Crushed Dreams and New Hopes

On the heels of discoveries about Abraham Lincoln's watch and Shakespeare's portrait, CNN reported today that one of the great mysteries of the twentieth century has now been solved. In typically dry fashion, buried far under a story entitled "Hot dogs lead cops to burglary suspects," is an article saying that DNA testing has definitively proved that princess Anastasia Romanov died at the hands of the Bolsheviks. All I could think about was the children of the future who will watch Disney's Anastasia with the knowledge that it's all a romantic falsehood; the princess is dead and there are no such things as talking bats.



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In personal news I just ran karaoke at the Student Center. Maggie got me find a pirated version of Photoshop, so now I can do everything I want.
I listened to Beck's Modern Guilt finally and decided it's ok. Everything else is going fine. I have a revised list of birthday gifts that I need but never got:

• A black knit hat to replace the one that was stolen from me when I went to see Coraline.
• A dead animal to replace the one that disappeared.
• More Secret Chiefs 3 albums.

The Future is a Big Place

Hey fools,
Now that I'm back at Bennington it feels funny to write here because most of the people who read it already know what I'm doing daily as much as I do. It's like writing about being an amoeba for the amoebas you share a petri dish with.

What's new:
I had a birthday party. I'm now officially 22 and I feel younger than ever. I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way once my body starts to fail. No wonder old people are prone to depression. Growing up you get used to a constant personal sea change as you grow - each year you feel pretty distinctly different than the year before. But, it seems, once you hit 21 you sort of just go "So this is it? What's left?" All the fun parts of growing old are behind me. It's depressing to be in the middle of the prime of my youth knowing that for the rest of my life I'll just be fighting fat and wrinkles. It makes me wish our culture revered age and wisdom as much as we do youth. Where's my cane? Youth is wasted on the young! I used to be like you kids! What's a tanned, taught body to experience and worldliness? I need a drink.

But my party was fun. It got to the point I had wanted but dared not hope for - there was no room to walk and you had to just stay where you were standing. That's the sign of a successful party in the Barnes houses. Third Street represent! My glorified closet was decked out pretty well, too. Nice wedding lights and a portrait of Jesus staring down. This was, of course, not just to look festive, but because the Bow's traditionally offer our bodies into spiritual wedlock with Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on our 22nd birthdays in the hopes that we will be blessed with carrying the next Christ child. It didn't work for my mom so the burden's all on these here shoulders.
What the hell am I talking about? How's your side of the petri dish?

Annnnyways, the white russians flowed like water and the presents and tchotchkes ran to my open arms. Among them, $100 for amazon.com from my mom. I took the opportunity to buy some CDs I've been wanting like Self's amazing Gizmodgery (which I've had off SoulSeek for years now, but always wanted to make it legal, kind of like my love for Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has now been formalized), TVOTR's Dear Science, Beck's latest (I'm hoping for OK and prepared for the worst after the terrible concert I saw last summer), Low's Drums and Guns, QOTSA's Lullabies to Paralyze (same deal as Gizmodgery - a fucking fantastic album), Coldplay's Prospekts March (because I've completely embraced my love of their blandness), Hatfield and the North's The Rotters Club and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's List of Lights and Buoys.

Pretty good for $100, I think. I've been listening to Soundgarden's Down on the Upside a lot over the last couple of days. I got Superunknown when I was really young and it has engrained itself in me a long time ago - so much so that I can't really listen to it anymore because it's so familiar - but I didn't get Upside until college. Kind of like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden albums sort of sound heavily samey on first listen, I think, but after time the intricacies open themselves up. And really Kim Thayil is one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, Ben Shepherd is amazing and Chris Cornell generated enough goodwill from Soungarden to make me forgive Audioslave - just because he can't sing a song without wailing for the rafters doesn't mean he can't wail with the best of them.

The B-side of Down on the Upside is a little spotty and, to me, never really rises above "pretty good," but the A-Side is outstanding, from "Pretty Noose" to "Never Named;" it's flawless as far as I'm concerned.

Blah blah blah. While I'm wanking about music, here's a couple of the songs that have me the most excited about my amazon purchase:

Back to School Like Rodney Dangerfield

Prof. Whitehead may not want me here, but I'm back at Bennington to stay. All I have to do in order to graduate is pass one exam. With the help of zombie Kurt Vonnegut (Kurt Zombigut) I can do it, but I was up last night dancing at the Oingo Boingo show in the student center and performing perfectly executed Triple Lindy dives at the rec center. All for the love of my son...


Me

Stray notes:

• Today in class we read a piece by Martin Buber. I realised what loneliness is when I looked around and there was nobody to laugh with about the name "Buber."
• It's really cold outside. Whenever I walk out I find myself saying in my head "It's FA-FA-FA-FREEZING!" and wishing that I could say that to someone without them being irritated by it before remembering that that person doesn't exist.
• Emily made me a schedule, which is very nice of her. There is a man on it with my name on his shirt as D-Bow, with the "D" being a bow and the hyphen being an arrow. How have I never in the course of my life thought of that?
• There's someone on campus who looks like Adam Freed, someone who walks like Sean and someone who sounds like Brian Schultis (kind of). I wish people I didn't know would stop unintentionally imitating people I did.
• I had my first class with Margie-babe today. It was intense. I don't ever want a class to end again with out-loud readings from Holocaust survivors quickly followed by discussions of our majors ("Dance-Lit!").
• I told someone after watching the first episode of Friday Night Lights on Hulu that, though it is widely acclaimed, I don't think I could get into it because I'm not that nostalgic about high school and never really liked football. Then I watched two more episodes and proved myself wrong. Now I'm hooked! Go Panthers! I'm sad!
• I brought one of my dad's old pipes back from home after cleaning it out into my trashcan. When I was in the car to the airport I realized that the large piece of ash I had removed was the filter. Bummer. Now I need a new pipe. It will go well with my growing incense addiction; my room already smells like a head-shop, it might as well get some of the accouterments. Next: posters of aliens in a wintry forest of mushrooms peeing "4:20" into the snow.
  

