so important.  I wasn't there in May of 1966 when the album came out.  I imagined young girls in high school buying the album at a record shop.  and I wondered where all those women were today.  Did they have grown children?  Did they remember the smell of the record, the crackling, popping noise it might make as they delicately placed the needle on the first track?  When they hear "God Only Knows" on the radio, do they imagine a past lover, a boy who, like the woman in question, shared the same sympathy with the lead vocalist?  Did they identify with music that supposedly shaped Rock and Roll history (for reasons unbeknown to me)?

When "don't talk, put your head on my shoulder" came on, I recalled a Paul McCartney concert a few years ago when he sang, "She was just 17, if you know what I mean..." and my insides almost curled up and died.  He looked like a gaunt, deathly ill ghost impersonating a man who once was.  An elderly shadow clinging to a moment that came and went.  And I wondered where the Beach Boys were now; what were they doing?  What time made them become.  Do they sit around and talk about the past, or do they have different lives now with new interests and new pleasures?  Did they have a moment with some butterflies, a cup of coffee, and a cat?

In this light, the songs seemed less pointless and poppy to me.  They seemed a little deeper than expected.  Suddenly lyrics like:
Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
then we wouldn't have to wait so long
and wouldn't it be nice to live together
in the kind of world where we belong?

Seemed like a group of people in a quarterlifecrisis reaching out for a future they were promised by parents who unknowingly programmed them.  I could feel people, perhaps a whole generation of people, itching to burst out of their skin, but feeling unable to do so.  The song that really stood out to me on this album, one that was not poppy and happy, one that seemed introspective and sad was "I just wasn't made for these times":

"I keep looking for a place to fit
where I can speak my mind
I've been trying hard to find the people
That I won't leave behind

They say I got brains
But they ain't doing me no good
I wish they could

Each time things start to happen again
I think I got something good goin' for myself
But what goes wrong

Sometimes I feel very sad
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Can't find nothin' I can put my heart and soul into)
Sometimes I feel very sad
(Can't find nothin' I can put my heart and soul into)

I guess I just wasn't made for these times"

I could feel the angst and the annoyance.  The constant searching for a destiny that never really existed, but was always promised by people who don't have to live your life.  How many others of his generation felt this feeling.  God, how many people of my generation feel this?

In sum, the album's placement on the list at first glance seems like something to be written off as a fluke.  It could easily be dismissed that "oh, it only made it so far up the list because it was pop music."  Perhaps that helped it get placed, but there is much more to this album beneath the surface.  The thoughts that it provoked in me made me rethink dismissing it.  I wonder if I heard it years from now if it would have produced similar thoughts, or a whole chain of different ones.  Maybe 'twas the culmination of being the same age as the band members, in a generation that so desperately wants change and yet feels so impotent to break away helped to formulate this "review" if you can even call it that.

So thanks 24-year-old Brian Wilson.  Did you know that one day, on my own path, yours would cross mine on an iPod and I would spend a Sunday afternoon with a cat named Socrates sharing a private eternity of thoughts that will soon be forgotten, like everything else?  Until I am blindsided by a Proustian Madeleine years from now and a song of yours from this album will come on, and I might tell children of my own how had I not written a blog in my confused 20s, I never would have stopped to appreciate a neurological path accidently forged by a musician before me, who never knew my name, nor has never and will never meet me.  And they might laugh, or think I'm strange, and I, in turn, might laugh at them when I go to make brownies and all the butter is missing.

You make me and baby Jesus happy to hear your music.

What people who actually know how to write reviews said:

"Who's gonna hear this shit?" Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band's resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. "The ears of a dog?" Confronted with his bandmate's contempt, Wilson made lemonade of lemons. "Ironically," he observed, "Mike's barb inspired the album's title."

Barking dogs — Wilson's dog Banana among them, in fact — are prominent among the found sounds on the album. The Beatles made a point of echoing them on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — an acknowledgment that Pet Sounds was the inspiration for the Beatles' masterpiece. That gesture actually completed a circle of influence: Wilson initially conceived of Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles' Rubber Soul.

Wilson essentially made Sounds without the rest of the band, using them only to flesh out the vocal arrangements. He even considered putting the album out as a solo project, and the first single, "Caroline, No," was released under his own name. The deeply personal nature of the songs, which Wilson co-wrote primarily with lyricist Tony Asher, further distinguished the album from the Beach Boys' typical fare. Its luxurious sound convey a heartbreaking wistfulness, as songs such as "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and "I'm Waiting for the Day" bid farewell to the innocent world of the early Sixties and to the Beach Boys' fun-in-the-sun hits.

