One thing I have not talked about is the fact that certain songs should never be covered. Now, I know that such wide-open generalizations are inevitably proved false (you know, with all those monkeys working away on all those typewriters….), but I think there are songs that are so indelibly and unalterably bound to their performers that they should never be assayed by someone else.

What got me thinking about this? Last night my children politely requested their nightly dance party (at almost 3 and almost 1.5 years, they actually screamed for it, but I digress). I turned on the television to Music Choice’s (sadly and pathetically) default Adult Alternative station and the following abomination filled the air:

I don’t really know who Teddy Thompson and Krystle Warren are and I am so incensed that I will not even bother to check them out Wikipedia. (How’s that for some false indignation?) Here’s the thing: “Pink Moon”, Nick Drake’s brief, ethereal and ephemeral anti-anthem, works because of its (1) simplicity, (2) beauty, and (3) brevity, all of which are made possible by the solo combination of Drake’s eerie/breathy voice and his iconoclastic finger-picking.  When the spare piano notes come in, their vibrattoed-brevity brings that solitary sense into relief like the light of the moon in a darkened sky.

This cover is earnest—the performers obviously love the song, but they just do too much. The two voices deprive the song of its solitary space; the extra instrumentation clutters up the sound; and the repetitions lengthen the time past its key feature: the almost orgasmic (if subdued) brevity that leaves you wanting more.

And isn’t that the central story of Nick Drake’s music and his life? The lack—the wanting, and the ultimate space of hope and disappointment left at the end?

The next morning, my good friend and sometime-commenter on this blog (who keeps threatening to write a post…) asked me about a song we used to cover when we were in a band, “Psycho Killer” by the talking heads. See, the band just released an earlier version of this song with a damn cello in it.

This version, I must admit, actually seems to reside somewhere between the 1977 version and the live version–it doesn’t seem to have the same stilted pace of the album version. It also seems to anticipate a little bit of the life of the much later live performance. When it comes down to it, though, the cello isn’t that noticeable or radical.

Now, here’s the problem with “Psycho Killer”. (If it is really a problem at all.) The version I grew up knowing (and ultimately the one our band covered) was actually from the live performance that became the sensation Stop Making Sense. In that live version, David Byrne walks on to the stage and presses play on a sound machine to produce the beat—he performs the song at a pace much faster than the album version for the most part alone.

The band slowly integrates into the music as the concert builds on. By the end of a few songs the stage is filled and the air vibrates with some of the most dynamic and symphonic sound to ever come out of lower Manhattan.  The album version of the song, however, is slower, almost sloppy even though recorded, and ultimately unsatisfying if you heard the concert version first.

Now, in between the original recording and the performance was over half a decade. Anyone who has performed the same song for a year, much less seven, knows that songs develop as if they are in fact alive: they mature and become more complex; sometimes they lose vibrancy and urgency. But what is important is that they, like the performer and the audience, change.

So, perhaps some of my resistance to hearing another version of this song and part of our cultural attachment to individual versions of songs is that they offer us the false promise of sameness—the recorded song stays the same, it doesn’t develop, it is like a photograph or a video: it is a fossilized version of something that once was. The song lives on forever. Psychologically, isn’t this an attractive flouting of the fact that we will not do the same?

Still Killing?

The trick of this, though, is that the experience of the song has changed because we as listeners are no longer the same and we live with the earlier experiences of hearing the song as part of our memory and our associations with that piece.

Now, “Psycho Killer” is a song whose power rests not in its particular beauty or in the simplicity of its articulation but in its message and structure, does lend itself to different reinterpretations. One of our favorite bands, Bishop Allen, does a fine and light job of it here ( I do appreciate the nearly manic pace of this cover and the humorous intro-patter; the slight change in phrasing isn’t as effective; the overall effect, though, seems to channel more of the punk-era aesthetic that the Talking Heads came out of). And the original version of the song above shows us some of the surprising depth that can be plumbed merely by adding in new instrumentation or varying the pace.

The lyrics of the song also lend themselves to pointed reinterpretation—where one version of the song is plaintive protest, another is mocking jest. What would this song be in the mouth of someone more earnest? What if a Bob Dylan or Bright Eyes performed this song? (There’s my impossible recover request: Bob Dylan, performing “Psycho Killer”,  five years before it was written in Washington, D.C. during the unfolding of the Watergate Scandal. Don’t ask. Just imagine.)

Of course, it is not only a simple song that is hard to perform. At times, the more complex a song gets, the more it depends on a dangerous tension between execution and failure. One of my favorite Talking Heads songs, “Nothing But Flowers”, works only when performed with a paradoxical severe levity.

I love this song. And, when I heard it performed live by another one of my favorite bands, Guster, I thought I was going to die of happiness. And, for at least a minute of the song, I was filled with joy. But, slowly, the sound started to wash over me and I realized how it seemed only half-way there, like something essential was missing.

So, the moral of the story? (Wait, there was a story?) Cover songs are hard and delicate work. An artist needs to make the song his or her own without losing whatever is essential to the song’s core.

I think. Maybe. While I figure it out, here’s another cover to mull over:

I have a few go-to podcasts that I like to store up. I also periodically select audiobooks (especially long ones) to distract me. Here’s a quick list before I get to the musician of the day (Jaimeo Brown).

1. This American Life: I have to be completely honest about this one: I have downloaded all of the back episodes. I have donated money through my cell phone. I have dragged my poor, pregnant life to a live simulcast of this show. I regularly cry

Ira, you cruel, cruel bastard.

while listening to it.

Now, I thought this attachment made me special. I thought my love for what I think of as the emancipatory power of narrative made me different. I even imagined that my ability to weep (while running, nonetheless) to Ira Glass’ nasally voice in some way indicated an emotional apparatus even my brother denied to me. When I mentioned this once at a party, I was quickly disabused of my fantasy: a woman around my age quipped “Everybody cries at This American Life.”

I am just shocked that the show doesn’t get its own entry on Stuff White People Like.

