lifeonashelf

[lifeonashelf]

COLDPLAY

Let’s get this straight right off the bat: Coldplay is fucking terrible.

We all know this. Designating Coldplay as terrible isn’t a statement of personal opinion, it is an easily demonstrable fact. Just listen to them; Coldplay’s music proves the existence of Coldplay’s terribleness the same way that breathing proves the existence of oxygen. Surely, even the band’s staunchest supporters understand that their songs are pretentious, monotonous, and unimaginative—they’d kind of have to; I assume these people have listened to Coldplay, too. If you like music as superfluous as Coldplay’s, that’s totally fine. I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t, nor to convince you to stop listening to Coldplay (you can’t stop listening to them, anyway; no matter how hard you try to escape, wherever you go, Coldplay will find you). But they are unequivocally fucking awful, and I need to make that clear before we continue in case I end up saying anything courteous about them later. And, who knows? I may indeed find something positive to say about Coldplay—I mean, nothing comes to mind right now, but it’s going to take me a few hours to write this piece so it’s possible something will at some point.  

Okay, so we’re all clear on Coldplay being fucking terrible, right? Great. But that isn’t the main reason I hate them. I appreciate plenty of terrible bands just as I appreciate plenty of terrible movies. Listening to a really shitty group is sort of like watching a cast of really shitty actors—though they clearly suck at what they do, there’s something oddly appealing about the charming naiveté they demonstrate by giving it the best go they can anyway.

For instance, since I was still filing most of my Warped Tour emo discs in my punk section when I began this venture, I never got around to writing about a band called Adair. If you’re not familiar with them, don’t worry about it; they only existed for a few years in the mid-aughts and their diminutive discography merely consists of a self-released EP and one full-length album, The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New. Sonically, Adair were so amusingly prototypical of every baby t-shirt screamo band that was thriving at the time, they essentially sounded like they were parodying the style of music they played (although, to be fair, a lot of those squads did). But, Adair were absolutely serious, regardless of what stridently nasal heights the vocals reached, regardless of how faithfully their compositions adhered to their genre’s textbook page by page, and regardless of the sublimely ridiculous realms some of their allegorical angst lamentations ventured into (the line “lock me up in Guantanamo Bay and throw away the key” from the song “I Buried My Heart In Cosmo Park” may very well be the lyrical apex of their entire genus).

Adair’s music is so inane that it makes me laugh out loud when I sing along to it—but here’s the thing: I do sing along to it. I have probably played The Destruction Of Everything Is The Beginning Of Something New a hundred times from start to finish since my copy was sent to me to review for some website back in 2006, and I have cued up individual high(low?)points like “The Diamond Ring” and “Folding and Unfolding” even more times than that. As silly as they sound—and trust me, they sound very fucking silly—I still sincerely enjoy their tunes and have spent enough hours listening to TDOEITBOSN for it to possibly qualify as one of my favorite records ever. Shit, even writing about it right now makes me feel like hearing the disc, so I’ll probably end up blasting it in my truck tomorrow (ed. note: I actually did). If they ever decided to do a reunion tour, I would absolutely go see them, and if vocalist Rob Tweedie did that whole “hold the microphone out toward the crowd so they can finish the lyric” thing which every frontman in every band that sounds like Adair does at least a dozen times per show, I would totally be able to fill in each of those blanks and enthusiastically do so.

Sorry, we were talking about Coldplay. To recap, they’re fucking terrible.

Unlike a frivolous whimper-core ensemble like Adair, the most off-putting thing about Coldplay isn’t their music. They’ve actually managed to excrete a few tracks that I grudgingly enjoy over the years. However, sporadically releasing songs which don’t sound like they were specifically written for Gap commercials actually works against Coldplay in this instance. Sure, most of their output is noxious twaddle, but since they occasionally come across as a marginally decent band, their work isn’t awful enough to at least ironically appreciate it for being awful.

In fact, there’s absolutely nothing ironic about Coldplay—other than U2 and Radiohead (more on them in a minute), I can’t think of another band that seems to take itself as dreadfully seriously as Coldplay does. There isn’t a single lighthearted number in their entire catalog, and the demeanor of their music is so staid and cheerless that it’s hard to imagine the dudes ever cracking a smile while they’re making it. Their approach to songwriting is rigidly Pavlovian—when the music gets louder, ring ring ring, that signals the listener the *really* poignant part of the tune has arrived and cues them to emotionally salivate in kind—yet despite their calculated use of sonic dynamics to manufacture sentiment, the vapid and unspontaneous nature of the delivery saps their tunes of anything resembling genuine soul or passion. Even when thrusting through the more energetic tracks in their litany, the musicians in Coldplay always sound like they’re actively striving to not play their instruments too hard. The result is that they consistently deliver some of the safest and least edgy rock ever created, shaping their ethos around a formula so willfully tepid and cuddly that they barely qualify as a rock band at all. Coldplay aren’t quite the musical equivalent of plain yogurt (that would be Jack Johnson, an artist so comprehensively flavorless that even his name is fucking boring) but the granola in their mixture is always judiciously distributed so as not to agitate anyone’s tastebuds.

And at the center of this slow-motion kaleidoscope, you have Chris fucking Martin (I find it difficult to cite his name without including the “fucking” in there; he’s just one of those guys—like Jason fucking Mraz, Blake fucking Shelton, or fucking Bono). Coldplay’s music may be stagnant, but you’d never know it from beholding the practiced arsenal of slinky paroxysms their vocalist bursts into while that music is playing. In performance and in their videos, Martin’s appendages are incessantly in motion, his hands ever-swaying gently through the air like he’s waving a pair of invisible cigarette lighters or finger painting on the goddamn sky, ostensibly so deeply lost in his band’s reverie of sound that he simply can’t help himself from moving his body in a cadenced pantomime of the way their music is meant to superficially move your spirit.

For the three non-ballads the group has written in their career, Chris usually switches things up by crouching in an incongruous bobbing panther-stance like a battle rapper delivering a diss track about fucking his opponent’s mama in the mouth, until it’s time to freeze in the tried and true messiah-statue pose as the number’s final notes chime into the ether. But it is in the quiet moments when Martin truly shines—which makes perfect sense given that he’s the leader of a group so systematically anodyne they probably should have actually named themselves Quiet Moments. These are the obligatory interims where the frontman takes the stage on his own to sit down at the piano, resplendent in the spotlight, and perform an intimate solo rendition of one of his most tender hits to show everyone in the audience that Chris fucking Martin is a bonafide fucking musician who, if he really felt like it, could totally do the whole Coldplay thing without the other three dudes whose names no one knows. His soaring falsetto croon is custom-feigned for the arenas the band was destined to coldplay from the moment they dropped their breakthrough single “Yellow” and caused a nation of book-sensitive sociology majors eagerly anticipating the arrival of their generation’s U2 to cream their Dockers in unison. When Martin opens his pipes to summon those indelibly contrived choruses about birds and stars and other monosyllabic nouns, it hardly even matters what words he’s singing—the leitmotifs in most of the tunes are basically interchangeable anyway. What matters is that Chris sounds like he really, really, really means it when he says he will try to fix you.

That analysis probably makes it seem like I hate Chris fucking Martin as much as I hate his band. I actually don’t—he’s too benign a character to elicit such a fervid response; hating Chris Martin is like hating turtleneck sweaters, or actual turtles. In fact, I suspect he’s probably a really nice dude.  At least, I’ve never heard any creepy stories about him showing his penis to under-aged fans on Skype or anything like that.

Regardless, while I don’t specifically despise either Martin, Dude Who Plays Guitar, or the other two anonymous members of Coldplay, I do gauge their collective as the fourth or fifth worst band of all time. And the reason I loathe them more than any of their neighbors on that list is because they aren’t the kind of prodigiously abysmal group you can just ignore until their moment in the spotlight inevitably passes—which is how I dealt with Five For Fighting from September 2001 through February 2002 and how I’ve been dealing with Twenty-One Pilots for the last four years (seriously, are you fuckers done yet?). Coldplay is a far cagier nuisance because they are massively popular and have been for a ludicrously long time. I’ve been patiently waiting for them to go away for two decades now, yet they continue to pop up every third summer or so to drop a new album and remind us that, yes, they’re still here assiduously mining the middle of the road for new ways to write more tunes about clouds being pretty.

Even worse, I can’t disregard their music because it’s everywhere. I hear “The Scientist” while I’m shopping for cereal at the grocery store, I hear “Talk” when I sit down to eat at any chain restaurant, and I imagine I’ll be viewing that idiotic video for “Adventure of a Lifetime” with the posse of animated dancing monkeys on an infinite Clockwork-Orange-eyes-gaping loop for the rest of eternity when my mortal essence exits this world and I am cast into the fiery pits of Hell. I can’t even watch football without encountering Coldplay, as I discovered with horror in 2016 when they took part in the most fatuous jumbled fucking mess of a Super Bowl halftime show the NFL had ever presented (a zenith of suckery which seemed impossible to eclipse until this past February, when Adam Levine showed up covered with prison tattoos and said, “hold my beer”).

The pervasive level of esteem Coldplay has reached dumbfounds me. This is a group that has sold millions and millions of albums worldwide, even though I have never once heard a single person utter the phrase, “man, that new Coldplay song kicks ass.” I’m sure their most dedicated fans have favorite hits, tracks that are significant to them in some way, etc. But their remarkable success is patently disproportionate to how patently unremarkable the work which garnered that success really is. Nobody ever describes the band’s music as “awesome”, just as nobody ever describes a glass of pinot gris as awesome—the term simply does not apply to their province; actually, in this case, describing the mouthfeel of Coldplay tunes and recommending cheeses they best pair with is probably more relevant than discussing how they sound. Coldplay is as universally popular as they are precisely because they aren’t awesome. They’re not beloved because they’re extraordinary; most people love them because they’re innocuous, functional, and suitable for almost any occasion—Coldplay is akin to a pair of cargo shorts, and no one thinks cargo shorts kick ass. Coldplay isn’t an alternative band (on the contrary, almost every good band is an alternative to Coldplay); they are a lowest common denominator band, undemanding and ubiquitous and safe to like because everyone else likes them. Their work is specifically geared toward people who think appreciating music demonstrates sophistication, but don’t ultimately give enough of a shit about the artform to put any effort into finding music that is actually sophisticated or appreciable. You may assume Coldplay is erudite because they’re British and they cite books you’ve never read when discussing the lyrical themes in their work, but they’re merely recycling the same emotional territory as every other pop act that writes tunes about finding love, losing love, missing love, and the 18th Century French peasantry.

The best thing about being a Coldplay fan is that it’s easy. You don’t have to buy their records, go see them live, or make any concerted effort at all to receive their music. If you listen to the radio for any extended period of time (or eat at an Applebee’s), you will eventually hear one of their songs; all you have to do is not hate it and, voila, you’re officially a Coldplay fan. There, don’t you just love the security of venerating a critically and commercially acclaimed band that will never challenge you or be unpopular?

Okay, I do strive to be fair—even in this arena where I can say whatever I want and no one can argue with me. I gave this a lot of thought, so here are four things about Coldplay that are not terrible:

 1)      “Clocks”: I resisted it for many years, but I finally had to concede that it’s kind of a pretty song. Notes of red currant and blackberries, and it goes superbly with a nice aged brie.

2)      “God Put A Smile On Your Face”: It doesn’t put a smile on mine, but that’s why I enjoy it. Most Coldplay songs sound like they’re aiming to evoke what being hugged by a koala bear feels like, so I appreciate Chris fucking Martin delivering a darker number that seems intent on making me feel depressed instead. Well played, sir.

3)      Viva La Vida, Or Death And All His Friends: I sincerely respect their effort to broaden their palate a bit by working with Brian Eno and making Dude Who Plays Guitar buy a distortion pedal to use on one song. This is still an archetypal shitty Coldplay record, but at least it sounds a little different than all of the other archetypal shitty Coldplay records.

4)      Nah. They’re still fucking terrible; they were lucky to get three things.

 There is one additional facet of the group’s career which has fascinated me over these past several years, even though it relates more to bands that are not Coldplay rather than the band that is Coldplay. Earlier I dubbed them the U2 of their generation, and recent events in particular have coalesced to underscore that comparison. See, when Coldplay came out, the tributes to their Irish brethren in choreographed affectation were far from subtle. Chris fucking Martin’s warbling was plainly modeled after fucking Bono’s, Dude Who Plays Guitar served up an endless cycle of repetitive but hooky high-register licks that were striking similar to the distinctive methodology of The Edge, and both bands’ workmanlike rhythm sections held things down with competent yet discreet backing tracks which militantly fulfilled each song’s basic requirements rather than showcasing the musicians’ dexterity. I don’t think anyone ever disputed the collective homage in Coldplay’s dogma, and no one was terribly bothered by it either; at the time there were a lot of people craving a band that sounded just like U2, because U2 didn’t sound like U2 anymore.

When Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes was released in July 2000, fucking Bono and company’s career was on a downward arc after they largely vacated their signature approach to instead craft a couple poorly-received discs dominated by insipid rave-lite tunes that not even the members of U2 listen to anymore. Though they would temporarily rebound later that year with “Beautiful Day”, the last honestly excellent song they would ever record, U2 had left a gap that needed filling. And the most obvious inheritors of their kingdom, Radiohead, had grown tired of anthemic guitar rock; they were hunkered down creating their demanding but exceptional opus Kid A, which sounded nothing like U2, nothing like Radiohead, and indeed nothing like any other music being made on planet Earth. Kid A still had some anthems, still had some guitar, and still had a little rock, but its oblique delivery clearly demonstrated that Radiohead was chasing a far different muse and had little interest in claiming the crown (of course, this would be abundantly clarified in hindsight when they subsequently slid further down their rabbit-hole, gradually abandoning the anthems and guitars and rock altogether, until finally settling upon their current songwriting formula, which seems to mostly involve Thom Yorke masturbating on his laptop, naming ten of his climaxes, and calling it an album).

So while U2 were busy trying to figure out why they weren’t relevant anymore and Radiohead were busy doing whatever the fuck they were doing, the lads in Coldplay stepped up and said, hey, why not us? They seized the ersatz-earnest arena rock mantle with A Rush Of Blood To The Head and never looked back. Now, 17 years and seven multi-platinum albums later, they can ruin the Super Bowl, collaborate with the Chainsmokers, and even make the same kind of lameass dance music that essentially buried U2’s career with impunity. Even more significant, they have come full circle. A group that started out playing second-rate U2 facsimiles under the moniker Pectoralz (this is absolutely true, by the way) is now one of the hugest pop institutions in the universe, beloved by millions of music and wine connoisseurs across the globe. And the student has eclipsed the teacher; U2’s desperate efforts to play catchup have made their modern work sound unmistakably like second-rate Coldplay facsimiles. Chris fucking Martin and those other three guys are no longer pretenders to the throne—they are Coldplay, and this is their empire now, bitches.

These days, U2 has to reprise their old records in their entirety on nostalgia tours to get anyone to come to their concerts, and Radiohead continues to release unlistenable albums which their fans claim to love while sheepishly casting them aside to listen to OK Computer for the thousandth time instead. But Coldplay has strategically situated themselves for an eternity as the undisputed emperors of rock mediocrity. I think they’ve got another two decades in them, too; I have no doubt that long after Twenty-One Pilots is (finally) relegated to the county fair circuit where they belong, Chris fucking Martin will still be promising sold-out crowds that lights will lead them home and having a series of polite, gently-articulated seizures while he sings “Speed Of Sound”.

It seems I respect Coldplay a little more than I suspected. You know what? I’m going to amend my original valuation right here and now. As of this moment, I am formally designating Coldplay the sixth worst band of all time.

Your move, Godsmack.

 May 15, 2019

[lifeonashelf]

...INTERLUDE...

Come to Vegas! We can make out, gamble, and forget all our troubles.

This is quite possibly the greatest text message I have ever received. Four days later, I hit the road.

I have never driven to Las Vegas by myself. Once I complete the journey I can’t fathom why this is, because despite the extended sprawl of nothing between us, Vegas isn’t nearly as far away as I picture it in my mind. I arrive in 3 hours and 17 minutes (which, oddly, is the exact figure Google Maps gave me when I checked the route before leaving my apartment—this is even more astonishing when you factor in that Google not only calculated my precise rate of speed for the entire trek, but evidently also predicted that I would be pulling off the road for seven minutes to have a cigarette at a rest stop just outside Baker). On the way, I listen to two volumes of a 10-disc playlist I made a few months earlier. When I burn mix CDs for myself, they are ridiculously schizophrenic—crossing the state line, I hear Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, my favorite track by the death metal band Gorefest, and then “Cool For The Summer” by Demi Lovato in immediate succession, and I sing every word to each of them. Needless to say, it is an awesome drive.

Everything proceeds smoothly when I arrive. The Gold Coast has my lodgings ready for me two hours prior to the posted check-in time and they are able to accommodate my request for a smoking flat. I take my bag up to the 9th floor, set up my laptop at the table by the window, and then smoke a cigarette in my room just because I fucking can. I purposefully skipped dinner the night before so my stomach would be prepared to maximize the possibilities offered by the hotel’s Ports O’ Call Buffet. I tear that shit up, then head to the lounge to play a bit of video poker and get a cup of coffee—the machines at the bartop are not kind to me; that cup of coffee ends up costing me sixty dollars. Such is Vegas.

The day is uneventful, by Las Vegas standards. I drink more coffee, I gamble some more and win back my sixty bucks, I write a bit, I watch some basketball. But I am really just killing time. Because the passing hours are merely a preamble; the woman who sent me the text message which acted as the siren song for this trip is in the same town as me, and come “around 7ish” we will be in the same building.

She’s here on business. ___ is a reality television producer, and has been dispatched to Sin City to film the upcoming season of the show Hell’s Kitchen. I have not seen her in over two years, even though she only lives 30 miles from my apartment in real life and driving to Nevada is in fact way more effort than I would normally have to exert to visit her. But our real lives are rarely able to intersect. Besides, I love Las Vegas. And there’s something undeniably enchanting about the prospect of walking beside a beautiful girl amidst a panorama of brilliant dramatic neon and exotic stereoscopic night-sounds. Being in Vegas is like being in a movie, and the character you get to play has way more fun than you do when you’re not on-screen. Compared to my daily existence, and the daily existence of anyone who does not live here, the milieu of Vegas feels like an ethereal dream. That’s why it’s the perfect place to rendezvous with ___; being around her is so intoxicating that it feels much the same.

Our history spans nearly two decades. It is as complicated and messy and wonderful as any history I have ever shared with anyone. I cannot possibly recount all of it here, though I will tell you some. I lost a girlfriend when ___ and I became close because that girlfriend clearly identified that we were mutually attracted to each other. I would have never cheated, but my relationship imploded because I aggressively refuted her well-founded apprehensions and pretended like she was acting crazy for even insinuating I was drawn this person who I would 17 years later drive 230 miles to visit at the whim of a late night text. As a result I broke the heart of an incredible woman who deserved far better, and she broke mine by dumping me. Twenty-four hours subsequent, I was on a park bench making out with a girl who I swore up and down was merely a platonic acquaintance, and I was officially a liar.

I was 23 years old. I was also far more charming and attractive than I am now, and in the mindset to actively explore the positive corollaries which arose from that confluence. I spent a few years kissing a lot of girls because I was single and I was in my early twenties and it’s a good idea to kiss as many girls as you can when you’re single and in your early twenties because you won’t get to kiss too many more after that. Despite the sagacity I demonstrated by accurately predicting this, I was an unadulterated fucking idiot when it came to ___. I am horrified by my conduct throughout everything that ensued between us, and I will forever be haunted by the what-ifs brought about by the consequent brazen stupidity I exhibited.

From the moment we began groping each other at Cahuilla Park in Claremont, ___ became sort of a surrogate for the girlfriend I had sacrificed, a proxy upon whom I could bestow both the passion that had been extinguished and the anguish that had been stoked after the break-up. ___ did not kill my relationship, I killed it by being a callous asshole. But I think subconsciously I blamed her anyway (for having the audacity to enter my life and be the extraordinary girl she is, I suppose); that was far easier than owning up to the fact that I had acted like an irredeemable piece of shit toward the girl she supplanted. My pride and my heart were wounded and I couldn’t take it out on the person whose inescapable-in-hindsight decision had caused those injuries since she was no longer taking my calls. So I took it out on her replacement instead. And over the course of the several tumultuous months that followed, I proceeded to meticulously break the heart of another incredible woman who deserved far better.

I have never handled anyone as poorly as I handled ___. She was a dazzling and unequivocal gem, yet I treated her like she meant nothing to me at all. The mere thought of her being with anyone else drove me mad, yet instead of telling her this I told her time and time again that she could never have me all to herself and continued dating other people to underscore my assertion. More than once, I brought her to tears by stating in no uncertain terms that I never wanted to see her again, only to call her the very next night and ask her to come over as if that conversation never happened. I wasn’t simply emotionally abusive to ___, I was utterly fiendish to her. For every year of my life leading up to that one and every year since, I have been proud to conduct myself as a true gentleman, so I will never understand how I was even capable of hurting anyone as persistently and comprehensively as I hurt her. Rest assured, I didn’t understand it at the time, either. Nor did I understand why no matter how awful I was to her, she still saw the best in me and held out hope that I would come to my senses and acknowledge the singularly special thing that was standing right in front of me.

Unfortunately, I realized far too late that the reason ___ did so was because she was deeply in love with me. And I also realized far too late that I was deeply in love with her.

By then I had done about as much damage to her psyche as one person could do to another. Though she wouldn’t know it, my comeuppance was delivered by the next woman I entered into a failed relationship with, who put me through a lot of the same things I put ___ through and came up with several novel doozies of her own for good measure. ___ and I remained in sporadic telephone contact, though we rarely saw each other in person. Bizarrely, this had the upshot of emphasizing the indissoluble strength of our bond, since none of the interactions we had were stilted by our silence and distance—every time we came together, I felt as close to her as ever and she clearly felt the same.

Over the years, we’ve had numerous conversations about what happened between us. I wish to keep those private, but the essence of what has been expressed is that despite everything she considers me one of the people closest to her in the world. She also told me that “Perfect” by The Smashing Pumpkins is her song to me; I listen to it often, even though those beautiful and devastating lyrics always bring tears to my eyes.

Of course, along the way I finally did what she desperately wished I would have done 17 years ago. I came to my senses and acknowledged the singularly special thing that was once standing right in front of me. I made overtures to that effect on a couple of occasions when we once again found ourselves simultaneously single, but they were way overdue. She said she did still love me and always would, but the wall I forced her to build to shield herself from me had grown too tall and sturdy to tear down. A tacit understanding developed between us: we would be friends for the rest of our lives, but I had confused and harmed her enough for one lifetime and she was not willing to give me any chance to add to that abominable legacy. It’s a verdict I had no choice but to accept because it was a much better one than I deserved; she would have been undeniably justified in never wanting to speak to me again.

I know ___ has never wholly resolved the chaos of emotions I stirred within her, neither the amorous nor the angry. Some cuts are too deep to be sutured, and those tend to leave scars. Truthfully, I think she despises me as much as she adores me; she just adores me too much to let the other side win out most of the time. But this paradox is entirely fitting because our entire relationship is a paradox, a saga of two satellites which have shared each other’s orbit since they were launched and create a blinding explosion when they collide. Last night, she kissed me in the lobby of the Golden Nugget casino and we melted into each other just like we did that first time in Cahuilla Park, seventeen years erased by the touching of lips. When we came up for air, she wrapped her arms around me and buried her face against my chest and said, “god, I hate you,” with so much love in her voice that it made my stomach swim. It was the perfect thing for her to say in that moment, both because it is absolutely true and because it is the absolute opposite of the truth.

We had a delightful night on Fremont Street, both of us properly investigating that very cool region of the city for the first time. We had some drinks and we listened to some music and we played some poker and we held hands as we walked the promenade. For a few hours, we got to be the couple both of us wanted to be at one time or another, just never at the same time; we even fought like a couple for part of that span, since the resentment and pain she’s had to bury deep within herself to continue accepting me into her life despite my previous sins still gets triggered from time to time when we speak of the past. Regardless, I wouldn’t have changed a second of it. The night was absolutely magical, because ___ is absolutely magical.

But the spell of Las Vegas gets broken once you realize that nothing there is real. There’s an axiom people use to justify all manner of debauchery they engage in while visiting Sin City: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”  Tonight ___ is out with a large group of people who esteem her, and I am alone in a smoky room sitting at my laptop, which is a lot closer to what our individual non-Las Vegas lives look like. This artificial vacation existence in which we were united as one happened in Vegas and will stay in Vegas, because it has to. Because, truthfully, the life she built for herself without me is much richer than the life I built for myself without her. Tomorrow morning I will get in my truck and exit this city of lights to travel back across a stretch of barren desert the length of two mix-CDs, and after I arrive home I will spend the next interminable number of days and nights sitting at my laptop in a room that is less smoky than this one but no less lonely. Meanwhile, tomorrow morning ___ will continue to work her fascinating job and then she will leave the country on some adventure, and no matter where she is and what she’s doing, she will be surrounded by people whose company is far more gratifying to her than mine ever could be.  

The hours we spent holding hands on Fremont Street were unreal. But they were also so real that I am still reeling from the aftershock of our latest satellite collision. Our relationship, both the real and the unreal, befits that manner of contradiction. I don’t think ___ and I are still in love with each other, but I do still love her in a way that I have never loved anyone else. I have committed unconditionally to other women in her absence and redistributed the connection we share into a more manageable framework, but whenever there is no one in my life I can’t help but recognize that there very well could be if I hadn’t once been a soulless beast to someone who was merely pleading for me to appreciate them the way they sincerely deserved to be appreciated. ___ is without a doubt one of the most phenomenal and inside-out beautiful human beings I have ever known and I cannot conceive of my life without her in it, yet I still to this day find it difficult to face her. Every moment I spend with ___ feels like a gift, but those moments also sting in equal measure, because she is a walking reminder of me at my absolute worst.

I don’t think she has ever truly forgiven me. I’m not sure she really ever could, or should. Nothing I do today can undo what I did yesterday. I know that no matter how exhilarating it feels to look into her gorgeous and soulful eyes after we kiss in a glittering alternate universe, there are times when she looks at me and only sees a man who likely hurt her worse than anyone else she has ever known. I know there is a part of her that will always love me, but I also know there’s a part of her that wishes she had never even met me.

While I can only suppose what the world might look like if I had treasured her instead of trashing her all those years ago, I am positive that it would look far better and brighter than it does now. I’m aware that even if I had done the right things then, it’s improbable we would still be together today. Very few relationships go that distance, and despite our exceptional chemistry, ___ and I are not effortlessly compatible. I wouldn’t change a single thing about her, but there are unchangeable things about me I know she could not abide and no one should have to. She detests smoking; I enjoy smoking more than I enjoy most other things. She dreams of spending her days traveling and exploring; I dream of sitting in my easy chair and watching blu-rays.

She thinks I was worth falling in love with; I think strongly otherwise.

I don’t specifically wish ___ and I were together now. Yet therein lies another paradox. Because I got a little glimpse of what that might look like last night on Fremont Street, and it looked amazing. But that wasn’t real, that was Las Vegas; what happens there stays there. It was a magnificent movie, but that’s not what our actual lives look like. We could make out, we could gamble, but we could never forget all our troubles—no matter how much she loved me then and loves me now, I will always be one of hers.

So maybe what I do wish is that I could really be the person she was holding hands with in that unreal fantasy, the person who kissed her with abandon in the lobby of the Golden Nugget, the person she gazed at with unbridled tenderness during that joyful interlude when both of us were able to shelve our past and exist solely and safely in our present. The person she hoped I would become before I shattered her hopes by becoming a monster. Regrettably, untethered from our mutual orbit, I grew to be someone else entirely, someone with numerous regrets he can never completely atone for, someone she will always measure with a watchful and skeptical eye to protect herself. Someone who can never be anyone else except who he is. And that person simply would not be capable of making ___ as happy as she deserves to be, because he already had his chance to do that and made her miserable instead.

Besides, he can barely make himself happy most of the time.

 ###

 The trip home is an inexorably depressing conclusion to every great vacation—you’re doing the exact same thing you did when you set off, except there isn’t anything to look forward to when you arrive. Fittingly, an unseasonable rain is coming down when I hit the 15 Freeway. The water-dappled windshield and the desolate unfolding highway ahead evoke another cinematic scene, perhaps a montage in which the central character takes a long drive to think heavy thoughts. At the risk of becoming a cliché, that is exactly what I do.

My mix-CDs play on, the music blurring past with the miles. I hear “Wonderwall” and I hear “Stairway to Heaven”, which are two songs that everyone should listen to extremely loudly on the open road at least once in their life. Seaweed… Tiamat… Purity Ring… My Chemical Romance… P!nk… The Dillinger Escape Plan... Fleetwood Mac… Each one of them imparts a decisively fantastic tune, but this time I’m not singing along. I am instead blinking away tears as it dawns on me exactly how much I am leaving behind in Las Vegas. Not the money I lost at the video poker machines, but the luminous girl I wagered at the age of 23 when I made a much more foolish gamble than I could have ever imagined and ended up losing the most precious thing I never had. The fortune that I lose over and over again every time ___ and I part from each other and return to the real world.

I discover that her hold on me, this cosmic magnetism we share, has not diminished with time. And I discover that the axiom is not absolute—not everything that happens in Vegas stays there; some things follow you all the way home.

That night on Fremont Street, she told me that she will never be completely over me. At least that makes us even in one respect.  

Though the imprint I left on her heart was shaped like a bruise, there will always be a piece of mine that is the precise shape and size of ___. That piece belongs to her, and though it is a woeful consolation prize, it is the only one I will ever have the opportunity to give her.

But it does come with a vow: forever and always, whenever and wherever we meet, in Las Vegas and in real life, I promise we’ll be perfect.

 May 9, 2019        

[lifeonashelf]

COHEN, LEONARD

So, here’s the thing: I don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen.

I do own two of his most acclaimed albums, but don’t get too excited. I bought both of them the week of Cohen’s passing solely because learning of his passing made me realize I didn’t have anything by him in my collection, and he’s always been on my radar as an artist I should probably know some things about, you know? I listened to those two discs one day while I was cleaning my apartment or something, and they were lovely and pleasant and sounded great, but then I filed them away on my shelf and that was essentially the extent of my immersion into the world of Leonard Cohen. I know the reissues I purchased are noteworthy entries in his discography, because they’re housed in these rather attractive hardcover digipacks with booklets that feature lengthy contextual essays written by people way smarter than me. I suppose I could read those essays and glean a little information about Cohen that way, but then I’d just be offering you disingenuous regurgitation, and I don’t want to fake anything in these pages; that’s kind of counteractive to the entire purpose of me writing these dumb things. So if you want to read a thoughtful essay about Leonard Cohen constructed by someone who I assume knows enough about Leonard Cohen to warrant being paid to write an essay about him, you should definitely seek out the striking deluxe editions of Songs From a Room and Songs of Love and Hate I’m referring to, because both have essays in them, and they’re printed on glossy paper so they’re probably pretty good (very few crappy essays get preserved on glossy paper).

No one is paying me to write this essay about Leonard Cohen—they’d be pretty stupid to do so, since I don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen—but I have that pair of records and he’s the next artist on alphabetical deck. So here we are.

Actually, you know what? Before we get started, I’m going to go ahead and advise you to just skip this piece altogether.

Hear me out. I can’t imagine this is going to be one of my better entries; considering my not knowing anything about the person I’m supposed to be writing about and all, the odds of my somehow summoning literary gold here aren’t particularly strong. Also, Leonard Cohen is a highly respected artist, and based on the listening I’m doing right now, he definitely deserves that respect—I’m on my second spin of Songs from a Room and it is an absolutely beautiful record. But what am I accomplishing by telling you that? You probably already know Songs From a Room is an absolutely beautiful record, and if you don’t, you should totally listen to it right this minute instead of reading anything I might observe about it, because the album is a whole lot better than this essay is going to be. I’ve been down this road before, so I can tell you exactly what’s about to happen here: I’m going to keep prattling on with gibberish just like this and end up embarrassing myself by blowing yet another chance to write something substantial about a substantial artist. I guess I could comment on how much I like the two Cohen songs that were used to bookend the mindfuck of a film Natural Born Killers or something, but what purpose will that serve? There, I commented on it, and biting into those ‘member berries hasn’t magically ignited some spirited dissertation, has it? Look, I’m saying this because I care: I really think you should call it quits on this piece right here and now, before you get in too deep. I’m already doomed, but it’s not too late to save yourself. Run, go, get to the choppah. Fly away, Clarice, fly fly fly. ‘Member?  