Unfortunately, Capitol Records proved no more enamored of Pet Sounds than had Love; the label actually considered not releasing the album at all. Not yet vindicated by history, Wilson withdrew further into his inner world. "At the last meeting I attended concerning Pet Sounds," Wilson wrote in his autobiography (which took the name of the album's opening track, "Wouldn't It Be Nice") about his dealings with Capitol's executive brain trust, "I showed up holding a tape player and eight prerecorded, looped responses, including 'No comment,' 'Can you repeat that?' 'No' and 'Yes.' Refusing to utter a word, I played the various tapes when appropriate."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-19691231/pet-sounds-the-beach-boys-19691231#ixzz1s8lvL2iN

#295 Meat is Murder - The Smiths

Trying to get through this album was like my recent three hour trip to the *genius* bar at the apple store.  That place is like a church where all the clergy have to be in wheelchairs, own square glasses or be non-white.  But if they are white, they must be outwardly gay; or at least pretend to be.  And you don't get an interview unless you have a more unconventional piercing than the interviewer.

yay.  celebrate **diversity**  Here is how it went down:

"I don't know; it is deleting all of my contacts and resetting itself to last Tuesday" I proffered in dismay as I handed the priest the iDol.

"eureka! Let's restore it," the trollish applepotamus exclaimed, as suavely as a minion of Steve Jobs could muster.

"I just did that; three times," declared your sarcastic narrator.

"okieee dokie.  let's sync it and see what happens."

"rad.  because I totally have all day with you at the shrine of Steve Jobs because I Dave Chappelled my ass out of institutionalized servitude known as employment.  Oh, rapture."

So, as I sat there, I began to soak up the ambiance of the store.  Like a sea of allusions for those *hip* enough to decode musical countercounterculture badassery, they played Clapton, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, U2, a whole bunch of bands you wouldn't know because they aren't mainstream, and finally, The Smiths.

"What band is this?" I asked; after 45 minutes of silence.

"omg, you don't know the Smiths?  They are like the best alternative band from the 80s.  They're from England.  Well, it's not that surprising you don't know them; I mean, you ONLY have 3,939 songs.  You know, when I bought my most recent iPod, i had to let it sync with my music library for 23 hours before I could actually use it because I had 90,000 songs."

"rad."

 ps. you have a booger.  almost.  just there, a little to the left, no other nostril.  good job, trogdor.

So when I left the store, I purchased "Meat is Murder" by the Smiths because it actually sounded like something I'd like; after all, I've been a vegetarian for 8 years.  But it just droned the fuck on.  and on.  and on.  The band whines and bitches about school and how mean the headmaster is for *like* ever.  SO DROP OUT ALREADY.  Jesus.  and then he's like "wah, I wanna go home" and continues to complain about how he doesn't want to participate in gym class.  Get off your whiny ass and run a little bit.  motherfuck.  It's not the end of the world.  Or be a man and shoot yourself in the leg like people did to go home from Vietnam.  Grow some balls, Morrissey; or go get a job at the apple store with the other spineless androgynous beings.

The next 8 songs he's bitching and moaning about some chick he can't have with whom he is in love.  Fucking man up and get a cool car or something.  Or brag about your 90,000 songs or do some other alternative-hipsterish mating call.  or just go find another girl who isn't dating a cooler guy than you.  There are plenty of chicks, man.  Stop singing about a non-story.  Nothing is happening in your songs except it's clear you're a loser and can't get laid or run a few laps around a track.  god damn it; get a diary and leave my ears alone.

And then, right when you think the moaning will subside, there is a song that starts off real awesome like.  You can sort of imagine a mirage on an airstrip and real badasses like from a Tarantino film walking toward the camera in slow-mo.  It's called "How Soon is Now?"  And then he ruins it by opening his mouth and crying about how he's human and he needs to be loved, just like everybody else does.  and I had to practice yoga breathing to get through the rest of this horseshit.  I have to get through this.  I kept saying to myself.  Just 2 times.  I only have to listen just 2 times.  I'd rather be getting time raped from me at the apple store.

