Tag Archives: Music

Low Fidelity, or: How John Cusack is ruining my life

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I should not be allowed to watch High Fidelity ever again. Because it’s amazing and it always makes me feel like shit. It’s a weird juxtaposition. I’m ambivalent about my love for this movie. It’s damn near a perfect movie. And I only qualify that with “damn near,” by the way, because I really hate the song that plays over the end credits.

No, stop it. You’re not going to talk me out of this one.

It’s damn near a perfect movie. And here’s why:
- Unbeatable soundtrack. Un. Beat. Able.
- Super witty dialogue. Excellent writing overall, based on a great book.
- John Cusack gets rained on. Again.
- Jack Black singing Al Green.
- Tim Robbins with a hilarious yuppie ponytail.
- Bruce fucking Springsteen.

Yeah, that was six, but whatever. Ha! Meta jokes! Sorry.

If you haven’t seen this movie, you simply must. Especially if you’re a music lover. Really especially if you’re a music collector. Basic rundown: struggling record store owner (Rob Gordon, played by our hero, John Cusack) loses his girlfriend, thus sending him into a shame spiral of self-examination. He recounts his top five horrible breakups, trying to figure out what contributed to each of them. It’s a weird structure for a movie, the narrator speaking directly to the viewer, told in flashbacks and present-day over-analytical musings. And the record store is a great backdrop for this story, because it shows the I-just-have-to-make-it-through-today aspect of a horrible breakup, which I think is lacking in a lot of American love story-based movies. Your heart just got stepped on and fed to you? Too bad, you’ve still got to pay the bills. Sad but true.

But the thing I think I really dig about this film is the way it’s just steeped in music references. Even the costumes and set design show an obsessive love of music that speaks not only to the backstory of the characters, but also to the viewer. A sort of inside joke, if you will. It’s a great movie. I love it. And I hate it. And that’s why it’s interesting. For me. Maybe not for you.

My only goal in this life is to write. You may or may not know that my secondary goal is to open my own bookstore, mostly just to subsidize my first goal. And also to feed my junkie-level book habit. Because I have a Literature degree and don’t want to teach, these are the only two things I’m qualified to do. But my way-down-deep, extra special, super secret dream job? I’d love to own a record store. Clearly none of my dreams involve me making any money. I’m honestly and truly ok with that. I hate money. It’s not about money. It’s about the love of a thing. On top of which, like agro whipped cream, I just don’t want to work for anyone else ever again. I got burned badly by the Giant Evil Bookstore. So fuck it, I’ll open my own. That makes sense. But a record store? That’s just crazy talk.

I won’t say vinyl is dead. It’s actually making a comeback. (Thanks, hipsters.) There are only two or three places left in the U.S. that still press vinyl. Everybody else went out of business in the 90′s. (Thanks, internet.) I’m not one of those people who thinks that absolutely everything sounds better on vinyl. Nine Inch Nails? Nope. You need those sharp, clean, digital edges. Anything live? No! Crowd noise plus needle noise equals too much fucking noise. But I love vinyl. I love how it smells. I love the necessity for interaction with vinyl, because you can only listen to a handful of songs and then you have to get up and flip it over, you know? Instead of just absorbing hours and hours of iPod music, mindlessly, and without any sort of intention. And you have to be delicate with records, store them properly and protect them from sticky hands and scratchy things. It’s an act of love to be a person who collects vinyl. Finding an obscure record that I’ve been looking for in the back of the bin in a thrift store for two bucks? That’s just heavenly. There’s really nothing bad about vinyl.

So High Fidelity really fucks me up. Every time I watch it I listen to The Clash for about a week solid. And I end up having all these horribly unrealistic fantasies about owning a record store. Which makes me feel like I’m cheating on my more plausible goal of owning a bookstore. Which then makes me feel like shit because, probably, neither of these will ever happen. So then I drink heavily and listen to The Clash for another week (possibly the Violent Femmes, after the drinking starts) and end up hating myself because I’ll never amount to anything.

See the problem?

This isn’t John Cusack’s fault, I guess. I’m a huge Cusack fan. Say Anything? War, Inc? Grosse Pointe Blank? Better Off Dead? Being John Malkovich? Come on. The guy’s a genius. I could blame it on Nick Hornby, maybe, for writing the wonderful novel. But there’s something about Cusack’s performance as Rob Gordon that’s just heart wrenching. It’s not the love story thing. It’s a great story, but it’s a love story like any other. No, what gets me in the feels is that he runs a business that is, essentially, for the connoisseurs and by the connoisseurs. That’s clearly frustrating, both because there’s no money in it, and also because collectors of things are always comparing their obsessions rather than their collections. Your fixation becomes a big part of your personality, a measure of your worth. And despite living squarely on the edge of bankruptcy, he continues to do it because he can’t do anything else. It’s all he knows, all he loves, all he is. That’s admirable. Rare, even. It’s impressive as far as the screenwriting goes, too. The love story bits are couched in the language of his love of music because that’s the only way he knows how to talk. Obsession makes for interesting linguistics.

