I have two favorite Devotchka songs so far - maybe three now - and they played one - maybe two - Saturday night at the Fillmore in Philly. It was a good show...I don't really feel like my life has been enriched by the odd encore of scantily clad gymnast, but oh the string section, and the intricate piano work, and the sheer temerity of the sousaphone. And the mariachi trumpets. And his voice.
Quite a tasty little wine, this odd combination of shiraz and viognier. It's a red wine that tastes fizzy without actually being fizzy...that makes your stomach sparkle...a mouthful of it is the opposite of dank. Which we can all use some of in New York this unsparkling, unfizzy, undelightful spring.
Every so often, I hear a single song and I know that I have to be able to hear it again whenever I want for the rest of my life, and probably whatever other songs it has been packaged with on a CD as well, and that I must possess this capability immediately.
This happens less and less often as I grow more cautious about all the previous CDs bought on a similar impulse that turn out to be, well, junk. But it remains a happy impulse when I can't rationalize myself out of it, and so it was yesterday morning.
Now that we've got a decent radio station in NY at 91.5FM, my alarm clock tunes in at 7 a.m., just in time for the NPR round-up, after which I usually drag myself out of bed. But yesterday this song comes on after the news and glues me to my mattress until it decides that it has had enough of me, and ends. Partly because of the determined guitar strum that kicks in at beat one and carries all the way through, building at around 2:20 to a great contemplative noise before pausing and then striding forward again. Partly because of the lyrics, which are simply true, and were especially true for me yesterday morning, and start off something like:
So I'm there Charging around with a juggernaut brow Over draft speeches and deadlines to make Cramming commitments like cats in a sack Telephone burn and a purposeful gait When out of a doorway the tentacles stretch of a song that I know And the world moves in slo-mo Straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day
And partly because of the ending - is that "Summertime" being played so faintly in the background? Curious...
"The Bones of You," this song is called (listen here), by Elbow, who I had previously lumped into the "another indie band that I don't have time for" category. No longer.
As a postscript to my marching band post, I have just accidentally watched a video called "Talkin' Out Da Side Of Ya Neck" by a group called Dem Franchize Boyz, the Charming Olde Shoppes of the rap world. The video features a marching band and a repetitive brass line that could be played by a lone horn player who regrouped after proving unable to master, say, the C major scale in junior high band.
The song appears, fortunately, not to be about tracheotomies (tracheotomiez?), but instead to be about lying jerks.
I usually don't listen to music when I run. For a lot of reasons: my ears I guess are weirdly shaped because the buds fall out; and they sweat and that's just kind of nasty; but mostly because the beat of the music interferes with my running. I find myself trying to keep time with the music, and I just can't get any kind of groove.
But a couple nights ago, I'm at my local NYSC, curse its raggedy soul, at the tail end of a run on the treadmill, and this Jay-Z song comes on the usually garbage in-house video network, and damned if it didn't exactly match my tempo, and damned if I didn't run for an extra five minutes because it was so perfect.
Michael Beasley has disintegrated my desktop computer and probably all my music files therein (it's a long story). Now I must struggle with the unhappy decision of buying a new hard drive and taking the old one to a specialist to try and salvage my stuff, or just reloading the OS and starting over with a clean slate. The latter option is tempting considering my low tolerance for bureaucratic BS, but oh, the music I will lose...
A happier tale lies in the Hungry March band, New York City's off-kilter group of musicians of varying talent who play just because they want to. I ran across them - I think it was them - at the entrance to Prospect Park, pumping out a goofy version of something I recognized vaguely. "One, two, three, four!" they all shouted several times, over a rhythm that went "bam-a-lam-a-ding-dong."
I knew I knew that, so off I went to my computer. Typing in "bam-a-lam-a-ding-dong" turned up a variety of interesting things, including the news that this was a song by someone named Barry Mann, but I knew that wasn't what I knew, so I found myself on Wikipedia, where mass intelligence quickly led me to what I remembered that I knew I knew.
I am inspired by Mr. Dan Kelly's list of books he has actually managed to kill off to post my own list of neglected books which are gathering dust on bookshelves or elsewhere and which I WILL read before I buy more books, dammit. Yeah sure (in my predicted order of actually getting read):
Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra
Wall Street Noir, featuring a short story by Henry Blodget??? Curious.
