Tuesday, January 31, 2012

2011 in Review: Whacking the Ball - Part 2


(NOTE: This is Part Two picking up at track number 11 of 20. It’s a CD length list of songs that affected me in 2011. You may refer to Part One in the previous entry, if you want to get yr. list in order. And why wouldn’t you?!? For further procedural notes, check the last entry.)



                                                          



OK... so like where were we??? Oh yeah...
11. Death Rattles - The Woods - At Echo Lake: There’s a sort of a spooky vintage feel that extends from “Angeles” to “Death Rattles,” but The Woods, as their name implies seem more concerned with some shady, psychedelic countryside than they are with the bright lights of the big city. Maybe we’ve cruised down route 66, away from the heroin and into the ‘shrooms. Ida know.
Anyway. There’s so much to like about At Echo Lake that it’s hard to know where to begin describing it. Like Titus Andronicus, The Woods wear their influences on their sleeves--listen to the groovy Neil Young vocal and minor chord strums here, and you might or might not be surprised to find some surf guitar riffs bumping up against some crisp Neu! style beats elsewhere on the album. They throw it all together in such an apparently ramshackle way, but somehow it works. It’s great stuff and ends up being a very unique sound. (More so than Titus Andronicus, who I also like, & hate to knock, but well...)
This album really is good. So good in fact, that there was another song really slugging it out with this one to make it on this list. Go out and get the album, so that I know you’ve heard the whole thing. It’ll ease my conscience, OK? Please?
12. The Killing Moon - Echo & The Bunnymen: Oh wow... am I regressing into adolescence here or what? Well, somebody’s adolescence--some real murky Goth thing. I never dyed my hair black, but blond. I never cut myself with razors, but did burn my skin pretty badly with a cigarette lighter. Nobody noticed. Sniff sniff. Waaahhh... 
Being 40 is hard!
OK, I’m being an asshole to myself. I was 14. And it was the 80s. But you know what? I mostly didn’t listen to any of this shit...
Ah fuck, this line of inquiry is getting us nowhere. Except... There is a swooping romanticism to this song that defies absurdity. Snicker as you may--I feel it. As a kid, I felt it moving past me, even if it wasn’t the kind of music I listened to. And now that I’ve come to appreciate the Brit pop/rock of the late 70s/early 80s, I can really get it. That slashing guitar is just great. Those nonsense vocals seems so ominous, but couched in a longing for...something.
Echo & the Bunnymen aren’t great. They aren’t Joy Division. Hell, they aren’t even The Smiths. But this song is pretty great. It showed up on the similarly great British TV show Misfits and just took me back. The song was stuck in my head so that I had to download it. Sometimes the best memories are the revisionist ones.
13. Mrs. Officer - Lil’ Wayne, Bobby Valentino & Kidd Kidd - Tha Carter III: If the humanity doesn’t survive the post-millennial muck it currently finds itself in, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s extinguished, not so much by cruelty and violence, as by a loss of emotion. I’m not speaking of an unwillingness to care--I don’t see that as the agent of our destruction--but rather of the inability to feel. Sadly, it’s a Pandora’s box we may have opened ourselves that brought us here, or an Oppenheimer’s plaything that sorta got away from us. In our embrace of everything ironic, I think we’ve kinda lost our moorings. As one slacker said to the other when the Simpsons went to Hullablooza, “Are you being sarcastic?” “I don’t even know anymore” was the answer he got.
I mean, does anyone remember love songs? Imagine trying to sing one now and not being laughed at! Unironically, I mean. You can’t, and you know it. But think of Otis Redding, say, and don’t you feel that something has been lost? An expression of beauty, of real feeling that dates back millennia, across cultures--from the romantic to the erotic--there’s a reason why the Song of Solomon is also know as the Song of Songs, as in its the last word in songs--or why courtesans were held in such high esteem in the courts of feudal Japan, not just for their bedroom artistry, but for their balladry as well. And I’m not just speaking of sex here either. I’m speaking of love, which, sadly, has become even more embarrassing to discuss somehow. It seems we’ve talked ourselves into a culture in which we should be ashamed of our most powerful feelings--aside from the violent ones. Passion is essential to the human spirit: it’s a sign of life. As such, it would seem we might want to cultivate it rather than snicker at it.
It’s hard, I know, because there are reasons why we all needed irony in the first place. It was alla that plastic, all those platitudes, that those fucking platypuses were putting out. They were counterfeiting real feeling in commercials and shitty teeny bopper pop music. It was an affront to any real pains or joy you might have had in the brief time that you got to walk around upright on this planet. Real feelings became indistinguishable from their counterfeits, and now whenever you try to point that out, instead of Donald Sutherland pointing atcha and burping really loud like he had too many tacos last night, (hard shell with ground beef, tomatoes and lettuce,) you get a bunch of assholes laughing at you.