I’d like to say, at the end of my life, that I absolutely, unabashedly, did what I loved. Even if it’s financial torture and it makes everything else harder, being passionate about what you do, how you spend your energy, is worth every penny you didn’t make. I saw a Facebook meme the other day that said “The biggest risk of all is the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” That’s the bottom line. (How sad is it that my current mantra-slash-philosophy was distilled down to a Facebook meme? One that I didn’t make? Urgh.)

Anyway. Go watch High Fidelity again. It’s so fucking good. You can turn it into a drinking game, too. Every time someone mentions a band, take a drink. Every time they quote a song, take a shot. You won’t get through the whole movie but it’s fun. And a great way to kickstart your self-loathing Clash marathon. Good times.

“And it makes me wonder…”

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It was a gorgeous day, sometime in the summer of 1997, and I was riding through the woods in a red convertible Jensen-Healey with my friend David. I said, “Hey, I really like this song. Who is this?” At which point he calmly pulled over, turned off the engine, and started lecturing (screaming) at me. Which I totally deserved. Because it was Stairway to Heaven.

I know, right?

I was fourteen! It was the 90s! I should’ve known Stairway. Or at least have heard it. Especially considering that my parents had every Led Zeppelin album on vinyl sitting in my living room. Guess I just hadn’t worked my way through the catalogue of awesome records yet. I got through Queen and Howlin’ Wolf and stopped, maybe? Anyway. David made me a mix tape (that’s right, I said tape!) with Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and a bunch of other classic stuff on it. He filled in the gaps in my rock canon knowledge, and I taught him about Nine Inch Nails, industrial, and electronica. And we talked music for the next sixteen years, among other things. I still have that tape somewhere, I just don’t have a tape player anymore. (Which is kind of a drag, isn’t it? How many mix tapes have been abandoned in the past decade or so? How much love is just sitting around in boxes collecting dust?)

So that tape started a kind of cascade, right? An avalanche of music stuff and life stuff. I firmly believe that some things are put on your path for a reason. (Even if they come along with, weirdly, a cute boy in a hot sports car. That doesn’t happen too often, let me tell you.) I became obsessed with classic rock, abruptly ending my goth phase and starting my pot-smoking/tie-dyed-shirt-wearing/Kerouac-reading phase. Maybe that all would’ve happened eventually on its own, but at least this way I had a badass soundtrack. The Doors, Hendrix, Joplin, the Grateful Dead, The Who, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and, most importantly, Led motherfucking Zeppelin.

Oh, Led Zeppelin. How I adore them so. And it’s been forty-four years since the first album came out, so I’m not going to waste your time telling you how awesome they are. You live in the world. You know how awesome they are. I do not need to plug Led Zeppelin. But I’ve been listening to them a lot the past couple of weeks and they’ve been on my mind so I want to talk about them. So there. And I should probably go ahead and tell you that if you don’t share my stance on Led Zeppelin being the greatest rock band ever, I respect your opinion. But bringing extra special snark to the blog comments table (and/or just telling me that I’m wrong) does not strengthen your argument. You know who you are.

Led Zeppelin received the Kennedy Center Honor in December, along with David Letterman, Buddy Guy, and Dustin Hoffman. All greats in their fields, obviously. In tribute, a bunch of artists performed their songs. That’s got to be nerve-wracking. I’ll say the Lenny Kravitz was alright (no worse than any of his other songs), and Kid Rock just needed to sober up and sit down. But, luckily, Ann and Nancy Wilson from Heart nailed it (nay – they fucking slaughtered it!) with their version of Stairway. And that gentleman on the drums? That’s Jason Bonham, son of John Bonham. He may never be as great as his dad, but no one else deserved to be playing that song on that stage. Amazing. It made Robert Plant cry, which, in turn, makes me cry every time I watch it. I’m such a sap.

Go ahead. Watch it again.

I always thought that song needed a gospel choir. Seriously, I did.

So after that show happened, I may have gotten sucked down a Led Zeppelin/YouTube rabbit hole. I think humans are hibernating mammals. This is not a widely accepted theory. However, I will submit as evidence that every winter I want to curl up with a book and a blankie and listen to the same five albums over and over and just eat chicken pot pie until spring comes. And this time I’ve been listening to Led Zeppelin albums constantly. (In my nest. With my chicken pot pie. It’s like heaven, except it can’t be because snow exists.) Also watching old concert footage of them. And documentaries. And I might have ordered a couple of biographies about them that haven’t shown up in the mail yet.

