So, I have been thinking a bit about re-reruns (prompted, I must admit by a This American Lifeepisode about re-runs). This thinking has dove-tailed with some of my thoughts about the repeatability of the cover song and the tension between one ‘performance’ and another. Part of this thinking is a tortured attempt to try to justify what I am about to do today: repeat one of our posts.
Like my brother, I have found that the busyness of normal life (whatever that means) has gotten to be a bit overwhelming. The end of the semester has brought me a pile of grading, a CV-length of promised articles, and two children who are growing faster than I can imagine. This has kept me (guiltily) from having the time to write a quality post while also making me wonder whether or not this blog is doing what it should.
See, it has been suggested that the posts are too long and too discursive–and, as readership has ebbed and flowed, I have wondered what the worth is. This contemplation lasts a few minutes because, when it comes down to it, I enjoy writing this blog even if the act is entirely masturbatory.
“Goddess, sing the Rage of Achilles, the son of Peleus / the destructive rage that sent thousands of Greeks to their doom”
Homer, Iliad 1.1-2
(We never took time on this blog to note the passing and commemorate the memory of the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch. It is always a loss when a good man dies young. Coverage of his passing made me think of this subject.)
When I was younger I had the peculiar experience of dating a girl a few years my senior. Now, as far as the dating goes, there was really nothing unexpected or abnormal (indeed, it was a formative and not atypical adolescent firestorm); the peculiar part was that her (the Mix Tape Girl’s) younger brother was my age and in my classes at school.
Perhaps that is not all that strange—it was, however, a bit awkward. At the beginning he and I were not friends or really all that friendly. (In fact, I am sure he was not all that happy to have me around.) But, by the end of the relationship, we were friendly enough—we actually ended up in a related network of friends. We went to at least one movie together. He farted around me openly.Where the Mix Tape Girl was a little ‘alternative’ (but still close enough to the in-crowd), her brother started out a little nerdy without being a geek—that is, he took AP Physics and Calculus, but definitely wasn’t into Dungeons & Dragons or They Might be Giants. He was a bit of a clown, atypically kind in private, and charmingly goofy outside of school.
One day, when the two of us were working together at a convenience store, I was inflicting another conversation about my band on him. I am sure he heard me sing and play the guitar more than anyone not dating me or related by blood should have had to. But he never complained. Instead, he seemed to try to understand the maudlin lyrics, the prog-rock harmonies and the attempts to imitate TMBG on one day, Nirvana on the next, and bad folk music on the third.
I think I was complaining about how no one we knew would come see my band play. And then, he said it: “Why don’t you guys play more angry? You know, like Rage Against the Machine or something.” He impressed upon me the value of letting people feel pissed off, the adrenaline sparked by angry music.
In all honesty I have always been a little bewildered by the attraction of the heavier and angrier bands (to the extent that my own affinity for Fugazi is only half-hearted). Moshing, slam-dancing, intentional violence—all these things always seemed off to me. Of course, at the time, the alternatives were to be a full-fledged Lilith Fair supporter, or to dwell somewhere awkwardly between the extremes.
The angry, or aggressive side of rock was not a new phenomenon even then—the heavier sounds that arrived with Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath set the stage for the much later mainstream popularity of a band like Rage Against the Machine which drew on the Hard Core movement of the 1980’s. Punk, especially in its early days with the Sex Pistols, shared the same genes.
Of course, I did not think any of this that day behind the register as we sold 99 cent King Cobras to local drunks. Instead, I tried to figure out what such a kind, often quiet, and altogether ‘happy’ guy like my girlfriend’s brother found to identify with in the anger of Rage Against Machine and the mad noise of “Sabotage”?
The complicated answer I come to years later is that for most of us who lead normal lives, such flirtation with anger acts like an emotional release valve. On a cultural level, our raging musicians, artists (and sometimes crackpots) express the destructive emotions that might just destabilize society if they are given no release.
