Butthole Surfers - Electricarryland

One thing about this project that has been disillusioning has been the confrontation with how subjective musical preference is. I can have my opinion changed of an entire artist by circumstances. I was a little wary going into this album. I had purchased it many many years ago. The first two tracks are straight forward rock tracks, and the lyrics are intentionally offensive in a way that ran afoul of my middle school prostelatyzing socialist principals. I was savvy enough to know that it was my own hang-ups getting in the way, and anyway everyone loves Pepper, so I held onto it and managed to not listen to it until now.

Yesterday I spent 40 minutes on the phone with a guy offering me a free cruise. Free except for the port fee, which was $60. I basically stayed on the line because hey, a $60 cruise is still a good deal. It was only after 40 minutes of me telling the guy I did not want to buy an additional package and I had to get to work that it came out that it was $60 per person.  At this point I was so pissed I told them to cancel the entire thing and went to work. When I arrived I found that they had taken $118 out of my account, and that it would get back in “in three to seven business days, depending on your bank.” Then I put on this album and heard the line “Wam bam it’s a scam.” That put me in a good enough mood to get to the rest of the album, and appreciate how objectively awesome it is.

Haha, you get? Is joke. Because appreciation for album was due to being in good mood. Impossible to tell how good art is “objectively.” Is horrible, crushing truth of life. All things relative. We die alone in cold.

Anyway. This album is pretty awesome. Let’s start with Pepper. It’s the third track but it was the big single that everyone knows. At the time this single came through America was well into the land of grunge overdose, as well as punk overdose and overdose overdose. For the segments of the population who were not committed to specific genres but were generally into heavy rock this song slotted neatly into a pervasive feeling of cynicism and cynicism weariness. The song is dark and clever, musically and lyrically, while retaining a pace and energy that makes it actually enjoyable to listen to. Such is the cliffs notes review of the song. In this way of looking at things, Butthole Surfers were in the right place and the right time with a good single that propelled them to one-hit-wonder status, after which they sank back into obscurity like so many other 90s bands.

The things is, when you dig a little, the Butthole Surfers are way more than a mid 90s one hit wonder. Let’s look at Pepper again. The weird riffs are not completely unheard of, in fact they hark to things a lot of artists have done. The electronically reversed bridge [Foo Fighters], the electronic, atmospheric fill in the background [Red Hot Chilli Peppers, to name one]. The freaking sitar-led psychedelic-style riffs[the Beatles, 13nth Floor Elevators, all of India]. These guys seem to have listened to everyone, ever, and brought those influences into the music. The more of the album you listen to the more clear this becomes, as each track hits notes of country, metal, southern rock, etc etc etc.

Here’s the thing. The Butthole Surfers started in 1977. So, this 90s one hit wonder that no one had ever heard of predated almost all the acts that one could name as having influenced this album. In fact they can list most of the major artists of the last 30 years as fans, including Kurt Cobain, who Met Courtney Love at a Butthole Surfers show, and Jello Biafra, who released their first few albums on his label. So how much of their sound is musical name dropping and how much was just stolen by other artists who got famous instead? It’s hard to say but they are musically linked to everyone under the sun. They were strongly influenced by Psychedelic rock bands, like fellow Texans the 13nth Floor Elevators, as well as 60s era hard rock acts like the MC5, and of course by the punk scene that they helped build in Texas and the Midwest. By that same token they inspired much of the punk scene at the time, certainly cross-pollinating with GWAR, they helped inspire the creation of Grunge by freely blending metal and punk, they pioneered the use of electronics in underground punk. As a psychedelic rock band from Texas with two drummers and notorious for destructive performances, it would not be a stretch to say they influenced fellow Texans …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, a Psychedelic indie-punk group known for having two drummers, heavy use of electronics, and destroying their equipment.

But then everything about the band can be linked to other bands. They are like a musical Wikipedia page, or even the Johnny Appleseed of modern Midwestern indie. They went everywhere, they’ve been around forever, and everywhere they went they got fans who went on to found other bands. Their lack of mainstream success before Pepper could be blamed on a verity of things, from their name to their habit of including a stripper in their live shows, but one gets the feeling that they really didn’t care. The band has always done what it has done, and Pepper’s success was more a function of the rest of the music scene finally getting to where they had always been, via their myriad spawn gradually infiltrating the pop charts.

If there is any objectivity in music appreciation it may come from importance in terms of influence. Though importance doesn’t mean you have to like a band, it does put them beyond the realm of preference and decoration and into the realm of High Art. Which of course the Butthole Surfers would tell you is bullshit. Nonetheless they represent something of a missing link in American indie rock, bridging a gap between 60s and 70s era psychedellia and hard rock and the punk, grunge, and alternative acts that have repeatedly played such a major part in pop music since the 80s. The fact that they never got famous for it probably amuses them more than anything else.

So Yesterday I did Blur, today I did the Butthole Surfers. Tune in tomorrow as I review Bach or Beethoven or some shit. 

Blur - Modern Life Is Rubbish

            One piece of housecleaning before I get into this. Ive been really trying to hit one entry per day, if not here then also on the other blog. But I am moving three states away so things are probably gonna be a bit hectic for a while. I know no one cares but me, but I care. And that makes it important to me. And therefore I apologize to you in the hope that you will absolve me of my self inflicted guilt.

Speaking of my problems, do you guys have trouble getting into Blur albums?

            I don’t mean that I don’t like Blur, I really do, and I’m not trying to make some joke about their new, shitty albums. I am saying that whenever I get a Burl album it really takes some effort to get into it. Once I get it, it’s great. There’s like this invisible barrier to entry that you just have to push past in order to like their music. Once you do you look back and wonder what was so difficult. 13 is moving and Parklife is unendingly fun, and you return again and again. It’s just getting to that point that is hard. Its not that the songs are bad, some stand out as fun, but something, some gear, is not yet meshing in your brain, and you have to listen a few more times to get it to gel.