It’s comforting to find that some artists are, actually, breaking the flow, and turning back to bold, unadorned expressions of tenderness in music. Not surprisingly, Lil’ Wayne, who’s never been afraid to do the dangerous thing artistically, is one of them. Wayne has always been willing to stretch as an artist, and his efforts have sometimes frustrated his audience--like half-baked head scratchers like I Am Not a Human Being--or even flat-out embarrassed them--like his decision to strap on a guitar and fumble around tunelessly with it on the stage at the Country Music Awards. Nothing could put him in a more potentially risky position than releasing the deeply moving “Mrs. Officer” did, but he didn’t blink.
There are so many things that make this song a great one. Whereas it’s easy to become annoyed and overwhelmed by the surfeit of guest artists on contemporary hip hop tracks, it would be impossible to imagine this one hitting you as powerfully as it does without the work of Bobby Valentino. His wordless tones hauntingly recall a late night urban environment. Anyone who’s lived in the city knows how this feels. It gives Wayne a production that’s dense but flowing wherein he can set his drama.
And “Mrs. Officer” is a drama, make no mistake, in which a real relationship flourishes, changes in various ways, but always returns to the essential feeling at its center. Where Wayne is obviously alluding to the Beatles classic “Lovely Rita Meter Maid” here, a more appropriate classic rock touchstone might be Tommy in terms of epic sweep. Only Wayne has boiled all of that emotion down into one song and done away with the solipsistic navel gazing. (And no, we’re not talking Meat Loaf here, even if there is some paradise to be had by the dashboard light.) Again, Wayne is talking about love, and he’s not afraid to become flat-out lyrical to express himself if need-be: (or to have Bobby Valentino do it, anyway) “We can hear the angels callin’ us/ See the sunrise before us...” Simple words and images, I’ll grant you, but earnestly expressed. And in this context, moving.
It’s genuine feeling, beautifully expressed through music, which, I think shouldn’t be a revolutionary artistic concept, but Wayne is here to wake us up, and he continues to do so, when he takes the mike himself. He explores the tensions between his characters, how their love is complicated by her role as an officer by the law. “I know you wish your name was Mrs. Carter,” he rasps, but  at the end of the day, they both know she has to remain “Mrs. Officer.” The ambiguity of this verse is beautiful. It suggests so much about what might be going on between the characters--about how the protagonist’s love interest could be pulled away from him by a husband or devotion to duty--either way, the regret in Wayne’s voice is palpable, and he remains an evocative lyricist. (You only have to consider how he’s able to work in bits of social commentary, for example, the references to police brutality and Rodney King if you need further evidence of his skill in this area.)
This is just an amazing track, and it restored my faith in the power of the love song. The album it comes from, Tha Carter III, is a little scattershot, but very strong overall. I was definitely into it this year.
14. You Never Know Dub - Rockers All Star - Classic Rockers: Another highlight from the Augustus Pablo collection I drew from earlier--in this case ‘tho, the man is showing off his genius as a producer. What’s more there’s a radical difference in musical approach from the one found in “Jah in the Hills”--so much so that you’re essentially listening to a different genre of music--as dramatic of a shift as if you’d moved from Nashville country and western, say, to Chicago post-war blues, at least in terms of the sound. I mean, we are still talking about Jamaica here, and the cultural frame of reference is the same, down to Pablo’s melodica, which floats in and out of the mix, but where “Jah in the Hill” was a stark paean--a simple and direct statement from artist to listener (and then to points beyond)--this is a complex amalgamation. Here you’ve got a dense production reminiscent of American and European hip-hop and electronic music--not so coincidentally, as these Western forms have borrowed heavily from dub reggae. These sounds are just as exciting to me in their syrupy warmth and in the unexpected twists they take.
15. Up the Wolves - The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree: There’s a wicked twist of irony at the heart of this song that I would appreciate, even if it didn’t speak to me personally, because... well, I admire someone who’s able to do more than write good song lyrics, but to place them musically in a context where they can bite. When the refrain “There’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home” comes up the second time, it’s lost it’s celebratory feeling, and not just because the lyrical bent of the song has changed, though that’s definitely true, but also due to the a glaring anger that bled in there somewhere around the bridge. Now all that transcendence that the song promised in the beginning seems kind of forced, though maybe not outright sarcastic. I take it more like the singer was white knuckling his way through the beginning, and then, well, things changed.
Things do change. Those little things you hold onto to get through--maybe you don’t throw them out, but their meaning can get kind of warped. I take that to be the meaning here. It’s a lot to cull from a short folk/rock song, but that’s what’s so impressive about John Darnielle/Mountain Goats to me. He can throw a few chords together and play them flat out and just state something in a way that’s usually moving and thoughtful. In this case, he unleashes an explosion of anger that comes with the slow build of trying to do what we’re often told to do when something bad happens: to accept. This is a song about biding your time when you’re supposed to be coping, even if, maybe, you’re really just in denial--if there’s nowhere, really, for your anger to go.
