2010 in Review: The Monkey I Have Been Told of
Part 2
OK… So where were we? Oh yeah I know…
12. Ruler - Marnie Stern - This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and... :
I've been making these playlists for 11 years now. One thing I've noticed in doing so, is that each list seems to form a personality around midway through the process. After I finish the list, I may hear it differently as time passes, but years later, that same essential character that I became aware of early on will still be palpable to me.
2010's list stands out positively in my mind--not because it was a great year… Actually, it sucked! And that makes this list yet another argument for the way a mix tape can uplift your life, but what's strange is that I didn't even find that much good new music this year. Time and money were more scant--apparently, so were the imaginative faculties of the people recording and/or distributing music out there. So. I did not find a lot of good new music. But what good new music I did find was really good--and in a really good way. Like this Marnie Stern record.
OK, maybe Marnie Stern isn't new to you. If so, the new album may not seem so revelatory, though the critical consensus seems to be that it's very good as Marnie Stern records go. All I can say is it blew me away. Aside from the drums here, most of what you're listening to is a one woman show. So yeah, there's a lotta multi-tracking, and she uses that and some incredible guitar virtuosity and extremely manic vocals to get out there somewhere really strange--somewhere that's both sunny and clear, but not remotely soft. Like a less cerebral Neu! And... she has a sense of humor and personality that rises up all over the record. This, to me, is a really unique sound, which is more rare in today's rock music than a Chicago Cubs postseason appearance. I'm really eager to see where she takes it. Her self-titled follow-up suggests a slower, more cathartic approach to the same ideas. I haven't fully digested it yet, but I can tell I like it.
13. A Horse Called Golgotha - Baroness - Blue Album:
Recently, you may've noticed a sorta ominous, muffled thudding coming from down yonder--no I'm not talking about that Down Yonder. Though it has been rumored to emit everything from roars to rumbles from hellhound howls to banshee shrieks. People've even tried to blame it for Led Zeppelin, which, no matter how truly awful Zeppelin may be is getting downright silly, I'm sure we can all agree. I mean, if Hell is really as tedious as your local classic rock station's weekly or... gulp... even nightly... Zep hour... then I think I really may have to repent and be born again. But that's probably grist for some other quixotic mill up the road.
But nope, I wasn't talking about Hell anyway. I was talking about down yonder past the Mason-Dixon line... down in the Sludgy South... and in particular, down in Georgia. (Where, to be fair, the Devil has been known to go--at least, according to the famous words of one fat lil' reactionary fireplug.) Must be something in the water, or more likely the mud, given the thudding sound of this stuff. You may or may not be aware of the fact that Georgia is the epicenter of the Dawn of New Metal Age, and I ain't talkin' 'bout nu-metal. This stuff is waaaaayyyy too big for that, both in terms of volume and ambition. The people have amps and ideas that are the size of glaciers, and they wield them with sheer tectonic force.
Mastodon, whom I championed in the past, is one of 'em, and size-wise, they obviously believe in truth-in-advertising. Baroness are their peers, and they're so confident in their badassery that they've named themselves not just after a chick, but a chick who probably sits on cushions being fed pastries all day. They don't care what you think, because when you hear them play this shit, you're gonna duck and cover. You will be amazed while you're being pummeled. I don't think you have to love metal to get this stuff, 'tho these guys show mastery of everything from Sabbath-crawl to Slayer-gallop and everything in between throughout their album. They also show such deep inventiveness as songwriters and such great cohesion as a rock band that their music is very difficult not to get caught up in.
14. All out of Love - Air Supply - The Best of Air Supply: One That You Love:
Including a song like this in a playlist is both provocative and cliche. Provocative because we, as a culture, have pretty much agreed to view this thing as an embodiment of treacle, to be recoiled from--with a smirk at best, with disgust at worst. Well... OK... you got me... The worst is boredom.
The opposite of love, sayeth the cliche is not hate, but indifference, and just a moment ago, we were speaking of cliches. Air Supply, and this song in particular, have been invoked so often, generally, these days, for the same ironic purposes that they have almost no meaning. But maybe it's worth remembering that irony only works when it has a base meaning to react against.
