Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

It Was A Felony

Momentous Birthday greetings are certainly required.

Straight outta Carollton, TX, that crazy mutherfucka named Robbie Van Winkle is celebrating his birthday today.

Vanilla Ice is 35.

Though famously the person who, just in case you didn't know, brought Miami on the scene, Ice was actually from my neck of the woods: the suburbs of Dallas.   He languished in obscurity until the hit song, Ice Ice Baby, had every white boy believing that they to could play the fade and write a hit rap song.

After about 3 months, he had us all asking questions like, "Will it ever stop?" to which Vanilla could only reply, cunningly, "Yo... I don't know."  It was truly a magical time for anyone who was around.

Of course, into every fairy tale a little night must come, so it wasn't long before Suge Knight started to mumble and he did, indeed, want to rumble.  In another DFW area confluence, Knight famously broke into Ice's penthouse in the Anatole hotel, and dangled him off the balcony, claiming he was owed money and demanding that Van Winkle give it up smooth.

After that, it was downhill for Ice.  Truly, the Dallas area died just a little bit that day.  The Cowboys went 7-9, the Rangers went 70-92 and the Mavericks went 28-54.  But mostly, the city just felt despondent, as though our brain was slowly being killed by a poisonous mushroom. Seeing our native (though unacknowledged) son going through such a dismal time was hard.

Time passed, and we soon learned to ignore our pain - though it still returns once in a while when a party is particularly jumping or we hear a cymbal and a high-hat with a souped-up tempo.  And it is during such moments, and on days like today, that I and my fellow Dallasites raise our glasses to the Iceman, a star who can be best summed up as, in his own words, anything less than the best.

Meet the New Look, Same as the Old Look

The queen of reinvention seemed to be going for the Valerie Cherish look, but she added a new nuance this weekend which appears to be a rehashing of her Sex book days, with a little "Hot and Horny Housewife" thrown in for good measure.

Yes, Virginia, I believe that is her labia.

John Wayne Gacy Jr.

So, Sufjan Stevens' newest album (though it isn't that new), Illinois, is a really special recording.  I'll talk about it at length later, but I wanted to mention something.

In the song John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (listen at the link the first link didn't work but the new one does), there is a line that always stands out to me.  It is in reference to the bodies underneath Gacy's floorboards.

Even more, they were boys with their cars, summer jobs... oh my God.

It's a relatively innocuous line, in of itself.  But the melody that goes along with it turns it from simple words to heartbreaking and haunting.

I've been thinking about it for a week or so, and I can't think of a better example than this where simple words and simple melody combined make the end result so much better than the sum of its parts.  Does anyone else have any examples?

Coheed and Cambria

I have a guilty pleasure.

Right off the bat I'll concede that this makes me uncool, but that's ok.  Coheed and Cambria aren't about cool.  They inhabit a place that is somewhere between "The Neverending Story" and that crazy made for TV movie where Tom Hanks gets too into D&D and ends up imagining creatures who live in a cave somewhere.  The kind of Saturday morning fare where a young boy gets swept off to worlds unknown where the ultimate moral is "Reading is Fun!" but the main character, if he'd existed 10 years later, would have never had this adventure because his parents would have given him Prozac long ago.

And that's my point, Coheed and Cambria conjure up a very specific time in a young boy's life, but which also only existed during a specific set of years in the late 80's.  It was a time when, on the young end, you had Kid Video on Saturday mornings, you were a little too young to move into your Metallica or Judas Priest phase, The Dragonriders of Pern series were just involving enough to make you think you were reading the height of intellectual literature, but the Dune series was way too much for you.  C&C (which isn't coincidental, I'd like to think) have managed to tap into a sound which is like the aural version of the stuff that made "Labyrinth" and "The Dark Crystal" cool (unfortunate Muppet connection aside).

It's like Goth music for the kids who also listen to Paula Abdul.

And so, I continue to like it, despite my best efforts to protect my snob-music sensibilities, because it so effectively puts me in a certain time where you are deciding what your social set is going to be.  You are deciding if you want to indulge the nerdy side that we all had when we were kids, but either gave up in favor of the pursuit of cool, or didn't give up and faced cafeteria exile and ridicule.  What's more, you didn't really know you were making a choice, even though it was ultimately one of the most important choices of your adolescence.  You were deciding if you were going to be Ducky, Spicoli, or Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.

This music is cheesy, overly-theatrical, but it is never too on-the-nose.  It's just an exploration of a darker, nerdier side of ourselves which we all, almost completely, look back on with a shake of our heads and a little smile.  It indulges the same part of us that Meatloaf does, without the linen scarves and motorcycles.

And anything which indulges our Meatlovian side can't be all bad.

22 Unreleased Elliott Smith Songs

They're being dubbed as "From the Basement on the Hill, II."  22 songs by the late Elliott Smith were leaked, and are available for download here.

Liz Phair's New Album

Slate's Douglas Wolk reviews Liz Phair's newest record, "Somebody's Miracle," and it does a pretty good job of capturing some issues I've had with her music over the past few years.

