Being a dork who finds herself drawn to even bad movies about music, I’m intrigued by this movie “Cadillac Records”, and by “Cadillac”, they mean “Chess”. It’s fictionalized, so they changed the name from Chess Records. I can think of another movie that does this—-”Grace of My Heart” borrowed heavily from Carol King’s life and her move from being a behind-the-scenes songwriter to up on stage. It allows you to take liberties, though from the IMDB listing, it looks like they didn’t change anyone’s name from real life.
Of course, the problem with movies like these is that your actors are trying to play people who are, in real life, usually full of verve, charisma, and of course massive talent. It seems, from the lack of success out there, that it’s really hard to embody that—-you either fall short of the real life person’s presence, or you pull a Dennis Quaid and turn in a performance that implies that charisma is a form of mental illness, the bizarre choice he made when playing Jerry Lee Lewis in “Great Balls Of Fire”. Naturally, the temptation is to bring in people who already embody the presence that the original great musicians had, i.e. to bring in today’s music icons to play yesterday’s music icons. As an added bonus, you get someone who can perform.
But that also has a massive drawback: Most iconic musicians have a signature style, and replacing one with another is disconcerting. Which is why all eyes are on Beyoncé Knowles, who has been tapped to play Etta James. No one’s laughing up their sleeve or anything. Beyoncé did a great job singing James’ signature ballad “At Last” at Fashion Rocks. But there’s a lot more to James than songs like that. Check out this 1966 performance of “Something’s Got A Hold On Me”:
If you haven’t seen this already, it’s one of those “are you kidding me?” stories. Amanda Palmer, who headed up the Dresden Dolls, put together a video for her song “Leeds United” off her new solo album. The song leaves me cold (I was amused to read that Ben Folds produced it, and then congratulated myself for relatively consistent taste), but the video is pretty looking, and owes a lot to the creepy scenes with the Master of Ceremonies in “Cabaret”.* It seems like the least controversial thing ever.
Okay, I’ve been teasing people on Twitter about this on and off, but for some reason, it took a little over a week for them to heal completely (I think it has something to do with how the artist digs the needles in to get the color really good), but Friday night is a good time for a light-hearted post anyway. So here’s my new tattoos!
I got the idea for them at the Devo concert, after watching all the people with Devo tattoos walk by and getting Devo tattoo envy. It comes as no surprise to anyone that Devo is my favorite band, because their music is amazing. But more than that, they have an aggressively geeky pose that is more punk than most punk rock, and of course, because the entire band is built around the concept of “de-evolution”. It’s both a denunciation and a celebration of conformity, the tendency of people to shut down their brains, materialism, and other problems with the herd mentality. In all honesty, explaining the concept of “devo” to people is like trying to describe porn. Seeing Devo at a concert hall is not especially devo, but seeing them at a horsetrack totally was. Agreed with Gavin—-John Lydon doing butter commercials is so punk rock, because it’s so devo. Because it’s hard, Devo fans who get it tend to seek each other out and geek out together.
I settled on tattoos illustrating the song above “Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA”, because it’s a song that plays with these ideas, but it’s in the form of a very silly comic book story that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. More importantly, it rocks like a motherfucker. It’s probably my favorite Devo song. I like to put it on for people who have their guards down and haven’t considered what an awesome band Devo is, because the increasing intensity of the song tends to blow their minds. So they’re under the fold.
Last night, Marc and my Rock Band 2 band got to the point where we had to play “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morrisette, another reminder that you will hear that song until you die. (And you’re still alive.) It did give me the inspiration to write this post, which is riffing on Michael’s Arbitrary But Fun Friday-type posts, and give you all a chance to vote on the song that, good or bad, makes you cringe because the lyrics are so desperate and pathetic. None of this means that the singers or songwriters are desperate or pathetic, of course. I’m not slamming anyone. It’s all about the narrative voice, which could be fact or fiction in pop songs, but whichever it is is irrelevant to this list.
The nominees:
1) Alanis Morrisette: “You Oughta Know”
No suspense here. The hardest part is figuring out what lyric is the most cringe-worthy, making you wish she’d written it on a napkin and then thrown it away rather than share this with the world. It’s a three-way tie between “Is she perverted like me?/Would she go down on you in a theater?”, “Does she know how you told me /You’d hold me until you died/Till you died, but you’re still alive”, and “And every time I scratch my nails/Down someone else’s back I hope you feel it”. Just as the happenings in the song “Ironic” are not ironic, blow jobs in movie theaters aren’t really perverted. The second set of lyrics are classic to the genre—-an embarrassing admission that you took a lover’s exclamations of affection as if it was a ironclad contract. The third is just embarrassing, because the answer is clearly, “He can’t feel it, and he obviously doesn’t care.”