I can see you cringing as you read this. Is he about to make an argument for Air Supply as serious musical artists? Um, well, no. But I'm gonna say something about how silliness may arise from earnestness. Sometimes something is silly because it's heartfelt. Is this song heartfelt? Wow, I sure doubt it. At least, I don't think it's heartfelt in its entirety. How could anyone even know if there's a heart down there under those layers and layers of keyboards and canned background vocalists, who are, yes, thoroughly hilarious, to the extent that they aren't annoying?
Maybe some hack felt something when he wrote this, but he's at least 50 or 60 generations removed from what you're listening to here. What difference does it make?
The difference that it makes is that my first girlfriend loved this shit to the the point of tearing up whenever Casy Kasem spun it. She bought all the Air Supply tapes she could afford with the meager funds she scraped together from babysitting, modest pot-dealing and her sporadic white trash allowance--all that weren't already spoken for by cigarettes, makeup, birth control and whatever sundry hackshit a 16 year old girl shells out for.
I hated this music back then, but somehow, whenever she sang it, I was touched by the obvious depth of her feeling for it. Never mind the fact that she was the only person in the world who seemed to see anything positive in me. Objectively, her own experience just seemed very real.
And plus, this song is just so dorky, how can it not give a much needed boost as we move into the next, less pleasant moment of reminiscence?
15. Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod - The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree:
When memories of adolescence aren't embarrassing, they're often just painful. Rock writer Lester Bangs once questioned popular music's glamorization of adolescence, calling it "one of the worst parts of life, it's the cloud of unknowing and a state of total awkwardness when the fun you have always seems to be tempered by some kind of stupid bullshit like parents or zits or what-have-you." This song, and most of the really powerful record it's drawn from, doesn't apply a waxy sheen to its reminiscence. It's about a lower life form's struggle for survival--a loathsome mass of flesh that dreams of "wriggling up on dry land" in the song's closing line. How poignant it is that this Darwinian crawl is being performed by a socially bottom feeding teenage boy may depend on whether or not you've been there, fielding confused hormonal urges toward violence and procreation, small enough that pretty much every other guy could (and many did) randomly work out his own confused aggressions on you, awkward enough that pretty much every teenage girl wanted nothing to do with you, and enough of a fuck up that pretty much every adult wished you'd just go away somewhere (maybe until you grew large and coordinated enough to make varsity sports or graduated and miraculously got into a decent college). Anyway, the simple declarative vocal and 3-chord punch, leading to a dreamy, but horrific image may still get to you. And I know for myself, that 1 little personal glimmer of escape does as well: the stereo--the one thing singer couldn't live without--that carries him away into a dream chamber, even in the midst of some really dark days he hopes to live through.
16. Masochism World - Husker Du - Zen Arcade:
This song sorta keeps the adolescent ball rolling onward for me. See, at 15 years old, I'd transferred to this new high school, whereat they had this exotic creature that wore grotesque amounts of eyeliner, styled her hair like that dork from Flock of Seagulls--'tho she could only achieve a sorta orange tone when she dyed it--and cultivated an openly bitchy contempt for the manifest stupidity of everyone around her. It was love at first sight. Well, not really, but eventually.
Anyway, she liked music, and she could coherently express why she liked the music that she liked in such a way that you could understand that her affections weren't cheap. She was a punk, she said, which was mostly a new concept to me And being a punk and all, many of her musical touchstones were unfamiliar to me.
In the blue collar big town/small city of Flint, Michigan, ca. 1985, a 16 year old's punk esthetic was quite forgiving--or at least my girlfriend's was. Soft Cell, New Order, The Thompson Twins, Depeche Mode and other fluffy-haired faces all made her hit parade. This being the sticks, I didn't know much better, and was left with the impression that punk was the music warbled by white kids who got beat up a lot and were OK with it. I was a white kid who got beat up a lot, but wasn't OK with it, but that didn't really make a hell of a lotta difference, I suppose. And to a large extent, I've seen that light, so that a lotta bands like that--e.g., the Cure--I like OK.
Later in high school, I would come to find that my relationship with my punk rock girlfriend really hadn't given me the background in the genre that I would need to be conversant in the genre. Yes she had mentioned something in passing about the Sex Pistols, maybe even the Dead Kennedys, but largely just in a name-dropping type capacity. Just like your friend's older brother, who was supposed to be a real stoner, had Hawkwind records, but thankfully never played the fucking things. It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I was even fully aware that the old Capitol Theater in Flint had live punk--mostly hardcore--shows several Friday nights each month, or that the city was even home to its own touring hardcore act the Guilty Bystanders, whose big hit was called "Broccoli Rules."