Yes, this seems obsessive. It happens. But for good reason. Their music never fails to melt my face. There’s pure blues in there. There are notes that shouldn’t be possible. There’s mandolin right alongside blistering electric guitar. There’s drumming that makes you appreciate madness. There’s sex and drugs and hunger and loss and love and death. There’s even fucking Hobbit stuff in there. A lot of it. Somehow Robert Plant makes Hobbit references sound very British and literary and deeply poetic and just a touch sexy. Not nerdy at all. I’d call that a superpower. But it might be the accent.

(Later, with caveats and addendums)

I spent about a week trying to find a way to end this blog post. There’s really no good way to do it. And I finally figured out that, while the Kennedy Center Honors make the subject convenient and topical, it wasn’t Led Zeppelin that I was trying to write about at all. Basically everything above just amounts to me saying, “I’ve always tended to geek out over music. Led Zeppelin = good.” And that’s boring.

Is it okay that it’s boring? I don’t know. My goal here has been to tell you about new and exciting things that I’ve run across in my efforts to try to be more well-rounded in my newly-minted digital paradigm. It’s been a year and I can’t say that I’ve plumbed all those depths yet, but I definitely feel like my writing is suffering for trying to maintain a sense of wonder about it all. It’s getting a little disheartening, frankly.

And I realized that with writing even this boring nonsense, as with all art, once you get past the surface, past the shiny colors or the new medium, all that’s left is the artist. It’s been creeping in. I’ve talked about myself more lately than I ever did in the posts a year ago or even six months ago. That’s a little scary. But good scary, right? Can I talk about what makes me mad? Or sad? Or terrified? Is it safe? Is it good? Is it art? Does it matter? Does talking about the best rock band ever change anything? No. It’s a drop in a bucket, a ripple in a pond. Is it going to make you run out and buy a Led Zeppelin album? Probably not, if only because they’ve been around long enough that by now if you were going to like them at all you already would. They’re not new and exciting, but they’re important. And more than that, they’re important to me.

So I took a little while and stepped away from this post and when I came back I saw that what I really wanted to write about was that long-ago mix tape from my friend. That makes me cringe. It’s just a tape. But it isn’t. And writing about why it’s so important to me seems self-indulgent and silly. Something worthy of conversation, but not necessarily of expository ramblings. But then, who’s to decide what’s “worthy”? (The voice in my head is saying, “I am, motherfuckers.” I have to fight her because clearly that’s just crazy talk.) As much as I don’t like to go on and on about myself it seems inevitable. It seems right. It seems, oddly enough, relevant. How the hell did that happen?

I know it sounds stupid, but there’s no way for me to thank David enough for making me that tape. Because of the aftermath of the thing, more than for the actual thing. First of all, you have to understand that I grew up in a place that exists about ten years behind the rest of the normal human timeline. So when I received that tape, our town was about where the everyone else in America was in the mid-1980s, feathered hair and all. A mix tape was hard work. And it meant a lot. I may technically be too young to appreciate the “Love is a mix tape” philosophy á la High Fidelity, but I’m damn close in practice.

Because of that tape, I learned about classic rock in the obsessive way that I learn about anything. I just swam in it for as long as possible, making it a part of everything that I did or thought or was at the time. That’s a fucked up way to live a life. Doesn’t make it wrong, though. And becoming well-versed in Led Zeppelin changed me in two very important ways. (I can’t believe I’m about to write this, you guys. Bear with me.)

1 – The Husband is a drummer, and he learned to play the drums by wearing out many a Led Zeppelin cd. (You know when they skip that fucks them up, right? Try playing drums next to a mid-90s boombox.) One of the first conversations we had, that wasn’t about me getting bumped out of a Magic tournament, was about how awesome Led Zeppelin is. We bonded over it. We dated. We got married. Our favorite song to sing together is Fool in the Rain. We actually take walks in the rain because of it. How dear and how precious are those moments.

2 – I learned enough about classic rock to be able to talk about it with my father. In the last year of his life, we talked about music constantly. He was a blues guitarist. We’d stay up all night discussing who was the better drummer, Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell. We’d go through albums and talk about why this note was best at this key change or that register wrong for that singer. We bonded over it. He died. But I’ve got all those lengthy conversations. And they’re not going anywhere. How dear and precious were those moments, as well.