2. The Moth: If you don’t know the Moth–a series of events where people tell stories without notes live (often in a competition)–and This American Life is a little too structured for you, check out this podcast. The stories range from hysterical to heartbreaking. The common denominator? Narrative. Hearing these stories makes me feel more alive in a strange way because of the vicarious sharing of emotion and experience. Try out a few.

3. Radiolab: This podcast is like This American Life for science. The episodes are always fascinating, enlightening, and entertaining. The problem? They don’t come out frequently enough.

4. Audiobooks: Recently, I finished listening to Delillo’s Underworld, a fascinating novel that uses as one of its conceits the story of the life of baseball hit by Bobby Thompson in 1951 to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers with a walk-off homerun after that game. The story is far more complex and finely written than that summary implies and it is one of the finer novels I have ‘read’ in a while. Of course, maybe this is because before I was obsessed with the Game of Thrones books…. 

Ok, ok. This was supposed to be a short post about something I heard on the radio and I digressed. After I finished underworld and before I downloaded a few books by William Gibson and Thomas Pynchon, I was listening to the Jazz station (the same one that metamorphoses into an Indie Rock station at night) and a breathy (probably adolescent or just a bit older) DJ introduced a track from the album Transcendence by Jaimeo Brown.

The lead single “This World is Not My Home”

Now, what first got me about this track is the phenomenal blend between blues sensibility and jazz instrumentation. After downloading the album and watching the performance, I realized that there was also a finely-tuned hip-hop aesthetic at the center of the choice to sample instead of performing some of the under-tracks. The sense of the performance is one of music history and present at the same time.

Jaimeo, the drummer, has a fantastic sense of rhythm and the composition blends parts blues, free-jazz and fusion (and hip-hop, the guitarist Sholar has worked as a producer with Jay-z and Kanye). But, what kind of shocked me about the music was the narrative frame provided by the DJ. He claimed that this album would prove to be “controversial”.  Why? The LA Times music reviewer Chris Barton alleges that  this album “should not work” but does because it is “a conversation between generations”.

Brown has real chops as a jazz drummer and an expansive mind for music, as well as  a great sense of its history. The album is eminently listenable–the tracks tend to be short (like blues instead of jazz) and each one offers something different. At times, the sound is more conventional, at times bluesy, at times I think I am listening to The Dirty Three.

If you have time, my brother, check out the track. I’d love to know what you think.

It’s too bad Ray wasn’t from Maine originally because then I could say he was our greatest musical export ever. Granted, there a few other really good bands to come out of my beloved home state, but Ray is just awesome in everyway from his blue eyed soulful voice to the super tasty production. This a Sunday morning staple for me right now.

It has been a crazy couple of months. Between things with the band getting way more busy, my new job, my old jobs, fixing the old homestead up for spring and trying to expand my social scene, I am pretty scattered right now. Granted, I have a pension for procrastination which is infamous and a continual point of contention with my brother so I am trying harder to write stuff more regularly amongst the chaos of my life. I know the Elder J is also  incredibly busy so he doesn’t notice my slackery as much which actually works against me because the guilt I feel when he give me shit actually forces me to write more.  I am sure he is not sitting around waiting for me to post stuff as he tries to move his growing family into a new home and all the other crazy stuff in his life, but I thought of this song anyway.

Love the Kinks and this song is so classic of that sound in the mid 60′s. I someday want to write a series of posts of why bands like The Kinks never got as big as the Beatles when they could of or a good one too would be how come Ten Years After never even approached the greatness of Led Zeppelin. More on that later.

I had my first day off in roughly two weeks yesterday and I spent much of it mowing my lawn and clearing out beds for my vegetables which I need to plant next weekend. I woke up painfully early after going out and seeing my lead guitar player’s sister play a songwriter’s round gig at a way too classy for me bar in the largest city of my homestate in Portland, Maine. The music was sick and the beer was expensive but good so I really relished the first sip of the West Coast IPA I ordered as soon as I could get to the bar.

Like five minutes later, in walks a school superviser and his wife in a completely out there coincidence. I guess all of our principals hang out at this specific spot so I did what I thought was necessary and got them a round. It turned into a great networking scene and I ended up being out later than I expected yet still woke up on teacher time at roughly 5:30 am. I realize I was blowing off steam from two weeks of stress, but it felt pretty whack.

Probably self explanatory.

Our first big show of the season is next Saturday afternoon. I am pretty excited since it is an afternoon show to raise money for breast cancer. It’s a bike run that has a bunch of motorcyclists pay to ride between a few different locations before meeting up at the end to eat food, have a beer, and watch our band play some tunes. A bunch of people who would never come to a show at night because of familial obligations, puritanical values or an early bed time. It will hopefully raise some more money for a good cause while introducing a bunch of my friends and acquaintances to my band. The whole biker thing is not new to us as a band, I just hope it doesn’t scare anyone who is not so familiar like my teen age cousins. Lastly, I think we can all support breasts and the saving of them.

I could not stop singing this song yesterday and the Saturday before in unison with a dude I met at my old job of banquet serving/bartending whose name is Levon and he is from South Carolina. This guy was quite a bit older than me but busted ass carrying trays while telling me some hilarous stories about living down south.

Chicago is actually an incredibly good band which is why we will end out this post with a double shot. I always saw them as this cheeey band but now I can’t really see why I would ever think this. Ok some of it is a little sharp in the cheese department, but come on, this jam right here is gold. The piano make me think of Carole King and the horn section is like funky Phil Spector production. I guess they are only behind the Beach Boys in American bands in most charting singles and albums which is a brand new fact for me. They still tour and apparently are not bad. The former lead singer/guitarist Terry Kath shot himself in the head accidentily in 1978 playing Russian Roulette with a semi automatic pistol. The man can wail but seriously, what is the thought process there? Clearly he did not grow up around firearms.