Strangely enough, one of the few kinda sorta legitimate punk bands of the day that sparked my girlfriends interest enough that I was exposed to it at that time was... Husker Du!
I'm not sure how significant it is that out all the stuff that was proselytized at me, that Husker Du, one of only artists I really connected with, was also one of the only artists that were arguably, really, "punk." (It seems somehow especially noteworthy when you consider that the officiating punkette sold them somewhat tentatively and listened to them infrequently if I remember right--and given the fact that up until this point and somewhat beyond, I still wasn't sure I really liked all this punk shit, which I pretty much saw as a buncha fey, elitist posturing. But this punk--the stuff with guys with guitars who were yelling--who were sloppy and loud--not like the stultifying fare my parents listened to like the Stones and Who... (I was also pretty ignorant of most of any Stones or Who that didn't get played on the radio at this point, which on Flint radio, meant mostly anything pre-1975 or so, when both bands lost any resemblance to a noisy sloppy rock band)... well this stuff I kinda liked.
And I still do. And Zen Arcade is the best of many worlds, because you can love it at 14 or 41. Well 15 and 41. And without any real nostalgia. I never really think about my second girlfriend much when I listen to it, 'tho most of my memories of her are good ones. It's one of those rare records that I really do just listen to pretty much every year just because I want to, and I always find something new in it. It's full of ideas and energy.
Sometime in the early fall, I was out for a walk, and I just heard this song in my head. Hadn't heard it in maybe a month or 2, and it wouldn't have been a song from the record I'd expect to have come to me like that. It's a great bit of noise--and definitely melodic in its way, but catchy? Guess so. As soon as I got home I put it on. Must be one of the consequences of living with a record that good for that long.
17. Master-Dik - Sonic Youth - Sister:
To continue the chronological thread: I was kinda "off" rock n roll for most of my teen years. White middle class kid that I was, I think this attitude was partly a reaction against the entrenched domestic culture around me, wherein Stones/Zep/Petty/et. al. were more or less the Perry Comos of the day. Mullets were crew cuts. Archie and Meathead were Kramden and Norton. (Actually All in the Family was a little on the early side for me, but it seemed a good correspondence here and close enough timeline wise.)
Not listening to a lotta rock radio not only liberated me from music that was presented in these overly reverent tones--as tho its holiness was manifest, despite the fact the songs often weren't so great to begin with--it also let me map out my own plan for youthful uprising.
"What are ya rebelling against?"
"I don't know, what did you use to rebel against whatever you rebelled against?"
"Uh… rock n roll. I guess."
"That then."
OK. You're right. Marlon Brando would totally have tripped himself up in alla those words.
Still, not liking rock n roll sorta was my rock n roll, if you get me. It was a way of rejecting an established norm of the bland-out culture around me. I mean, what healthy teen wants to listen to his parents music? Do you want to hang out with that kid?
It's one thing for girlfriends to listen to New Order or, gulp, even Air Supply. They have something you want! Eyeliner! You can freak adults out with that shit! But Tom Petty? Really? I still hate Tom Petty.
In my own way, I was a punk then--way more than my 2nd girlfriend--even if I had to use Prince or Run-DMC to induce fury and disgust in parents, teachers, jocks, preppies, stoners, etc. around me. Whatta rebel!
Only years later, at college, did I calm down enough to realize that I was missing out on a lot. I resolved to become more programmatic. I noticed that some hippie chicks were hot. I grew my hair long. I even cultivated a beard for a while. I started listening to Neil Young a lot--the really loud stuff mostly. At least that was angry enough that I could relate to it. Then I reconnected with the Beatles, whom I'd loved since infancy, and all a that was fine, but clearly, if I was really gonna make my peace with rock n roll, I was gonna have to find some new artists that were making stuff that was good.
And here was a problem. Much as I could grudgingly admit that I liked a lot of the canonical stuff--again, Neil Young, Beatles, also Velvets, (tho I never cared much for anything after White Light, White Heat,) Stones, (tho I never really cared for anything after Exile on Main Street,) Hendrix, et. al.--and some of the more underground stuff from way back, it seemed that everyone making new records was just trying to sound like some amalgamation of some of that old shit. That's fine, you know--building on established forms, putting your own stamp on it, etc. Jazz, blues, country, various folk forms have all flowed along like that, right?