This is not to say that artists like Rage Against the Machine, Black Flag, or Fugazi have nothing to be angry about, but, rather, that their appeal to those who are not defined by protest and inspired to challenge authority confirms that they are filling a larger cultural need.
Or something like that.
But, when I think about this topic further, this explanation makes sense (although it needs nuance and support). Anger, or perhaps something more basic and animalistic like rage, appears as the central theme of one of the oldest narratives in the Western tradition, the Iliad, where the main character’s rage (Achilles) is so super-human that it not only destroys his enemies but it results in the deaths of his friends. In turn, as Achilles follows his anger to its (il)logical end, it secures his death as well. It is only when he gives up his rage to make common cause with Priam, the father of his enemy Hector, the man he kills and then whose body he disfigures in fury, that Achillles becomes something like a human. He re-enters society. To become a civilized man, he must foreswear his rage.
Led Zeppelin got angry. About a foot.
Yet, the society that tells his tale still ponders the dangers and effects of anger. Why? Because the sub-human, animalistic spirit resides within us—especially within men. I used to think that angry music was popular because anger is a simple emotion that often covers for more complex things. Now, I think that while anger may correlate with many other emotions—loss, frustration, jealousy, to name a few—it is more basic and profound than a mere cloak for tender feelings.
Anger, I could say, is that battle within as we negotiate the balance between our needs and the world that confounds us. Anger, on a larger scale, is the expression of fundamental disappointment in the way things are. Anger, when sampled even vicariously, must be tamed or released for us to live together in something like peace.
Or that’s the answer I have now for why a nice young man essentially implied that my band was too whiny and needed (as he put it later) “balls”. Perhaps this too may explain my brother’s disdain for ‘emo’. Who wants every day and self-pitying emotions when stronger stuff is on offer, when angry music lets us feel something or express something that we don’t find every day?
Here’s some real angry stuff:
And what do you think my brother? Does the theory pass the smell test? Did you ever think you’d read about Achilles and Black Flag in the same post?
As many who read us regularly may know, my brother and I have differing opinions on the hugely popular Mumford and Sons. It turns out that my opinion differs with most people as of late and I think I need to address this. I wrote last week about how even though they are not a rock band, they were still nominated for a rock category in the Grammys. I would never define them as a rock band but I think if I am going to keep spouting off how I hate the band that I should at least listen to the tracks I haven’t heard from their new album Babel.
My brother and I will both admit that sometimes we do not like things just because everyone else does. I try and not do this anymore and was often hypocritical because I do in fact love Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and numerous other bands that everyone likes because they are damn good bands. It’s okay to like bands that everyone else does which is a statement I will have to keep repeating to myself.
In a recent, honest, and soul-baring post, my brother daringly ventured into one of the two subjects verboten at dinner tables and water-coolers throughout the country—religion (we crossed the politics line a few times in the past few months, so why not get this one over with?). I responded with an ambling, sometimes senseless, and mostly unclear comment.
My brother’s moment of clarity and its relation to music, however, deserves more thought. It deserves more time. It deserves a weighted and patient consideration. Yet, I fear, I may not be the right person to do this. As I said in response to my brother, music is the one thing that has made me feel a sense of something greater (unlike writing, music can be powerfully communal). Despite these feelings, I remain skeptical and unsure whether feeling something beyond yourself has anything to do with the divine.
“Down to the River to Pray”, Alison Krause
This beautiful song has been in my head off and on since I first heard it on the soundtrack to O, Brother Where art Thou. The fact that the “Sirens” sing this song in the movie points to an uncomfortable connection between Homer’s seductive and dangerous creatures and religious music…
My brother wrote a few weeks ago about dealing with winters in the north and their effect on your psyche. He also stated that this issue basically disappeared when he moved to a southern climate; but I think this has a lot more to do with the fact that the man has no time to be morose with two young kids, a full time job as a professor and so on and so forth.