This  is the late Terry Kath tearing it apart on an extended solo which sounds like it’s got a bunch of wah-wah pedal on it which is never a bad thing for me, as much as it annoys so many others. I have to attend an adult chorus concert tonight, do you think I have any chance of hearing this bad boy getting performed?

So now it is Sunday morning and I am going to finish writing this, maybe do a little fishing before attending my mother’s adult chorus concert at three and then being home in time for band practice at six which will hopefully end by nine so I can see the new Game of Thrones episode or at least finish watching the episode from last week that I still haven’t finished. Wore me out just writing that sentence but I ultimately feel blessed that I have so many things going on that I am interested in and passionate about. I know a lot of people who waste a lot of their time from my outsider’s perspective and one day we all figure out that time is finite and you better spend it well. So on that note, spend a solid few minutes listening to this amazing cover of a an amazing song and contemplate.

Obviously really into Ray right now, again. He’s the man.

“Rock n’ Roll High School”, The Ramones

My brother is in a band now but when I was in high school, it was all rock n’ roll for me. I can’t think back to high school without thinking about being in a band. High school as the Ramones know, is a mentality and a time more than a place.

Now, the problem with my brother’s job isn’t just that it is underpaid (he’s not even paid as a full-time teacher but as a long-term sub) and that he’s leveraged for the next 25 years to pay for the education he got to get there; no, the real problem is that people don’t respect high school teachers—the general public doesn’t understand that educating our children comes at a great psychological cost. And, my brother works with the students who are most at risk but whose potential for change is the highest.

“I’m the Man”, Anthrax

My brother writes well on several occasions about his experience in and after high school. His soundtrack always has a bit of a hip-hop beat. My high school days were a little more heavy metal.  The attitude Anthrax lampoons in this song? That transcends musical genre.

One of the things that may not be clear already is that we come from a family of educators. Our grandfather was a superintendent of schools; our grandmother and aunt taught; our mother is still a teacher; my wife taught English in Hollis Queens (the neighborhood of Run DMC and LL Cool J) before fleeing to become a dentist. I have taught for fifteen years.

We were raised on the belief that not only is education a primary avenue for economic and social mobility, but that educating is a sacred task that rewards sacrifice and dedication with honor and meaning. As I have worked in a high school and Universities I have had to test that belief consistently. When I talk to my brother now, I know that he is struggling to do the same every day.

“School’s Out for Summer”, Alice Cooper

Oh, students run ecstatically into the open arms of summer. They don’t realize how relieved teachers are to get there at the end of the year. To all the talking heads who complain that teachers work only part of the year: try spending 9 hours a day with middle school students and see if you can make it through a week.

The end of the school year always brings me a chance to breathe a bit more deeply and reflect on what the year has brought. As a professor, I am afforded a shorter teaching year because I am supposed to spend the rest of my time in “the production of knowledge.” This rather masturbatory period allows me to refresh my mind and refocus. Even though many university educators do get tired out and bitter, we have a much easier time of it than our secondary school brethren.

So, I get to spend months working on articles, writing for the blog, spending time with my family and working on syllabi for the coming year. High School teachers often have to get additional jobs because we pay them too little. This is something I can’t really get over. Why do we pay those responsible for training and preparing the next generation so poorly?

 “Umass”, The Pixies

I have mentioned this song before. I love the chorus. I love the implied irony of the screamed chorus. I love the implied criticism of what ‘educational’ even means. Growing up in New England, the universities of Massachusetts loomed as castles of learning and bastions of experience. The farther away I get (and the more I listen to wrong-minded debates about higher education, the more conflicted I am about which is more important.

It isn’t only that we pay teachers poorly, we also don’t really think about what they do. A big difference between my brother’s job and mine is discipline. If a student doesn’t behave in my classroom, I tell him to leave. In 15 years of teaching, I have only had to do this once. Students choose (generally) to come to college.

Because middle school is essentially mandatory, students arrive with mixed expectation and preparation. Teachers like my brother are on the front line and the final line for some students. The sad fact is that by middle school, the general ‘destiny’ of many students has already been written. On most days, my brother performs a desperate kind of triage. On others, he just prays to survive.

“Oxford Comma”, Vampire Weekend

The boys from Vampire Weekend went to Columbia University. If you have ever spent some time on a college campus, listen to their first album, you can almost smell the dorm rooms around the lyrics. I love this song for the opening “Who gives a fuck about an oxford comma” because of the mix of high and low, the irony that to dismiss an oxford comma you must first know what one is, and because I had an advisor in graduate school who insisted on the damn thing.

But the thing that keeps bringing him back is some kind of twisted combination of (1) need (he has to work; (2) hope (he believes he can make things better); (3) and responsibility—he really does believe that this is a sacred task.

The problem with younger students and their teachers is that there is an asymmetry in what they’re trying to derive from the situation. Teachers want to teach (but they also want to make a decent wage) and students, by and large are not really there to learn. Too much of our social discourse is excessively pragmatic: we worry about how ‘education’ translates into dollar bills. But, much of what makes us smarter and wiser does not simply translate into a wage.

“Suspended From Class,” Camera Obscura

This is a beautiful song. The rhyme of “class” with “ass” both evokes the upside down nature of living inside a high school body and elides two things that shouldn’t go together but often do (class and ass, you see). I love this debut album—the airy vocals are both saccharine and sharp. Who doesn’t want to be suspended from class?

So, two problems to end this post thinking about—first, there is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is about facts; wisdom is about what to do with facts and how to evaluate them. Knowledge can be learned from books or websites or MOOCS; wisdom is gained from experience and process.

A good teacher can help you digest facts and guide you towards wisdom because he or she is wise in terms of process and judgment from years of training and experience. Human teachers will always be indispensable because education needs to be about the acquisition of a measure of wisdom, not the apprehension of myriad facts.

“One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” Ben Folds Five

One of the reasons many of us keep remembering high school is that we still allow our self-worth to be gauged by who we were then or what we think other people thought about us. Carrying around such baggage is unhealthy, but it can be cathartic to let it go through fantasy or even reality. This Ben Folds’ song about such psychic revenge has one of the worst and most tortured titles of any song in my iTunes library. Despite the title, this is a great rock-revenge song.