I wonder if David realizes what he did with that tape. I don’t know if I’ve ever told him. (Sorry, buddy. But at least I asked your permission before telling that opening story. Hugs!) He’s one of a very few friends who knew my dad before he died. They had the same birthday. And they talked about music, too. Funny, at the time I thought it was weird that my dad knew that much about Led Zeppelin. And The Husband was the best man in David’s wedding. Everything comes full circle, somehow, with that. Maybe it’s just in my head. Probably.

So, yeah. Now I’m feeling all raw in the nerves. Maybe we’re starting a new phase here on the blog. Maybe not. I really don’t know. But I’m sorry I got all squidgy on you without fair warning. I didn’t expect it, either. But you’ve gotta write what wants written or it’ll drive you crazy. That particular hamster wheel is a bitch.

We ARE the media

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I may have overdosed on Amanda Palmer, you guys. Unfortunately, most people I’ve mentioned her to don’t know who she is, so let me illuminate your lives for a minute. Because that’s why we’re both here, right? (Warning: there is much more link clickety fun than normal in this blog post. Just do it. It’s worth your time. Mostly.)

Back in the day, Amanda Palmer was the lead singer for The Dresden Dolls. She went solo and then ditched her record label. Somewhere in there is when I started listening to her, right around the time she released a badass album of Radiohead covers all played on the ukulele. That’s right. That’s what I said. Radiohead covers. On the ukulele. A whole album of them. Because that’s how one rolls with no evil corporate scumfucks looking over one’s shoulder. Art for art’s sake. Anyway, she’s just a great big tornado of weird fun and I love everything about her.

The reason that I bring her up now is that she’s been in the center of a wee little media frenzy with this new album, Theatre Is Evil. This is like the history of New Media in three acts, for real. What happened was that she crowdfunded the money for the album on Kickstarter, raising way more than she asked for (the goal was $100K and they ended up with $1.2 million). That’s what happens when your fans love the shit out of you and you make perfectly reasonable requests that will have awesome artistic repercussions. So, she made the album and, in addition to regular cds and itunes and all that blah blah, she released it on her website on a pay-what-you-can basis. I paid ten bucks for mine, even though I’m broke and could’ve gotten it for free. Because it’s her music and she worked her balls off to make it and she can do whatever the hell she wants with it! Once you take a record label out of the equation, anyway, and there’s no one telling anyone else what to do. Ever. (Frankly, I doubt very many people tell this woman “no.”)

So when she and her band started their tour they crowdsourced some musicians to go onstage with them. Now, here’s where the bullshit starts to get thick. I, personally, think this is a fucking fantastic plan. Why pay to haul an orchestra’s worth of people and equipment around the world when you can find a few people in each town to play with you, save on travel costs, and give some of your musically-inclined fanbase such an awesome opportunity? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s brilliant. Saves money and gives a bunch of people a huge happy. I love it. But apparently some musician’s union asshats had a problem with it because she was bucking the system. Demeaning everything they’ve worked for as a union and whatnot. Which, I mean, I see their point, too, but it’s not like she hired professional musicians and then refused to pay them. These folks were all enthusiastic volunteers who were aware of the terms when they signed up. (I should clarify that since this nonsense got some media attention, she and her team of minions have revised their budget so now they are paying everyone who comes to play, even though they never asked her to.)

And then, like a ninja, she sneaks onto the Billboard charts (as of this writing, she was sitting at number ten). With a crowdfunded album! With no record label! Which is a pretty incredible thing. Probably the first time all three of those circumstances have come together, although I can’t say that unequivocally. We kindasorta had this conversation when Radiohead released In Rainbows and gave it away. And then we noticeably didn’t have this conversation when Nine Inch Nails did the same thing with The Slip, which I thought was weird. Maybe it’s just being made into a big deal now because the interwebs is becoming exponentially more important each year. Evolution is speeding up. The singularity is getting closer and closer. And although the music industry was among the first to feel it, they’re turning into the whining toddler of the group, that annoying one that won’t leave without howling its fool head off. And folks like Palmer are the thorn in their side, telling them to their faces that they’re wrong. Good on her.

Now, we all know that I’m not a particularly adept music reviewer, but I am great at analogies and will say this: Theatre Is Evil fucking rocks. It’s like if The Cure and Concrete Blonde had a baby who was raised in a traveling burlesque show by Tori Amos and Ben Folds and grew up to be smoking hot and eyebrowless. I definitely like some songs more than others. I have listened to those songs about a thousand times. And I’ve listened to the whole album about ten times in the three days I’ve had it, and I’m just now able to get through the damn thing without crying. I even took the afternoon off yesterday and learned Ukulele Anthem on my uke. (Side note: at this point I feel obligated to mention that you shouldn’t pronounce it “you-kuh-lay-lee” but “ooh-koo-lay-lay,” because if I don’t my mother will yell at me.)