            I actually have two blur albums that I am working on right now: Modern Life is Rubbish and Leisure. Of the two I have listened to Leisure a lot more since I have had it for about six months now, whereas MLIR is a recent purchase, and finally completed my Blur set. I’ll be pissed if they put out another album and I have to drop more money and time on this. I kid. But seriously, Coxon? Albarn says you smell. And your recent solo work was brilliant, you don’t need that cartoon obsessed twit. Goooooood. Goooooood.

            Anyway, yeah so the albums. I have had Modern Life Is Rubbish for a month or so and I have had almost no traction. Part of the problem may be the, ahem, Blur formula. I love Blur, and hate to criticize, but yeah, we get it that you are from the suburbs and it wasn’t super fun and there were problems in paradise in England. And that middle class people are boring, and overly obsessed with uninteresting minutia. Kinda a funny thing coming from a couple Colchester boys like yourselves. Another manifestation of pre-indie Strummeritis? The album painting of Blur dressed as mop-top skinheads says yes. Moving on.

            The Blur Formula has a third side, which is brilliantly composed pop music, and that is certainly in abundance here. I am probably not ready to take the crown for Favorite Blur Album away from Parklife yet, but this has everything you could want in a Blur album, musically: rockin numbers, songs with deceptive cadences that stop and go a lot, even a kind of dancy tune. The vocals deliver well, with Albarn, that golden-voiced angel, composing his usual lilting harmonies which ar expertly woo-ed to by Coxon.

            As usual with the band the album has a whole mess of drama in its background. It was, in many respects, the first Brit-pop album. Their first album, Leisure, is considered more of a shoue-gaze kind of record, a style that the British public was cooling on. Blur’s label, in desperation, sent them on an American tour, where the band had their face rubbed in America’s then complete obsession with grunge. Other bands might have packed it in, or at least decorously retreated back to the underground, but Albarn and Coxon are anything but decorous, and are apparently fueled by a seething cocktail of rage and more rage. Using this towering angst, the band put together an extremely happy pop album that just makes ya want to go on a picnic.

           

            The rage really comes in with the lyrics, which are extremely sarcastic and cover everything from how dull the suburbs are to how boring the middle class is. Oh did I make that joke already? Ok. How about trouble in paradise in England? Ah ok. Hmm. The phoniness of marketers? Ok..we also have one about peeping toms. Ok, so “everything from the phoniness of marketers to complimentary portraits of peeping toms.” That’ll do.

I have to say, the album art here is some of the most finely crafted possible. Not only did the band hire good people to do the art, and hold them to a theme, they took an active hand in the layout and design. It’s such an integral part of the theming of the record that the lyrics layout, which includes chord tabulations, is discussed on the album’s Wikipedia page. I noticed this attention to detail, and the band will be rewarded in the herafter.

            This is a Blur album. At this point you probably know Blur, and given the, ahem, select nature of my readership, you know I love Blur. I really do, and writing this review has actually made this album click for me. It really is an excellent album. It is also a Blur album, so if you like Blur you know what you are getting here. If you don’t know Blur this might be a good place to start, since the whole Brit Pop thing basically started here. In fact the album has been called a concept album. I would add a concept album that got lost and became a genre for a few years there. Certainly a career for the band.

           

Brian Setzer Orchesta - Dirty Boogie

Man I don’t know what to do with the Brian Setzer Orchestra.

                I love Brian Setzer. Or, at any rate, I love the Stray Cats. They pretty much set the tone for modern Rockabilly, as discussed in my entry on Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. After the breakup of the Cats, Setzer spent the 80s doing solo work that I would be interested in looking up. By 1990 Setzer joined that bizarre shift within the Rockabilly subculture towards swing. Given his influence within the genre it is worth asking whether he was the chicken or the egg in this move. His own statements along the lines are that he had always wanted to front a big band with a rock guitar. This would certainly support the Setzer-led hypothesis, as would the relatively early 1990 foundation date. On the other hand most commentators credit the shift to the Royal Crown Review, which was founded in 1989. So is Setzer a bandwagon jumper? It is worth recalling that, while he founded the Cats in New York playing 50s retro, they only solidified their sound and style after moving to England to merge into the just-starting Teddy Boy revival. With the swing revival his orchestra was not the first band, but they were hardly late entries.

I think something needs to be said here in favor of bandwagon jumping. In life we achieve nothing by ourselves. Artistic statements usually need movements to make their point, since individual artists can never hash an idea out with all its angles. Our culture trains us to suspect groupthink and desire to make our own impact, but I think the most influential people in any artistic group is often the second or third entry, who realizes the genius of what is being said by the first entrant, and begins to chew on it and realize its parameters and implications.

I always seem to end up referencing the Clash, but hey, they are my favorite band. They were also not the first punk band. not even the second, and Shane MacGowan has made numerous statements along the lines that he always considered Joe Strummer a bandwagon jumper. That the rest of the Pogues hired Joe to replace him after his alcoholism made him inherently unstable had nothing to do with this assertion, I am sure. Anyway, despite not being first, I think the Clash made some of the most serious contributions to the punk sound. By broadening the subculture's horizons into reggae and world music they ultimately gave it legs far beyond the art-school rejection it was up to that point.

                So there is a lot about the history and structure of this album to dislike. It came out nearly simultaneously with the infamous Gap commercial, and the album’s first single happened to be a cover of the song featured in the commercial. Thus the two served to culturally cross-subsidize each other, the ubiquity of the commercial serving to popularize the cover, and visa versa. As such, the album is largely to blame for the mainstreaming of swing, and its subsequent spectacular shark jump. This was certainly helped by the album’s Teflon-smooth production values and arrangements tighter than Kate Winslet’s rectum. The album is also largely covers. Seven of the thirteen album tracks are covers. I hate musicians who don’t write their own music. One of these covers prominently features a duet with post-Tragic Kingdom era Gwen Stefani. Ew.