Sure. But rock is more self-conscious, and in the age of heavily recorded and distributed music, there are fewer excuses for a lack of imagination. And besides, remember? This is all about me?!? My needs! Not history! Fuck history! I needed a new rock esthetic, or a newer 1, anyway, or rock was just gonna fizzle it's way back into a lil' blip on my CD rack. (That's what I had then--a big 1 that my then girlfriend made me. Always had lots a music.) And that'd be a tragedy, 'cuz, well, there's lotsa good rock, right?
Ignorant 'twas I. A bumpkin from Flint, MI. No internet. MTV showing videos still, but by none too many bands. I didn't even know about all the bands that were out there. Tons of 'em! You did! You were out there, dyeing yr. hair, piercing yr. labia &/or foreskin, singing along to Diamanda Galas arias while you shoved a dildo in yr. neighbor's plughole. (Tho she's only sometimes sorta rock and only sometimes sorta good and only sometimes do these things sorta line up.) And you're laughing at me! Because you hate Sonic Youth! And they're my rock esthetic!
Well, they're part of it, 'tho not in an immediate way. Truth be told, the last Sonic Youth record I bought was NYC Ghosts & Flowers back in 2000. And before that, I hadn't bought one since Dirty in 1992. Before 1992, I can think of few popular rock band's with a sound I found more exciting than Sonic Youth's. It's a big, wicked field of noise that leaves room for all these haunting little jagged details. The guitar lines and interplay of Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore were so vivid and unique that I could identify them almost immediately. (Famously when the band's instruments were stolen, they were no longer able to play a lot of their old songs, because they couldn't recreate the weird tunings in which they'd left the guitars.) And from 1983's Confusion Is Sex until Dirty, everyone in the band contributed odd ideas about arranging and writing songs that gave Sonic Youth records a feeling of experimentation and newness that never stripped them of sheer rock n roll immediacy. After that, something happened, it seems to me. I don't know what. (I'm not too rigorous of a fan of anything these days, and I swear it's by choice. I just can't take the disappointment of knowing too much.)
Anyway, another great thing about Sonic Youth is that along with inventiveness and rock power, they've also always had a sense of humor. (Sometimes to an excessive cornball degree, but, hey, ya gotta try...) This song finds then in their Ciccone Youth persona, a hip-hop group named after Madonna (Ciccone), thus tying together 2 of their many pop culture obsessions--the style and the musician. The song just popped in my head 1 day, and I had to put it on. The bit where it keeps going "I know... I know... I know..." made me laugh, and it's been in my regular rotation since. Really dumb song, but one that I like.
18. See the Leaves - The Flaming Lips - Embryonic:
I was a late convert to The Flaming Lips. I hated that "Tangerine" song like it was stomach flu. Still do really. I always felt it epitomized a tendency that I still think the band has to drift into arch cutesiness. 'Course, everyone who knows who the Flaming Lips are and gives them enough thought probably hates something about them. That's because the Flaming Lips are chameleons--though not in a traditional sense--they alter colors very after long changeless intervals, and when they do, the shift can be disorienting. The twist from mischievous alterna-mugsters to sophisticated psych-prog rockers was so convincing that I stopped being distantly annoyed by them and gradually sat down and listened to records like The Soft Bulletin long enough to absorb their imaginative scope and emotional sweep. Heart and energy, despite the tepid quasi-ironies of that "Tangerine" claptrap. Sure, there were full-paunched specters of MOR complacency lurking in the mixes somewhere, but you can't damn the work for the marketing, even if, at times, things seem a little calculated.
If the band's new album is this self-conscious, I didn't notice it. It has the feel, anyway, of some guys walking into a studio and plugging their instruments into really crappy amps, just ready to play some straight-ahead music. The guys are probably in a bad mood, maybe even suffering from profound personal problems. Themes of exorcism and black magic creep up in the song titles, but the lyrics are muddled and buried in the mix, and are delivered somewhere between a mumble and squeal anyway. The sounds are mostly muddy, overly bassy with the occasional spooky tone in a higher register. The chick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guests on one song where she and lead Lip Wayne Coyne role play over the phone, making animal noises. It's one of the few tracks where his voice is immediately recognizable--'tho you can catch it pretty quickly elsewhere. The song is also too cute by half in an old school Flaming Lips way. It's the only song really that drifts that way, and even it has this kinda spooky feel due to some brittle keys and textural effects.