I know this close to the election, I probably should be writing about electoral politics, but I have to take some posting time to register my annoyance at Beyoncé‘s first single released as her unwitting drag queen persona, Sasha Fierce. The ladies at Broadsheet tackled the single “If I Were A Boy”, so I won’t bother with that. Plus, as annoying as that song is, it didn’t get on my nerves in nearly the same way that the other song they linked did. This is not the official video, which has embedding disabled, but you can hear it:
So I’m scrolling through a backlog of Coverville podcasts and I see that he did a Bruce Springsteen show, and I shot right to it. Because I have a soft spot for the Boss, and I’m fascinated by indie musicians who share it and are going to try like hell to get his reputation revived in the same way that old country-western has been revived. The most effective shot of this was definitely Bonnie Prince Billy and Tortoise covering “Thunder Road”. But I’m skeptical that it’s ever going to take. Springsteen mines the same territory as country-western musicians—-valorizing the lives of the most ordinary people—-but it’s way more uncomfortable because there’s not a thick layer of nostalgia to give the listener distance. The characters in Springsteen songs are people you know, and if you’re an insufferable music snob, odds are they’re the very people that you’ve spent most of your life trying not to be. It’s painful to listen to a lot of the time, because it’s just depressing to hear the small dreams and little frustrations that are just too close to home. But honestly, that’s what appeals to me about Springsteen. He’s successful as a social realist, and as bonus, his music really means a lot to the very people he writes about. You can imagine the characters in songs like “Atlantic City” or “The River” dipping into their savings to go to a Springsteen show, and making a night of it, taking a little break from the lives of quiet desperation.*
The resurgence of ugly right wing populism reminds me of one of the more amusing ironies that makes liberals feel superior, which is the disconnect between Springsteen (humongous liberal) and the right wing leaning of so many working and middle class white people who relate to his music. It’s a microcosm of this major frustration—-they can get so close, identifying the forces that make their lives harder, and yet can’t make that final leap into realizing what has to be done to make it better, instead pouring out their bitterness into a vote for Republicans. (Obviously, not all, but a significant percentage.) I will say that this lens of seeing things makes the famous story of Springsteen and Reagan much more complicated than it appears to be.
Magazines love to publish lists because people are utter suckers for them. Count me in—-I love a good list. But Out’s 100 Greatest, Gayest Records list was just especially fun to read. (Hat tip) I just wish they’d blurbed every choice, because then I could dork out on this for that much longer. If this is the list of the gayest albums of all time, I guess I have pretty gay taste because I’m a ginormous fan of huge chunks of this list.
Actually, what I think made this list for me is that the theme means that it’s eclectic and personal, which to me is more interesting than trying to categorize albums by “greatest rock albums” or anything like that. There’s also a tendency of a lot of rock magazines and fans who are homophobic to paper over the importance of both gay people and gay themes in rock history, and this is a good corrective. I think, for instance, that some of the queerness I perceive in bands like the Velvet Underground might get lost out there, because the stereotype of the music snob champion of a band like this is a straight guy who might blanch to think of it that way. I’m a big fan of breaking down the stereotype of who can or can’t be a music snob.
Plus, they revive a couple of bands that are pretty good that might be generally forgotten, like Deee-Lite or Soft Cell.
Lately, I’ve been reading some more Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, specifically. Klosterman is an endlessly fascinating read, because he’s someone who thinks a lot and is an engaging writer, but has great lapses of intellectual laziness and is neurotic, utterly afraid of commitment on any level. (To the degree that he has bragged about not owning a bed.) At times he’s provocative in a good way, but in this book he’s all too often provocative because he’s willing to make bold proclamations but unwilling to dig deep into his own ideas and find the flaws in them.
But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about a specific tendency that Klosterman embodies better than anyone, which is defensive aesthetic populism. I say “defensive”, because aesthetic populism of his sort seems to only exist defensively. It’s a way to make hipsters, snobs, and anyone else who has strong opinions about what’s good and what sucks feel bad if their category “stuff that sucks” includes something you like. It’s accusing the snob of, well, snobbery—-having a downright elitist disconnect with the great unwashed and morally pure masses that love, to name two examples that Klosterman defends in this manner, Billy Joel and Ratt. The Ratt defense is the perfect example of aesthetic populism. Some member of Ratt died at the same time that Dee Dee Ramone did under similar circumstances (AIDS and heroin overdose, respectively). Klosterman writes an article mourning how unfair it is that Ramone got so much more attention because the snobberati loves the Ramones, and then proceeds to hide behind the “Ratt sold more records, a lot more records” excuse for this, aware that the reason that Dee Dee Ramone’s death was more important was because the Ramones, unlike Ratt, didn’t suck. The implication is clear: If you are one of those snobs who clings to your Ramones records while sneering at Ratt fans, you are downright undemocratic. A real populist would embrace Ratt, and be impressed at how this crap really speaks to people.
Update: Apparently the song is about the evil record executives. Which doesn’t, considering the make-up of the record industry’s top honchos, make a bit of difference to the awesomeness of my title. Especially not when it was written in the 70s. If it makes the Wilson sisters feel any better, I suspect record executives treat all musicians like they just fell off the turnip truck.
Doh! Totally caught. I put up a minor ode to the awesomeness of 70s-era Heart,* posted a video of “Barracuda”, and was informed by Auguste that Sarah Palin’s song leaving the stage after her acceptance speech was “Barracuda”. Which means two things:
1) I was totally caught. I didn’t watch her speech, instead spending my evening watching a DVD of the second season of “The Office”. I probably should have, for professional reasons, but yeah. “The Office”.