Then, finally, the big song: "Meat is Murder" comes on for the 10th and final track.  Yes, I'm thinking, a song for we veggies everywhere.  And then it's practically a joke.  Like if I were a cattle slaughterer, I'd totally play this shit while killing cows all day as a sardonic joke.  It's a parody of itself it's so bad.  It's like a bad horror movie where the audience is laughing instead of being frightened.  You know, like a Twilight movie or something when preggers Bella wakes up from her impromtu C-section and being bitten by her 400 year old husband and everyone is covered in blood and the werewolf guy is trying to get up on her infant baby.  It was sort of like that.  But you can't even laugh about it with the person next to you because everyone else loves the smiths.

I just wanted to scream at him.  If you're going to write a song about the horrors of eating meat, you need to arm yourself with some fucking ethos, pathos, and logos.  motherfuck.  Get some English class, yesterday.  First, Morrissey, establish some credibility by not being a whiny pussy who complains about gym and some girl he can't have.  Second, make us feel bad for these animals.    Describe how they cut off chicken beaks and pack them in together really tight; or how they chain small calves to poles so they can't move their whole lives.  For more information please visit: here. For "fleshed out" arguments, please click: Animal Liberation by Peter Singer.  Make me FEEL BAD FOR THE ANIMAL.  You can't do that with horrible lyrics like, "a death for no reason is murder..." blah blah blah.  CONVICTION, MORRISSEY, CONFUCKINGVICTION.  Get some.  And finally, you need to show the logic behind why a person shouldn't eat meat.  Because meat eating causes cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, ugliness, sluggishness, lethal dog-farts, and erectile dysfunction etc.  If you don't believe me, go get you a netflix subscription and watch the following movies: Forks Over Knives, Food Matters, Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, The Gerson Miracle, Going Further, The Beautiful Truth, Raw for 30 days, and Food Inc. to name a few.  After you watch these movies you won't want to argue with me because you'll have a paradigm shift and be like, omfg I need to buy a juicer.  Wake the fuck up people.  Or write better songs and say more than cursory bullshit.

Man, that felt good.  Maybe I was having a shitty day.  the album wasn't all that bad.  Sorry if I offended everyone because that was probably the best band to come out of the 80s.  Glad I missed 6 years of the 80s.

Cows and apple-people approve of "Meat is Murder" by The Smiths.

What the Rolling Stone Experts are saying; although, I disagree with all of it:

Inspired by can riffs, bookended by lengthy, brutal songs about corporal punishment and the horrors of the cattle industry, the Smiths' 1985 disc is the darkest entry in the U.K. group's catalog. On "How Soon Is Now?" Morrissey sums up with great pathos and hilarity what a drag it is to be shy. More pathos would come.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-19691231/meat-is-murder-the-smiths-19691231#ixzz1ntdG20VI

#63 Sticky Fingers - The Rolling Stones

You know you're unemployed and a potential drain on society when you've realized that for the last two hours, you've been watching a family of ducks while listening to the Sticky Fingers album by the Rolling Stones.

I felt like Tony Soprano this week because I found myself sitting by a pond near my house obsessing over a family of ducks that recently decided to make it their home.  For those of you who didn't know; I have a secret *not anymore* obsession with birds.  Not that I've ever tried before, but I finally found a reason to relate to Mark Bittner, in one of my favorite all time documentaries: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.  It's about a homeless dude who befriends a flock of parrots.  But he can get away with this shit because he lives in san francisco, not in shit kicker county, texas.

Because I spent the last 60 hours of my life watching HBO's classic Shakespeareanesque series The Wire, I began to name the birds after the characters.  The one who was all alone and quacking at the others received the name of Omar; the one who kept trying to mate with all the females was McNulty; the douchey one who kept pissing the others off was Prezbo etc etc.

There is no segway, not even a bad one into the music section of this particular post-- oh wait, I lied.  I do have one today:

In one of the earlier episodes of The Wire, Prezbo explains to all the cops a line in "Brown Sugar," the opening song to the Sticky Fingers album.  It's a line that, as Prez puts it, we've all heard before but never listened to.  It ultimately sheds insight into listening to wire taps over and over to crack a case about trafficking foreign women into the United States for sex--but back to MY story with Ducks and Stones, I named one little duck Prezbo and listened to Brown Sugar over and over and rather than hearing slurred speech and something like: "Go-Mo haze, you know the kind in tears, sold in the market down in New Orleans--"  I finally heard it like Prezbo: "Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields, sold in the market down in New Rrleans" and I began to repeat the song over and over and was suddenly grossed out by the audacity of their lyrics.  They really are singing about young black women being raped in a sex trade!

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Wooo.