                But the album is just really good. Sure, that is because it is largely someone else’s writing, but in the swing (or jump blues) era, that kind of musical trading was extremely common. In fact, it is worth discussing if the current obsession with artists writing their own music in the indie scene isn’t contributing to the lack of quality in pop music. In traditional music scenes, including jazz, blues, and pop until very recently, this kind of constant trading created a firmament of creativity and trading ideas. Economically, musicians were poorly compensated, so writing music for someone else to perform was a good way to increase one’s revenues. Nowadays writing one’s own music means one gets a bigger portion of the profits, leading to those who write for others being perceived as mercenary, inauthentic, or not good enough to make it on one’s own.

This doesn’t mean I am about to stop holding non-writers in contempt. But in this case it is probably forgivable or even appropriate. After all, Setzer did the arrangements, and given the size of the band this is probably more important anyway. And the arrangements here are spectacularly energetic and solid. There are no dull moments here and the arrangements are such that the album feels to the listener like it was all written by the same hand. This album level coherence is something I value highly. Even the Stefani duet is well done. Somehow.

So I don’t know. There’s a lot of background here that is discomforting, and assaults the sense of authenticity that I so value in pop music. But the album is just way too much fun to discount. If you haven’t heard it yet, or have only heard “Jump Jive and Wail,” I would certainly recommend checking this out. Now that all the hoopla surrounding the Swing Revival has largely faded out, we can appreciate this as a really fun album with absolutely no dead wood. Go find it somewhere, I’m sure someone is still trying to get rid of a copy. 

Blitzkreigbliss - Every Day is Marked

What is wrong with me? seriously, this band plain rocks. I had remembered them as unlistenable. They are certainly not, like, melodious, but they are hardly, like, the Locust, or something. This is actually awesome. I am going to listen to this often. Like, this is really awesome.

ok, ok Evil_Tom. this is a review blog. Use your keyboard words.

Blitzkreigbliss is a three-piece post punk group with a female lead singer and guitarist, an Asian drummer named Earl, and a bassist who is either a reedy Israeli or a heroin addicted trucker. I know post punk is a big tent, so lets say they sound more like the Pixies or Henry Rollins than Ben Folds. Yeah, like if the Pixies were less harmonious or Henry Rollins didn't play metal and was, like, a chick. And not the size of Wachuset Mountain.

Unfortunately I guess they broke up and now the reedy guy with the trucker 'stache and the lead singer are in a band whose songs are inspired by seminal '60s sci-fi show 'The Prisoner.' Fuck.

Black 47 - Bittersweet 16

God, pretty much everything about this album is a guilty pleasure. This album is basically a greatest hits collection, with a few rarities sprinkled on for good measure. An angrily political bunch of Irish Republicans, Black 47 are probably the only band that can combine traditional Irish music, punk rock, Reggae, and rap. Are they musically successful? Not always. Do they come off as huge nerds? Absolutely. Is a lot of their music cringingly dated? Yes. Does this album include a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What Its Worth?” Yup. For a huge music nerd/ hipster like me, this album is completely retarded and embarrassing.

But fuck it, I love this album and I love Black 47. Formed in the late 80s by an off-the-boat Irishman and an ex-NYC cop, the band rapidly gained a reputation for refusing to compromise any aspect of their sound, for better or worse. Larry Kirwan, the Irishman, was mad for punk and had played in a number of very early NYC punk acts, but wanted to push his range. Chris Bryne, the cop, played the Irish Pipes but had come to love early rap during his days in the force. In a story very reminiscent of the Blues Brothers these two gathered a group of equally ner-do-well musicians with equally diverse backgrounds including a drummer with classical African training and a full-on fucking horn section.

In a bunch of really weird ways the band worked, and they never get credit for some of the ground they broke. I spoke a few entries ago about the duality of middle class punk acts so into rebellion that they try to represent the proletariat. This has gradually died away in many circles, but it continues to be prevalent in Irish Punk circles. The Irish experience in America basically requires it, despite the fact that most Irish Americans have long since moved on from the five-points. Kirwan and Bryne were smart enough to realize that the African American community was the new working class, and even though theirs was an Irish style, they still wanted to speak to the working class experience. As time has gone on, I must say, I have now seen more Irish guys start rapping as they absorbed African American culture than one might have expected in the pre-House of Pain days. I can’t say that I’ve seen very many black dudes at Flogging Molly shows, however.

Black 47 has two song writing modes: political declaration, and ner-do-well musician. Write what you know, I guess. Both are equally fun. The a-political songs tend to be pretty funny, to the point of describing getting drunk and crashing an ex’s wedding. The political songs tend to focus on important, often tragic, events. In that classically Irish way, the story is given primacy of place, the music gives it importance, while the anger of the story drives the music along with energy, authenticity, and passion.

I got into the band in middle school. The fading of punk from the radio left me with a deep emotional need for powerful music and not much to tie me to popular culture. I ran upon Black 47 by mistake in a history channel special, of all things, and got their songs stuck in my head. It turned out my mom had their debut album and what followed was a nearly ten year obsession with Celtic music that basically only faded when I went to college and discovered indie. In between the band was there for a number of key moments in my life, including being the location of one of my first dates and spawning my love of small, smokey clubs. My love of punk smoldered on below, after all Black 47 is kind of a punk band, but when I made my monthly pilgrimage to CD world I would graze the rock music section, and obsess over the Irish section.