Okay, you’ve been duly warned. So if you do decide to continue on, I’m not going to feel terribly bad about wasting your time, especially since I essentially just promised you anything I write from this point forward is going to be a waste of your time. I mean, everything I’ve written so far has also been a waste of your time, but I haven’t written that much yet. And at least the stuff I wrote so far has served a purpose: it cautioned you that everything to come is going to be an even bigger waste of your time. I can’t promise any of the supplemental paragraphs I’m about to compose will be worth even that much, so I really have to advise you to take a moment here and consider your situation carefully. Weighing everything I’ve just told you about my not knowing anything about Leonard Cohen (and, just to be clear, I’m not playfully minimizing that disposition; I honestly don’t know shit about him), along with my stated unambiguous surety that I am about to waste an indefinite amount of your time (you must be familiar with my work by now; it’s totally plausible this thing could end up running 15 pages)—do you really want to read any of more of this? It’s still not too late to back out. Your time investment thus far is minimal. You can just move right along to the next piece (it’s about Coldplay, so I’m sure that essay is going to be way funnier than this one). My feelings won’t be hurt, I promise. I can hardly fault you for not reading this, because there isn’t any reason at all you should read this. Unless you just really enjoy reading these entries in general, but that seems highly unlikely because nobody enjoys reading them—shit, I only enjoy every fifth one or so, and I write the fucking things.

Check it out: usually by this point in a composition, I would be painstakingly rereading what I’ve written so far to make sure I’m off to an okay start, right? But I haven’t done that in this case because I already know everything I’ve written so far is garbage. This piece isn’t going to improve, either. And that’s what I’m really trying to get across to you here: I am woefully ill-equipped to write anything about Leonard Cohen that is as excellent as his music—I just listened to Songs of Love and Hate a couple times, and holy shit, that’s an absolutely beautiful record too. You may assume I’m continuing this obnoxious diatribe because I’m setting you up for some grand gag (granted, it’s a fair guess, because I’ve done that a few times in entries past). But I’m not joking when I say that I’m not joking in this instance. This rambling philological self-fellation is not going to coalesce into something worthwhile; it’s just going to go on and on like this until I decide I’m done fucking with you and then this essay will just sort of… end, without preamble or satisfaction. I’m telling you, if you keep reading this, you are going to be super pissed off when you finish it. You’ll get to the conclusion, and you’ll grumble, “That’s it…? That was stupid.” And you will be right, because that will be it and it will be stupid.

Since that will be transpiring soon, we should probably clarify that at this point, when it does it’s going to be entirely your fault. If you go all the way back to the beginning of this twaddle, you’ll clearly see the very first thing I wrote was, “So, here’s the thing: I don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen.” That was the opening fucking sentence, dude. Seriously, what did you think was going to happen after that? And only a few lines later, I wrote: “I’m going to go ahead and advise you to just skip this piece altogether.” Then came that whole part about how reading this was going to be a total waste of your time, blah blah blah. You can check if you want; it’s all totally in there. I’m sure you didn’t think I’d be reprinting complete sentences you already read—and, you know what, yes, that’s kind of a low blow, I’m realizing now—but after I took the time to explain in detail that this essay would likely end up serving no purpose whatsoever, surely that must have given you pause. I mean, didn’t you think to yourself, “Wait a minute, before I read this essay, is it going to serve some purpose?” As I’ve made abundantly clear, the answer is: No. No, it is not. I was pretty up front about that. In fact, I specifically told you not to read it—“there isn’t any reason at all you should read this”; is that ringing a bell at all? So if you are still reading it, that’s kind of on you, dude. Sure, I could have stopped writing a long time ago and spared you from all of this bullshit, but let’s not get caught up in semantics.

Have you seen the movie Reservoir Dogs? I’m assuming you have, but if you haven’t, you can add that to the list of far more fulfilling things you could be doing right now instead of reading this essay. Anyway, the film is centered around the aftermath of a jewelry store robbery gone horrifically wrong. We don’t actually see the caper take place, but the characters reference it enough along the way for us to get a clear sense of things devolving into a bloodbath after one of the robbers, Mr. Blonde (played by Michael Madsen) shoots numerous people inside the establishment. Is it coming back to you now? Good. There’s a reason I’m bringing this up.

Since Madsen is absent for a lot of the movie, the audience’s understanding of the storyline relies mostly on what the characters played by Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel share with us about what has occurred. Their perspective is clear: Mr. Blonde went crazy and started killing people, and that’s why the whole heist went tits up. However, when Madsen finally appears at the warehouse where the bulk of the plot’s action takes place, he presents an entirely different assessment of the exact same incident. It is here that the movie shifts into the subtle employment of a narrative device known as the “Rashomon Effect,” so-named because this formula’s introduction to Western film-goers is commonly credited to the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon—a picture which we can assume in hindsight Reservoir Dogs creator Quentin Tarantino was consciously invoking since his filmography has since revealed a heart-on-sleeve fandom for the work of that storied Japanese director (several Tarantino flicks make reference to this allegiance, but his Kill Bill films in particular are at their core unashamed modern reimaginings of Kurosawa’s legendary Samurai epics). I won’t recount the entire plot of Rashomon, since doing so would be superfluous here (as opposed to all of this shit I’m writing about Reservoir Dogs, which is obviously vitally important to this essay about Leonard Cohen). All you really need to know for our purposes is that the crux of the story is a singular event which is assigned completely disparate interpretations by the various people in the film who witness it.  Which is precisely what happens when Michael Madsen makes his entrance.

Now, I’ve seen Reservoir Dogs many times, but not enough times to have the dialogue faithfully memorized; you’ll have to forgive me if I paraphrase a bit here. Essentially, Keitel’s character calls Mr. Blonde a “maniac” or something to that effect, a designation based on Madsen’s character opening fire upon one of the store’s clerks for what Keitel perceives as “no reason at all.” Madsen’s response to this slanted accusation is fascinating. In direct repudiation of his labelling as a “maniac” seconds before, he continues calmly drinking his soda as he amends Keitel’s analysis of the murder by providing a remarkably lucid and utilitarian explanation for the killing: “I told her not to press the alarm, but she did. If she hadn’t done the thing that I told her not to do, then I wouldn’t have shot her.”

It seems we are sharing our own Rashomon moment, my friends. You may feel like your time has been wasted, and it certainly has. But I am not the one who wasted it. That was you. I told you not to read this essay, but you did. If you hadn’t done the thing I told you not to do…  

Mr. Cohen: I am truly sorry. Your music is stunning, and you deserve far better than this.

As for the rest of you: I mean, dude, I fucking told you.

 March 31, 2019

[lifeonashelf]

COBAIN, KURT

Dying was definitely the worst thing that ever happened to Kurt Cobain.

That may not read like a particularly brilliant statement. You’re saying: “Taylor, I’m sure if you solicited any random sampling of people to compile a list of the worst things they could imagine happening to them, dying would end up at the top of most of those lists” (although, it would land below “being married to Courtney Love” on mine). However, the reasons I’m positing this in regards to Cobain are only tangentially related to the most common side effect of death being an immediate cessation of one’s mortal presence on this earth. Explanation: Cobain’s too-short life was characterized by profound and abiding existential pain, so in his specific instance I presume ending that life at least came with the not-unwelcome corollary of providing a respite from his suffering. Besides, the manner of his death left ample evidence that he sincerely did not want to be alive anymore, so it’s unlikely he was overly concerned with side effects. In case there’s any misconception that I’m somehow endorsing Kurt Cobain’s suicide, please feel free to text me and I’ll gladly forward you a selfie so you can see the tears that are filling my eyes right now as I revisit the devastating final chapter of a man whose music means the world to me. Yet, somehow, the strip-mining of his memory that began the very day his body was found strikes me as a tragedy which nearly equals what was done to that body.

Tucked away on one of my shelves, you will find a bootleg box set entitled Into the Black (I mean that figuratively; you will not find it—if you really want to see it, I will get it down for you; seriously, don’t start touching my shit). I procured this anthology upon its release in 1994, and back then it had the distinction of being the richest available source of previously-unreleased Nirvana live performances and songs that were never included on any of their albums. Such a find would be largely meaningless today, when a quick internet search can immediately unearth all of those tracks within seconds. But for a distraught fan to whom the prospect of facing a world where there would never be any new Nirvana music again seemed unbearable, Into the Black was an immensely cathartic salve for me at a time when I desperately needed it. The scope of the compendium remains impressive—I think it’s a way better collection than the official With the Lights Out box set that came out 10 years later—and by presenting the included material in chronological order, all the way from Nirvana’s first demo cassette to a complete recording of their final North American concert, the seven hours of tunes on Into the Black provide about the most fitting and comprehensive Kurt Cobain encomium ever delivered.

Which is part of what makes the final track on the anthology arrive like a dagger to the soul and the ears. There really isn’t a name for this closing selection—after all, it isn’t even a song. But the creators of Into the Black had to call it something in the track listing. So they called it exactly what it is: “Courtney Love’s Complete Eulogy For Kurt Cobain.”

This recording was played for a crowd of several thousand despondent fans who gathered in Seattle for a public memorial on April 10, 1994, two days after Cobain’s body was found. Its manifestation occupies a limbo unique to itself, half significant historical document, half ghoulish tabloid spectacle. Though the song “Miss World” was released on March 28, in a very real sense, it was this Courtney Love recital that served as the first proper single from Hole’s Live Through This, which would be released forty-eight hours later and subsequently propel her music career to previously unthinkable heights—a result that arguably stemmed as much from Love’s deft public navigation of her grief process as it did from the fact that Live Through This is a fucking incredible record.

Reactions to “Eulogy” (for lack of a better title) will inevitably vary by listener. If you view Courtney Love as an unfortunate casualty of Kurt Cobain’s war against himself, you will probably hear a shell-shocked widow valiantly facing her worst nightmare. If you view Courtney Love as one of the likely reasons Cobain loaded his shotgun on April 5, 1994, you will probably hear an unhinged harpy using the most intimate words her late husband ever wrote against him in a monstrously demeaning fashion. Over time, I’ve come to rest somewhere in the middle of those two poles, so I don’t quite know what to make of the recording now. What I do know is that I never want to listen to it again, and don’t really need to since it’s still vividly burned into my brain from past spins—I couldn’t bring myself to revisit it while authoring this segment about it. Because even in 1994 when I was playing Into the Black endlessly, even when I was struggling to make sense of something that seemed utterly senseless, and even when the message Love was delivering was allegedly intended for anguished fans just like me, my reaction to that audio was exactly the same as I assume it would be today: I shouldn’t be hearing this.

“Eulogy” essentially features Courtney Love narrating Cobain’s suicide note in its entirety. Since photographs of the document have subsequently surfaced in numerous places, a cursory review plainly reveals that despite Love’s proclamation on the tape that she elected to omit parts of the letter about herself and their daughter Frances “because they’re none of your fucking business”, she does in fact share nearly everything that appears on the page. Irrespective of that, her rationalization is a bizarre one—after all, it can be sensibly argued that nothing in that epistle was really the “fucking business” of anyone outside Cobain’s immediate circle. The mere reading itself denotes a sort of indecent invasion, but it is the peculiar spin the author’s self-appointed spokeswoman put on the broadcast that truly makes it astonishing. Love didn’t simply orate Cobain’s note, she annotated it, interjecting frequently to pose her own biting counterpoints to his words, sometimes leveling these ripostes directly at him, sometimes addressing her running commentary to the royal listening we. Her delivery veers between naked tear-choked agony that will move you no matter how you feel about her, and primal hissing vitriol—at one point on the recording she instructs the entire crowd to call the man they came to mourn “asshole.” It is the sound of a woman purging an entire spectrum of very private emotions in a very public way, it is an unseemly peek under the mortuary drape of a man who had just shot a gaping hole in the hearts of millions, and it is extremely uncomfortable to listen to.

I do not know Courtney Love. I have no desire to know Courtney Love. Only she could tell you how actively she calculated the channeling of her deceased husband’s musical legacy into the birth of her own. I cannot definitively state that Courtney Love exploited Kurt Cobain’s death to make herself famous; it’s not nearly that simple. I can state this again, because it’s true: Live Through This is a fucking amazing record, and it probably would have been a next-level hit even without the supernatural timing of its arrival and the uncanny way several of its key tracks seemed to capture what all of us who were shattered by Cobain’s suicide were feeling at that moment in time. But regardless of her intentions, the transmission she delivered at the Seattle Center on April 10, 1994 was undeniably indecorous. The very circumstance of it feels wrong, and witnessing it via that recording feels even worse. I didn’t want to know what that note said. I wish I didn’t know what that note said. And I wish I could listen to Live Through This—which is, to reiterate, SUCH A FUCKING GREAT RECORD—without inescapably pinpointing it as the moment Courtney Love became the first person to strike gold at Kurt Cobain’s gravesite.

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of the excavation.

Elsewhere in my apartment, on the bookcase directly to the right of the desk at which I’m sitting, you will also find no fewer than six biographies about Nirvana. In relation to the sum of available material, my library isn’t even close to complete; after a while, I stopped buying every associated text as they were published (once you read a half-dozen volumes about a band that only existed for a half-dozen years, redundancy becomes an issue—also, reading about Nirvana is always a dispiriting experience because no matter how good the book is, you’re inevitably going to reach THAT chapter eventually). Filed next to those is Cobain, a coffee table book which assembles almost every Nirvana-related article that appeared in Rolling Stone during their career. And directly beside that rests an even larger coffee table book entitled Journals. Kurt Cobain is the credited author, which I suppose makes sense, since nearly every word therein is in his handwriting. Nevertheless, that attribution becomes difficult to digest when you consider that the tome was released in 2002—given that Cobain had been dead for 8 years when Journals came out, I’m naturally skeptical about the scope of his involvement in the project.

I have a hard time accepting that this book exists. On one hand, the drawings, correspondence, and scribbled musings which comprise its pages offer a rare and informal glimpse into the mind of one of my favorite songwriters of all time. Yet a much larger part of me can’t discount my impression that by glimpsing these things I have in essence sneaked into Kurt Cobain’s room and picked the lock on his diary. It seems highly improbable he would have ever published this material in this form of his own volition; actually, I suspect he would have been mortified if these logs were leaked while he was alive. The justification, one would suppose, is that Cobain is a singularly iconic figure and remains an object of fascination, therefore any piece of himself he took the time to immortalize in writing has intrinsic value (even a dip recipe he got from his mom, evidently). Except the absence of his agency over this particular venture indicates that the significance of the content showcased in Journals was determined solely by outside agents. Cobain was actually fairly prolific given the brevity of his career—it would take a book roughly the same size as Journals to assemble all of the lyrics he wrote for Nirvana’s catalog. Yet, like any artist, he put most of his work through rigorous internal scrutiny and editorial refinement before he unveiled it to an audience; he was the only person who decided if and when it had value. A lot of the poetry featured in Journals was eventually funneled into Nirvana compositions; those are the pieces we can presume he was ready to share with the world—because he, you know, did share them. But when it comes to the numerous drafts of personal letters that appear throughout the tome, it seems innately obvious he did not want those to be read; if he did, he would have fucking sent them to the people they were addressed to and they wouldn’t still be present in his notebooks to be pilfered.

When the release of this relic was announced, the rabid fan in me was of course curious, and I knew this was an item I wanted in my library. But the altruistic side of me always grappled with that desire; I could never quite concur that Cobain’s inability to object constituted a license for me to read work that he chose to keep to himself. Obviously, Journals was a guaranteed best-seller, which is precisely why it was published (oh, I was never snowed by that “a way for his fans to better understand him” bullshit; I have no doubt “a way for his fans to spend money” was the primary purpose this tome was meant to serve). It certainly has intriguing bits, particularly the sections that show sketches Cobain made for early Nirvana t-shirt designs that were never produced and the numerous mixtape track-listings he itemized (sadly, due to his fondness for bands so deeply obscure they are outside the scope of even a collection as large as mine, I don’t have all the listed tunes to faithfully reproduce any of them for my own listening pleasure).

Other articles such as a grossly-gushy sweethearts note to Courtney Love and a childish screed addressed to MTV are far less interesting to me, since the only parts of Cobain they help me “better understand” are parts I already know far more about than I care to. Good and bad are basically negligible designations here anyway, since the revelatory bits and the patently trivial snippets are all culled from the same invasive pedigree. It certainly didn’t assuage my conflicted feelings about reading Journals when I opened the book and saw that the very first sentence printed in it is, “Don’t read my diary when I’m gone”… a request that becomes somewhat clouded by what Cobain wrote two lines later: “please read my diary… look through my things, and figure me out.” I did look—I looked cover to cover—but since I listened to all of Nirvana’s records long before that, I already had Kurt Cobain figured out about as much as I imagine he wanted myself or any of his fans to. A photocopy that confirms he did ordinary things like pay his phone bill doesn’t do much to augment my appreciation of all the extraordinary things he did.

By exhibiting monumental developments like Cobain’s first stab at the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” alongside snippets of humdrum humanity like his jotting down of the 1-800 number for NordikTrack, a chronicle like Journals is ostensibly meant to show that even a man who was exalted as a demigod used to put on his Daniel Johnston shirts one sleeve at a time just like the rest of us. If so, the very existence of Journals negates its own premise, since none of its content would be considered even remotely noteworthy if said content wasn’t scribed by Kurt Cobain—which only advances the misguided hero-worship that plagued his quintessence and encumbered a future suicide victim with spiritual baggage he never welcomed nor desired. Even with my limited understanding of what Kurt Cobain’s art meant to him, I am certain he would never have wanted a book like Journals to happen. Just as I am equally certain that the inflation of his esteem to such excessive heights that his admirers would be itching to read the undisclosed documents he kept in his underwear drawer played a large part in the events of April 5, 1994.

I guess this is as good a time as any to explain why a songwriter who was never a solo artist is the subject of his own entry here—especially since I just chastised the publishers of Journals for giving him special treatment. It’s true that nearly every piece of music Cobain had his hand in was issued under the Nirvana masthead (except for that collaboration with William Burroughs I wrote about a long time ago… but I’m trying to forget that ever came out since it’s not much more enjoyable to listen to than “Eulogy”). Yet, thanks to the same vulturous machinations I’ve been recapping throughout this piece, the Kurt Cobain discography does indeed include one solo album to date. There is an itty-bitty asterisk next to that item, though:

* Kurt Cobain’s solo album came out twenty-one years after Kurt Cobain died.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain did not participate in the making of Kurt Cobain’s solo album.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain’s solo album is not technically an album.

Oh, also * Most of the songs on Kurt Cobain’s solo album are not actually songs.

Oh, and lastly * When Kurt Cobain recorded this solo not-album of mostly not-songs, he had no idea that anyone was ever going to hear it.

The sort-of record I’m referring to was assigned the title Montage of Heck, which is needlessly confusing for anyone familiar with Nirvana’s history, since Montage of Heck was originally the title Cobain bestowed upon one of his earliest demo cassettes. The Montage I’m examining in this essay bears no relation to that one; rather, Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is an ill-considered compilation that was released in conjunction with a congruently-monikered and congruently ill-considered 2015 documentary. Licentiously-hyped as one of the most profound musical portraits ever unveiled, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck was directed by filmmaker Brett Morgen, who was granted unprecedented access to Cobain’s personal archives and shaped that material into an allegedly insightful study of the artist’s epigrammatic life and shocking death. Since she had already exhausted the potential for monetizing her late husband’s sketchpads, Courtney Love upped the ante for this project by allowing Morgen to use the family’s personal home videos as the film’s major selling point—evidently, neither party gave a shit that two decades earlier Cobain expressed how violated he felt when strangers invaded his private life in a song bluntly entitled “Rape Me”.

I’ll keep my review of the biopic Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck brief—mostly because I didn’t enjoy it at all and the overriding emotion I was left with after watching it was anger. But it is worth mentioning here, since it was similarly levied with the purported intention of making its viewers “better understand” its subject. Strange, then, that the two most memorable moments in the movie are unabashedly salacious, and both are focused on candid glimpses of Courtney Love’s behind-the-scenes comportment rather than her husband’s. If you’re wondering what Love’s breasts looked like in the early-‘90s, or if you relish the notion of watching her toddle around the couple’s apartment in a state of opiated incoherence in the presence of their baby daughter… then, brothers and sisters, this film is the Casablanca of that specific genre. But anyone seeking a meaningful exploration of what kind of person Cobain was outside the limelight is bound for disappointment since Montage mostly underscores his least appealing traits, the unpleasant facets of his humanity that we as fans have trained ourselves to banish from our thoughts as we continue applauding his inimitable artistic contributions. Aspects which, of course, Courtney Love is central to. Her odious presence throughout the documentary, and indeed in Cobain’s orbit, serves as a manifest reminder that a man we lionize for writing some of the most exquisite songs of all time was also deeply in love with a vulgar, revolting succubus. And perhaps this is a key reason why revisiting him via panegyrics like Montage of Heck and Journals always leaves a sour aftertaste—as long as Courtney Love has stewardship over his legacy, the worst thing Kurt Cobain ever did will be always be a principal figure in each new celebration of the best things he did.

In addition to her boobie videos, Love also turned over a box of cassette tapes to Brett Morgen (if memory serves, this batch of recordings was dutifully referred to as a “treasure trove” in every press release about the project I read). Morgen cherry-picked a few bits of music from this lot for usage in his movie, which were naturally cobbled into a soundtrack that was touted to fans as a cache of “previously-unheard music by Kurt Cobain.” Since the filmmaker was ostensibly the one who decided what portions of the tapes to appropriate, he is recognized in Montage of Heck’s liner notes as its “Executive Producer”—a dubious acknowledgement that gives Brett Morgen the distinction of being the only person in the history of audio engineering credited with producing an album whose recording he wasn’t actually present for, by an artist he never even met.    

Morgen’s pastiche job doesn’t merely form the basis of Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, it is the disc’s entirety. Stripped of any historical provenance generous listeners may feel obligated to apply, what the proffered material basically amounts to is a half-hour of Kurt Cobain getting stoned in his living room and fucking around on a series of out-of-tune guitars. I wasn’t present for Morgen’s listening party, so I can only speculate on how much music was available for him to sift through, or what the stuff he rejected as inadequate sounded like. But this much is clear: the pieces he chose to disseminate on Montage of Heck range from drearily frivolous to blatantly insulting. The disc offers no real insights (unless you didn’t already know Kurt Cobain got high or played guitar, I suppose), and fans searching the conclave for Nirvana songs that might-have-been will merely discover that Cobain was sensible enough not to pursue an inane number called “Burn My Britches” any further than the two-minute segment he toyed with on his couch here.

Perhaps fittingly, the disc opens with the unmistakable bubbling of a bong, which effectively sets the tone for what follows: Cobain yodeling to warm his pipes up before launching into a rudimentary power chord sequence and yodeling over that for a little while for no apparent purpose (at least Morgen gave the cut a suitable title—it’s called “The Yodel Song”). Elsewhere, attempts are made to tie this cycle of doodles into the songwriter’s established canon, such as the inclusion of the promisingly-dubbed “Scoff (Early Demo)”. Yet, while the prospect of hearing a preliminary version of the 7th-best number on Bleach may seem like cause for celebration, the actual track lands like a slap to the face once you hear that this extract which Morgen judged as precious enough for commercial immortality merely consists of Cobain scat-growling gibberish lyrics over the tune’s main riff until the tape unceremoniously cuts off 38-seconds later; identifying this nothing-morsel as a rough draft of the song “Scoff” is akin to calling a piece of paper with the word “It” typed on it a rough draft of A Tale of Two Cities. Such is the caliber of material spotlighted on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, a “treasure trove” that would have been better left buried.    

One of the few genuine items of interest among the detritus is “Reverb Experiment”, which consists of three minutes of droning throwaway instrumental noodling, but still sounds kind of cool since a lot of it sounds like the refrain of Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask”. There’s also a fairly well-formed idea called “Desire” that might have been turned into something striking if its author had chosen to develop it, and the closing number “She Only Lies” is noteworthy since it features Cobain working out an idea on bass guitar instead. Regardless, nothing on Montage of Heck justifies the ballyhoo that accompanied its release, and even the marginally decent pieces are unworthy of mention on their composer’s resume—although, Brett Morgen certainly got a great resume item out of the deal; now he can call himself a “filmmaker / record producer.”

However, this was Kurt Cobain who documented these scraps on the battery-operated boombox in his apartment. And he’s an icon, remember? So—said Brett Morgen and Courtney Love and everyone at Universal Music who had their dollar-bill-mounted fishhooks in the water of this endeavor—Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings shouldn’t be treated like some gratuitous cash-grab collation of idle time-killers which Cobain thought so little of he didn’t bother revisiting most of them again. No, no, no. This is an Event. Try this: Montage captures a peerlessly illustrious artist as his fans have never heard him before, in his rawest, most intimate form, no studio, no audience, just a man and his guitar seizing inspiration out of the ether and channeling it into his instrument as he explores new incarnations of the sound that made Nirvana the band that launched a revolution. Well, hey, that sounds pretty good; we can really shift some units with an idea like that. The only problem is, if we’re going to treat this thing like a legitimate album, it has to have a legitimate hit single we can sell it with. And how do you dig a unicorn out of a pile of lo-fi cassette tapes that live in a shoebox?

Luckily, Brett Morgen found just the solution for this quandary inside that shoebox.

“And I Love Her” was issued with all the buzz of an actual lost Nirvana song—it was even pressed on 7” vinyl like a proper single. It didn’t really matter that the sound quality was wispy, nor that the performance wasn’t particularly polished. This was a recording of Kurt Cobain playing a fucking Beatles tune, dude, and not only was it previously-unavailable, no one even knew it fucking existed. And the internet went apeshit. The cosmic synchronicity of this find couldn’t have been scripted any better: the architect of the band who electrified the zeitgeist in the 1990’s covering the band who electrified the zeitgeist 30 years earlier, arguably the only other rock group in history whose rapid ascension to immortality Nirvana’s was comparable to. The concept alone was glorious, and it wasn’t merely some music nerd’s wetdream—this Moment in musical mythology Actually Happened.

Here’s the thing, though: Kurt Cobain’s rendition of “And I Love Her” only has significance because people desperately wanted it to, NEEDED it to. It was still just a lark the dude recorded in his living room one lazy night, and it still sounds just as slapdash as every other fragmentary living room lark featured on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings. There isn’t anything especially revelatory about Cobain esteeming The Beatles so highly that he learned to play one of their songs—both his backstory and his discography are liberally sprinkled with evidence he appreciated the Fab Four’s work, and in case you missed the homages there, nearly every piece of literature ever written about Kurt Cobain has helpfully cited the “Beatle-esque hooks” in songs like “About A Girl” and “In Bloom” to underline his unambiguous approbation. Even casual Nirvana fans were surely already well aware that Cobain enjoyed playing songs by musicians he admired—the dozen-or-so covers in the band’s repertoire and the fact that nearly half the tunes which comprised their legendary MTV Unplugged performance weren’t written by Nirvana provided some telling clues on that front.

The level of hype which heralded the arrival of “And I Love Her” (and Montage of Heck as a whole) intimated that a vital missing piece of the Kurt Cobain puzzle had finally been unearthed. Yet the disc supplies nothing more than a disenchanting anticlimax once you actually listen to it and ascertain that the venerated songwriter’s busy-work wasn’t all that impressive. Perhaps this is more a result of a faulty selection process—I’m willing to imagine there is some truly fantastic material on those tapes which Brett Morgen overlooked for whatever reason—but whether or not Cobain’s archives are ripe with undiscovered gems, the resounding impact of The Home Recordings is much the same as that of Journals: nearly everything in that time capsule would be appraised as inconsequential nonsense if it wasn’t Kurt Cobain’s nonsense. Which takes us right back to the pitfalls of deifying any musician to such a degree that every note they ever played is assigned an implied indispensability, even the botched ones that actually make them sound like a less gifted musician than they were.

Besides, we Nirvana fans already got our missing piece. That happened in 2002, with the release of the band’s self-titled greatest hits package. The one I bought despite owning every record which sourced that compilation, solely because there were three minutes and thirty-eight seconds of music on there I had never heard—the one and only known completed and previously-unreleased Nirvana song: “You Know You’re Right”. (Although, Courtney Love had the audacity to debut that tune way back in 1995 when she performed it as part of Hole’s MTV Unplugged set—seriously, sometimes I wonder if every single thing she’s done in the past 25 years has been predicated on a willful and concerted effort to make everyone who loves Nirvana hate her; although, her campaign of terror has made it nearly impossible to even mention Nirvana without also mentioning her, so maybe she’s a fucking genius).

In stark contrast with the nebulous scribbles on Montage of Heck or the interesting but inessential rehearsal tracks which dominated With the Lights Out, “You Know You’re Right” is indeed a revelation of almost religious proportions, a roaring burst of dynamism that is as powerful as anything else in Nirvana’s catalog—the lone tantalizing taste of a fourth record the band would never get to make, a frozen moment of fragile optimism captured just before the world as we knew it ended. “You Know You’re Right” is fucking AWESOME, and its explosive potency is all the more impressive considering that the lone recording of it which exists was essentially the group’s first stab at it. It is one of my absolute favorite songs in a catalog bursting with favorites. And I cried the first time I heard it. And I cried the second time I heard it. And the third… And, 17 years onward, I cried when I listened to it moments ago.

Plenty of Cobain’s tunes have this effect on me. Still, “You Know You’re Right” is a singular case. And I know exactly why that song, above all others, devastates me the most. It’s not because the lyrics are especially poignant, even though they are. It’s not because the track’s intoxicating promise reminds me of precisely how much all of us lost on April 5, 1994, even though it does. The reason “You Know You’re Right” tears my fucking guts out every time I hear it… is because that was it. That was the final song Nirvana recorded. And after it came out, there would never be any more. “You Know You’re Right” was the moment I had to say goodbye to Kurt Cobain forever.

I did that. And I think it’s time for the rest of the world to let him sleep, too.

Over the years, I have accumulated bootlegs of more than 200 Nirvana concerts. Roughly 150 of those shows are phenomenal, and plenty of them are of strong enough audio quality to warrant an official disclosure. That is the true “treasure trove,” a nearly limitless stockpile of unreleased Kurt Cobain recordings that could fuel a supplementary Nirvana release every single year for the rest of human history. And we already know he wanted an audience to hear that music, because he stepped onto the stage and played it for them. Since the continued fracking of his legacy is inevitable, by all means, the Cobain estate should absolutely tap into that wellspring whenever the marketplace is clamoring for fresh product or Courtney Love is clamoring for further cosmetic augmentation. I’ll buy every goddamn disc they put out, and I’ll probably buy them all on vinyl, too. And if you, personally, feel the need to explore the more obscure corners of Cobain’s discography, there are already plenty of places you can look—start with the single for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, where you’ll find the tremendous B-side “Even In His Youth” and a killer alternate recording of “Aneurysm” that blows the version on Incesticide out of the water.

Hey, I’m a fan first and a snarky asshole second; I get it. I can surely identify with the sustained hysteria enveloping his heritage. Cobain’s suicide was the single most traumatic event of my teen-hood, and all these years later I can still tell you where I was, what I was wearing, and even what I was eating when I first heard the horrifying news of his departure (my family’s comic book store in Anaheim Hills, a Groo the Wanderer t-shirt, and a foot-long tuna on white from Subway). Still, even then, I had a firm pragmatic grasp on my grief. Kurt Cobain wasn’t my mentor, my hero, someone who embodied the man I hoped to eventually be when I reached his epoch of then-unimaginable elder statesmanship (hey, when you’re fifteen, 27 seems like an eternity away—at the time I assumed when I was Cobain’s age I’d probably be doing all sorts of old-people shit like buying a house and raising babies… or at least finally having sex). He wasn’t deity to me, he was simply someone responsible for some of the most imperative music in my life; unfortunately, since music has always been a lot more imperative in my life than deities, his abrupt absence was crushing nonetheless.