And there are about another 20 that I ought to just put out on the curb because I am clearly never going to read them. I'm so uninterested in them that I'm not even going to list them here.
For eons, I've been trying to build a playlist of marching band-inspired music - let's qualify that: an enjoyable playlist of marching band-inspired music - and was motivated by Vampire Weekend's recent incorporation of a high school drumline in their lineup to finally get this list out of my head and onto blog.
We aren't talking anywhere near CD length yet, and without Missy Elliott we wouldn't even be talking EP, but here ya go:
My favorite marching band-influenced performance evuh is Kanye West's Jesus Walks, which he did live with the Ohio Central State marching band for "Dave Chappelle's Block Party". Irritatingly, the only way to see or hear this performance is to buy the DVD (which I did, but still). It didn't make the CD, and there's no trace of it online. Grumble. Hating on whatever copyright laws are keeping me from enjoying this someplace other than my TV.
We'll just have to content ourselves with these other offerings. Can something be simultaneously whack and dope?
*JC Chasez: Blowing Me Up With Her Love. This song was made for marching band. Literally. It appears on the soundtrack to the movie "Drumline," a fine example of the movie genre of good teenager A faces off against bad teenager B, goes through trials and tribulations, and ultimately, unsurprisingly and tritely, triumphs.
*Gwen Stefani: Hollaback Girl. Gwen kind of lost me with the whole Harajuku girl thing, but I still dig this song. Wind It Up has a similar vibe.
*Missy Elliott: Bad Man. Missy loves her some marching bands in general. But she especially loves them on "Bad Man," which is all about the tuba. As anyone who's ever been in band knows, that's, well, whack.
A few other also-rans: Eve's Tambourine, which makes solid use of drum major whistle, but is devoid of energy, and Outkast's Morris Brown, which is a full-on marching band extravaganza and even talks about marching bands, but somehow completely lacks excitement. And Destiny's Child with Lose My Breath. Yawn.
I don't know why this list is all hip-hop. Is marching band inherently anti-rock? What am I missing?
A friend I hadn't seen for nine years was, awesomely, in town last weekend. Needless to say, we had some catching up to do. One of the things we did was reminisce about Russian music - especially bad Russian music.
I reminded him of Ivanushki International (Little International Ivans), the Russian equivalent of the Backstreet Boys. I particularly love this song, which translates as "I'll be yelling about this all night," for its lovely combination of classical riff and disco beat and its tuneless screaming about something that ought to be romantic ("I seriously love you! I really hope you love me too! And I'll be yelling about it all night!" And then they put it in the third person for a chorus of screaming: "He seriously loves you! He hopes you love him too! Etc.")
He, in turn, introduced me to this wonderful horribleness, which isn't strictly Russian (it's Ukrainian) but certainly qualifies in terms of cheesy, huh?-inducing strangeness. Or wait, maybe that's just a characteristic of European popualar music...
I'm only writing this post because I stumbled across "Osaka Loop Line" before the vast majority of the tune-oblogosphere, which never happens. I would also like to take this opportunity to brag that I saw Vampire Weekend for free - FREE - at some weird outdoor amphitheatre down on the East River by the F train East Broadway stop last summer. In the audience were lots of overdressed Williamsburg kids, some folks from Virginia on whose floor the band had crashed, and a guy with a video recorder who was maybe a dad? Vampire Weekend still was a little frayed around the edges, which made them even better. It was a beautiful day to take off your shoes and listen to a little ska.
I'll be real curious to see what happens to this band in the over-hyped new media world that we live in. I'm wondering if it's even possible to have a "next big thing" anymore, given the backlash to the backlash to the backlash environment that now dominates.
I've been vaguely conscious of the Shout Out Louds as that band with the one song that you can sing along with loudly and that is easily confused with a rather similar LL Cool J song..."Let's call this the comeback...mumble mumble"...but otherwise I had pretty much ignored them. But when my Magnet indie rock magazine declared their follow-up album one of the top 20 of last year I revisited them.
This song is pretty good objectively. It also happens, for me, to be that rare song that burrows its way into your consciousness just because it happens to exactly match your mood the very first time you listen to it.