Over the years since a lot of the band’s classic sound has started to be really dated. Hip Hop has moved on a bit since 1989, and white dudes rapping in the old style has gotten a bit goofy. More damningly, the horn section draws a lot of influence from Springstein, which is not aging well. Politically, for those who understood the situation, fervent Irish Republicanism needed some effort to defend in 1990, and has only gotten harder. Given the specter of Irish American fraternal organizations buying arms for the IRA until startlingly recently, a lot of the anger expressed by Black 47 has become suspect. That Black 47 has always espoused a pacifist socialism and condemned the actions of the Irish American community makes me feel better but might not convince the casual listener. More importantly, however, the increasing success of the Good Friday Accords, signed in 1997, has constrained violence in Northern Ireland to an increasingly safe history. The country is not out of the woods yet, but now that all parties are represented in the government, the people of Belfast and Londonderry seem to have unified around a desire not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Chris Bryne left the band in 2000, and the band didn’t release any new albums until 2004. Kirwan has retooled the band since the hiatus, and I am not sure they have found their way so much as they couldn’t keep quiet anymore. 2004’s “New York Town” was a discussion of the ramifications of 9/11 on their hometown of New York City. 2008’s “Iraq” was a violently anti-war album. Two albums are expected to drop this year, one of which is called “Bankers and Gangsters,” So I think we can guess what that one will be about. The band seems to have largely shifted focus from the historic Irish experience of Anglo oppression to the modern reality of the lower middle classes and their victimization by the wider forces of American society.

And I still fucking love them. Larry Kirwan looks more like an expired redheaded mushroom every year, while Geoffrey Blythe, the sax player, looks more like a fish, but god love them I hope they never stop. With all the Green Parties and Tea Parties and the centrism of all Parties and the fall of the wall and the dissolution of the Left and the death of the old socialists it is completely necessary to have voices like theirs in the world. They may not always write the best music, but their music is fucking fun even when it’s goofy.

I rarely say this for greatest hits albums but this one really does have some of their best moments, spanning their entire career from the first EP they put out with Rick Ocasec to their latest albums, warts and all. As with everything the band does, it is worth noting the warts as well as the and all. I have to say the singles from the newer albums are weaker, managing to preserve the embarrassing rapping while leaving behind the traditional sound that often made the music so fun. But there is more than enough of the old stuff to make up for this and the newest stuff is hardly all bad. The liner notes are constructed in exactly the way I would expect them to. Kirwan, that Irish bastard, spends pages and pages rambling on and on about his songs and I love every word. Old tours, history, girls he really should call back some time, long, long stories. For any fan of the band this is a wonderful album to hit up. For anyone who is not a fan I really would recommend starting at the first album, “Fire of Freedom,” but hey, if you find this for cheap half the album is on here so why not.  

Billy Joel - River of Dreams

God fucking damnit do I hate Billy Joel.

            To me, he is generic music incarnate. He is the Coldplay of his generation. His music is easy listening ubiqitouosness writ large. It just makes it worse that I really enjoy many of his singles, because when I get into an argument with one of his numerous Jewish Suburbanite fans they inevitably say “really? You hate ‘We didn’t Start The Fire?’” “Well no, I just think it’s a bit overplayed.” “Well it isn’t His fault people like his music. What about Piano Man?” “Well I think that’s a very pretty song actually.” “So why do you hate Billy Joel?”

EVERY. FUCKING. OTHER. SONG.

I mean, that’s not fair either, but being an actual fan of Billy Joes is like stating a preference for Wonder Bread while walking through an artisanal bakery. His music is the ever present soundtrack of department store mediocrity in the 1980s. And he was bland 1980s before it was cool.

His early stuff from the 70s? Bland 1980s music. This album, “River of Dreams,” © 1993? Bland 1980s music. I’m not sure how one could crank out this stuff post-Nirvana but hey, why change. I keep buying his albums hoping that I’ll find what people are so gaga over, but it continues to evade me. He has some really competent singles, some I even really like. “Downeaster Alexa” gets huge points in my book for being an enjoyable song about a boring topic, not that writing about dying industries in the 1980s was an edgy or unique move.

The one thing I can say for him is that Billy Joel is a very talented musician who is very good at using pop hooks to further effective storytelling. This is indeed worthy of respect, and many of his songs are even well constructed. For what it is worth he seems like a nice guy. But this album is ass.

The first two songs are actually decent, but the entire rest of the album is trash. The third song, “Blonde Over Blue,” sounds like a nursery rhyme had unprotected sex with a Supremes song at a Styx concert. Lest you think I am talking influences, I mean I am pretty sure he lifted the hook from “Mr. Roboto” and a Supremes song and inserted it into a nursery rhyme. “A Minor Variation” is a sad attempt to pick up where fucking Huey Lewis left off, “Shades of Grey” has some interesting moments which one gets the impression were lifted from a Queen song. “All about Soul” is exceptionally earnest in a super generic way. “Lullabye” fucking sucks. “Two Thousand Years” seems to go on at least that long, and I can say unequivocally that “Famous Last Words” “blows.”

When lost in the Billy Joel desert I usually find solace in the singles, in this case “The River of Dreams.” I remember liking this as a child, but fuck dude. This song is so fucking insulting. Warmed over theology set in this poorly ripped off gospel setting. It’s like his manager said “Billy, we need a knock out single. Rewrite the Lord ’s Prayer so it sounds more urban and call it a day. Be sure to rip off The Tokens.”

So what happened here? This album is a disaster. There are a lot of things that can contribute to a musical miscarriage such as this. The artist could be at a bad part of their career, the production team could have done a bad job, or the artist could blow. The first of these options is definitely a plausible hypothesis here. Billy Joel had a very long career and this album was the very end of it. As the album was being written his marriage was disintegrating and he had just discovered that his long-time manager and brother-in-law had been embezzling millions of dollars and covering it up with shoddy accounting. His last pop album, critics consider it exceptionally dark, tied up in themes of weariness and betrayal. After this album he retired from pop music and devoted his energy to classical piano compositions.