Some Things

Whew, I haven't found time to write in here forever. I think my readership has dropped off to zero (to match the readership of my other, more self-indulgent blog). Today I still can't be assed to make a proper blog entry, but here are some things:

• I watched Demitri Martin's Comedy Central special yesterday and laughed and laughed. Comedy Central is my de-facto channel to put on while I'm packing eBay packages because stand-up makes for good background. They've been advertising Martin's new show every five minutes until I got sick of his floppy-haired visage. I was a big fan of Demitri Martin when he was the youth correspondant on the Daily Show and I've always thought his whole schtick was just a little bit grating and I couldn't figure it out until someone told me they thought he was a smug little shit. He is kind of a smug little shit, isn't he? I don't think I could hang out with him, funny or not.
• I'm going down to Roseberg, the town of my birth tomorrow. It will be a great pilgrimage. I will take pictures of the depression floating by on the breeze.
• I'm in the process of packing my childhood bedroom into boxes. It's a very strange experience. It's given me the idea for a book, though. I've had the desire to write clawing at my brain for weeks now, but I haven't had a good subject (that's probably why I don't write in here anymore. Plus, like I said before, I have more of a life now that I'm back in the US). But I think I'm going to contrast some of the dumb shit I'm throwing out with some of the sweet shit I inherited from my dad (a machete, a skull, mysterious teeth...). It will give me something to do in Sue's class.
• Tonight I'm seeing Lykke Li. I was stoked until someone told me she was just ok in concert. Now I'm medium-stoked.
• The other night I dreamed about mice crawling all over a burlap dummy hanging from the ceiling of our garage. I tried to beat the dummy so the mice would fall out and I could catch them in a brown paper bag, but I was failing. My friend told me the mice represented petty fears and annoyances. I don't know.
• I just looked in a notebook I was keeping during travel from Belfast to home. In it I wrote a in/out list for 2009. The best one: Out - High School Musical. In - Reform School Musical.
• I started writing a couple of blog entries the other day, but I got tired of them and the fizzled out. One was about the batshit craziness of the comic strip, Safe Havens, and how I'm sad they've replaced it in the Oregonian with a terrible local strip. The local strip is called Adams' Apples and is about a teacher named Mr. Adams who teaches a class of wise-alec, adorable elementary school kids. I like to imagine it's about Sean's future. The strip looks like it was drawn in MS Paint and most of the jokes are like yesterdays: Person A: "I'm looking for those tablets that help you lose weight. What should I ask my pharmacist for?" Person B: "Girth-control pills!" That shit makes Garfield look like Proust.

All Things Geek

• Today I finished posting all of my dad's old board games on eBay. The geek money's piling up! Nobody wants Assassin, though, which shocks me. Going by the box lid alone, it's easily the coolest game.
  
  
  From what I can tell, the game is like Taxi Driver except instead of a mohawk Travis Bickle has a mullet and his target is John McCain.
  
  Assassin's only competition on the cool-o-meter is the dashing fellow on the cover of Rail Baron, the "game of building railroad empires" (which I'm keeping for myself). He's There Will Be Blood but drunk.
  
  



• In other media news, my literature burnout has moved me to comic books. I read Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life, Debbie Dreschler's heartbreaking Daddy's Girl, a bunch of R. Crumb and now I'm halfway into Watchmen. I sure like them words when the come with lots of purdy pickshures. Reading the much hyped Watchmen, I totally understand why it's considered a classic. I didn't know how into it I was until I saw a preview for the movie the other day and had a nerdgasm. I hope it doesn't suck.
  



• As for music, I can't stop listening to Love's Forever Changes. Sometimes it sounds like someone going crazy, sometimes it teeters into hippie-dippy bullshit, but most of the time it's just an amazing beautiful album. I bought it for my dad but I don't think he ever really liked it. I'm not sure why. I can't embed anything from it, but check it out anyway.
  
• Today on TV there was a British movie from 1999 called Virtual Sexuality on. I remember passing it at Hollywood Video and always thinking that it was raunchy Cinemax-style porn. Little did I know that it was basically Just One Of The Guys but with shitty CGI. The amazing thing is how late-'90s everything about it is. There's bleached tips and Macy Gray everywhere. When my kids want to know what 1999 was like I'll hand them VHS copies of this, Can't Hardly Wait and Spice World.


• I'm afraid that all of my favorite TV shows are dying. I thought the last two episodes of The Office were pretty weak in comparison to what had been going on. What, so the Angela/Andy/Dwight triangle reaches a head and then the issue's dropped and everything's normal? No! I have a stake in these imaginary people's lives and I want resolution!
  