Watching that Memphis-Texas game last night was painful no matter which team you were rooting for. As somebody down the bar from me put it about Texas' last five minutes desperation hack-a-Tiger strategy, "It's like Hillary Clinton's campaign!"
This book is so good, I can't describe it. Because when writing is really good, trying to convey it in my own lame words just diminishes it. So, this book is good. The chapter "The Thing to Do and the Place to Be" has blown a hole in my soul. Period.
Other things that are this good (in their own way):
Turn your head while it happens in your back yard Put your tough face on go on act hard Tell a story before you know what the facts are But everybody knows the truth.
The Ting Tings. As some other blog wrote, who doesn't love a song with the chorus "The drums/The drums/The drums/The drums"?
This song. Turn the volume up. Properly position your speakers. The Mae Shi.
It's hard to say, but the new Raconteurs album might be. You can find it if you look for it. Lots of reverb-y goodness. And some trumpets? Let's see if this uber-cool (love the piano player's tat) video persists on Youtube. If it doesn't, you can see it at their Web site.
Oh, and this. As the email forward I got proclaimed: EVERYONE SHOULD SEE THIS.
With all the basketball I've been watching the past couple of weeks, the Nike commercial that's been in heavy CNBC-like rotation on ESPN and CBS was bound to sink into my consciousness eventually. "What is that?" I finally thought to myself this morning as the song stirred me off my couch and towards my running shoes (which aren't Nike).
With the wonders of the Internet, it took me about two minutes to figure it out, and another two minutes to download the song. It's called "List of Demands," by a guy by the name of Saul Williams. Apparently first a poet and second a rapper, and has been around for years. This returns me to my eternal question: how can good music go so unnoticed for so long?
Nice work, Nike. Make a better shoe and I'll run in it.
Go see him live April 9 at Irving Plaza. Meanwhile, go here to get the song.
I have long been a fan of Luda's genius song, Area Codes, which, like Kanye's Gold Digger or Chingy's Dem Jeans, is just too funny to be offensive. So I can't stop giggling over the above map and link, which take the whole concept one step further. I'm particularly enjoying the Midway and Wake Islands speculation.
And, as my pal AMP points out, if you work in the media industry as we do, you can delude coworkers from afar into thinking you are staring at some weird delegate map, unless, of course, they overhear you snickering to yourself.
I never listen to New York radio, with the exception of WFMU, which technically is Jersey City radio. In the morning, I put on KCRW or KEXP archives streaming online. On the subway, my iPod. If I rent a car, CDs. I only rarely have the desire to listen to a--hole men on morning talk radio on K-Rock or latest vapid hit #45 on infinite repeat on Z100 or self-important yammerings on Hot 97 or anything on any Clear Channel station.
So this is the best news ever. Aptly titled Radio Liberation can't liberate me from death by NY radio soon enough.
I've been digging through my infinite Radiohead mp3 collection at the bequest of someone I think will become a friend, despite the fact that in one of our first meetings he blasphemed that he wasn't really into Radiohead. But he claimed redemption by declaring himself ready to be reconvinced, and asking what CD he should start with. Whereupon I of course offered a mix.
I'm still fumbling through my 24 versions of The Gloaming to find the perfect one, but I have already stumbled across a few random gems I had totally forgotten. Herewith:
I'm looking forward to this, which comes out next week and promises to be an album of really unique-sounding covers. It's hard to tell for sure, since the only stuff available online so far is the Pete Yorn/Kinky cover of "Use Me" - not as good as Grace Jones' campy version, but what is? - and a few snippets of the other songs. Still, promising.
Commentary on stuff I like, which is mostly music, but is sometimes, in no particular order, college basketball, wine, books, pop culture, media, weird business trivia, Brooklyn, good food, and other stoopid stuff. And sometimes, commentary on stuff I don't like, which includes but is not limited to, in no particular order, the MTA, rude people, too much work, and other stupid stuff.
I have two favorite Devotchka songs so far - maybe three now - and they played one - maybe two - Saturday night at the Fillmore in Philly. It was a good show...I don't really feel like my life has been enriched by the odd encore of scantily clad gymnast, but oh the string section, and the intricate piano work, and the sheer temerity of the sousaphone. And the mariachi trumpets. And his voice.
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