What is insane is that everyone ate this up. Critics loved it and his fans bought so many copies that the thing debuted at number 1 and stayed there for…for fucking ever. When listening to this I get the feeling he had, for whatever reason, to finish up some kind of contractual obligation, but his fans still fawn over “The River of Dreams” as if it were something other than nearly blatant plagiarism. I get the feeling he had reached the point in his career where his fans would go orgasmic over anything he produced, and he knew it. I really think he put this out so he could get out on a high note and return to serious music.

But really there isn’t much in this album that is uncharacteristic of Billy Joel. I find it kind of funny that critics found this album to be dark, considering the cloyingly sweet production values and skull cracking constant major keys. It continues to be appalling to me that the decade that produced Husker Du and Devo could consider Billy Joel trendy or unique; that critics were calling Billy Joel’s album “dark” 14 days after the Smashing Pumpkins released “Siamese Dream” kind of boggles the mind. The production here is irritatingly glossy, but that was classic 1980s pop and, thus, completely par for the course for Billy Joel. More worrying is the by the numbers genre-hopping and democratic party liberalism in the song writing. There’s several maudlin songs to his daughter, there’s songs about how war is bad but he sympathizes with those involved, there’s songs about how traditional enemies aren’t that bad. He pulls in elements of funk, soul, glam, afro-beat, and electro. Normally I would think this genre hopping and liberalism was something to be admired but he doesn’t suggest any solutions for the world’s problems and despite musically name dropping the genres he doesn’t absorb them.

Go listen to “White Man In Hammersmith Palais” by The Clash. They are obviously still The Clash and retain their punky sound, but they so clearly inhabit the ska influence in the music that the one song changes the sound of the whole album. Billy Joel can have as many fucking gospel backup singers as he likes, his music still sounds like Billy Fucking Joel. Its still this bland, major key pop music replete with hooks and no substance. He is adapting his style somewhat to the genre but he takes no risk, doesn’t drive his song writing to inhabit the new space. He’s changing his genre along with his overcoats. I wonder if his managers thought it was funny, selling rebellion for money?

Sorry, got a little carried away there.

I am, of course, not the first to notice that, no matter the genre he was assaulting, Billy Joel still sounds like Billy Joel. That award goes to the great satirist of our time, Weird Al Yankovic, whose song “Still Billy Joel To Me,” is, while very lighthearted and funny, one of the most savage satires of a respected artist I have listened to. That Weird Al got away with it in the time of slavering Billy Joel fans says much for his jovial, harmless persona, as well as his relative anonymity at the time.

I am almost done with my third fucking page on this shitstorm of an album, and I want to let you finish, Taylor, but I have one more point to make. In the grand tradition of psychological thrillers and horror movies everywhere, I must leave you with this question: Is Billy Joel generic because he aped 80s pop clichés, or did he create 80s pop clichés?

I really don’t have an answer for you, and It may not matter, but think about this for a second. He was played to death or an entire decade. He managed to hop on every lame political musical bandwagon, and rip off, impersonate, or pay tribute to every fad to be flung forth, viscous and wriggling, from the 1980’s gaping urethra. In the process, he folded a broad ribbon of bland mediocrity into the chocolate mouse of an entire decade. I’m not sure if this makes a difference in how I view him, since it is clear that he did not pioneer any of the causes or genres that he championed, but I don’t need my artists to be on the bleeding edge, I just want them to have authenticity. Is it possible that, at one time, he had authenticity, and the over-play made the authenticity sound like cliché?

I don’t know. But fuck this album.

Bambix - What is in a Name?

            Bambix is a Dutch punk band with a German drummer, a Brazilian following, whose songs are in English. The main songwriting force in the band is, I suppose obviously, the lead singer, Wick Bambix, a platinum blonde who looks very much like modern day Rod Stewart in a trucker cap. Supposedly their gimmick is Wick’s voice, which seems kind of a silly thing to be proud of at first but really does grow on you. She uses it to deliver very sing-chanty performances that kind of remind me of Against Me, though a highly knowledgeable AM fan yanked my scrotum and told me I was nuts for this opinion.

            The band is very…like something. It is vaguely a 90s, pre blink, ska-less underground punk sound, with significant 90s alternative elements, but that’s all kind of a gobbledygook that may not mean much to you. The band maintains a powerful performance energy while maintaining vocals that are actually sung and high quality song writing. This combination of strengths makes the band something of an instant punk gem. They manage that oh-so difficult task of being obviously punk without sounding exactly like every other punk band, and manage to dodge the numerous punk subgenres.

            Which is kind of some egg on my face. The reason it took me so long to listen to this album was that I thought they were a Riot Grrl act, and I had such a bad time trying to listen to Bikini Kill that I passed this one over. Bambix is certainly a feminist band, but 2/3 of the members are men and they tend towards pro-woman story telling rather than intellectualist soap-boxing. The lyrics are engaging and interesting and narrative, a feature that I find delightful and which is often ignored by the kids these days.

Check these guys out if you can. Obviously it’s worth listening to their myspace page, http://www.myspace.com/bambix, before laying out any cash, but I would go so far as saying it’s worthy ordering a CD from Amazon. This is definitely one of the gems of my PREX runs.

Babaloo - Hardcore Juju

Much of my freshman and sophomore years of undergrad were spent in Comparative Literature classes. I am interested in literature, and philosophy, and comparing things, so I had taken a Freshman Seminar on the topic, which stuck me with a comparative lit advisor. I really didn’t know what I wanted to study, but the pre-registration literature assured me that changing advisors later would be simplicity itself.  Later, when I decided to pursue Urban Planning and International Relations as a course of study, my advisor seemed personally let down, like he thought I had a future in comparative literature. He didn’t take it too well when I said I would prefer to do something that had an actual impact on people’s lives.