But the nature of Cobain’s subsequent beatification seems to suggest that many of his fans choose to remember him as something more, a shooting star that painted a tapestry of light across the heavens before inexorably crashing down to earth, “the grunge-poet voice of a generation” and all that. Hell, to many people, he was. But despite his canonization by the masses, Kurt Cobain was not a messiah and never strived to be. He was flawed and beautiful and complex, and a mystery even to himself—in other words: he was just as fucked-up and human as any of us. Kurt Cobain is not some riddle to be solved; we will never decode him because he didn’t stay the course of his journey long enough to find out who “him” really was or would become. And his awful conclusion will never make sense, because there’s ultimately nothing sensible about putting a shotgun in your mouth and ending a life that meant so much to so many when it had barely just begun.

As we near the 25th anniversary of Cobain’s death, let’s resolve to (finally) allow him his humanity again, and to allow the still-buried pieces of his spirit he chose to keep solely for himself to remain interred with him. Because we’re only paying disservice to the topsoil of his legacy by continuing to dig. And besides, we have Bleach, we have Nevermind, we have In Utero, we have Unplugged, we have a few-dozen additional non-album tracks, and we have “You Know You’re Right”—Kurt Cobain already gave far more of himself to the world than any of us were entitled to ask for.

So if you want to “better understand” him, you won’t achieve that by reading his diary, or seeing his widow’s areolae, or hearing him offhandedly strum some ditty from his childhood to amuse himself. The best avenue available for those of us who never met Cobain to look through his things and figure him out is lighting a candle, putting on a set of headphones, and letting the breathtaking majesty of “All Apologies” surge out of those speakers and into our souls. There is no more intimate way to honor him than that. Nor should there be. Understanding Kurt Cobain isn’t necessary. As long as we understand his music, and we understand what it means to us.

We don’t need his secrets. We have his songs. And for anyone who truly holds the memory of Kurt Cobain in their heart, that’s enough.

 March 25, 2019

[lifeonashelf]

CLASH, THE

As anyone who self-identifies as a “serious” music fan  is indubitably aware (goddammit, this essay is already pretentious and I haven’t even finished the first sentence), there are certain bands which other self-identified “serious” music fans have long-ago designated as “important” artists that all “serious” music fans are supposed to love. There isn’t any set-in-stone mandate for this, no handy reference guide which lists all of these acts for the benefit of those seeking to become “serious” music fans—actually, there very well might be, but I don’t feel like looking it up and I wouldn’t want to read such a pompous list anyway. The artists in this elite pantheon are mostly identified through accumulated cognizance, via extensive reading of material scribed by writers who self-identify as “serious” music fans and/or extensive conversations with people who self-identify as the same. Unfortunately, uncovering those exalted names is an often-insufferable process, since most self-identifying “serious” music fans are themselves often-insufferable. And doing so is also an exercise in sheer inanity, since requiring someone else to tell you whether or not a band is good defeats the entire fucking purpose of being a music fan.

I am “not” a “serious” music fan. Yes, I have written over 200,000 words about that specific subject for this project, and my every waking moment is spent either listening to records or wishing I was listening to records instead of doing whatever it is I’m doing instead of listening to records. Yet there are two notable discrepancies in my psyche which disqualify me from thriving among the insufferable: 1) My favorite album of all time is by fucking Queensryche, so I harbor absolutely zero delusions about possessing any sophisticated expertise in this field; and 2) I honestly couldn’t give a shit whether or not anybody else likes the bands I like.

That second distinction is rather important for our purposes here, since one notable attribute of “serious” music fans is a deportment of haughtiness towards people who aren’t “serious” music fans, which is usually accompanied by a reflexive disdain for anyone who does not subscribe to the putative preeminence of the “important” bands on the afore-mentioned possibly-nonexistent list. This isn’t something the aficionados I’m speaking of will necessarily acknowledge—to be fair, most of them probably aren’t even aware they’re dicks—but rest assured, if you ever tell a “serious” music fan that you think Radiohead has been awful for the entirety of this century, they will indeed think less of you.

On the contrary, I don’t think less of people who don’t exalt Operation: Mindcrime as highly as I do, nor would I bother expending energy trying to convince anyone they should share my ardor for the second-best-selling album by a band most people barely remember even existed. If you love Operation: Mindcrime, that’s totally cool—we can certainly geek out on how Chris DeGarmo’s precise shredding throughout “Speak” reveals him to be the most underrated guitar player of all time, and we can rhapsodize about how the interlocked suite of “Breaking the Silence”/ “I Don’t Believe In Love”/ “Waiting for 22”/ ”My Empty Room” and “Eyes of a Stranger” is the most exhilarating 18-minutes of music ever recorded (and it’s entirely possible I will ask you to marry me at the conclusion of our discussion). However, if you don’t love Operation: Mindcrime, that’s totally cool, too—maybe you simply prefer the band’s subsequent record, Empire, and I certainly won’t begrudge your attempt to make a case for its superiority based on the incontrovertible strength of “Silent Lucidity”, “Jet City Woman”, and “Another Rainy Night (Without You)”, because all of those tracks are also fucking marvelous. Or maybe you think Queensryche totally sucked and you’d rather chat about Animal Collective instead—seriously, that’s also perfectly acceptable (although our conversation will have to be fairly brief since I’ve still never heard that band and don’t really care that I’ve never heard them).

Needless to say, Queensryche probably isn’t on the shortlist of many music fans, serious or otherwise. They aren’t even on mine—despite the apex they reached with Operation: Mindcrime, the records they made before that are merely decent and I think pretty much everything they released after Empire is terrible. “Serious” music fans wouldn’t even mention such frivolous and undistinguished fare in passing. Though they will eagerly plunk down $200 for a Bob Dylan box set featuring 14 discs laden with endless alternate versions of the songs from Slow Train Coming, and they will subsequently embark on a thorough scholarly analysis of each increasingly redundant track until they reach a decisive verdict that Take 6 of “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” is slightly superior to the version that was used on the album, after which they will inevitably engage in spirited discussions about their findings with other “serious” music fans, who are liable to counter that Take 4 with the alternate bridge lyrics is the true superlative rendering of that number. Such things are deeply significant to “serious” music fans, which is one of the many reasons they’re insufferable. And if you were to inform these ardent votaries that you think the vast majority of Dylan’s recorded output is boring as shit and you’d much rather listen to anything in the Queensryche catalog than anything Bobby D released after 1975, they would readily conclude that you know absolutely nothing about music.

And perhaps I don’t. Because despite what every “serious” music fan has to say about the matter, Queensryche is infinitely more important to me than Bob Dylan. Operation: Mindcrime was the album that led me to pick up a guitar for the first time. Operation: Mindcrime was the album that led me to start writing songs and begin exploring my creative talents in earnest. Which means that, ultimately, Queensryche is the reason I’m sitting here at my laptop thirty years later, typing an essay about The Clash that has yet to actually say anything about The Clash. In a tangible and legitimate sense, Queensryche changed the course of my entire life. Out in the “serious” world, Dylan may be a Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist and the most acclaimed musician of the 20th Century. But in my world, he’s just a dude who made three albums in my collection that I never listen to. So, clearly, importance is a subjective characterization.

Here’s where that applies to the topic at hand: The Clash are one of those lionized bands whose work everyone who professes to love music is supposed to love. They are undoubtedly “important.” Their records are “seminal.” I am acutely aware of this. Yet this awareness only reinforces my recognition that I must not be a “serious” music fan, because I don’t fucking care.

My valuation of The Clash tallies out to a half-dozen-or-so kickass tunes, twenty-or-so pretty good tunes, and “Rock the Casbah”, which is one of the most comprehensively annoying songs ever excreted—a ratio that doesn’t chart them anywhere on my personal best-list. A recent documentary about the group was outfitted with the ludicrously hyperbolic title The Only Band That Matters, a designation which suggests I have evidently squandered my entire life by seeking out the literal thousands of bands that matter a lot more to me than The Clash does. As with Dylan, The Clash only factors into my musical paradigm by virtue of other artists they influenced—in other words, I like most of the bands who like The Clash a lot more than I like the band they like. Since they’re “important,” this roster is extensive and encompasses a wide range of artists responsible for some of my favorite records ever. Nonetheless, even limiting my scope strictly to the track listing of Burning London—a 1999 tribute CD which features 12 Clash tunes covered by a decidedly anemic assortment of 12 bands who are not The Clash—I still enjoy listening to half of those bands more than I enjoy listening to the Clash. Which is, I think, a good indication of how little their music matters to me, since the only bands on Burning London I actually do prefer The Clash to include bottom-scraping pedestrians like The Urge, Indigo Girls, and goddamn No Doubt, whose very existence aggravates me so much that hearing their music makes me physically nauseous.

Afghan Whigs supplied a track to Burning London, and I love Greg Dulli’s work with parts of my soul that Joe Strummer’s songs have never strummed anywhere near. 311 also has a cut on there, and my fondness for them is far more long-standing and sincere than the casual appreciation I have accumulated for The Clash. So does Third Eye Blind, whose self-titled debut I’ve spun WAY more times than I’ve played my copy of The Clash, by a factor of at least 20. Even the presence of a more peripheral outfit like Cracker serves to remind me that I think “Low” rocks harder than “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” Sure, I like the Clash more than I like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, but if I’m being honest, I probably prefer fellow Burning London contributors Silverchair to both of them, and Silverchair is kind of lousy by any standard.

So, does this confession reveal that I know fuck-all about music? Or does it perhaps reveal that the connections each of us forge to the artform we’re exploring here are so exclusive and individualized that any sort of flighty designation of what bands “matter” completely undermines the sacred and inimitable power of music? I propose the latter—mostly because I have to make this piece about something, and I don’t feel like writing about how awesome The Clash is because I don’t think they’re nearly as awesome as I’m apparently supposed to.

I have a friend named Celine (save it—she’s heard all the jokes) who would probably tell you that Fall Out Boy changed her life. She’s not a “serious” music fan—if she’s ever listened to The Clash at all, it likely occurred by happenstance while she was watching Stranger Things—but she is one of the most committed music fans I’ve ever met. She goes to a lot of shows, she buys hoodies from peripheral squads like Sleeping With Sirens, and she could probably sing you multiple Panic At The Disco records from start to finish. The kind of love she has for the bands that are important to her is of the purest and most zealous grade—a passionate embrace that pulls their music out of the background of her life and into the foreground of her heart, a fandom based not on what’s hip this minute but on what moves her always. Precisely the kind of love that music is fucking meant to inspire, as far as I’m concerned. And, frankly, I don’t think it matters if the band who opened that door for her is Fall Out Boy, because the open door itself is far more important that any capricious critical assessment of how “important” their work is.

The Clash have been sanctified as one of punk’s most imperative progenitors, but that doesn’t mean I feel obligated to love them simply because I love punk rock. The Clash had absolutely nothing to do with my submersion into the genre—a girl named Alison who used to play NOFX cassettes in her car when she gave me rides home from Bonita High School had a greater influence on that corollary than Mick Jones did. Alison had several tapes in the caddy she kept in her center console—Pennywise, Guttermouth, and the like—and we listened to all those, too. But it was NOFX’s masterwork Punk in Drublic that stole my heart, cuts like “Linoleum” and “Lori Meyers” and “Dying Degree” that energized my eardrums and unveiled a whole new biosphere of sonic possibilities. Punk in Drublic is the record that made me a fan of punk rock, which sort of makes NOFX the most important punk rock band of all time to me. And neither the lasting impact of that introduction nor the multitude of memories which augment my experience every time I listen to Punk in Drublic are tempered by the feeble insistence of self-appointed music scholars that The Clash and Sex Pistols represent proper punk essentiality, because in my universe The Clash is predominantly meh and the Sex Pistols are predominantly shit-awful.

But perhaps the problem here isn’t me. Maybe it’s just time to reassess the derisible notion that there have only been a handful of significant bands formed since the 1970’s. And maybe it’s also time to reassess how such designations are tabulated, and how often we revisit those tabulations. Because The Clash haven’t done anything especially noteworthy in my lifetime, and I’ve been around for 40 fucking years now. The last “important” record they made—1982’s Combat Rock—came out when I was 4. And despite the group’s repute as one of the wellsprings from which all things punk were born, the most enduring tracks off Combat Rock are the bare bones Kinks-esque rocker “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” (which, granted, is an unimpeachably rad song) and the utterly dreadful “Rock the Casbah”, which—near as my ears can tell—didn’t influence any of the songs in the NOFX catalog, but definitely influenced a lot of the songs in the decidedly un-punk Fine Young Cannibals catalog. The band was remarkable in their own epoch because of their anti-aristocracy philosophy and their then-novel fusing of punk and reggae, yet the lasting effects of those oft-cited dogmatic components are negligible today. Sure, The Clash lit a protest rock fuse that later motivated Rage Against The Machine to make some of the coolest music of the ‘90s, but they also accidentally invented Slightly Stoopid, so those two contributions probably cancel each other out. And, yes, they embraced vital social causes and pledged undying support to anti-Nazi groups, but the Dead Kennedys managed to issue a condemnation more blistering than The Clash’s entire combined catalog in just sixty-four seconds when they recorded “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”.

The fact that “Casbah” remains the band’s most lasting and highest-charting hit suggests that a whole lot of The Clash’s non-“serious” fans don’t ultimately give a shit about any of the reasons their “serious” aficionados have deemed them indispensable. Which sort of speaks to the point I’ve been making here. Cougars who scurry to the dance floor to shake their asses with their Solo cups held high whenever “Rock the Casbah” comes on at the club are just as welcome to the track as the Art & Activism professors who play it for an auditorium full of bored freshmen to preface their lectures on Iranian despots banning Western music. The song serves extremely different functions for both extremes of its audience, which is ultimately a point in its favor. The reason the omnipresence of “Casbah” irritates me, besides the song itself being irritating, is because its tedious one-riff groove showcases none of the band’s stronger attributes and the general goofiness of the presentation makes the whole affair resonate as nothing more than a frivolous novelty number—adopting “Rock the Casbah” as the anthem that defines The Clash is a lot like picking “Batdance” as the best Prince song.  

All of this reads like I hate The Clash, which is definitely not the case (although, I am listening to Combat Rock from start to finish for the first time in ages right now, and most of the record is actually pretty terrible). What I do hate is the sort of stuffy snobbery which has come to predominate cultural discourse on any music that intellectuals have chosen to elevate into the category of high art, whether the subject is revolution-minded ‘70s proto-punk or contemporary socially-conscious hip-hop (which has become the genre du jour of all modern pop music critics striving to prove how woke they are). And maybe my aversion doesn’t apply exclusively to the deification of bands; maybe it stems from my tenure in grad school, where I was continually reminded by English professors that authors like Stephen King and Elmore Leonard—i.e. writers whose work people without PhDs enjoy reading—somehow belong in a lesser tier than the likes of William Faulkner and James Joyce, who are deemed superior by the literary elite simply because they have been elected into canonization by that same literary elite. Maybe I’ve grown to believe that making distinctions between so-called “high” and “low” art is inherently an act of arrogance, because no matter how much activity a piece of prose or music may inspire in the minds of the cognoscente, it is the impact art has on our hearts and souls that should govern how its importance is measured. Some of us find the same rich tapestry of storytelling in back issues of Amazing Spider-Man as “serious” readers find in The Dubliners. And some of us find the same door-opening revelations in Operation: Mindcrime as “serious” music fans find in London Calling. Highbrow culture’s continued insistence that there is somehow a marked disparity between the two is false and exclusionary—and both of those sins are egregious because all art is most powerful when it serves a mirror that reflects truths within ourselves, and that kind of existential revelation is wide open to anybody who cares enough to seek it out. Any band whose music accomplishes a feat that outstanding doesn’t need to have a graduate thesis or a documentary devoted to them to be important.

If The Clash changed your life, I’m very happy for you. But Fall Out Boy changed Celine’s life, and Queensryche changed mine, and The Clash never did shit for either one of us. So, while I’m sure someone gave themselves a huge boner when they came up with the title The Only Band That Matters, an allegation like that only serves to deepen the divide between the insufferable and us lower-echelon fans who cultivate our love of music based on what it makes us feel instead of whether smart people think it matters or not. Because when you strip away politics and history and erudite mammon, there’s only one way to gauge the eminence of any band: fucking put on one of their records and see if it kicks your ass.

The Clash’s albums offer me sporadic moments of excitement, but they do not kick my ass. So if that means I’m not a “serious” music fan, I guess I’ll just have to learn to live with that. And I’ll take the $200 I’m not spending on some otiose Bob Dylan box set and buy 14 discs I’ll actually listen to instead. I may never find out whether Take 11 of “God Gave Names to All the Animals” is superior to Take 8, but I do know every word Geoff Tate wails on “Breaking the Silence”—and, goddammit, that should count for something.

 March 11, 2019

[lifeonashelf]

CLARKSON, KELLY

Since we’ve already tackled a fairly diverse musical sampling in this tome, it may not shock you to learn that I sincerely think Kelly Clarkson is awesome-sauce. And I’m not just referring to her talent (which is obviously abundant) or her register of great songs (which is also obviously abundant), I’m referring to her essence—the authenticity she embodies, and how much more fundamentally likeable she is than any other pop star of her stature or epoch. I have not met Kelly Clarkson, yet her entire vocational ethos has been so blessedly free of pretention that I kind of feel like I know her, even though the only thing I know for a fact about Kelly Clarkson is that she is a singer named Kelly Clarkson.

I never viewed one episode of the American Idol season she won and I have never seen her interviewed as far as I can recall. The impressions I have of her character are intrinsic, based on nothing more than the calmative sound of her voice and the traits I instinctively suppose a person whose voice sounds like hers must surely possess (certain voices are just like that—I don’t think anyone on the planet assumes Morgan Freeman is a dick, for instance). By that criteria alone, I am led to believe Kelly Clarkson is a kind human being, the sort of gentle soul who gleans authentic happiness from making other people happy. I am led to believe she is a humble human being, the sort of grateful and unaffected luminary who lends her resources to numerous charitable causes without requiring any fanfare for it. I am led to believe she is a wonderful mother, although I am merely presuming she has kids since I don’t actually know anything about her personal life. And I am so innately certain of these things that if someone told me they have it on good authority that Kelly Clarkson bathes in the blood of kittens to preserve her youth, I wouldn’t believe that person for a second, even if they had pictures (conversely, if someone told me the same thing about Taylor Swift, they wouldn’t even need photos to convince me).

I have an anecdote which supports my hypotheses, even if the anecdote isn’t my own. My cousin Lauren worked at a restaurant in Hawaii for a few years, and on her last day at this café, a vacationing Kelly Clarkson happened to stop in to eat there. Since it was Lauren’s final shift, her co-workers were scribbling farewell messages on her uniform with magic markers throughout the day, inscribing it like the pages of a yearbook. My cousin’s engraved vestment drew the notice of the eatery’s eminent visitor, who amiably asked about its significance; when Lauren explained the circumstances to this world-renowned superstar in her establishment, Clarkson proceeded to gush about how delightful she thought the gesture was and asked if she could add her signature to the shirt. As a result, my cousin is now the proud owner of a decidedly unique piece of apparel which is autographed by a slew of her former hospitality industry peers… and Kelly Clarkson. When Lauren told me this story, I was acutely charmed and—yes, I admit—a little envious. But I was not a bit surprised, because that is exactly the sort of genial exchange I imagine everybody who meets Kelly Clarkson probably has with her (conversely, if Lauren told me that Taylor Swift came into her restaurant, wrote “fuck you” on her t-shirt, then defecated on the floor, she wouldn’t even need the signed garment to convince me).    

While artists like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj have allocated periods of their careers to embodying post-apocalyptic femme-bots or community-theater sorceresses or whatever-the-fuck, Kelly Clarkson has exclusively devoted her career to embodying a performer named Kelly Clarkson who doesn’t come across as markedly different than the self-effacing lass named Kelly Clarkson who curls up on her tour bus after her concerts to watch old episodes of Friends (granted, I have no idea if Clarkson is a fan of that particular show, but she sounds like she must be). The only way I would ever recognize Lady Gaga in the wild is if she walked up to me and said, “Hi, my name is Lady Gaga”—and after I nodded and remarked, “oh, that’s kinda neat for you,” I can’t imagine I’d have much else to say to her. Yet if I happened to be at a craft store and I spotted Clarkson browsing the yarn aisles (for some reason, I also presuppose she knits a mean sweater), I would instantly know who I was spotting because she would probably look exactly like Kelly Clarkson always does, and I’d feel duty-bound to approach her, shake her hand, and thank her for being all of the things I assume she is. And if she wanted to hang out for a little while and chat about patterns, I would totally hear her out, because listening to Kelly Clarkson extrapolate on the textile arts sounds like a perfectly pleasant way to spend an afternoon. I have a strong sense that if I were to meet up with Kelly Clarkson for coffee—actually, now that I think about it, she probably prefers tea—we would totally get along; I also have a strong sense that Kelly Clarkson is precisely the kind of celebrity who actually would meet up with a fan for tea (not me, obviously, because I clearly sound like a lunatic right now).  

“The Girl Next Door” is such a tired trope (especially in my case, since the girls who live next door to me are a Goth lesbian couple), but that is indeed the model Clarkson educes: an ingenuous small-town gal-done-good who spent her teenaged weekends canning homemade jam with her grandmother and reading YA romance novels on her porch with a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade beside her (again, I’m not sure Kelly Clarkson did any of these things; regrettably, my insights into small-town living are limited to the saccharine tableaus represented in the Lifetime Original movies I’ve watched over the years—which, consequently, I presume Clarkson also enjoys). Her comportment evokes a high-spirited yet enduringly sweet kid sister you impulsively want to protect from the leering eyes of the world, and while she is certainly a beautiful woman, my attraction to her has never ventured anywhere near the realm of the erotic (my pop chanteuse crush is Demi Lovato, whose open struggles with bi-polar disorder, depression, and substance abuse—perhaps unfortunately—make her way more my type than Clarkson is). Honestly, I can’t envision making out with Kelly Clarkson; any fantasies my brain might entertain about her would be more likely to involve tracking down whatever scoundrel inspired the fervent pathos in her performance of “Behind These Hazel Eyes” and defending her honor by punching that fucker in the face.

I guess the word I’m really looking for here is “refreshing.” While Clarkson built her renown in a realm of play-acting, her career has been defined by an absence of artifice, which is ultimately a much more substantive thing to define oneself by than prowling around in spangled booty shorts. At her peak, Clarkson’s implicit message to the young women in her fanbase seemed to be, “you don’t have to pretend to be something you’re not; just be who you are and great things will happen.” I’m certainly no prig, but if I had a music-consuming daughter who looked to pop idols for guidance, I’d much rather her absorb that philosophy than the one proffered by, say, Rihanna—whose well-publicized turbulent coupling with Chris Brown would instead tacitly edify my fictional offspring that “ride-or-die” means sticking by your man even after he beats the absolute fucking shit out of you.

Of course, Kelly Clarkson’s ascent was predominantly reliant on her faculty—I doubt millions of people bought her records solely because she’s a nice person—yet in that respect also, she handily outshined her contemporaries. While most of the circa-aughts female pop icons were essentially sonically interchangeable, Clarkson’s soaring vocals always had enough distinctive character to render them unmistakably hers—surely, no amount of Auto-Tune could have endowed the bottom-scraping likes of Fergie with enough juice to do “Because of You” justice. She was also savvy beyond her years, and it was her refusal to let her handlers dictate the course of her career that ultimately allowed her to flourish when so many of her fellow American Idol graduates floundered.

Clarkson’s sophomore album—2004’s Breakaway—turned out to be the best-selling entry in her discography, and will likely forever remain her most iconic opus. But she had to fire her manager and battle just about everyone else in her camp to make that disc happen on her terms. After riding the wave of Idol worship which lifted her safe and satisfactory debut Faithful to its logical ceiling, she was tenacious in her resolve to transcend that threshold and announce herself as an artist capable of achieving far greater heights than triumphing in a televised popularity contest. As preparations for Breakaway began, Clarkson insisted on being heavily involved in the songwriting process—disregarding the protests of her mostly-male producers, who myopically deemed that a twenty-something woman couldn’t possibly possess any insight into what the twenty-something women who comprised the largest audience for the record they were making wanted to hear. She was also adamant about integrating more diverse and dynamic elements into her sound instead of simply settling upon another cycle of tepid pop-contemporary numbers. The result was a monster of a record that offered up five chart-igniting classics and a supporting cast of remarkably strong deep cuts. As evidenced on Breakaway, Kelly Clarkson’s vision of her craft encompassed something much weightier than a series of Pez-dispenser singles and shark-costume dance numbers. She clearly wanted to make a cohesive album that never gave the listener occasion to reach for the Track-Skip button, and she succeeded brilliantly. Commencing with the anthemic title cut, the feisty “Since U Been Gone”, the masterful “Behind These Hazel Eyes”, and the show-stopping apogee “Because of You” in immediate succession, Breakaway is surely a front-loaded disc, but it’s nevertheless one that continues delivering gems long after it exhausts its radio bait: “Addicted” is as solid as anything else on the record, “Walk Away” brims with irresistible quirk, and despite being buried near the tail-end of the track listing, “You Found Me” is more indelible than most other artists’ biggest hits.

This, too, illustrates a refreshing component of Clarkson’s mien—she made an entire record worth listening to, a feat which regrettably few artists on the pop landscape ever seem to bother themselves with. None of the tunes on Breakaway resonate as throwaways; each has something to offer beyond a hummable chorus, and each is solely Clarkson’s domain, firmly entrenched in her esthetic wheelhouse and blessedly devoid of any posturized pandering or blundering Ja Rule cameos. Even at this early stage of her artistic development, she possessed a seasoned understanding of the clear difference between making a song marketable and making a song memorable, and a keen awareness that those two things are not mutually exclusive. Surely, Clarkson was just as aggressively promoted as any of her peers, but her product wasn’t aimed at the audience hungry for gyrating, hypersexual caprice—peddlers like Christina Aguilera already had that demographic covered. Kelly Clarkson wasn’t selling her navel, she was selling a much more durable commodity: fantastic songs performed by an exceptional singer. And the grandeur of her vocal acumen elevated her wares beyond the disposable and into the timeless—indeed, as of this writing, Breakaway remains a thoroughly satisfying listen; meanwhile, nobody would bother spinning an Ashlee Simpson album from start to finish today, not even Ashlee Simpson.

And unlike far too many of her colleagues, Clarkson didn’t require a force-field of studio trickery to bolster her transmission. The organic nuance and passion in her voice floated atop the reverb rather than drowning in it, and the intricate, exquisite descants she conjured revealed hours spent mining her soul for the best way to communicate the emotion each track called for instead of pondering what shoes to wear in the eventual video. Which is probably why “Since U Been Gone” still makes me pogo around my apartment every time I put it on, while every Katy Perry song sounds like it was specifically written for a lipgloss commercial.

Clarkson’s output has waned in the last decade or so—though “Stronger” is a notable high-point—but even if her most significant work is destined to remain behind her, the legacy she built for herself transcends her standing as the first and most successful American Idol victor (at press time, that is; I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Lee DeWyze or one of the seven other winners whose names nobody remembers might still create the most amazing record ever made). After weathering an era replete with shameful moments like the skinhead meltdown of Britney Spears, The Pussycat Dolls pledging the drooling males in their litterbox echelons of filthy sluttery their lowly mortal girlfriends could never aspire to, and Lindsay Lohan being Lindsay Lohan, Kelly Clarkson emerged with her class, her dignity, and her career intact. The reality-TV platform that introduced her to the world is now a footnote, but her catalog continues to stand the test of time. And even though I actually shook Randy Jackson’s hand when he ate at the restaurant where I work (take that, Lauren), Clarkson will always be the American Idol alumnus I feel most closely connected to.

Speaking of… Kelly, if you’re reading this: my last shift at Eureka is on Monday, January 28. If you happen to be in the vicinity of Claremont that night and feel like swinging by, I’d be honored to have you sign my shirt. Just don’t invite Taylor Swift, please; I heard she does some really gnarly shit to kittens.

 January 17, 2019

[lifeonashelf]

CLAPTON, ERIC

Before we get started, I should probably mention that it might be helpful to regard this piece as sort of a “to be continued…” affair. A handful of entries from now, the subject on my docket will be Cream, whose work is such a vital part of Eric Clapton’s canon than any appraisal of them will unavoidably qualify as a supplemental appraisal of him. I’m sure I will have some nice things to say about Cream since I think they were a pretty excellent band (although time will tell… as you’ve surely gleaned by now, these essays often encompass topics that have absolutely nothing to do with the artists I profess to be evaluating; I can’t predict where my mind will be when I get around to writing about Cream, so it’s entirely possible I’ll end up writing about Mork & Mindy or something instead). However, for our purposes here, I think it will serve us better if I focus exclusively on Clapton’s work as a solo artist. Which is likely to engender a far different climate than the forthcoming Cream-slash-Mork-slash-Mindy piece since I think 85% of the music Eric Clapton made after Cream disbanded is dreadfully fucking lackluster.

When I was learning to play guitar as a teenager, there were several monthly magazines devoted to that pursuit, all of which I perused religiously. (For the benefit of any millennials reading this: “magazines” were similar to books, except they were shorter and usually had more pictures in them—and “books” were similar to the missives your hyper-dramatic friends constantly post on Facebook, except they took a little bit longer to read, were written with proper grammar, and the stories in them weren’t all a bunch of histrionic bullshit—also, “grammar” refers to the coherent presentation of words that aren’t abbreviated or misspelled).

Much like any periodical dedicated to a singular subject, magazines like Guitar World regularly featured articles which graded the luminaries in their particular field—in GW’s case, these usually took the form of arbitrary ranking reports on “The 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time!”. I assume modern publications still rely on similarly banal and undemanding space-fillers: “The 10 Most Lethal Armor-Piercing Shells!” in Guns & Ammo, perhaps, or “The 4 Hottest Members Of  5 Seconds Of Summer!” in NAMBLA Monthly (for the benefit of any tweens reading this: if you ever encounter anyone who subscribes to this magazine, get out of their van immediately).

Of course, discerning readers must surely recognize the flaws inherent in any classification system which surveys qualifications that are subject to myriad personal tastes and biases—in other words, lists like those are completely goddamn meaningless (after all, designating any member of 5SOS as the hottest is utter lunacy; who could possibly make a firm decision between such dreamy candidates with any degree of certainty?). In the post-internet world, such items would qualify as your basic gratuitous clickbait. Yet at the time, I scrutinized those rankings with great interest, and I even took an undue amount of pride in finding some of my favorite guitarists logged at prominent positions on the docket—whenever Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil cracked the Top-20, I figured maybe the editors who put that particular list together actually knew their shit.

The cast of musicians who regularly occupied the apex slots in these polls never changed all that much—it seems to be universally agreed among everyone who reads magazines like Guitar World that the greatest player of all time is either Eddie Van Halen or Jimi Hendrix, which is a verdict I don’t have a strong argument against. Jimmy Page was usually ranked around #3 or so, and I never had any problem with that either because he’s Jimmy fucking Page. The rest of the Top-10 was a bit more fluid, with different architects wandering in and out of contention based on what was happening in their contemporary careers when the list was published. A few guitarists were ubiquitous placeholders who merely shifted numbers from year to year, like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, who seemed to always be classed in the Top-10 despite neither of them ever recording a single piece of music I would listen to on purpose.

Another omnipresent figure on these rosters was Eric Clapton, who was perpetually enumerated in the uppermost echelons of the guitar-god hierarchy, sometimes even slotted way up in the Top-5. A recent poll on ranker.com with 500-thousand tallied voters escalated the matter by rating Clapton as the THIRD greatest axe-wielder of all time, just below Jimi and Jimmy. And despite my cognizance that these standings are fundamentally inconsequential, the net result of Slowhand’s recurrent designation as one the most prodigious craftsmen in the history of his art-form is that for my entire life I have been systematically instructed to distinguish Eric Clapton as one of the greatest musicians of all time. Which is an assertion that rings as patently incorrect when you actually listen to his music.