The rule of the album is better exemplified what you hear in this song: thudding doom. Big thunder. Mumbling pronouncements, more panicky than Dylan's, of something you half understand. To my ear the coupling of melody and groove is probably lifted from "Ball of Confusion," an appropriate touchstone for the kinda heat this one's generating, both musically and in its dark, hefty sorta mood.
19. A Fond Farewell - Elliott Smith - From a Basement on a Hill:
I've already written about Elliott Smith elsewhere on this list, so I won't add much here. As with Ween, I've included 2 of his songs on this list to show what a big part his music played in my life this year. Every year, I seem to develop a greater appreciation for a few songs by playing them on the guitar. "A Fond Farewell" falls into that category. I spent some time figuring out that main riff, which is really only tricky, as it involves some very focused string-bending. I also felt a connection with the mood of the song though.
Some people think the lyrics forecast Elliott Smith's suicide. It's true that he was working on this album when he took his life. But his death was so violent and seemingly impulsive--I find it hard to imagine someone planning to stab himself multiple times with a kitchen knife, but maybe that's just me. I also find it hard to link it to the calm, almost meditative tone of the vocals. The lyrics are sad, the farewell does feel final, and I do believe that the "friend" Elliott Smith is offering it to may be a part of himself. But the suicidal intent remains obscured, and if present, maybe conflicted, which is, I think how suicidal people maybe live most of the time, while they do live. So it's paradoxical. Hope in despair and that sorta thing. I almost never hear hopelessness in Elliott Smith's music. A lotta times, actually, he sounds like he's just trying to work things out.
And the string-bending part is really pretty fun.
20. Big Jilm - Ween - Pure Guava:
At first, when I was messing around with a track sequence, "Big Jilm" seemed like a strange place to end things. Somehow, though the abruptness of it, leaves the list feeling more immediate than unfinished to me. It feels like the year is still in progress in a way, which seems appropriate somehow. It's not a bad feeling, tho 2010 was not a good year. Decades always seem to have rocky beginnings for me.
One of the entertainment highlights of 2010 for me was going to see Ween play the Aragon Ballroom. I hadn't been to a live show in a while. Maybe I'm showing my age, which is roughly the same as that of Dean and Gene Ween. Anyway, they looked pretty good on stage, and tho half the show was ruined by Gene periodically wandering off in a (one assumes pharmaceutically induced) daze, the other half was really powerful stuff. "Big Jilm" had to by the biggest lighter-raising moment. Tho some of the other songs were performed just as well, it was when this song came on that the crowd went really, really berserk.
If Elliott Smith's "New Monkey" was my theme song this year, Ween's Pure Guava was probably the album I listened to the most, when I settled in to listen to a whole album. ("Settling in" being figurative here, as this was often while walking around.) As much as humor is essential to Ween's music, Pure Guava strikes me as sorta a dark album--murky, claustrophobic, paranoid, twisted, melancholy and angry. Still frequently silly, of course, but kinda heavy. It's a monster of a headphone record, if you've never listened to it that way, but I think that derives from the fact that it was really concocted by a couple of guys in a studio to be privately shared... maybe with you.
I wouldn't say that Ween and Elliott Smith were the poles of my musical existence this year. Lots of less popular music type stuff--e.g. most of my jazz--never even makes it onto these lists 'cuz the songs are so damn long. But both Ween and Elliott Smith were important to me, so I'm beginning and ending this way. I'm not sure what that says about where I was at or am at. I guess I'm not blazing any new trails, and I'm also not exemplifying a positive, mature attitude--musically. (I promise next list'll be nothing but dubstep and Billy Bragg/Fugazi re-issues, seriously.) (Not that dubstep will be hip at that point.) (Not that it's probably hip now.) But I think it's also worth noting that I stumbled on some new sounds. Not a lot of 'em, and I hope I didn't the relatively small number of new tracks doesn't seem too dreary. The ones that are here make up for it in how good they are, I think. Seems like there's more happening out there that's actually interesting than there has been in some time. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in 2011--musically anyway.