  Degrassi's long been put out to pasture, but that doesn't make its decline from pre-teen, Canadian guilty pleasure to pre-teen, Canadian guilty pain any more acceptable. Who are these new people that I'm supposed to care about? You can't just send characters to Africa and expect me to forget about them, Degrassi writers; not when you've left me with this:
  
  
  
  But what's really broken my heart is Skins. Oh Skins, I loved you so much! For those of you who aren't British and/or retrograding back to middle school, Skins' first two seasons were hella good. What started as a guilty pleasure (Matt warned me it was "Degrassi meets Rules of Attraction") turned into one of my favorite shows ever. But now? Let me list some of the offenses: extensive plots involving gangsters; penis-tattoos; drawn-out fart jokes; live goldfish-eating; characters nobody could give a shit about.
  
  These characters who seem to be drawn from imaginary TV-types rather than actual people - sensitive sk8r boi, walking pharmaceutical receptacle (Chris without the likability), Screech-like nerd who the former two are friends with for no discernible reason, xtreme maybe-lesbian (probably not) named Naomi Campbell (wtf??), twins (one's wild the other's not and probably is a lesbian). Oh, and Tony Stonem's little sister who the show keeps reminding us is totally attitude and anything-goes, yet somehow became way less interesting now that she talks. Skins - don't make me hate you. Please come back down to earth.
  

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Back to that irritating nerd and Darcy's froggy, Jesus-loving sister in Degrassi, let me put a question to you, world: is the nerd stereotype even relevant in 2009? Revenge of the Nerds? Fine. Saved By The Bell? Cool. The straight-laced programming geek in Virtual Sexuality? Ok. But now that the internet has taken over our lives and people camp out all night for Apple products is there still a cultural otherness to nerds? Look at tv - shows like The Office and motherfucking Chuck; movies like Rushmore and its imitators; the rise of Michael Cera and all indie quirkiness.

The outdatedness of the nerd stereotype really hit me when I was on the airplane from Belfast and they showed an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I guess it's a popular show, but it felt to me like something from another era. Haven't the nerds finally taken over? When the biggest movie franchises of the last decade have been The Lord of the Rings, comic book movies and Star Wars, I think we need to reevaluate things. Does this really represent a reality anyone thinks of as true anymore?



Of course, this is coming from someone who reads comic books, watches childrens' programming and then goes and writes about it in his blog, so what do I know?

Katy Perry, I Still Hate You

Ladies and gents, when I wrote my post about Katy Perry's enduring shittiness back in December, little did I know that it was going to be sent around the internet and discovered by actual Katy Perry fans. Increible! The power of this information super highway!

The responses I've gotten have inspired me to get back on that blog horse and ride, clarifying why Katy Perry sucks and you should hate her, too (that's hyperbole, middle schoolers; don't get in a tizzy yet). I'm happy to find that, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, Perry's 15 minutes lasted its rightful course. That doesn't mean she's gone, though. So let's hold our breath and go back in, taking it back to the opening lines of "Hot n Cold" again to pick that shit apart.

"You change your mind like a girl changes clothes"

Ok, so that's just playing with a hackneyed stereotype; not necessarily offensive, but certainly not trenchant or funny. It's the kind of thing that seems so outdated to me; an ignorant sweeping statement from a past age. It might as well be about women bringing home so many hat boxes that men don't have room for their golf clubs. "You make excuses like my wife makes supper - poorly! Har har! Now lemme tell you about airplane food!" More disturbing than the implication that women are fickle and indecisive (at least when it comes to clothes - they love their clothes, amiright?) is the implication that men aren't and shouldn't be because it's a feminine trait.
More on that later.

It goes on:

"You PMS like a bitch - I should know"

Here's where it gets more complicated. PMS, something that is inherently feminine (at least in the literal sense), is being used as an insult. Basically, "you're acting like a girl;" a little playground chauvinism. Like "don't be a fag," it's putting down a whole group of people for being different. More than that, Perry ropes herself into the inferior group. She's a fickle bitch and she's proud of it! But that doesn't mean you can be one, indecisive guy; unlike her, you can probably help it.

Where does this weird latter part come from? Why, it comes with help from the song's co-writers, Dr. Luke and Max Martin! Two men - surprise! See, if Katy Perry were just a shitty singer-songwriter things would be a little different, but the fact of the matter is that she is part of an industry made up of people - many of the men - who are capitalizing on selling this inferior, bimbo-bitch image to the very people it's trying to keep down. Not like it's trying to keep them down in some sinister/conspiracy-theory way - I doubt Dr. Luke, Max Martin or even Perry herself even thought about it - but a minstrel show's still a minstrel show.

That brings me, briefly, to Perry's bigger song, "I Kissed a Girl." Where once Jill Sobule tread with introspection, Perry struts with the lesbian-lite, attention-grabbing look-at-me attitude of a college girl who thinks it's wild to kiss someone of the same sex. Aren't I crazy? Bet you never thought you'd see me doing this! Fuck you, mom and dad! But don't worry, I still have a boyfriend and care what he thinks, so I'm not really an icky lesbian. That's hot, right?
On that note I could go into her failed single, "Ur So Gay," but that really speaks for itself doesn't it? Doesn't it??



But that's just who Perry is, old maaan! She's a crazy bitch who don't care what no one thinks!
You mean she's not a calculated, iron-on icon who was created to fill pockets? Then what do we make of her career starting point as the Christian pop singer, Katy Hudson? Ellen Carpenter at Spin Magazine says it better than me:

"But I can claim to be an old-school Perry hater. It began in 2004, when she told another music magazine, "I'm completely outrageous and I'll do anything for attention!" This from the daughter of two pastors, who had already attempted to be a contemporary Christian music star, but whose debut didn't skyrocket her to Michael W. Smith heights (despite Christianity Today calling her song "Growing Pains" "pure ear candy with the message that we're being molded perpetually into Christ's image")."