So while I was into this song last year anyway, this year it clicked in a personal way as the lyrics took on an increasing personal significance. First, there were some losses near the beginning of the year. I moved on from these, with some difficulty, and I guess that was like the first verse, but then the low blow to me--‘tho as we all know...heh heh... life ain’t fair--was losing the use of me arm suddenly and some attendant horseshit in late August. At first, I even dealt with that OK, but I admit it, it wore me down. I lost it a little bit. To a point where I became about as angry as the singer at the end of this song... which is ridiculous... but, y’know... you had to be there. But in the interest of marking the moment, here’s this song. It’s pretty great.
16. Waiting Room - Fugazi - 13 Songs: Speaking of my arm and anger... 
From August through December of this year, I bounced from one waiting room to another, anticipating examinations, MRIs, X-rays, surgery, various (unpleasant) neurological tests involving electrical shocks and probes, and consultations with doctors.
Anger is frequently derived from frustration and feelings of powerlessness, and there’s nothing that induces these states more than waiting to see the doctor. Not that I wasn’t pissed off and confused enough already by what was happening with my arm, which is to say, it wasn’t working. But being pissed at your body is like being pissed at a doctor in a truly poignant and profound way: It’s a waste of time! Ha! Go ahead! Get as mad as you want! You are powerless!
The narrator of this song is where we’ve all been or, heh heh, are gonna be... (Trust me on this one, kids, your time is at hand...) Your body let’s you down, and that’s humiliating and depressing. Your arm won’t move no matter how much you will it to. Little old ladies will hold the door open for you. (If you’re lucky.) It’s hilarious!
The song is anyway--it nails a fundamental truth--a psychological state--some of the things you tell yourself--how you marshall your dignity, preparing to face the doctor and your circumstances as bravely as you can, trying not to get ground down by that interminable wait! It’s miserable!
“Waiting Room” is a great song that dignifies insecurity by a great band that transformed punk and pointed toward some new places music could go, as both underground and mainstream rock were falling on desperate times creatively. Fugazi wanted to be like Iggy Pop with reggae thrown in, but they are their own thing entirely, Not long before I got hurt, I picked up 13 Songs this year as I’d somehow let their stuff go missing from my collection. Just in time, it seems. I really ended up needing this song--and digging the whole record.
17. Miss Misery (Early Version) - Elliott Smith: For Aggie. She was a good soldier.
18. Take on the World - Wavves - King of the Beach: OK... You’re on the edge of your seat now, right? That is, if you’re not hip like me and don’t know about this ODB stuff. No, I don’t mean Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Wu Tang’s huge, so you can’t be hip just cuz you know about them, & besides, he’s been dead for years. He’s yesterday’s rolling papers. No, I don’t mean a shroud... Ah fuck... Let’s start over...
What I mean is I artfully left you hanging over that Marnie Stern/ODB/Wavves stuff, remember? That’s how I got you to read through all this shit. OK, in case you don’t know, here’s what happened: Back in September, during an interview with the music magazine Impose, Marnie Stern dismissed the lyrics of the band Best Coast. “What’s with her?” she asked of vocalist Bethany Cosentino. She then said, “You might as well be an 80s hair metal band, saying ‘I want pussy.’”
Ooooohhhh... indie cat fight?!? Uh... Not really. Cosentino told an audience in Philadelphia that “There’s nothing wrong with writing a song about your cat and boys. Haters can suck my dick...” (Which left me with some really confusing imagery... Cats, dicks, what is all of this shit, and where is it located?)
Marnie then got cagey and talked about how she never meant to hurt anyone’s feelings... (Uh, yeah, right... Respected you a lot more when you were stating your opinion outright, but OK...) “But a woman shouldn’t be saying anything about another woman--doesn’t that set us back however many years?”
I don’t know, Marnie, how many? Oh, wait, this isn’t a vaudeville routine? My mistake. I always was a lousy straight man...
Yes... Well, where were we? Ah, yeah... It seems that Cosentino’s boyfriend is none other than hip-hop blogger extraordinaire/Wavves frontman Nathan Williams, and his heart was stirred by the call of chivalry, so he did what any knight gallant would do and blogged forth: “If I was a tired old desperate bitch, I might say something like that too...”
And so was the dragon slain! Did that guy get, uh, cat that night or what???
But wait! There’s more! And it brings it all home!!! Marnie then, on the next leg of her tour, began distributing T-shirts with an image of her own face printed upon them, bearing the legend “ODB” beneath it. No, dumbass! That’s not “Ol’ Dirty Bastard! Remember? This is what got us into me having to add 300 or so words to an already overlong playlist description, damn it! It stands for Old Desperate Bitch! See? Who sez indie rock hasn’t got attitood??? Who needs hip-hop? Or Middle Eastern diplomacy?
