It’s that time again. The one where I tell you about all the great music I discovered this year and about the various epiphanies I’ve had concerning music w/ which I am already familiar. Unfortunately, there were considerable financial restraints placed on me, so I wasn't able to buy as much music as I usually would. Not that I would’ve even had any idea of what to buy, for the most part. (Aside from the old standards, of course. Improbably, there are still a few Charles Mingus, Bill Hicks and Spacemen 3 records I don’t have!)
There was an even more intense leeching of my energy and personal freedom, so taking the time to find new music—taking the time to even listen to music—was frequently out of the question. I was nearly dead, musically, which, for all intents and purposes, made me dead emotionally, which, for all intents and purposes, kinda makes it seem like I should've been dead altogether. Dontcha think? I mean, what’s the point of living, if you don’t feel anything?
To be fair to myself, it’s not all aging. Whereas I often use music as a life preserver to get me through my personal ration of dismal, agonizing shit—(not sayin’ I’m special—I know you’ve got yr. own shit and yr. own ways of dealing w/ it)—here, music became a luxury at best. For one thing, I spent a great deal of time w/ people to whom music means almost nothing—who, in fact, often find music of almost any sort to be annoying.
It didn’t help that I bought a new home this year. In the process, I had to deal w/ realtors, loan officers, lawyers, inspectors, contractors and their ilk. Some of those people were nice. To some, I am extraordinarily grateful even. Others were just the degenerate sows they are made out to be. But that's to be expected and had no effect on my relationship to music.
What surprised me was the people I already knew in a non-professional friendly capacity, and who helped me out both before and after I bought the place. They were the worst people I dealt with, making situations that were stressful worse, and developments that should've been happy bleak. What's more, there's nothing worse than feeling beholden to people treat you like shit and have no use for music.
A lotta times, I’m not sure that music would’ve been equal to the situations I encountered anyway. There was rarely an opportunity to even try to find comfort in music. That pains me, 'tho circumstances seem to’ve improved, emotionally and musically. Truth be told, I feel as inert as a darkened, dried up eraser that lies at the end of an old pencil—shredding little threads and specks of myself—blunt and rigid enough to be completely pointless. Ha ha. Get it? Pointless. So in interest of letting you laugh yr. ass off at that funny gag—or even better, at the overwrought metaphor wherein it lies, I’ll shut up and get to the music…
The List:
Come to Daddy – Aphex Twin: Containing a lift from "Skull" by the Misfits. Solid noise.
Revolution – Mudhoney: A cover of a Spacemen 3 song. It was recorded as part of a split-single. Mudhoney, predictably, took this as an opportunity to poke fun at Spacemen 3’s reputation as junkies. The gag did not go over well w/ Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3.
Che – Suicide: Speaking of covers... Last year’s playlist included Spacemen 3 covering “Che...”
Chittam Irangaayo – The Ruins: No covers here—‘tho the Ruins do play a wicked Black Sabbath medley. One night, this song came on the iPod when it was on random play. I was walking home, alone, and...
Pro Life – Bill Hicks: Bill Hicks has influenced what I think and write. This track appeared on the iPod on during the same walk—a very good night for shuffle play as…
What a Botheration – Lee “Scratch” Perry: …This song came on next! I love the tinny organ. It sounds like a refugee from a skating rink. And I always like the way Scratch says this piece.
New Rock – Buffalo Daughter: Again, on the iPod... on the same night!
Uphill – Can: Yes... the same night! The final song in a suite, and this one I hadn't heard in a while. Here, I really felt it.
Holly-wuud – Miles Davis: Lately I'm really into Miles's darker, thicker 70s stuff. Many people wring their hands over the idea that he was no longer playing "jazz" at this point... As he himself once said: "So What?"
Countdown – John Coltrane: I was at a restaurant w/ some people whom I often find depressing. Giant Steps came on, and it was like a cold beer in the Sahara to me.
Hurricane Heart Attack – The Warlocks: The Warlocks' Phoenix was one of a very few new albums I picked up this year. Good solid rock n' roll, played w/ imagination.
You’re the Dream Unicorn – The Blood Brothers: I've already said that the Blood Brothers have given it a new spirit. The decaying oldster badly needed this gift. Picture Grampaw from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and we will be on the same page. And hey! Blood! Remember how he slurps the blood from that foxy chick's finger during the dinner scene?
Put a Little Love in Your Heart – Leonard Nimoy: HA! Hahaha!!! Ahooo... ahuh... huuhh... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
New Genius (Brother) – Gorillaz: The Gorillaz songs are ingeniously produced sound worlds. There's a lot of upbeat energy, but the Gorillaz don't punk out—they also acknowledge the other, more painful side of experience
St. Ides Heaven – Elliott Smith: Elliott Smith always seems to be talking to you. That is both comforting, as you might feel that you aren't alone, and claustrophobic, and he's so damn close, and just won't go away.
Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction: This summer, I was I walking between my old place and the home I had just bought. On my headphones, two simple chords sounded on a guitar, the steel drum fired itself up, and I felt kind of alive.
Revolution – Spacemen 3: Here is the original. Accept no substitutes. Except Mudhoney's.
Voodoo Child (Slight Return) – The Jimi Hendrix Experience: This year, I spent a lot of time listening to Electric Ladyland, the Experience's last album because I'd picked out one of the dorkier tracks, "1983... A Merman I Should Turn to Be..." as something my guitar teacher and I might play. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, it's 14 minutes long, and didn't fit on this list.
A summing up: I said above that I'm not sure whether music was equal to my problems this year; maybe because I was looking to the wrong music for solace or strength. In order to find what I needed, it may be true that I needed to actively explore, rather than just clutch at the familiar and the comfortable. Sometimes, when life sucks, it is necessary to rest—to mourn and heal. However, at other moments, it is more helpful to act and move.
For me, the music of Richard James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin, has provided both comfort and invigoration. His ambient electronic stuff is beautiful, but it presses sound into weird shapes, and when he moves outside of ambient territory, the shapes get even weirder. And louder. Here, James sounds like he's angry—maybe at all of the unimaginative imitations of his sound. But maybe he's just restless. He's always on the move, providing glimpses of the places electronic music might go. And in 2008, when I very often couldn't connect to "music," I could feel a connection to this spirit.
This is not to say that many of the songs on this list, aren't simple, traditional music. Lee "Scratch" Perry, The Gorillaz, Elliott Smith, Coltrane and Mudhoney are each very approachable, while "Jane Says" and "Voodoo Child" are inescapable rock standards. Still, I think that some of this stuff is a little darker than the usual moon in June clichés. Elliott says he's high on amphetamines, and Jane, no matter how bright and sunny her song, is a junkie. Then you have a cosmic vision of death in "Voodoo Child" and a nightmare of ghostliness and paranoia in "New Genius."
Elsewhere on the list the songs start to disintegrate, or, at least, become more difficult to hum along w/ or bop yr. head to. You can certainly thrash it around to "You're the Dream Unicorn," which, despite its fury, shows off the perverse humor of the Blood Brothers in the ridiculous refrain that gives the song its title. And Spacemen 3's take on "Revolution" is, for all its embarrassing, muddled earnestness, an ominous, asymmetrical drone that ultimately explodes in howling noise. And that's how I find myself looking elsewhere.
One thing that all of this music says to me is that there is absolutely no reason to quit, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's worth it to try and make something real, heartfelt and new—something that isn't entirely formulaic, and won't just be recognized w/ impatient nods and a reflexive barfing out of money, at best.
The crime committed against humanity that is Leonard Nimoy's "Put a Little More Love in Your Heart" might be better forgotten, but maybe it perfectly illustrates part of the experience I had and am continuing to have. Songs became insufficient. Songs began to seem frivolous. At times, by virtue of their gross oversimplification, songs became downright insulting. Against that backdrop, Mr. Spock is doing what so much popular music does; he's just doing it more thoroughly.
Whether it's intentional, whether he's that much of a visionary, which I doubt, Nimoy captures exactly how crass and ludicrous this stuff can be—something that is not just irrelevant to, but that mocks real emotion. All that bad taste, all that insipidness, all that falseness that you can find all over yr. radio dial, in commercials, on CDs, in TV theme songs. Leonard's doing it to the 9s here, isn't he? Fortunately, he's so awful at it that it's also really, really funny.
Despite Leonard's provocation, I am not done w/ songs. I do think it's worth looking further for new ways to make them. I'm not ready to let Jane's Addiction or Mudhoney go—I wholeheartedly love this music—but for the first time in years, I feel really, actively engaged by the idea of really looking to see what the hell else may be going on out there.
Buffalo Daughter offer a sorta model for how music might be able to stay familiar while becoming strange at the same time. The sonic swirl of "New Rock" is alive, has a beat and melody, but creates its own brightly lit place, where song structure and instrumentation take unexpected turns. Can it be cultural? I'm hesitant to generalize, but many Japanese bands seem to approach the making of music w/o some of the preconceptions their Western colleagues have. Look at the Ruins, who roll out weird, unpredictable stuff that, improbably, remains musical. The melody's haunting, the beat kicks, and it's all put forward by two dudes w/ drums and a bass guitar.
So here's where I find myself, and aside from everything else, I still believe that good music is being made, and that it can make your life better. And I look forward to discovering it, if I can. It's just a feeling. It may go nowhere, but at the end of a very bad year, it gives me some hope. What more can you ask of a mix tape?