The second problem is that we ask our teachers to bring knowledge and wisdom at a time when students are at their most vulnerable emotionally and biologically. Our teachers, furthermore, can be instrumental in helping students develop and navigate the confusing world they face in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The more resources we give to these champions, the better chance they have to make a real difference.

And, despite terrible stories like those that have come out of Horace Mann and some other private high schools, many of those of us who do succeed owe some gratitude to high school teachers. My Latin, English and History teachers changed my life. I still think of them and shudder to think of the control and discipline they mastered to be so inspiring despite financial and cultural challenges.

“Bishop Allen,” Charm School

When it comes down to it, education doesn’t stop in the classroom. It also doesn’t start there.  A lot of the things we learn in life come from experiences far estranged from the conventional classroom. I love this song because it sounds fun and has a great feel to it. But, what I love more is that the speaker understands that he needs to learn something more, that what he can do is no longer sufficient. This type of ‘metacognition’ is the best thing we can learn because it teaches us how to diagnose what we don’t know, the first step towards addressing the problem.

So, this post is a way for me to remember my brother and all the teachers who labor every day with too few people noticing. The teachers in my family and my life have made my current life possible; they have endured me, inspired me, and, most importantly, educated me in more ways than they know.

Our best teachers are remarkable carry with them the most sublime and optimistic belief—that people can change and that education can be a catalyst in making our lives better. Without a conviction in the former, then we are all doomed to live out destinies over which we have no control. And, without a belief in the latter, we are cursed to a world in which we cannot improve the lives of those around us.

Dear Brother, have a beer on me.

Mmmmm

Man or Band? It doesn’t matter. D. V. Snaith is Caribou

On the way back from the airport, swooning a bit from the early hour and senseless thoughts on the fragility of self and the passage of time, I turned the local jazz radio station up to an uncomfortable volume and rolled all the windows down. (Not a cool sight: remember, I am the one in the rapidly aging blue Prius.) Yet, much to my surprise, the local jazz station straight-out gremlins over night and becomes an Indie-Rock madhouse.

Now the thing about Indie-Rock is that it is mostly described by what it is not: mainstream, major label fare. Beyond the boundaries of delivery device and popularity, it can be anything. So, an overnight, red-eye into the belly of the beast will, in all likelihood, be a mixture of depression, delight and digression. For every moment of wonder, there is another Pavement wannabe or Velvet Underground worshiping poseur.

After languishing through some local act falling somewhere between Stevie-Ray Vaughn and the post-breakdown side of Daniel Johnston (seriously if you don’t know Daniel Johnston and want to be Austin-hip, check out the fine documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston) this track came on:

I love everything about this song from the name (“Every time she turns about Its Her Birthday) to the fantastic rhythms, free-jazz inspired horns, and especially, as anyone who has read this blog before can imagine, the indirect and almost incoherent lyrics:

Spinning round you weigh me down
Gravel hands of green and brown

In your cells both red and white
On the sun that gives us light
In your cells both white and red
From the mouth our kids get fed

Now, what I also love about this track is that there is an essential compatability of sound and lyric-sense–both are fluid, mixed and, for lack of better descriptive, cloudy. The music is somewhere between jazz, rock, and ambient while the lyrics are slightly post-modern and impressionistic. Both, and especially together, invite interpretation and contemplation.

Of course, before it was dawn, I had downloaded the whole album Up in Flames by Caribou who used to be called Manitoba. Caribou, I discovered, is not a band but a man masquerading as one with all the skill of an Aphex Twin blended with a Beck unsullied by mainstream success. The album? One of the most interesting and challenging compilations I have heard in a while. The music is thick and layered, like a sonic parfait doing battle with a milkshake. The lyrics are exceptionally oblique and always wrapped up or buried beneath steppes of rhythm and sluiced by horns.

I thought I had heard of the band Caribou before and bad the mistake of dismissing it as some Train wannabe or fringely progressive one-off. I am so glad I was wrong.  Before that morning, the only musical Caribou I knew about was this one I have heard my brother singing to many times before:

I can’t say that I understand what is going on in Caribou’s music or lyrics; I can say that I will try to. I can also say I am thankful to the randomness of the universe for giving me this song at that time. It took me away from myself and the monotonous road. It took me away from that marginal and displaced feeling in between the end of someone’s visit and the resumption of ‘normal life’. And, whatever normal life is, it saved me from that for a bit too.

Hungry for some more Caribou, my brother?

A friend who plays fiddle with my band suggested David Lindley to me a while back and has a portrait of the man in his living room where I often occupy the couch while jamming late into the night. This song gave me a very real feeling of closeness to my Father because I know he would have loved it since he held an affinity for religious tunes. Also, it’s so much better than the music I am subjected to on a daily basis as will be seen.

I have talked recently about how I have a new job. I am the long term substitute for the head of an alternative education program in the 8th grade. Both of the two teachers in the program had to leave (the last quickly), so I was shoved to the top of the ladder and suddenly had my own program.

I don’t want to get into specifics, but it has been a hard transition for everyone, most importantly the students. Most of these kids come from broken homes and have never succeeded in the traditional classroom due to a myriad of social, mental, and chemical reasons that cause them to exhibit some non-traditional behaviors. They love this song and I am constantly shutting it off throughout a normal school day on their iPads, iPods, laptops and cell phones. What happened to the Sony Discman?

The kids think I don’t know this song is about drugs. I asked them one day, just to mess with them, “Who is this Molly girl?” Although I never took this drug, whenever Disco Biscuits or Sound Tribe Sector 9 or Phish came through town in Vermont, there’d be a lot of it around and all the dread locked white kids (wookies) would be spinning around the campus greens. I was always more of a beer guy. For those not in the know, “molly” is pure MDMA, which is the active ingredient in Ecstasy and I believe a few other designer drugs. 