It dawned on me that the whole album mirrors these moments.  The music is beyond fantastic.  It gets you high because the beats throw you into the kind of mood where you feel like you're pumped and ready to take on the duck pond--but then, after repetition, you begin to comprehend the gravity of the lyrics which juxtapose the music forcefully.  My settled favorite song on this album is Dead Flowers.  It flopped from Bitch to Brown Sugar, to Moonlight Mile and ended up on Dead Flowers.  The music is mellow, yet happy somehow-- but there is a jarring line where Jagger says, "I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon" and I was just like "yikes, man, lighten up.  What do you think this is, an episode of The Wire?"

I was a bit put off by his phony Texas twang; it made me feel a little insulted, because a REAL Texan would know that we ain't got no basements in this here state.  Y'all gotta go up north fer that.  damn brits.

Overall the album was priceless.  A true gem and one of my favorites so far.  I wish that bands today could rock out and tell it like it is like the Stones.

Even Ducks approve of the Rolling Stones.

I'd like to give kudos to this blog that helped clarify how the "Brown Sugar" convo went down in the police room in the Wire: The Codebreakers

and omfg, this album cover is still vulgar after 41 years.

What the Rolling Stone Magazine had to say about this album:

Drummer Charlie Watts remembered the origin of Sticky Fingers as being Mick Jagger and the songs he wrote while filming a movie in Australia. "Mick started playing the guitar a lot," Watts said. "He plays very strange rhythm guitar . . . very much how Brazilian guitarists play, on the upbeat. It is very much like the guitar on a James Brown track — for a drummer it's great to play with." The album has tough, straight-up rock, such as "Brown Sugar" and "Bitch," but also finds the Stones expanding their sound with strings on the lovely "Moonlight Mile." Two of the best cuts are the two country songs: one forlorn ("Wild Horses") and one funny ("Dead Flowers").

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-19691231/sticky-fingers-the-rolling-stones-19691231#ixzz1nA77sl4q

#316 Rock Steady - No Doubt

So I was at this gelato place the other day and this little pixie-waif girl was yes-manning the shit out of this hipster type in a lumberjack plaid button up.  He was ranting on and on about how his unapologetic friend "was all like this and that" concerning said friend's newest idea on how to spend his trust fund moneyz.  The girl was sucking on the tiny spoon and saying, "omg, that is ridic.  so ridic.  If I had that kind of money, I would do something better with it, like go skiing in Colorado.  It's skiing season, you know."

I was keenly tuned into this opportunity to be the anthropologist in my mind and my fiance and I were shaking our heads, both wondering the same thing, which is of course is-- when the zombie apocalypse happens, clearly we won't be the first to go.  

And then the male specimen turned the the female and said, "and all that shit between me and him went down about the time the Drake album came out."  and that's when Dulce de Leche came out of my nose.  I asked my fiance later, "Who the fuck measures time by when the Drake album came out? and P.S., didn't he mean crippled Jimmy from Degrassi?

But anyway, I began to wonder which albums I measured time by.  I really could only think of Enima of the State by Blink182 when I was in the 8th grade.  I was fortunate enough to find a way to tie in that anecdote with No Doubt's Rock Steady album by saying that it came out when I was in the 9th grade.  I remembered people being excited about the new album and the radio overplaying it, but I wasn't a big No Doubt fan myself.  I thought she was kind of annoying.

This time around, I listened to this album longer than usual.  I chewed on it, and sat on it, and wondered what I was going to write about.  I didn't get attached to any of the songs, nor did I care so much about the music.  I found it to be mostly an upbeat album and like one of those wine blends that sounds horrible but by the time you're drinking it, you're too drunk to care.  It was mostly like that.  It's EXCELLENT dance music, a little R&B, hip hop, lots and lots of Jamaican beats (which I found out is why she titled the album "Rock Steady") and overall just a good album from the 1st to the last song.  It didn't move me, it wasn't memorable, it wasn't super special, it was just nice background music.  Not my style.  But if you want to dance like nobody's watching; it would be a good purchase.

What the RS Mag has to say (lol, at least I didn't reference ewoks):

In which No Doubt do dancehall and techno but reveal themselves to be a great New Wave band: On "Don't Let Me Down" (produced by Ric Ocasek), they sound more like the Cars than the Cars. Bassist Tony Kanal compared Steady to Return of the Jedi: "It's, like, full of Ewoks. You know, just happy."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-19691231/rock-steady-no-doubt-19691231#ixzz1l4ELTLbM