There’s nothing incendiary about Clapton’s guitar playing, nothing particularly inimitable about his style. He didn’t develop a new musical language for his instrument to sing with—Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Jimmy Page all did that, but not Slowhand. The two main things Eric Clapton did exceptionally well were splicing a strain of safe white-boy blues into a strain of nonthreatening AOR rock and building the bulk of his career on serviceable renditions of songs written by other people. Whether this particular musical aesthetic appeals to you is irrelevant; no matter how much you like his version of “I Shot the Sheriff”, a modest benchmark like that is not indicative of genius, it is merely indicative of a seasoned session musician plying his trade. Make no mistake, Clapton is a very good guitar player, and I get the sense he’s a nice enough dude. Nevertheless, while the ability to knock out solid cover tunes might curry plenty of favor on Tequila Tuesday at the local dive bar, that skillset alone does not signify any form of virtuosity.

Timepieces—the 7x Platinum-selling 1982 greatest hits album most likely to represent Eric Clapton in the collections of casual fans—features ten songs culled from his 1970’s harvest, the most acclaimed era of his solo career. Of those ten tracks, Clapton is only credited as a songwriter on three cuts, and only one amidst that trio names him as the sole songwriter. This seems to reveal that out of all the most enduring tunes he released during his most enduring era, this musician alleged to be among the greatest of all time was only able to piece together one outstanding song when left to his own devices. Sure, “Cocaine” and “Layla” are fairly strong by any standards (although, Clapton didn’t write the former and merely co-wrote the latter), but the rest of Timepieces is notably unremarkable as far as best-of showcases go—unless the one major thing your life has been missing is the opportunity to hear Eric Clapton tackle the novelty number “Willie and the Hand Jive” like he was submitting it for the opening credits of a sitcom.

Then there’s the knotty matter of “Wonderful Tonight”, the only song on Timepieces credited singularly to Clapton—and, arguably, the only one of his solo period creations that has prevailed in a comprehensive cultural sense. You won’t meet too many wedding DJ’s who don’t have “Wonderful Tonight” in their arsenal, and I’m positive plenty of couples have selected the track to accompany their first dance at the reception. The tune has been widely appropriated as a naked avowal of love and devotion—and, hey, why not? Is there any woman in the world who doesn’t appreciate being told she’s wonderful?

However, sometimes songs get borrowed for things that don’t necessarily match up with their essence. Consider Green Day’s “Time of Your Life”, which will probably be played over every high school graduation slideshow in the civilized world for the next several decades because of its lyrics about turning points and forks stuck in the road—this, despite the fact that the proper title of the song is “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” and the refrain “I hope you had the time of your life” was actually penned as a derisive fuck-you aimed at an ex-girlfriend who jilted Billie Joe Armstrong. In some cases, the intended meaning of a tune doesn’t really matter; once it becomes transcendently popular, it means whatever the people who made it transcendently popular want it to mean. And before you know it, teenagers are dancing to a song about a bitter break-up at their senior proms without any apperception of irony.

This is why I’ve always been fascinated by the quixotic ideals that have been ascribed to “Wonderful Tonight”. Though the swooning masses have evidently chosen to accept that song as a chronicle of the profound romance nurtured by two lovers throughout a night on the town, to me the lyrics tell a far different story.

My sad tale is about a woman fretting woefully as she dolls herself up to attend a party with her carping husband, nervously asking him, “do I look alright?” She’s well aware that to this imperious man, her physical attractiveness is her primary asset; he regards her as a prop, an arm-candy accessory that buttresses his inflated sense of prestige. When the couple arrives at the gala, the caddish groom basks in the attention of the numerous leering men who crane their necks to look at his trophy (“everyone turns to see this beautiful lady that’s walking around with me”). Each swiveling head substantiates his ego, confirms that he is a superior alpha-male because he has managed to ensnare such a stunning female specimen—“I feel wonderful tonight,” he tells her, and this declaration might as well be a cackle of triumph.

His supremacy established, he then proceeds to get absolutely shit-faced. The song doesn’t specify whether his recreation of choice is alcoholic or narcotic or both, only that by the time he’s finished indulging in his spree of hedonistic rapture he’s “got an aching head.” The brevity of the account doesn’t allow a verse which elaborates on his conduct at the festivity, but we can reasonably assume this sort of character becomes a boorish lout when he’s intoxicated—just imagine the undignified behaviors a man like that adopts under the influence while his unfortunate wife helplessly watches on, mortified; perhaps Clapton is being kind by sparing us that part of the saga.

When the bender is over, he is too wasted to drive, so the onus of shuttling him home falls upon his submissive mate. And she is further demeaned when she has to then assist him as he staggers to bed. There, just before slipping into black-out unconsciousness, he slurs to her, “you were wonderful tonight.” A backhanded compliment, surely, reminding her of her place, letting her know that shutting up and looking pretty while he has all the fun is precisely what’s expected of her. “You were wonderful tonight,” he gabbles again, twisting the knife, reiterating that the evening is now over and she will once again curl up on her side of the mattress neglected and unsatisfied and cry herself to sleep while his insensate carcass snores and farts beside her.

[Okay, I made all that shit up. But now that I read the lyrics again, they don’t necessarily contradict my facetious analysis, so the above interpretation might actually be right on the money. Besides, if twelfth graders can slow-dance with their sweethearts to the soundtrack of a disintegrated relationship, then I can make “Wonderful Tonight” be about a doomed and loveless marriage if I want to.]

The other most obvious benchmark in Clapton’s solo catalog is his MTV Unplugged release, which shifted over 26-million copies and still holds the distinction of being the best-selling live album of all time. (For the benefit of any millennials reading this: “Unplugged” was a program that MTV produced during the prehistoric age of their existence, back when they had to lower themselves to airing rubbish like music videos and concerts because there weren’t enough quality reality shows being made about teenagers who have babies and get plastic surgery to fill their broadcast schedule). The network’s marketing strategy for the Unplugged series was actually quite ingenious: in addition to airing hour-long presentations of sets like Clapton’s in prime time, select songs from these shows were earmarked as “singles” and those individual performances were slotted into heavy rotation among the other hit videos of the era, a model which allowed MTV to essentially promote their own albums as frequently as they wanted. Since the channel’s driving ethos at the time was to pummel their audience with constant spins of even the most mediocre clips until viewers decided those songs must be cool because MTV played them all the time, plenty of latently unexceptional offerings like Clapton’s Unplugged were given a ready platform to become smash hits (lest we forget: this approach was so insidiously effective that even Mr. Big and Wilson Phillips achieved Platinum sales figures in 1992).

Hell, even I bought the fucking CD (I never bought those Mr. Big or Wilson Phillips records, though). I’ve listened to Unplugged a couple times while shaping this write-up, and I still have yet to locate a shred (pun possibly intended) of persuasive evidence that Eric Clapton is one of the greatest guitar players of all time anywhere on this disc. The revue has a couple of high-points—the version of “Tears in Heaven” here is indubitably definitive and “Layla” fares surprisingly well in a slower, stripped down form—but as a whole the album is an unadulterated slog, laden with an abundance of instantly-forgettable renditions of unessential blues tunes that are reduced to benign dentist-office white noise by the neutered arrangements which were integral to the Unplugged format. What these moments actually demonstrate—rather than Clapton’s mastery—is that a style of song-craft which was initially channeled straight from wounded souls into ragtag instruments doesn’t translate very convincingly to a fleet of $5,000 guitars; in a fundamental sense, Unplugged’s glossy and pristine studio-audience presentation, every chord perfectly EQ’d and in-tune, strips away whatever raw immediacy cuts like Son House’s “Walkin’ Blues” may have possessed in their primal form. I’m not earnestly criticizing Eric Clapton for his professionalism, but since the thrilling quintessence of live music is the anything-can-happen spontaneity of the stage, it’s difficult to get overly invested in the meticulously premediated and pokerfaced routine captured for this specific document.

The album does indeed embody Clapton’s mien—capable musicianship and a batch of songs unlikely to offend anyone’s sensibilities—but the guitarists who truly belong in the realm of the immortals are those whose work sounds like an existential search for deeper sonic truths. The notes they strike broadcast more than chords, they transmit fever and fire, each one eddying uncontainable passion from their hearts to their fingertips. This is why procedural players like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have never been engaging: their main artistic drive has always seemed to be showcasing how many arpeggios they can execute, and the soulless military precision of that execution doesn’t convey any sincere affection for their craft—listening to Satch and Vai et al do their thing is kind of like watching a squad of soldiers marching in lock-step; you get the sense the last thing on those lads’ minds is how pleasant it is to be getting some fresh air. And my reaction to Unplugged is similar: Slowhand’s rigid delivery of tried-and-true fret phrases he can undoubtedly strum in his sleep by now doesn’t rouse much in the way of excitement; since Clapton doesn’t sound like he’s overly interested in challenging himself, he doesn’t challenge me either.    

Ironically, at this very moment, my heart is seized by the precise melancholy sensations that are metaphorically denoted as “the blues.” I won’t go into a whole thing about it, but I assure you I am sad as fuck right now. Yet, even though I always seek out music I can relate to in times of pathos, somehow hearing Eric Clapton chirrup about drinking “Malted Milk” isn’t doing a whole lot to make me feel better—hearing Greg Puciato shriek his way through The Dillinger Escape Plan’s tempestuous masterpiece “Farewell, Mona Lisa” might do the trick, but not this shiny and innocuous enactment that would sound equally at home on a Jack Johnson record as it does on Unplugged. And this is usefully underscoring why Clapton’s work is so profoundly dull to me: despite being an artist who has devoted most of his catalog to the blues, a genre whose lyrical dominion deals exclusively in heart-borne emotions, his music doesn’t make me feel a goddamn thing. When I get low like this, I know from experience that I can release some of those negative energies by weeping, or wailing, or screaming my fucking head off. But try as I might, I can’t think of a single occasion when the balm my soul cried out for was twelve tasteful bars in the key of E with some gentle, susurrated crooning on top.

So you 26-million consumers can keep your guitar-hero, and his bubbly acoustic blues, and his songs about rakish men who disgrace their wives at parties. I don’t give a shit if Slowhand is ranked 16 spots higher in Guitar World—fucking give me Kim Thayil any day.

 August 4, 2018

[lifeonashelf]

CKY

Do any of you remember a film from the ‘90s called Shazaam?

Allow me to refresh your memory: Shazaam was a vehicle for C-list comedian Sinbad, who is perhaps best known for starring in a 1994  sitcom that was creatively titled The Sinbad Show—which I never watched because the show starred Sinbad. The Sinbad Show didn’t even last a full season on the FOX network (probably because the show starred Sinbad), but sometime either shortly before or shortly after that program was cancelled, its namesake landed the lead role in a film entitled Shazaam, a part which allowed him to stretch his acting chops by playing a wisecracking genie who acted exactly like Sinbad.

I distinctly remember seeing the trailer for this cinematic tour de force. To the best of my recollection, the plot revolved around two precocious children—one girl and one boy, naturally, to ensure that twice as many kids would beg their parents to buy the tie-in merchandise that would inexorably be produced if the film was successful—who one way or another encounter a djinn named Shazaam. Though their initial meeting befalls as a startling surprise for all parties concerned, they quickly become the best of pals and Shazaam subsequently convoys his youthful comrades through a rote series of comical PG hijinks. The specific nature of their shenanigans has been lost to the haze of time, but those details don’t matter much; a mid-‘90s movie built upon that scenario and geared toward that audience sort of writes itself (I doubt there was a subplot about Hungarian sex traffickers, for instance). I’m sure Shazaam helps the moppets surmount some sort of reasonably benign conflict and everyone learns a lesson about the true meaning of family by the time the credits roll. I’m assuming a clever dog is also involved in some fashion, and I’m confident the film features at least one protracted flatulence gag. Mind you, this is all just speculation; I can’t verify any of it since I never actually watched Shazaam (I decided not to because the trailer revealed that the film starred Sinbad).

Perhaps you already know where I’m going with this, but in case you don’t: Shazaam likely qualifies as the least successful celluloid offering ever concocted, because it is a movie which literally nobody watched. Oddly, this dearth of viewership didn’t have anything to do with Sinbad starring in it; the main reason nobody watched the film Shazaam is because the film Shazaam doesn’t actually exist. And I have a real difficult time wrapping my head around this, because not only am I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING CERTAIN that I remember viewing the trailer I’ve described, I can also readily visualize the VHS case for this movie that was never really a movie on the shelves at Blockbuster Video (imagine my incredulity when I learned that Blockbuster Video never actually existed, either). And even stranger, there are evidently thousands upon thousands of people who recall the existence of this movie that does not exist as vividly as I do.

If you kept up with the brief internet furor about this topic which arose a couple years ago, you’re undoubtedly aware the Shazaam phenomenon has been explained away as some peculiar mass delusion known as the Mandela Effect—apparently, so many human brains muddled the title and star of the ill-advised Shaquille O’Neal genie flick Kazaam that our collective hive-minds fabricated an illusory film to match our erroneous memories. (Of course, this begs the question: do those of us who remember Shazaam subconsciously wish there was a film in which Sinbad plays a sassy, flatulent genie…?). This clarification makes a kind of sense, even though my vague recollections of the corporeal Kazaam and my lucid recollections of the false Shazaam differ substantially (in my brain, Sinbad never raps or does karate in his movie, yet both disciplines factor into major plot-points in Kazaam—and Shazaam doesn’t meander into a baffling second-act detour about Hungarian sex traffickers like Shaq’s film inexplicably does).

So here’s the reason I’m bringing this up here: when I sat down to write about the band CKY, the paramount thing I intended to delve into was how I was introduced to their music. Do me a favor and keep that in mind—this information will come in handy later.

 #

  When I was a twenty-something in the very late 1990’s-slash-very early 2000’s, I worked at Domino’s Pizza as a delivery driver, which was a really excellent gig at the time. I had almost no bills and gas was a buck a gallon, so I only needed to work about 20 hours a week to earn enough money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. And like most twenty-something males who make their living as pizza conveyance professionals, when I wasn’t on the road, my comfortable lifestyle mainly entailed spending inordinate amounts of my free time listening to a bunch of punk rock, smoking a bunch of pot, and playing a bunch of video games.

[To be clear, not all of my co-workers at Domino’s did even one of these things. There was Dennis, for instance, who to the best of my knowledge did not enjoy punk rock, marijuana, or video games. He did, however, regularly come into work with cartons of expired baked goods that he extracted from the dumpsters behind Vons, which he would then rinse in the sink to make them “fresh” again. The prevailing rumor about Dennis’s backstory was that he was a former surgeon who had a nervous breakdown after losing a child patient on the operating table. I’m not so sure that was true, although I am very sure that he once brought in a plastic grocery bag filled with vomit instead of pastries and attempted to rinse that in the sink, too—which is why I tend to lean more toward believing Dennis was probably just fundamentally insane. There was no preamble to his unambiguously unhinged act; the dude simply strolled into the prep area at the start of his shift and said “hey, Taylor” to me like it was any other day… except he was carrying a sack of upchuck with him, clutching it right below the straps, as if girding the parcel to ensure he wouldn’t spill any of his cargo. My manager sent him home when she saw what was in the bag, but Dennis came back to work the very next afternoon—sans puke satchel—and the incident was never spoken of again. To this day, I cannot fathom how Dennis accumulated all that vomit, why he was hauling it around in his car, or what he was hoping to accomplish by soaking it in the same basin where we washed our pizza pans. Anyway, what I was getting at is that he didn’t especially fit the stereotype I outlined. We got along okay, though; I always made it a point to be really nice to the guy—you know, considering his alarming derangement and all.]

One of the staples of my Playstation habits in those days was the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. Despite having only spent a combined total of maybe zero-point-three hours on an actual skateboard in my entire life, my best friend Andy and I logged approximately 19,000 hours guiding the avatars in those seminal games through a multitude of gravity-and-logic-defying feats which no human being could ever possibly achieve with or without a skateboard. In the real world, I probably couldn’t even pull off an elementary trick like an ollie—but in the realm of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater I was a four-wheeled fucking god who could effortlessly grind up the side of a building, soar off the opposite edge, perform roughly nineteen twisting flips on my way back down, then execute a perfect landing on the downslope of an opportunely-placed ramp so I could launch off that and catch enough air to do nineteen more flips. Though I have never been an aficionado of that particular sporting pursuit, the Tony Hawk games were incredibly fun and offered endless replay potential due to the almost pornographic extremity of their facets. The conscientious city planners in THPS’s utopia were mindful to randomly insert dozens of half-pipes and empty swimming pools all over their towns, and none of their edifices featured a single surface that could not be utilized for some sort of astonishing aerodynamic exploit.

Instead of composing an original musical score for the series, the developers of the Pro Skater franchise rather ingeniously opted to license fifteen-or-so songs by relatively popular bands for each installment. These tunes supplied the background inspiration during gameplay, and were ostensibly chosen because they represented genres which the skater demographic enjoyed—unsurprisingly, the soundtracks predominantly relied on crowd-pleasing punk and hip-hop material (although one of the sequels featured a song by Powerman 5000, whose fanbase was roughly equivalent to the number of people who have watched Shazaam). However, a cycle of only fifteen tracks doesn’t go a very long way when it’s entirely feasible to play 100 rounds in one sitting—as Andy and I regularly did. So as you might suspect, we ended up hearing the same song-batch an incalculable number of times throughout the course of any given session, which inevitably burned every one of those tracks permanently into our brains. This is how I became intimately familiar with the band CKY, whose cut “Flesh Into Gear” appeared in one of the Tony Hawk releases and was consequently submitted for my listening pleasure hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Luckily, “Flesh Into Gear” is a really cool tune, a prime slice of appealing proto-metal with an insidiously catchy chorus and a snaking stoner-rock guitar riff that would undoubtedly inspire anyone in their right mind to rail-slide across a chain of forty conveniently-equidistant park benches. I could hardly believe a song this excellent and shrewdly-crafted was coined by an outfit like CKY, since the group’s foremost point of notoriety at the time was their drummer’s family ties to one of the cast members of Jackass—an obtuse reality television showcase for the misadventures of a squad of unabashed idiots whose misguided testosterone impelled them to launch bottle rockets out of their rectums, drink animal semen, and obsessively scour the ends of the earth searching for various objects to pummel each other’s testicles with.

My persistent exposure to “Flesh Into Gear” via Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater eventually motivated me to purchase CKY’s 2002 release Infiltrate-Destroy-Rebuild, the album the track was borrowed from. I have been spinning that disc repeatedly since I started writing this, and—while the rest of the band’s material is satisfactory but un-extraordinary—every single time “Flesh Into Gear” comes on, it instills me with a rush of delightful nostalgia. I cannot remember the last time I played any of the Pro Skater installments, but with “Flesh Into Gear” navigating my recollections just like it navigated my board-wielding avatar seventeen years ago, I can still clearly visualize the games’ indelible imagery and virtually weave my way through the vast intricacies of those levels I traversed countless times back then. And these evocations are accompanied by a flood of additional splendid reminiscences, snapshots from a far simpler and more idyllic time—perhaps my very favorite phase of my life—an era free of real jobs and real responsibilities, when on any given day my best friend and I could unreservedly spend endless hours engrossed in Playstation, and the most critical concerns in our purview were what combination of toppings we should order on our pizza and whether or not we would be able to track down an eighth so we could smoke a bowl before watching that evening’s new episode of South Park.  

This is the true and immeasurable splendor of music. Even this many years removed, I can still listen to “Flesh Into Gear” today and instantly be enveloped in those potent and wonderful memories, transported back to a comfortable living room in Lakewood, sitting in front of a big-screen television beside someone who is closer to me than a brother, our fingers frenetically tapping on the joysticks which control our destinies on the monitor, beautifully oblivious to the evaporating hours because we are twenty-one and our time seems infinite and our futures are wide open and we have a whole lifetime of escapades ahead of us. On these glorious occasions, Andy and I weren’t just mindlessly zoning out on some silly skateboarding game. We were ardently devoting ourselves to having fun, pure and unadulterated fun, the kind of serene merriment you only get to have for a woefully short yet richly blessed period of your existence, the kind of immaculate and untroubled amusement you don’t realize you won’t ever experience again until that phase of your life imperceptibly cedes to the next and the ravages of the real world begin to methodically devour your body and your soul. We were also laughing, a lot, often so vigorously and exuberantly that our giggle-fits overtook us in irrepressible paroxysms that brought tears of elation to our eyes. Simply by being in the same room with each other, we were celebrating just how special a friendship that spans literal decades truly is, and how singularly magnificent it feels to spend time with people whose mere presence has the ability to make you happy. So, it didn’t ultimately matter how many times we heard “Flesh Into Gear”. I never got sick of that song. Who could ever get sick of laughter and happiness?

The list of CKY’s quantifiable merits isn’t an especially long one. Nevertheless, they created something which conjures a surge of jubilant memories that I will never forget, and would never want to. Thus, they will always occupy a warm place in my heart, a place where they are inextricably tied to one of the most joyful epochs of my life: those euphoric and carefree days when my best friend and I had all the time in the world to listen to “Flesh Into Gear” over and over and over again while we were playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Okay, are you ready? Here comes the Sinbad part…

In the interest of accuracy, I went online to look up the Pro Skater series and clarify which installment this particular track was used in. As I said, each of the Tony Hawk releases featured a different assortment of songs, and since Andy and I enthusiastically immersed ourselves in all of them as they came out, we heard and re-heard the music on all of those playlists accordingly. I was fairly certain “Flesh Into Gear” was part of Pro Skater 3’s soundtrack, but I wanted to verify that it hadn’t instead appeared in one of the previous games before I started waxing nostalgic here.  

What I found out is this: CKY’s song “Flesh Into Gear” did not appear in any edition of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The band did indeed supply a track to THPS3, but it was an entirely different cut called “96 Quite Bitter Beings”, which I do not have in my collection because it isn’t even on the same album as “Flesh Into Gear”. This means that for the last however-many years, I have been assigning a reverent sentimental significance to a song that, for all intents and purposes, has absolutely no relevance to the detailed web of memories I have snuggled around it. The crystal-clear recollections I have of guiding a pixilated daredevil through a labyrinth of nosegrind-ready obstacles while “Flesh Into Gear” churned in the background never happened.

Shazaam.

For the record, Andy is still my best friend, and has been for 33 years and counting. Our lives have changed significantly since our Pro Skater era, but our bond has not. Though we are only able to hang out every couple months or so at present, whenever we do, we still play video games. And we still watch South Park. And we still approach ordering pizza like the medley of toppings we select are variables in an intricate and vitally-imperative equation. And we still laugh a whole fucking lot.

Sure, I miss the old days—anyone who doesn’t miss the old days obviously wasn’t doing the old days right. Yet, despite only seeing Andy a handful of times a year and having to drive two hours to Oceanside to do so, I never get so wistful for the way things were that I neglect cherishing the way things are now. I love Andy’s wife, Neisa, and I love having a front-row seat to the incredible and inspiring marriage they have built together. I absolutely adore the two remarkable humans they created, Shae and Nixon, and I consider it the most profound honor of my life to be their Uncle Taylor. There are plenty of things I would change about my own contemporary reality, but there isn’t a single thing I would change about theirs.

Still, every now and then, I do find myself wishing I could revisit that living room in Lakewood, settle down in front of that big-screen TV with Andy, turn on the Playstation, and feel as infinite and invincible and utterly content as I did back when I was a twenty-one year-old pizza conveyance professional whose universe was far too harmonious and secure to generate even an inkling of anxiety about the present, let alone the future. If I did return to that time and place, it wouldn’t be so I could instigate any sweeping amendments or pass on some sage piece of cautionary wisdom to my younger self. No, I think I would let the pages of that chapter turn exactly the way they did. Because, all things considered, spending entire days on end doing something as enchantingly frivolous as playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with your best friend in the world isn’t really all that irresponsible—it’s probably precisely what life is all about. And, you know what, it wouldn’t matter to me one bit which CKY song was on the soundtrack, just as long as Andy and I were having fun while we listened to it.  

I hope you enjoyed this piece. Even though it starred Sinbad. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go ahead and roll the credits here on that poignant note. I’ll save the story about my run-in with Hungarian sex traffickers for another time.

 July 21, 2018

[lifeonashelf]

CINDERELLA

It is one a.m. A massive explosion has just ignited mere yards from my apartment. Thunderous, powerful, disturbing. The sonic shockwave of the blast pierces my ears, rattles my windows, makes my balcony physically shudder beneath my feet. Off in the distance, I hear a cannonade, seemingly endless sonorous reports at various sites on the horizon. Mingling with these, there is also an inharmonious descant of smaller discharges, sustained staccato pops that ring out in the night like the deadly buzzing of machine guns. The sky is full of shrapnel that has been launched into the air, and my rudimentary understanding of physics tells me that what goes up must surely come down somewhere. I am not a praying man, but I nevertheless conjure a silent thought in my head and do my best to beam it into the universe, hoping that none of this fiery flak touches down on my roof to trigger a conflagration. Long moments pass and the discordant, jarring cacophony does not abate—more explosions, more gunfire salvos. Another hugely loud boom rings out, this one the closest yet, so close that I can see the light of its discharge dancing on the side of the building across from mine. It sounds as if I am sitting in the epicenter of a warzone. It sounds like a nightmare. It sounds like the end of the fucking world.

It’s not the end of the world, though. It is the 4th Of July. Which naturally means that all throughout my neighborhood, packs of heavily-intoxicated alpha males are “celebrating” how awesome our country is, in the most traditionally American way possible: by detonating a shitload of cheap and dangerous explosives made in Mexico.

And that’s not even the ironic part. The really ironic part is that these discourteous douchebags are commemorating the day our ancestors declared independence from a tyrannical king and the imposition of Christian doctrine, in 2018—a year in which we are presently ruled by a tyrant who is actively striving to expunge every safeguard that will prohibit him from occupying his dominion for life, and a cadre of puritanical legislators who are actively rewriting our laws in accordance with their selective interpretations of Christian doctrine.

Of course, like our forefathers, we are taking bold and decisive action against despotism. We’re posting memes on Facebook like crazy, for one, a strategy which I imagine will eventually get a whole lot of stuff accomplished. We’re also rising up and marching, showing solidarity, letting our fascist-in-chief know we won’t stand idle while women and people of color are being treated as marginal citizens and children who come to this country seeking asylum are being detained in concentration camps. And since July 4 is the linchpin of our freedom, the one day which all of us have agreed upon as an occasion to unite as a nation and show the world, and each other, what America really stands for… Well, it stands to reason that in this critical annum of 2018, while our noble democratic experiment is enmeshed in the most dire jeopardy it has ever faced, we are presented with a golden opportunity to make our grandest statement yet, to stand in defiance of the current status quo and announce to those who seek to subjugate us that we are not credulous automatons who will simply lay down and allow ourselves to be crushed under the wheels of the machine. This year, truly—as Bill Pullman said in that movie where Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum beat up a bunch of aliens—we celebrate our Independence Day…

Nah, not so much. We were too busy attending barbecues and having parades and drinking beer and blowing shit up today. But in our defense—from the sound of things outside my apartment—we bought waaaaaaaaay more Mexican-made explosives than ever this year.  

This is ‘Murica. And right now, America sucks.

Given the statements I made in my introductory paragraphs, it probably won’t surprise you that I’m not particularly fond of fireworks. And given the statement that comprised the last paragraph, it probably won’t surprise you that I’m not particularly fond of America these days, either. (I do love that the principles of this land still allow me the freedom to type the words “America sucks”—although, if the bridge-troll in charge at the moment has anything to say about it, that probably won’t be the case for long). There are those who will read my proclamation and issue some sort of gut-check response like, “if you don’t love America, then git the hell out.” To which I say: 1) fuck you, because that brand of idiotic nationalistic rhetoric is precisely why we’re in this mess to begin with, and 2) if you honestly can’t comprehend how someone who has lived in this country for the past forty years could find so much to loathe about its contemporary state of affairs that they would profess to loathe the nation’s prevailing identity as a whole, then I would strongly recommend opening your eyes to what’s crashing down around you because your willful ignorance of just how fucked this place is right now is a far bigger concern than anything I could possibly write.

Then I would ask you a question: Why are you still so stoked about America? Okay, two questions: Is your ardor based on any measured assessment of what this country stands for now, or are you simply rah-rah-ing the home-team? Most of my educated acquaintances would likely answer with some variation of the standard “it may not be perfect, but it’s still the best nation in the world” reply. Which is a perfectly acceptable response… Except it’s simply not fucking true. Because America is not the best at anything anymore. We lead the globe in mass shootings and shitty hip-hop artists with face tattoos, and that’s about it.

So under what criteria is America “the best”? I’m not posing that question in the spirit of communism, I’m posing it in the spirit of pragmatism. Because, lord knows, I DON’T WANT TO FEEL THIS WAY. But it’s goddamn difficult not to when every single day I see more and more increasingly abhorrent events unfolding on the news, I see a vile cackling shithead mocking all of us from his ivory throne while he assaults every trace of common decency we had left just like he has assaulted women his entire life, and I don’t see a single ray of light on the horizon. My heart isn’t broken, it hasn’t stopped beating, it has simply filled to the brim with disgust—viscous, black, oozing, poisonous disgust. And I am drowning in it. I am disgusted by Donald Trump. I am disgusted by every single person who voted for Donald Trump. I am disgusted by every single corrupt sycophant in his party who facilitates his evil machinations. I am disgusted by every single person I see wearing t-shirts with images of AR-15’s emblazoned on them. I am disgusted by every single asshole who is still exploding M-100’s in my neighborhood even though it is now 3 a.m. And while there is plenty of overlap in each of those categories, if you added up all of those people, they comprise about half the voting population of The United States. We’ve already discussed how much I despise math, but even with my limited grasp of arithmetic, this seems to suggest that roughly 50% of Americans are abominable, racist, ignorant, and/or fundamentally stupid. So, I return to an expanded version of the question at the top of this paragraph: How can any country where this is the case possibly be “the best”?

Make no mistake, Donald Trump did not create our present debacle. Sure, he’s the pus-dribbling herpe at the tip of this diseased penis, so it’s easy to erroneously label him the culprit. But no matter what medicine you apply to that sore, the virus remains. People voted for him. LOTS of people. Lots of Americans. If any evidence was required to demonstrate that our democratic structure has massive systemic problems, there you have it. I understand that we as a nation aren’t necessarily defined by our President, who merely serves as a temporary figurehead—even if this particular figurehead embodies the most horrific symbol imaginable of our national paradigm: an uneducated jingoistic criminal buffoon with no respect for anybody; Donald Trump represents the espoused virtues of America about as well as Jaws represents the gentleness of marine life. However, let me repeat: he is the President because millions of Americans voted for him. And they did so despite the fact that his being an uneducated jingoistic criminal buffoon with no respect for anybody was not only common knowledge but something he openly boasted about. So, not to belabor a point, but this alleged “greatest country in the world” is comprised of millions and millions of individuals who think these are desirable qualities for the person who controls the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet to have. This alleged “greatest country in world” is also home to multitudes of people who have indicated they would vote for Kanye West if that megalomaniacal psychopath ran for President. Clearly, the masses who ultimately chart the course of this nation are not intelligent enough to make any decision with such weighty consequences. And this is why we can’t have nice things.

Yet so many among us still cling to time-honored fallacies about our superiority. To them, America is like The Beatles—unassailable, immune to criticism. To them, it’s just blindly accepted that America is the world’s zenith. So pass the fireworks and don’t tread on me, motherfucker.

And maybe that’s a big part of the problem. Maybe too many of us have been impetuously clinging to this tarnished ideal, clutching our flags to our proud red-white-and-blue bleeding hearts, oblivious to the feces smeared all over the fabric. We still think we’re Let It Be, even though the music we’re making these days sounds a lot more like Ringo Starr’s solo albums. So maybe, just maybe, it’s time to accept the sad reality that our magic moment has passed, that Yoko has sapped the soul of our foundation and torn us apart from within. Then maybe we’ll start caring enough to actually fucking do something about it.

Hey, the dudes up the street are. Two more roaring explosions just resounded across the blue-black firmament. It is 4:14 a.m. It’s never too late to celebrate America, apparently.