2) Really? “Barracuda”?
It’s an interesting insight into Republican sexism that they figured a song sung by a woman that screams “Barraaaaaacoooooodaaaaa” must mean that she’s bragging about her general bitch power. But actually, that’s not what the song is about at all. It’s not a particularly deep song, but here are some lyrics:
Mighty Ponygirl has posted the song list for the upcoming “Rock Band 2”, and has, as a public service, separated the songs into those sung by dudes and those sung by chicks. If you’ve played the first game at home or in a party situation, you know that the gender disparity is a major issue. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable cross-dressing their voices for some reason—-either out of fear of incompetence, or just plain fear—-and so for women who suffer this fear, they sing the three songs they feel they can do and quit. Not cool. The new game Rock Band 2 has more women, I think, and an interesting mix of badass punk (Bikini Kill, L7), pop punk (the Go-Gos, the Muffs, the Donnas), and crap that you have to smile gamely through as people clamor to sing it (Alanis Morrisette). Still, as MP demonstrates amply, the lack of parity is still appalling—-12 songs out of something like 80 have female singers, and a few of those songs are ones that you’ve never heard before. Or that I haven’t, which is to say that there’s 3 bands on there that are probably friends of the programmers, or as MG says, “a lot of crappy samey ‘if only the WB were still on the air and we could get our song played on Smallville’ stuff.” The upside—-many an 8-year-old will be singing the lyrics to “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. The puzzling thing is that at least two of the bands on the list have plenty of songs where their female members sang, but the programmers picked male-led songs—-“Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth and “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac. It seems that if you’re going with those bands, you have an opportunity to add more female singers.
I’m beginning to think that it was ungrateful of the Republicans not to nominate Mitt Romney; Republicans owe the Mormons a lot. First of all, they owe them for taking over the Boy Scouts and securing it as a homophobic institution. The church also populates the FBI and helps feed that particular paranoid right wing nuttery mindset. They made it okay for non-Catholic Christians to display giant families. They preceded Jack Abramhoff in exploiting Native Americans and the party in general in racism towards black people.
But above all, they have borrowed the Mormon tradition of baptizing the dead. The latest victim? Johnny Cash, who was defended by his daughter Roseanne Cash against the diabolical resurrection by some asshole musician named John Rich.
Marc and I decided the theme for our housewarming party is going to be “Fuck It, We’re Staying”, a sentiment inspired by the recent moves of some friends out of the state, and just a general willfulness in an era where we’re supposed to choose between red states and blue states. It’s a celebration of things Texas—-the food, the beer, the salsa, and the music. On the last one, I’ve got a pretty solid list going, but could always use more inspiration. So, Pandagonian, are there Texas musicians and bands you like? Country, rock, hip-hop—-I’m for it all. Vent your favorites in comments.
Okay, so I bought some T-shirts from a local store that makes them. Basic goofy stuff—-a picture of a Moog synthesizer, an argyle design with some skeletons, a drawing of Iron Man by Daniel Johnston for Marc, and a T-shirt that cracked me up because I thought of it as a commentary on today’s downloaded music wars. I thought someone made it up as a reminder of how these things come and go, and that the over-the-top nature of it pointed to a parody.
Being a dork who finds herself drawn to even bad movies about music, I’m intrigued by this movie “Cadillac Records”, and by “Cadillac”, they mean “Chess”. It’s fictionalized, so they changed the name from Chess Records. I can think of another movie that does this—-”Grace of My Heart” borrowed heavily from Carol King’s life and her move from being a behind-the-scenes songwriter to up on stage. It allows you to take liberties, though from the IMDB listing, it looks like they didn’t change anyone’s name from real life. 
So I’m scrolling through a backlog of 
Lately, I’ve been reading some more Chuck Klosterman, 
Update: Apparently the song is about the evil record executives. Which doesn’t, considering the make-up of the record industry’s top honchos, make a bit of difference to the awesomeness of my title. Especially not when it was written in the 70s. If it makes the Wilson sisters feel any better, I suspect record executives treat all musicians like they just fell off the turnip truck.
I’m beginning to think that it was ungrateful of the Republicans not to nominate Mitt Romney; Republicans owe the Mormons a lot. First of all, they owe them for taking over the Boy Scouts and securing it as a homophobic institution. The church also populates the FBI and helps feed that particular paranoid right wing nuttery mindset. They made it okay for non-Catholic Christians to display giant families. They preceded Jack Abramhoff in exploiting Native Americans and the party in general in racism towards black people. 
Marc and I decided the theme for our housewarming party is going to be “Fuck It, We’re Staying”, a sentiment inspired by the recent moves of some friends out of the state, and just a general willfulness in an era where we’re supposed to choose between red states and blue states. It’s a celebration of things Texas—-the food, the beer, the salsa, and the music. On the last one, I’ve got a pretty solid list going, but could always use more inspiration. So, Pandagonian, are there Texas musicians and bands you like? Country, rock, hip-hop—-I’m for it all. Vent your favorites in comments. 