My advisor’s specialty was in Latino/ Hispanic film, so I ended up taking a number of Latino focused courses, exposing me to a fair amount of criticism of American culture from a Latino perspective. One commentator, whose name escapes me now, welcomed the influx of Latino influence on popular music, which he criticized as becoming increasingly vapid and over produced. I found this pretty funny, since most popular music with a Latino influence is pretty much shit, with the exception of Rage Against The Machine and some of Madonna’s work. At the time it was even worse, as Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin had only just dropped off the pop charts, but the author was writing in the 90s, if I recall correctly, a period that, while not exactly known for scintillating pop charts, had some moments of sublime rebellion and underground fervor.

I have thought a lot about this bizarre contradiction over the years. I wonder if I were to play the commentator work by Green Day, Nirvana, and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, bands that I feel represent the best of the 90s in all its odd eclectic variety, would he change his opinion of American popular culture? Probably not. If I countered that I found the Latino influences that came out in popular culture to be over produced and boring at best, and dangerously regressive at worst, would he understand what I was talking about? Again, unlikely. I might be labeled closed minded, and unable to see beyond my own, mainstream white person culture. As a socialist youth deeply embedded in underground punk subculture, I like to think that I respected multicultural influences and welcomed musical variety that this commentator’s favored subculture sought to introduce, and yet this bizarrely myopic statement, from a supposedly well educated commentator, stood between us.

This mutual miscomprehension is becoming more and more common in the United States. One particularly fascinating example of this was the online fallout from the Arcade Fire’s Grammy win in 2011. For those in the indie subculture Arcade Fire were so well known as to be ubiquitous, and of beloved quality for most. The complete outrage from the Hip-Hop and Pop community, and the subsequent Indie backlash, showed a lot about both communities. The fact that the Hip Hop and Pop communities continue to be completely unwilling to acknowledge or comprehend alternative subcultures in American popular consciousness, 50 years after the start of the beat and hippie subcultures, 30 years after the start of punk rock, and seven years after indie music stormed the carts in 2004, showed up the increasing insularity of a “popular culture” based on the sales figures of a small group of failing industries. On the other hand, the subsequent backlash by the Indie community revealed that group’s extremely unjustified sense of self satisfaction at being some kind of pop music intelligencia. Though more aware of other subcultures and at least superficially more accepting, comments made online revealed, as they often do, that the average member of any group is as uncomprehending of others as they are of him/her.

Blends of Latino music into subcultures of the United States on equal terms face barriers that go beyond language and geography. In the same period that immigration has accelerated from Latino and Hispanic countries, the suburbanization of the culture of the United States has made the presence of minorities significantly invisible. Despite large populations existing in roughly the same geographic boundaries, Latino and White kids rarely go to the same schools or mix in the same social circles. This is why there has been way more Latino influence upon hip hop and popular music than on the increasingly isolated world of indie rock, despite the latter’s often avowed love of new influences and musical styles.

There are some exceptions. Calexico are beloved indie darlings and feature strong Mexican Folk influences, and there have been acts with lesser or more influence. The biggest act worth noting is the 90s powerhouse, Sublime. Incorporating Dub, Reggae, Ska, Punk, and Latino influences, the are hard to classify and it is almost always hilarious when commentators try. Nonetheless Sublime has not generated a large influx of Latino influence in their related subcultures. Part of this might be explained away by their limited creative lifespan, but among my friends they had a very brief popularity. Most still acknowledge their talent, but many will say something along the lines of “yeah, I listened to them way too much back in the day, I really can’t stand them anymore.” The music was so infectious that it was listened too much and was worn out. And so Sublime’s influence died away like a self cauterizing wound.

Since reading the critic’s comment all those years ago I have made sporadic attempts to familiarize myself with Latino music. One of the things I discovered is that there has been much more subcultural bleed-back into Latino music in their home countries than we see in this country. Bands like Cabrito Vudu and Control Machete helped pioneer a ska and punk flowering in the border areas of Mexico that lasted until the current drug violence began to overtake those regions. Of almost universally high quality, I was hoping to find another of these albums when I picked up Babaloo’s “Hardcore Juju.” I did not find that, but, I’m not really sure how to characterize what I did find.

Babaloo sound very much like the border bands I have grown familiar with. In fact, they sound more Latino than the bands actually from the homelands, despite about half their songs being in English. They use very formal song types and structures, which isn’t to say the music is cliché, but much like Jazz, Mexican, Caribbean, and central American Folk styles have their own conventions that you have to train your ear to understand. My ear is trained enough to know that there is a lot going on here, but not enough to know how much of it is original and how much of it is aping precedents. That said, it almost doesn’t matter how original it is because there is so much going on here. There are literally folk styles being incorporated from various Mexican Folk regions, numerous Caribbean Islands, even various Creole and Spanglish styles. I am nowhere near knowledgeable enough to unpack the influences on this disc, but suffice it to say that I know they sing in Spanish, English, and French, and if I could identify Portuguese I am pretty sure they sing in that as well. Their website claims that the total comes to seven.

How does one band bring in all these styles? Are they globe-trotting elder intelligencia of the Latin world? Not really. They seem to be a bunch of kids who met in Jamaica Plain in 1994. Now, granted, in 1994 Jamaica Plain was not the gentrified near-suburb of today, but one has to assume that, given Boston’s college town status, some amount of education went into this band. In fact, the guitarist, one of the main song writers, is actually an Irish girl who specialized in Arabic music in college. This irritates me a bit, because they maintain this persistent populist attitude in the music. I cannot help but compare this to the modern indie tendency to be honest about middle class origins and not spend time rewriting them out of their personal history.