One of the many things that add to Seasonal Affective Disorder is that when it is extremely cold and/or snowy, you can’t do much outside unless you thrive on a winter sport like skiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling or whatever. Snow removal generally sucks as well (which we will discuss a little further along). The bad weather coupled with the come-down from the holidays and the crappy economy of the last few years has really made me feel this S.A.D. thing. I also tend to miss my father more around this time for the obvious reason that the anniversary of his death comes at the end of this month and the holidays really emphasize his absence.
So I had a long talk with my brother on the phone on this subject and one of the many ways we talked of dealing with these generally shitty feelings is to write about it in our blog. He has already sort of covered it and I will add my own experience right now. I’m lucky to have a brother that not only listens about why I feel like shit but also helps me look at various ways I can combat this yearly phenomena. Exercise, limiting of alcohol consumption and a renewed focus on finding a real job were key points. So here it is.
I hate Christmas this year. I didn’t always hate Christmas and I suspect I will not forever hate it, but right now, I am Scrooge. It’s not a misanthropic thing so much as a reaction to where I think I should be in life right now and the fact that the holidays seem to make mourning my father a thousand times more difficult. The latter reason also propels my mother to handle it by going ape-shit on the Christmas decorations and buying a very expensive tree which was three feet to big for the palatial home to handle.
But, please keep reading, I am not going to continue the negativity.
I miss my old man who also always hated the season because his father passed away in an extremely traumatic way during the holidays several decades ago. I also know the old man would not want me to wallow in sadness and he would be cracking jokes as best he could. Luckily for the case of being positive, because I bartend and because I know so many people locally, I have gone to several holiday parties and had some pretty hilarious experiences I am slowly feeling festive and I invite you to learn why.
No, I also have never heard “Aqualung” at a holiday party and it is actually in reference to a generally but slightly creepy DJ at the banquet hall where I tend bar. You will notice a theme of non-seasonal musical choices here although do not fret; there will be choice cuts along the way like my boy Derek Trucks doing “Greensleeves” which I know is kind of a Christmas song right? Anyway, I digress as usual and am missing the point of this paragraph which is to say the creepy DJ is only creepy in that he is quite a bit older than the most of us at the banquet center and is always hitting on girls that could easily be his daughters and who also are not interested. Gotta hand it to him for trying.
He played this song many times at the holiday party for a local car dealership. Those ones are interesting because you have everyone from the secretary to the owner to the salesmen attending so it really makes for a strange mix of people who usually do not hang out socially. I made a million white Russians, as well as cheap vodka tonics by the score while the tips got higher and the peeps got drunker. Afterwards, for the first time ever, I decided to go out with some of my fellow employees to a Buffalo Wild Wings for a beer before last call. I’m not prejudiced against the people I work with, I just live farther away than most of them and often have other plans for after work. And, I tried to just go to Wendy’s and get a cheeseburger because I was starving, but it was closed so I really had no choice because I was famished. Open late, my ass.
When I got to Wild Wings, the creepy DJ was there and bought all ten of us a drink which was very nice of him. He also got some appetizers which I attacked with gusto as I had been denied my artery clogging two dollar Junior Bacon and Cheese minutes earlier. I’m sure the tall IPA and artichoke dip I sucked down weren’t great for me either, but again I stray from the point. The DJ, while everyone is talking to each other loudly, leans over and points at this bartender named Kathy and whispers “Is she single?”
What I heard was “is she cool” like does she smoke pot a la Dazed and Confused to which I replied “Yeah, I think she’s cool man”. When he used the restroom, Kathy left saying he kept hitting on her and all I could think of was “Slowride” by Foghat. I appreciate the free drink and I respect the enthusiasm of a DJ to hit on a girl so much younger and out of his reach. Happy holidays and good luck to you sir!