Now I know it's been almost ten years since Katy Hudson came out and I know that people can change, but my guess is that the change that came over Katy Perry was a desire for more money.

Now with that all said, I'm willing to pull the microscope out. I hate it when adults spend their time wringing their hands about the impressionability of today's youth. I was a youth not very long ago and I remember how little credit I got for my own intelligence. I also understand the argument that "the song's just fun." Why pick it apart?
Well, because it's everywhere. And kids are listening to it. And some kids - maybe not you bright young things reading this - are dumb as dirt; willing to swallow the old gender stereotypes that this contrived cash-cow is pushing.

Lastly, my speculation on the future of Katy Perry:
Next comes the weak sophomore effort with songs that sound like "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot n Cold" but less catchy. People will move on to someone else. Maybe Miley Cyrus will start flashing her crotch getting out of cars or something and that's where attention will shift.
After that, Katy Perry will reinvent herself, releasing a softer, more mature album of acoustic songs showing "the real Katy Perry." It will have a one-word title - probably Katy. One of the songs might be about God.
Then the world will forget...

Non-Post

So, while Bennington is letting it's current students out into the freezing Vermont tundra, I'm still here in Belfast. Only two more days after today, then it's on to Francia with mama mia (was that Italian? I don't know what I did there).
I've been spending my time here studying, drinking, saying goodbye and writing blog posts nobody reads.

Other activities:

• Sketching portraits based on people's Facebook photos, which is really just a big image library (if you're creepy).
• Reading my horoscope for 2009, as predicted by The Onion.
• Bulleted lists
• Trying to remember how to say "stabbed to death" in Old English for my test on Wednesday (it's "ofstingan")
• Listening to "Johnny Hit & Run Pauline" a gazillion times, by X, punk's cutest couple this side of Kim and Thurston:




• Discovering that dating is obsolete, courtesy of Mr. Charles Blow (...David Charles Blow??). That means if you haven't been going on dates much recently you're ahead of the curve. Go you! Go me!
  
• Spending all my UK pennies on a blank casette.
• Watching Top Gear and kind of understanding why it's the biggest show in the UK and not just a British Discovery Channel series. Kind of.
• Thinking about how I'm going to get to the airport but not actually planning anything.
  
• Procrastinating.
  

Odds and Ends

So I've got a real post in the works, but I don't feel like writing it right now, so I'm just going to share some things:

I've gone into detail before on my love of shitty political cartoons that I disagree with. In the midst of a bunch of fawning cartoons about Obama at Slate, there was this:



All the reasons that this cartoon is stupid are so numerous and obvious I won't go into them. I'll just let you soak it in. Really, cartoons that unintentionally mimic The Onion's intentionally awful editorials like the one below make me laugh. I love it when reality outdoes parody for ridiculousness. Also, no matter what, editorial cartoons are never really funny, but they can become transcendentally greatly awful when they apparently come from some paranoid, misanthropic crank who's scared of change and knows his way around a pen. I wish I could see what the artist of the above cartoon would have written about Lincoln's victory if he'd been alive then.



Today I went into city center to pick up some Xmas gifts. I got my mom some earrings and myself some CDs - among them Death Cab For Cutie's Narrow Stairs. I've always been put off by Death Cab's extreme blandness coupled with Ben Gibbard's irritatingly writerly lyrics. It's the same mixture that has always kept me away from the Decemberists as well. I took a writing class once where the teacher talked about how distracting it is to the reader when they can "hear the writing," and that's what I feel about the lyrics of both bands. The lyrics that "She can't relax with his hand on the small of her back/ and as the flashbulbs burst, she holds a smile/ like someone would hold a crying child" are beautiful and evocative but they seem too calculated and unnatural to me. There's a coat of self-satisfaction on the whole thing.

Regardless, I was won over by the feeling and hooks of songs like "Cath..." and "I Will Possess Your Heart." At least, won over enough to plop down a few pounds for a used copy. All that's a backhanded way of saying that a band that I've always rolled my eyes at put out some songs that I think are really affecting. The rest of the album still sounds a bit like the soundtrack to an indie waiting room to me, but, you know...

What does it do for my mixed feelings about the album that Ben Gibbard looks kind of like Rainn Wilson mixed with a Hobbit in this video? I haven't decided yet.



The other CDs I picked up were Exile in Guyville and Portishead's Dummy, two albums that get blessed with the "classic" label a lot but I've never really given much time. I also got Under the Big Black Sun by X, The Ink Spots' Greatest Hits and an album called The Magic Wurlitzer that I was really excited about, but I kind of underestimated the annoyingness of the Wurlitzer as an instrument. It's pretty interminable. But it was cheap and I guess if I ever buy a skating rink and can't hire my own organ player I'm set.

America Missed Out

Remember in 2004 when British band The Darkness blew the charts open with their disarming mix of winking over-the-top attitude and a sincere love of Queen? Their subsequent backlash (we were just talking about this, right?) must have come too quickly for their hometown friends Goldie Lookin Chain to break in the US. Or maybe it's because they're like a walking in-joke on British chav culture, which holds no cultural relevance in America.

