» Posts in Music
September 14, 2010
It’s been a while. Life and other endeavors have gotten in the way and blogging has fallen far down the list of priorities. My blog ranking has suffered because of it. According to Alexa.com, this is no longer one of the top million web sites in the world. Michelin has taken away one of my three stars.
A friend once told me he hopes that upon death, we will all receive a stat sheet, detailing our minor accomplishments. Miles walked. Daves known. Cumulative hours spent listening to Al Jarreau. The sheet will also feature our all-time world rankings. Have I eaten more buffalo wings than Alexander the Great? Hit more three pointers than Charles Nelson Reilly? Important knowledge for a man to take into the afterlife.
One thing is for sure. Every person is bound to be the best in history at least one thing, though most of us probably wouldn’t know what that thing is.
“Congratulations, my friend, you have spent more time doing annoying, and inaccurate, Austin Powers impressions than any other human in history.
“Fine. Guilty. Just give me a trophy and let me in, St. Pete.”
“Do it first.”
“Come on. I just want to sit on a cloud and flirt with Joan of Arc.”
“Do. It.”
“Fine. Groovin’ Baby. Groovin’.”
It embarrasses me to tell you this, but one of the important things I’ve been doing instead of blogging is playing Rock Band. Thanks to Craig and is eponymous list, I picked up a full set for a cool $30. For that price, I’d be a fool not to try to master Mountain’s Mississippi Queen on a plastic push-button Fender!
One thing I learned from my foray into Rock Band is that I’m not very good at video games. I used to be okay, back in the days when Kid Icarus was the rage. But I haven’t played many video games as an adult, and I certainly lack the inspiring dedication some of my peers possess.
I remember one lazy summer Saturday a few years back when I turned on the TV and I saw a Guitar Hero competition. On ESPN. With adults involved. All varieties of nerd were collected on stage and they were playing Metallica and, I don’t know, Molly Hatchet or something. They were mugging and fist pumping and throwing the devil horns out to the crowd. All the while their fingers were racing across video game frets like Bishop’s knife trick. They didn’t miss a note.
All I could think was: Good gravy! If these guys dedicated their time to actually learning how to play guitar, then they might have a crowd full of screaming women in front of them. Instead they have some pasty Best Buy employees, the IT department from Chubb, and a small percentage of South Korea’s teenage boy population. Perhaps that’s what they want, but it breaks my heart just the same.
But not as much as this. This guy might just be the greatest video game drummer in the history of mankind. When he dies, we’ll check his stats to be sure. But even if he’s second or third best, I can’t help but want to shake him silly.
To quote his youtube description: “I do not play the real drums.”
Because that would be a waste of time, wouldn’t it?
2 Comments | Posted by Aaron under Music, Video Games | Bookmark or Share
June 3, 2010
I have a friend who was a holdout for the cassette tape. Up until seven or eight years ago, he would only buy new music in cassette tape form. Absurd, I know, and as you could guess, I teased him mercilessly about it. When the music industry finally did away with the archaic format, he threw up his hands and joined the rest of the world. He accepted CDs into his life.
His reasons for sticking with the cassette ranged from his suspicion of format fads (CDs might go the way of the laser disc or DAT, he argued) to his thriftiness (why buy new equipment, when his “decks” worked just fine?). My friend came of age in the 80s, so nostalgia may have played a big part too, and honestly, I can’t begrudge him that.
Admittedly, there’s nothing cool about being nostalgic for cassettes. I’ve never been a vinyl guy, but I respect the people who scour the flea market tables and garage sale boxes, examining the grooves of old 78’s and confidently tucking their salvage under their arms. There’s purpose and a little bit of poetry in that. Vinyl has history, beauty, and acoustic integrity. Cassettes have none of the above.
But still, I am nostalgic for cassettes. I didn’t realize it until recently. Another friend, who is prone to bouts of pop philosophy when beer is on hand, can be blamed for my ill-advised wistfulness. He proposed that when the CD stabbed the cassette in the heart, and the CD-R and MP3 twisted the knife, not only did the cassette die. The album died too. I had to agree.
Consider this. The album as a concept was only fully realized during the short age of cassettes. The vinyl and digital ages are highlighted by ease of choice. Not digging a particular Hendrix solo? Just lift the arm and drop the needle on another groove and relax into the familiarity of “Purple Haze.” Not sure which Vampire Weekend song you heard on the latest Gossip Girl. Scan a few tracks until you hear that distinctive keyboard chords. Why bother with an entire album when you can simply spin the hits?