First of all, I liked her last album, "Liz Phair", but I didn't lurve it.  It was, very obviously, her attempt at a homogonized, mainstream, radio-playable, Top 40 fare while still maintaining her bad girl image.  Sometimes it worked, such as songs like "Rock Me" (which is a good example of how a mundane pop song can become interesting once a good producer gets done with it.  I saw her perform it live, and the only thing rockin' about it was the fact that, regardless of how watered down her lyrics are, she is just damned sexy).  Sometimes it didn't, in the case of "H.W.C." (Which stands for a temperate, clear male fluid which has become her "favorite beauty routine").

From the Slate review:

It sometimes seems that Liz Phair has spent half her career running away from her strengths as an artist. Her first album, 1993's Exile in Guyville, was a near-perfect debut, showcasing a songwriter with a thoroughly original style and scathing insights into relationships. It's also cast a shadow over everything she's done since. For the last decade, Phair has been alternately trying to approximate what made Guyville so special and rebelling against it.

That's always been my issue with her.  There is something intensely likeable about all of her music, but "Exile in Guyville" and, though most people disagree with me, "Whip-Smart" are two pretty perfect singer-songwriter's albums for the tragically hip.  "Whip-Smart" is maligned, but it's tiny diddies are basically tone-poems which all unite around one theme of someone who has taken a risk, struck out on their own, is finally seeing the fruits of those efforts, but still longs for comfort and stability that "home" used to represent.

I haven't heard the new album yet, and she made me enough of a fan over the years that I'll buy it and listen to it, but I'm past the point where I expect anything authentic or inventive from her.  Liz Phair's career path is now more about her image and less about the unique insight she provided in her early albums.

Friday Random Ten - The "Oh, How We've Missed You" Edition

Since my blog apathy has all but eliminated the routine around here at SRWU headquarters, I figured a FRT was exactly what was needed to jumpstart the situation.

You know the drill: Fire up your iPod (or lesser device), and list the first ten songs that come up.

1. Leaving Here - Pearl Jam
2. Me and All the Others - Louden Wainright
3. Vehicles and Animals - Athlete
4. Do You Sleep? - Lisa Loeb
5. Change Your Mind - The Killers
6. Space Dog - Tori Amos
7. Hallelujahs - Chris Rice
8. Breathe Me - Sia
9. Scenes From an Italian Restaurant - Billy Joel
10. Annie Waits - Ben Folds

Nashville

Amanda's post, this evening, touched on something nostalgic for me:

When I was growing up, the word "Nashville" was whispered in awed tones. To get a chance to go to Nashville was considered the end all be all of existence. (You have to understand that in the South in every community I know of--and I know nothing about wealthy communities, just working class ones--music was critically important and getting a career in it was considered the equivalent of winning the lottery. I have stories like you wouldn't believe of great musicians who never went anywhere.) I'm serious--a friend of mine had an uncle who was a country musician who did a lot of studio work in Nashville and every time he would leave town and leave his dog Puta behind (Spanish-speakers are snickering), his family would literally whisper the word "Nashville" with awe, even though he'd had the job for probably 20 years.

Her post goes on to talk about "vintage country" vs. "contemporary country", and is a discussion that I'm not really the best to talk to about.  Country music, for the most part, just doesn't blend into my musical landscape.

But the awe and reverence for Nashville is definitely something that resonates with me.

In high school, as I've written about frequently here, I was a good, church-going boy.  At the time, all the music I really listened to was Contemporary Christian Music.  If there was music going on at my church, I was involved.  I was in the youth and adult choirs.  I was in the Easter Passion Plays.  I led music in Sunday School and was a member of the band that led music during the Wednesday evening youth group meetings.  I really believed, at the time, that my future calling was to be a music minister and, eventually, a Contemporary Christian artist.

Nashville, unsurprisingly, was the center of the CCM world.  I suppose the DFW area would be one of the areas that Amanda's wealthy cities, but the growing up Southern Baptist can most certainly be likened to the smaller, working-class areas of the South. Nashville was Hollywood in those circles.  It was where you went when you made it big.   It is very difficult to think of any artists at the time that weren't based out of Nashville.  Later on, bands like Jars of Clay would begin to loosen things up, although I'm not really sure what the state of the industry is now.

One summer, on one of our youth group's choir tours, we went to Nashville.  This was an event for me.  I harbored dreams of someone being in the audience of one of the churches we were performing at, discovering me, and launching me on to a career in Nashville.   And I loved the town.  There was something about it, at the time, that felt very comfortable to me.  I was 14 or 15 years old then, so today I'm not sure if I was convincing myself of an affinity, or if there really was some sort of elemental connection at the time.

In 1996, when I graduated high school, a friend of mine, Yardley Young, told me that she was planning on going to school at Belmont College in Nashville.  Yardley and I had similar aspirations in life, and her enthusiasm for the school was infectious.  Belmont is to Christian Music what Julliard is to ballet or Cornell is to architecture.  It was the place to be.  Up until that point, I had planned on going to Dallas Baptist University, but Belmont seemed to this innocent dreamer to be more than a first choice school, but the place I was destined to go.