The next two parties I’d like to talk about are ones I attended. My dive bar had it’s company party the night after my trip to Wild Wings and I ended up getting out early because some idiot executive had hired a science experiment exhibition crew instead of a band, DJ, or even a magician. Granted, the science shit was cool but this group, also a car dealership, was mostly mechanics who just wanted the free vittles and the possibility of winning a raffle or impressing someone higher up with their witty conversation. So I got to the bar before ten with a green Santa hat on and I soon had a Wild Turkey on the rocks in hand and was shooting pool with my lead singer‘s father, a local pro. I was feeling good.
Then the shit hit the fan and it had to do with my lead singer and two separate crazy woman. The first approached me and asked me if I was seeing anybody and because this girl has a serious local reputation and I was not attracted to her, I quickly suggested she should seek the attention of another related friend who I knew liked her. She then decided to rip into my lead singer for taking some friend of hers home three weeks before who also used to date her brother. He had told me about it and that nothing had happened and I related this information to the girl. Yeah, it barely made sense to me too and neither did the next incident two minutes later outside when one of the local bartenders and known hellion starts literally yelling at the lead singer because he didn’t call her father back in relation to some logging job.
As with the girl before, I jumped to the defense of my boy saying “You know it’s the freakin holidays, can’t we all just have a good time?” This was met with a scowl and a few beautiful moments of silence before she just started swearing again. Unfortunately the drawback of smalltown-living is everyone is in everyone else’s shit out of lack of stimulation. This was turning into a very not jolly holiday so we did what we would normally do when things got weird at the bar which is take the back door when the two crazy girls went to pee. The holidays seem to rile other people up too.
I don’t like this song but it’s an apt choice here and is on the jukebox at the dive bar far more than anyone should have to withstand. Maybe finding a new bar or even not going to bars anymore is a choice for the new year?
For my last holiday party that is worth mentioning, I was invited for the second year to a very swanky restaurant’s holiday party, located down on a peninsula in a very popular coastal town where two former presidents are sometimes in attendance. I had a great time last year except I abused the privilege of the very nice open bar and drank all of the high end bourbons from Maker’s Mark to Booker’s, each one more potent than the next. Needless to say, I don’t remember much and this year I intended to network which really means talk to as many women as possible and invite them all to come see our band on New Year’s Eve. I was pretty successful at this without being obnoxious, at least in my humble opinion.
The downstairs bar of this place had a little dock where people smoked cigarettes and a vicious wind came off the water. I was demonstrating the type of dancing I’d maybe do at a music festival to some younger folks and set my whiskey on a metal table. Like two minutes later, it slid right off the table and bounced off the ground, not shattering but certainly emptying. It had frozen up around the bottom and become a serious hazard and spilled all my whiskey.
Luckily, a very pretty girl offered to make me a margarita shot which is an offer I took up. It seems some dishwasher was dancing up on her on the pumping dance floor upstairs and she wanted to know if I’d help deflect. In my altered state of mind, I assumed she wanted me so I said I’d meet her up there post haste. The very young DJ played this song numerous times. Catchy once, annoying more than that.
The dancing with my tequila girl was not to be. I had attended the party with the head bartender and her husband, the General from my dive bar days, as well as another bartender whom we picked up on the way. This other bartender was three years younger than me and owned her own house paid for by tending bar. She also rode horses. I have a thing for equestrians and I know it’s a little weird so we don’t have to get into it too much. Needless to say, I was instantly attracted to her but she seemed to be more concerned with slamming Bud Light and talking to the elderly patrons who also came to the party. I went up from my shot to find the General and tell him we had to stay a while longer so I could dance when I saw my horse girl falling off the front porch of the bar. She apparently cannot handle her booze at all and we had to quickly leave. So much for Christmas love.
Is there a theme here? I think, at heart, everyone wants to be happy for Christmas and we can find that through relationships with other people, whether ones we have or ones we’d like to create. I know a big part of my own disillusionment with the holidays is that it will largely just be my mom and I this year and would probably be better if I had a significant other whom I really liked or maybe even a family as this is really what the holidays are about.