 On the other hand, most of the punk acts I love perpetuate this same act of dishonestly. Despite spending his entire career singing about rights for the proletariat, Joe Strummer was the son of a British Diplomat, and went to art school.  Though he spent his twenties living in squats and was pretty much on his own after age 9 one really doesn’t get the impression that he was starving. Given these precedents it wasn’t until the late 90s that this kind of posturing was really abandoned, even in most avant-garde circles. And the band is clearly influence by mid-90s punk culture. Beyond the fact that they say so on their website, the album art has a large amount of illustration of the band engaging in various punk lifestyle activities, like skating, drinking in clubs, and getting arrested by the police. Whatever their origins, the band tries hard to stake a claim as working class and whether this is a choice cause by the punk environment or some seed of reality is hard to tell given the paucity of information about them on the internet.  

So I guess I can deal with the faux populism. The fact is that the band is fascinating to me. Drawing in this plethora of influences, singing in a billion languages, and using more instruments than the blue man group, the music exists in this weird mid 90s time slide, being obviously of their time and yet sounding like none of the contemporary acts. The lyrics touch on a fascinating variety of socially progressive lyrics, touching on everything from popular Luchadores to feminist dress codes. I really wish modern Latino artists had held onto this kind of liberal progressivism, instead of backsliding into escapist machismo.

That said, I’m not sure this is the kind of thing I will seek out for relaxing listening. The music is well preformed and written, but lacks hooks or good vocal performances. I get the feeling that the band would be good live, and people who are into Latino music might really enjoy this. Something about this recording is a bit grating, and I am not sure whether it is my weariness with the Latino cultural imperative left in my brain from college, the fact that my ear is not yet trained to listen to this kind of music, or some inherent lack of harmony in the music itself. I will probably be holding on to this one because of its numerous intriguing qualities, and I would recommend giving it a listen on your own. Just maybe preview a song or two on YouTube first.  

Ben Folds Five - Naked Baby Photos

Ah the b-sides collection. Overachieving child of the compilation family. Look at him, all big and successful in New York, never comes back home, rarely calls. I suppose I also wouldn’t call if my family did nothing but wallow in their own filth, but some family feeling would be appreciated. And its not like there aren’t bad b-sides collections, its just that when b-sides are good they are really good, and when they are bad they are at least interesting.

See, unlike “greatest hits” collections, there is a built in quality control mechanism in b-sides. Some producer can be given three grand by a record label to randomly decide on an album’s worth of “hits.” B-sides, by their nature, require a career’s worth of work, and even though they are by their nature the “leftovers” of that career, they are often the best of the leftovers. Things that kill in concert but would not translate to disc, like “For Those Of Ya'll Who Wear Fannie Packs,” or songs that were dropped from the album for nearly inexplicable label reasons, like “Emaline,” which may be one of Ben Fold’s finest songs. Obviously I like this album, but I would say this is one of the finest b-sides I have had the pleasure of listening to.

On the one hand I was never going to hate this. Part of the reason b-sides are better than other compilations is that one tends to buy them only for bands you already admire. I am a huge Ben Folds fan, both Five and otherwise. It is my oh-so-humble opinion that, though he is beloved of a legion of adoring fans, he is bizarrely underappreciated by critics. There have been other rock pianists, but no one really incorporated it as well as Ben Folds and the Five. By completely ignoring the guitar and fuzzing the bass they were essentially the first group since Elvis to successfully fuck with the rock formula. Their songs contain a hidden track where you can hear them playing with the very sinew and bones of rock n roll in a way few others have done. Compared to the Five, other people are just a rock band with a piano along side. They may be the most important band to have ever- oh dear I seem to have soiled my pants.

Anyway, I was always going to like this, but this really is a particularly good B-sides collection. Even the liner notes are well constructed, containing short blurbs about how the song was written, where it was recorded, and why it was left off the original albums. Most of these songs are good in their own right, some could even have been singles. The album also directly captures the sense of humor of the band in a way the main albums can only hint at. This alone would add materially to the Ben Folds Five body of work. Finally, the album actually has the flow of an album, which is something you rarely see in Greatest Hits and almost never see in the average Comp. Like normal albums, thought has been put into the ordering of the songs, and as such there is a noticeable progression in the energy of the music. It isn’t a subtle or complex movement, mostly from single-quality material up front to live tracks in the middle and extreme rarities at the end, but it dosent need to be. Simply having an organizing principal makes the work more enjoyable, for the same reason most songs are not random jumbles of notes.

With apologies to Sonic Youth.

So I am keeping this, and you should buy it if you like Ben Folds and his Five. Most of these I say to buy if you find them cheaply, but In this case I would seek this out. It is a good album and worth money.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Hahaha, hey guys, I just heard a funny joke. Remember the swing revival?

Heh.

That’s it. That’s the joke.

I actually have two albums in the B boxes from this genre, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and the Brian Setzer Orchestra. I’m not sure I have enough to say about swing to do them separately, but I’m gonna give it a shot, because these are really very different albums.

Oh! Another funny thing about swing. According to Wikipedia it was called the “swing revival,” but really they were playing jump blues, a short lived post-war genre popular in African American communities! So the swing revival wasn’t actu- fuck this isn’t funny at all. Its barely even interesting. I think the best comment on the topic of the swing revival was actually made in a Friends episode.

So this couple is discussing the band for their wedding. The guy is adamant that he really wants an act called “The Swing Kings,” because he really loves swing music. She asks, since when do you like swing music? He says something along the lines of “Oh cumon! I’ve always loved swing…even since I saw that Gap commercial.”

My god I am taking social commentary from Friends. No wonder I have no readers.

So the swing revival, as with all things since 1977, emerged from a punk subculture, specifically rockabilly. “Evil Tom,” you say, “Rockabilly is its own genre, with a history stretching back to the era before Rock N Roll!” This is true, but let’s be honest. Until the 80s Rockabilly was the place where untalented country acts pretended to be happy until their got recognition from Nashville and were able to do a duet with someone in rhinestones. Then the Stray Cats came along, and ever since Rockabilly has been the place where Punks go when they realize that they care too much about musical talent to play in a hardcore act. But that’s a whole nuther entry.