The cassette’s limitations were also its virtues. Fast-forward and rewind were labor-intensive operations, so listeners were forced to actually suffer through an artist’s indulgences. Spinning the hits on cassette just wasn’t a convenient option. By listening to an album front to back, tastes were acquired and grander ambitions bubbled to the surface. One came to appreciate an album as a whole, not as just a collection of songs.
As a teenager, sitting in the dark listening to my sister’s Pink Floyd tapes, I experienced something akin to an Almost Famous moment. I discovered that “Wish You Were Here” only had full resonance when sandwiched between the various parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” I gradually fell in love with “Southhampton Dock” while waiting for “The Final Cut” to kick in. This was not the first music that seduced me (that honor goes to the Muppet Movie soundtrack), but it was the first time I was seduced by the organization of music, the noble concept of the album.
That might not have happened with a record or a CD. It certainly wouldn’t have happened with MP3s. I would have logged onto ITunes, made my Pink Floyd greatest hits playlist and called it a day. I would have paired “Money” with “Another Brick in the Wall” and finished it off with “Learning to Fly.” Somewhere in England, Roger Waters would have felt a shiver go down his spine and absolutely no one would have been the better for it.
I still try to listen to albums front to back, no matter what the format. I hardly ever hit shuffle. But I must admit I’ve hit skip more than one time on Yo La Tengo and Guided By Voices. I shouldn’t necessarily be ashamed of that, but as a fan of both bands, I have a responsibility to trust them a little more. Relationships with musicians are like relationships with anybody. You must let eccentricities sink in, be willing to grant forgiveness, and endure patches of annoying feedback.
The same could also be said for mix-tapes. I used to have a box full of old mix-tapes under my bed. Mix-tapes are like time capsules—monuments to tastes, to the evolution of music collections, and to the efforts once expended in the name of puppy-love and friends-forever idealism. I will not step on Nick Hornby’s toes and write a mix-tape manifesto, but I will say that the mix-CD and ITunes playlist pale in comparison to the glorious mix-tape.
For the mix-tape requires genuine effort. From the scouring of shelves of music, to the pause-play-record-pause-play-record dexterity required of dubbing, to the handwritten liner notes, the elements of a mix-tape speak of dedication and romance. There’s no dedication involved in dropping a bunch of files from one computer folder to another, hitting burn, and loading up the ink-jet with jewel-case-sized sheets of paper. There’s absolutely nothing romantic about ITunes. And what’s to say the person you’ve presented with a mix-CD isn’t going to hit skip when that Califone tune doesn’t grab them right away? What’s to say they aren’t going to dump the file of Nina Simone covering “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” into the trash because they’re sick of you trying to sneak a little Bob Dylan past them.
In some ways, cassette tapes are also like letters. Remember letters? They were like emails with souls. Cassette tapes have souls too. And like letters, they’re messy and imperfect and personal. Forgive me some “things were better in my day” indulgence, but the hiss of a 5th-generation dubbed copy of Straight Outta Compton will always mean more to me than the crisp playback of the latest Drake joint. And sitting in a friend’s basement with a tiny screwdriver, trying to flip the reels on a Led Zeppelin cassette around so we could listen to “Stairway to Heaven” backwards feels a hell of a lot more subversive than exchanging torrents. Cassettes are tangible objects with tangible stories and sadly they have been relegated to the trash-heap and forgotten.
My cassette-dedicated friend has an IPod now. As do I. The IPod’s size and shape are vaguely reminiscent of a cassette. Only they hold more music—a whole lot of music. I am certainly thankful for that. Yet IPods will eventually be replaced too and IPod nostalgia will be deemed quaint and silly. There’s nothing quaint and silly about championing the experience of music, though. Format is tied into that experience. So let me mourn the death of the cassette tape, because it provided me, and many others, with genuine experiences. It shaped the way I listen. It exposed me to more music. It made me a curious and tolerant fan. Its sound wasn’t so great, maybe, but its sound will be missed.
2 Comments | Posted by Aaron under Childhood, Music | Bookmark or Share
April 30, 2010
I’ve started writing what I hope will become my next novel. I can’t say much about it, other than it’s snarling and short, a fast-paced genre-tweaker with bad kids doing bad things. Trashy in only the best ways. Or so I hope.
I’ve thought about the style in relation to songwriting more than anything. A get in and get out sort of approach. Songwriters who are also storytellers have always appealed to me. People love to throw around Bob Dylan’s name in this department and I can’t blame them. I went through my Dylan phase, shortly after the mandatory Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd ones, and I can still say confidently that Dylan’s oft-overlooked Ballad in Plain D has few lyrical peers. But I’ve been thinking more contemporary than stuff like that.