Some of them allegedly do drugs, which is a shame at their age and for their already suffering thought processes. Of the 16 kids in my class, I bet at least half of them have smoked pot or currently do, with half of those claiming to also do other drugs. I continually am explaining why the consumption of any mind altering substance at their age, molly or otherwise, will help to stop the development of their brains because their young minds are still forming. They almost always answer that this is only the case with hard drugs like molly or acid or cocaine and that weed and alcohol are ok and, in fact, legitimate stress relievers. I hope they don’t learn this from their parents, but I am sure they learn a lot of  it from Lil’ Wayne.

I had to explain to my assistant principal what Kush was when they played this in the gym while we shot some hoops at our daily gym time right after lunch. This is one of the things I instituted when I came in because I feel one of the issues is the kids don’t get their energy out in a positive way. He quickly shut off the stereo when he realized what the song was about but as soon as he left, back on it went while I was across the gym working on my free throws. I play the turn down or shut off game while one of them reverses it all day long.

I have never liked Lil’ Wayne, always being more of a fan of old school gangster rap like Biggy and Tupac. So much of his vocals are auto tuned and I just find that noise to be incredibly annoying. Furthermore, I find most of his messages are be about getting messed up and treating women badly which none of my students need in their lives. Now, there are many many misogynistic lyrics in the rap I like too but I didn’t listen to it in 8th grade and I could surely separate reality from fiction at that point in my life. I suspect that my students can too, but when engaged in an argument with a student on him attending French class last week, I said he was acting like a baby for refusing to go. In response, he swore at me and said  ”Do babies snort coke off of strippers asses?” I almost responded  with “No they don’t and you don’t either because you have no money and can’t even get into a strip club” but my good sense prevailed and I just walked him down to the principal’s office to cool out. There is one song they play that is from my generation, albeit still kind of stupid but at least having a good beat and funny lyrics.

This guy was huge in my home state around freshmen year of high school, but it was “Cause I got High” and “Colt .45″ and I don’t think I ever got through the album enough to hear this little diddy. I obviously can’t allow them to listen to this, but of the songs they listen to, this has the best beat and the most amusing lyrics.

I shut this song off at least ten times a day while the kids dance around to it and yell the parts with profanity louder than any other lyrics just to show people they can yell swears and attract attention. One of my favorite/worst students is a kid whose mother is dying of cancer in their trailer park while the step father does very little to help and the father having died when my 8th grader was in the 6th grade. This kid basically only has control over anything while at school so he mostly spends his days disrupting other classes and driving me nuts and occasionally sitting down and talking with me about why he acts the way he does.  Yesterday, he ran into a classroom in the sixth grade and yelled “sugar tits” and then slammed the door, prompting an email sent to me within two minutes of the crime committed  Dealing with that took up the best part of third period,  but he ended up not getting suspended and driving my stress levels up the rest of the day.

I am trying to get  a job in this school district next year so I deal with these kids as best I can to various results. My bosses think I’m doing a good job and some days I do, but I worry about these kids succeeding in the high school and in life in general. It’s more social conditioning than anything else so I wish I could play them this one rap song which will roll at the end of this paragraph. If they learn nothing else from me this year, it’s that you can’t play obscene songs in public areas and you need to use your words calmly and not yell at people. In other words, express yourself!

I could actually use this, it’s got clean lyrics! Plus, Dre says something about a subject and a predicate right?

Yeah, them too,

(So, I guess you could say I found out something new about myself, if we keep up with the transvestitism of the underwear analogy.)

Part of this decision, I swear, has only to do with the novelty of it. Even if you labor sedulously to perfect your playlists the element of surprise and wonder that makes a lot of music listening so thoroughly compelling is gone. When I dumped a thousand songs into my wife’s iPod (which sounds far more sexual than it should) I created something of a hybrid of her tastes and mine. A new, strange, musical offspring.

As I ran around the streets of our adoptive town, I found myself newly engaged both by the strange juxtaposition of some of my chosen tracks next to hers (Wilco as a prelude to Rihanna? Sinatra followed by Fugazi? Whiplash.) and by initial hearings of songs I didn’t know my wife was listening to. See, she and I have been together (if not as husband and wife, as the prequel) for fifteen years. I didn’t know she was keeping secrets from me.

On a recent morning one of these secrets that obsessed me briefly was “Mr. Me Too”, by Pharrell and Clipse, from way back in 2006. I immediately understood why my wife liked the music (the rhythms are spare but complex; the rapping is clear but at times adventurous). So, of course, I listened to it a few times.

The central theme of the song is the same type of implicit rivalry (as expressed in materialistic and behavioral terms) explored in 2 Chainz’s “I’m different”(and about a thousand other songs). But this song is also about the kind of acquaintance who always tries to one-up you or at least compete with both grand and minor accomplishment (“I know what you thinkin’ why I call you, Me Too/ Cause everything I say, I got you sayin’ Me Too”; a la the Kristin Wiig character Penelope from SNL in the worst cases).

Of course, the point to be made in this song, is that the addressee can’t possibly do that in this comparison because the singer is so far and above his reach—simply put in the comparison offered half-way through the song:

I say I got a Benz so you said me too
You hangin’ out the window so they can see you
But you ain’t hangin’ out the window
When you in that G2
Or that G3 or G4 like we do

If there is something rather disappointing about this song it is again that any accomplishment is expressed purely in terms of material possessions, here a ghastly ostentation. But, of course, this lingers throughout the song—Pharell has his own sneaker deal and is so influential he’s signing sponsorship deals (“Ni**as just hate us, I’m doing deals like the majors / Ice Cream Sneakers, I signed my first skater”).

This notoriety is also expressed through name drops (an allusion to Snoop Dog and a mention of hanging out with Sean “I used to be Puff Daddy” Combs). We find the typical dropping of label names (clear like the G3 and G4 or “Pyrex Turs turned into Covalli furs”, more attenuated, “that enzo”) and a reference to street life to keep it real (“I was just assuming you’d keep the coke movin’” and ““All my ni**az caped up, selling gray and beige dust / Had that money right or end up in the trunk taped up”). And, of course, there is some light misogyny here and there to round out the formula.