So in the late 80s a bunch of Rockabilly bands started bringing jazz elements into their music. One thing led to another and a bunch of bands on the west coast began playing a jazz influenced music that began to draw more and more heavily on post-war big band music. This kind of bubbled away on the west coast, gradually gaining a national following until, in 1998 or so, after the pop music world of the 90s had used up literally every other genre, swing started getting radio play, the Gap made their commercial, the whole thing became a joke, and evaporated leaving everyone wonder what the fuck had happened.

As a cultural commentator this is my personal take on this whole swing revival phenomenon: The underground scene in the post-punk era has been characterized by increasing levels of open mindedness as new talent grows up in the crucible of Punk or Metal and then realizes the purists are kind of stupid. Once you realize you can play anything you start experimenting with everything. In the pre internet era scenes were created in the traditional manner, by people liking what their friends are doing, taking inspiration from that, and creating feedback loops of even concentrating talent in local areas. The record industry and the popular media, which are always looking for the next big thing, would constantly scour the country for active scenes that were producing talent that they could hire. Unfortunately during the 90s, as everyone was finishing the replacement of their record collections and profit margins were beginning to constrict, record companies stopped being willing to sit on odd talent and continue to promote it. This results in one hit wonders. Everyone knows about the sophomore slump. If your record label isn’t willing to promote your third record after your second is a failure that guarantees you will become a one hit wonder. 

 Combine this process with the underground’s constant generation of new and exciting genres, and the mass media’s tendency to push things until the point of over exposure, and you get the constant flitting between styles that we saw in the 90s. As the internet took off it allowed an even faster move between styles in the underground since everyone could do their own thing and still find fellow travelers. The result may have been the rise of indie as a necessary blanket term for all underground genres, as well as a gradual homogenization of the entire underground. Meanwhile the record industry, whose inability to adapt to technology combine with their own price-gouging and inability to work with talent, has seen their profit margins implode at the same time that the underground essentially realized that they no longer needed the studios to get their music heard and stopped returning their calls. While I think in previous eras mainstream studios represented the uptake of the most energetic members of the underground, I think that in the modern era they have become disconnected from what young artists are doing, and as such represent a self contained reality that will eventually perish.

                As far as the swing revival goes, we are left looking back on it in confusion. What a weird little fad, we think. Thank god it went away quickly and didn’t leave us with as many embarrassing photos as the 50s retro thing did. I think it’s kind of sad though. The studios basically came in and turned an entire, legitimate genre of underground creative endeavor into a huge joke. It is amazing the amount of damage one Gap commercial can do.

                Big Bad Voodoo Daddy were one of the first swing groups to form, and this is their first album. They have all the awesome things one hopes for in a genre pioneer’s first album. It is hard to do a successful swing album in a traditional lo-fi, there are just too many players sonically, but there’s some really convincingly hokey moments where you can just hear the band struggling to find the delicate balance between retro and modern sensibilities. By and large the vocals focus on more of a crooning quality than on any kind of gravely delivery. This, combine with the insistently 40s feel of the song topics, combine to make the songs charming and fun in the way any good period piece is. It is kind of like watching a noir version of P.G. Wodehouse. To modern eyes a lot of what they are doing is completely ridiculous, and part of the fun and humor is that they know it too, but they are going to sell it, 100%, down to the hilt, because that is the only way to make it good and because they really do love the material.

                This album represents pretty much all the good and bad of its genre. There’s a lot of creativity and they even jump between big-band genres, even throwing in a war-era French jazz-ballad.  The production and delivery are a bit on the glossy side, possibly even more than was necessary, but I felt this was made up for by the almost ramshackle nature of the lyrics. One can see from the production values where it all went wrong, but this is a really fun album, from before the Gap commercial. If you see it and its on the cheap side, which I’m sure it would be, it’s worth the money. Unless of course you are a jazz aficionado. If you are, I am not really sure why you are reading this. You should probably leave. Go on. Git. 

B. B. King - Best of the Black Blues

I hate renowned great artists. Not because they are overrated, though sometimes they are. I hate the way their body of work requires such research. I like to start getting into bands at the beginning, with the first album. Even if I can’t, I need to know that I am listening to a document of an artist in a particular period. I have nothing but contempt for artists with long careers who put out albums that are 90% crap and 10% good. It feels dishonest and wrong to get snookered into an album by a single, and a compilation of singles is no better, since singles are so often written by others. Things get worse with greatly renowned artists, as record companies scramble to cash in on their success by churning out “albums” full of already released material that is essentially randomly placed on that record. With particularly well regarded artists it becomes likely that the CD you purchase is not only not an original album, it is often a collection compiled of things that have fallen into the public domain, or even something put together by pirates.

Such is the case with my B. B. King album, Best of the Black Blues, though in this case I owe my possession of this psychic abortion to my mother. Mom, in a fit of pretty awesome cunning, at one point purchased an entire years Christmas presents from a online seller in Hong Kong. To her surprise all of it was boot legged, but hey, it was like $0.30 per album, so I’m not gonna blame her, and I got a pretty sweet copy of the classic anime Outlaw Star as a result, so no complaints. She’s a great Mom

On the other hand, this album is garbage. Not the music, of course. B. B. King is a legend, and listening to the music one can see why. Though it is more polished that I usually expect from the blues, his talent on the guitar and the craftsmanship of the songs is wondrous. Why pisses me off is that this is so clearly a pirate copy, and so I can’t do a real review of this. The “album” shows up on no internet searches except on illegal download sites. Amazon will not list it. The fine print on the back is in Cyrillic. The liner notes contain lyrics, but no additional information. At least compilations usually contain charming anecdotes about the one time the ad executive who put it together met the great man himself. But this? This does NOTHING to further my quest for authenticity! And the worst thing is that I am going to have to keep it for now as it is my only B.B. King recording. Bah. Curse you all.