For my money, the best storytelling songwriter today is Mike Cooley from Drive-By Truckers. You may not listen to Drive-By Truckers, but you really should. Start with The Dirty South and work forward and backward from there. You’ll find the dominant voice in the band is Patterson Hood, and the man can write morality and mortality with the best of them. Jason Isbell appears on three albums and contributes a handful of gems, including three certifiable masterpieces. But it’s Mike Cooley who consistently and deceptively astonishes. He takes hook-heavy chug-a-lugging rock songs and finger-picked ballads and fills them with so many clever turns of phrases that you’d be tempted to think he’s just a whiskey-drenched jester, aiming for whoops and backstage fondles. What he’s really doing is writing efficient and effective tales, which taken together form a tragicomic southern epic of tough guys and sad sacks looking for a way out or a way back in life. The songs Zip City and Space City could work as the opening and closing chapters to a heartbreaking biographical novel. Carl Perkins’ Cadillac is a flawless distillation of the Sun Studio days in Memphis, while the rise and fall of grunge detailed in Self Destructive Zones serves as a sequel, featuring verses like:
The hippies rode a wave putting smiles on faces,
that the devil wouldn’t even put a shoe
Caught between a generation dying from its habits,
and another thinking rock and roll was new
Till the pawn shops were packed like a backstage party,
hanging full of pointy ugly cheap guitars
And the young’uns all turned to karaoke,
hanging all their wishes upon disregarded stars
Yes, Cooley gets in and gets out and gets it done. And since I have a crush on y’all, I’ve put together a little mixtape for you, an Itunes playlist of the Best of Mike Cooley.
I skipped songs from the new album The Big To Do, cause I haven’t had a chance to give it much of a listen. I’ve also left off live versions and his songs from Pizza Deliverance and The Fine Print, just to ruffle some feathers. Still, I think this is a good representation of Cooley at the top of his game and I hope it encourages you to buy some of the complete DBT albums (maybe you’ll prefer Patterson Hood – no skin off my back). For me, I’ll use the mix as inspiration and instruction while I write a children’s book. I’m sure that’s what Cooley intended.
P.S. Cooley and the gang are some of finest ambassadors from the state of Alabama. Worlds better than this knucklehead, in any case.
4 Comments | Posted by Aaron under Music | Bookmark or Share
April 29, 2010
I try to keep up with the Bieber-stream media. You see what I did there? Rather than writing “mainstream” or even “lamestream,” I went with “Bieber-stream.” It’s something I do here. Keep folks on their toes. Comment on culture in clever ways. Thank me by buying a book.
In any case, the Justin Bieber-slanting CBS News has asked the kids of New Zealand (The Kiwiettes, if you will) to chill the hell out. Bieber Fever has reached George Romero-like levels, resulting in a frightening mob scene at the Auckland Airport, and Justin’s “mama” has suffered as a result. I want to think the best of our very distant neighbors to the southwest (or southeast should you decide to fly Air Emirates), so I’m a skeptic. I smell a PR person behind this. And if not that, then I smell Germans. Because as anyone who has set their watch to NZST will tell you, if you want meet someone from Munich, go to the Auckland Airport. I swear, it’s like Paris in 1942.
Of course, this is from a tourist’s perspective. I spent 3 months in New Zealand a couple years back. My wife and I bought a cheap car, and filled the trunk with camping equipment and drove down every road and hiked in as many corners of that lovely little country as we could and slept in huts and yards and hostels and on beaches. We met plenty of locals, very few Americans, and a shocking number of Klauses and Ilsas. We ran into one intrepid young Bavarian on two separate occasions: once while doing a jigsaw puzzle in a headlamp-lit hut along the Milford Track; once along the steaming, sulfurous moonscape of the Tongariro Circuit. He (and every other German we met) spoke flawless English and was a perfectly lovely fellow, so I don’t mean to disparage an entire people. I’m just intrigued by the disproportion. The French and Spanish and English and Italian combined didn’t even have half the representation.
I’m sure if I actually lived and worked in New Zealand, I’d shrug this German infiltration off as some backpacker urban legend. But I assure you it’s true, and I think it has resulted in a Bieber bumrush. Germans get a bad rap for their taste in music. So perhaps a band of backpackers were trying to regain some cred. Perhaps they weren’t fans at all, but musical freedom fighters trying to rid the world of a devastating future filled with soulless bubble-gum pop. Perhaps Bieber is lucky to have gotten out with his reputation intact. Have you ever read The Dead Zone?