Either way, Goldie Lookin Chain is an exquisitely stupid rap group who had five exquisitely stupid hits: "Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do," "Have Man Half Machine," "Your Mother's Got a Penis," "You Knows I Love You," and the extremely British slag off of Victoria Beckham, "Your Missus is a Nutter."

Just like The Darkness, Goldie Lookin Chain really says more about the people snickering at it than the people it's ostensibly making fun of. I always thought The Darkness made their irritating fans who were too self-conscious to indulge in glam rock without a safe layer of irony look worse than people who aren't embarrassed to listen to Journey or Boston. Likewise, listening to GLC was probably more comfortable to a lot of young British folks than listening to NWA was. Either way, check out this awesomely bad video for "Your Mother's Got a Penis" and imagine seeing this on American MTV.

Katy Perry, How I Hate You

Today I needed to share how angry Katy Perry makes me. I don't know if her 15 minutes is up in the States, but it keeps ticking over here (though it's definitely on a downswing). She reminds me of other artists in the past who I've stood on the sidelines and watched part of the world go ga-ga over (I know anyone reading this isn't included there, but, to prove my point, CNN chose to interview her the other day) just waiting for the inevitable backlash. I was trying to make a mental list of these other artists who were really hot one day only to have all of their fans disowned them the next. Of course, this happens a lot in the "indie" community - usually when a band gets semi-popular - but nobody but the indie community is listening to those bands, so it doesn't count. I was thinking more along the lines of Creed and boy/girl bands (also still strong in the UK), where it felt like the whole world went crazy for a little while before dumping them. What other names am I trying to think of?



Anyway, the point is, Katy Perry is one of those artists - I can tell she's one of them because I can't seem to write about why she's so awful, the reasons seem too glaringly obvious for any right-thinking person. This isn't snobbery, it's common sense. The levels of ignorance and faux-attitude in the first line of "Hot n Cold" speak for themselves, don't they? Don't they, world??

"You change your mind like a girl changes clothes/ Yeah, you PMS like a bitch, I would know."

Nothing could make me angrier than a walking Betty Page-lite miming feminine empowerment, yet undercutting it with retrograding gender stereotypes and calculated sass. How can you hear lyrics like that without seeing the league of middle-aged, male writers who put the song together (Dr. Luke and Max Martin, in this instance)? Isn't it a bit like the white guys at Disney writing James Baskett's Uncle Remus-jive talk in Song of the South? There's condescension just dripping off the thing. The message coming from these lyrics is that women are inherently fickle and bitchy. Because they're not girls, men should be above these traits, but women can't help it.



And it's not that I'm just an overprotective dad, but it disgusts me to see middle schoolers choking down this kind of thing. It's like those shirts little girls buy that say "Spoiled Princess" or whatever, thus reinforcing this Super Sweet 16 attitude; telling little boys and girls that it is appropriate and desirable for girls to be sassy, sexy bitches. I'd rather Jeff Dunham were popular with todays youth.

The bottom line is, that, like Creed before her, I will be happily relieved when Katy Perry falls on her face. I look forward to her lame sophomore release that will cause the Disney Channel Generation to find some new pop tart to worship, while Perry joins Fergie and Avril Lavigne in outdated corporate sex-symbol purgatory (Fergatory?).

HEY KIDS! You don't understand my points? You wanna read an updated opinion on why I hate Katy Perry? You think I'm an old jerk who just doesn't understand and wanna send me some more hate mail? Then bop on over to the new and improved rant and tell me what you think!

Girls Aloud Made Me Made Me Love Them

If you were to ask me which song most defined my Belfast experience it would have to be "The Promise" by Girls Aloud. You should really watch the video while trying not to hate it and simultaneously trying not to love it.



I've heard this song at least a hundred times since I landed here, none of them of my own free will. Unlike that shitty Kid Rock song and all of Katy Perry's songs which refuse to stop being popular here, this Girls Aloud song has entered my ear and begun to control me like the yerks from the Animorphs books. I don't like it or respect it, but it has turned my hatred for it into a grudging affection, even though it sounds like a hybrid of No Doubt with the Spice Girls at their euro-trashiest.
This video is also a good barometer for what the music scene is like here. In a word: shit. But Stockholm Syndrome has set in and I'm beginning to understand my captors and sympathize with them.

Runner ups:
The Saturdays - Up.
This song is a boring version of "Disturbia":



Who Da Funk - Shiny Disco Ball:
You may think this is the trashiest of euro-trash and you wouldn't be wrong. But don't get too snooty, Jack; the atrociously-named Who Da Funk are from the US. I feel dirty by association.

Hunger

I want to go have dinner but the freshmen I'm living with are singing along with and dancing to a boy band cover of Nickelback's "How You Remind Me" and I don't want to get involved.

Multi-National Mediocrity (co-starring Robin Williams)

Now, when I talk about pop culture differences between Ireland and the US I usually find myself neatly picking out the worst, most glaring aspects of Irish pop culture (the ones most visible to me) and juxtaposing them with my favorite aspects of US culture (likewise). But that mindset overlooks perhaps the ugliest sides of both, which, to my mind, are products of seething banality. Both in the US and here I'm shocked by the terrible, terrible mediocrity that is embraced nationwide.
I hear myself getting on my high horse again, which is never fun to read. I don't mean to sound like some Chuck Klosterman-like arbiter of holier-than-thou taste.
But I do know what I like and what annoys me:

I've bitched before about how passable, Nashville blandoids The Kings of Leon are treated like rock gods here. Am I crazy? I mean I know it's not terrible, but it's not that amazing is it? Doesn't it sound like the Rock 'n' Roll Generator is set on "Default?"
That said, "Sex On Fire" is kind of fun.