I was talking to an old dishwasher soon before I spilled my whiskey about finding love in the modern age and he said “You know man, you probably got so many women who like you and you don’t even know it.” He looked vaguely like Jerry Garcia so I took his advice to heart. If you got loved ones, tell them you love them and if you don’t, I firmly believe you will find them if you are supposed to.
O,k so one more song and it is in fact Christmas flavored but it made me laugh so hard that I can’t not include it. UH HUH! Happy Holidays!
I have written before about how music just bubbles up to the surface of my consciousness from the past. Over the past few days, without clear provocation or invitation, I remember a song I might have heard two or three times nearly two decades ago: “Josephine Baker” by a band called Fossil.
I distinctly remember driving at night with the windows down in a friend’s Ford Fairmont hearing this song on the local college radio. I know what road we were on. I know we were heading home.
I have no idea where we were coming from. It was spring or early summer. The moon was out and the air had that blend of grass and humidity that belongs to a very particular time of year. I remember hearing this song. I remember thinking about the song. And then, it disappeared from my mind for years.
But I couldn’t revisit the memory without the song. All I could remember was the first line. Thank god for google. You know something has been pretty much eradicated when it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page and the most information you can find about it comes in the form of brief album reviews and an amazon.com discussion board. Or, and this is quite bizarre, in the discussion thread on a political website.
But, and truly, thank god for youtube which has the song in all of its “glory”.
My earlier take on birthday songs was a bit morose. Here’s a different one.
Recently my wife and I decided that we weren’t playing enough music for our children—we’re worried about both the frequency and the variety of the music they hear. So, in addition to our frequent radio games in the car, we’ve added sessions with the pre-fab music channels on TV, alternating channels and genres by day.
I also got some new speakers for my computer or iPod—when the wife isn’t around and I am in control, I try out new albums or old ones on the kids (much to what I can imagine will be my brother’s horror I think they really enjoyed Mumford and Sons and thus allowed me to think about the band in a different way—a subject for a future post).
Hilton Als, in the December 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine, offers up “I am Your Conscious, Your Love: A Paean to Prince”. The article navigates the dynamic between adoring writer and iconoclastic performer as both grow and respond to the demands of the world(s) around them. The article both educates about Prince and helps to (re)-create the world in which Prince was received and enjoyed.
Now, before I get to the article you might be wondering why I am reading Harper’s . If you don’t know the periodical, you should try it out (and if you do, you’re probably not wondering why…). It is easily one of the best written, best edited and most contemplative mainstream publications in the English language.
But, as always, my reading of this (probably elitist and left-leaning) monthly has deep roots in personal history (perhaps also anticipating my openness to this particular article). Our late father was a voracious reader. We always had subscriptions to weekly news magazines that my father referred to as rags with terrible writing, good for pictures and browsing at best. He extended this snobbery to newspapers. The local daily was rubbish. The closest acceptable newspaper was the Boston Globe.
(That still didn’t stop my father from getting in a car accident while attempting to negotiate cigarette, coffee and the local daily at an intersection. He also feared not having something to read so much that we used to get into terrible fights over merely possessing Newsweek. Eventually, we actually had to get two subscriptions.)
I never really thought much about this video. The song? Can’t forget it
Tom Brady is now is his 13th year in the NFL. I worry about every change in his offensive line. I watch every scramble for a sign of weakness. When the Patriots lose, I wonder if this is the game that heralds the beginning of the end. I fret over him as I do not even for myself. And, I know I am not alone in this.
We are all young. For a time.
But when Tom Brady was young, there was magic in the air. It almost seemed like the sudden excellence of the Patriots raised the tenor of the entire region. The Red Sox were transformed and it even looked for a moment that we would have a president from Massachusetts in 2004. Of course, most of this was simple escapism—I had my head in the sand to avoid the terrible truth of two wars, a nation speeding off into some of its worst inequalities in its history and a graduate career that at times seemed stalled and going nowhere.