Also, there are a couple of really awesome videos for these songs. Like this one. And this one. That stop-motion ink-crawly weirdness is just so fucking cool. And that’s not CG; it was all practical. This kind of shit makes you remember when video was important, and think maybe it could be again. Most of that money that they repurposed for paying the musicians is coming out of the video budget, though, so I don’t know how much more fun visual stuff we’ll see for this album. Thanks for that, media/musician peer pressure. I really do miss that combo of visual and musical art that was so prevalent in the age of music videos. But Palmer also commissioned a bunch of folks to help her make an art book to go with the album (which I think was part of the higher-level Kickstarter package), so maybe that idea will catch on and we’ll have a new and exciting way to do music-slash-art stuff in this wretched post-video era.

Anyway, check out Amanda Palmer. She blogs (and somehow, inexplicably, overuses the word “kerfluffle”) at amandapalmer.net (where you can also buy the new album), and is @amandapalmer on Twitter. Basically, she’s awesome wrapped in art dipped in punk. You can’t beat that.

PS – I tried really, really hard not to mention this, but she’s married to Neil Gaiman, and we know how much I lovelovelove him. And while that has absolutely nothing to do with her music or her art, this is one of the sweetest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Ever get slapped in the face with a metaphorical glove by a librarian?

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This may not be a typically nerdy post. I’m way out of my comfort zone here. But I’ve been issued a challenge from which I am loathe to back away, hands up in surrender.

Lemme ‘splain.

I have this friend who, for the sake of anonymity we’ll call…what? Something totally wacky…”Matthew”. So, Matthew and I have a particularly snarky friendship, built mostly on a mutual love of books, music, and sarcasm. He’s both nerdier and cooler than me at the same time. It’s really weird. Dude wears a tweed librarian jacket with the leather patches on the elbows with no irony whatsoever (although to be fair, he is in fact a librarian).

Anyway, what’s the point? A couple of years ago he gave me a CD. Many, actually, and most of them I love. I’ve found a lot of great music through old Matthew (Of Montreal, The Roots, The Decemberists, TV on the Radio, Pavement, Godspeed You! Black Emperor). But this particular CD was meant to be a part of my musical education in hip-hop.

And I never listened to it.

Oh! Fail! Slacker friend!

I know, I know. I’m horrible. So then I see that this artist (GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan) is working on an album with Neil deGrasse Tyson, my very favorite astrophysicist (check out his podcast, StarTalk Radio, for sciency goodness). A Wu-Tang/astrophysics mashup! How cool is that? I, of course, immediately posted a link about it on Matthew’s Facebook page. To which he said, and I quote:

Him – I’d be more excited if I thought for an instant that you ever listened to that copy of Liquid Swords.
Me – Alright, fine. I’ll go listen to it.
Him – I’m not so much angry as I am disappointed. Also, I expect a full report. ON YOUR BLOG.
Me – Deal.

So I did. I’ve listened to it all the way through about four times. And I’ve got to say, honestly and truly, at this point I have nothing interesting to say about it. I really tried. There were great beats. And I love that they used the dialogue from Shogun Assassin. I’m still trying to figure out the last song (the angle on it: pro-church? Or not?). I’ll definitely listen to it again. You’ve got to chew on hip hop for a while, until you can really get into all the words. I do, anyway. But I wasn’t as captivated by it as I’d hoped to be. This puts me in a somewhat awkward position. I’m very rarely at such a loss for words. I can’t seem to even bullshit my way through this one. Fail again. I made myself sad.

Because I’m more interested in why I didn’t find it interesting. I do like hip hop. I don’t have a lot of it in my collection, sure, but what I like I really like. I think hip hop is really fascinating. It’s pure wordplay, extremely clever and difficult poetry (of course I find the dorkiest way possible to talk about this, looking at it like a fucking Lit major – it’s all I’ve got, guys, take it or leave it). But hip hop is a kind of liminal language, isn’t it? Like any other subculture, the language and its use define the boundaries of the group. One doesn’t have to be indoctrinated into the culture to enjoy it, but I always feel like I’m missing some basic understanding of what’s going on. Not the music, but of the culture, which are probably more inextricably bound than any other kind of music. But that’s a completely neophyte opinion. See? This is pointless. I can barely talk in a straight line about hip hop. I even called in backup. I tried to have this conversation with my personal Tyler Durden. Her insight was that a big part of the enjoyment of hip hop and hip hop culture (for lack of a better term) is the participation of the audience in the outrageous bluster of the artist, which I find both preposterous and accurate. This could quickly turn into a dangerous slippery slope into anthropology, though, and frankly I’m ill-equipped. But someone should do it. Get on that, internet, I’d love to read it.