I've been trying to find an analogous mediocre American band that also made it big here. I knew there must be sweet, sweet examples of middle-of-the-road history repeating itself. Imagine my happiness when someone told me that the Fun Lovin' Criminals were huge in Ireland for years and are even still touring. Don't remember them? Yeah you do:



Of course, when the Northern Irish aren't runnin' around robbin' banks all whacked off of Scooby Snacks they're watching X-Factor, which, like American Idol is complete shit. Unlike American Idol, though, everyone tunes in weekly, from old grandpas to 8-year-old girls. And Northern Ireland even has it's own horse in the race, the living Cupie Doll that is Eoghan Quigg:






Speaking of that awful Snow Patrol song, they played that at halftime during the Northern Ireland football match I went to. There's a lot of support for local artists.

But could anything drop my spirits and lift my ire like the fact that universal boil Jeff Dunham has wormed his way into the hearts of people in both the US and the UK? I turned away from the US, embarrassed that Jeff Dunham's Christmas special was the most-watched program in Comedy Central history, only to find that Northern Ireland has embraced his hacky, broadly-racial ventriloquist act, too. It's this kind of humor that makes me even miss the out-and-out, inarguable atrociousness of someone like Carlos Mencia. It's the type of thing I'm almost sure my dad's side of the family undoubtedly thinks is great (other things they like: the movie August Rush, Josh Grobin, church)
Why, world, why? Why do the freshmen I live with quote Achmed the Dead Terrorist to me?
I dare you to watch all 11 minutes of this clip - the most popular youtube clip in my hall at the moment - without clawing your eyes out so you can get to your brain to switch it off:



Oh, but it's not all question-setup/answer-punchline with a dead terrorist puppet; there are plenty of other too-bland-to-be-offensive stereotype puppets on display.
Like Sweet Daddy D! The lisping, jiving, black pimp!



Look at that lily-white crowd laugh! But Jeff didn't forget about them. What about hillbilly Bubba J? He likes - get this - watching Nascar and drinking beer! Haha! I relate to that!



And who could forget Jose Jalapeno. He's a sleepy Mexican pepper... on a steek! Watch purple abomination Peanut tell him what we're all thinking - your accent is funny! "What the hell is feeling "cchhhappy?" You fucking freak!



US and Ireland: this is your culture. You have the power to kill it; you have the power to make it stronger.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Speaking of August Rush, I had to go imdb to remember it's name. While there I looked at the movies that Robin Williams currently has in production. Listen to these plot synopses and tell me that you can't already picture the movies in your head/ have maybe already seen them:

• The Krazees - "Unable to deal with his daughter reaching puberty, a psychologist (Williams) has to get a handle on his emotions, which have come to life as different characters."
• Old Dogs - "Two friends and business partners find their lives turned upside down when strange circumstances lead to them being placed in the care of 7-year-old twins."
• World's Greatest Dad - "A comedy about a man who learns that the things you want most may not be the things that make you happy, and that being lonely is not necessarily the same as being alone."

Hey, I have a script: unable to deal with the pressures of making a few good movies in the '90s, Robin Williams handles his emotions by becoming a giant self-parody.
That, or Hook 2.

Norwegian Thrill Explosion

CNN Headlines of the day:
Winner of World's Ugliest Dog contest dies
Message to Mormons: Stop baptizing dead Jews
Ted Turner: 'I'm not chased by demons.'
Are you rude? Maybe you should think again

Last night, when not racing through Great Expectations, I was watching some sweet music videos from Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp. Ch-ch-ch-check it out (in order of favoritude):












Awww, poor Leno

Strap another horse to the bitchin' post

Dear Belfast and friends in Belfast,
I'm a little drunk right now, but before I go to bed I have a confession to make: I hate your music. The music you listen to here is, almost without exception, complete shit.

Before coming over to the UK I labored under the delusion that there was great music in Britain that never made it over to the US due to our cultural differences. I was wrong. America actually does a great job of making sure your Euro-trash nostalgia has as much chance of crossing the Atlantic as British soldiers in redcoats.

I tried to reach out and find common ground, like the Knife, Lykke Li and hip-hop from the '90s, but you rejected me. I wouldn't feel so hostile if you hadn't derided my music, instead putting on the following songs:







Don't fuck with me, Belfast, I know I'm right. The year 2000 is over. You need to move on. None of this is viable music, even if (especially if) you have to put a rave beat behind it and drop pills to make it relevant.
And don't get me started on that fucking Kid Rock song. If you didn't know who Lynyrd Skynard was before hearing it, you certainly haven't been "singing 'Sweet Home Alabama' all summer." Also he rhymes "different things" with "funny things," which is not something a "Rock and Roll Jesus" would do.

Also, please stop playing Blink 182 and Wheatus' "Teenage Dirtbag." It's like rolling a corpse over just to smell it fresh. Some things deserve to be buried!

A Love Letter to... the Mid-'90s: 1994, pt. 1

So I'm back in N.Ireland and I've so many stories to tell. But instead of doing that, I'd rather write more about '90s music. I was initially thinking that I'd write about important albums in a chronological order. Then I thought that I'd do it alphabetical by bands... I've decided that I'm gonna do some mix of the two. Mostly I want to communicate albums that are timeless to me and examples of how awesome I think the mid-'90s were.