Yet, what I find both confusing and compelling about the song, is I cannot tell where the lines of contempt for “Mr. Me Too”, the failing yet still noteworthy addressee, begin and end. I cannot tell, furthermore, if Pharrell and Clipse have totally denied the same charges of imitation against themselves. And, most importantly, I cannot dispel the sense that there is some kind of irony to be sensed in the dismissal of a man as a Mr. Me Too with a song that is merely echoing what a generation of rappers have said before. Which, of course, leads me to read something more into the collapse between performer and addressee in the song.

See, the song makes the awkward pairing of the sensed danger of a street life (Pharrell even claims “Bulletproof under t-shirt because they hate us”) even as no one fears for Pharrell and the performers so strongly insist that their lives are far and above such a thing. It is similar to the way that Dr. Dre so thoroughly insists that even though he is a producer (“with a pen and a pad”) he is still armed and dangerous (…ain’t got done / what you think I sold ‘em all / cause I stay well off”) and therefore genuine (STILL). They themselves are playing a game on one-upsmanship. There is no addressee. There is only the idea that each one is both the exceptional competitor and the wannabe at the same time.

Did I mess this one up too, my brother?

It doesn’t matter. I’ll take the risk, since, as Pharrell and Clipse taught me, “Tomorrow ain’t promised so we live for the moment”

“God Bless the Dead” is certainly my favorite Tupac song and possibly my favorite rap song ever. It’s got bad-ass beats and, as an extremely white person from almost the most northern state of the United States, the lines “I was the last of G’s, pump the shit that make the white man bleed” really strike a chord with me. Although a much bigger fan of Biggy, I can say that Pac was definitely a mainstay of my high school class’s listening, he definitely wrote some more socially conscious lyrics and was definitely more publicly in trouble with the law which made me him scary to me as a youth. Tupac Shakur was one of the greatest rappers ever and like his Mama, he is appreciated.

I always loved this ode to his mother. The production is great with like light jazz licks and a steady bass line while the content mixes the heavy with the light while Pac admits its not easy to raise a man. For some reason, while enjoying too many adult beverages I think in NYC, my brother’s wife said something to him along the lines of “like Pac’s mom, you are appreciated!” (I later found out she was quoting our friend Professor Mortis, who was quoting Pac). I had no idea in 2003 about this song and my brother and I found it very amusing.  My sister-in-law was from East Hartford which might as well have been Compton for all I knew at the time and I owe it to her for exposing me to a lot of hip hop.

Pac always seemed more dangerous to me then Biggy because whenever I saw him on MTV, he was coming out of a courtroom or flashing gang signs on the set of “California Love”.  The fact of the matter is, Biggy came up under much different circumstances that should have made him the more gangster, what with growing up with a single mother in Bed-Sty and all. Pac was named after the Peruvian revolutionary Tupac Amaru II because both of his parents were Black Panthers and very active in the movement. Both were in litigation at various times in Pac’s childhood and they ended up divorcing and his mother married someone with the last name Shakur which is where he got the surname. Besides his parents, some siblings also got into some legal hot water so I guess I can take back my assertion that Biggy grew up more gangster. The difference is that Biggy’s mom was legit….which really is not much difference at all.

This was the first Pac song I really got into and I think it had more to do with the post-apocalyptic video with flavors of Mad Max than the actual content, although I could understand the line “where the streets are untouchable like Elliot Ness” because of repeated viewings of the Kevin Costner starring movie.

 After a tumultuous childhood, Pac did sort of come out of it by joining the arts and learning jazz, acting, and the occasional ballet step which won him the role of the Mouse King in The  Nutcracker as a teenager. He also was in a few Shakespeare productions, later telling an interviewer that Romeo and Juliet  was sort of a gangster story with the Capulets and the Montagues being like the Crips and the Bloods.

I never knew any of this stuff until about twenty minutes ago and it really does change my perspective on the man. I always saw him as this hardcore gangster who did time for everything from sexual assault on a woman to accidentally shooting and killing a six year old boy on a video shoot. Much of these crimes were overblown and not necessarily fully investigated, but this is easy to say after the fact. Oh yeah, he was also in a terrible Chevy Chase movie right before he got big when he was with a group called The Digital Underground as a back up singer and dancer.

This was my very first interaction with Pac even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time. This movie is really really bad and for some reason, my father rented it on VHS not once, but twice. Nobody wants to see John Candy in drag.

After working through some different artistic endeavors and a bad Chevy Chase flick, Pac finally started his music career and was certainly one of the most socially forward thinking rappers at the beginning of his career. His first album, 2pacalypsenow, was called out by Dan Quayle as promoting police violence and was an album that never needed to be made. This was one of many factors that almost surely boosted Pac’s star power and put him to the fore front. Here is the one song that really focuses on police brutality and how it can trap a young black man.

Even if his level of social conciousness never got back to this first album, he was something Biggy never was by starting out with this direction. Biggy was always about the life of the gangster and the various adventures, misadventures and pitfalls of the fame. Pac was not at all this at the beginning and actually was almost the opposite, but over time you can see a definitive change in his style towards more of a gangster format. Ultimately, you sell more records rapping about gang banging and partying then you do about your mom and the self fulfilling prophecy of the young black male in the hood. That being said, Pac did still release some chill songs that had positive messages like this gem right here, a constant song in the rotation of driving around and up to no good when I was in high school.

I don’t know a lot about Pac’s production but this is a song that sounds a lot like the best Biggy songs so I wonder if there was any back and forth of each other’s production teams or if it was just the style of the times. Either way, it makes you feel good and bob your head.