But this isn’t what you want to read about right now, is it? I suppose you saw the header of this piece and assumed I was going to write some eloquent, reflective treatise about the band Cinderella. Well, I cannot. And it’s not just because despite my overly generous appreciation for the hairspray hard-rock of my youth, Cinderella’s limited charms place them in the bottom tier of those outfits. Even their very best song, “Nobody’s Fool”, exists squarely in the middle of the road—it’s neither great nor awful, it’s just sort of… there. Tom Keifer does a decent impression of AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, and the Night Songs disc I’m listening to right now is enjoyable enough for me to accede that Cinderella was probably a better band than Bang Tango, but those merits are woefully inadequate to justify my writing anything of substance about them.

And even worse: I can’t write anything of substance about our country’s dismal state of affairs, either.  I have no solutions to offer, no wisdom to impart. I am merely a broken man sitting at his laptop trying to make sense of the madness suffusing the world around him. And here’s the worst part of the even worse part: all of it, every insane and malevolent thing that is happening to us right now, makes absolute sense to me. I told everyone close to me that Donald Trump was going to win this past election as soon as he announced his candidacy, a prediction which was roundly scoffed at by the smartest people I know. Being right doesn’t make me a soothsayer or a political genius, it simply makes me an overanxious pessimist who has been gauging the very worst in humanity long enough to assume that the very worst thing which can happen in any situation where humanity is involved is more likely than not the thing that is going to happen. Therefore, it was only natural for me to assume that Trump was going to happen.

Whether we like it or not—and this is the thing we’re going to have to accept about the modern American identity if we ever want to make the situation any better—the ethos of Donald Trump’s reality-show sensationalism epitomizes more Americans than the ethos of an arrogant professional shrew in a pant-suit does. The reasons I voted for Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with her dogma speaking to me and touching my soul and igniting a spark of patriotism in my heart—no, those were the reasons I voted for Barack Obama twice. I actively revile Hillary Clinton; I just revile her a whole lot less than I revile Donald Trump. I wasn’t With Her, I was merely Against Him. And I was not alone in this perspective. And I think this is rather emblematic of the broad-spectrum mediocrity and complacency which is inherent in present-day America: legions of the best among us were willing to embrace a patently unexceptional figurehead simply because she wasn’t as bad as the alternative. We didn’t demand the best possible representative of our values, we were prepared to settle for someone who obfuscated her shadiest tenets instead of flaunting them as selling points like her opponent did. “Good enough” was good enough for us. But being a better candidate than some of the truly abhorrent alternatives did not make Hillary Clinton the best candidate. Any more than being a better republic than some of the truly abhorrent alternatives makes America the best country.

No, I am not especially proud to be an American. Especially not at the moment. Why should I be? My nationality is not a product of any extraordinary accomplishment on my part, it is a product of my being lucky enough to be sired by parents whose ancestors managed to slip across the border before ICE existed. I’m certainly not saying I hate America—it’s where I live, it’s where my friends and family live, and it’s where my record collection lives; it has some appealing qualities. Yet espousing our nation’s superiority while disregarding its numerous and glaring failings is a lot like rooting for the New England Patriots despite their legacy of cheating and dishonor because they win more games than they lose. Donald Trump didn’t invent corruption and atrocity; America has a long history of both, one which we conveniently discount while championing its greatness. But here’s the thing there: we treat those unpleasant facets of our bygone chronicle as if they are challenges we have overcome, as if we have somehow evolved past them. Yet, if there’s any salient wisdom to be gleaned from the events of the past two years, it is that we as a society have not actually progressed as much as we claim. How dare we assert our enlightenment when we still live in a land where a man can rape an unconscious woman with a foreign object in an alleyway and be virtually immune to punishment because his white scholar-athlete eminence is hoisted as an exemplar of the American ideal. How dare we claim to be the best at anything when first-world nations around the globe continue eclipsing our finest accomplishments while we’re busy playing Democrats vs. Republicans, battling each other like boorish Neanderthal contestants on the same sort of trash television programs which launched our current President to notoriety.

Trump’s ascendency has legitimized his most repugnant traits and demonstrated that there is a vast and ravenous fan-base for cruelty among our populace. It has proven this country is laden with people devoid of empathy, callous budding sociopaths who were just waiting for someone to come along and tell them that their deep-seeded bigotries and intolerances are venerable assets. Which is why simply removing one fiend from office will not be enough to pull us out of our extant quagmire. That resolution will be like remedying our slit throats with kisses from our mamas—it may feel good for a moment, but it will not suture our wounds. Because America has been hemorrhaging for a very long time and we have chosen to ignore that. Donald Trump merely rubbed that blood over all of our faces for the world to see.  

If you’re proud to be an American, that’s just fine. But what are you so proud of right now? It seems to me that anyone who truly loves this country should want it to be the very best it can be. And it seems to me that the first step toward achieving that is acknowledging that the American essence needed drastic and sweeping improvements well before Der Fuhrer took office. It’s time for us to admit that we are not the greatest country in the world; such a contention only rings as superciliousness at this juncture, in light of the all the evidence to the contrary. Because as long as a maestro with absolutely zero redeeming qualities is orchestrating our symphony, we need to account for the pandemic narrowness among the citizenry who handed him the baton. The time has come to concede that a body riddled with cancerous cells cannot possibly be the healthiest. And to ask ourselves what redeeming qualities we have left—what can we possibly stand for—when enough of us decided that an unprincipled monster represented our nation’s spirit to put one at the helm. Then, and only then, can we begin to cure our sickness.

Okay, here’s how we fix everything…

Nope. I told you, I have no answers for you. Because a large and terrified part of me suspects we may have already cued the band to play our funeral march the moment that diminutive orange hand touched a Bible and sealed the oath that made him the global symbol of what America represents in 2018. And this absolutely fucking devastates me. I may not adore this country at present, but of course I want to it to survive. Because if it does, maybe there’s a chance we can eventually make it the greatest country in the world for real.

For now, everyone I know is resolving to hold on tightly to the masts until the storm passes and the great vessel stops listing. Regrettably, I think there’s a very strong chance our ship will sink before that happens. Regrettably, perhaps it already has. I’m not sure there’s any coming back from the path we’re on now, if this much damage can ever be undone. I’d love to say I’m hopeful, but most of my “Hope” went away when the singularly kind and inspiring man who delivered that slogan did.

That’s why I wasn’t out watching others wave sulphuric pom-poms in the sky to rejoice in the majesty of America tonight. I was huddled inside my apartment, seeking shelter from the onslaught, listening to the terrible sounds of the world exploding around me and knowing I was utterly powerless to stop it, desperately wishing the trauma would end and hoping that when the new dawn finally came my home would not lie in ruins.

After all, it’s 2018. That was the most appropriate American experience I could think of.  

 July 4, 2018  

[lifeonashelf]

CIGARETTES AFTER SEX

Perhaps fittingly, the band Cigarettes After Sex was recommended to me by a woman I have been simultaneously naked with.

If she’s reading this, I want to assure her that she won’t be identified here (no need to drag her name through the mud; I figure anyone who’s been simultaneously naked with me has already suffered enough). Fortunately, she wasn’t naked when she suggested I should give Cigarettes After Sex a listen—if someone’s thinking about bands to recommend to you while you’re simultaneously naked with them, you’re clearly doing something wrong. Plus, had she been naked at the time, it’s highly unlikely I would have even registered her advocacy of Cigarettes After Sex—I very much enjoy seeing her naked, so contemplating any matters unrelated to her proximate nakedness is generally unfeasible under those circumstances. She told me to check out the band roughly an hour before any mutual nudity transpired, and I duly noted her endorsement because at that point I wasn’t even aware that mutual nudity was pending—if I had known that, I would have definitely been raptly musing on how super-awesome it was that we were both going to be naked in a hour instead of raptly musing on what this band she was telling me about called Cigarettes After Sex might sound like.

And maybe you’re now thinking, “dude, you had your arm around this girl on the couch in your apartment and she started talking to you about a band called Cigarettes After Sex… how could you not know simultaneous nakedness was imminent?” Which is, you know, a fair question. So I guess I should clarify that me and this woman have been friends for many years, but we’ve only taken our clothes off in the same locality on a handful of occasions—in other words, when we see each other, it isn’t necessarily a given that we’re going to see each other’s genitals at some point in the evening. It’s actually sort of ironic that this particular girl would be the one to tell me about Cigarettes After Sex, because I would very likely see her naked more frequently if I didn’t smoke cigarettes; she’s inherently grossed out by the habit, so whenever we hang out I have to be mindful that if I light up around her, the chances of any subsequent synchronized nudity taking place become greatly diminished.  

Anyway, since everyone who knows anything at all about me knows I love music, people are always recommending bands to me. Truthfully, I rarely actually investigate those bands. This is mostly because I’m always worried I’ll think their music is terrible and end up trapped in an awkward situation when the person inevitably asks for my feedback later, at which point I will either have to: a) lie, or b) inform them I think the band they told me is awesome sucks. Neither of those scenarios especially appeals to me, so I usually just play things safe and say, “I haven’t had a chance to check them out yet” a few times until the person forgets they ever recommended a band to me at all. It’s not a perfect solution, but I am not a perfect man (as anybody who has ever been simultaneously naked with me can readily attest to).

Despite my typical methodology, I decided maybe I should go ahead and listen to this specific recommendation, both because Cigarettes After Sex is a decisively superb name for a band, and because the suggestions of the girl who told me about them have been mostly on point in the past—for instance, she was the first person to play me the Metric song “Patriarch On A Vespa”, which was the song that made me realize Metric is fucking rad. Even though Radiohead is her absolute favorite band of all time and I think almost everything Radiohead has recorded in the last 17 years is ostentatious dogshit, generally she has excellent taste (despite her choosing to engage in contemporaneous nakedness with me on occasion).

So I did indeed make it a point to seek out Cigarettes After Sex. And, hey, as it turns out: Cigarettes After Sex is really, really, really good. Their music is totally sensual, too, so once I heard them I inevitably ended up reckoning they would have supplied a perfect soundtrack while me and the girl who mentioned them to me were in the process of becoming simultaneously naked that night (at the time, we were instead listening to a record by an outfit called Pity Sex, which—looking back—is probably not the band I would have chosen if had known we were soon to begin subtracting clothes from each other, regardless of their moniker being decidedly appropriate under the circumstances).

Rest assured, even if you’re not in the altogether with someone while you listen to Cigarettes After Sex, they still sound marvelous (I’m the only naked person in my apartment at the moment, and I’m enjoying their self-titled debut just fine). Most of their songs are virtually interchangeable—imagine Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” played at a half-speed on a broken turntable with Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star handling the vocal duties and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what every track on Cigarettes After Sex sounds like. Notwithstanding, the band’s single-leitmotif approach doesn’t bother me too much because they do the one thing they do extremely well. And the voice driving these wistful canticles is unequivocally superb—so exquisitely feminine and amatory, in fact, that I was frankly amazed to learn the tunes were all written, produced, and performed by a singer named Greg Gonzalez, who ostensibly has a penis.

Though the lyrics are predominantly focused on various erotic entanglements, the downcast aura which permeates this slow-burning cycle seems to infer that sex inevitably leads to catastrophe (this is another thing that anybody who has ever been simultaneously naked with me can readily attest to). Gonzalez’s tales are raptly fixated on the grey shades in the pupils of starry-eyed lovers, reveling in the duskiest corners of carnal partnerships, where ardor has as much potential to cause pain as pleasure and sending roses and sending dick-picks are weighed as equally romantic gestures. His pensive poetry is infused with a compelling and refreshingly candid duality, vacillating between tenderness and vulgarity with an almost-schizophrenic abandon. It’s certainly jarring the first time you hear a phrase like “show me your tits” or “sucking cock” in songs this gorgeous, yet Gonzalez isn’t merely being crass—he’s just a songwriter honest enough to acknowledge that sometimes sweethearts make gentle velvety love and sometimes they fuck each other’s brains out. He peers his lens into the windows of bridal suites with perfumed silk sheets and filthy 20-buck-a-night motel rooms with paper-thin walls, and evidently feels equally at home in both. Though each track here qualifies as a beautiful love song, the overall dictum of Cigarettes After Sex seems to be that lust has a regal beauty of its own.

Don’t be misled, though. The somber ambiance that permeates the record suggests that the beating heart of this lush and alluring song-cycle is a fragmented one. The disc’s magnificent opener “K.” plays thing fairly straight, bursting with meditations about kissing until dawn and bodies blissfully intertwined in afterglow as they wait for sleep to come. But this candlelit exuberance only lasts about five minutes; the title of the next song—“Each Time You Fall In Love”—is also its first line, and the second line is, “it’s clearly not enough.” Even on a cut called “Sweet”—in which Gonzalez makes the truly awh-worthy declaration that when his girl sends him dirty videos, her smile and her eyes are the parts of her body he focuses on most—the sweetness culminates with him vowing, “I would gladly break my heart for you.”

It’s maybe a bit incongruous that music this melancholy will undoubtedly fuel countless make-out sessions—hell, at this very minute, there are probably multitudes of people getting undressed in tandem while Cigarettes After Sex softly plays on the stereo in the background (and good for them; they’re certainly having a better night than I am). But whether you’re fervidly caressing someone’s anatomy or simply sitting at your laptop drinking iced tea in your underwear at three in the morning, I’m here to tell you that Cigarettes After Sex is a wonderful record which I have absolutely nothing bad to say about. And now that I’ve acquainted myself with the band, I can categorically state that finding out about them was easily the second-best thing that happened to me the night I found out about them.

Which reminds me, it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen my friend who I sometimes experience concomitant nudity with. I should shoot her a text tomorrow and see if she feels like coming over to listen to records sometime soon.

Hey, I was only suggesting I should invite her over so she can recommend some more bands to me since I like this one so much… Why, what did you think I was talking about?

 July 16, 2018

[lifeonashelf]

CHURCH, THE

I feel kind of bad for The Church. Here you have this outfit who perfected a strain of moody indie rock with lush psychedelic flourishes, except they did so a few zeitgeists too early and peaked about twenty years before the sound they were instrumental in shaping started being deemed stylish by hipster tastemakers (actually, they did it about twenty years before hipsters were even a thing, back when cassettes were fashionable the first time). If their most enduring record—1988’s Starfish—was released today, Pitchfork writers would be tripping over themselves while racing for their laptops to vigorously espouse its merits (then after everyone else caught on to how good The Church is, these same writers would inevitably turn against them and start including them in articles with titles like: “20 Crappy Bands That Hipsters Love”). The group would likely be enjoying the same level of chic esteem as squads like Interpol and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club—bands that are regarded as cool both because they actually are cool, and because people who regard themselves as cool also regard those bands as cool. It naturally follows, then, that The Church would be the third or fourth-billed name in the Saturday line-up for next year’s Coachella, after which assorted dudes with excessively-manicured facial hair would pause between gusts of mango-papaya vape to expound on how “ah-may-zing” their set was (though they would go on to insist the true highlight of the festival was Sia’s performance, which they would—also—designate as “ah-may-zing”).

The Church also arrived a bit too early to benefit from the 1990’s alternative explosion, an epoch during which they would have surely gotten along famously, probably sold at least as many records as the Gin Blossoms, and ostensibly been written in as a favorite band of the character played by Claire Danes on My So-Called Life (Angela Chase never specifically mentioned The Church on that show, but I still sincerely think she probably did like them and I’m reasonably certain “Reptile” was her go-to cut; I doubt Jordan Catalano enjoyed their stuff very much, though—Angela would have been all, like, “hey, let’s listen to this Church CD,” and he would have fluttered his eyelashes and been all, like, “nah”).

Unfortunately, even in their own era, the band’s timing was inopportune. An effective LP like Starfish had all the potential in the world to set up The Church as a benchmark of the thriving college radio circuit, which reasonably could have segued them to continued success in the decidedly guitar-friendly age to come. However, they had to settle for relegation to the middle-ground because they happened to release that record in 1988, a year during which numerous sonic purveyors who would ultimately define the impending alt-rock movement in The Church’s stead released seminal works that were so trailblazing they inevitably made Starfish’s more discreetly-admirable fare sound underwhelming by comparison. While the album boasts four stellar tunes and six solid others, I don’t think anyone could successfully argue that Starfish is anywhere near as exhilarating as Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing Shocking, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything, The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK, or Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug—to name just a few of the 1988-alumni discs which effectively set the tone for much of the decade following their release. Even if The Church wrote ten songs as fabulously hypnotic as “Destination”, they couldn’t have possibly competed against a roster of that caliber.

As things stand today, the group’s legacy rests in the realm of far more humble peers such as Soup Dragons and Aztec Camera—which is to say The Church is fondly remembered by dudes in their late-40’s who still wear Happy Mondays t-shirts and scour vinyl bins looking for elusive Charlatans UK singles, yet they rarely earn more than a passing mention in broader critical symposiums about the fertile ambit of 1980’s indie rock. Most people under the age of thirty-five only know The Church even existed because their song “Under the Milky Way” appeared in the most slavishly overrated cinematic offering released so far this century, Donnie Darko (granted, Donnie Darko is far from terrible—in fact, it very well may be one of the best movies ever made about a disturbed teenager who hangs out with a demonic ghost-bunny and travels back in time to masturbate in front of Drew Barrymore—but for all its meandering allegories and figurative virtuosity, the film is nowhere near as mind-bending as its Cult Classic status suggests). And here’s the kicker there: even with their best song prominently featured on a popular soundtrack during an era when popular soundtracks were still a thing—a circumstance which would seem ideal to trigger a contemporary reappraisal of The Church’s prowess—the band was outshined yet again. And this time it wasn’t a cadre of future legends who shoved them into the backseat, it was a now-forgotten singer-songwriter named Gary Jules, whose admittedly first-rate cover of “Mad World” usurped “Milky Way” as Donnie Darko: The Album’s breakout anthem and sparked a contemporary reappraisal of Tears For Fears instead. Even though Tears For Fears was objectively a better band than The Church, it still kind of sucks that Gary Jules dropped a fucking jet engine on the latter’s shining moment.

I hope The Church at least takes solace in knowing they are responsible for one of the most killer tunes ever recorded. “Under the Milky Way” remains an utterly magnificent creation, a five-minute slice of brilliance which is nigh impossible to dislike. Though only a modest hit when it was released—the single didn’t crack the Top-20 anywhere, not even in the collective’s home country of Australia—“Milky Way” nevertheless demonstrates the sort of definitive song-craft most bands could only dream they were capable of summoning. Its hooks are melodic and mesmerizing enough to immediately satisfy the ears of the most jaded pop purists, yet the multifarious arrangement is layered with supple intricacies which invite, and richly reward, a more duteous immersion (to put it in more articulate terms: the song sounds really simple, but there’s actually a whole lot of shit going on there). The brilliantly ambiguous lyrical stanzas are ripe for personal interpretation, unfurling the sort of stream-of-consciousness reverie that any listener searching for revelations can self-apply as they see fit (“Something shimmering and white leads you here, despite your destination / Under the milky way tonight”… ah-may-zing). As for me, I’ve listened to the track well over a hundred times in my life, and I still have no idea what it’s about—although I assume it’s either about fucking or dying, since just about every song ever written is inevitably about one of those two things. “Milky Way” is so entrancing, not even the presence of a densely-processed solo which sounds like braying bagpipes can shatter its dark spell (an old joke comes to mind here: Why do Scotsmen always walk while they’re playing their bagpipes? They’re trying to get away from the noise…). The sole other tune I can think of that accomplishes a similar feat is Korn’s “Shoots and Ladders”, which would still be extraordinary even with ten sets of bagpipes pealing through it, since it holds the distinction of being the only song in the history of recorded sound which inspires moshing alpha-males to savagely pummel each other while growling the words, “Knick knack paddywack, give the dog a bone, this old man came rolling home” (these lyrics naturally lead me to assume “Shoots and Ladders” is about both fucking and dying, concurrently).

I need to back up for a second here, because the more I listen to The Church, I’m starting to think their interment in the crowded mausoleum of ‘80s one-hit-wonders is probably more fitting than not (this concession sort of negates my original thesis for this piece, but fuck it). I do dig several of the tunes on Starfish a whole lot (I have yet to mention “North, South, East And West”, which supplies five more of the finest moments on the record), yet none of them are remotely as transcendent as “Under the Milky Way”. And my appreciation for the band’s dexterity, while potent in single-serving dosages, has not inspired me to seek out the rest of their surprisingly voluminous discography. Until I started writing this, I wasn’t even aware they are still active, nor that they have issued a full dozen records since Starfish (I just now checked out a couple clips from their most recent offering—2017’s Man Woman Life Death Infinity—and they were about what I expected: competent, but not remarkable). I am much fonder of The Church than I am of Soup Dragons or Aztec Camera, I would definitely select one of their shirts over a Happy Mondays tee if it came down to it, and I would be far more excited to stumble across the 12” for “Destination” in a record store bin than a whole stack of Charlatans UK singles. Nonetheless, I can’t think of any persuasive criteria under which I could possibly contend that Starfish is as essential a record as Daydream Nation (although, it is a way better record than Sonic Youth’s 2000 release NYC Ghosts & Flowers).

Ultimately, I guess all I can really say about The Church with conviction is that they made at least one really great album that I own and enjoy. Which is good enough for me, even if that rote conclusion makes all of the needlessly flowery paragraphs leading up to this one rather pointless. But I already wrote all that other shit, so I’m not going to go back and excise it now; there were a few decent jokes in there, and at my age, I can’t really afford to delete pages that I squandered several nights working on. It was a dumb premise, though—who the fuck am I to insinuate that the dudes who wrote a timeless classic like “Under the Milky Way” somehow didn’t realize their full potential? Especially when they’re still touring on the strength of that creation 30 years later, and all I’ve really managed to do in the last 30 years is get myself savagely pummeled by alpha-males at a few Korn shows while Jonathan Davis scatted nursery rhymes at me from the stage.

I suppose if I ever write about The Church in the future, I’ll give my notions a bit more thought before I type myself into a corner. For now, I think I’m just going to close this piece and allow it to simmer in its averageness. If I start tweaking these entries just because they aren’t any good, I’ll never finish a single one. And then who’s going to author middling essays about the hundreds of bands in my collection I haven’t gotten around to yet?

Like a bagpipe-wheezing Scotsman, I’ve got to keep moving. It’s time for this old man to come rolling home.

 June 28, 2018

[lifeonashelf]

CHRISTIAN DEATH

Lesson learned: don’t do research.

Until a few minutes ago, I had a fairly sturdy concept for this piece. My intention was to write about how deeply misconstrued the Goth subculture is and perhaps rectify the hackneyed fallacy that the attendant music and its devotees are enraptured with darkness and depression. I would have probably likened the Goth sect to the scores of incorrectly stereotyped extreme metal enthusiasts I’ve become acquainted with through the course of my own lifelong obsession with that genre, who—despite their infatuation with songs about eating babies and the concurrent general assumption that anyone infatuated with songs about eating babies must be a choleric psychopath—are by and large some of the friendliest and sweetest people anyone could hope to meet. I was also planning on examining the delightfully paradoxical phenomenon of “Bats Day”—an annual gathering centered around hundreds of allegedly morose and antisocial ebon-clad Goth aficionados making a pilgrimage to Disneyland to mingle and have their photographs taken alongside relentlessly-jolly anthropomorphic cartoon characters—and pointing out how the mere existence of that event handily refutes the oft-lampooned typecasting of Goth fans as sullen misfits who seek out adamantly grim music because the principal doctrine of their worldview is that life is a perpetual cycle of darkness and pain from which death is the only escape. In my ill-informed imagination, this article was all set up to be a rollicking good time.

But then I decided to look up some historical information about the band that is the subject of this essay. Upon which I promptly learned that the dude who sings on all of the Christian Death records I own—the project’s chief architect, Rozz Williams—hung himself in 1998 at the age of 34. Which sort of suggests that he actually did view life as a perpetual cycle of darkness and pain from which death is the only escape. Granted, this notion is mostly accurate; unfortunately, the solution Williams employed to disentangle that existential quandary sort of negates any possibility of me using an exploration of Christian Death here to supplement a broader treatise about the healthy escapism offered by art that dwells in the realms of the macabre. Oops.

Since I wasn’t aware until I started writing this that one of the faces on Goth’s Mount Rushmore committed suicide two decades ago, it probably won’t surprise you that I’ve never been especially well-versed in that particular genre. I do, however, have a bit of insider knowledge about how immersing yourself in a widely-misunderstood niche sector of the musical spectrum strongly connects you with the greater body of people who appreciate that same genre. So I guess I’m going to have to make this entry about that instead.

I own somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 music-related t-shirts. There are many explanations for this—among them: I’m obsessed with music, t-shirts are comfortable, and the amount of energy I’m willing to expend on how I dress is limited to my basic understanding that black matches everything. But on a more pragmatic level, I suppose the main reason I rely on such a narrow wardrobe is because I believe that aside from exculpation from being arrested for public nudity, the primary function most clothing serves is advertising the product you are wearing. So if my body is fated to be perpetually co-opted as a billboard, I would much rather allocate that real estate to promoting music I think is awesome than to endorsing apparel companies I give absolutely zero shits about. Hence, I wear my various band tees just about everywhere I go, and on any given day my torso publicizes everything from little-known Canadian grindcore geniuses like Fuck The Facts to venerated icons like Billy Joel. I must not be a very good envoy, though; no matter how eminent the bands on my garments are, it is extremely rare for anyone I encounter in the course of my circadian travels to comment on my attire.

However, there is a notable exception to this trend: literally every single time I wear a Slayer tee in public, I have at least one person approach me to offer some variation of the greeting, “fucking badass shirt, man.” Sometimes a casual conversation will ensue from these encounters, but any further dialogue is essentially extraneous; when a stranger acknowledges they are also a fan of Slayer, that simple statement speaks volumes on its own. “Fucking badass shirt, man” carries with it the implication that we are both members of the same select tribe and therefore intrinsically linked by a bond of respect. Though that may sound overly stagey, I assure you this inferred bond has tangible weight. For instance, if a fellow shopper at Target praised my apparel in this manner, and then a gang of ruffians suddenly attacked me on the next aisle (I can’t imagine what I might possibly do at Target to elicit this assault, but bear with me), I am absolutely confident that the dude who just told me my Slayer shirt was fucking badass would jump into the fray to assist me. This hypothetical is not intended as a commentary on the violent character of Slayer’s music (even though they do have at least four songs with “Blood” in the title and a record in their catalog called God Hates Us All), nor is it intended as a commentary on the violent character of Slayer’s fans (even though I have experienced the pummeling mosh pits at their concerts first-hand and can readily confirm that some of the people who listen to Slayer truly are batshit fucking insane). Irrespective of any of that, appreciating Slayer—and by extension, appreciating a variety of music that is stigmatized in most arenas of polite society—gives you something immediate and distinctive in common with everyone else who appreciates Slayer. I hesitate to use the term “brotherhood” since both the Slayer fanbase and the greater extreme metal community include plenty of female constituents, yet the tacit camaraderie which forms between humans who share a mutual fondness for blast beats and abrasive riffs is undeniable, and this is a phenomenon which manifests most prevalently among fans of music that thrives on the fringes of popular culture.

While I would never wear a Muse shirt because Muse is a goddamn terrible band, I assume there are people who inexplicably do not recognize precisely how goddamn terrible Muse is and feel compelled to proudly announce this on their bodies. And I guarantee that they are rarely accosted by other Muse admirers when they do. This is largely because there’s nothing innately remarkable about liking a band like Muse. Declaring oneself a Muse fan doesn’t signify anything in and of itself—that proclamation could mean you own all of their records and listen to them religiously… or it could merely mean you don’t change the station when their singles come on the radio;  it could mean you’ve seen them in concert twenty times… or it could mean you’ve merely scrolled through a few of their live performance clips on YouTube; it could mean that middle-of-the-road faux-art-rock touches that sacred place in the center of your soul… or it could mean you just really enjoyed the Virgin Atlantic commercial that “Feeling Good” was used in. Since their music is tailored for such a wide and nonspecific audience, a person donning a Muse jersey isn’t revealing anything substantial about their character or tastes by doing so; they’d be making pretty much the same statement by wearing a shirt with the Spotify logo on it. Encountering someone who esteems a band at Muse’s echelon of fashionable omnipresence is roughly as banal as encountering someone who likes Starbucks. And nobody ever approaches a latte-wielding stranger to declare, “fucking badass coffee, man.”

Slayer, however, are one of the rare articles that exist in an echelon of their own. They are not merely a metal band, they ARE metal. Much the way Led Zeppelin has come to embody “classic rock” and the Ramones have come to embody punk, the mere mention of Slayer’s moniker serves as a short-hand for their whole genus. Consequently, anyone identifying a Slayer shirt as “badass” is identifying the entire metal province as badass. This obviously doesn’t mean they like every single metal group that has ever existed—I have over 2,000 different bands in my metal library, yet I’ve heard at least 2,000 others that I think are worse than Muse—but it does mean that on a fundamental level they revere what that division of the musical spectrum has to offer. And since the metal scene has historically existed as a decidedly underground phenomenon (aside from its brief dalliance with the mainstream in the early to mid-‘90s), pledging allegiance to it represents much more than just enjoying that particular style of music, it represents being affiliated with a fervent minority faction which consists of some of the most dedicated musicians and fans in the world.

While Slayer is certainly renowned enough to qualify as a household name, it is their reputation as a long-standing institution which has bred that notoriety—a preponderance of the people who have heard of them have likely never heard a single note of their music, and those obviously aren’t the people who wear the band’s shirts. Being famous does not necessarily correspond with being popular. Reign in Blood, which is considered by many to be not only Slayer’s best album but also one of the most important and influential metal albums of all time, was released over thirty years ago and still has yet to sell enough copies (one million) to be certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. To put that into better perspective, Nickelback, who are commonly regarded as the most hated band in the world, has five multi-Platinum records in their discography and one designated with Diamond status—which means that All the Right Reasons sold over 10-million copies in the United States alone in less than a decade. I didn’t write that sentence to belittle Nickelback (regardless of their negative repute, I would personally much rather listen to them than Muse any day); I am only citing this audience disparity because I suspect it will be difficult for most of the people reading this to fathom precisely how rare it is for fans of relatively-snubbed genera like metal to encounter others as passionate as they are about their beloved field. Having Slayer in common with someone is intrinsically meaningful because Slayer is not something you will have in common with most of the people you meet in your lifetime, which naturally elevates these affinities far above the sort of tenuous bonds that form between two individuals when they discover they both like—say—Kendrick Lamar.    

Even bands who take deliberate strides to mold a thriving community for their fans fall short of fostering the natural kinship that manifests within peripheral genres like metal (and Goth, which I feel like I should mention again since it’s the genre this essay was ostensibly supposed to be about). For example, Pearl Jam’s unpredictable setlists and incendiary live performances have long-provided their devotees plenty of stimulus to travel to gigs and network with each other about their collective experiences. Yet being a Pearl Jam fan does not necessarily trigger an immediate comradery with every other Pearl Jam fan; like Muse, their base is simply too massive and divergent for this to be possible. I’ve been to a whole lot of their shows and interacted with a whole lot of attendees at those shows—and sure, I’ve met plenty of folks who were just as stoked as I was to witness scarce performances of tunes like “All Those Yesterdays” and “You Are”. But I’ve also met a whole lot of jaded squibs who walked out of the arena bitching about how disappointing the concert was because there were only three songs from Ten in the setlist; I felt no connection whatsoever with any of those simpletons, and I doubt they would have felt overly connected to me if I told them I wished the band had skipped that evening’s umpteenth rendition of “Yellow Ledbetter” and closed things out with a rarely-played track like “Parting Ways” instead. A crowd as varied as Pearl Jam’s is inevitably comprised of people situated at varied levels of fandom, and there can be no true unity among them as long as there are people in the building who remain seated until the band plays “Betterman” sharing space with the people who are on their feet screaming along with every word Eddie Vedder yelps throughout the entire three-hour set. Translating this back to clothing terms, if someone told me one of my Pearl Jam shirts was “fucking badass, man,” they wouldn’t necessarily be expressing that they share my same degree of admiration for the band’s ethos or their standing in the rock pantheon… they might just be telling me they listened to “Alive” a lot in high school. Which is totally fine because I listened to “Alive” a lot in high school, too. Nevertheless, identifying with a band that has garnered global critical and commercial acclaim doesn’t mean nearly the same thing as identifying with a band that has harvested a global cult of avid enthusiasts despite a notable lack of critical and commercial acclaim.