Obviously everyone's got their own classic albums and their own tastes. On the whole I fucking hate music journalism, so this is just a personal account. Plus I can't speak for albums I haven't heard, so I would never purport to write about albums on a whole. I'm much more comfortable writing a field guide for albums that have been important to me and that I think sound of their time while being timeless.

Like I said before, I draw a circle around 1994-1997 - between Kurt Cobain's death and the release of Radiohead's OK Computer is the sweet spot. There are albums building up before '94 and echoes afterward, but there is something distinct about those four years. Genres were merging and shifting and, most importantly, exploring.

Let's start with 1994. It was the year that OJ Simpson led reporters on a chase after killing his wife and Ron Goldman. Meanwhile, figure-skating competitor and Portland-home-town-hero Tanya Harding and her husband had rival Nancy Kerrigan's knee bashed in. And, of course, after putting on REM's seminal album, Automatic For the People, Kurt Cobain blew his head off in his Washington home with a shotgun.

This was after Nirvana's appearance on MTV's Unplugged (a show that could not exist anymore), but before the album came out. Though they'd just released an album produced by Big Black's Steve Albini in an attempt to counter the perceived commercialism of Butch Vig's treatment on Nevermind and return their sound to sludginess, the Unplugged in New York episode and album helped convert the hesitant to accepting Cobain as the (unwilling) voice of his generation. Perhaps the most powerful moments in the concert are the band's covers of some of Cobain's heroes - David Bowie, Leadbelly and the Meat Puppets (who show up on stage to help out):




Meanwhile, fellow grunge-elite Alice in Chains had also stripped away the distortion to create their quietest, most heroin-soaked album Jar of Flies. As with Unplugged, the less harsh sound lent the album an understated power that was subtly effective in ways the band had not been before (not coincidentally, Alice in Chains had their own episode of Unplugged, which is pretty good, too). It was also a daring move for a group whose fan base consisted of more hesher, metal-heads than most of their grunge contemporaries.

(There's a great music video of "No Excuses" out there, but the embedding is disabled so I'm posting this video of someone's vacation pics instead)




And while Kurt was busy bearing the burden of everyone liking him, his wife, Courtney Love's - at that time just as respectable, if more-unknown - star was on the rise. It was shortly after her husband's death that Love's band, Hole, released it's breakthrough (and best) album, Live Through This. In the years since Cobain's death that Love's star has dropped tragically and drug itself around through the mud (with plenty of help). It's a shame that her tattered personal life has completely overshadowed the fact that, at her best, Courtney Love was an amazing, charismatic singer and songwriter in a genre that was (and still is) too much of a boys' club.




Back in the boys' club, the Stone Temple Pilots were putting out their second album. Emerging on the scene a couple of years earlier, STP was still a couple of years too late to be taken seriously. Though successful commercially, the band was derided by critics as being nothing but a Pearl Jam knock-off.
Indeed, if everything they put out had continued sounding like their debut, Core, then this derision would be founded, yet the follow-up, Purple, was it's own beast; a more mature, layered record. In part because the guitar/bass duo of the DeLeo brothers had the jazz chops to lead the group into more intricate places and in part because Scott Weiland, presumably tired of being called a poseur, was conked out of his gourd on heroin, Purple is deeper and more interesting than anything Core hinted at, with tracks like "Big Empty" touching on sadness more profound than the . The album begins with the rolling "Meat Plow" (I remember asking my dad what a meat plow was, thinking it was some sort of farm equipment - he told me it was a penis. In the context of the song, neither makes sense) and ending with a hidden track of Weiland crooning smooth jazz.
Famous, of course, for "Interstate Love Song," and lesser hits "Big Empty" and "Vaseline," there are so many indelible songs on this album, though, that it's a shame that STP remains more of a punch-line than a respected band.




And while Stone Temple Pilots were being compared unfavorably to Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder's band had critics scratching their heads. Upon releasing their monumental debut, Ten, Pearl Jam were saddled with so much critical acclaim it seemed to feel the need to buck it at once. The more people wanted them to be "grunge as it should be," the more Eddie and co. tried to be something else.
Their third album, Vitalogy, was one of many "fuck-you, take-me-as-I-am" records Pearl Jam gave to a head-scratching public that eventually diminished to a cult. Part of the message was Vedder's unhappiness with the still-new CD technology compared to vinyl. In response, Vitalogy was released on vinyl two weeks before CD and sported the unfortunately-named song "Spin the Black Circle." Other parts of the message were off-putting tracks like the accordian-accompanied rant, "Bugs" the bizarre "Satan's Bed," and the bizarre-r "Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me." At this point in their career, though, Pearl Jam were still magic men and the public ate up anything they did. The fact that the album sported strong tracks like "Better Man" and "Tremor Christ" didn't hurt either.




Meanwhile, a band truly deserving of the accusations laid on Stone Temple Pilots, Live, put out their breakthrough album, Throwing Copper. One can draw a line through famous Eddie Vedder impersonators with diminishing returns: Scott Weiland -> Eddie Kowalczyk of Live -> Scott Stapp of Creed -> Nickelback. While I consider STP to be a greatly overlooked band, Live not so much (though I think their name is pretty clever).
This album, though, features some really good songs. And it was produced by Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, as if to single-handedly give it cred. Among those songs is "Selling The Drama," which hints un-rock-like to Kowalczyk's Christian leanings, and perrenial adult-contemporary favorite "Lightning Crashes," perhaps the only top-40 song to ever contain the word "placenta." For my money, though, the best song is the riveting starter, "The Dam at Otter Creek." In my favorite Vedder-impersonation to impersonate, you can hear Kowalczyk get fired up as he sings the lyrics, as if he can't wait to let loose in a Vedder-like howl: "took a dead man to the riivvvveerrrr...." The album hits it's silliest moment in the overwrought silliness of "Waitress," Kowalczyk's plea for tipping, due, inpart, to the fact that the waitress in question, though a bitch, "wore a funky dread in her hair." "Leave some change behind... some fucking chaayy-yee-ayyeeeyange!"