Things got increasingly tense as Pac was shot coming out of a studio in NYC while awaiting charges of sexual assault for which he ended up doing almost a year. His music was already turning more and more hardcore and this cemented that style . I wonder if he had experienced some type of wake up call or religious event, he would have stuck to the socially conscious rap that was about to hit the scene with the likes of The Roots and the earlier work of A Tribe called Quest and countless other rap groups I don’t know. Here’s another song we bumped a lot as youth which was off of his last album while he was alive and very indicative of the life he was living.

Pac was shot before Biggy so it will always look like one had something to do with the other’s death but from all reports, the whole East/West feud was created by the media and fueled by ignorance. It is too bad because it robbed us of two of our greatest rappers ever and for really no reason. Pac is a great rapper because of the diversity of his character, music, and thematic material. If you were to listen to one song from each album, you can see how it gradually gets more gangster but there are still moments of harmony throughout. I end this post with an amazing acoustic remix of a Pac song that I must have listened to almost every Sunday morning of my senior year of high school after the parties. I’ll always like Biggy more so read my other post on him, but Pac will always mean something to me and everyone who has any kind of appreciation for hip hop. Hard or soft, he is one of the greatest rappers ever and history will remember him as such.

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.

Today I am off to the scene of many of my crimes (literal and figurative), New York City for a brief weekend away from the madness. While I relive the past, I’ll let the blog relive a little bit too (even if its past is a little shorter).

So, there it is. Just in time for Spring Sweeps, here’s a re-rerun of a post put up a year ago today.

It’s just as simple as that.
Well, it’s just a simple fact. 
When I want something,
I don’t want to pay for it.  

“Been Caught Stealing”, Jane’s Addiction

Earlier I wrote about the iPod—mainly its deadly allure and seductive nature. While failing to come down fully on one side or another, I also neglected to identify another unique and salient feature: the iPod’s portability. Now, it may seem too obvious to mention, but it is this one feature that essentially defines the iPod. For, if it were much larger, what would be the advantage of owning one?

Yet, portability—let’s think of it in terms of movable wealth—as easily a liability as an asset. That which may be moved may be stolen. And here’s where the iPod’s convenience (which also enslaves) most endangers. While successive versions of iTunes have warned us to back up our music regularly, many of us do not. Before we bought our music digitally, we had CDs, cassettes, and records (hard copies!) to carry around; the iPod liberated us from literal baggage.

(When will there be a device to lighten the load of our figurative burdens?)

It is when we abandon hard copies altogether that the iPod transforms from tool to master. A few years after I first got an iPod, my apartment burned down and with it years (decades?) of music on CD. Although, when it happened, I was not that upset—I lost only replaceable things (with the exception a 1979 Ovation Legend) and I had every CD in my collection, on my computer and on the iPod.

Six months later, my computer was stolen; my iPod happened to be connected to it at the time. As a consequence, it was stolen as well. I had electronic back-ups for all my work; the iTunes back-ups were a bit less rigorous: only those things I had bought digitally had been preserved. I was undone by grief. My Pixies albums? Gone. Every TMBG album? Gone. Suddenly the cracked CD cases and torn booklets I had so bravely forgotten from the fire came rushing back to me. My musical collection now went back only two years.

But, as it goes, sometimes the darkest hours come right before the brightest dawns. A colleague of mine, a girl whose music tastes seemed to embrace everything without truly liking or understanding it, had a new iPod filled with music (nearly 40 gb) she and her boyfriend had uploaded over a weekend at some rich kid’s place—someone who had impeccable taste and a bankroll to support it. She (the colleague) hadn’t listened to most of it. In her pity for my plight, she offered to let me copy the contents. (She had noticed many of the bands I listened to on the list).

It is hard to say what happened to me after I received this treasure. I can always recall moments when music struck me for the first time, when I knew that my breath was being taken away, that I was hearing something different and that. in retrospect, I recognize as a seismic shift in my tastes, as the line between different eras. (The first time I heard “She’s An Angel”, “Monkey Gone to Heaven” or “Nothing Better”.) The musical treasure trove turned up such a series of revelations as to undermine each one, so as to detract from their ability to make the greatest impact, as if the force of one explosion were to be attenuated by the response of others.

What was on this mythical iPod? I did replace most of my lost music; but what I added was far greater. In short order, I encountered newer bands (Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes, Magnetic Fields, Mates of State, Micah P. Hinson, Modest Mouse, Spoon) older artists I now could spend time listening to (Billy Bragg, Built to Spill), indie-rock mainstays (Belle and Sebastian, The Decemberists, Pavement) alongside classics I never would have bought (The Beach Boys, the Clash, the Flaming Lips, Husker Du, Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground) and obscurities I now treasure (Daniel Johnston, The Mountain Goats, TV on the Radio). And for each of these artists, what was included was not merely one album but the entire catalog. (There are many artists I left out).

I could say that hooking up this iPod to my (new) computer and methodically organizing playlists to investigate everything I didn’t recognize constituted a radical change in my life. But this would be a bit histrionic and hyperbolic. The truth is, my life was changing anyway: the loss of every possession helped push this along, but I also lost (and gained) friends, completed graduate school and somehow started to become a ‘professional’ around the same time.

(But not too professional. I don’t seem to have had any compunction about stealing music to replace stolen music. Who isn’t a thief when no one is looking?)

Conveniently, the iPod driven sound-track of my life changed too. And all because of this nearly unbelievable moment. On the train I listened to Mates of State for the first time. Walking down Bleecker, I puzzled through Le Tigre. I rediscovered the Red House Painters sitting in the Park. I learned to love both Modest Mouse and Sun Kil Moon through the same songs. I could go on and on and on and…
What makes this a story worth telling, however, is how memory and time have changed my perception of it. My delight at finding this collection soon morphed into horror. The taste of the original collector was obviously superior to mine; the instincts were better. This history of alt-rock had been so carefully and thoroughly assembled that it mocked any pretense I had at caring about music at all. The eclecticism of rare blues albums and blue grass artists I had never heard of shamed me.