Anyhoo, what does that have to do with this song? Well, duh, you are slow, aren’t you? Obviously, this song is by the Wavves, whose name, thankfully has an extra “v” in it, thus saving me the trouble of having extra letters to emphasize your stupidity. But I put it on here for a couple of other reasons: 1) I like it; 2) I think it’s a good sign that people are still making good, unpretentious rock music with some heart in it; 3) the small conflict between wanting things to be better than they are and wanting to be better than you are vs. kinda wanting to duck and cover that gets played out here, well I can sorta relate to at this point.
A really pretty good song from a good album. This band has a lot of promise to do more, I think. 
19. Atmosphere - Joy Division - Joy Division+- Singles 1978-80: From “I hate myself, man” to “a mask of self-hate...” Wo! Are you on suicide watch yet? No? Maybe I need to put Nirvana doing “I Hate Myself and I Wanna Die” next.
Seriously, I forgive you. After all, look at Joy Division. Ian Curtis’s bandmates have gone on record as being surprised that he hung himself while they were making their second album/masterpiece Closer, the lyrics of which are an unmitigated torrent of bile, spleen and despair. The sentiments are beautifully expressed--light years beyond the cartoonish posturing of a Trent Resnor and much more coherent than the yelps of Kurt Cobain (who was just as expressive as Curtis nevertheless). And embedded in the lyrics, repeatedly, are images of self-destruction, but somehow, the fellas in New Order, nee Joy Division, just didn’t get it.
“Atmosphere” is the first song that John Peel played on the radio after Curtis’s death was announced, and since then it seems to’ve become associated with his passing--a sorta elegiac piece. Certainly if you sit down to watch the new Joy Division documentary or the biopic Control, you will find it fading in at the appropriate moment, swelling up dramatically, and leading you into some sorta mandatory catharsis. And why not? It’s that kinda song. It sounds that way, right?
Well... for one thing, that association makes me wanna puke. For another, the bass line, ever as melodic as the apparent idiot savant Peter Hook can make ‘em, almost sounds like Peter Gabriel at his worst quasi-pan-global here, especially as it lopes along over the tribal thud of the drums. The shimmery keys, while, to be fair, were a relatively new touch, might seem corny, when they drift in and out to meet up with the power chords the guitar doles out.
SO THEN HOW COME IT WORKS?
Well it does for me anyway, and I hate Peter Gabriel.
I really don’t know. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I’ve made an investment in Joy Division’s body of work, obviously. I’m willing to cut them some slack. But “Atmosphere” isn’t just something I tolerate; it’s something that moves me. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a statement of alienation that I can relate to, which is something of a paradox, I guess. At his best, as a lyricist, that’s exactly where Ian Curtis worked, delineating what was universal in absolute loneliness. To go somewhere that extreme, you have to risk silliness. Musically, Joy Division support his lyrics differently, with another kind of extreme playing that broke boundaries and established rules, but which might also elicit snickers now, if you’re unsympathetic to it. It is so much what it is, and pretends to be nothing else. No shame. Here, they chose a different path, eschewing down-tuned murk and discordant clatter,  and threw another light on Curtis’s lyrics. The words aren’t really that different than some of the slower, more contemplative numbers on Closer, but with the rough edges polished away, you hear not just the weariness in his voice, but something like equanimity?
Or maybe I just watched too many of those fucking movies.
Anyway, I’ve grown to love Joy Division in the last few years more than ever. They’re a young band--forever now, of course. They’ll always have a real spark, especially if you get a hold of their live stuff. They weren’t just goth or post-punk or whatever, but really one of the best rock bands or their time, I think, and they got me through some hard times here and there this year. 
20. Someday - Ween - Shinola, Volume 1: I have this awful tendency to shoot myself in the foot--or maybe it’s a healthy inclination to burst my own balloon when it’s getting too bloated. You tell me.
Also tell me this--please--wasn’t that a perfect transition? C’mon! I mean, for a minute there the mood seems exactly the same as “Atmosphere,” and then the lead singer comes in, and you’re thinking, “Uh, who’s this geek?” And then those muppet backup singers, and then “pizza day?” Ha! Brilliant!
Sorry. Things were just getting too weighty--the year, the playlist, all of it. I needed a good laugh. Maybe you did too. Let’s forget the whole thing and back to the old drawing board. Maybe 2012 will be better. I’ll check back with you later and we’ll see. We’ll get a pizza or something.
Also, I know I’m always promising to get back to this subject or the other--Hawaii epics, NYC excursions, etc.--but I have written most of an account of how I got shot and where it’s left me. If nothing else, it might at least explain why I’ve been so quiet. I’ll try to have it up soon, for anyone who’s interested. Take care of yourselves out there.