So, what have we learned? I really like my comfort bubble. It’s warm and soft and they play heavy metal. And I should think more carefully before guaranteeing that I’ll put my intellectual experimental failures in print. Thanks for that, Matthew. Achievement unlocked.

Meanwhile, if you’re a hip hop fan you should listen to this: Saul Williams – Telegram

Logic! Science! Atheism! Pianos?

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Hooray for a post that’s not a downer! Fucking finally, right?

If any of you are my friends on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed the obscene number of Tim Minchin videos that I’ve posted in the last six months or so. (Did you watch them? Weren’t they great?) I may have mentioned him on the blog before. I think it was in my comedy post. Maybe just in the Pointless List box. Anyway, we all know I love comedy. And I love music. But somewhere in the middle there’s a weird cross-section of people who can do both. At the same time. These people are mutants. Hilarious mutants (and really, if you’re going to have mutants, those are the best kind to have, aren’t they?).

The reason I love Tim Minchin is that he’s fucking smart. Perhaps not in a typically booksmart way (no offense, there’s just no other way to say that), but in an important-subject-matter, Bill Hicksian sensibility kind of way. Intelligent, logical humor. Which is hard to do. Harder still to do whilst banging away on a grand piano, singing really complicated lyrics in a sort of baroque jacket with tails, the entire time maintaining an irresistible redheaded Australian adorableness. Logic plus adorable plus funny equals smart-girl bait. Oh, also barefoot. Barefoot smart-girl bait.

He’s one of those comedians that you either love or hate, as is usually the case when someone tries to base an entire career on making people laugh at controversial issues instead of being all profound and serious about them. Religion comes up a lot in his work, as well as other spiritual or ethereal (read: not provable) belief systems. He’s a staunch atheist, and consistently comes back to the point that logic and science should trump blind faith based on nothing. For the record, I’m not an atheist (you can stop having a panic attack, Mom). But I am pretty devoutly pro-logic and pro-free-thought. I have no issues with other people’s beliefs or faith, so long as they can find their peace or happiness or whatever in a quiet, unobtrusive, keep-it-to-yourself kind of way. Just because you think you’re right doesn’t automatically mean that I’m wrong, does it? I’d like to think it doesn’t. Live and let live. You keep your Jesus magic, and I’ll keep my space aliens and theory of evolution and we’ll just agree to disagree and continue to go about our business and love each other unconditionally and unabashedly in spite of our differences. Ok? Ok.

Hello, weird digression. Where did you come from? I should stay on topic.

The problem with combining any kind of social commentary with comedy (or music, for that matter), is that so often people can’t overlook the medium for the sake of the message. Like people who don’t listen to heavy metal or hip hop saying that it’s a bad influence on their kids. Or that all risqué photography is porn. Or that graffiti isn’t art. (“Stay on topic, Vanessa.” Ok.) Probably the best relevant example of this is Minchin’s The Pope Song, which is about the Pope (the last one, not the Nazi Emperor Palpatine-looking one we have now) covering up for priests who sexually abused children. In two minutes he manages to say the word “fuck” 92 times (by my count, could be wrong). Outstanding. Brilliant. Tremendous. The word itself doesn’t offend me in the least. Fuck fuckity fuckfuck. I can listen past it, right? Past the fact that “fuck” is just another word, to get to the point of the other lyrics, which are quite clever, considering that not much actually rhymes with “fuck.” It’s like a test. A battle of wits. And at the end you’re either offended on a shallow level by mere language, or you’ve understood the satirical juxtaposition of a word that shouldn’t be offensive (but so often is) with words that are seemingly more benign but illustrate something far more disturbing.

That last sentence got a little out of control. Just listen to the damn song and you’ll see what I mean.

Politics aside, Minchin is an excellent pianist and a great singer (you’d think that would go without saying, but in the world of musical comedy a lot of people are funny or technically talented but not both). Apparently he doesn’t read music or write his stuff down. Which I find both impressive and annoying. I’m trying to learn his song Not Perfect on the ukulele. But when I went to look for the chords there were about 800 different versions because everybody who ever put one on the internet had to figure it out for themselves. Also, piano to guitar to ukulele is a bizarre little game of Telephone to play with chords. But it turned out ok, I think I’ve figured it out. (Now I just have to learn to sing. Duck and cover folks, this is not going to be pretty.) He’s super versatile, too. An incomplete list:

Satire (for lack of a better word) – Fuck the Poor, Woody Allen Jesus, Prejudice
Straightforward social commentary – Fat Children, Canvas Bags, Peace Anthem for Palestine
Love songs – If I Didn’t Have You, White Wine in the Sun, Drowned, You Grew On Me
Ridiculousness – Cheese, So Fucking Rock, Doctor Who theme song (performed on a keytar while wearing a Prince Charles mask – yes, I’m serious)
Beat poetry (for real) – Storm, Mitsubishi Colt
Musicals – Won an Olivier Award for his lyrics and music for the stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda

That should keep you busy on the old YouTube for a bit. Mwahahahaaa. I’ve imposed my timesuck upon you. You’re welcome (unless you’re easily offended, in which case: don’t blame me, you clicked on that shit of your own free will). Tim Minchin’s blog and tour/merch/news/etc info are at timminchin.com. I’ll leave you with this one, because it’s my absolute favorite (insert obligatory “I’m not a pirate, all rights belong to the artist” blah blah – I couldn’t get it to embed, you’ll have to click on it, sorry): Tim Minchin – Rock and Roll Nerd

If you get addicted, it’s not my fault.

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I suck at science. Ok, that’s not true. I suck at math, which in turn makes it difficult for me to do science-type stuff. But I like science. I just don’t get a lot of the technical how-to-get-shit-done bits. Sometimes I wish I understood it more so I didn’t feel like people have to dumb it down to talk to me about cool science stuff, especially when it’s something I think is really interesting. I hate that feeling. That being-the-reason-that-the-conversation-is-being-reduced-to-the-lowest-common-denominator kind of feeling. But it’s necessary in this case, in this realm. I know that’s a bit of a contradiction, but still. It is what it is.

Which is why I’m a huge Radiolab fan. If you don’t know Radiolab, unearth your NPR love from wherever it’s been hiding and go look that shit up because it’s freaking awesome. And then come back and read the rest of this. I’ll wait here.

Doo doo dooo…(That’s my “waiting patiently” whistle. Didn’t really come across, did it? Gotta work on that one. )

Freaking awesome, right? For those of you not playing along: Radiolab is a badass radio show out of New York (WNYC) hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. (They’ve got a sort of good cop/bad cop, deadpan guy/fall guy dynamic dynamic going on. Superfun.) Did I build it up enough at the beginning for you to know it’s about science? Because it’s about science. But they never say that it’s about science. I mean, you could say it’s about anything, really: philosophy, language, storytelling, the human experience, blah blah blah. But at the bottom of it all, it’s a show about the science that backs all those other things up. Which is odd, but I give them props for not being too niche or pigeonholey. Basically it’s radio theater (or theatre, if you prefer) meets documentary journalism. It sounds weird, I know. Hear me out.

On the show they take an interesting question or concept and look at it from a couple of different angles, not so much through technical bullshit (although there is a little of that just to get the listener up to speed), but through good storytelling. It’s the best possible way to get into the guts of these ideas, especially for laypeople, which I assume most listeners are. Because this stuff is really cool. And I wouldn’t have ever heard about it otherwise. If it were just people talking and oversimplifying it would sound like every other boring documentary out there. But I’m big enough to admit that when I don’t know much about something, making it fun makes it way more interesting. On a similar note, every episode of Radiolab gives me like ten more books to add to my list (which is a monstrous thing of OCD spreadsheet beauty, let me tell you).

Besides the happyfun learning time you get, Radiolab is extremely joyful to the earholes. Jad Abumrad is a musician, so there’s a sort of symphonic, through-composed feel to every episode (he’s also a winner of last year’s MacArthur Genius Grant – major street cred). Like I said, it’s basically radio theater. Little one-act plays, full to brimming with fantastic sound production – cool loopy stuff, great music, voice effects, etc. Supremely listenable. There’s definitely something to be said for relying on both economy of language and auditory artistry to get a point across (“auditory artistry” sounds like a horrible dubstep band, by the way, so if your horrible dubstep band needs a name please feel free to use that one). I think this combo is becoming a lost art in some ways. Besides your standard NPR fare (Prarie Home Companion, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, This American Life) and all those hateful political talk shows, there’s not much going on in the radiosphere these days. I will say as a caveat to that point, though, that there are some cool kind of retro-radio-show-style things happening on some fun podcasts that I’ve discovered lately (i.e., The Thrilling Adventure Hour). So maybe just the delivery mechanism for listeney awesomeness is changing, not the desire to make it.

Still, you’ve got to admit that it’s pretty ballsy to dedicate one’s self to radio at this point in the culture game. Before television ruined us as a nation, we could listen to a good old fashioned story and think up good old fashioned pictures in our good old fashioned brains. And so it was for a thousand thousand years. Now it’s almost gone. We live in a Twitter society, you know? Tiny bits of mental effluvium leak out of us all the time and we’re obsessed with absorbing the brain dribbles of others. Our attention span is about 140 characters. Which is sick and sad, but I feel like it’s an inevitable evil at this point, so just hang on tight to the sides of the handbasket and enjoy the ride to intellectual hell, ok?