Make no mistake, metal fans are a vigorously passionate lot. Nobody sort of likes Slayer—if their music moves you when you discover it, this is a revelation which tends to change your life and how you listen to all other music forever; it’s sort of like finding Jesus, only way more exciting and rewarding. So, despite the profoundly intimate nature of the relationship between the self and the music most important to that self, it’s still enlivening to interact with other people who have reached the same epiphany as you; in a very real sense, they understand a part of your essence that most people do not. Which, I think, is probably one of the major reasons hundreds of Goth fans assemble once a year to have a family photo taken on the drawbridge of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Here’s a non-suppositional example: On the way home from my month-long road trip through the Pacific Northwest in the winter of 2013, I stopped to bunk down at a half-dozen or so randomly-chosen towns I had never been to—or even heard of—to break up the drive and do a bit of exploring. This is how I came to watch Super Bowl XLVII in the lounge of a Red Lion Inn located in the city of Eureka, California. Now, Eureka is not a particularly fetching place—in fact, the only less-charming city I stayed in during that sojourn was Lompoc, California (I didn’t find out until I arrived that Lompoc’s principal visitor attraction is a state prison for violent offenders; the night I spent there, I ate dinner at 4:30 p.m. because the desk clerk at my hotel strongly recommended I should refrain from walking the streets after dark, and I slept sparingly due to the vociferous intrusions of a psychotic junkie who was prowling the hallway outside my room in the middle of the night repeatedly bellowing the phrase “fucking n**gers” at the top of his lungs for two hours straight). What I saw of Eureka proper—a lot of vacant dirt parcels and nearly-deserted strip malls populated by shuttered businesses—appeared to confirm the census data that most of the municipality’s 30,000 or so residents earn less than $30,000 a year; the site looked generally run-down enough for an unkind traveler to designate it a shithole. However, I refuse to do so here because my stopover in Eureka proved to be extremely pleasant in light of the events I will convey in this anecdote (it was way better than Lompoc, which actually was a shithole; seriously, dude, that place SUCKED).

After the San Francisco 49ers squandered their lead over the Baltimore Ravens despite the largely stellar performance of future-pariah Colin Kaepernick, the Red Lion’s lounge took on the milieu of a local dive bar as the small bloc of my fellow hotel guests on hand to watch the Bowl were gradually replaced by a crowd of a couple-dozen-or-so regulars. I had made fast acquaintances with the afternoon bartender and the dude sitting beside me at the counter (all three of us were rooting for the Niners, and fans of secondary-market sports teams tend to exhibit some of the same innate tribal behaviors as aficionados of unconventional music). Unfortunately, shortly after the game ended, the latter bid us farewell and the former clocked out and ceded the taps to the girl who was working the closing shift, leaving me to fend for myself. It was still early, and I had already checked out the most happening spot in the immediate vicinity: a Sizzler across the street, which I chose for my post-game supper primarily because it was literally the only open establishment for as far as I could see looking both ways down the road. So, faced with a paucity of recreational options, I decided to stick around the lounge to have a couple more drinks before I headed upstairs to my room.

As I sat there alone at one of the booths sipping a beer, just me and my Slayer shirt, soaking in the ambiance and the wretched modern country music blaring from the jukebox, I noticed that a trio of suspect gentlemen clustered around the pool table across the room were eyeing me intently. They weren’t especially intimidating characters—they mostly just looked like unkempt white dudes in their 30’s who occupied a lot of their nights drinking a lot of Jack Daniels. But there were three of them, and I was there by myself, and they were clearly laser-focused on me. I grew reasonably tense as I watched the three of them watching me. And I grew more so when they evidently reached a consensus among their consort, abruptly leaned their pool cues against the wall, and ambled over toward me.

“Hey…” came the cigarette-charred voice of the one in front—a lean and wiry specimen wearing a wife-beater, a few-day growth of stubble, and a haphazard assortment of rudimentary tattoos that traversed both of his arms. I said nothing, waiting to see how this confrontation was going to unfold… And immediately relaxed when I found out.

“Fucking badass shirt, man,” he said.

I couldn’t tell you any of their names now. But after a quick cycle of introductions, an invitation was proffered and I joined them at the billiard table, where we proceeded to shoot some stick and shoot the shit and buy each other rounds of drinks in between. At some point, one of them asked me if I “throw plastic,” which I subsequently learned is Eureka slang for Frisbee golf—turns out, they were all avid chuckers. I confessed that I have never played that particular sport, which elicited a sequence of hearty inducements from each of them. These dudes who had known me for all of ten minutes insisted I should take part in the game they had scheduled for the following afternoon and assured me I’d have a blast if I did. Regrettably, my plan was to hit the road at checkout-time to ramble on to my next destination, so I had to politely decline—but if I had an extra day to spend in Eureka, California, you bet I would have happily spent it throwing plastic with those fellas, and I absolutely believe I would have indeed had a blast. Sure, we didn’t have a ton in common. But we had Slayer in common, which was enough to activate an instant alliance and a few hours of friendly banter. In the end, three guys who clearly didn’t have a bunch of extraneous money went out of their way to treat an outsider to some beers and make him feel at home in their town, which is a pretty awesome thing. And they wouldn’t have even come over to my table if I wasn’t flying my Slayer flag that night.  

[My Red Lion experience would have surely unfolded much differently if I was wearing, say, a Phish tee (we’re back to the suppositional mode again; Trey Anastasio and his squad of tedious self-fellators are the third or fourth shittiest band of all time—way higher on the list than Muse—so the only way this scenario would ever transpire is if some sadistic fiend murdered me and then draped a Phish t-shirt over my corpse). If the dudes I met in that tavern were Phish phantatics, my evening would have probably consisted of listening to them blather endlessly about how the 17-minute version of “You Enjoy Myself” the band wanked through on their 1998 summer tour was infinitely superior to the truncated 14-minute version they were playing in 2006. All things being equal, I’m extremely glad I ended up spending my stopover in Eureka, California drinking bourbon and playing pool with Slayer fans instead.]

Which brings us back to Christian Death (actually, it doesn’t at all, but since I’ve already authored 3,500 words without saying anything about the band I initially set out to write about, I suppose I should try to tie this in to them somehow). Perhaps I can rationalize my rambling approach by now segueing into a conjecture that Christian Death may very well be the Goth genre’s symbolic answer to Slayer. While the longevity of Bauhaus is probably a more apposite colleague to Slayer’s extended discography and Joy Division’s work has secured a more equivalent stratum of prominence, when it comes to distilling the musical and imagistic components of the genus gothica into their most emblematic forms, Rozz Williams and Co.’s 1982 introduction Only Theatre of Pain is an unrivaled masterpiece.

It’s perhaps more constructive to compare Christian Death’s inaugural statement strictly to the opening salvo Slayer launched a year later on their own debut record Show No Mercy, which—like Theatre—was not the first album of its kind, yet shifted the groundwork laid before it into new dominions of iconic ruthlessness and menace. Both Bauhaus and Joy Division richly deserve all the credit they get for honing the sound that would come to be classified as Goth, and both made a lot of fucking superb music. Nonetheless, Bauhaus’s pivotal recordings have a decidedly elegant and erudite flavor to them—a vibrant stained-glass window beneath the black curtains, if you will—while the austere solemnity in Joy Division’s brilliant handiwork was always tempered with an emphatically tuneful sensibility—which was rendered even more explicit in retrospect when the group’s surviving members rebounded from their own frontman’s untimely suicide by creating New Order and subsequently producing high-charting pop singles like “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “True Faith”. In that sense, those outfits can be more accurately flagged as the Iron Maiden and Metallica of their genre, respectively. By contrast, the song cycle on Only Theatre of Pain is conjured from the same jurisdiction of raw malevolence that Slayer drew from, a collection of ominous and dissonant anthems which evoke phantasmagorias of vampires in decaying castles fucking on velvet mattresses encircled by black candles—which is, I assume, exactly what you’re supposed to envision when you listen to music that sounds like Christian Death’s music does (or maybe I just presuppose that because so many self-identifying Goth fans I’ve met habitually adorn themselves in regalia designed to make them resemble literal vampires).

If that doesn’t read like an emphatic endorsement of Only Theatre of Pain, then by all means, don’t take it as one. Christian Death’s work certainly isn’t for everybody, and one’s enthusiasm for it will be directly proportional to one’s enthusiasm for unabashedly sinister ditties about crucifixion and necrophilia and Satan (and vampires in decaying castles fucking on velvet mattresses encircled by black candles, I guess). Even during its most melodic moments, Theatre encapsulates a consistently macabre and foreboding prophecy whose unsettling stream-of-twisted-consciousness lyrics, primitive hammering rhythms, and discordant instrumentation are so unremittingly grim that the sporadic dulcet riffs on tracks like “Romeo’s Distress” end up seeming about as sprightly as the glassy gleam in a corpse’s eyes. Given that the most poetic libretto Williams offers during the album’s ceremony is about spiritual abandonment (“Jesus won’t you touch me, come into my heart / Where the hell are you when the fire starts?”), the material here is far from uplifting. But here’s the thing:  it isn’t supposed to be uplifting. And it isn’t supposed to be for everybody. Which is precisely what makes music of this ilk so special to anybody who finds themselves uplifted by it.

Admittedly, I haven’t ventured very far beyond Only Theatre of Pain. My half-baked comparison between Christian Death and Slayer is faulty in at least one major aspect: while you can put on any disc in the latter’s arsenal and be assured it will sound unmistakably like Slayer despite the sporadic line-up and market shifts the band weathered throughout their existence, Christian Death’s history has been characterized by a pandemonium of personnel changes that has long-since evaporated any sense of cohesive symmetry between their records. Aside from Rozz Williams, none of the musicians present on Theatre’s roster stuck around long enough to make another album. A few years later Williams himself attempted to adjourn the venture he started, only to have the band’s replacement guitar player usurp his role as frontman and record several further offerings under the Christian Death ensign without him; this transferal later became even more convoluted when Williams decided to assemble a new line-up and release additional music under the super-clever appellation “Christian Death Featuring Rozz Williams” while that other group of dudes was still actively carrying on as Christian Death—which ostensibly means that for a few years it would have been entirely possible to attend a music festival where two completely different bands called Christian Death were playing the same songs on the same bill. I won’t even get into how many times the project’s non-Williams incarnation has swapped members in and out… this shit is long enough already. Suffice to say that due to C.D.’s chaotically-splintered legacy, the potency of the copious discs bearing their mark varies wildly.

Alas, nothing I’ve heard from any of the assorted successive versions of the band comes remotely close to matching the sheer awesomeness and intensity of Only Theatre of Pain. The rest of my associated library consists solely of two live recordings, the latest of which, (a “Featuring…” effort titled Sleepless Nights) does very little to contest my assumption that my restricted discography already encompasses all of the most decisive work Rozz Williams created—although the gig was recorded well down the road in 1990, his band at the time was still culling nine of their set’s twelve songs from Theatre. Yet, even regarded as a one-off tour de force, Only Theatre of Pain is a goddamn tremendous record that casts Williams as a true visionary whose black flame burned brightly until his drug abuse and eventual self-immolation snuffed out that spark. The disc also established a marriage of eerie atonality and bellicose rock dynamism that has never been captured with such brio again, even though multiple generations of dusk-draped Goth and Black Metal purveyors have been both consciously and unconsciously referencing Theatre’s template ever since.

I can only assume that a Christian Death shirt would function much like a Slayer tee in heralding fidelity to the band’s genre and waving a banner that other devotees would feel compelled to salute, because I don’t own one. However, it’s clear their moniker remains distinguished-slash-infamous enough to be synonymous with the brand of music they helped pioneer. As of this writing, twenty years after their founder committed himself to the great velvet mattress in the sky, Christian Death is still touring and drawing a fanbase, which suggests that even without a single original member in the fold, that signature is an alluring enough talisman on its own to remain significant to the faithful.  

Despite the dark proclivities of the music itself, cult bands like Christian Death and Slayer perpetually achieve the often-challenging accomplishment of genuinely connecting people together, particularly those who feel largely disconnected from the world at large until they discover a force greater than themselves that burrows into their soul and opens a door to a place where they unconditionally belong. Some people think the only place to find that is in religion, but some of us find it in songs about dying that make us feel alive. When I accepted Slayer into my heart, the world suddenly seemed like a far more wondrous place and I knew I had a friend to walk beside me for the rest of my days. So as long as there are disaffected kids who enjoy dressing in black and wearing inverted ankhs around their necks, I hope that records like Only Theatre of Pain will continue to provide them a beacon for succor and inclusion. Because whether a bonding ritual consists of running around in circles bashing into each other or putting acrylic fangs in your mouth and riding Space Mountain with a bunch of people wearing capes, the end result is the same: humans joining together with other humans to celebrate their shared humanity… which is ultimately a rather beautiful thing, no matter how grotesque their soundtracks might be to those who fail to understand them.

And when you get right down to it, addressing the woeful paucity of that unifying phenomenon in this frequently-miserable world of ours may very well be the key to enacting positive changes within it. Writing songs beseeching peace and love for the past few decades clearly hasn’t done the trick—that approach mostly just got John Lennon shot and ensured that “Imagine” will be played without any cognizance of irony at the opening ceremony of every Olympic games until the end of time. Perhaps tunes about the darker corners of the human experience are actually more honest, and universal. And maybe the rest of mankind could learn a little something from the Goths and the metal-heads, people whose sonic passions dwell in the morbid, yet nevertheless forge integrated societies that accept everyone regardless of what color they are or who they have sex with or what social caste they come from. Because, contrary to popular belief, the principal doctrine of their worldview is not that life is a perpetual cycle of darkness and pain from which death is the only escape. It’s actually something a lot closer to this: if you love the same music we do, then you are among friends and we can totally share a boat on Pirates of the Caribbean. Pretty cool how simple that is, huh?

Fucking badass interpersonal relationships, man.

 May 3, 2018

[lifeonashelf]

CHIODOS

It’s nearly impossible to expound on the “process” of writing without coming across like a self-important shithead. I only mention this because I’m about to attempt to do the former without doing the latter. Though I’ve maybe already hamstrung myself by referring to the act of pressing buttons on a laptop as a “process”—and I certainly haven’t helped my case by putting quotation marks around “process,” nor by using the word “expound.” Come to think of it, that “nor” is also ringing awfully pompous to me, even if in a technical sense “nor” was the grammatically correct word to use there... And there I go informing you what’s “grammatically correct,” which makes me sound like a total asshole.

Nevertheless, making this text be a thing is indeed contingent on a sequence of mental formulation and ritualistic preparation and elementary discipline, and when you put all of those things together, the noun which most accurately describes the result is indeed “process” (I consulted my thesaurus for a less ostentatious term, but only an officious wanker would describe writing as a “procedure”).

The first aspect is probably self-explanatory—“mental formulation” is basically just a douche-y way of saying “thinking about stuff.” Naturally, I have to develop an idea in my mind that I think is worth putting into words before I, you know, put it into words. Despite the schizophrenic tangents these pieces often swerve into, I assure you a significant amount of forethought goes into what they should ostensibly be about before a single letter is typed. So no matter how insensible the missives in Life on a Shelf may seem at times, I assure you that all of them are hatched from an embryonic guiding vision which was subjected to vigorous cerebral computation before I expelled it onto the page. Or something.

My “ritualistic preparation” these days involves brewing a pot of coffee while my laptop boots up, then stepping out onto my balcony to smoke a cigarette. I assume other writers have their own routines (although I can’t fathom how anybody gets anything done without coffee and cigarettes). As for me, a Camel Blue and five minutes of pensive silence are the ideal trappings to activate the creative headspace I need to be in to get down to business, and a glug of Pacific Northwest Blend with plenty of creamer supplies a constructive intermission whenever I need to gather my thoughts before finishing a sentence… like I just did after I typed those ellipses.

These elements are easily managed—I think about stuff all the time, and I’ve been known to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee even when I’m not writing. In fact, “elementary discipline” is the sole truly daunting component of the “process” (“pretentious fucking quotation marks again”). Though you might imagine the most challenging aspect of being a writer is generating quality material, this is absolutely not the case. Have you ever browsed the Romance section at a bookstore? Next time you do, select any novel with a bare-chested cowboy or highlander on the cover and read the synopsis on the back; you will promptly ascertain that something as otiose as quality never factored into that author’s process. Admittedly, I’ve never written a Romance novel, but I’ve read enough of them to deduce their methodology: devise a serviceable plot which strikes the delicate balance of sappy and rapey that is essential to the genre, concoct a couple names like Liam O’Shaughnessey and Analisa Winthrope, then start cranking out pages. Whether or not the finished product turns out any good is basically irrelevant; it got written. And ultimately, that’s all that matters.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue, my friends: the only difficult thing about writing… is actually writing. As in, sitting down and fucking doing it. Whether you have ideas or not. Whether you have time or not. Whether you even want to or not.

I am battling against all of those things at present. I don’t have any concrete concept of where this piece should go, despite having already listened to the trio of Chiodos discs I own two times each. I suppose I do technically have time because I’m not at work and I’m not asleep—however, it is currently 2:49 a.m., so I’m only a couple hours away from officially being up Stupidly Late. And if I’m being totally honest, I don’t particularly feel like writing this right now. Actually, I haven’t much felt like writing anything lately.

Popular legend asserts that Jack Kerouac authored On the Road in a single marathon, chemical-fueled session. That particular work has of course accumulated a mythic significance, and the integral way its unorthodox genesis factors into the iconography of The Beat Generation’s magnum opus cannot be overstated—there’s just something irresistibly romantic about the notion of a writer so driven to immortalize his masterpiece that he hammered away at it non-stop until he purged the whole thing out of his head and onto the page. On the Road’s putative origin story is such a renowned facet of its existence, it hardly matters anymore that the accepted account of Kerouac composing the novel in one fever-dream sitting is pure hyperbole. It actually took him three full weeks to type the thing, and he was only able to do it that quickly because he had been sketching out the manuscript in his journals for several months beforehand. I’m not pointing this out to belittle the impact of Kerouac’s most revered literary contribution—although I personally found On the Road prodigiously underwhelming when I finally read it, I still concede that crafting an entire novel in three weeks is a duly impressive feat. Even so, for our purposes here, I would like it known that the quixotic notion of writers routinely hunkering down and hammering out text in a frenetic slit-jugular gush is absolute bullshit.

The truth is this: writing is almost never borne from lightning-in-a-bottle surges of inspiration. The vast majority of prose is instead borne from endless, maddening hours spent agonizing over a single word. An entire afternoon spent obsessing over one sentence that will inevitably undergo further alteration when you re-read it the next afternoon and realize it’s still not sitting quite right. Days and nights and months and years whose elapses become measured in pages—days and nights and months and years spent toiling in seclusion. Writing is lonely, punishing work that yields limitless frustration and only sporadic satisfaction. It is the most bi-polar of artistic expressions, a drug that poisons as often as it cures, and you never know which trip you’re in store for from one fix to the next. To be a writer is to give your heart to a mistress who demands steadfast devotion while she repeatedly punches you in the face, yet you keep coming back for more because every now and then she gives you a really awesome kiss instead. Asked what advice they would give to aspiring wordsmiths who wanted to know the secret to living a happy life as a writer, one prominent author is said to have remarked: “Don’t be a writer.” This quote is possibly apocryphal, but when I heard it, I believe it was attributed to Sylvia Plath—or maybe I just assume Sylvia Plath said it because she ended her life by sticking her head into her fucking oven. And, frankly, I don’t think she chose an entirely unreasonable course of action. Because, goddamn, this shit really hurts sometimes.

I am not Jack Kerouac. I did not shape my debut novel in one sitting, or even in three weeks. It took me five grueling years. Once I garnered the interest of an agent, I spent another several months editing my tome to the more marketable length she advised me to trim it to, then spent an additional several months patiently waiting while she shopped it. It was a protracted and sometimes excruciating interval. But one of the things that kept me afloat while I was laboring on this intensive undertaking was my presumption that its consummation was bound to feel like the afterglow of an epic make-out session.

Regrettably, it has not.

Since I finished the book, I have instead found myself in the grip of an acute postpartum depression. I do not feel triumphant, I feel lethargic and uninspired. This is a turn of events I did not foresee—throughout the half-decade I spent striving to complete that project, in the back of my mind I was simultaneously making grand plans to commence a new endeavor, and to subsequently start churning out huge chunks of pages on this one (or at least finish the goddamn letter “C”). And now, at last, for the past few months I have had several hours a day to fill with whatever artistic activities I choose… but I haven’t particularly desired to spend any of those hours doing anything artistic (the most significant feat I’ve been able to muster thus far is re-watching the first three seasons of Miami Vice).

I think I know what has instigated this listlessness. While I was working on the novel, my exclusive goal was its completion; the success or failure of that mission rested solely in my hands. However, my present goal is considerably loftier: I want the thing to get released so I can begin the career I’ve been chasing for two decades… and this is something I have absolutely no jurisdiction over. The outcome of that mission will be decreed by the prospective publishers who will determine the course of the rest of my life, faceless strangers who have the capacity to shatter all of my dreams simply by emailing the word “pass” to my agent.

Which many, many, many have already done.

I am incredibly grateful to be as far along on the course as I am. I am incredibly grateful that a representative at the most prestigious literary agency in the world read something I wrote and found enough merit in it to decide, “this guy doesn’t suck.” I am prouder of the novel I produced than I have been of anything I’ve ever created, and there are passages in it that are so good I can hardly believe I’m the one who wrote them. The manuscript represents an impeccable embodiment of the vision I had when I first sat down and started plucking away at it all those years ago, blissfully unaware of the weight and scope of the expedition I was about to embark on because it was a journey I had never taken before. I bumbled my way through the early chapters as I struggled to gain purchase on the story I wanted to tell, I gradually got to know my characters, and along the way I fell in love with some and grew to despise others, just as I hoped my eventual readers would. Writing the book was a revelatory experience—I became intimately acquainted not only with my craft, but also with the vastness of my passion for it. I drew upon reserves of endurance I did not even know I possessed, consuming innumerable days grinding on the text for six hours straight, breaking away only to go work an eight-hour restaurant shift, then coming home and writing some more until the sun came up before finally collapsing into my bed to sleep for five hours so I could wake up and do the exact same thing again the next day. It took literal and figurative years off my life, but I wrote a novel. And even better, when it was finished, I realized I had somehow written one that I think is pretty goddamn fantastic.

But I’m not basking in victory at the moment—I’m fucking terrified. Because now, after dozens of rejections, there is an increasingly strong chance that no one will ever read my pretty goddamn fantastic novel and this aspiration I have been working toward my entire life will culminate in failure.

I understand that every successful writer surely weathered numerous rebuffs before someone believed in their work enough to green-light their publishing career. My cognizance of this should probably provide me some measure of solace, perhaps assure me that I am in good company and merely going through another step of the “process.”

Except that’s not how I feel right now at all. Right now, I feel like I did the best I could, but the best I can do simply isn’t good enough.

And since we’re putting it all on the table here, I can freely admit that some of my melancholy stems from all of this happening while I’m counting down the final weeks of my thirties. I’ve never placed much significance on age-related milestones—sure, I was depressed when I turned 30, but that was mostly because I was still recovering from a recent break-up; I was also depressed when I turned 35, but that was mostly because I started that birthday eating alone at a Denny’s at two in the morning, which is an inherently depressing way to kick off your birthday irrespective of the year. I realize that being 40 is roughly as inconsequential as being 39 in the scheme of things. Only, it’s kind of fucking not.

It’s not so much the age itself that unsettles me—most of the time, I still conduct myself like an 18 year-old with an advanced record collection and an excessive proportion of grey in his beard; I’ve even grown out my belly and my hair again, so whenever I put on a Slayer shirt I don’t look a whole lot different than I did when I was actually 18. No, the aspect of turning 40 that I find discomfiting is purely internal: I can’t help myself from holding the general assumption that someone who has been on this planet for 40 years should probably have their shit together. And I know I do not. In almost every conceivable realm of my existence, I am behind the curve of innate anthropological evolution: I have not married or procreated, my current vocation is in an industry where even my superiors are at least a decade younger than me, and I still regularly stay up until 5 a.m. eating Doritos while I binge-view Friday The 13th films (in case you’re thinking of investing some time in the franchise, be cautioned that Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is not merely the worst entry in the series by a massive margin, it is an absolutely unredeemable piece of shit; I’ve only watched that one like 20 times).

When you’re young, 40 seems inconceivably ancient. And no matter how intimately you stay in touch with the edition of yourself who thought that way, sometimes 40 seems inconceivably ancient when you’re 39, too. That clichéd adage “you’re only as old as you feel” delivers no comfort whatsoever on the nights you come home at three in the morning after trudging through nine hours of the food-service work you’ve been slogging in the trenches of for ten years, when you’re depleted and sore and desperately wishing you had some other skillset to realistically earn a decent living, and you evaluate your throbbing feet and your aching back and your weary brain and conclude that if you truly are as old as you feel, then you might have accidentally blinked and turned 65 during your shift. I’m uncertain if I’m old enough to accurately classify myself as old, but I am certainly too old to accurately classify myself as young, and I am old enough to be painfully aware of this.

Consequently, I’m probably also too old to be listening to Chiodos, an archetypal emo ensemble whose musical ethos predominantly evokes a more symphonic incarnation of My Chemical Romance, with intermittent screamy-growly vocals and plenty of requisitely-unwieldy song titles like “I Didn’t Say I Was Powerful, I Said I Was A Wizard”. It’s unlikely I will ever see Chiodos live since they split up in 2016, though I can presume with minimal imprecision that if I did go to one of their shows I would be older than every other person there. Tellingly, the group’s eldest member was only 30 when they disbanded, which suggests that even the dudes who actually played in Chiodos deemed their music unsuitable for people my age.

Despite my cultural incompatibility, I do like Chiodos, and I think a few of their tunes may even merit the designation of awesome. I don’t know if this justifies owning three of their records—the only one I spin with any regularity is 2014’s Devil, mostly for the scorching cut “Ole Fishlips Is Dead Now”, a balls-out metal opus whose bridge section is as thrillingly brutal as its title is silly. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things about the band’s sonic and imagistic aesthetic that strike me as silly, so I’m not sure I entirely understand why I like them. Further, I’m not sure I’m even supposed to like them. In a very real sense, Chiodos embodies the epoch when I officially stopped being part of the demographic that music for young people is aimed at: their debut record—2005’s All’s Well That Ends Well—was released the summer after I graduated from college to presumably take my first steps into proper adulthood (although, I spent most of that summer smoking pot and playing Tekken with my then-girlfriend from two in the afternoon until sunrise, which may not have necessarily qualified as “adulting”).

As such, my initial awareness of Chiodos was primarily defined by my not being aware of them at all. They were exactly the sort of outfit that headlined the Vans Warped Tour the very first year a line-up for that festival was announced which forced me to concede I hadn’t heard of any of the bands performing at an event I had once attended religiously. I don’t think I even registered this sea-change at the time (I think I mostly just grumbled, “dude, the Warped Tour line-up sucks this year”). Yet as Chiodos and I continued advancing on our separate paths, I gradually became conscious that my alt-rock era had officially come to an unceremonious end and a legion of skinny-jean-and-eye-liner-wearing dudes with injudicious haircuts and a multiplicity of neck tattoos had seized the mantle. Since this new crop of youth-medium-t-shirt bands—Falling In Reverse, Sleeping With Sirens, Pierce The Veil, et al—looked so ridiculous to me, I naturally assumed they also sounded ridiculous; upon further inspection, many of these bands do, indubitably, sound ridiculous. However, somewhere along the way, I began to accept an uncomfortable truth: my inability to wholeheartedly appreciate the music of the alt-young is more my fault than the bands’.

It would be extremely narrow-minded of me to sum up what we’ll call the emo scene—for lack of a better term—as “loud songs about girls” (especially since the inclusion of pretty songs about girls between the loud songs about girls is precisely the reason so many girls like the bands in this genus). Nonetheless, on a fundamental level, the vast majority of the music in that canon is indeed characterized by myopic lyrical musings about assorted stages of the boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl paradigm. Even the heaviest track in the Chiodos catalog (the afore-mentioned “Ole Fishlips”) features a chorus that begins with the lines: “I want to forget you / You’ve broken everything I love, took all my light and turned it into dusk.” Granted, that’s a damn solid stanza, but it’s not one I can presently relate to. Those words don’t evoke anything in my current existence—the last time someone took all my light and turned it into dusk was a full five years ago; I can barely remember what that felt like now, let alone what being in love to begin with felt like. As much as I appreciate some of the music crafted by acts of Chiodos’ ilk on a purely “that rocks” level, it simply doesn’t resonate with me on an emotional level. The most pressing concerns in my world aren’t centered around whether any of my foxy co-workers like-me-like-me or not; I’m a lot more worried about how I’m going to pay my rent in a few years when my body is too broken down for me to be their co-worker anymore.

Which brings about a more imperative revelation that is just now dawning on me: there isn’t a whole lot of modern rock I can relate to. People of my advanced age are ostensibly supposed to listen to bands like Coldplay, whose music has never spoken to me at all—near as I can tell, most of their songs are either about how exhilarating it feels to discover a great new organic juice bistro or the simple pleasure of trying on an Abercrombie & Fitch v-neck that fits you just right. There aren’t too many rock frontmen writing tunes about wrestling with an uncertain future while the mounting impediments of middle age conspire to diminish their tenacity. Maybe that’s why most of the new records I get excited about are still by death metal bands, whose tunes eschew any musings on situational angst or starry-eyed ardor in favor of graphic elucidations of the various phases of the deceasing process (being violently killed, decomposition, the ensuing sexual defilement of one’s corpse, etc.). Perhaps it’s depressing that I think about dying a lot more frequently than I think about girls these days, yet the fact remains that my particular juncture of the mortal cycle is sorely underrepresented in the contemporary rock register. Aerosmith’s “Dream On” was written way back in 1973; what the fuck have you done for me lately?

When I hear a twenty-something vocalist plaintively bemoaning insecurity about his place in the world, it doesn’t elicit a poignant response from me anymore—now I just sort of meh-shrug because I know he has plenty of time to figure his shit out (and, besides, I find it difficult to sympathize with the amorous woes of any dude with flawless cheekbones who belts out those songs every night to a sea of female fans so devoted to him that they’d willingly gouge out the eyes of the person standing next to them if he told them they could touch his penis afterwards). An audience of that singer’s peers is wholly in synch with that species of nebulous life anxieties, so they are undoubtedly buoyed to ascertain that a musician they esteem is going through the same trials as them. But I am no longer in that audience, no longer a peer. I can hardly blame any of those bands or their fans for my being a man staring down his 40’s; they didn’t do that to me, time did. Regardless, I have become increasingly incapable of forging a sincere connection with them, which makes it tough for me to take them seriously since they ply their trade via an art-form that is the most singular connective tissue of my being.  

I’m of course minimizing for humorous and dramatic effect. There are plenty of more recent outfits whose work has invigorated me over these last few years (if you want me to name names, I’ll happily toss out Modern Baseball, White Lung, Pity Sex, TV Ghost, Moon King, Thee Oh Sees, and Warpaint, among others). Still, I am perpetually reminded that as I segue into my future, most of the truly significant musical figures in my life are destined to remain those who came into my life in my past—especially when I consider that out of the six upcoming concerts I currently have tickets for, not one of the bands I’m going to see was formed in this century.

Chiodos was a very good band. Perhaps even a great one. They authored some creative, impressively-technical music that was executed by a cast of clearly skilled players. Devil is a consistently killer record from start to finish. Judging by how many of their stylistic flourishes I’ve noted in the work of several similar outfits that arrived in their wake, Chiodos is probably terribly important to a large number of people a generation removed from me. Nonetheless, as much as I enjoy a lot of their tunes, Chiodos is just not terribly important to me—I am writing about them here simply because they are the next band in my library.