Unfortunately, Belmont was quite expensive and, though I'm a smart guy, I basically did what I could to get by in school.  I got A's and B's, but my grades were hardly inspirational enough to merit the kinds of scholarships I would need to be able to afford it.  Slowly, over the course of my last semester in high school, and then the summer leading up to college, I let go of the idea Nashville, went to DBU and then, over the course of the next couple of years, let go of music as a career entirely.

It's still a hard thing for me to think about today.  I still consider myself a musician, though I have no real areas in my life in which I can stretch those muscles.  Nashville and the place of reverence it once held in my mind, today represents the loss of a dream.  Maybe that's just the way life is in the big, bad real world, and maybe everyone has their own Nashville.  I don't know.

I guess the timing of Amanda's post had a lot to do with the memories it brought up for me, because I find myself, in a strange way, similarly anticipatory.  I'm at the point in my life where I feel like I'm on the verge of a big change, though I'm not really ready to share it widely and not really sure what will come of it, if anything at all.  But I'm very much channeling the same emotions today that I had back then.

I'm interested to see how the disappointments of that time in my life fuel the decisions I'll be making in the future.

Some Random Musical Recommendations

A few things I've been meaning to mention for a while.

• Apropos of the Six Feet Under from a few weeks ago, there's an acoustic version of "All Apologies" on the compilation, "With the Lights Out" that is worth the whole double album.  It's just Kurt Cobain in front of a tape player playing what, I think, is his best song.  He just finds a groove that anyone who's ever played the guitar (and, let's face it, one of the beauties of Kurt Cobain was that it isn't too difficult to believe that you can play it) will recognize.  It's a completely different song, raw, and totally worth it.  iTunes has it available for download (I'd provide a link, but I haven't mastered the ability to link to iTunes yet).
• Athlete's "Vehicles and Animals" is an addictive little album.  Their second album, "Tourist", has just come out, but I keep going back to "V&A". The lead singer is so cockney he's almost New York, and the style is pop, but never boring.  "Westside" and "One Million Things" are the highlights, though the title track is brilliant, too.  This is a band to watch.
• I met Kristy Kruger a few years ago, when I tried to hit on her at a bar, but failed so miserably that I ended up following her out to her car.  It wasn't my finest moment, but she was very gracious.  This was all before I knew she was a singer, and, as it turns out, she's a very, very good songwriter.  "Bachelor of Apathy" was my indoctrination into her infectious (how cliched is that? I am never going to be a music critic) style.  "The Noise I Make" was very highly received in local circles, and is one of my favorite albums.  Her newest album, "The Unauthorized Guide to Human Anatomy" has just come to my attention when I heard her on This American Life last week (for those who listened, she was the girl in the improv group who though the Salem Witch Trials came before WWI).  The songs on the new album are available for download, but do me a favor and help a local girl make good.  Trust me, this one's worth it.

Friday Random Ten - The "What the Hell Happened to the Friday Random Ten?" Edition

And I think I'll audit them, this week... Just to see what kind of coolness I'm rocking.

1. Falling Down the Mountainside - David Gray - Lost Songs (5/10).  I'm a fan, even if he was just a flavor of the month artist.  Lost songs is a great little, mournful acoustic set, and this song, while one of the more memorable, isn't one of my favorites.
2. Go - Moby - Mobysongs (5/10).  Why did I ever listen to Moby? It was back in my "Well, maybe I should give techno a try?" phase.  It never took, and neither did Moby.
3. With a Wonder and a Wild Desire - Flogging Molly - Within a Mile of Home (7/10).  I'm not as big a fan of Flogging Molly as I feel like I'm supposed to be.  They seem kinda gimmicky to me.  But this is a decent song.
4. Goodbye - Hootie and the Blowfish - Cracked Rear View (2/10).  Shit.
5. Clementine - The Decemberists - Castaways and Cutouts (6/10).  I can't figure out the Decemberists much like I can't figure out Wilco.  I get why people think they are good, I just can't figure out why people think they are great.
6. Rape Me - Nirvana - All Apologies (9/10).  One of their bigger hits, but still genius.  Kurt Cobain is one of the few people who can sing repeating lyrics ("I'm not the only one") and make them interesting each time he does.
7. Spaghetti Junction - Outkast - Stankonia - (7/10).  Note to self.  Must update my Outkast collection.
8. Fire Door (Live) - Ani Difranco - Living in Clip (10/10).  Ani's one of those artists that, if forced to chose, I'd have no hesitation in just taking her two double-live albums and running.  "Fire Door" is one of my all time favorite live recordings of her's. It's a toss-up between this and "To the Teeth" on the "So Much Shouting..." album.  A great retooling of one of her earliest songs, with a great groove, and captivating vocal.
9. My Name Is - Eminem - The Slim Shady LP (6/10).  I am such a cliche.
10. 40' - Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand (7/10).  I'm just starting to get to know them.  But don't forget, it can be a surprise when you ask a whore for the Franz Ferdinand in heavy rotation.

Clocking in at a 7.3 here.  That sounds about right for me.  Most people would describe me as around 75% cool.  It's the other 25% that can get a bit scary.  Your turn.