And lastly for this entry, Soundgarden put out Superunknown, a sprawling album that completely sums up the ambition and excitement of this period. It's hard to write with any objectivity about this album; when I got it for $6.00 in middle school it absolutely did my head in. Everything I try to write about it is just gushing - just to warn you.
Let me first state my problems with Soundgarden: Chris Cornell is one of those vocalists who has an amazing range, yet uses it on every song, thus eliminating subtlety and surprise. Likewise, Soundgarden could sound sludgier and heavier than almost any mainstream band, a fact they employed almost too often, making their music drag somewhat.
But, both of these facts are offset on Superunknown by the amazing versatility of the writing and the virtuosity of the playing. Unlike prog bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or metal bands like Metallica, Soundgarden could play intricate, complicated songs without seeming to break a sweat. Charting time signatures while listening to this album is a real treat for me, nerd that I am. I love that even on singles like "My Wave" or "Spoonman" they make liberal use of 5/4 or 7/8 while making it sound natural and easy: almost unheard of elsewhere. I'm gushing again.
For Superunknown, Soundgarden's sound had also transformed into something new. Ben Shepherd's songs like "Half" and "Head Down" are almost unclassifiable, as are "4th of July," "Like Suicide" and "Black Hole Sun," though the latter's freshness has been dampened by years of radio overexposure.
I could go on and on, but I don't want to sound like an infomercial. I'll just end this entry by saying that any album with "Black Hole Sun," "Spoonman," "The Day I Tried to Live," "Fell On Black Days," and "My Wave" on it would be bound to be a classic. However, on Superunknown these singles are part of a much deeper portrait that, as this writing attests, is very personal to me. I love this album - it is a perfect example of the promise that grew out of grunge's death of something bigger and stranger.




Wow! It's really fun to write about albums that I like. Is it any fun to read about them? Is anyone reading about them? Did you find anything here that you liked? Hated? Leave me a comment, friends.
Next time - More '94, less "post-grunge" more "alternative."

A Love Letter to... the Mid '90s

I've been thinking over the past couple of days about my favorite period in modern music. I think that, when reminiscing, every music nerd has a space of a few years that holds a more specialer place in their heart than all other periods. It's not that this period is better than any other - it's just that they identify with it more than any other. Some people love early '60s rock, or late '60s, or late '70s glam, or mid-'80s new wave, etc. etc. I have a correlating theory that one's magic period is usually focused on the time that they, themselves, became aware of the music coming out around them.

At least both of these things are true for me. Somewhere wedged in my chest is a hollow of glitz and glitter devoted to post-grunge, '90s alternative circa 1994-1997. In reality, the whole decade has me in love with it from the 1989 stirrings of Mudhoney, Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, the Happy Mondays, Faith No More and Primus to the final death-rattles that alterna-rock gave as it was successfully co-opted by adult-contemporary radio to be replaced by boy- and girl-groups and the likes of Matchbox 20 and the Goo Goo Dolls.

But, to my mind, after Cobain died the muddy self-seriousness of grunge filtered into a mainstream stew with Brit-pop, electronica, funk, punk, folk, blues, etc. to create a really exciting mixture of sounds that, to my ears, look more to the future than most of the throwback rock/pop that makes it onto the radio now. From the likes of the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Hives and (ugh) Jet to the Killers, the Bravery, Interpol and (ugh) She Wants Revenge to the Kings of Leon and whatever other bland bullshit has been bumping for the past three or four years, mainstream rock radio has become populated with bands that traffic in impersonating attitudes and sounds by bands that did them better decades ago.
It's not that the mid-'90s were a font of originality born fully-formed out of a vacuum, but there was a sense of reaching for something new. Today bands reach to the past; retro is in, whether it be murky carbon-copies of the Velvet Underground or Joy Division.

Modern indie-rock, for it's part, has become Ouroboros-like. Fans look for bands based on contrived shticks and self-conscious flailings to set themselves apart from other groups, leading to bizarre sub-sub-categories of music by fans trying to distance their pet-groups from others. "They're like this freak-folk, sleaze-core group from New Hampshire, but they all wear black stockings on their heads so they can't see what they're doing. At the end of the show the lead singer always dresses up like a butterfly and runs through the audience. Their name is unpronouncable, because it's entirely made up of Arabic punctuation." Music has become overlooked for cache and gimmickery causing the turn-over rate for hot new bands has become miniscule.

Meanwhile mainstream rock has become almost non-existant leaving bands-least-likely-to like Nickelback and Hinder to wear the mantles of rock kings.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But it wasn't always like this.
Over the next couple of days I want to write about my favorite albums of my favorite 4 years of music. They will almost definitely not match up with anyone else's tit-for-tat, so I want to know from people reading this about their favorite period of music. Who else identifies with a musical chunk of history more than any others? You have to answer, cuz this post will look really sad with no comments on it.