It seems far-fetched until you watch the following clip. It’s taken from an interview in New Zealand shortly after the airport fiasco. Cunning as ever, Bieber strikes back by denying that the German language even exists. “I don’t know that means. We don’t say that in America,” he quips. It’s a brassy move, and will spark numerous conspiracy theories. I expect Glenn Beck to break it down blackboard-style any day now.
Which brings me to the real point of this post. New Zealand! A strange and wonderful place and so much more than hobbits and Bret and Jemaine. I will be posting frequently about the oddities and peculiarities of New Zealand in upcoming weeks, and hopefully you’ll all learn a little something. Bieber was a just a gateway, the first dose to get you hooked. Stay tuned.
2 Comments | Posted by Aaron under Celebrity, Music, World Cultures, World Famous in New Zealand | Bookmark or Share
March 23, 2010
I have a scar on my forehead, starting just below my current hairline. I “cracked open my skull,” as the neighborhood kids liked to say, at the height of my curly-haired moppetness. It was the result of a head-to-head collision during an intense garden hose fight. Six stitches later, I was fixed, but I was forever marked.
This was the early 80s. Forehead stitches, as well as dermatological pastiness, were Frankenstein’s stock in trade, and I was the proud possessor of both. I can’t count the number of times I was chased through elementary school halls by pitchfork wielding bullies. Well, maybe not pitchfork-wielding, but they certainly had some sharp barbs to poke me with. My hair wasn’t helping things either. You could swab a deck with the stuff. Since the barber crisis of the 70s had come and gone, afros weren’t cutting it anymore in my town. If you didn’t look like Ted McGinley, William Zabka or Michael Schoeffling, you might as well have been Curtis Armstrong. I only wish I was born a generation or two later. “Why?” you ask. Well let’s look at the evidence.
Forehead Scars
The boy who lived, and has the scar to prove it. That’s right. Harry Potter. Can you think of anything that would get you more hand-holding at a modern-day roller skating party? You can’t, because a Harry Potter scar bestows upon its owner a Fonzie level of chick-magnetism. It implies that you are a hero, but the soul of a bad-boy is always at the front of your mind. It’s the type of internal conflict that will keep the valentine box full and the pleas to see your patronus pouring in.
Ghost Skin
Thanks to Robert Pattison, visible cheek veins haven’t been this en vogue since they were casting for The Munsters. Vampire fanaticism is nothing new, but 13-year-old girls never hung posters of Bela Lugosi or Max Schreck on their walls. And it’s certainly not the Interview with a Vampire Brad Pitt that got them swooning more than 15 years back. All the libidinous metaphors aside, what distinguishes the current craze is its insidious, ubiquitous infiltration of bubble-gum culture. Most notably: Justin Bieber. He may not be some 100-year-old man who runs his incisors across your daughter’s neck, but he’s as pale-skinned as they come and his lyrics give away his agenda. His song Eenie Meenie features the chorus, “Eenie meenie miney mo. Catch a bad chick by her toe. If she holla (if, if, if she holla) let her go.” It’s nice to see Mr. Bieber takes no for an answer, but what happens if she don’t “holla?” He’s Canadian, you know? I don’t doubt that deep in the woods of Manitoba, Bieber’s got a log cabin full of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and ninja gear. And I don’t doubt that he stands on the roof of that cabin, all shirtless and pigment-free, and he screams his mantra into the endless Canadian night: “By the blood and souls of all shorties, I will never, ever die!“
Hair Nests
Dr. Spock must have added an afterword to one of his tomes imploring us to raise a bunch of Albert Hammond Juniors. Because kids these days look like rejects from Phoenix (the band, not the city…or the mythological beast). Go to any grade school and you’ll find the evidence that parents of all socio-economic stripes are against the clear cutting of hair. When I was a kid, the school nurse would make regular visits to our homerooms to perform lice examinations. We’d put our heads on our desks and she’d tickle our scalps with rubber-gloved fingers. Then, 45 minutes after she left, the classroom phone would ring and the teacher would call out names of children who were to report to the gymnasium. Never was there a less subtle outing of the lousy. In my day, the shamed would hang their heads as they shuffled to the door. Now, I bet they walk a proud gauntlet of high-fives and sprint to the gym hoping to learn that their tangled locks are harboring ticks.
Which all means…had I been born 20 years later than I was, my scar, my skin and my hair would have made me, quite simply, legendary. Or maybe I would have ended up a tan, unblemished boy with a nicely parted quaff and nary an invitation to slow dance. In any case, a man must ponder these things from time to time.
1 Comment | Posted by Aaron under Books, Celebrity, Childhood, Music | Bookmark or Share