So, I tried to re-educate myself, to make myself become the person who had these albums in his collection, despite the fact that I hadn’t suffered for them: I didn’t pay for them, I didn’t handle them, I didn’t make sacrifices to find room for them on my shelves.
When we (or maybe just when I) make ‘iPod choices’ one of the influences on these choices is, for better or for worse, ‘appearances’—what ‘should’ I have on my iPod if I am the person I say I am? Through what music will someone, should they acquire my iPod, most accurately gauge the person I want to be seen?

The treasure trove gave me all the tools I needed to create a new identity at a time when I was most prepared to do so. The horror came from realizing that many of the artists I should like were not the ones I do like now. As I listened carefully to the collections of Pavement and Built to Spill, I realized who I was not (their music just didn’t make me care). Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground?

Yawn.

Sometimes what glitters isn’t gold and it’s the sheen on the metal that helps you see. The treasure trove, which I laboriously worked through, made me face what music I actually cared about. When I told my colleague that The Magnetic Fields and Mates of State changed the way I looked at the world or that Micah P. Hinson made me weep on University Place, she turned to me and said “Huh?”
Of course, I still have Pavement and The Velvet Underground on my computer. Just in case anyone is looking.

And you brother, can you point to so singular a moment? Can you apply such a veneer of honesty? Was such a torrent of musical emotion possible before the iPod?

I try and sing along with this because the high note is incredibly hard to hit, nearly impossible. Myself and the lead guitar player in my band try to harmonize on it as a means to practice doing vocal harmonies. Obviously, the results are not perfect but it sure is fun. I also love thecomplex production of this song because the little percussive noises really make it snap.

I can’t stop singing “Under the Boardwalk” and I don’t even like going to the beach. True Story: It always involves sand getting into everything and I am extremely pale so I can’t enjoy the sun the way most people do. After one hell of a long winter with various ups and downs and a way late season snowstorm a few weeks back, springtime is finally here. The Drifters really captured the feeling of sunshine and milling around on this track and I have had it on repeat in my head and on my PA in the band’s jam room. I am incredibly happy for the season to change and I can’t wait for summer.

“The taxman’s taken all my dough” rang true to me on this sunny afternoon when I decided to send in what I owed the Feds. My state refund was more than half of what I owed and seeing as I didn’t really pay in anything, it really wasn’t all that bad but I’m still going to bitch about it a little. The Kinks rock and I really need to get some more albums so I can write about them sometime.

It feels like we are finally having a long run of sunny days with no rain and even just two days ago when I was driving from my teaching job to my bartending job amidst a beautiful afternoon, I couldn’t even be bummed out that I was only halfway through a 16 hour work day. I haven’t worked at the latter job for many months because my band got hired for way more money then we deserve for New Year’s Eve based on our Redneck Ball show. The banquet supervisor at the hotel where I bartend hates me as a result of me not working that night even though I told her about three months ahead of time. I suspect she is a sociopath of some shade and probably was bullied as a youth because she is pretty vicious to some of the younger staff. So, I will probably not be back working there anytime soon and I was not unhappy to work my last double for a while or maybe ever.

I can feel the Neil Young versus Bob Dylan post creeping on on me here and I can’t wait. This one has been brewing inside of me for a long time. I haven’t heard much on this album and I need to get the whole thing.

I ended up going to a friend’s after work at 11 because I was still pretty jazzed from all the sugar-free Red Bull I’d drunk to get through my bar shift and I stayed at her house until probably 3 am. I probably slept for maybe three hours because my internal clock woke me up at Psychedelic Breakfast time much to my chagrin. Luckily, I heard the above Neil Young song and it really captured my attention. I love the sparseness of the music and how the voices are so loud and clear so you can hear the relaxed harmonies going on.  Not a lot for guitar solos here, but the little he does with what sounds like a dobro is so tasty. This is a beautiful song.

It got me thinking about the hotel job and how I really don’t want to deal with the bullshit anymore. Granted, I barely work there, but just going in there and being around a lot of the negative environmental stuff really made me not want to be there. The work crew is by and large very cool and I love working with the wide variety of people in it, but the banquet department is a revolving door because of the crazy person who runs it. If you don’t make people feel like they want to be at work, they are not going to perform well.

The lyric at the end of this song brought this whole thing together in my brain. It goes  ”In the stand, the home crowd scatters/ for the turn stiles, for the turn stiles, for the turn stiles”. This is like that job for me and for everyone, leaving through the gates maybe to return but maybe not because its not a good working environment anyway. And goddamn Mr. Young can you write a song.

I could not have removed this brush without my friend’s truck. Thanks buddy!

I spent the most of that morning filling a borrowed dump truck with loads of brush and then attended my hippie neighbors daughter’s sixth birthday party which ended with fireworks, beers, and the singling out of a lone aggressive rooster from the hundreds strong flock that threatened to spur one of my neighbor’s distant relatives at the get-together and everyone of the hippie neighbor’s children in the past month. I am not sure what happened when I left for my house, but I assume the rooster did not make it to crow this morning.

I ended up playing some music with the lead singer from my band and then we headed down to our local dive bar. I hadn’t been down in a long time and it really felt like coming home. Being that my bandmates and I are now local celebrities, I didn’t have to buy any drinks and I danced with a lot of people’s girlfriends. I ended up talking with an old friend from elementary school who was about to get beat up by some Iron Horsemen for some stupid reason. I used the term “non confrontational conflict resolution” when talking with him before he went to try and get out of the imminent ass kicking.

Jamey Johnson is one of the few modern country stars who doesn’t suck. Although some of his lyrical content doesn’t vibe directly with my own philosophies, a lot of it does and all of the music is good. Most of these are good rules for the bar too.

I left right before close and the conflict seemed to have been resolved, but who knows. My friend could be at the bottom of the river right now and I wouldn’t be any wiser. I am happy that spring is here because it means winter is over and summer is not too far off. I have a new job, a band getting more gigs and many other potential situations in the works. Now if I can just get more blog posts up each week, I’d really be sitting pretty.

Rest in Peace Richie Havens!