Check out all the full-length episodes and a metric ton of short podcastlets at radiolab.org. You will not regret it.

Nerd music (and a bad haiku)

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I was trying to write a blog about nerdy music. It was really hard.

That was almost a haiku. Let’s try again.

 

I was trying to

write a blog about nerdy

music. It was hard.

 

That was the worst haiku ever.

Wow, I’m really easily distracted these days. Um, anyway. So I was thinking about nerdy music. And I ran into an unanticipated logistical problem. What’s the difference between the music that nerds listen to, music that is played by nerds, and music that is inherently, intrinsically nerdy? It’s tough.

For the most part, the nerds I hang out with (you know who you are) have really great taste in music. But that’s totally biased, isn’t it? Because I listen to the same stuff. This is not a legitimate control group. We’re metalheads from the grunge era. With a penchant for ska an d classic rock. On the other hand, I love Beethoven and The Smiths in equal measure. There are all these bands that, for no good reason, I lump together in my head as being nerdy. Stuff like Neutral Milk Hotel and The Decemberists. And if I’m being honest, most of the people I know who like them are actually hipsters (sorry, guys). There’s no way to judge the nerdiness of music by the people who love it. It’s just not possible.

Then there are a bunch of 90’s bands that stick out as having nerdy musicians. They Might Be Giants, Weezer. They came around at the beginning of geek chic, or maybe they were the beginning of geek chic. These glasses I wear? Pure Rivers Cuomo. Weird Al comes immediately to mind. But is his music nerdy? Not all of it. Or is he just a tremendous nerd? Definitely. But you’ve got to be kind of a genius to do what Weird Al does, frankly. And a lot of the music he spoofs is mainstream and not nerdy at all. But there’s an air of nerdiness about him and his music that’s kind of undeniable, you know? Dude plays the accordion, for fuck’s sake. It’s one of those “you know it when you see it” situations.

There are all kinds of weird crossover conundrums (conundra?), as well. There’s that one line about ringwraiths in The Battle of Evermore. Ok, I’m kidding about that last one. Not really. But sort of. See? This is really hard.

So then I got to the hard bit of trying to figure out if there actually is anything that stands on its own as nerdy music. Lyrically speaking. I figured I would just begin at the beginning and, being true to my generation, ask the interwebs. And let me tell you, our technological overlords were super helpful. Things I found, in no particular order of ridiculousness:

Nerdcore – hip hop with scifi/comic book/pop culture themes – way more awesome if you listen to it for the lyrics and don’t try to judge it by mainstream hip hop standards

Geeksta rap – like nerdcore, but more about serious science, chemistry, math, computers

Filk – scifi/fantasy fan folk (that is hard to say out loud…really, go ahead, try it) – lots of balladic, medievalish, LARPer stuff, think lutes and lyres and songs about Hobbits

Nintendocore – heavy metal plus video game sound effects – sounds like Russian techno, but good in a thrashy kind of way

Wizard rock – Harry Potter metal. Oh, yes. But only Harry Potter. No other wizards allowed.

Chap hop (my personal favorite, just because of the silliness of it all) – Steampunk rap. Seriously. No, no, let it sink in for a second. I said: Steampunk. Rap. And really, what more can you say?

These are just some teensy snippets from my first eighttenfourteen hours with Google and Youtube. I encourage you to look it up because, man oh man, there is a lot of stuff out there. To a certain degree, which of these you actually like depends on your particular flavor of nerd. But come on: a song about Marvel vs. DC? A song about Neville Longbottom being the real chosen one? A whole album about Firefly? I can dig it. My Spotify runneth over. I’ve been glued to my computer for like two weeks, just eating this stuff up. And some of it’s really great and some of it’s really awful and some of it’s just so fucking weird I listen to it over and over just to see if I’ll eventually understand it. I will say this: I’ve got a whole new and exciting list of references I didn’t understand. Score. New blog topics.

Here’s the bottom line. I’m so happy about this stuff, good or bad, because these people are just singing and making music about what they love. And fuck the mainstream for trying to delineate what is cool or nerdy or whatever. Fuck the mainstream for saying what will or won’t work on the radio, or make money, or find a fanbase. If the musicians are passionate and the fans are passionate, they’ll seek each other out. That’s all that matters, really. Sincerity. Honesty. Earnestness. They’re what music should be about.

Also, while we’re on the subject, I’m learning to play the Tetris theme on the ukulele. I’ll let you know how it goes.