What is important to me, however, is overcoming this dismal miasma that has settled over me. I have no desire to spend my 40’s the same way I spent most of my 30’s: ever-crawling dejectedly onward, all the while recognizing my destiny like a beacon on the distant horizon and wondering when I will reach it, inexorably waiting for the life I want to live to finally begin. After facing numerous setbacks—the worst being a deal that was actually on paper awaiting signatures, one that my agent was forced to pass on to protect me because of an untenable small-print proviso which ceded absolute ownership of my work to the publisher—the status of my authorial career is thus: my best option now is to craft another novel and restart the process from scratch. The challenge this poses is fresh and staggering: now I know precisely how difficult it is to write a novel, how long it takes, how much of myself will be devoured along the way. And I will have to plunge into this undertaking without any assurance that eventual success will ensue, since it did not the first time.

Yet if I have any prayer of meeting that challenge, first I have to dissipate this fog that has enveloped me. I cannot complete the task until I begin it in earnest. So maybe, just maybe, if I can coax myself to finish an essay about a band that doesn’t mean anything to me, I’ll be able to coax myself back to pursuing the desire that means everything to me.

It’s time for me to sit down again. And fucking do it. Whether I have ideas or not. Whether I have time or not. Whether I even want to or not. Like chaste Analisa Winthrope—who initially resists the brutish advances of that notorious rogue Liam O’Shaughnessey, until she beholds the throbbing nucleus of manhood beneath his kilt and finally yields to the humid yearning in her loins—I must succumb to my passion.

Because writing isn’t something I do. It’s what I am. Sure, those punches in the face are never pleasant. But, man, when I get those kisses instead…

This probably isn’t the best installment of Life on a Shelf I’ve ever composed. It might not even be a particularly strong one.

But that’s basically irrelevant. It got written.

And right now, ultimately, that’s all that matters.

 April 5, 2018

[lifeonashelf]

CERVENKA, EXENE

“Santa Barbara Shooting Staged For Gun Control… sick of these hoaxes”

Exene Cervenka built her legacy as one of the shrewdest and most principled icons in rock history by writing pages upon pages of marvelous lyrics for the band X and her various extracurricular endeavors. It took her a mere eleven words on fucking Twitter to decisively obliterate that legacy.

I’m referring to this essay’s prefacing statement, which Cervenka tweeted in response to the mayhem that transpired at UC Santa Barbara on May 23, 2014, when a craven piece of shit stabbed, shot, and ran down twenty people over the course of one horrifically busy evening. Six people died that night, fourteen others suffered injuries which left them with physical and emotional scars that will last a lifetime, and a beautiful campus in a beautiful city was forever tainted as a site of infamy and violence.

According to Exene, this is all bullshit.

I won’t cite the killer’s name here—the pathetic excuses for humanity who perpetrate these sickening crimes are afforded far too much attention in the aftermaths of their sprees as it is. In fact, since a desire for attention is the precise mania that motivates many of these homicidal dickheads, it can be safely inferred that our media’s sensationalized responses to incidents like the one in Isla Vista have significantly contributed to the staggering upsurge of mass killings we have experienced in this early chapter of the 21st Century. We should probably be outraged by the mere possibility of this correlation, and we should probably take the fourth estate to task for turning assassins into rock stars by keeping their faces plastered upon our television screens for days and weeks after they commit their appalling acts, endlessly rehashing the particulars of the latest slaughter because dead kids equal ratings. But we generally don’t, because ultimately we’d be damning the media for showing us exactly what we want to see—money-shot glimpses of gore on the sidewalk and body-shaped lumps draped in stained coroner’s sheets, the sort of resplendently macabre displays we just don’t get enough of on our other reality TV programs—and then we’d have to admit that we’re assholes, too, for wanting to see it in the first place. So fuck that… Here we are now, entertain us. Give us every lurid detail. Who got killed…? Shit, that’s too many names to remember; just skip that part and tell us about the star of the show instead. Ooh, he looks batshit crazy in that re-appropriated Facebook profile pic! Hold on, I’m going to make a meme… Wait, he wrote a fucking manifesto? Send me a link!

Sure, I read it.  Not the whole thing—dude should have done some copy-editing; that shit was LONG. But I skimmed through some of it on my phone over breakfast and two cups of coffee at Rabi’s Diner one afternoon. I figured the missive might offer a morbidly fascinating peek into the mind of serial killer, the same kind of glimpse I get when I read one of the true crime paperbacks I mingle into my book rotation once a month or so. I found this particular author’s screed a little anticlimactic, though—and lot pathetic. What he wrote, basically, was that the reason he decided to commit mass murder was because he couldn’t get laid. Apparently, his female classmates at UCSB didn’t readily succumb to the wily charms of a latently-narcissistic misogynist with no perceptible redeeming qualities and a closet full of killing machines. So he elected to teach them a lesson. Syllabus: six dead, fourteen wounded, thousands traumatized.

Nah, said Exene. Never happened.

The tweet I quoted above was one of several Cervenka posted that day, and some of her blurbs included links to a series of YouTube clips purported to substantiate her assertion that the events which unfolded in Isla Vista on May 23 were actually a deftly-orchestrated fiction perpetuated by our liberal government—that gun-snatching Muslim commie President Obama up to his old tricks again, no doubt. As near as I could discern from Exene’s video evidence, she believes spree shootings like the one at UC Santa Barbara are contrived in an effort to sway the public to embrace downright draconian gun control legislation: namely, measures which would thwart criminals and people with histories of mental derangement from buying firearms capable of shredding a human being to kibble in two-point-six seconds on the internet. I can’t quite fathom why the ability to purchase machine guns with our PayPal accounts is hoisted by so many as a shining exemplar of ‘Murican liberty, yet the mere suggestion that perhaps it should be more difficult to procure instruments which can efficiently murder dozens of people with minimal exertion has become one of the most vehemently-contested political arguments of our age.

We’ll save that debate for another time; I’m hoping this piece will eventually get humorous, and I’m going to have a real hard time steering us there if I start writing about children being massacred at elementary schools. However, I’m under no obligation to be impartial here. So I won’t name the obtuse architect behind the videos Cervenka touted, for pretty much the same reason I have chosen not to identify the waste of semen who terrorized UCSB: Exene Cervenka is the only wacko I care to discuss in this essay.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for a great conspiracy theory myself—I find them endlessly fascinating, both as a sociological phenomenon and as ripe fodder for palaver and intrigue. But a solid conjecture requires the accompaniment of enough compelling evidence or unanswered questions to lend it at least a modicum of credence. The implication of a second shooter in the Kennedy assassination, for instance, is a perfect example of a top-notch conspiracy theory; you’ve got the Zapruder Tape, the Magic Bullet, all that capitalized shit. We’ll never know for certain whether or not there was an accomplice lurking on the world’s most famous grassy knoll… yet we can analyze the matter for the rest of human history, and the whole puzzle gets denser and more intriguing when you’re high—that’s the Dark Side of the Moon of conspiracy theories right there. Courtney Love allegedly murdering Kurt Cobain is another robust offering in this genus; second handwriting on the suicide note: check; a dosage of heroin in Cobain’s system that should have made it exceedingly difficult for him to pull the trigger himself: check; two brands of cigarette butts in the dead man’s ashtray: check; reports of imminent divorce and Courtney conceivably losing her meal-ticket: check. That one’s not quite an apex, but it’s captivating enough to qualify as a bonafide classic—we’ll call it the Led Zeppelin III of conspiracy theories.

Conversely, Cervenka’s hypothesis about the mass manufacture of mass shootings is more like the Metal Machine Music of conspiracy theories: a patently meritless ejaculation of soulless, nauseating drivel that irrevocably sullied the reputation of an acclaimed musician.

While I’m sure the families and friends of the UC Santa Barbara students who lost their lives that day were duly comforted when Exene announced on Twitter that their loved ones weren’t actually dead, this sense of relief was likely fleeting; after going to the morgue to identify the bodies and attending the victims’ funerals, most practical people would probably deduce that the “hoax” supposition merited reassessment in light of the contradictory data. And when you consider that the first three young men to die in the Isla Vista bloodbath were riddled with a combined total of something like 150 stab-wounds, that information likewise challenges some major aspects of Exene’s contention—principally:

1) Someone who was stabbed over 90 times—as casualty George Chen was—is liable to be deceased in a clear, non-hoax sense, and:

2) If Cervenka is correct in her claim that the carnage at UCSB was a devious ruse concocted by Democrats to dupe their constituents into demanding stricter firearm regulations, then fabricating a report about three people being butchered with a knife strikes me as a decidedly impractical ploy to convince the public that guns are dangerous.

Anyway, the point of that lengthy preamble is to clarify why I have a hard fucking time taking Exene Cervenka seriously now.

I’m no luddite. I am familiar with, and sometimes participate on, social media. A large percentage of the seven people who will read this essay are only going to know it exists because I told them it did on Facebook. I occasionally post on Instagram, too—though I usually share pictures I take at concerts rather than portraits of the chicken pad Thai I had for lunch, so I think I’m using it wrong. I am aware that if I ever get in the mood to send photos of my genitals to people, I need to sign myself up on Snapchat.

Twitter, however, utterly mystifies me. I understand how the platform works—hashtags, trending, feuds, etc.—I just don’t even remotely care how it works. I cannot imagine ever having a Twitter account, mostly because I can’t think of a single person in the world I find so interesting that I wish I was privy to every thought that burbles into their head while they’re sitting on the toilet.

The 300-million-plus folks who regularly use this medium obviously disagree with me. Of course, if 300-million individuals banded together for some other common pursuit, there’s no telling what infinitely wonderful milestones mankind might accomplish: erasing world hunger, mediating global peace, mending our decimated ecosystem, stopping Tom Morello from making any more of those awful Nightwatchman records… fucking anything. Alas, as it stands, the only thing Twitter’s teeming multitudes seem to agree upon is that having ready access to a vast depository of inane twaddle is totes awesome. Keeping track of what peripheral celebrities other peripheral celebrities are engaging in snarky public skirmishes with has evidently become humanity’s primary unifying concern.      

Me, I’m apparently a weirdo; I don’t particularly give a shit if Talib Kweli is quarreling with Iggy Azalea—I don’t particularly give a shit that Talib Kweli or Iggy Azalea even exist, really. Nor do I give a shit that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi was compelled to post weeping emojis when Glenn was ravaged by zombies on The Walking Dead. And I certainly don’t give a shit how fond the bass player of Imagine Dragons is of the florae in his house (February 17: “I love my plants”).

Regardless, substantial numbers of people deeply care about each of these things, or at least assign them a measure of importance by subscribing to the feeds which provided this valuable intel. When Ben McKee shared his above-cited avowal of vegetal ardor, he did so to an audience of nearly 92,000 followers. And this number absolutely staggers me; I don’t personally know a single person who thinks Imagine Dragons is a good band, let alone anyone so invested in the group that they’re dying to know what snackfoods the fourth musician listed in the album credits thinks are yummy (February 16: “I love the way pork rinds crackle under hot sauce”).

By the way, I feel compelled to mention that even though the useless crap McKee posts and the quantity of devotees who read it helpfully substantiate my position on the shallow quintessence of Twitter, I didn’t set out to pick on him specifically—any extraneous member of any latently mediocre band would have worked just fine for my purposes here (I almost chose the drummer of The Fray). I selected Ben McKee entirely at random, and I actually had to look up his name; until fifteen minutes ago, if someone put a gun to my first-born infant’s head and said they’d pull the trigger unless I told them who plays bass in Imagine Dragons, I would have had a super-dead baby on my hands (“no you wouldn’t,” asserts Exene Cervenka). Yet 92,000 non-me humans not only know who Ben McKee is, they know he was a real sexy bitch on November 15 (his actual tweet from that day: “I got up and looked in the mirror this morning, and I was like, ‘Damn, Ben. You’ve got it goin’ on!’ ”). My own feelings about Twitter notwithstanding, this is significant information to a lot of people, clearly.

Logically, more renowned celebrities reach proportionally larger audiences on the site. Someone like Kanye West can boast that his tweets command the attention of 19.3-million followers (which is roughly 5-million per decent song that profoundly untalented asshat has managed to wheedle out on ProTools). Yeezus’s wife has more than twice that number (of followers, not songs—I’m fairly certain Kim Kardashian does not make music; near as I can gather from her Twitter feed, she sustains her fame mainly by putting on and taking off various articles of clothing). I give even less of a shit about the marital dynamics in the West household than I do about what Ben McKee dips his pork rinds in, but I’d be willing to bet this substantial disparity in the couple’s respective adherents really pisses Kanye off; as such, I’m inclined to view Kim K’s Twitter hegemony as a positive, even though I still find it wholly depressing that 44-million people would rather view photographs of her Birkin bags than read a goddamn book.

The chasm between Twitter’s expansive popularity and my expansive disregard of that popularity seems to signify I am hopelessly out of touch with our culture at large. Nonetheless, I can’t think of any pragmatic use for a vehicle which intrinsically endorses vapidity the way Twitter does. The medium simply isn’t built for intellectual discourse; the imposed character limit makes it virtually unfeasible to communicate anything substantial, so it has become a delivery agent for irrelevant blurbs by default. I’m not suggesting there isn’t any intelligent, positive, or humorous content to be found on Twitter—as of this writing, Barack Obama and Ellen DeGeneres both rank among the site’s top-10; since they are both extremely intelligent, positive, and humorous figures, I assume some of their tweets are bound to fall into those categories. However, Justin Bieber has several-million more followers than the current President of the United States, which suggests that more people on this planet are interested in the musings of a twenty-something Pop star than the endeavors of the figurehead for the most powerful government in the world. Sure, I’ve come around to accepting that Justin Bieber is a far more talented artist than I used to give him credit for (I wouldn’t quite classify myself a Belieber, but his most recent record, Purpose, surprisingly seems to have one). Yet I find it demonstrative of Twitter’s systemic frivolity that Bieber can tweet a single word (February 18: “#company”) and draw 96.5-thousand likes, while material recently posted on the POTUS feed about Obama’s efforts to fill the U.S. Supreme Court’s vacant seat received a paltry 5,000 likes.

This inevitably confirms that Twitter is more widely employed as a web-based popularity contest than as a conduit for useful information. Granted, Katy Perry is probably stoked to be planet Earth’s Prom Queen (she sits atop the most-followed list with a reasonably comfortable lead over The Biebs and Taylor Swift). Yet a mechanism which allows her to simultaneously tell 83-million people when her new single is dropping doesn’t necessarily benefit the world in any significant way. If Twitter’s designers supposed their innovation might allow our species to better connect with each other, they clearly overestimated the general intelligence of the species that would be using it. Whatever noble ambitions they may have had, their creation has instead been adopted as a tool utilized by a lot of fatuous people to get a lot more fatuous people to pay attention to them. And unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, it’s not utilized for a whole lot else.

The point of that lengthy digression is to explain why I have a hard fucking time taking Twitter seriously, ever.  Which brings us neatly full circle to the original subject of this essay.

If Exene Cervenka had authored a thoughtful treatise which expressed her concern that agents within our government are manipulating the media to generate anti-Second-Amendment propaganda, I would have actually esteemed her for it. She would still be alleging that all mass shooting tragedies are hoaxes, and that notion would still be idiotic—but at least I could have potentially admired her attempt to forge a persuasive commendation of material that I regard as drivel (similar to how I’ve respected some of my former college professors despite their lectures extolling the novels of William Faulkner). Who knows, a cogent reconnaissance from someone as venerable as Exene might have compelled others to further her cause, or at the very least engendered some food for thought.

Instead, she went on Twitter and essentially wrote, #fuckyoudeadkids.  

Exene Cervenka is not unintelligent—she couldn’t have penned lyrics for a song as tremendous as “The World’s A Mess, It’s In My Kiss” if she was. The most diplomatic way to rationalize her tweets is to classify them as “insensitive”: she used the loaded word “hoax,” she marginalized a horrific event to endorse a line of Tea Party indoctrination, and she tried to authenticate her misguided opinion by directing her followers to a thread of small-minded internet gibberish concocted by a derisible jackoff who probably drives around with a Confederate flag mounted in the bed of his Chevy pickup. (By the way, consider the implicit testimonial she was offering by posting links to those clips: “I am confident what I’m proposing is true because some guy says so on YouTube”—the same site where you can watch a video that “proves” Twitter mayor Katy Perry is actually former child pageant star JonBenet Ramsey, all grown up and thriving as a pop music idol despite being brutally murdered in 1996). Surely, Exene is smart enough to know better, but she did this anyway.

But what she did afterwards was actually worse: she tried to take it all back.

When Exene’s irresponsible commentary drew an acerbic backlash from her fans, she backpedaled like a scandalized politician, promptly responding with a “my bad” message on X’s Facebook page. In this weedy appeal for clemency, she recanted the hot-button term “hoax” and acknowledged that actual people did actually perish in Isla Vista—insinuating, I suppose, that the hoax itself was a hoax, which is a more confusing wormhole than the one she opened originally. Then she deleted all of the contentious tweets from her feed, and scrapped her entire Twitter account shortly thereafter.

And here’s the problem with that: Exene Cervenka earned those fans she disenchanted by refusing to be anyone but herself. Her repute as a punk icon was cultivated by resisting trends, standing tall as a defiant female vocalist in a traditionally hostile and male-centric scene, and speaking her fucking mind no matter the consequences. Yet after contributing to a ridiculous social networking site on which “trending” is currency, she acquiesced when male-centric hostilities were levied at her, then begged us to forgive her for speaking her fucking mind because she didn’t like the consequences. And then she took her ball and went home. I used to admire Exene because she was an iconoclast; now I mostly think she’s a coward.

If Exene Cervenka truly believes what she wrote about Isla Vista—and I assume she must, because she fucking wrote it—she should have owned up to her words. A more fitting open letter to her fans might have read: “I know some of you are pissed off, but this is my opinion and I stand by it. If you disagree, that’s your opinion, and you have just as much a right to it as I have to mine.” Mind you, I would still roundly dismiss her “hoax” conjecture as ludicrous. But at least I’d respect Exene for sticking to her guns (pun probably intended).

X is one of the greatest musical forces ever. As far as I’m concerned, this is an inarguable fact, one which is easily verified: simply listen to any of their first five records and hear for yourself. My estimation of the band’s excellence hasn’t changed just because one of their principal creators expressed views which aligned her with a creed of grievously parochial conservative psychosis. Even so, another inarguable fact is just now dawning on me: I went to something like a dozen X shows before Exene’s Twitter fiasco, but I’ve only attended one since—one I can’t even fully count because they were opening for Bad Religion, and I’d sit through a performance by Imagine Dragons if doing so meant I got to see Bad Religion afterwards. I hate to suppose that Exene’s daft notions and her subsequent pusillanimity in the face of criticism have even minimally dampened my ardor for one of my favorite bands of all time… Yet when I consider their numerous local gigs I’ve skipped since then, I don’t think I can dismiss that connection outright.

Perhaps predictably, my diminished enthusiasm is extending to the album Sev7en, which I’ve been playing repeatedly while shaping this piece because it’s the only solo Exene Cervenka outing I own. Sev7en is a perfectly solid record, and I recall giving it a laudatory write-up in whatever publication I reviewed it for when it was released. However, I’m well sick of the disc by now and probably won’t ever want to listen to it again after I wrap this essay up. And I don’t think this is necessarily because I don’t like Exene’s music all that much anymore—I think it’s mainly because I don’t like Exene all that much anymore. And this realization definitely bums me out, because I liked her a whole lot until I got a peek behind a curtain I never had any desire to look behind to begin with.

Obviously, I hold Exene chiefly accountable for her thoughtless commentary. Still, in a larger sense, I also blame Twitter for providing a ready outlet for otherwise sensible people to be idiots on a massively public scale. My investigation of the site during the course of this writing hasn’t sparked any interest in participating on it. My life is no richer now that I know the bassist of Imagine Dragons is named Ben McKee and he cuddles with his ferns. Watching a video of Kim K’s mascara application regiment hasn’t changed my valuation of her fundamental uselessness. Nor has reading the self-aggrandizing onanism her husband posts every ten minutes convinced me that the absurd allegation he’s a genius has any more substance than the plain white t-shirts he sells for $120 as part of his “clothing line,” or that his negligible music is anything more than the flavorless ramblings of an ever-scowling megalomaniac.

Twitter has indeed changed the way we communicate. And in doing so, it has changed the world. But I’ve yet to see an example of how that change is for the better. Because, ultimately, the principal thing Twitter has added to the human experience—aside from helping Katy Perry peddle downloads—is one more avenue for us to spend most of our waking lives fucking around on our cell phones instead of doing something productive or having actual conversations with each other.  

In the end, all I got out of diving into the sea of ego-driven detritus that is Twitter is a couple of jokes. I’m not sure what Exene was chasing when she took that plunge. But unless her aim was to alienate her most dedicated fans, her mission was surely a #failure.

 November 26, 2016

 POST-SCRIPT

These are the first words I have added to “Life on a Shelf” in eight months; I procured an agent to represent the novel I’ve been working on the past five years, so I had to put this project on hold to more expediently finish that one. I’ve been eager to dig back into these pages, but before I ventured forward, I thought it would be prudent to take another pass at the piece I was working on when I stepped away. The changes I ended up making to the essay you just read were minimal. However, given the phenomenon a large portion of the above text is centered around, I realized my assessment of Twitter would be woefully incomplete at this juncture if I didn’t address one major event that has transpired during my hiatus.

Much to my dismay, the form of social media I have been excoriating for the past several paragraphs has become an even more omnipresent cultural force than it was when my screed was originally authored—which is only one of the regrettable corollaries of President Donald Trump appointing Twitter as his anus. In this brave new world of 2017, tweets are now routinely the lead stories on newscasts, due to Trump’s myopic obsession with the modus. Granted, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Donald Trump loves Twitter—the 140-character limit is ideally suited for the attention span of someone who has actually bragged about never reading a book in his life, and an interface tailor-made for bitchy 12-year-old girls who require constant validation is a perfect vessel for a man who conducts himself like a bitchy 12-year-old girl constantly seeking validation.

Rest assured, I have no intention of veering this coda into a lengthy dissertation about the self-absorption and prodigious inadequacy of our Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief. If I voiced my honest feelings about President Trump, I’d be in Secret Service custody within minutes of this being posted—and besides, I’d rather save my definitive evaluation until after his superfluous saga reaches its justified conclusion, when he’s either making America great again by serving out his treason sentence in a federal prison or being skull-fucked by Lucifer on a tri-hourly basis.

I offer this addendum merely to dispel any insinuation that Twitter is somehow more relevant now than it was when I authored the above appraisal, simply because the current President of the United States apparently ranks it as the third-greatest thing in human history (landing on his personal best-list just below “money” and “my daughter’s breasts”). Quite the contrary, Donald Trump’s incessant use of Twitter emphatically corroborates my contention that those who tweet the most have the least to say, and his multiple disseminations of Fox News-borne material that has been summarily verified as false usefully underscores my statements about the utter tripe which predominates the Twitter-sphere.

So, let this post-script clarify that our walking asterisk of a President has not elevated Twitter’s eminence by making it the voice of his administration. He has merely proven that participation on the social media platform in question does not require sophistication, intelligence, or even the ability to conjure thoughts more complex than those of the average dung beetle—the only thing anybody needs to use Twitter is a set of reportedly-wee fingers.

SAD.

 July 30, 2017

[lifeonashelf]

CAVE IN

Confession: I don’t have any especially deep insights about Cave In. Honestly, I essentially forgot Cave In even existed until I trotted to my shelf to pull the next band in my queue and found out that band is Cave In. Though as I sit here listening to them for the first time in over a decade, their credentials are gradually coming back to me: they earned a solid reputation on the indie-label circuit, which led to them being scooped up by RCA and receiving a heavy promotional push for their first major-label offering—2003’s Antenna, the disc I am playing right now to make things about Cave In gradually come back to me.

Bereft of any nostalgic association with the band, I suppose I should craft some sort of proper critical analysis of Antenna to justify this piece’s existence. I can’t readily compare this disc to the band’s previous releases since I’ve never heard any of them, but Antenna certainly boasts some sturdy material: nuanced, slightly-proggy dropped-D rock with nice thick riffs and enough big-chorus melody to allow the songs a soaring, anthemic quality that makes each one memorable. There’s enough nifty shit going on here to make it difficult for me to comprehend how I completely disremembered that Cave In was a thing.

As I soak the music in, I’m realizing that Cave In most readily reminds me of Failure (the band, not the antonym of “success”). This is mostly because all of the tunes and tones on Antenna strongly resemble the tunes and tones on Failure’s sophomore release, Magnified, a sludgy gem of the highest order which features some of the tastiest guitar playing ever committed to disc. The similarities aren’t even subtle: I’ve heard plenty of music that sounds like Failure mixed with some other bands, but Antenna-era Cave In mostly sounds like Failure mixed with more Failure. I don’t intend that as an insult at all—Failure is fucking awesome; as far as I’m concerned, mirroring their approach is an artistically judicious course of action. Really, the only injudicious thing about Antenna is RCA’s ostensible prediction that Cave In would reach next-level success by mirroring the approach of Failure.

That reads like an insult too, so allow me to clarify. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain to you that ginormous record conglomerates don’t ultimately give a shit what the records they put out actually sound like, just as long as lots of people spend money on them. The music industry has always placed its focus squarely on the “industry” end of things; it’s mainly just a happy accident when the “music” component is supplied by talented, interesting, or even listenable, artists. So it would be fair to suppose that the primary reason RCA decided to sign Cave In is because they believed the band might prove to be a profitable acquisition. Yet in this instance, their dice-roll involved signing an outfit that sounds uncannily like Failure, a group which disbanded and subsequently withdrew into a 15-year hiatus shortly after putting out their magnum opus, 1996’s Fantastic Planet—a record that didn’t even crack the Billboard Top 200 album charts despite being an unequivocal masterpiece. Now, Failure was-and-is an amazing band, and if you’ve never heard Fantastic Planet you should absolutely stop reading this bullshit and go listen to it immediately (and then you should check out Magnified, because that one rules too… hell, their 2014 reunion disc The Heart is a Monster is also killer, and so is their first album, Comfort—truthfully, everything they ever recorded is better than anything you’ll find in these pages, so I can’t fathom why you’re wasting time with my nonsense when you could be listening to Failure instead). The thing Failure was NOT was commercially successful, which seems to indicate that RCA was grossly misguided in expecting Cave In to ignite the charts by mining strikingly comparable musical territory seven years after their muse’s own major label debut went criminally ignored by the masses.

Since Cave In didn’t get huge either, I’m assuming the RCA money-men deemed this particular procurement a failure (this time I am referring to the antonym of “success,” not the band). However, the more I listen to Antenna, the more I’m concluding it’s a pretty excellent disc that reasonably should have been heard by far more people than it evidently was. A quick read-up on the band’s history has informed me that this effort is an anomaly in their discography, which was previously characterized by far more ferocious fare, and that many of their fans received the outfit’s RCA-branded stylistic shift with cries of “sell out” (which becomes somewhat ironic when you consider that the album didn’t sell a gaggle of copies and the band quickly went back to playing shows at small gen-ad clubs for the same people who called them sell-outs). I’m certainly game to hear Cave In’s screamier stuff, but even if Antenna is the most placid entry in their canon, there’s plenty of evidence here that these dudes rock plenty hard. Though I could do without the obligatory lighter-waver “Beautiful Son” and the meekly-poppy “Penny Racer”, the opening cut “Stained Silver” is a bombastic minor-chord maelstrom, “Joy Opposites” seethes with somber beauty and lush guitar flourishes, and the absorbing “Woodwork” closes out the disc in satisfying and stridently epic fashion. There are some real choice tracks here that would have likely grabbed a lot of ears back in 2003 if those ears had been given due exposure, so it seems rather shitty that the mainstream mostly left Cave In out in the cold while that insipid “wake me up inside” song by Evanescence was being spewed from half of the goddamn radio stations on the goddamn dial every four goddamn minutes. When all was said and done, Cave In was summarily dropped by RCA when the label’s spit-polish netted the band little more than a cameo on the Billboard register at #167, while the members of Evanescence banked enough cash to fuel a lifetime of Hot Topic shopping sprees.

Of course, this begs the question: if people weren’t buying Antenna when it came out, what records were they buying (besides the Evanescence disc with that fucking “wake me up inside” song on it)?

I did a little investigative journalism (actually, I just did a Google search—I’m a terrible journalist) to get an overview of some of the hit releases from 2003 and ascertain what the multitudes were passing over Antenna for. What I learned both surprised me a lot and didn’t surprise me one bit. The part which did the first thing was discovering that the records which Soundscanned their way to #1 on the Billboard list that year suggest a fairly favorable marketplace for Cave In’s wheelhouse: of the 34 albums that topped the charts in 2003, 6 of them were by rock bands. The part that didn’t arrive as a bombshell was finding out that most of the rock albums which sold a shit-ton of units in 2003 were absolute garbage (the antonym of “quality,” not the band).

Droves of folks eschewed the more thoughtful approach of Antenna to instead listen to Aaron Lewis whimper about how his daddy didn’t hug him enough on Staind’s 14 Shades of Grey and root on Godsmack as they plodded through a dozen retreads of the same dimwitted WWE pay-per-view theme song on their appropriately-titled Faceless. Rock fans also purchased a lot of copies of the dullest entry in Marilyn Manson’s catalog, The Golden Age of Grotesque, and of Metallica’s 80% unlistenable St. Anger—an interminable series of throwaway riffs without songs whose shoddy patchwork assemblage suggested that ProTools had as much to do with the album’s construction as Metallica did. Granted, Antenna isn’t necessarily mandatory listening, but it’s undoubtedly a far more appealing record than any of those offerings, and has aged far better (an aside: I recently spun St. Anger in its entirety for the first time in over a decade to reassess it; I discovered that even with the benefit of fresh ears the record still sounds just as abysmal as it did then, and this encounter merely served to remind me that Metallica was a really awful band for a few years).

The rest of the releases that reached the top slot during Antenna’s annum were about what you’d expect: a few hip-hop sets (by 50 Cent, DMX, Outkast, and Eminem), factory-constructs from a host of mostly-disposable female pop stars (Monica, Ashanti, Hilary Duff, Britney Spears), CD-shaped product-placement trinkets from American Idol alumni (Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard, and Kelly Clarkson), and a smattering of appearances from the requisite country icons of the era (Shania Twain, the admittedly-diggable Dixie Chicks, and Alan Jackson with his eloquently-dubbed compilation Greatest Hits Volume II and Some Other Stuff). Additional dubious notables from that year were issued by Madonna (whose American Life shot to #1 the week it came out, then subsequently plummeted progressively down the charts once people started actually listening to it), Toby Keith (whose Shock’n Y’all plagued mankind by being christened with the lamest pun of all time and by being a Toby Keith album), and R&B’s most talented lunatic, R. Kelly (whose Chocolate Factory was rendered icky in retrospect as gradually-revealed details of his personal life suggested the record’s title was probably a reference to defecating on adolescent girls—an association which could only possibly be more insalubrious if Chocolate Factory had hit the charts at number two).

Sure, there were some bonafide standouts on that year’s roster—Jay-Z got a lot of mileage out of his superb Black Album, while Alicia Keys reached the apex slot with her dynamite LP The Diary of Alicia Keys—but I can honestly say I would much rather listen to Antenna than roughly 30 of the discs which shifted enough units to reach #1 in 2003. I’m not sincerely suggesting Cave In’s tunes boast the extensive cross-demographic appeal of something like Come Away With Me by Norah Jones (released the previous year, but still going strong and occasionally wandering to the top of the charts throughout 2003) or John Mayer’s Heavier Things (a compendium of sultry bedroom-eyed blues that mesmerized legions of sorority girls, their desperate-to-be-hip cougar mothers, and men with vaginas). Nonetheless, I’ve heard Antenna a half-dozen times now and I’m not sick of it yet, which indicates to me that it’s a thoroughly respectable outing. And when compared to the material it was most directly competing with, Cave In’s neglected opus certainly stacks up well against most of the dreck that was dominating the alternative charts during a year when trifling acts like Chevelle, Dashboard Confessional, and Three Days Grace inexplicably had hit records.

I know I didn’t help matters by forgetting Cave In existed. However, I’ve resolved to at least partially make up for that now by adding them to my mental list of bands I need to seek out more work from very soon. By the time you read this, I predict that I will have augmented my Cave In library with several more of their albums, and I further predict that I will enjoy them.

And I also predict that my library will still be blessedly devoid of the Evanescence disc which features that idiotic “wake me up inside” song with the sulky Vogue-Goth piano intro and the melodramatic dear-diary lyrics about being nothing inside and the lame-ass two-note quasi-industrial juh-jun juh-jun juh-jun guitar riff that runs through the whole fucking track and the dipshit in the background who keeps fruitlessly trying to sound like a badass when he snivels his “can’t wake up” part on the chorus and then raps out a pathetic bridge where he sounds just like that other dipshit from Papa Roach.

Seriously, fuck that song.

February 4, 2016

[lifeonashelf]

CAT POWER

When I started working as a clerk at Rhino in 2001, one of my floor managers was a guy named Aaron, a real cool cat who was a few years older than me and a fellow writer (poetry, mostly, but working on his elusive first novel, if I recall correctly). At the time, he probably also fit the textbook description of an alcoholic—hey, it was a record store; most of us who worked there fit that textbook description. But Aaron wasn’t one of those slovenly, discernibly reckless drunks. He was a good-looking dude whose unruffled mien suggested that when he got wasted, he got Elegantly Wasted, and whenever he came in the morning after a bender, the luggage under his eyes was accompanied by a knowing smirk which intimated he had way more fun than you did last night and possibly woke up next to a foxy companion whose name he could only vaguely recall. Naturally, since I was a budding writer with aspirations of being an Elegantly-Wasted alcoholic, I looked up to the guy.

After Aaron left Rhino (I was promoted into the managerial spot he vacated, so he did me a solid there), he switched to bartending at a spot called the Second Avenue Alehouse, where we continued to have positive dealings. Since one of his duties was booking bands to perform at the pub, he slotted Happyending into the schedule several times. Second Avenue was in Upland—only ten miles away from almost everyone I knew at the time—and the place drew healthy business with or without us, so our Alehouse gigs were all reliably well-attended. We were also allowed to play for as long as we wanted, an attractive proposition since our repertoire had ballooned to something like 50 originals and 15 or so covers at that point. Since we obviously thought we had a lot of good tunes to offer, executing a Pearl Jam-esque thirty-song set was much more appealing to us than whittling our wares into a tidy thirty-minute package to be efficiently shoe-horned into rosters with like six other bands at the more traditional clubs where we performed. Plus, Aaron always made sure we got paid—generously, I might add, for an outfit of our limited stature—and kept us plied with free beer all night. Unsurprisingly, the Second Avenue Alehouse ended up being my very favorite venue that ever hosted Happyending.

[Our experiences there were infinitely preferable to some of our more ill-starred outings, such as one disastrous gig at a Cask ‘N Cleaver steakhouse (yes, really) in Orange County, where our entire audience consisted of my dad, the restaurant’s staff, and the consequently aggrieved lady who booked the show: an amateur promoter named Linda, who we had done a few previous gigs for despite ascertaining she was fucking insane. Linda was in particularly rare form the evening of that fabled Cask ‘n Cleaver show. While we were chatting with her upon our arrival at the eatery, she erupted into a lengthy tirade about how the government was putting chemicals in Hostess Twinkies which allowed the CIA to use said snack cakes for nefarious mind-control purposes. She was wholly sincere—and rather frightening in her fervor—so I didn’t have the stones to tell her that the only post-hypnotic suggestion I’ve ever received while eating a Twinkie is that Twinkies are goddamn delicious and I should eat five more of them in immediate succession. Anyway, Linda was incensed that we had failed to lure vast throngs of people to come watch us play in the lounge of a two-and-a-half-star chain restaurant located in a city where we didn’t know anybody. As our scheduled set-time drew near and the establishment remained completely empty, her fretfulness morphed into a vehement lambasting. “Where is everybody, Taylor?” Linda growled, to which I summed up the utter idiocy of the booking by shrugging and telling her, “Linda, this is a Cask ‘N Cleaver.” Nevertheless, we played reasonably well to that room full of vacant white-clothed tables—the candles ornamenting each one gently flickered as I threw power-chords and throaty yells at them, almost like a swaying sea of lighter-hoisting admirers; if we had any ballads in our set, we might have found ourselves in the midst of a poignant moment there. I also definitely noticed the bartender rocking out while he idly wiped down all the mugs behind the bar, ostensibly preparing his glassware just in case the zero people sitting at his counter started ordering pints. However, what I remember most about that night is how dejected we felt driving home from the gig… Not because my father was the only person who showed up to see us, mind you, but because we realized we had inadvertently walked out on the sizable tab we accrued for the hearty appetizers-and-all feast we devoured before our performance. I assure you our malfeasance was wholly unintentional (the food was really quite good; the joint handily earned its 2.5 stars). We simply forgot all about the bill because we were so focused on making a quick exit from the premises after we finished packing up our gear—as I said, Linda was livid; we were justifiably worried she might assault us with Scopolamine-laced Twinkies if we stuck around to give her the chance. In any case, I never returned to that Cask ‘N Cleaver (apparently, the dearth of clientele wasn’t limited to the nights Happyending performed there because the location has long since closed) so it’s entirely possible there is an outstanding warrant for my arrest in the city of Fountain Valley.]

My memories of hanging out with Aaron after each of our Alehouse performances are just as fond as my memories of the shows themselves. We closed the pub down every time we played there, and our host was always game for a few after-hours rounds once he cleared everyone else out; more than once, we ended up lingering to drink and smoke and shoot the shit until four or five in the morning, which naturally proved to be a fertile milieu for some extremely pleasant and memorable conversations (actually, I can’t really remember them, I just remember they were pleasant). Anyway, aside from that, the main reason Aaron has turned up in this essay is because in addition to being a real good dude, he was also a big fan of Cat Power.

I hadn’t yet heard any of Cat Power’s music when she first came up in palaver with Aaron at Rhino, so it was through him I learned that moniker is the stage name used by a highly-regarded singer-songwriter named Chan Marshall, who he assessed as follows: “She’s a fucking trainwreck, man. But I love her.” He then went on to tell me about some of the various Cat Power gigs he had attended over the years, which he succinctly described as “iffy”—he was being overly polite, I think, considering the particulars he then shared.

Aaron told me he was present for at least one show where Marshall abruptly ended the set after a few songs and walked off stage without explanation (which was evidently a common occurrence at the time), and another which was cancelled moments before it was set to begin because she didn’t feel like playing at all (which was evidently also a common occurrence at the time). Yet Aaron sounded positively tickled as he described these episodes to me, as if an aborted Cat Power concert was still a rewarding event to witness—to hear him tell it, Chan Marshall’s histrionic refusal to perform somehow endeared her to him more, perhaps even perversely validated his enthusiasm for her work because her erratic conduct reinforced the brittle-diva mythos she had cultivated. Since he had already accepted the “will-she-or-won’t-she” cliffhanger as part of the whole Cat Power mystique, even when Marshall was too much of a mess to operate, she was still satisfying some aspect of his fandom. And he clearly wasn’t dissuaded by either of these experiences; the very next time a Cat Power gig was announced in our area, Aaron bought a ticket for that show, too.

In a very real sense, Chan Marshall was playing hard to get. But Aaron kept chasing her because he was optimistic that someday, if he persisted, she was bound to eventually put out and play songs at one of her concerts. I’m fascinated by the singular impact this prolonged ear-tease fostered for him. Imagine: when he finally did get to watch a complete Cat Power performance, that gig must have been momentous by default, simply by virtue of it actually happening. And make no mistake, the effusiveness of Aaron’s gushing suggested he would remain a steadfast fan for life; though the wearisome cycle he described made me initially reckon that Chan Marshall was either a pretentious wanker or a narcissistic wacko, the more I think about it, she might actually be a genius.    

[When I told my friend Paul I was working on this piece, he shared a strikingly similar reminiscence of a Cat Power performance he went to in Claremont several years back. According to him, that show started 45-minutes late because Marshall kept sending out a roadie in her stead to fastidiously tune and retune her piano several times; Paul also added that when Chan finally took the stage, she was essentially dragged there by one of her handlers and never once used the piano which had been so painstakingly fussed over.]

To this day, I still know almost nothing about Chan Marshall or her music, beyond Aaron’s insinuation that she apparently doesn’t like performing it in front of people. I do have one Cat Power selection in my library—you wouldn’t be reading this if I didn’t—though the sole reason I own You Are Free is because one of the tracks features a guest appearance from Eddie Vedder, and that is the only song on the album I can recall ever listening to (I didn’t even purchase this disc, actually; mine is an advance promotional copy that was given to me when it was released in 2003—in a precisely literal sense, I could say to this CD, “you are free”).

Despite writing nearly 2,000 words up to this point, I still have not cued up a single song off You Are Free. I decided to take an atypical approach to this essay because I wanted to examine this particular offering in a more concentrated fashion. Although I’ve spent a lot of time heckling Cat Power thus far, my casual mockery isn’t motivated by any authentic malice—I’ve been doing it mostly just because I’m a dick sometimes. The truth is, I have lofty expectations for this record. Marshall’s work comes enthusiastically endorsed by multiple people I know, and the credentials she has cultivated since Aaron first told me about her (widespread critical acclaim, concert appearances at which she presumably actually performed, etc.) have made me far more curious about Cat Power now than I was 12 years ago. So I’m ready to give Chan Marshall my undivided attention. And just to make sure I’m listening closely, I’m going to tackle You Are Free one track at a time:

Okay, so the first song on the disc is called “I Don’t Blame You”. It’s essentially just a rudimentary piano melody with an austere vocal on top of it—it reminds me of all the songs in Tori Amos’s catalog I don’t like, mostly. Marshall’s voice sure is lovely, though. Delicate. Subdued. Lamenting. And the piano has obviously been meticulously tuned.

Up next is the quasi title-track, “Free”. This cut kicks off with a cycle of four stabbing power chords, so I’m anticipating that it maybe-possibly is going to rock. A few bars in, I’m slightly reminded of Elastica, which is totally fine with me because Elastica is awesome. Now an atonal second guitar part has joined the fray in the background—sweet, the song is building. Chan keeps repeating the same riff over and over again, but this motif is bound to make a huge impression when the drums kick in and the chorus arrives. Yep, there we go: a crunchy guitar just dropped in to double the chords, and… Oh… So, that only happened twice; now we’re back to the lumbering refrain she’s been playing this whole time. Okay, here come the drums… Wait, those aren’t real drums—they sound like the percussion pads on a child’s keyboard, and it’s not even a “beat,” really, just some clunky tap-tap kick-snare thing. Something’s bound to happen soon though, I can feel it. “Everybody / get together / free.” There aren’t a whole lot of lyrics in this song. Okay, any second now, the dynamic payoff is going to… Wait… It’s over? What the fuck, Chan? One dopey riff for three and a half minutes, “everybody, get together, free” like eight times, and that was it? Shit. That was anticlimactic.

Thankfully, “Good Woman” is much better. The warm guitar tone sells it: slow, chiming notes on reprise, but there’s some emotional atmosphere behind them. R.E.M. has built countless great tunes around this same minimalist approach, and it’s working just fine here. I also dig the fiddles randomly scissoring through; they sound like they’re playing the chords to an entirely different song, but that’s kind of neat and it works. This is super-droney and super-gloomy, but in a good way. Chan Marshall really does sing beautifully. Maybe I like Cat Power. My promo copy didn’t include a lyric booklet, but this track is making me sad, so I’m assuming it’s about something sad. That’s cool, I love sad music. Hey, there’s Eddie Vedder. He sounds sad, too.

Now we’re on to “Speak For Me”. Yeah, I can get on board with this—perhaps those first two unexceptional tracks were flukes? This is a perfect spot on the album to encounter a decent mid-tempo number that actually feels like a fully-formed song, with chord changes and a chorus and everything. This reminds me a bit of Neko Case, and I figured out a couple entries ago that I love Neko Case. I wonder if the Girl With the Neko Case Tote enjoys Cat Power. I should text her and ask her. There’s a nifty plinking piano line and a few layers of textured guitars along for the ride, so this track has a lot going for it. Good tune.

“Werewolf” is a rather glum exercise, but I like the sparse arrangement and the way the lazily-picked campfire acoustic sits way down in the mix and the pair of melancholy violins moaning on top of it. Marshall’s pipes are the clear centerpiece here, though; now that I’ve heard her run through a few modulations I’m getting a better sense of what all the fuss is about. I can’t tell if this song is about metaphorical werewolves or actual werewolves, but from the sound of things I’m reasonably certain it’s about werewolves who are non-metaphorically depressed. I’d probably be depressed if I was a werewolf, too. I can totally relate to this one.

Now I’m listening to “Fool”, which sounds exactly like what I assumed Cat Power would sound like when I didn’t know what Cat Power sounded like. This track isn’t doing much for me. The only instrumentation here is an elementary replicating guitar line; while there’s nothing wrong with “simple,” “Fool” veers much closer to “dull.” There are a couple of harmonizing vocal stratums present to beef up Marshall’s quaver and infuse the track with some nuance, but there’s nothing especially special about this one, I’m afraid. The promotional blurb on my CD notes that “You Are Free marks Chan Marshall’s first album of original material in nearly 4 years…” “Fool” is only four minutes long, and shouldn’t have taken any capable musician much longer than that to write—I can’t fathom what Chan was doing for the rest of those four years.

“He War” marks the record’s mid-point and would, I assume, be the last tune on Side A if I was listening to this on vinyl. That makes this a significant cut in terms of placement, though it’s not particularly significant in terms of quality. Actually, this is the first song I’ve heard on You Are Free that I’m having trouble distinguishing from other songs I’ve already heard on You Are Free—it basically just marries the repetitive chugging of “Free” to the loose groove of “Speak For Me”. I’ve heard enough sparks of excellence thus far to discern that Marshall is a skilled songwriter, but this is another one of those instances where Chan merely stumbles into a single serviceable riff and continuously recycles it for the entire track. This album is starting to frustrate me; I still have the haunting hum of “Werewolf” in my head and I keep wishing Cat Power was consistently as good as that track suggests. Marshall’s voice remains great, but “He War” doesn’t conjure up a very exciting backdrop for it. Instantly forgettable, this one. I hope Side B is stronger.

The second division begins with “Shaking Paper”, which is indeed stronger than the last two numbers. Marshall is still only playing one phrase, but it’s a good one, and this tune at least has a legitimate snapping drum beat carrying it along. There’s also a feedback-rich binary guitar track lending some effectively menacing ambiance. This one, I get.

“Baby Doll” is another somber narrative in the same tonal vein as “Werewolf”, and I like this one a lot, too. Marshall’s husky front-and-center vocals here are exquisite. She hits a couple of plainly-audible flubbed guitar notes, and I totally dig that she left the mistakes in; the emotional urgency of the track benefits from those spontaneous human touches. This song sounds like something you’d hear in a pivotal film scene—Jennifer Lawrence driving down a lonesome shadow-swept highway in a torrential rain storm looking gorgeously despondent at the end of the second act, perhaps. I’m not sure if that’s exactly what Chan Marshall had in mind when she wrote this; You Are Free came out in 2003, so she was probably picturing Kate Winslet instead. Nevertheless, “Baby Doll” is more evocative and potent than anything else I’ve heard on this disc. If all of Chan’s stuff was this strong, I would definitely consider going back and deleting all of the snarky jibes in this piece—but, you know, I’m not going to do that.

Alas, the title of the next song serves as an apt rejoinder to my supposition that maybe I’m starting to genuinely dig Cat Power: “Maybe Not”. I wasn’t craving yet another Chan-at-the-piano exercise, let alone one that is essentially a lackluster reworking of “I Don’t Blame You”; I think she may be playing the exact same chords, even. The blurb on my CD’s insert proclaims that “You Are Free is most assuredly not easy listening,” which now reads more like a warning than a sanction. I’m always suspicious when publicists whose job is to promote an album use “challenging” as a buzzword. That just seems like a democratic way of saying, “this record sounds terrible at first, but maybe it will grow on you if you listen to it a whole bunch of times.”

In a sterling example of what could only be kismet, one of the first lyrics I discern in the next cut is the phrase, “having difficulty.” And I am: “Names” is so drearily monotonous that merely lasting through it is a grueling task. It’s the longest track on the album, stretching to nearly five minutes (though it feels much longer; I had to pause the song in the middle for a cigarette break). Yet again, Marshall is milking a single dowdy and dismal piano melody all the way through the tune. Which means that “Names” sounds exactly like “Maybe Not”, which means that it also sounds exactly like “I Don’t Blame You”, which means that I’m bored. Even the vocal performance is uninspired—this track evidently bores Chan Marshall, too.

“Half of You” is half a song, more of an interlude than a lude. At least it’s pretty. It’s got drums, too. Actually, just one drum, resounding over the soft acoustic flutter like rolling thunder, or like a heartbeat, maybe. Similes.

Hey! The intro to “Keep On Runnin’ ” sort of reminds me of a slower rendering of the intro to Metallica’s “The Unforgiven”. Now, that’s a killer song. Kirk Hammett’s climactic solo on that number gives me goddamn chills. That dude’s one of the greatest lead guitarists ever, hands down. Metallica got all kinds of shit for making such a blatantly commercial record after cranking out four underground thrash classics in a row, but as far as I’m concerned, Metallica (more commonly known as “The Black Album”) is a truly remarkable piece of work that has aged splendidly. And not just the obvious tracks, either—give “My Friend of Misery” and “The God That Failed” another spin sometime soon; fucking fantastic stuff (“Don’t Tread on Me” still blows, though). That album also features the song “Of Wolf and Man”, which is about non-metaphorical werewolves (the lyrics don’t specify whether or not they’re depressed). Granted, “Of Wolf and Man” is kind of cheesy, but it’s still a solid cut with some excellent chugga-chugga riffing; in the pantheon of hard rock songs about lycanthropy, I’d rank it slightly higher than Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark at the Moon” (which I have to assume is about metaphorical werewolves since actual werewolves howl at the moon rather than bark at it—though this distinction is somewhat puzzling since Ozzy had himself made-up like a non-metaphorical werewolf for the cover of the album and the song’s video). Anyway, The Black Album was a keystone disc for me that opened up a whole lot of sonic doors and proved to be a tantalizing viaduct to the more brutal metal I would soon become obsessed with. Since I heard “Enter Sandman” long before I heard “Fight Fire With Fire”, I wasn’t even cognizant that Metallica was toning down their sound—besides, I was too busy being floored by this aural juggernaut with walloping drums and an insanely cool riff progression to care (fun fact: “Sandman” was the very first song I learned to play on my very first guitar, a red Peavey Predator which I of course still have). Oh… “Keep On Runnin’ ” just ended. Shit, I wasn’t paying attention. It was… okay?

“Evolution” is a glaringly unsuitable title for a song that is practically identical to three other tracks on this disc. For all of their elemental equivalencies, “Evolution”, “Names”, “Maybe Not”, and “I Don’t Blame You” could have been recorded in a single sitting—hell, they could be alternate takes of the same tune which Chan Marshall simply superimposed different lyrics over. I’ve run out of clever ways to indicate when she’s playing the same plain melody ad nauseam for the entire song. Instead, I will merely note that “Evolution” features Marshall playing the same plain melody ad nauseam for the entire song. The best endorsement I can give this redundant ditty is that it marks the end of an album I have not enjoyed listening to very much.

So, there’s a really terrific EP buried amidst the hour-long straggle of detritus and tedium that comprises You Are Free, and there’s just enough testimony to support Chan Marshall’s classification as a worthy artist. However, I didn’t find the record “challenging” as much as I found it inconsistent and wearying. Marshall’s voice is sincerely magnificent, and I have no doubt she’s talented, but she seems to struggle with channeling her energies into songs which demonstrate both of those things at the same time. It’s possible she’s just one of those artists whose entire body of work needs to be absorbed to cultivate an inclusive appreciation—regardless, I have little desire to labor through five more Cat Power albums searching for a few additional tunes as good as the stronger tracks I’ve heard here. I highly doubt I will want to listen to You Are Free again for another 12 years, so I’m not sure there’s even a reason for me to keep my copy of it. Still, in the interest of thoroughness, I did replay the disc from start to finish while reading over what I’ve written here so far. End result: I’m still mostly meh about You Are Free, but now I’m totally in the mood to hear Metallica.          

I also ended up texting The Girl With the Neko Case Tote to ask her feelings on Cat Power; as I guessed, she is a fan. Interestingly, her estimation of Chan Marshall’s work is markedly similar to mine—she’s just far more forgiving than I am of the bouts of ennui between Chan’s intermittent bursts of excellence. She also informed me that Marshall’s history has been dogged by recurring struggles with alcoholism. This data probably should have caused me to reconsider the way I’ve been making light of her eccentric fitfulness in this piece, but instead it makes me wonder why her music isn’t more interesting when she has such an artistically-suitable vice to inspire her (I told you I was a dick sometimes). Deducing that booze is at the root of Cat Power’s gig cancellations and wildly uneven songwriting doesn’t necessarily make me enjoy her work any more or less—though her conduct does disqualify her from being an Elegantly-Wasted alcoholic and shift her more into the realm of a too-wasted-to-play alcoholic, which is a far less appealing breed to me.

Anyway, I asked my secret soul-mate’s permission to quote her response because it provided a nice balance to my own conclusions. This is what she typed:

“Here’s the thing with Cat Power tracks, they are either stunning… OR they’re… sort of eh matte mess because they sound half finished or undone or loose at the seams.”

This seemed to be right in line with Aaron’s assessment from 12 years earlier. Which makes me suspect that acknowledging Cat Power is terrible a lot of the time is an integral part of being a Cat Power fan. When I shared how unimpressed I was by Chan’s brand of prosaic, single-idea song-writing, she added:

“Baby listen, she’s drunk. And she’s Cat Power. So we forgive her and just stop listening to her songs for a while. Until I or we (Royal) become drunk and take her records off the shelf… And appreciate her humanity in all its stand-up and stumbling glory… She reminds us of someone we know, or someone we sometimes have been.”

The Girl With The Neko Case Tote may be onto something there. This entire installment has been crafted under the influence of mere coffee, so I might be missing the point because I’m missing a key ingredient of the Cat Power recipe. I wouldn’t be any kind of reporter if I didn’t pursue every possible avenue of our story here, which is why I’ve decided to do some field research: I have just opened a beer, and I’m going to proceed to get heavily intoxicated while listening to You Are Free one more time before I write the conclusion to this essay…

[a couple hours later] Okay, I’m drunk now and I played the disc again. Here’s what I found out: Ritual Brewing Company’s “Love & Malt” brown ale is mighty tasty. Still, the tunes I didn’t already enjoy on You Are Free only sound marginally better to me when I’m smashed—except for “I Don’t Blame You”, which sounds approximately 41% better. However, after I was done listening to Chan, I went ahead and cued up Metallica’s Black Album, and “Nothing Else Matters” sounds waaaaaaay better when I’m drunk  (“Don’t Tread on Me” still blows, though).

So now I’m loaded and I have no idea how to finish this piece (which, consequently, likely explains why many of the songs on You Are Free sound as slapdash and half-formed as they do). Reading back, I’m realizing this entry has been a rather vicious one. That’s not something I’ll necessarily apologize for—hey, I did my due diligence; I’ve listened to the record three times now, and by every objective criterion it’s more not-good than good. But after conscientiously ruminating on why the Cat Power apologue resonates as so uninviting to me, I think an explanation may have dawned on me: Chan Marshall is unstable, often disappointing, and she spent many years squandering her tremendous potential because of her self-destructive habits…

She does, indeed, remind me of “someone [I] sometimes have been.” And that evocation isn’t a particularly welcome one, because I’ve never liked that person a whole lot.

Goddamn. That’s a non-metaphorically depressing epiphany right there.

 November 28, 2015

[lifeonashelf]

CASKET LOTTERY, THE

One of the most personally exciting aspects of this project is the opportunity it allows me to excavate some of the hidden gems in my collection and reexamine bands whose work has not found its way into my ears in ages. The archive I’m dissecting in this tome is obviously fairly massive, encompassing literally thousands of discs—on a purely pragmatic level, I’ve simply amassed too much shit at this point to intimately familiarize myself with every single piece of music I have, and I actually own at least a few hundred discs which I’ve probably only listened to once in my life. If it seems odd that I would eagerly spend money on a record, spin it a single time, then file it away and forget I even have it, then you’ve clearly learned absolutely nothing about me while reading this.

Right now I’m listening to Moving Mountains by The Casket Lottery, which is one of the efforts in that one-spin category. There’s a $1.99 Rhino price sticker on the CD with a date stamp that indicates it was printed in August 2002—what this tells me is that I paid two bucks (actually $1.50 with my discount) to add Moving Mountains to my collection back in August 2002. The music I’m hearing is utterly unfamiliar to me, so much so that if someone else was playing The Casket Lottery for me instead of me playing The Casket Lottery for me, I would have to ask this hypothetical other person what band they were playing for me—what this tells me is that the last time I listened to Moving Mountains was in August 2002.

Since I don’t recognize these tunes, I sort of feel like I’m hearing Moving Mountains for the very first time. Except I’m not; the record is only 29 minutes long, so I’ve already heard it twice in its entirety while shaping the first two paragraphs of this write-up—what this tells me is that if I don’t speed up my process here, I’m going to end up hearing Moving Mountains 43 times before I finish writing about it. Realistically, I’ve listened to the vast majority of my favorite records of all time less than 43 times each; even though Moving Mountains is a totally decent disc, it seems somehow improper for me to give it that many spins when I’ve only heard some of the albums in the wonderful catalog of, say, Low a couple times apiece—what this tells me is that maybe I should spend less time writing about records that I’ll probably never listen to again after I’m done writing about them and more time revisiting some of the truly superb music in my collection that I’ve been unfairly neglecting.

Yet the assignment I’ve given myself for Life on a Shelf is to cook up an essay about every band in my CD library, and the most practical methodology for that naturally involves listening to the band I’m writing about while I’m cooking up said essay about them. If I were to put on Low’s Songs For A Dead Pilot right now instead of starting Moving Mountains for the fourth time (I heard the whole thing again while writing that last paragraph) I would be upending the essence of this entire endeavor, the mere notion of which is making me have a minor existential crisis—what this tells me is that I’m possibly far more neurotic than even I suspected. Result: I have now pressed play again, and my fourth run-through of Moving Mountains has begun, and the disc opener “A Dead Dear” doesn’t sound unfamiliar anymore, and I totally knew the singer was going to say, “I’ll be sure to give a fuck as soon as I get out of this car,” because I’ve heard him say it four times now—what this tells me is that I’m going to know the whole record by heart by the time this piece is through, even though I’ve forgotten every note of most of the songs on Pink Floyd’s Obscured By Clouds, which seems highly unreasonable because I definitely care about Pink Floyd a lot more than I care about The Casket Lottery.

And now I’m realizing that I’ve listened to Moving Mountains four times and written four paragraphs about it, yet I still haven’t stated a single thing about the record except for the fact that I’ve listened to it four times—what this tells me is that this piece is pretty much a litany of utter nonsense at this point. I guess I should convey that The Casket Lottery is stylistically affiliated with the likes of Quicksand, Jawbreaker, and Rival Schools, though they’re not as great as either of the first two and it’s totally possible they don’t sound anything like Rival Schools because I honestly can’t remember what Rival Schools sounds like—what this tells me is that I’ve only listened to the Rival Schools CD I own once, too. I’ll also add that The Casket Lottery pleasantly reminds me of a lot of the semi-indie-rock stuff that was coming out in the early 2000’s, when there were approximately 6,000 active post-hardcore bands and at least 5,817 of those bands sounded basically identical to each other, which more accurately meant they sounded a lot like Fugazi, except I dug a lot of those bands even though I think most of Fugazi’s shit is unlistenable—what this tells me is that a lot of kids who started bands in the early 2000’s loved Fugazi a hell of a lot more than I do.

I’m now giving Moving Mountains its sixth spin, which is more times than I’ve listened to the last two Death Cab For Cutie records combined—what this tells me is that despite my best efforts, I just couldn’t quite get into Codes and Keys. I’ve heard the album enough times now to identify my favorite song on it (the prototypical but effective “Vista Point”), my least favorite song on it (the prototypical but less effective “Keep Searching”), and the song that I would play for a different hypothetical someone who asked me what The Casket Lottery sounds like (the purely prototypical “Stolen Honda”)—what this tells me is that I’m officially intimately acquainted with Moving Mountains now, which is kind of cool because I wasn’t acquainted with it at all a couple days ago and it’s a good record, but also kind of bums me out because that outcome is simultaneously making me aware that I’ve only listened to Billy Joel’s Turnstiles all the way through on maybe three occasions and Turnstiles is a much better record.

This paragraph marks my seventh repetition of Moving Mountains, and while I can honestly say I’ve grown to like The Casket Lottery quite a bit, I’m getting a little sick of hearing them at this point—what this tells me is that seven times is too many times to listen to Moving Mountains over the course of two days. Skimming back over what I have written, I’m seeing that I have successfully identified some other bands this band generally resembles, told you they’re good, and distinguished a couple of highpoints on Moving Mountains for you to check out if you’re so inclined—what this tells me is that I’ve provided a satisfactory overview here. My decisive assessment is that you may want to look up The Casket Lottery if you enjoy the other outfits I compared them to (though maybe not if the only outfit you enjoy out of the outfits I compared them to is Rival Schools, because I’m growing increasingly certain that I have no recollection of what Rival Schools sounds like and their music might not actually bear any resemblance to The Casket Lottery’s at all). However, I will add this caveat: if you’re going to listen to Moving Mountains seven times, it might be better to start off by listening to it like twice, then listen to some other stuff, then listen to Moving Mountains again a few days later, then listen to some other stuff again, but perhaps not the same “other stuff” you listened to before because then you might burn yourself out on those records, although if you fancied the other records you listened to in between the times you listened to Moving Mountains then I guess it would be okay to listen to those same records again because if they’re good records you’re probably going to want to hear them more than once anyway, so go ahead and listen to those records a few times, that should be fine, then listen to Moving Mountains again, and back and forth like that until you get to the seven times, because you’ll probably enjoy it more that way; I mean, you can totally listen to Moving Mountains more than seven times if you want to because it’s actually rather good, it’s just not SO good that you’ll want to hear it seven times in a row, you know, so maybe if you’re going to listen to it multiple times, you should do so over a longer span of time than I did, is really what I was getting at there—what this tells me is that…  shit, I don’t know; that sentence was way too fucking long and I can’t really make any sense of it.

I’ll go ahead and wrap this up, because I don’t especially want to listen to Moving Mountains for an eighth time right this minute (nevertheless, I did just start it for the eighth time because I’m not quite done writing about it). Ultimately, it’s a solid disc—maybe not quite a “hidden gem,” but solid—so it’s absolutely conceivable I will listen to it again more times down the road, after I’ve listened to some other stuff. But eight is enough for now.

Hey, that reminds me of that sit-com Eight is Enough. Do you remember that show? I don’t either, I just remember it was on and it was called Eight is Enough—what this tells me is that it probably wasn’t a very good show. But when I typed “eight is enough,” that made me think of it. That’s really the only reason I’m mentioning it; I could probably tell you less about Eight is Enough than I can about Rival Schools, frankly. It’s not really important for our purposes here, so I guess that’s all I have to say about that. Ha… That reminds me of Forrest Gump. Anyway, I’m going to conclude this here; the last track on Moving Mountains—“Optimist Honor Role”—is playing right now, and if I end up hearing the record a ninth time I might end up hating it, which would be a real shame because it’s a perfectly good record.

Wait… they had eight kids, right? On Eight is Enough? Wasn’t that why it was called Eight is Enough? Or did they have six kids, and the parents made the “Eight”?

Whatever. So, yeah, I’m going to stop writing now because I’ve spent this whole entry driving a single gag into the ground and it really wasn’t all that funny to begin with—what this tells me is that this has been a prototypical installment of Life on a Shelf.

Wasn’t there a wacky next door neighbor, too…? I feel like there was always a wacky next door neighbor on those sit-coms. So maybe they counted the neighbor as one of the eight because the neighbor was always around? Were there only five kids, then? That’s still a lot of kids; they could have totally called the show Five is Enough and the title would have still made sense. Except if they did that, you wouldn’t have the alliteration in there, and the alliteration is the thing that makes Eight is Enough stick in your brain. I can’t remember anything about it, but you know what I mean.

 November 6, 2015